Mona Simion

The investigation of epistemic virtues, such as curiosity, open-mindedness, intellectual courage and intellectual humility is a growing trend in epistemology. An underexplored question in this context is: what is the relationship between these virtues and other types of virtue, such as moral or prudential virtue? This paper argues that, although there is an intuitive sense in which virtues such as intellectual courage and open-mindedness have something to do with the epistemic domain, on closer inspection it is not clear to what extent they should be understood as genuine epistemic virtues. We draw a distinction between epistemic virtues and virtues with epistemic content and provide reason to believe that the aforementioned virtues are moral virtues with epistemic content rather than bona fide epistemic virtues. The upshot is that there are far fewer epistemic virtues out there than commonly assumed.

Trust in experts and institutions is declining. To interrogate this, we must distinguish between, on the one hand, irrational responses to otherwise trustworthy institutions, and, on the other hand, rational responses to evidence of institutional untrustworthiness. In this chapter we do two things: first, we briefly review some recent sociopsychological results brought to explain increasing distrust in expertise, and show that the explanations on offer suffer from two main weaknesses: the underlying conceptual frameworks are deficient, and the hypotheses put forth have low prior plausibility, in that they imply highly implausible levels and spread of epistemic and practical irrationality. Second, we argue for an alternative hypothesis: often, distrust in expertise is the result of unjust hearer epistemic exclusion. This form of injustice occurs in cases in which, intentionally or negligently, hearers are not put in a position to come to know the content of the performed speech act.

Suppose you could change people’s way of thinking about the world at its very roots, by changing the very concepts by means of which they think. Suppose, further, that this would make the world a better place; that would be quite something. Conceptual engineering is concerned with this remarkable kind of feat. This book is a comprehensive and systematic study of the nature and normativity of conceptual engineering. The study is comprehensive in that it deals with all the central questions in the field: concerning the very possibility of conceptual engineering, its success conditions, the epistemic and moral permissibility of conceptual engineering, the nature of conceptual ignorance and conceptual understanding, duties to engage in conceptual engineering, as well as with political aspects of conceptual engineering, such as engineering social kind concepts, the nature of hermeneutical injustice, and conceptual disinformation. The study is systematic in that it answers these questions in a unified manner, whereby the accounts put forth centre on conceptual functions. We develop a functionalist approach to conceptual engineering that is wholeheartedly optimistic, in that it takes conceptual engineering to be something that we can and should do. In fact, it is argued, it is not even distinctively difficult to do it.

In ‘Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence’, we develop a novel account of how it is that AI can be trustworthy and what it takes for an AI to be trustworthy. In this paper, we respond to a suite of recent comments on this account, due to J. Adam Carter, Dong-yong Choi, Rune Nyrup, and Fei Song. We would like to thank all four for their thoughtful engagement with our work, as well as the Asian Journal of Philosophy for publishing the symposium on our paper. The game plan for the paper is as follows. We will first briefly rehearse the account and then respond to comments in turn.

This paper develops an account of trustworthy AI. Its central idea is that whether AIs are trustworthy is a matter of whether they live up to their function-based obligations. We argue that this account serves to advance the literature in a couple of important ways. First, it serves to provide a rationale for why a range of properties that are widely assumed in the scientific literature, as well as in policy, to be required of trustworthy AI, such as safety, justice, and explainability, are properties (often) instantiated by trustworthy AI. Second, we connect the discussion on trustworthy AI in policy, industry, and the sciences with the philosophical discussion of trustworthiness. We argue that extant accounts of trustworthiness in the philosophy literature cannot make proper sense of trustworthy AI and that our account compares favourably with its competitors on this front.

Recent literature features an increased interest in the sufficiency claim involved in the knowledge norm of assertion (KNA-Suff). This paper looks at two prominent objections to KNA-Suff, due to Jessica Brown and Jennifer Lackey, and argues that they miss their target due to value-theoretic inaccuracies. It is argued that (i) the intuitive need for more than knowledge in Brown’s high-stakes contexts does not come from the epistemic norm governing assertion, but from further norms stepping in and raising the bar, and (ii) Lackey’s purported quality-driven case against KNA-Suff boils down to a quantitative objection. If that is the case, Lackey’s argument will be vulnerable to the same objections as Brown’s.

According to the achievement account (AA) of the value of knowledge, knowledge is finally valuable because it is a species of a finally valuable genus, achievement. The achievement account is said to solve Pritchard's tertiary value problem (TVP), the problem of showing that knowledge enjoys a different kind of value than mere true belief. This paper argues, first, that AA fails to solve TVP, and, second, that Pritchard's motivations for TVP are inadequate. They do, however, motivate a weaker value problem, one that can be solved by showing that knowledge is weakly superior to mere true belief. Finally, third, we argue that knowledge does enjoy this form of weak superiority. Since this argument rests on AA's key species-genus claim, AA can retain the upper hand in the debate.

Trust in experts and institutions is declining. To interrogate this, we must distinguish between, on the one hand, irrational responses to otherwise trustworthy institutions, and, on the other hand, rational responses to evidence of institutional untrustworthiness. In this chapter we do two things: first, we briefly review some recent sociopsychological results brought to explain increasing distrust in expertise, and show that the explanations on offer suffer from two main weaknesses: the underlying conceptual frameworks are deficient, and the hypotheses put forth have low prior plausibility, in that they imply highly implausible levels and spread of epistemic and practical irrationality. Second, we argue for an alternative hypothesis: often, distrust in expertise is the result of unjust hearer epistemic exclusion. This form of injustice occurs in cases in which, intentionally or negligently, hearers are not put in a position to come to know the content of the performed speech act.

The phenomenon of defeat is hot in epistemology. However, surprisingly little attention has been paid to defeat in the semantics of aesthetic discourse and aesthetic epistemology. We think that this is a lack that needs supplying. Here, we argue for a conditional claim: if epistemic defeat about aesthetic matters—what we will call, for convenience, aesthetic defeat—exists, this gives us (pro tanto) reason to worry about several views in the semantics of aesthetic discourse—to wit, contextualism and relativism—and one major player in the epistemology of aesthetic testimony—i.e. pessimism about the capacity of aesthetic testimony to generate knowledge. None of these can straightforwardly accommodate aesthetic defeat. The alternative is to endorse scepticism about aesthetic defeat; however, there is reason to believe the latter move is highly implausible. We conclude that the theorist of aesthetic discourse is faced with a choice between either being a realist about the semantics and an optimist about the epistemology, or coming up with a thorough defence of defeat scepticism.

Knowledge-first epistemology places knowledge at the normative core of epistemological affairs: on this approach, central epistemic phenomena are to be analyzed in terms of knowledge. This study offers a defence of an integrated, naturalistic knowledge-first account of justified belief, reasons, evidence and defeat, permissible assertion and action, and the epistemic normativity of practical and theoretical reasoning. On this account, the epistemic is an independent normative domain organized around one central etiological epistemic function: generating knowledge. In turn, this epistemic function generates epistemic norms of proper functioning that constitute the epistemic domain, and govern moves in our epistemic practice, such as forming beliefs, asserting, and reasoning.

When in the business of offering an account of the epistemic normativity of belief, one is faced with the following dilemma: strongly externalist norms fail to account for the intuition of justification in radical deception scenarios, while milder norms are incapable to explain what is epistemically wrong with false beliefs. This paper has two main aims; we first look at one way out of the dilemma, defended by Timothy Williamson and Clayton Littlejohn, and argue that it fails. Second, we identify what we take to be the problematic assumption that underlies their account and offer an alternative way out. We put forth a knowledge-first friendly normative framework for belief which grants justification to radically deceived subjects while at the same time acknowledging that their false beliefs are not epistemically good beliefs.

Contemporary ‘Fitting Attitude’ axiological frameworks – defining value in terms of having properties that provide reasons for pro-attitudes – struggle with the so-called Wrong Kind of Reasons problem. That is, they fail to offer a coherent account as to what reasons are fitted to enter our evaluative endeavors in the first place. Furthermore, WKR opens FA to charges regarding intransitivity of value ordering. I argue that revisiting Josiah Royce’s ‘plan of life’ mediating principle offers a promising reasons’ aggregation recipe, and thus safeguards the transitivity axiom under FA.

According to Jonathan Kvanvig, the practice of taking back one’s assertion when finding out that one has been mistaken or gettiered fails to speak in favour of a knowledge norm of assertion. To support this claim, he introduces a distinction between taking back the content of the assertion, and taking back the speech act itself. This paper argues that Kvanvig’s distinction does not successfully face close speech-act-theoretic scrutiny. Furthermore, I offer an alternative diagnosis of the target cases sourced in the normativity of action.