Keith Raymond Harris

Evidence resistance occurs when individuals fail to update their beliefs in ways recommended by the evidence. Scholars representing a range of disciplines have offered various explanations of evidence resistance, including motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, and distrust toward sources of evidence. Even when taken together, these explanations do not fully account for evidence resistance as it manifests in the real world. I argue that a key causal factor in certain important cases of evidence resistance is suspicion about the way in which the evidence is controlled. Among other merits, this explanation explains how distrust can cause resistance to certain kinds of evidence and not others, why conspiracy theorists are especially prone to evidence resistance, and why novel technologies, especially generative artificial intelligence, promote resistance to certain kinds of evidence.

Evidence resistance occurs when individuals fail to update their beliefs in ways recommended by the evidence. Scholars representing a range of disciplines have offered various explanations of evidence resistance, including motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, and distrust toward sources of evidence. Even when taken together, these explanations do not fully account for evidence resistance as it manifests in the real world. I argue that a key causal factor in certain important cases of evidence resistance is suspicion about the way in which the evidence is controlled. Among other merits, this explanation explains how distrust can cause resistance to certain kinds of evidence and not others, why conspiracy theorists are especially prone to evidence resistance, and why novel technologies, especially generative artificial intelligence, promote resistance to certain kinds of evidence.

An agent’s epistemic prospects depend on a combination of that agent’s individual characteristics and features of that agent’s epistemic environment. Such factors cannot always be cleanly separated. Often, individual characteristics impact agents’ epistemic prospects by shaping the epistemic environments in which individuals find themselves. In particular, features of individuals often repel or attract certain sorts of information, a phenomenon I label epistemic magnetism. I argue that epistemic magnetism is a ubiquitous and underrecognized phenomenon that sometimes promotes and sometimes frustrates the achievement of positive epistemic outcomes. Then, I consider a series of simple proposals concerning what distinguishes between beneficial and harmful forms of epistemic magnetism. I argue that these proposals cannot capture the impacts of epistemic magnetism. Instead, I offer a series of principles that serve to roughly characterize the consequences of this phenomenon. I conclude with some remarks on why epistemologists have thus far tended to overlook epistemic magnetism.

It is commonly claimed, based in large part on survey data, that we now face a crisis of trust characterised in part by a lack of epistemic trust in experts and mainstream media institutions. Such claims have been met with competing data suggesting robust popular trust in scientists. I complicate both claims as to a crisis of trust and claims to the contrary by distinguishing between stated, introspected, and revealed epistemic trust. Drawing on these distinctions, I argue that survey data concerning trust in experts are ambiguous between various interpretations. Understanding the crisis of trust, or indeed determining whether there is such a crisis, hence depends on more carefully distinguishing between these interpretations.

The epistemic virtues and vices are typically defined in terms of effects or motivations related to the epistemic states of their possessors. However, philosophers have recently begun to consider other-regarding epistemic virtues, traits oriented toward the epistemic flourishing of others. In a similar vein, this paper discusses outward-facing epistemic vices, properties oriented toward the epistemic languishing of others. I argue for the existence of both reliabilist and responsibilist outward-facing vices, and illustrate how such vices negatively bear on the epistemic prospects of others. I pay special attention to how outward-facing epistemic vices may manifest in online activities that promote the epistemic languishing of others by negatively influencing the online epistemic environment.

In light of the complexity of some important matters, the best epistemic strategy for laypersons is often to rely heavily on the judgments of subject matter experts. However, given the contentiousness of some issues and the existence of fake experts, determining who to trust from the lay perspective is no simple matter. One proposed approach is for laypersons to attend to displays of intellectual virtue as indicators of expertise. I argue that this strategy is likely to fail, as non-experts often display apparent intellectual virtues while legitimate experts often display apparent intellectual vices. Then, I argue that this challenge is difficult to overcome, as experts who attempt to better exhibit apparent intellectual virtues would likely compromise their own reliability in the process. Finally, I discuss two conclusions—one more optimistic and one more pessimistic—that one might draw concerning the role of intellectual virtue in the identification of experts.

Existing analyses of disinformation tend to embrace the view that disinformation is intended or otherwise functions to mislead its audience, that is, to produce false beliefs. I argue that this view is doubly mistaken. First, while paradigmatic disinformation campaigns aim to produce false beliefs in an audience, disinformation may in some cases be intended only to prevent its audience from forming true beliefs. Second, purveyors of disinformation need not intend to have any effect at all on their audience’s beliefs, aiming instead to manipulate an audience’s behavior through alteration of sub-doxastic states. Ultimately, I argue that attention to such non-paradigmatic forms of disinformation is essential to understanding the threat disinformation poses and why this threat is so difficult to counter.

Who deserves credit for epistemic successes, and who is to blame for epistemic failures? Extreme views, which would place responsibility either solely on the individual or solely on the individual’s surrounding environment, are not plausible. Recently, progress has been made toward articulating virtue epistemology as a suitable middle ground. A socio-environmentally oriented virtue epistemology can recognize that an individual’s traits play an important role in shaping what that individual believes, while also recognizing that some of the most efficacious individual traits have to do with how individuals structure their epistemic environments and how they respond to information received within these environments. I contribute to the development of such an epistemology by introducing and elucidating the virtue of epistemic exactingness, which is characterized by a motivation to regulate the epistemically significant conduct of others.

Emotive artificial intelligences are physically or virtually embodied entities whose behavior is driven by artificial intelligence, and which use expressions usually associated with emotion to enhance communication. These entities are sometimes thought to be deceptive, insofar as their emotive expressions are not connected to genuine underlying emotions. In this paper, I argue that such entities are indeed deceptive, at least given a sufficiently broad construal of deception. But, while philosophers and other commentators have drawn attention to the deceptive threat of emotive artificial intelligences, I argue that such entities also pose an overlooked skeptical threat. In short, the widespread existence of emotive signals disconnected from underlying emotions threatens to encourage skepticism of such signals more generally, including emotive signals used by human persons. Thus, while designing artificially intelligent entities to use emotive signals is thought to facilitate human-AI interaction, this practice runs the risk of compromising human-human interaction.

Deepfakes and other forms of synthetic media are widely regarded as serious threats to our knowledge of the world. Various technological responses to these threats have been proposed. The reactive approach proposes to use artificial intelligence to identify synthetic media. The proactive approach proposes to use blockchain and related technologies to create immutable records of verified media content. I argue that both approaches, but especially the reactive approach, are vulnerable to a problem analogous to the ancient problem of the criterion—a line of argument with skeptical implications. I argue that, while the proactive approach is relatively resistant to this objection, it faces its own serious challenges. In short, the proactive approach would place a heavy burden on users to verify their own content, a burden that is exacerbated by and is likely to exacerbate existing inequalities.

Experts are sharply divided concerning the prevalence and influence of misinformation. Some have emphasized the severe epistemic and political threats posed by misinformation and have argued that some such threats have been realized in the real world. Others have argued that such concerns overstate the prevalence of misinformation and the gullibility of ordinary persons. Rather than taking a stand on this issue, I consider what would follow from the supposition that this latter perspective is correct. I argue that, if the prevalence and influence of misinformation are indeed overstated, then many reports as to the prevalence and influence of misinformation constitute a kind of higher-order misinformation. I argue that higher-order misinformation presents its own challenges. In particular, higher-order misinformation, ironically, would lend credibility to the very misinformation whose influence it exaggerates. Additionally, higher-order misinformation would lead to underestimations of the reasons favoring opposing views. In short, higher-order misinformation constitutes misleading higher-order evidence concerning the quality of the evidence on which individuals form their beliefs.

Social media misinformation is widely thought to pose a host of threats to the acquisition of knowledge. One response to these threats is to remove misleading information from social media and to de-platform those who spread it. While content moderation of this sort has been criticized on various grounds—including potential incompatibility with free expression—the epistemic case for the removal of misinformation from social media has received little scrutiny. Here, I provide an overview of some costs and benefits of the removal of misinformation from social media. On the one hand, removing misinformation from social media can promote knowledge acquisition by removing misleading evidence from online social epistemic environments. On the other hand, such removals require the exercise of power over evidence by content moderators. As I argue, such exercises of power can encourage suspicions on the part of social media users and can compromise the force of the evidence possessed by such users. For these reasons, the removal of misinformation from social media poses its own threats to knowledge.

In light of the complexity of some important matters, the best epistemic strategy for laypersons is often to rely heavily on the judgments of subject matter experts. However, given the contentiousness of some issues and the existence of fake experts, determining who to trust from the lay perspective is no simple matter. One proposed approach is for laypersons to attend to displays of intellectual virtue as indicators of expertise. I argue that this strategy is likely to fail, as non-experts often display apparent intellectual virtues while legitimate experts often display apparent intellectual vices. Then, I argue that this challenge is difficult to overcome, as experts who attempt to better exhibit apparent intellectual virtues would likely compromise their own reliability in the process. Finally, I discuss two conclusions—one more optimistic and one more pessimistic—that one might draw concerning the role of intellectual virtue in the identification of experts.

The core texts of the QAnon conspiracy theory are posts on online image boards made under the name ‘Q’. ‘Q drops’ range from cryptic, to implausible, to downright bizarre. Nonetheless, an enormous community has seemingly developed around the QAnon conspiracy theory. Polling indicates substantial support for core elements of the theory. The community has its own media programs and influencers, and hosts its own conferences, some of which draw prominent U.S. politicians. Various acts of violence have been connected to QAnon, including murders and, most notoriously, the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. How is it that so many can be taken in by such a bizarre theory? Broadly speaking, epistemologists and cognitive scientists have offered three kinds of answers. Individualist answers maintain that belief in QAnon and other conspiracy theories is often rooted in epistemic vices, like gullibility, or in psychological pathologies like hyperactive detection of agency or patterns. According to social structural answers, belief in such theories is due instead to social phenomena like echo chambers and epistemic bubbles. According to deflationist answers, belief in such theories is—despite appearances—rare. I illustrate and briefly assess these accounts of belief in conspiracy theories, focusing mainly on QAnon.

Psychological-epistemic accounts take scientific progress to consist in the development of some psychological-epistemic attitude. Disagreements over what the relevant attitude is – true belief, knowledge, or understanding – divide proponents of thesemantic,epistemic,andnoeticaccounts of scientific progress, respectively. Proponents of all such accounts face a common challenge. On the face of it, only individuals have psychological attitudes. However, as I argue in what follows, increases in individual true belief, knowledge, and understanding are neither necessary nor sufficient for scientific progress. Rather than being fatal to the semantic, epistemic, and noetic accounts, this objection shows that these accounts are most plausible when they take the psychological states relevant to scientific progress to be states of communities, rather than individuals. I draw on recent work in social epistemology to develop two ways in which communities can be the bearers of irreducible psychological-epistemic states. Each way yields a strategy by which proponents of one of the psychological-epistemic accounts might attempt to account for the social dimensions of scientific progress. While I present serious reasons for concern about the first strategy, I argue that the second strategy, at least, offers a promising path forward for a psychological-epistemic account of scientific progress.

Several social metaphysicians have argued that groups are constituted by, but not identical to, their members. While the constitution view is promising, there are significant difficulties with existing versions of that view. Fortunately, lessons may be extracted from more traditional metaphysics and applied to the case of group agents. Drawing on such lessons, I present a novel account of the constitution relation holding between individuals and group agents. According to the resulting structural-constitution view, when individuals constitute a group of a certain kind, they do so in virtue of exhibiting the structure characteristic of groups of that kind.

This book argues that misinformation poses a multi-faceted threat to knowledge, while arguing that some forms of content moderation risk exacerbating these threats. It proposes alternative forms of content moderation that aim to address this complexity while enhancing human epistemic agency. The proliferation of fake news, false conspiracy theories, and other forms of misinformation on the internet and especially social media is widely recognized as a threat to individual knowledge and, consequently, to collective deliberation and democracy itself. This book argues that misinformation presents a three-pronged threat to knowledge. While researchers often focus on the role of misinformation in causing false beliefs, this deceptive potential of misinformation exists alongside the potential to suppress trust and to distort the perception of evidence. Recognizing the multi-faceted nature of this threat is essential to the development of effective measures to mitigate the harms associated with misinformation. The book weaves together work in analytic epistemology with emerging empirical work in other disciplines to offer novel insights into the threats posed by misinformation. Additionally, it breaks new ground by systematically assessing different forms of content moderation from the perspective of epistemology. Misinformation, Content Moderation, and Epistemology will appeal to philosophers working in applied and social epistemology, as well as scholars and advanced students in disciplines such as communication studies, political science, and social psychology who are researching misinformation.

Deepfakes pose a multi-faceted threat to the acquisition of knowledge. It is widely hoped that technological solutions—in the form of artificially intelligent systems for detecting deepfakes—will help to address this threat. I argue that the prospects for purely technological solutions to the problem of deepfakes are dim. Especially given the evolving nature of the threat, technological solutions cannot be expected to prevent deception at the hands of deepfakes, or to preserve the authority of video footage. Moreover, the success of such technologies depends on institutional trust that is in short supply. Finally, outsourcing the discrimination between the real and the fake to automated, largely opaque systems runs the risk of undermining epistemic autonomy.

Existing analyses of disinformation tend to embrace the view that disinformation is intended or otherwise functions to mislead its audience, that is, to produce false beliefs. I argue that this view is doubly mistaken. First, while paradigmatic disinformation campaigns aim to produce false beliefs in an audience, disinformation may in some cases be intended only to prevent its audience from forming true beliefs. Second, purveyors of disinformation need not intend to have any effect at all on their audience’s beliefs, aiming instead to manipulate an audience’s behavior through alteration of sub-doxastic states. Ultimately, I argue that attention to such non-paradigmatic forms of disinformation is essential to understanding the threat disinformation poses and why this threat is so difficult to counter.

Some philosophers regard it as a serious possibility that we now exist within a simulation. That this hypothesis is somewhat probable has been defended extensively by Nick Bostrom. Notably, Bostrom does not defend the conclusion that we inhabit a simulation, but rather the disjunctive conclusion that the human species is very likely to die out before reaching a ‘posthuman stage’, that posthuman civilizations are extremely unlikely to run significant numbers of simulations, or that we almost certainly inhabit a simulation. Bostrom argues that there is no basis for strongly favouring one of these alternatives over its counterparts. The upshot is that it is fairly probable that we inhabit a simulation. I argue that posthuman civilizations are likely to be unwilling to run significant numbers of simulations, thereby undermining the case for assigning a somewhat high probability to the hypothesis that we live in a simulation.

Many of our beliefs are acquired online. Online epistemic environments are replete with fake news, fake science, fake photographs and videos, and fake people in the form of trolls and social bots. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the threat that such online fakes pose to the acquisition of knowledge. I argue that fakes can interfere with one or more of the truth, belief, and warrant conditions on knowledge. I devote most of my attention to the effects of online fakes on satisfaction of the warrant condition, as these have received comparatively little attention. I consider three accounts of the conditions under which fakes compromise the warrant condition. I argue for the third of these accounts, according to which the propensity of fakes to exist in an environment threatens warrant acquisition in that environment. Finally, I consider some limitations on the epistemic threat of fakes and suggest some strategies by which this threat can be mitigated.