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Leading prescriptions for addressing the spread of fake news, misinformation, and other forms of epistemically toxic content online target either the platform or platform users as a single site for intervention. Neither approach attends to the intense feedback between people, posts, and platforms. Leading prescriptions boil down to the suggestion that we make social media more like traditional media, whether by making platforms take active roles as gatekeepers, or by exhorting individuals to beh…Read more
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People, posts, and platforms: reducing the spread of online toxicity by contextualizing content and setting normsAsian Journal of Philosophy 1 (2): 1-19. 2022.We present a novel model of individual people, online posts, and media platforms to explain the online spread of epistemically toxic content such as fake news and suggest possible responses. We argue that a combination of technical features, such as the algorithmically curated feed structure, and social features, such as the absence of stable social-epistemic norms of posting and sharing in social media, is largely responsible for the unchecked spread of epistemically toxic content online. Shari…Read more
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Why knowledge is the property of a community and possibly none of its membersPhilosophical Quarterly 65 (260): 417-441. 2015.Mainstream analytic epistemology regards knowledge as the property of individuals, rather than groups. Drawing on insights from the reality of knowledge production and dissemination in the sciences, I argue, from within the analytic framework, that this view is wrong. I defend the thesis of ‘knowledge-level justification communalism’, which states that at least some knowledge, typically knowledge obtained from expert testimony, is the property of a community and possibly none of its individ…Read more
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When is consensus knowledge based? Distinguishing shared knowledge from mere agreementSynthese 190 (7): 1293-1316. 2013.Scientific consensus is widely deferred to in public debates as a social indicator of the existence of knowledge. However, it is far from clear that such deference to consensus is always justified. The existence of agreement in a community of researchers is a contingent fact, and researchers may reach a consensus for all kinds of reasons, such as fighting a common foe or sharing a common bias. Scientific consensus, by itself, does not necessarily indicate the existence of shared knowledge among …Read more
Boaz Miller
Zefat Academic College
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Zefat Academic CollegeManagement Information SystensSenior Lecturer
University of Toronto, St. George Campus
Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science
PhD, 2011