Elsa Magnell

Amongst recent work on analogies between the epistemic and the moral domains, one interaction is absent: apologies. This paper aims to fill that gap. After providing some reasons for thinking that epistemic apologies already exist in our practices, we explore the phenomena of epistemic relationships and epistemic trust. These are then used to build an account of epistemic apologies where we suggest that the function of an epistemic apology is to provide a basis for epistemic repair between an epistemic norm-violator and the victim of that violation. We illustrate how epistemic relationships can become impaired and what it takes for them to be repaired. Our hope is that this will be one step towards a cohesive picture of epistemic normativity. The resulting account also illustrates the similarity between epistemic and moral responsibility exchanges: they have the same conversational structure – consisting of the same kind of moves whose functions are special cases of a general functional schema – even as they are concerned with different kinds of failures.

We discuss the striking similarities between Friedrich Nietzsche's and Wilfrid Sellars's respective philosophies of mind. Drawing especially on recent Nietzsche scholarship by Riccardi and Katsafanas, we argue that the Nietzschean picture of consciousness is essentially the same as Sellars's view of conceptually structured thought. In particular, we argue that both consider structured thinking to be a linguistic phenomenon whose structure, in turn, arises contingently from social interactions within a community. Further, both views provide for a special role to be played by specifically mentalistic vocabulary, making it possible to engage with the mental states of others in a reflective way. We also discuss how this parallel extends to their respective views on perception. Drawing on O'Shea and Riccardi, we argue for interpretations on which there still is a clear connection between their respective views. Finally, we end the article by discussing some reasons why this similarity should not be as unexpected as it initially seems.

According to Ruth Chang (2002, 2022), incommensurability in hard cases cannot be cases of vagueness. This is because vagueness, unlike hard cases, can always be resolved by arbitrary stipulation, leaving no resolutional remainder or substantive disagreement. Contrary to this, I argue that Chang’s argument fails because proponents of the vagueness view are in no way necessarily committed to the claim that vagueness always can be resolved by arbitrary stipulation. In fact, there seems to be no reason to assume that vagueness could not accommodate our intuitions about resolutional remainder and substantive disagreements in a satisfying way. If we want a simple theory, and if at least some incommensurability is vagueness, this could then be a reason for understanding incommensurability as vagueness; and perhaps even rejecting parity.