John Hawthorne

Deference in politics is often necessary. To answer questions like, “Should the government increase the federal minimum wage?” and “Should the state introduce a vaccine mandate?,” we need to know relevant scientific and economic facts, make complex value judgments, and answer questions about incentives and implementation. Lay citizens typically lack the time, resources, and competence to answer these questions on their own. Hence, they must defer to others. But to whom should they defer? A common answer is that they should—or are at least permitted to—defer to co-partisans. This view initially seems attractive on both normative and empirical grounds. Against this, the author argues that deference to co-partisans has overlooked moral and epistemic problems. In light of them, the author proposes several new ways to revise our expectations of citizens in a democracy, both individually and institutionally.

The author defines and analyzes a practice central to inquiry: treating things as relevant to questions. This notion helps illuminate what lines of inquiry are, how those lines unfold, and how to evaluate them. When applied to the context of news journalism, we can use the notion of lines of inquiry to understand how questions get built into frames that give shape to news stories. Armed with this concept, we can then better understand the roles of lines of inquiry in journalism, and see more clearly how to evaluate news stories not just by fact-checking, but also by considering which facts should be selected to build a story to begin with.

Moral encroachers claim that the moral risks of falsely believing something raise the threshold of epistemic justification, thereby making justification and knowledge harder to come by. Leary argues that there’s a tension between moral encroachment and #BelieveWomen: there are certain paradigm cases involving rape reports about which most proponents of #BelieveWomen would agree that the hearers in these cases are justified in believing the accusation, but moral encroachment suggests they are not. This tension cannot be easily avoided by claiming, as some encroachers do, that the moral risks of not believing the accusation lower the threshold of epistemic justification: it’s unclear that this view succeeds at delivering the result that hearers are epistemically justified in believing the accusation in the relevant paradigm cases, and even if it does, its explanation of why hearers are justified in believing the accusation is demeaning toward victims. The tension also cannot be avoided by interpreting #BelieveWomen in an alternative way, as other encroachers do, that is compatible with claiming that hearers in the relevant cases are not epistemically justified: the salient alternative interpretations of #BelieveWomen are either implausible and unsatisfying to victims or they undermine the main motivations for encroachment. So, encroachers have more work to do to show that this tension can be resolved.

We are ignorant of many things. Most of the time, that ignorance seems epistemically neutral. At other times it seems like a ground for epistemic criticism. The permissibility problem is the problem of explaining why some cases of ignorance are epistemically criticisable whilst others are not. In this chapter, Munton argues that the standard resources of epistemology, both internalist and externalist, are poorly placed to capture our evaluative practices around ignorance and solve the permissibility problem. By contrast, thinking in terms of the attentional dispositions which underwrite problematically resilient forms of ignorance can more satisfactorily ground the evaluative resources we need.

The large literature on the ethics of statistical evidence and its use in courtrooms is premised on the assumption that statistical evidence can be highly probabilifying (i.e. that it can support a very high credence). When statistical evidence seems to render a morally problematic proposition highly probable, scholars then divide over how they respond to the problem: some attempt to identify a different epistemic problem with the inference, while others grant the inference’s epistemic legitimacy but object to the conclusion on a moral or political basis. In this chapter, the authors argue that, in fact, it is very difficult to construct realistic cases in which statistical evidence is highly probabilifying. The authors explain how noisy data resulting from misclassification—a common feature of most realistic cases—drastically reduces statistical evidence’s probative value. As a result, it is not necessary to advert to additional theoretical bells and whistles to explain why one ought not form a high credence based on statistical evidence in most realistic cases.

This chapter takes up the question of how videographic public announcements (VPAs)—i.e. videos that a wide swath of the public sees and knows that everyone else can see too—have functioned to mobilize people politically, and how the presence of deepfakes in our information environment stands to change the dynamics of this mobilization. Existing work by Regina Rini, Don Fallis, and others has focused on the ways that deepfakes might interrupt our acquisition of first-order knowledge through videos. But Hyska points out that even where every audience member takes a video to be veridical, and where first-order knowledge acquisition is therefore secure, an audience aware of deepfakes in their environment will not acquire higher-order knowledge in the way that has erstwhile been characteristic for audiences of VPAs. Engaging with ideas from the literatures on public announcement logic, common knowledge, and convention, Hyska enumerates a variety of ways in which we should expect this absence of higher-order knowledge to throw up barriers to political mobilization. Hyska goes on to apply this analysis of VPAs to the mechanisms by which an uptick in publicly available videos of police brutality over the last decade, mediated by camera phones and social media, was responsible for the largest mass protests in US history in summer 2020. This makes vivid the stakes of the transformation in our mobilizing environment that Hyska claims deepfakes effect: where we lose the common-knowledge-generating effects of VPAs, there are fresh obstacles to this sort of mass mobilization.

Many people form beliefs about matters of social and political importance online, in what have been described as “echo chambers.” These include social media news feeds and news sites tailored to the consumer’s political perspective. Some philosophers have suggested that there is nothing especially worrying about this from an epistemological view, while others have taken it to be a serious problem in need of diagnosis and remedy. This chapter applies some ideas of the 17th-century philosopher Blaise Pascal to the dispute about echo chambers. Pascal emphasized the role of affect, or what he called “the heart,” in determining belief. The ways in which the heart can affect belief are characterized as motivated reasoning and motivated seeing—the influence of affective states on the processing of evidence and the appearance of evidence, respectively. These influences and their manifestation in online echo chambers are discussed, and the consequences for one’s rationality assessed. A Pascalian perspective that emphasizes the heart, rather than focusing exclusively on reasoning, has great potential to explain and diagnose the problem with online echo chambers, and thereby shed light on a major issue in applied epistemology.

This chapter serves as an introduction to the special issue on applied epistemology that occupies the remainder of this volume of Oxford Studies in Epistemology. The author—who is the editor of the special volume—gives a characterization of what applied epistemology is, distinguishes it from ‘social epistemology’, sets out some reasons why it is worth doing, and raises some dangers to be aware of in doing it. He then gives an overview of the chapters in the special issue and situates them in the existing literature, highlighting how they make distinctive and exciting contributions to that literature and represent some of the best new work in the field.

You omega know something when you know it, and know that you know it, and know that you know that you know it... This chapter first argues that omega knowledge matters, in the sense that it is required for rational assertion, action, inquiry, and belief. The chapter argues that existing accounts of omega knowledge face major challenges. One account is skeptical, claiming that we have no omega knowledge of any ordinary claims about the world. Another account embraces the KK thesis (that if you know something, then you know that you know it), and identifies knowledge with omega knowledge. This position faces counterexamples, and struggles to make sense of inexact knowledge. The chapter then develops a new account of knowledge, by proposing the principle of Reflective Luminosity: if you know that you know something, then you omega know it. The chapter argues that Reflective Luminosity allows for omega knowledge while avoiding the problems for KK.

Epistemic trespassing, science denial, refusal to guard against bias, mishandling higher-order evidence, and the development of vice are troubling intellectual behaviors. The chapter advances work done by psychologists on moral self-licensing to show how all of these behaviors can be explained in terms of a parallel phenomenon of epistemic self-licensing. The chapter situates this discussion at the intersection of three major epistemological projects: epistemic explanation and intervention (the project of explaining troubling intellectual phenomena in the hopes of deriving ameliorative strategies), hostile epistemology (the study of how intellectual vulnerabilities might be exploited), and the promise of higher-order evidence (the hope that higher-order evidence leads to epistemic improvement). Analyzing epistemic licensing allows us to explain and offer modest interventions aimed at mitigating these behaviors, while illuminating exploitable vulnerabilities and tempering optimism about the promise of higher-order evidence.

We explore the consequences of a natural and well-motivated modeling assumption of Bayesian epistemology, according to which the objects of credence are sentences in the agent's language. We show that this assumption is inconsistent with two further natural Bayesian idealizations: those of Logical Perfection (the logical-deductive consistency and closure of the sentences in which the agent is certain) and of perfect access to (i.e., certainty regarding) the presence or absence of certainty in any particular sentence in the agent's language—an assumption we call “Luminosity.” That is, it turns out that a luminous agent is an irrational agent. After presenting our main result and some related impossibility results concerning variations on Logical Perfection and Luminosity, we briefly examine the range of candidate solutions to the puzzles that these results present us with.

How can the propositional attitudes of several individuals be aggregated into overall collective propositional attitudes? Although there are large bodies of work on the aggregation of various special kinds of propositional attitudes, such as preferences, judgments, probabilities and utilities, the aggregation of propositional attitudes is seldom studied in full generality. In this paper, we seek to contribute to filling this gap in the literature. We sketch the ingredients of a general theory of propositional attitude aggregation and prove two new theorems. Our first theorem simultaneously characterizes some prominent aggregation rules in the cases of probability, judgment and preference aggregation, including linear opinion pooling and Arrovian dictatorships. Our second theorem abstracts even further from the specific kinds of attitudes in question and describes the properties of a large class of aggregation rules applicable to a variety of belief-like attitudes. Our approach integrates some previously disconnected areas of investigation.

In 1968, David Lewis provided a translation scheme from the language of quantified modal logic (QML) into the language of counterpart theory (CT), one that he thought would make manifest the truth conditions of absolute or metaphysical modal claims. Lewis’s other main contribution to the logic and semantics of modality is his celebrated 1973 semantics for counterfactual conditionals, which is put forward as a more general theory that subsumes the logic of metaphysical modality. It is natural for the advocate of CT to wish to extend Lewis’s 1968 translation scheme for QML to a language that includes the counterfactual conditional connective. This chapter first examines the translation of QML to counterpart theory proposed by Lewis in 1973, making vivid various challenges that confront anyone wishing to marry counterpart theory with a logic of counterfactuals. It then proposes a superior translation scheme within the framework of Lewis’s own counterpart theory.

“There are no gaps in logical space,” writes Lewis (1986), giving voice to sentiment shared by many philosophers. But different natural ways of trying to make this sentiment precise turn out to conflict with one another. One is a _pattern_ idea: “Any pattern of instantiation is metaphysically possible.” Another is a _cut and paste_ idea: “For any objects in any worlds, there exists a world that contains any number of duplicates of all of those objects.” Jumping off from discussions from Forrest and Armstrong (1984) and Nolan (1996), the authors use resources from model theory to show the inconsistency of certain packages of combinatorial principles and the consistency of others.

Defenses of pragmatic encroachment commonly rely on two thoughts: first, that the gap between one’s strength of epistemic position on _p_ and perfect strength sometimes makes a difference to what one is justified in doing, and second, that the higher the stakes, the harder it is to know. It is often assumed that these ideas complement each other. This chapter shows that these ideas are far from complementary. Along the way, a variety of strategies for regimenting the somewhat inchoate notion of stakes are indicated, and some troubling cases for pragmatic encroachment raised.

A good deal of Dorothy Edgington’s work has involved fruitful applications of the probability calculus to philosophical subject matters—notably, conditionals and vagueness. This chapter forms part of a project of exploring the relevance of probability to various epistemic phenomena, including knowledge and epistemic modality. Its focus here is on certain epistemic uses of ‘ought’ and ‘should’. The chapter argues against flat-footed ways of grounding those concepts in the ideology of probability, although it makes room for certain other, less reductive, structural relationships between the two. The discussion involves various idealizations and simplifications. Nevertheless, it argues that flattened ordering sources are a useful tool for developing a broadly Kratzer-style treatment of least some uses of ‘ought’.

This chapter explores solutions to a somewhat underappreciated family of puzzles concerning propositional attitudes generated by intensionalism—the view that necessarily equivalent propositions are identical. After presenting the puzzles informally, the chapter introduces the apparatus of higher-order logic, which allows one to quantify into the position of any type of expression, and makes possible a formally rigorous statement of the puzzles. Many philosophers will think that it’s quite obvious how one should respond to the puzzles—namely by treating them as refutations of intensionalism. But this response is arguably too quick. The chapter explores strategies for responding to the puzzles within the framework of intensionalism, laying out a taxonomy of such strategies. Certain of these strategies treat English attitude sentences as opaque and others don’t. However all of them use a transparent (i.e. non-opaque) language as the vehicle for theorizing. The focus here will be on the logical ramifications of the various strategies.

Scotus contended that the humanity of Socrates has less than a numerical unity. But what does that claim come to? And how does Scotus’s position relate to familiar debates concerning the existence of universals and/or tropes? This paper provides a detailed sketch of Scotus’s view, arguing that it is not intrinsic to Socrates’s nature that it has numerical unity. The paper goes on to explain why Ockham’s attack on the coherence of Scotus’s argument does not succeed. What initially looks like a successful master argument against Scotus’s view is ultimately a failure on account of its neglect of the role of intrinsic determination.

The problem of evil is the most prominent argument against the existence of God. Skeptical theists contend that it is not a good argument. Their reasons for this contention vary widely, involving such notions as CORNEA (Condition Of ReasoNable Epistemic Access), epistemic appearances, ‘gratuitous’ evils, ‘levering’ evidence, and the representativeness of goods. This chapter aims to dispel some confusions about these notions, in particular by clarifying their roles within a probabilistic epistemology. In addition, the chapter develops new responses to the problem of evil from both the phenomenal conception of evidence and the knowledge-first view of evidence.

This chapter argues that there is a tension in the semantic views held by certain antiphysicalists. These philosophers accept Fregean arguments against direct-reference theories of ordinary proper names but maintain that phenomenal concepts refer directly. Against this semantic package, it is argued that the thought experiments that motivate a sense-reference distinction for ordinary proper names — roughly, Hesperus-Phosphorus stories — can be replicated at the level of direct phenomenal concepts. (A Hesperus-Phosphorus story is one in which one rationally believes both that object a has a property _P_ and that object _b_ lacks _P_, even though _a_ = _b_.)

This is the most comprehensive book ever published on philosophical methodology. A team of thirty-eight of the world's leading philosophers present original essays on various aspects of how philosophy should be and is done. The first part is devoted to broad traditions and approaches to philosophical methodology (including logical empiricism, phenomenology, and ordinary language philosophy). The entries in the second part address topics in philosophical methodology, such as intuitions, conceptual analysis, and transcendental arguments. The third part of the book is devoted to essays about the interconnections between philosophy and neighbouring fields, including those of mathematics, psychology, literature and film, and neuroscience.

Many treat it as theoretical bedrock that knowledge cannot be generated by false belief. Much of the impetus behind this view stems from the literature generated by Edmund Gettier’s influential paper. Nevertheless, some recent literature has undermined the alleged structural feature using compelling cases. Roughly, two groups have emerged: those proposing that knowledge is had via a true belief in the vicinity and those suggesting that a false belief provides the epistemic support required for knowledge. While we tentatively side with these authors, we are not at all sympathetic with the theories on offer as they prove problematic upon closer reflection. An alternative picture is suggested wherein falsehoods play a causal role in generating knowledge. In this sense knowledge can be generated by habits involving false beliefs.