Molly O'Rourke-Friel

Who is responsible for extremism? It is tempting to answer that only extremists are responsible for extremism. We argue that this position is false. Neither extremism nor responsibility for extremism requires extremists. And even people who hold extremist beliefs are not exclusively responsible for those beliefs. Focusing solely on individual epistemic responsibility judgments – judgments that assign responsibility for the truth or justification of beliefs strictly to the individuals who possess those beliefs – obfuscates the extent of our social epistemic dependence. Given the social nature of our cognitive lives, responsibility for all beliefs, including extremist beliefs, is socially diffuse. Rather than thinking that this blunts the force of moral responsibility for extremism, we contend that this illuminates the epistemic responsibilities we have to one another. We owe it to one another to create epistemically healthy third places that enable virtuous belief management.

This paper argues that we are not just social epistemic creatures because we operate in social contexts. We are social epistemic creatures because of the nature of our epistemic cognitive capacities. In The Enigma of Reason, Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber develop and defend the view that reasoning is a social competence that yields epistemic benefits for individuals through social interaction with others. I argue an epistemological consequence of their position is that, when beliefs are formed and sustained by dialogical deliberation, the relevant justification-conferring process doesn’t occur solely within the cognition of the subject whose belief is under evaluation. Rather, it extends to include her interactive engagement with other deliberative participants. I argue this demonstrates that not all justification-conferring is evidential. As such, the analysis not only supports reconceiving the process reliabilist’s notion of justification-conferring processes; it also serves as an argument against evidentialism. A goal of this paper is to demonstrate that social epistemology isn’t merely a siloed offshoot of traditional epistemology. Even when approaching social epistemology using a conservative methodology, our investigation has serious implications for fundamental questions concerning epistemic normativity.

Our epistemic lives are ones of deep social dependence. Social epistemology is often understood as a subfield that stands apart from, but is compatible with, traditional individualistic approaches to epistemology. In my work I reject this view and argue instead that human epistemology is necessarily social epistemology. I argue for this as an epistemological naturalist. I understand epistemological naturalism as a commitment to the following: (a) the claim that empirical research from psychology, cognitive science, and evolutionary biology is relevant to epistemological inquiry and (b) the meta-epistemological thesis that knowledge and justification are reducible to natural phenomena. In Chapter 1 of my dissertation, I argue that a naturalistic epistemic lens can account for the phenomena and considerations that are foundational to non-naturalist arguments. This chapter not only defends epistemological naturalism from its opponent; it makes room for epistemic naturalists, reliabilists about justification in particular, to say that our social epistemic practices, like our ability to defend our beliefs to one another, are epistemically significant. Naturalistic reliabilists have historically just explained away non-naturalist intuitions about the importance of the human capacity for reasons-giving. This chapter gives naturalistic reliabilists the resources to claim that, while non-naturalists are mistaken when they characterize our reasons-giving capacity as the source of epistemic normativity, they are correct in thinking that it is of deep epistemic importance to creatures like us. In Chapter 2, I develop the naturalistic reliabilist theory of justification so that it can accommodate empirical analysis of our social epistemic lives. I argue that there can be extended interactive justification conferring processes. In short, whether our individual beliefs are doxastically justified can be a function of the reliability of our dialogical interactions with interlocutors. My argument not only serves as a development and defense of reliabilism; it also functions as an independent argument against evidentialist views of doxastic justification. In Chapter 3, I turn my attention to epistemic blameworthiness and blaming. I give an argument against the plausibility of positing an epistemic norm of blameworthiness that is distinct from doxastic justification. I argue that internalists can’t do so, because their notion of blameworthiness can’t be meaningfully different from their notion of justification. I argue that it is difficult for externalists to do so, and that they ought not because of the fundamental commitments of externalism. I argue that we can give an account of our practices of epistemic blaming that construes them as instrumentally epistemically important. Chapter 1 establishes and defends a naturalistic social epistemic framework. The following two chapters explore how we should think about epistemic norms governing epistemic justification and blameworthiness if we adopt this framework.