Tamar Gendler

Deference in politics is often necessary. To answer questions like, “Should the government increase the federal minimum wage?” and “Should the state introduce a vaccine mandate?,” we need to know relevant scientific and economic facts, make complex value judgments, and answer questions about incentives and implementation. Lay citizens typically lack the time, resources, and competence to answer these questions on their own. Hence, they must defer to others. But to whom should they defer? A common answer is that they should—or are at least permitted to—defer to co-partisans. This view initially seems attractive on both normative and empirical grounds. Against this, the author argues that deference to co-partisans has overlooked moral and epistemic problems. In light of them, the author proposes several new ways to revise our expectations of citizens in a democracy, both individually and institutionally.

The author defines and analyzes a practice central to inquiry: treating things as relevant to questions. This notion helps illuminate what lines of inquiry are, how those lines unfold, and how to evaluate them. When applied to the context of news journalism, we can use the notion of lines of inquiry to understand how questions get built into frames that give shape to news stories. Armed with this concept, we can then better understand the roles of lines of inquiry in journalism, and see more clearly how to evaluate news stories not just by fact-checking, but also by considering which facts should be selected to build a story to begin with.

Moral encroachers claim that the moral risks of falsely believing something raise the threshold of epistemic justification, thereby making justification and knowledge harder to come by. Leary argues that there’s a tension between moral encroachment and #BelieveWomen: there are certain paradigm cases involving rape reports about which most proponents of #BelieveWomen would agree that the hearers in these cases are justified in believing the accusation, but moral encroachment suggests they are not. This tension cannot be easily avoided by claiming, as some encroachers do, that the moral risks of not believing the accusation lower the threshold of epistemic justification: it’s unclear that this view succeeds at delivering the result that hearers are epistemically justified in believing the accusation in the relevant paradigm cases, and even if it does, its explanation of why hearers are justified in believing the accusation is demeaning toward victims. The tension also cannot be avoided by interpreting #BelieveWomen in an alternative way, as other encroachers do, that is compatible with claiming that hearers in the relevant cases are not epistemically justified: the salient alternative interpretations of #BelieveWomen are either implausible and unsatisfying to victims or they undermine the main motivations for encroachment. So, encroachers have more work to do to show that this tension can be resolved.

We are ignorant of many things. Most of the time, that ignorance seems epistemically neutral. At other times it seems like a ground for epistemic criticism. The permissibility problem is the problem of explaining why some cases of ignorance are epistemically criticisable whilst others are not. In this chapter, Munton argues that the standard resources of epistemology, both internalist and externalist, are poorly placed to capture our evaluative practices around ignorance and solve the permissibility problem. By contrast, thinking in terms of the attentional dispositions which underwrite problematically resilient forms of ignorance can more satisfactorily ground the evaluative resources we need.

The large literature on the ethics of statistical evidence and its use in courtrooms is premised on the assumption that statistical evidence can be highly probabilifying (i.e. that it can support a very high credence). When statistical evidence seems to render a morally problematic proposition highly probable, scholars then divide over how they respond to the problem: some attempt to identify a different epistemic problem with the inference, while others grant the inference’s epistemic legitimacy but object to the conclusion on a moral or political basis. In this chapter, the authors argue that, in fact, it is very difficult to construct realistic cases in which statistical evidence is highly probabilifying. The authors explain how noisy data resulting from misclassification—a common feature of most realistic cases—drastically reduces statistical evidence’s probative value. As a result, it is not necessary to advert to additional theoretical bells and whistles to explain why one ought not form a high credence based on statistical evidence in most realistic cases.

This chapter takes up the question of how videographic public announcements (VPAs)—i.e. videos that a wide swath of the public sees and knows that everyone else can see too—have functioned to mobilize people politically, and how the presence of deepfakes in our information environment stands to change the dynamics of this mobilization. Existing work by Regina Rini, Don Fallis, and others has focused on the ways that deepfakes might interrupt our acquisition of first-order knowledge through videos. But Hyska points out that even where every audience member takes a video to be veridical, and where first-order knowledge acquisition is therefore secure, an audience aware of deepfakes in their environment will not acquire higher-order knowledge in the way that has erstwhile been characteristic for audiences of VPAs. Engaging with ideas from the literatures on public announcement logic, common knowledge, and convention, Hyska enumerates a variety of ways in which we should expect this absence of higher-order knowledge to throw up barriers to political mobilization. Hyska goes on to apply this analysis of VPAs to the mechanisms by which an uptick in publicly available videos of police brutality over the last decade, mediated by camera phones and social media, was responsible for the largest mass protests in US history in summer 2020. This makes vivid the stakes of the transformation in our mobilizing environment that Hyska claims deepfakes effect: where we lose the common-knowledge-generating effects of VPAs, there are fresh obstacles to this sort of mass mobilization.

Many people form beliefs about matters of social and political importance online, in what have been described as “echo chambers.” These include social media news feeds and news sites tailored to the consumer’s political perspective. Some philosophers have suggested that there is nothing especially worrying about this from an epistemological view, while others have taken it to be a serious problem in need of diagnosis and remedy. This chapter applies some ideas of the 17th-century philosopher Blaise Pascal to the dispute about echo chambers. Pascal emphasized the role of affect, or what he called “the heart,” in determining belief. The ways in which the heart can affect belief are characterized as motivated reasoning and motivated seeing—the influence of affective states on the processing of evidence and the appearance of evidence, respectively. These influences and their manifestation in online echo chambers are discussed, and the consequences for one’s rationality assessed. A Pascalian perspective that emphasizes the heart, rather than focusing exclusively on reasoning, has great potential to explain and diagnose the problem with online echo chambers, and thereby shed light on a major issue in applied epistemology.

This chapter serves as an introduction to the special issue on applied epistemology that occupies the remainder of this volume of Oxford Studies in Epistemology. The author—who is the editor of the special volume—gives a characterization of what applied epistemology is, distinguishes it from ‘social epistemology’, sets out some reasons why it is worth doing, and raises some dangers to be aware of in doing it. He then gives an overview of the chapters in the special issue and situates them in the existing literature, highlighting how they make distinctive and exciting contributions to that literature and represent some of the best new work in the field.

You omega know something when you know it, and know that you know it, and know that you know that you know it... This chapter first argues that omega knowledge matters, in the sense that it is required for rational assertion, action, inquiry, and belief. The chapter argues that existing accounts of omega knowledge face major challenges. One account is skeptical, claiming that we have no omega knowledge of any ordinary claims about the world. Another account embraces the KK thesis (that if you know something, then you know that you know it), and identifies knowledge with omega knowledge. This position faces counterexamples, and struggles to make sense of inexact knowledge. The chapter then develops a new account of knowledge, by proposing the principle of Reflective Luminosity: if you know that you know something, then you omega know it. The chapter argues that Reflective Luminosity allows for omega knowledge while avoiding the problems for KK.

Epistemic trespassing, science denial, refusal to guard against bias, mishandling higher-order evidence, and the development of vice are troubling intellectual behaviors. The chapter advances work done by psychologists on moral self-licensing to show how all of these behaviors can be explained in terms of a parallel phenomenon of epistemic self-licensing. The chapter situates this discussion at the intersection of three major epistemological projects: epistemic explanation and intervention (the project of explaining troubling intellectual phenomena in the hopes of deriving ameliorative strategies), hostile epistemology (the study of how intellectual vulnerabilities might be exploited), and the promise of higher-order evidence (the hope that higher-order evidence leads to epistemic improvement). Analyzing epistemic licensing allows us to explain and offer modest interventions aimed at mitigating these behaviors, while illuminating exploitable vulnerabilities and tempering optimism about the promise of higher-order evidence.

This is the most comprehensive book ever published on philosophical methodology. A team of thirty-eight of the world's leading philosophers present original essays on various aspects of how philosophy should be and is done. The first part is devoted to broad traditions and approaches to philosophical methodology (including logical empiricism, phenomenology, and ordinary language philosophy). The entries in the second part address topics in philosophical methodology, such as intuitions, conceptual analysis, and transcendental arguments. The third part of the book is devoted to essays about the interconnections between philosophy and neighbouring fields, including those of mathematics, psychology, literature and film, and neuroscience.

This volume consists of fourteen chapters that focus on a trio of interrelated themes. First: what are the powers and limits of appeals to intuition in supporting or refuting various sorts of claims? Second: what are the cognitive consequences of engaging with content that is represented as imaginary or otherwise unreal? Third: what are the implications of these issues for the methodology of philosophy more generally? These themes are explored in a variety of cases, including thought experiments in science and philosophy, early childhood pretense, self‐deception, cognitive and emotional engagement with fiction, mental and motor imagery, automatic and habitual behavior, and social categorization. The chapters are organized into two large sections. Those in Part I—six in all—explore the role of intuition and thought experiment in science and philosophy; those in Part II—the remaining eight—look more generally at the role of imagination in a range of domains. Within each section, the chapters are grouped into pairs. In Part I, the first two look at the role of thought experiments in science; the next two at the role of thought experiments in exploring philosophical questions about personal identity; and the final two at a number of issues concerning intuitions and philosophical methodology more generally. In Part II, the first two chapters explore the relation between pretense and belief; the next two look at the phenomenon of imaginative resistance; the next two consider issues of imagination and emotion; and the final two introduce and discuss an attitude that the book calls alief.

In this article, I propose one way of understanding the expression “feminist epistemology.” I begin from the premise that improper philosophical attention has been paid to the implications of what I call The Fact of Preconditions for Agency: that moral and rational agents become such only through a long, deliberate, and intensive process of intervention and teaching, a process that requires commitments of time, effort and emotion on the part of other agents. I contend that this is a sufficiently important aspect of what it is to be a person that accounting for its philosophical implications may have repercussions not only for moral and political theory, but for epistemology as well. I contend further that, given the current configuration of social possibilities, a theory that acknowledges this Fact might appropriately be deemed “feminist.” My argument is presented in four segments. In Section II, I show how such a theory could be feminist by providing a discussion of categories of social identity; in Section III, I show how such a theory could be epistemology by describing a strategy of argument from parity. In Section IV, I apply this strategy to a case from political philosophy to show why its counter‐intuitive implications do not provide good grounds for rejecting the suggested redistricting. And in Section V, I apply the same strategy to a case from epistemology to bring out how it might lead to a theory that might legitimately claim to be feminist epistemology.