•  234
    How should we think about the ways search engines can go wrong? Following the publication of Safiya Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression (Noble 2018), a view has emerged that racist, sexist, and other problematic results should be thought of as indicative of algorithmic bias. In this paper, I offer an alternative angle on these results, building on Noble’s suggestion that search engines are complicit in a racial contract (Mills 1990). I argue that racist and sexist results should be thought of as pa…Read more
  •  336
    Receptive Publics
    Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    It is widely accepted that public discourse as we know it is less than ideal from an epistemological point of view. In this paper, we develop an underappreciated aspect of the trouble with public discourse: what we call the Listening Problem. The listening problem is the problem that public discourse has in giving appropriate uptake and reception to ideas and concepts from oppressed groups. Drawing on the work of Jürgen Habermas and Nancy Fraser, we develop an institutional response to the liste…Read more
  •  871
    Deepfakes and the epistemic apocalypse
    Synthese 201 (3): 1-23. 2023.
    It is widely thought that deepfake videos are a significant and unprecedented threat to our epistemic practices. In some writing about deepfakes, manipulated videos appear as the harbingers of an unprecedented _epistemic apocalypse_. In this paper I want to take a critical look at some of the more catastrophic predictions about deepfake videos. I will argue for three claims: (1) that once we recognise the role of social norms in the epistemology of recordings, deepfakes are much less concerning,…Read more
  •  74
    This paper explains some of the reasoning behind “Can a Good Philosophical Contribution Be Made Just by Asking a Question?,” a paper which consists solely in its title and which is published in the same issue of the journal as the present paper. The method for explaining that reasoning consists in making available a lightly edited version of a letter the authors sent to the editors when submitting the title-only paper. The editors permitted publication of that paper on the condition that the aut…Read more
  •  339
    Collective Practical Knowledge is a Fragmented Interrogative Capacity
    Philosophical Issues 32 (1): 180-199. 2022.
    What does it take for a group of people to know how to do something? An account of collective practical knowledge ought to be compatible with the linguistic evidence about the semantics for collective knowledge-how ascriptions, be able to explain the practicality of collective knowledge, be able to explain both the connection between individual and collective know-how and the possibility of a group knowing how to do something none of its members know, and be applicable to a suitably wide range o…Read more
  •  294
    Thinking Together: Advising as Collaborative Deliberation
    Philosophers' Imprint. forthcoming.
    We spend a good deal of time thinking about how and when to advise others, and how to respond to other people advising us. However, philosophical discussions of the nature and norms advising have been scattered and somewhat disconnected. The most focused discussion has come from philosophers of language interested in whether advising is a kind of assertive or directive kind of speech act. This paper argues that the ordinary category of advising is much more heterogenous than has been appreciated…Read more
  •  567
    Knowing more (about questions)
    Synthese 200 (1): 1-23. 2022.
    How should we measure knowledge? According to the Counting Approach, we can measure knowledge by counting pieces of knowledge. Versions of the Counting Approach that try to measure knowledge by counting true beliefs with suitable support or by counting propositions known run into problems, stemming from infinite numbers of propositions and beliefs, difficulties in individuating propositions and beliefs, and cases in which knowing the same number of propositions contributes differently to knowled…Read more
  •  674
    In this paper we apply social epistemology to mathematical proofs and their role in mathematical knowledge. The most famous modern collaborative mathematical proof effort is the Classification of Finite Simple Groups. The history and sociology of this proof have been well-documented by Alma Steingart (2012), who highlights a number of surprising and unusual features of this collaborative endeavour that set it apart from smaller-scale pieces of mathematics. These features raise a number of intere…Read more
  •  679
    Group Knowledge, Questions, and the Division of Epistemic Labour
    Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 6. 2019.
    Discussions of group knowledge typically focus on whether a group’s knowledge that p reduces to group members’ knowledge that p. Drawing on the cumulative reading of collective knowledge ascriptions and considerations about the importance of the division of epistemic labour, I argue what I call the Fragmented Knowledge account, which allows for more complex relations between individual and collective knowledge. According to this account, a group can know an answer to a question in virtue of memb…Read more
  •  275
    Caliphate and the Social Epistemology of Podcasts
    Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 10 (2): 27-35. 2021.
  •  2628
    Towards a Critical Social Epistemology of Social Media
    In Jennifer Lackey & Aidan McGlynn (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Social Epistemology, . forthcoming.
    What are the proper epistemic aims of social media sites? A great deal of social media critique presupposes an exceptionalist attitude, according to which social media is either uniquely good, or uniquely bad for our collective knowledge-generating practices. Exceptionalism about social media is troublesome, both because it leads to oversimplistic narratives, and because it prevents us making relevant comparisons to other epistemic systems. The goal of this chapter is to offer an anti-exceptiona…Read more
  •  277
    _ To the Best of Our Knowledge: Social Expectations and Epistemic Normativity _ By GoldbergSanfordOxford University Press, 2018. xvi + 278 pp.
  •  946
    Fake news, conceptual engineering, and linguistic resistance: reply to Pepp, Michaelson and Sterken, and Brown
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 65 (4): 488-516. 2022.
    ABSTRACT In Habgood-Coote : 1033–1065) I argued that we should abandon ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’, on the grounds that these terms do not have stable public meanings, are unnecessary, and function as vehicles for propaganda. Jessica Pepp, Eliot Michaelson, and Rachel Sterken and Étienne Brown : 144–154) have raised worries about my case for abandonment, recommending that we continue using ‘fake news’. In this paper, I respond to these worries. I distinguish more clearly between theoretical and…Read more
  •  669
    Group Inquiry
    Erkenntnis 87 (3): 1099-1123. 2022.
    Group agents can act, and they can have knowledge. How should we understand the species of collective action which aims at knowledge? In this paper, I present an account of group inquiry. This account faces two challenges: to make sense of how large-scale distributed activities might be a kind of group action, and to make sense of the kind of division of labour involved in collective inquiry. In the first part of the paper, I argue that existing accounts of group action face problems dealing wit…Read more
  •  661
    Knowledge-How, Abilities, and Questions
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 97 (1): 86-104. 2019.
    The debate about the nature of knowledge-how is standardly thought to be divided between intellectualist views, which take knowledge-how to be a kind of propositional knowledge, and anti-intellectualist views, which take knowledge-how to be a kind of ability. In this paper, I explore a compromise position—the interrogative capacity view—which claims that knowing how to do something is a certain kind of ability to generate answers to the question of how to do it. This view combines the intellectu…Read more
  •  33
    Review Socially Extended Epistemology (review)
    Metascience 28 (3): 441-447. 2019.
  •  572
    What's the Point of Authors?
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. forthcoming.
    Who should be the author(s) of an academic paper? This question is becoming increasingly pressing, due to the increasing prevalence and scale of scientific collaboration, and the corresponding diversity of authorship practices in different disciplines and subdisciplines. This paper addresses the conceptual issues underlying authorship, with an eye to ameliorating authorship practices. The first part of the paper distinguishes five roles played by authorship attributions: allocating credit, const…Read more
  •  473
    What's the point of knowing how?
    European Journal of Philosophy 27 (3): 693-708. 2019.
    Why is it useful to talk and think about knowledge-how? Using Edward Craig’s discussion of the function of the concepts of knowledge and knowledge-how as a jumping off point, this paper argues that considering this question can offer us new angles on the debate about knowledge-how. We consider two candidate functions for the concept of knowledge-how: pooling capacities, and mutual reliance. Craig makes the case for pooling capacities, which connects knowledge-how to our need to pool practical ca…Read more
  •  4090
    Stop Talking about Fake News!
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 62 (9-10): 1033-1065. 2019.
    Since 2016, there has been an explosion of academic work and journalism that fixes its subject matter using the terms ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’. In this paper, I argue that this terminology is not up to scratch, and that academics and journalists ought to completely stop using the terms ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’. I set out three arguments for abandonment. First, that ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’ do not have stable public meanings, entailing that they are either nonsense, context-sensitive,…Read more
  •  580
    Knowledge-how: Interrogatives and Free Relatives
    Episteme 15 (2): 183-201. 2018.
    It has been widely accepted since Stanley and Williamson (2001) that the only linguistically acceptable semantic treatments for sentences of the form ‘S knows how to V’ involve treating the wh-complement ‘how to V’ as an interrogative phrase, denoting a set of propositions. Recently a number of authors have suggested that the ‘how to V’ phrase denotes not a proposition, but an object. This view points toward a prima facie plausible non-propositional semantics for knowledge-how, which treats ‘how…Read more
  •  21
    This thesis concerns the nature of knowledge-how, in particular the question of how we ought to combine philosophical and linguistic considerations to understand what it is to know how to do something. Part 1 concerns the significance of linguistic evidence. In chapter 1, I consider the range of linguistic arguments that have been used in favour of the Intellectualist claim that knowledge-how is a species of propositional knowledge. Chapter 2 considers the idea that sentences of the form ‘S know…Read more
  •  519
    The generality problem for intellectualism
    Mind and Language 33 (3): 242-262. 2018.
    According to Intellectualism knowing how to V is a matter of knowing a suitable proposition about a way of V-ing. In this paper, I consider the question of which ways of acting might figure in the propositions which Intellectualists claim constitute the object of knowledge-how. I argue that Intellectualists face a version of the Generality Problem – familiar from discussions of Reliabilism – since not all ways of V-ing are such that knowledge about them suffices for knowledge-how. I consider var…Read more
  •  657
    Knowledge-how is the Norm of Intention
    Philosophical Studies 175 (7): 1703-1727. 2018.
    It is a widely shared intuition that there is a close connection between knowledge-how and intentional action. In this paper, I explore one aspect of this connection: the normative connection between intending to do something and knowing how to do it. I argue for a norm connecting knowledge-how and intending in a way that parallels the knowledge norms of assertion, belief, and practical reasoning, which I call the knowledge-how norm of Intention. I argue that this norm can appeal to support from…Read more
  •  495
    Knowing-how, showing, and epistemic norms
    Synthese 195 (8): 3597-3620. 2018.
    In this paper I consider the prospects for an epistemic norm which relates knowledge-how to showing in a way that parallels the knowledge norm of assertion. In the first part of the paper I show that this epistemic norm can be motivated by conversational evidence, and that it fits in with a plausible picture of the function of knowledge. In the second part of the paper I present a dilemma for this norm. If we understand showing in a broad sense as a general kind of skill teaching, then the norm …Read more