Eleonora Cresto

We take up the challenge of developing an international network with capacity to survey the world’s scientists on an ongoing basis, providing rich datasets regarding the opinions of scientists and scientific sub-communities, both at a time and also over time. The novel methodology employed sees local coordinators, at each institution in the network, sending survey invitation emails internally to scientists at their home institution. The emails link to a ‘10 second survey’, where the participant is presented with a single statement to consider, and a standard five-point Likert scale. In June 2023, a group of 30 philosophers and social scientists invited 20,085 scientists across 30 institutions in 12 countries to participate, gathering 6,807 responses to the statement Science has put it beyond reasonable doubt that COVID-19 is caused by a virus. The study demonstrates that it is possible to establish a global network to quickly ascertain scientific opinion on a large international scale, with high response rate, low opt-out rate, and in a way that allows for significant (perhaps indefinite) repeatability. Measuring scientific opinion in this new way would be a valuable complement to currently available approaches, potentially informing policy decisions and public understanding across diverse fields.

Higher-order likes and desires sometimes lead agents to have ungrounded or paradoxical preferences. This situation is particularly problematic in the context of games. If payoffs are interdependent, the overall assessment of particular courses of action becomes ungrounded; in such cases, the game’s matrix is radically underdetermined. Paradigmatic examples of this phenomenon occur when players are ‘perfect lovers’ or ‘perfect haters’, in a sense to be explained. In this paper, I use a dynamic doxastic logic to mimic the search for a suitable matrix. Upgrades are triggered by conjectures about other players’ utilities, which can, in turn, be based on behavioural or verbal cues. We can prove that, under certain conditions, pairs of agents with paradoxical preferences eventually come to believe they cannot interact in a game. As a result, I hope to provide a better understanding of game-theoretic ungroundedness and, more generally, of the structure of higher-order preferences and desires.

According to the usual way of understanding how true knowledge attribution works, it is not right to attribute knowledge of p to S unless p is true and S is justified in believing p. This assumption seems to hold even if we shun away from the idea that we can give an analysis of knowledge in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. I want to raise some suspicions on the correctness of this traditional picture. I suggest that justification is not always perceived as a necessary condition for true knowledge attribution, according to our pre-theoretical usage of standard epistemic terms. This is not to say that justification is never seen as an important requirement; sometimes it certainly is. Still, the full-fledged, traditional position on epistemic justification needs to be seriously qualified. Ultimately, I will contend that this result lends support to a rival epistemological standpoint — what we might dub a Moderate Peircean stance on epistemic matters.

Some propositions are structurally unknowable for certain agents. Let me call them ‘Moorean propositions’. The structural unknowability of Moorean propositions is normally taken to pave the way towards proving a familiar paradox from epistemic logic—the so-called ‘Knowability Paradox’, or ‘Fitch’s Paradox’—which purports to show that if all truths are knowable, then all truths are in fact known. The present paper explores how to translate Moorean statements into a probabilistic language. A successful translation should enable us to derive a version of Fitch’s Paradox in a probabilistic setting. I offer a suitable schematic form for probabilistic Moorean propositions, as well as a concomitant proof of a probabilistic Knowability Paradox. Moreover, I argue that traditional candidates to play the role of probabilistic Moorean propositions will not do. In particular, we can show that violations of the so-called ‘Reflection Principle’ in probability need not yield structurally unknowable propositions. Among other things, this should lead us to question whether violating the Reflection Principle actually amounts to a clear case of epistemic irrationality, as it is often assumed. This result challenges the importance of the principle as a tool to assess both synchronic and diachronic rationality—a topic which is largely independent of Fitch’s Paradox—from a somewhat unexpected source.

Epistemic transparency tells us that, if an agent S knows a given proposition p, then S knows that she knows that p. This idea is usually encoded in the so-called KK principle of epistemic logic. The paper develops an argument in favor of a moderate version of KK, which I dub quasi-transparency, as a normative rather than a descriptive principle. In the second Section I put forward the suggestion that epistemic transparency is not a demand of ideal rationality, but of ideal epistemic responsibility, and hence that ideally responsible agents verify transparency principles of some sort; I also contend that their satisfaction should not be tied to an internalist epistemology. The central argument in favor of transparency is then addressed in Sections 3 to 8, through the development of a formal system. I show that, in a well-behaved formal setting, a moderate version of transparency is imposed upon us as a result of a number of independent decisions on the structure of higher-order probabilities, as long as we request that our probability and knowledge attributions cohere with each other. Thus I give a rationale to build a model for a hierarchy of languages with different levels of knowledge and probability operators; we obtain an analogous to KK for successive knowledge operators without actually demanding transitivity. The formal argument reinforces the philosophical intuition that epistemic transparency is an important desideratum we should not be too ready to dismiss.

I develop a strategy for representing epistemic states and epistemic changes that seeks to be sensitive to the difference between voluntary and involuntary aspects of our epistemic life, as well as to the role of pragmatic factors in epistemology. The model relies on a particular understanding of the distinction between full belief and acceptance, which makes room for the idea that our reasoning on both practical and theoretical matters typically proceeds in a contextual way. Within this framework, I discuss how agents can rationally shift their credal probability functions so as to consciously modify some of their contextual acceptances; the present account also allows us to represent how the very set of contexts evolves. Voluntary credal shifts, in turn, might provoke changes in the agent’s beliefs, but I show that this is actually a side effect of performing multiple adjustments in the total lot of the agent’s acceptance sets. In this way we obtain a model that preserves many pre-theoretical intuitions about what counts as adequate rationality constraints on our actual practices—and hence about what counts as an adequate, normative epistemological perspective.

En este trabajo se ofrece un comentario al artículo de Miguel Ángel Fernández sobre el veritismo y el valor del entendimiento publicado en Diánoia 65. En primer lugar, se observa que el veritismo descansa en una definición de valor epistémico que amenaza con trivializar toda la discusión. Luego se procede a examinar los argumentos de Fernández con cierto detalle. In this paper I comment on M.Á. Fernández's paper on veritism and the value of understanding. I begin by observing that veritism relies on a definition of epistemic value that threatens to trivialize the discussion. Then I proceed to examine Fernandez's arguments with some detail.