Clayton Littlejohn

According to a recent account of disinformation, disinformation is content that “generates ignorance” (Simion in Eur Rev 32(4):321–34, 2024a; Episteme 21(4):1208–1219, 2024b). The view improves upon previous accounts that focused primarily or exclusively upon the potential for disinformation to induce false belief since these views ignored a further functional connection to inducing doubts that generate ignorance. While this proposal gives us a broader understanding of what disinformation can be, it retains the idea that disinformation functions as evidence that provides incremental confirmation for falsehoods. Thus, this approach implies (in line with previous views) that disinformants need to capture the attention of agents, present these agents with content that will be treated as evidence, and hope that this content will change an agent’s belief state in epistemically undesirable ways. Certainly, this is an apt description of some disinformation tactics, but it is not an adequate definition of what disinformation is. In some successful real-world disinformation campaigns, a disinformant wants the audience not to gather and process evidence. In some cases, evidence that provides incremental confirmation for falsehoods will also provide the audience with the knowledge they seek. After arguing that there are documented disinformation tactics and campaigns that don’t fit with Simion’s approach, I shall offer an alternative pragmatic approach. On this view, disinformation can come in the form of evidence that’s misleading in ways that the agent doesn’t see, but it can also come in the form of content that makes it evident that the evidential resources the agent might need to advance her inquiries is corrupted. Rather than think of disinformation as essentially epistemic (e.g., functioning to increase the inaccuracy of attitudes), we should see it as essentially pragmatic, used by disinformants to minimise the probability that agents pursuing threatening ends will succeed in their efforts. In the special case (which is our focus here) where a disinformant is threatened by an agent’s inquiry, it is content that’s used to minimize the probability that the inquisitive agent achieves her ends by coming to know the answers to questions. This includes both misleading first-order evidence to lead agents away from the truth, but also accurate higher-order evidence that confirms that evidential resources have been degraded.

According to a recent account of disinformation, disinformation is content that “generates ignorance” (Simion 2024a; 2024b). The view improves upon previous accounts that focused upon the potential for disinformation to induce false belief, overlooking its role in generating ignorance by inducing doubt. While this proposal gives us a broader understanding of what disinformation can be, it retains the idea that disinformation functions as evidence that incrementally confirms falsehoods. Thus, this approach implies (in line with previous views) that when disinformation is used intentionally, the disinformant hopes to capture the attention of agents and induce these agents to process this content as evidence to change an agent's belief state in epistemically undesirable ways. Certainly, this is true of some disinformation tactics, but it won't give us an adequate definition. In some successful real-world disinformation campaigns, disinformants add to the available content to deter the audience from attending to and processing evidence. In some cases, evidence can incrementally confirm a falsehood while providing knowledge of its negation. I propose an alternative pragmatic view that explains this. On this view, disinformation can come in the form of misleading evidence, but it can also come in the form of content that makes it evident that the evidential resources the agent needs to advance inquiry have been corrupted. This content functions as disinformation because it rationalises decisions that can protect a disinformant’s interests instead of promoting the inquirer’s interests. Instead of thinking of disinformation in epistemic terms (e.g., evidence that’s misleading), we should see it as fundamentally pragmatic. In the special case where a disinformant wants to influence another agent's inquiries, disinformation is content that’s used to minimise the probability that the inquisitive agent successfully draws conclusions that threaten the disinformant's interests. This includes misleading first-order evidence that leads agents away from the truth (per Simion's account), but it also includes non-misleading higher-order evidence that accurately shows evidential resources are corrupted, functioning as a deterrent that rationalises withdrawing from dangerous lines of inquiry.

A theory of rational belief should get the cases right. It should also reach its verdicts using the right theoretical assumptions. Leading theories seem to predict the wrong things. With only one exception, they don't accommodate principles that we should use to explain these verdicts. We offer a theory of rational belief that combines an attractive picture of epistemic desirability with plausible principles connecting desirability to rationality. On our view, it's rational to believe when it's sufficiently likely that you'd know because believing when it's sufficiently likely that you'd know minimises expected objective epistemic undesirability.

The typical epistemology course begins with a discussion of the distinction between justification and knowledge and ends without any discussion of the distinction between justification and excuse. This is unfortunate. If we had a better understanding of the justification-excuse distinction, we would have a better understanding of the intuitions that shape the internalism-externalism debate. My aims in this paper are these. First, I will explain how the kinds of excuses that should interest epistemologists exculpate. Second, I will explain why the intuitions that underwrite the new evil demon argument don't provide support for the internalist claim that justification is just in the head. The positive response that Cohen's example elicits is an indication that the subject should be excused if she violates an epistemic norm, not an indication that no norm has been violated. For just about any conceivable norm we can think of we can imagine situations in which someone violates that norm because they're moved by evidence that misleadingly suggests that they'd conform to it. When that happens, we'll respond positively in just the way we do when we consider Cohen's deceived subjects. When that happens, we cannot say that the subjects' responses were justified because we've stipulated that the subjects' responses contravene the relevant norms. Regardless of whether you think of norms along internalist or externalist lines, you should see that the intuitions that underwrite the new evil demon objection tell us nothing at all about whether a subject conforms to a norm. They tell us nothing about justification

In this paper, we propose a new theory of rationality defeat. We propose that defeaters are "indicators of ignorance", evidence that we’re not in a position to know some target proposition. When the evidence that we’re not in a position to know is sufficiently strong and the probability that we can know is too low, it is not rational to believe. We think that this account retains all the virtues of the more familiar approaches that characterise defeat in terms of its connection to reasons to believe or to confirmation but provides a better approach to higher-order defeat. We also think that a strength of this proposal is that it can be embedded into a larger normative framework. On our account the no-defeater condition is redundant. We can extract our theory of defeat from our theory of what makes it rational to believe—it is rational to believe when it is sufficiently probable that our belief would be knowledge. Thus, our view can provide a monistic account of defeat, one that gives a unifying explanation of the toxicity of different defeaters that is grounded in a framework that either recognises knowledge as the norm of belief or identifies knowledge as the fundamental epistemic good that full belief can realise.

Lewis thought concessive knowledge attributions (e.g., ‘I know that Harry is a zebra, but it might be that he’s just a cleverly disguised mule’) caused serious trouble for fallibilists. As he saw it, CKAs are overt statements of the fallibilist view and they are contradictory. Dougherty and Rysiew have argued that CKAs are pragmatically defective rather than semantically defective. Stanley thinks that their pragmatic response to Lewis fails, but the fallibilist cause is not lost because Lewis was wrong about the commitments of fallibilism. There are problems with Dougherty and Rysiew’s response to Stanley and there are problems with Stanley’s response to Lewis. I’ll offer a defense of fallibilism of my own and show that fallibilists needn’t worry about CKAs.

This paper looks at whether it is possible to unify the requirements of rationality with the demands of normative reasons. It might seem impossible to do because one depends upon the agent’s perspective and the other upon features of the situation. Enter Reasons Perspectivism. Reasons perspectivists think they can show that rationality does consist in responding correctly to reasons by placing epistemic constraints on these reasons. They think that if normative reasons are subject to the right epistemic constraints, rational requirements will correspond to the demands generated by normative reasons. While this proposal is prima facie plausible, it cannot ultimately unify reasons and rationality. There is no epistemic constraint that can do what reasons perspectivists would need it to do. Some constraints are too strict. The rest are too slack. This points to a general problem with the reasons-first program. Once we recognize that the agent’s epistemic position helps determine what she should do, we have to reject the idea that the features of the agent’s situation can help determine what we should do. Either rationality crowds out reasons and their demands or the reasons will make unreasonable demands.

Evidence is one of the most fundamental notions in the field of epistemology and is emerging as a major topic across academic disciplines. The practice of every academic discipline consists largely in providing evidence for key theses and The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of the Philosophy of Evidence, the first collection of its kind, is an outstanding reference source to the key topics, problems and debates in this exciting subject. Comprising over forty chapters by a team of international contributors the Handbook is divided into six parts: Ontology of evidence Sources of evidence Evidence and normativity Evidence and probability Social epistemology of evidence Evidence in the disciplines. Within these sections central issues, debates and problems are examined. Questions covered include: What is evidence? What is the relationship between knowledge and evidence? Is a pluralism of evidence possible? What other sources of evidence are there in addition to perception? Is what a person ought to believe completely fixed by the totality of evidence they have, or does it also depend on other factors like practical interests? Can evidential force be measured in any well-behaved way? How do socially created biases - for instance, gender biases - affect evidence-gathering? How is evidence relevant within different academic disciplines? The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of the Philosophy of Evidence is essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy of science and epistemology and related disciplines such as law, religion, history and the social sciences.

In this paper, I present a puzzle about epistemic rationality. It seems plausible that it should be rational to believe a proposition if you have sufficient evidential support for it. It seems plausible that it rationality requires you to conform to the categorical requirements of rationality. It also seems plausible that our first-order attitudes ought to mesh with our higher-order attitudes. It seems unfortunate that we cannot accept all three claims about rationality. I will present three ways of trying to resolve this tension and argue that the best way to do this is to reject the idea that strong evidential support is the stuff rationality is made of. In the course of doing this, I shall argue that there is a special class of propositions about the requirements of rationality that we cannot make rational mistakes about and explain how this can be.

There has been considerable discussion recently of consequentialist justifications of epistemic norms. In this paper, I shall argue that these justifications are not justifications. The consequentialist needs a value theory, a theory of the epistemic good. The standard theory treats accuracy as the fundamental epistemic good and assumes that it is a good that calls for promotion. Both claims are mistaken. The fundamental epistemic good involves accuracy, but it involves more than just that. The fundamental epistemic good is knowledge, not mere true belief, because the goodness of an epistemic state is connected to that state's ability to give us reasons. If I'm right about the value theory, this has a number of significant implications for the consequentialist project. First, the good-making features that attach to valuable full beliefs are not features of partial belief. The resulting value theory does not give us the values we need to give consequentialist justifications of credal norms. Second, the relevant kind of good does not call for promotion. It is good to know, but the rational standing of a belief is not determined by the belief's location in a ranked set of options. In the paper's final section, I explain why the present view is a kind of teleological non-consequentialism. There is a kind of good that is prior to the right, but as the relevant kind of good does not call for promotion the value theory shows us what is wrong with the consequentialist project.

Could it be right to convict and punish defendants using only statistical evidence? In this paper, I argue that it is not and explain why it would be wrong. This is difficult to do because there is a powerful argument for thinking that we should convict and punish defendants using statistical evidence. It looks as if the relevant cases are cases of decision under risk and it seems we know what we should do in such cases (i.e., maximize expected value). Given some standard assumptions about the values at stake, the case for convicting and punishing using statistical evidence seems solid. In trying to show where this argument goes wrong, I shall argue (against Lockeans, reliabilists, and others) that beliefs supported only by statistical evidence are epistemically defective and (against Enoch, Fisher, and Spectre) that these epistemic considerations should matter to the law. To solve the puzzle about the role of statistical evidence in the law, we need to revise some commonly held assumptions about epistemic value and defend the relevance of epistemology to this practical question.

The internalism-externalism debate is one of the oldest debates in epistemology. Internalists assert that the justification of our beliefs can only depend on facts internal to us, while externalists insist that justification can depend on additional, for example environmental, factors. Clayton Littlejohn proposes and defends a new strategy for resolving this debate. Focussing on the connections between practical and theoretical reason, he explores the question of whether the priority of the good to the right might be used to defend an epistemological version of consequentialism, and proceeds to formulate a new 'deontological externalist' view. On this view, the justificatory status of a belief depends upon whether it is fit for the purposes of practical reasoning. Only beliefs that meet externalist standards are fit for such a purpose. If we want to understand how a wide range of norms (e.g., moral norms) apply to rational agents regardless of what their evidence or outlook is like, we have to embrace an externalist account of the justification.