Thomas Grundmann

Undoubtedly, the testimony of scientific experts carries significant epistemic weight. But how exactly does it normatively constrain the belief formation of laypeople? This book argues that expert testimony holds epistemic authority over laypeople in a way that partly preempts their critical reasoning from being rationally usable in belief formation. This Preemption View of epistemic authority, shaped by philosophers such as Joseph Raz, Arnon Keren, and Linda Zagzebski, has yet to receive a thorough epistemological explanation, a compelling motivation, or a robust defense against challenges—all of which this book aims to provide. Preemptive reasons are explored through the framework of higher-order defeat, with a novel argument demonstrating how expert testimony generates these higher-order defeaters. Because these defeaters are themselves defeasible and of limited scope, the book systematically addresses and overcomes the ten most significant objections to the Preemption View. The emerging view explains how laypeople’s deference to experts is properly linked to their thinking for themselves and what remains of their epistemic autonomy. Additionally, the book offers a short history of epistemic authority and applies its theoretical insights to real-world phenomena.

Disrespect for the truth, the rise of conspiracy thinking, and a pervasive distrust in experts are widespread features of the post-truth condition in current politics and public opinion. Among the many good explanations of these phenomena there is one that is only rarely discussed: that something is wrong with our deeply entrenched intellectual standards of (i) using our own critical thinking without any restriction and (ii) respecting the judgment of every rational agent as epistemically relevant. This chapter argues that these two Enlightenment principles—the Principle of Unrestricted Critical Thinking and the Principle of Democratic Reason—not only conflict with what is rationally required from a purely epistemic point of view, but also further the spread of conspiracy theories and undermine trust in experts. As a result, we should typically defer to experts without using any of our own reasons regarding the subject matter.

This volume consists of a series of essays on the epistemology of fake news, written by leading philosophers. The epistemology of fake news is a branch of applied epistemology, and an exercise in non-ideal epistemology. It provides insight into the nature and spread of misinformation, fake news, conspiratorial thinking, echo chambers, epistemic pathologies in the formation of public opinion, and the relation between epistemic ideals and fake news. The volume is arranged into three parts. The chapters in Part I are concerned with the meaning of ‘fake news’ and related notions such as ‘conspiracy theory’ as well as with the novelty of the phenomenon of fake news. This part also addresses the question whether ‘fake news’ and related notions can be properly used within science. Part II discusses various practices that generate fake news, promote its spread, or are purported to do so. These practices include science denialism, Google algorithms, democratic ideals, vice in experts, and unreliable echo chambers. Part III explores potential therapies for fake news. Authors’ proposals include developing the virtue of epistemic trustworthiness, abstaining from news, and developing good epistemic practices.

This volume presents new research on the epistemology of experts. It features original essays from leading epistemologists on this timely topic. Modern societies benefit significantly from a certain kind of epistemic division of labor: they outsource much of their epistemic work to well-trained cognitive experts. However, due to their degree of specialization, cognitive sophistication, and highly privileged status, cognitive experts tend to become alienated from laypeople. This leads to what one may call the paradox of experts: as experts become more competent, specialized, and sophisticated, the harder it will be for laypeople to identify and trust experts. The chapters in this volume explore the epistemology of expert judgment across several core themes and crucial questions: 1. Analysis of Experts: What does it take to be a cognitive expert? 2. Epistemic Authority: How much should we concede experts over laypeople? 3. The Social Roles of Experts: What role do experts play in society, and what role should they play? 4. Challenges: What problems arise from experts’ epistemic authority and societal role? This volume is an essential resource for scholars and advanced students working in epistemology, philosophy of science, political philosophy, and the sociology of knowledge.

In this paper, I address the problem of integrating deference to experts with thinking for oneself from a layperson’s perspective. This integration requires more than acknowledging that proper deference always involves epistemic agents who decide for themselves whether and how to defer in any concrete situation. This would only suffice to show that deference and thinking for oneself are interwoven in such a way that whenever a layperson forms deferential beliefs about some proposition, she must also think for herself about some other proposition. However, an adequate reply to the target problem requires an explanation of how it is possible to defer and to think for oneself concerning the very same proposition. As argued here, this is possible only if we distinguish between beliefs and acceptances: the former being deferential, the latter being responsive to thinking for oneself. I motivate this distinction and inquire into how it can be fruitfully applied to solve the problem.

Skeptical dream-arguments are intended as general challenges to our epistemic claims concerning the world. They argue that we can never rule out the possibility of merely dreaming what we believe to perceive. In my paper I will scrutinize whether any kind of such argument is sound. On my view, many versions of this argument are defective. They are either too weak to challenge all kinds of our epistemic claims or they rely on implausibly strong epistemic principles. More plausible versions of the argument can be rebutted by the results of recent empirical dream research. As I will argue, there is an introspective criterion for currently being awake. Nevertheless there is one version of the dream-argument, which I will call quasi-dream-argument, that survives all criticism and brings out the structure of a compelling skeptical argument very clearly.

In “The Possibility of Epistemic Nudging” (2021), I address a phenomenon that is widely neglected in the current literature on nudges: intentional doxastic nudging, i.e. people’s intentional influence over other people’s beliefs, rather than over their choices. I argue that, at least in brute cases, nudging is not giving reasons, but rather bypasses reasoning altogether. More specifically, nudging utilizes psychological heuristics and the nudged person’s biases in smart ways. The goal of my paper is to defend the claim that nudging, even when it bypasses reasoning, can result in justified beliefs and knowledge. As I argue, it takes two things to accomplish this goal: suitable meta-epistemological views and appropriate circumstances. If a broadly reliabilist account of justified beliefs and knowledge is correct, and if the relevant belief-forming methods are externally individuated in the right way, then nudging to knowledge is possible. If, in addition, the nudger is knowledgeable, epistemically benevolent and systematically effective, then nudging to knowledge will become reality. In their replies Neil Levy (2021) and Jonathan Matheson and Valerie Joly Chock (2021), put pressure on my argument from different angles. Levy thinks that a better case can be made for his view that nudging is giving testimonial reasons, and finds my objections to this view unconvincing. Matheson and Joly Chock, on the other hand, point out that acquiring knowledge through nudging (i.e. epistemic nudging) is compatible with evidentialism, even if nudging is not giving reasons. On their view, evidentialism provides an explanation of epistemic nudging that is superior to my own account, which, according to them, also suffers from a number of counterintuitive consequences. I am grateful to my critics for raising these concerns, because considering them deepens our perspective on the target phenomenon, and has made me think harder about the relevant epistemological issues. Nevertheless, I am convinced that my core claims can be defended against these criticisms.

According to Alvin Goldman, reliabilists need to distinguish between unconditionally and conditionally reliable processes. The latter category is used to account for processes such as reasoning or memory. In this paper, I will argue that Goldman’s account of conditional reliability needs substantial revision in two respects. First, conditional reliability must be reinterpreted in terms of dependent reliability to avoid serious problems. Second, we need a more liberal account that allows dependently reliable processes to operate not only on doxastic but also on non-doxastic input. Thinking this way advances the explanatory power of reliabilism significantly.

Typically, nudging is a technique for steering the choices of people without giving reasons or using enforcement. In benevolent cases, it is used when people are insufficiently responsive to reason. The nudger triggers automatic cognitive mechanisms – sometimes even biases – in smart ways in order to push irrational people in the right direction. Interestingly, this technique can also be applied to doxastic attitudes. Someone who is doxastically unresponsive to evidence can be nudged into forming true beliefs or doxastic attitudes that are propositionally justified. When doxastic nudging uses non-rational mechanisms, the worry is that nudging cannot result in justified beliefs or knowledge, as the resulting doxastic attitudes lack the right kind of basis. In this paper, I will argue that given the right background views about knowledge, justified beliefs and the relevant processes, epistemic nudging is possible even in these cases. That is, all kinds of nudging can – in appropriate circumstances – produce justified beliefs or knowledge in the nudgee.

In this chapter, I survey and assess various answers to two basic questions concerning experts: (1) What is an expert?; (2) How can laypeople identify the relevant experts? These questions are not mutually independent, since the epistemology and the metaphysics of experts should go hand in hand. On the basis of our platitudes about experts, I will argue that the prevailing accounts of experts such as truth-linked, knowledge-linked, understanding-linked or service-oriented accounts are inadequate. In contrast, I will defend an evidence-linked account of expertise. In the second part of the chapter, I address the question of how laypeople can identify experts in this sense. Here, I will argue that agreement among experts plays a major role. I will outline how laypeople can follow this criterion without running into circularity.

In this paper, I discuss a new problem for moral realism, the problem of moral aliens. In the first section, I introduce this problem. Moral aliens are people who radically disagree with us concerning moral matters. Moral aliens are neither obviously incoherent nor do they seem to lack rational support from their own perspective. On the one hand, moral realists claim that we should stick to our guns when we encounter moral aliens. On the other hand, moral realists, in contrast to anti-realists, seem to be committed to an epistemic symmetry between us and our moral aliens that forces us into rational suspension of our moral beliefs. Unless one disputes the very possibility of moral aliens, this poses a severe challenge to the moral realist. In the second section, I will address this problem. It will turn out that, on closer scrutiny, we cannot make any sense of the idea that moral aliens should be taken as our epistemic peers. Consequently, there is no way to argue that encountering moral aliens gives us any reason to revise our moral beliefs. If my argument is correct, the possibility of encountering moral aliens poses no real threat to moral realism.