Annalisa Coliva

This book offers the first systematic extension of hinge epistemology—originally developed as an account of perceptual justification and as a response to Cartesian and Humean skepticism—into the domains of social and applied epistemology. It advances a novel hinge-theoretic framework that distinguishes between de jure and de facto hinges, a distinction that allows for a nuanced analysis of a broad range of issues in social epistemology. The framework is applied to central debates on common knowledge, genealogical challenges, deep disagreement, and the nature of testimonial justification and trust, including pressing questions surrounding trust in artificial intelligence. It further engages with debates on testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, as well as conceptual engineering, with particular focus on the contested and socially significant concept “woman.” Beyond these social applications, the book explores the implications of hinge epistemology for understanding psychiatric delusions and the epistemic structure of conspiracy theories, shedding light on how basic commitments shape and constrain our cognitive and social lives. By extending hinge epistemology into these diverse contexts, the book demonstrates its power as a unifying framework for addressing both traditional epistemological concerns and contemporary challenges at the intersection of knowledge, society, and practice.

The primary objective of this paper is to tentatively investigate how a family-resemblance approach to concepts might be applied to the related notions of knowledge and understanding, with the aim of deflating or redressing ongoing debates surrounding each. Given that the concept of family-resemblance is frequently misinterpreted, and there is a prevailing tendency to revert to more conventional methods of conceptual analysis, the paper offers a comprehensive overview of the notion. To lay the groundwork, it traces the origins of family-resemblance to Goethe's morphological method, illustrating the approach with an example from botany. It then presents a family-resemblance account of the concept of knowledge and understanding.

According to a prominent strand of thought in analytic philosophy of mind, certain judgments of the form “a is F” are such that, although one can be mistaken about what property it is that a has, one cannot be mistaken that it is a that has the relevant property. Judgments of this kind are said to be immune to error through misidentification (IEM). This article has two main aims. On the one hand, it responds to a need for a systematization of the debate about immunity to error through misidentification, which consists of multiple contributions in epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and metaphysics that have accumulated throughout the last 80 years – since the publication of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Blue Book – and which no one – to the best of our knowledge – has drawn together in an exhaustive and accessible way. On the other hand, the article will take a stand on matters concerning the nature, scope, explanation, and significance of immunity to error through misidentification.