Gabriella Hulsey

In the contemporary epistemological literature, peer disagreement is often taken to be an instance of a more general phenomenon of “higher-order evidence.” Correspondingly, its epistemic significance is often thought to turn on the epistemic significance of higher-order evidence in general. This chapter attempts to evaluate this claim, and in doing so to clarify some points of unclarity in the current literature – both about what it is for evidence to be “higher-order,” and about the relationship between disagreement and higher-order evidence. We will begin by considering some candidate definitions of “higher-order evidence,” and offering our own definition that attempts to capture the phenomenon of interest. We will then consider, in light of this definition, whether disagreement and its epistemic significance are best-understood as a kind of higher-order evidence. We’ll argue that although peer disagreement can be epistemically significant qua higher-order evidence, this role doesn’t exhaust its significance, and that it can also serve as straightforward first-order evidence. Finally, we’ll suggest that inattention to this latter point has made broadly conciliatory views about peer disagreement seem somewhat easier to resist than they in fact are.

Our actions and decisions are regularly influenced by the social environment around us. Can social cues be leveraged to induce curiosity and affect subsequent behavior? Across two experiments, we show that curiosity is contagious: The social environment can influence people's curiosity about the answers to scientific questions. Participants were presented with everyday questions about science from a popular on‐line forum, and these were shown with a high or low number of up‐votes as a social cue to popularity. Participants indicated their curiosity about the answers, and they were given an opportunity to reveal a subset of those answers. Participants reported greater curiosity about the answers to questions when the questions were presented with a high (vs. low) number of up‐votes, and they were also more likely to choose to reveal the answers to questions with a high (vs. low) number of up‐votes. These effects were partially mediated by surprise and by the inferred usefulness of knowledge, with a more dramatic effect of low up‐votes in reducing curiosity than of high up‐votes in boosting curiosity. Taken together, these results highlight the important role social information plays in shaping our curiosity.

Whereas Bernard Suits argued that judged sports such as diving and figure skating are aesthetic performances rather than games, I argue that they’re simultaneously performances and games. Moreover, their two aspects are connected, since their prelusory goal is to dive or skate beautifully and the requirement to do somersaults or triple jumps makes achieving that goal more difficult. This analysis is similar to one given by Scott Kretchmar, but by locating these sports’ aesthetic side in their goals rather than in their rules, it better captures the importance of beauty in them