Alex Worsnip

Scientific experts frequently say things that encode value judgments, not least when they are called on to offer advice or recommendations. Often, however, the value judgments underlying their testimony are tacit or covert. This paper explores the problems that covert value judgments in expert testimony pose for the practice of deference to experts, which occurs when a layperson believes an expert’s testimony on their say-so. Many philosophers (and others) have suggested that laypeople ought to defer to experts a lot more than they do. But, I will argue, this advice can be problematic when value judgments are involved, since scientific experts often have no special authority with respect to these value judgments. I illustrate this with reference to a range of cases, with particular focus on policy during the COVID pandemic. My aim is not to argue that we should never defer to experts, but to raise to prominence a complication for its rationality in many cases, which suggests that our public discourse about deference to experts is often too coarse. I conclude with some reflections on how experts can be appropriately cognizant of the problem in issuing testimony, and in so doing, make this testimony more worthy of deference.

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 chapter argues, contrary to the consensus of most contemporary Western ethics, that there are no (distinctively, fundamentally) prudential reasons for action. That is to say: there is no class of reasons for action that is distinctively and fundamentally about the promotion of the agent’s own well-being. Considerations to do with the agent’s well-being can supply the agent with reasons only in virtue of her well-being mattering morally or in virtue of her caring about her own well-being. In both of these cases, the way that such prudential considerations supply reasons for action is a way that the well-being of others can supply reasons for action too.

It’s fairly uncontroversial that you can sometimes get misleading higher-order evidence about what your first-order evidence supports. What is more controversial is whether this can result in a situation where your total evidence is misleading about what your total evidence supports: that is, where your total evidence is misleading about itself. It’s hard to arbitrate on purely intuitive grounds whether any particular example of misleading higher-order evidence is an example of misleading total evidence. This chapter tries to make progress by offering a simple mathematical model that suggests that higher-order evidence will tend to bear _more strongly_ on higher-order propositions about what one’s evidence supports than it does on the corresponding first-order propositions; and then by arguing that given this, it is plausible that there will be some cases of misleading total evidence.

Philosophers have recently been increasingly attentive to “coherence requirements,” with heated debates about both the content of such requirements and their “normativity” (i.e., whether there is necessarily reason to obey them). Yet there is little work on the metanormative status of coherence requirements. Metaphysically: what is it for two or more mental states to be jointly incoherent, such that they are banned by a coherence requirement? In virtue of what are some putative requirements genuine and others not? Epistemologically: how are we to know which requirements are genuine and which are not? This chapter offers an account that tries to answer these questions. On this account, the incoherence of a set of attitudes is a matter of its being constitutive of the attitudes in question that any agent who holds these attitudes jointly is disposed, when conditions of full transparency are met, to give at least one of them up.

Going about our daily lives requires us to dismiss many metaphysical possibilities. We take it for granted that we are not brains in vats, or living in the Matrix, or in an extended dream. Call these things that we take for granted “anti-skeptical assumptions.” What should a reflective agent who believes these things think of such beliefs? The chapter surveys and criticizes some prominent answers to this question, then offers a positive view that blends externalism about evidence with a mild, qualified kind of pragmatism. The view offered aims to do justice to the sense that anti-skeptical assumptions are evidentially groundless while also maintaining that one cannot rationally believe something that one judges oneself to lack sufficient evidence for.

The prison system in the United States is a moral catastrophe. As Jennifer Lackey shows in this powerful book, the moral catastrophe extends to the criminal justice system that sends people to prison, and in particular to the ways that it handles testimony. In doing so, she also makes an important contribution to theoretical epistemology, especially to ongoing debates about epistemic injustice— making a case for a distinctive kind of testimonial injustice, agential testimonial injustice. The concept of testimonial injustice provides a powerful lens through which to understand many of the cases on which Lackey is focused. Yet, like many conceptual frameworks in philosophy, it also has its limits. In this critical notice, I probe these limits in several ways. First, I ask whether the conceptual framework of epistemic injustice is apt or necessary for understanding the full range of cases in which Lackey is interested—making some general points about the category of epistemic injustice that I think are insufficiently recognized and then applying them to Lackey’s arguments. I then broach the question of the scale of the wrong of testimonial injustice relative to that of false conviction more broadly. Finally, I explore limits on the extent to which we can arrive at evidentially well-founded credibility distributions given the paucity of evidence that we typically have to go on in assessing speakers' credibility in the legal context. This questions whether the framework of testimonial (in)justice will provide much guidance in hard cases, beyond the flagrant injustices on which Lackey is focused.

Several decades of work in both philosophy and psychology acutely highlights our limitations as individual inquirers. One way to recognize these limitations is to defer to experts: roughly, to form one’s beliefs on the basis of expert testimony. Yet, as has become salient in the age of Brexit, Trumpist politics, and climate change denial, people are often mistrustful of experts, and unwilling to defer to them. It’s a trope of highbrow public discourse that this unwillingness is a serious pathology. But to what extent is this trope accurate? Answering this requires us to settle both a normative question—under exactly what conditions ought we to defer to experts?—and an empirical question—under what conditions are people willing to defer to experts? The first question has been investigated primarily by philosophers; the second, primarily by psychologists. Yet there is little work integrating these literatures and putting together their results. The aim of this review article is to begin this task, enabling us to begin reaching conclusions about how much real practices of deference diverge from the ideal. We present an opinionated guide to relevant work from both philosophy and psychology, and note places where the literature has important gaps.

As a slew of recent work in epistemology has brought out, there is a range of cases where there's a strong temptation to say that prudential and (especially) moral considerations affect what we ought to believe. There are two distinct models of how this can happen. On the first, “reasons pragmatist” model, the relevant prudential and moral considerations constitute distinctively practical reasons for (or against) belief. On the second, “pragmatic encroachment” model, the relevant prudential and moral considerations affect what one is epistemically justified in believing. The pragmatic encroachment model appears to have several advantages over reasons pragmatism, and this has led many recent philosophers to endorse the former. However, in this paper we argue that a version of reasons pragmatism can be (at least largely) saved from these purported disadvantages once paired with an independently plausible permissivism about epistemically justified outright belief. This hybrid view—“permissivist pragmatism”—holds that when there is more than one epistemically permitted doxastic attitude, practical (including moral) considerations can determine which epistemically permitted doxastic attitude one all-things-considered ought to have. This view avoids both the problems faced by simple versions of reasons pragmatism, and those that distinctively attend pragmatic encroachment, while preserving the advantages of each view.

The remaining seven papers (eight, if you count this introductory piece) in this volume of Oxford Studies in Epistemology constitute a special issue on applied epistemology, an exciting, novel, and currently burgeoning subfield of epistemology. The term ‘applied epistemology’ is a relatively recent one, however, and anecdotally, many people I’ve encountered are not quite sure what it denotes, or what different works within the field have in common. In this introductory piece, I’ll venture some views about these questions, and about why applied epistemology is worth doing, as well as about its dangers. Doing so will set the state for me to situate the papers in this volume within the subfield.

Public life abounds with examples of people whose beliefs—especially political beliefs—seem suspiciously convenient: consider, for example, the billionaire who believes that all taxation is unjust, or the Supreme Court Justice whose interpretations of what the law says reliably line up with her personal political convictions. After presenting what I take to be the best argument for the epistemological relevance of suspicious convenience, I diagnose how attempts to resist this argument rest on a kind of epistemological ideal theory, in a sense to be made precise. And I argue that the ways in which this ideal theory can be deployed in defense of suspiciously convenient beliefs brings out the pernicious and distorting nature of such ideal theory in epistemology.

This entry is composed of three sections. In §1, we survey debates about what structural rationality is, including the emergence of the concept in the contemporary literature, its key characteristics, its relationship to substantive rationality, its paradigm instances, and the questions of whether these instances are unified and, if so, how. In §2, we turn to the debate about structural requirements of rationality – including controversies about whether they are “wide-scope” or “narrow-scope”, synchronic or diachronic, and whether they govern processes or states; as well as examining various forms of skepticism about structural requirements of rationality. In §3, we turn to the debate about the normative significance of structural rationality, surveying central challenges for the view that structural rationality is normatively significant and the theoretical options that arise in light of these challenges.

Despite myriad controversies about reasons, two theses are frequently taken for granted: (i) reasons are sources of normative support for actions, attitudes, etc; and (ii) reasons, at least in simple, paradigmatic cases, consist in atomic facts. Call this conjunction “the atomic view.” Against this, we advocate what we call “the cluster view,” on which even in the simplest cases, the normative support for an action or attitude is typically provided by a whole cluster of facts. Moreover, many of these facts are on an explanatory par—they each play the same kind of role in explaining why there is normative support for the action or attitude in question. We show that presupposition of the atomic view generates unnecessary (psuedo-)puzzles⁠—about topics such as rationality, moral worth, and doxastic justification⁠—that can be largely (dis)solved with the cluster view in place. The cluster view’s ability to do this constitutes an argument in its favor, beyond intuitive considerations that we also adduce.

Especially but not exclusively in the United States, there is a significant gulf between expert opinion and public opinion on a range of important political, social, and scientific issues. Large numbers of lay people hold views contrary to the expert consensus on topics such as climate change, vaccines, and economics. Much political commentary assumes that ordinary people should defer to experts more than they do, and this view is certainly lent force by the literally deadly effects of many denials of established science. But there are complex philosophical issues here, concerning, among other things, (i) what an expert is; (ii) what kind of deference is called for; (iii) and when deference is called for. This entry gives an overview of these three issues and recent work on them. It then examines some potential collective and pragmatic disadvantages of deference, before concluding with reflections on what we can say to those who distrust experts.

In the contemporary epistemological literature, peer disagreement is often taken to be an instance of a more general phenomenon of “higher-order evidence.” Correspondingly, its epistemic significance is often thought to turn on the epistemic significance of higher-order evidence in general. This chapter attempts to evaluate this claim, and in doing so to clarify some points of unclarity in the current literature – both about what it is for evidence to be “higher-order,” and about the relationship between disagreement and higher-order evidence. We will begin by considering some candidate definitions of “higher-order evidence,” and offering our own definition that attempts to capture the phenomenon of interest. We will then consider, in light of this definition, whether disagreement and its epistemic significance are best-understood as a kind of higher-order evidence. We’ll argue that although peer disagreement can be epistemically significant qua higher-order evidence, this role doesn’t exhaust its significance, and that it can also serve as straightforward first-order evidence. Finally, we’ll suggest that inattention to this latter point has made broadly conciliatory views about peer disagreement seem somewhat easier to resist than they in fact are.

It is fairly uncontroversial that when you encounter disagreement with some view of yours, you are often epistemically required to become at least somewhat less confident in that view. This includes political disagreements, where your level of confidence might in various ways affect your voting and other political behavior. But suppose that your opponents don’t comply with the epistemic norms governing disagreement – that is, they never reduce their confidence in their views in response to disagreement. If you always reduce your confidence, but your opponents never reduce theirs – and everyone participates in the political process accordingly – then it seems like the deliberative process will be unfairly skewed in favor of your opponents. In this paper, I do two things. First, I try to explain how this can be so, even though the process by stipulation represents everyone’s beliefs equally. Second, I defend the view that in such cases, you should remedy the unfairness by voting out of accord with your beliefs. By introducing a distinct state that I call a “personal take,” which you can vote on the basis of in such a case, I explain how doing this need not be problematically insincere, nor incoherent from the inside. The discussion has a number of independent upshots for both democratic theory and the epistemology of disagreement.

In epistemology and in ordinary life, we make many normative claims about beliefs. As with all normative claims, philosophical questions arise about what – if anything – underwrites these kinds of normative claims. On one view, epistemic instrumentalism, facts about what we (epistemically) ought to believe, or about what is an (epistemic, normative) reason to believe what, obtain at least partly in virtue of our goals (or aims, ends, intentions, desires, etc.). The converse view, anti-instrumentalism, denies this, and holds that the facts about what we ought or have reasons to believe are independent of our goals. In this chapter, I present the case for anti-instrumentalism. I lay out a well-known problem for instrumentalism, which is to say exactly what goal (or goals) grounds our epistemic reasons. For each possible answer, the view seems to generate problematic results. I consider some ways of trying to make the instrumentalist view more sophisticated to solve the problem and reject them. I then note a further problem for instrumentalism that applies regardless of what goal the instrumentalist says grounds our epistemic reasons. Finally, I sketch my preferred positive anti-instrumentalist view and argue that it is more theoretically virtuous than instrumentalism in several respects.

Some combinations of attitudes--of beliefs, credences, intentions, preferences, hopes, fears, and so on--do not fit together right: they are incoherent. A natural idea is that there are requirements of "structural rationality" that forbid us from being in these incoherent states. Yet a number of surprisingly difficult challenges arise for this idea. These challenges have recently led many philosophers to attempt to minimize or eliminate structural rationality, arguing that it is just a "shadow" of "substantive rationality"--that is, correctly responding to one's reasons. In *Fitting Things Together*, Alex Worsnip pushes back against this trend--defending the view that structural rationality is a genuine kind of rationality, distinct from and irreducible to substantive rationality, and tackling the most important challenges for this view. In so doing, he gives an original positive theory of the nature of coherence and structural rationality that explains how the diverse range of instances of incoherence can be unified under a general account, and how facts about coherence are normatively significant. He also shows how a failure to focus on coherence requirements as a distinctive phenomenon and distinguish them adequately from requirements of substantive rationality has led to confusion and mistakes in several substantive debates in epistemology and ethics. Taken as a whole, Fitting Things Together provides the first sustained defense of the view that structural rationality is a genuine, autonomous, unified, and normatively significant phenomenon.

It's often said that it is impossible to respond to non-evidential considerations in belief-formation, at least not directly and consciously. Many philosophers think that this provides grounds for accepting a normative thesis: typically, some kind of evidentialism about reasons for belief, or what one ought to believe. Some also think it supports thinking that evidentialist norms are constitutive of belief. There are a variety of ways in which one might try to support such theses by appeal to the impossibility-claim. In this paper, I put pressure on these various attempts by raising a simple yet overlooked problem for them. In brief, the problem is that it isn't true that one cannot (directly and consciously) respond, in belief-formation to considerations that don't actually constitute (good) evidence for the proposition under consideration; what is true, at most, is that one cannot (directly and consciously) respond, in belief-formation to considerations that one oneself takes to be evidentially irrelevant to that proposition. While this point is obvious once stated, its significance hasn't been appreciated, or so I'll argue. Once we take full account of it, the standard arguments from the impossibility-claim to evidentialism don't go through.