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17Science–policy research collaborations need philosophersNature Human Behaviour. 2024.Wicked problems’ are tricky to solve because of their many interconnected components and a lack of any single optimal solution. At the science–policy interface, all problems can look wicked: research exposes the complexity that is relevant to designing, executing and implementing policy fit for ambitious human needs. Expertise in philosophical research can help to navigate that complexity.
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12Social Group Moral EncroachmentEpisteme 20 (4): 894-911. 2023.According to moral encroachers, the moral stakes of a belief partly determine how much evidence we need for the belief to count as knowledge. This view concerns the beliefs of individual believers. In this paper, I argue for a social group version of moral encroachment: dominant groups, such as white people or men, need to have more evidence than the marginalised in order for some of their beliefs to constitute knowledge. I argue for this claim in three steps. First, I spell out the group moral …Read more
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26Can theorising epistemic injustice help us decolonise?Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.The paper argues that some tools from the epistemic injustice literature can be fruitfully applied to the debate on epistemic decolonisation. The first step for such a project is to defuse recent misgivings about the liberatory potential of epistemic injustice scholarship. I group these misgivings under the slogan ‘Epistemic injustice is white-people stuff’, or ‘the WPS challenge’, for short, and use them to set desiderata for good theorising with epistemic injustice tools. I then look at three …Read more
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22Socialising epistemic risk: On the risks of epistemic injusticeMetaphilosophy 54 (4): 539-552. 2023.Epistemic risk is of central importance to epistemology nowadays: one common way in which a belief can fail to be knowledge is by being formed in an epistemically risky way, that is, a way that makes it true by luck. Recently, epistemologists have been expanding this rather narrow conception of risk in every direction, except arguably the most obvious one—to enable it to accommodate the increasingly commonplace thought that knowledge has an irreducibly social dimension. This paper fills this lac…Read more
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15Clearing space for extreme psychologism about reasonsSouth African Journal of Philosophy 35 (3): 293-301. 2016.
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20The Factive Turn in Epistemology (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2017.When you believe something for a good reason, your belief is in a position to be justified, rational, responsible, or to count as knowledge. But what is the nature of this thing that can make such a difference? Traditionally, epistemologists thought of epistemic normative notions, such as reasons, in terms of the believer's psychological perspective. Recently, however, many have started thinking of them as factive: good reasons for belief are either facts, veridical experiences, or known proposi…Read more
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40Why Epistemic Decolonisation in Africa?Social Epistemology 37 (6): 739-752. 2023.The call to decolonise knowledge is gaining increasing popularity in African philosophy. But as scholarly attention to the topic intensifies, so do doubts about the usefulness of theorising it, especially in spaces – like Africa – that are riddled with deeper problems such as mass poverty and social disempowerment. I focus on three challenges that Bernard Matolino has recently issued. If these challenges are on the right track, they threaten to derail the whole project of epistemic decolonisatio…Read more
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19Introduction to the special issue: Skepticism, relativism, pluralismInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.The precise and proper territorial boundaries of skepticism, relativism, and pluralism have been perennial topics of debate in philosophy. Very few philosophers endorse these positions in an unqual...
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37The collective epistemic reasons of social-identity groupsAsian Journal of Philosophy 1 (2): 1-20. 2022.In this paper, I argue that certain social-identity groups—ones that involve systematic relations of power and oppression—have distinctive epistemic reasons in virtue of constituting this group. This claim, I argue further, would potentially benefit at least three bodies of scholarship—on the epistemology of groups, on collective moral responsibility, and on epistemic injustice.
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99A New Argument for the Non-Instrumental Value of TruthErkenntnis 88 (5): 1911-1933. 2021.Many influential philosophers have claimed that truth is valuable, indeed so valuable as to be the ultimate standard of correctness for intellectual activity. Yet most philosophers also think that truth is only instrumentally valuable. These commitments make for a strange pair. One would have thought that an ultimate standard would enjoy more than just instrumental value. This paper develops a new argument for the non-instrumental value of truth: (1) inquiry is non-instrumentally valuable; and (…Read more
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101Decolonising Knowledge Here and NowPhilosophical Papers 49 (2): 191-212. 2020.The topic of epistemic decolonisation is currently the locus of lively debate both in academia and in everyday life. The aim of this piece is to isolate a few main strands in the philosophical literature on the topic, and draw some new connections amongst them through the lens of epistemic injustice. I first sketch what I take to be the core features of epistemic decolonisation. I then philosophically situate the topic. Finally, I map it in relation to key epistemic-injustice concepts and to the…Read more
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8What do I care About Epistemic Norms?In Martin Grajner & Pedro Schmechtig (eds.), Epistemic Reasons, Norms and Goals, De Gruyter. pp. 199-224. 2016.
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60Explanatory Injustice and Epistemic AgencyEthical Theory and Moral Practice 23 (5): 707-722. 2020.What is going on when we explain someone’s belief by appeal to stereotypes associated with her gender, sexuality, race, or class? In this paper I try to motivate two claims. First, such explanations involve an overlooked form of epistemic injustice, which I call ‘explanatory injustice’. Second, the language of reasons helps us shed light on the ways in which such injustice wrongs the victim qua epistemic agent. In particular, explanatory injustice is best understood as occurring in explanations …Read more
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10Believable EvidenceCambridge University Press. 2017.Believable Evidence argues that evidence consists of true beliefs. This claim opens up an entirely overlooked space on the ontology of evidence map, between purely factualist positions and purely psychologist ones. Veli Mitova provides a compelling three-level defence of this view in the first contemporary monograph entirely devoted to the ontology of evidence. First, once we see the evidence as a good reason, metaethical considerations show that the evidence must be psychological and veridical.…Read more
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58Why W. K. Clifford was a Closet PragmatistPhilosophical Papers 37 (3): 471-489. 2008.This Article does not have an abstract
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38Age and AgencyPhilosophical Papers 41 (3): 335-369. 2012.Abstract I defend the following three-part hypothesis: (1) the sense that one is running out of time diminishes one's capacity to reauthor oneself; (2) this capacity is constitutive of agency par excellence; so, (3) the sense of running out of time attenuates agency. (2) is shown to enjoy both intuitive and abductive plausibility. (1) and (3) are confirmed by existing reflections on old age, as well as by empirical research
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50The Value of Epistemic NormsSouth African Journal of Philosophy 24 (2): 65-76. 2005.It is argued that, contrary to popular pragmatist opinion, the source of epistemic normativity does not lie in the realm of practical rationality. Epistemic norms are indeed hypothetical, as the pragmatist anticipates, but he has misjudged how much their antecedent can do for him. I first consider the most general argument available to the pragmatist. I then focus on the way John Heil and Hilary Kornblith have refmed it. Kornblith’s position poses the most plausible challenge to the defender of …Read more
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18A Quasi-Pragmatist Explanation of Our Ethics of BeliefTeorema: International Journal of Philosophy 28 (3): 113-130. 2009.
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34What do I care About Epistemic Norms?In Pedro Schmechtig & Martin Grajner (eds.), Epistemic Reasons, Norms, and Goals, De Gruyter. pp. 199-224. 2016.
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3Epistemic motivation: towards a metaethics of beliefIn Andrew Reisner & Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen (eds.), Reasons for Belief, Cambridge University Press. 2011.
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44Why pragmatic justifications of epistemic norms don't workSouth African Journal of Philosophy 27 (2): 139-150. 2008.Pragmatic justifications of epistemic norms tell us to observe these norms as the best means to attaining the things we value. I argue that such justifications do not work, because they harbour an irresolvable tension: their non-alethic character intrinsically conflicts with the truth-aiming character of the epistemic norms they are justifying. We should abandon, then, either epistemic norms or pragmatic justifications of these norms. I therefore argue that we should abandon pragmatic justificat…Read more
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139Truthy psychologism about evidencePhilosophical Studies 172 (4): 1105-1126. 2015.What sorts of things can be evidence for belief? Five answers have been defended in the recent literature on the ontology of evidence: propositions, facts, psychological states, factive psychological states, all of the above. Each of the first three views privileges a single role that the evidence plays in our doxastic lives, at the cost of occluding other important roles. The fifth view, pluralism, is a natural response to such dubious favouritism. If we want to be monists about evidence and ac…Read more
Johannesburg, Gauteng, South Africa
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Social Epistemology |
Meta-Ethics |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Action |
Social Epistemology |