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Social Epistemology
Edited by Allan Hazlett (Washington University in St. Louis)
About this topic
| Summary | Social epistemology, in the broadest sense, is concerned with the ways in which knowledge and inquiry are social. A bit more narrowly, it is concerned with the generation, preservation, and transmission of knowledge in social contexts. In its early incarnations, social epistemology often took the form of a critique of traditional “individualistic” epistemology, and social epistemologists continue to emphasize the mistake of ignoring social and political considerations when seeking to understand knowledge and inquiry. However, there is no consensus among specialists in this field whether social epistemology complements or competes with traditional epistemology. Central questions in analytic social epistemology include whether and how knowledge can be transmitted through testimony, whether mutually recognized reasonable belief is possible, and whether groups of individual people can enjoy knowledge. Some questions in social epistemology have engaged philosophers for millennia: the Pyrrhonian skeptics argued that irresolvable disagreement ought to prompt suspension of judgment and Kant and other Enlightenment thinkers extolled the value of intellectual autonomy. However, social epistemology as a sub-field of analytic philosophy arguably came into existence in the late 20th century, with the emergence of feminist “standpoint theories” in the philosophy of science and, within epistemology, of literatures focusing on testimony, disagreement, and the epistemology of collectives. More recently, questions about epistemic injustice (as when someone is given deficient credibility on account of prejudice), information environments (such as those saturated with fake news or those characterized by echo chambers), and the epistemic significance of social location (as on the view that socially disadvantaged subjects enjoy an epistemic advantage over their socially advantaged counterparts) have taken center stage within analytic social epistemology, and the methods of formal epistemology have been applied in the epistemology of disagreement and standpoint epistemology, among other places. |
| Key works | Goldman 1991 provides the canonical articulation and defense of the idea of social epistemology, and Schmitt 1994 was an important early collection, containing a number of important early contributions to the field. Harding 2001 collects essential readings in feminist standpoint theory. Coady 1992 is the first book-length treatment of the epistemology of testimony and served as the starting point for the contemporary revival of interest in testimony; other important contributions include Ross 1986, Fricker 1994, and Lackey 2008. Feldman 2006 and Kelly 2005 set the agenda for contemporary debates with their respective defenses of the “conciliationist” and “steadfast” positions in the epistemology of disagreement. Contemporary collective epistemology can be traced back to Gilbert 1989; Lackey 2020 constitutes the state of the art. Fricker et al 2019 and Lackey & McGlynn 2025 are excellent handbooks with chapters surveying central topics and questions; Goldman & Whitcomb 2011 is also an important collection. |
| Introductions | Goldman 2011, Schmitt 1994, Schmitt 1999 each seek to explain the nature of social epistemology and introduce it with examples. O'Connor et al 2024 is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry and has been recently updated. Toole 2021 provides an excellent introduction to contemporary standpoint epistemology. |
Show all references
Related
Subcategories
Testimony (1,323 | 203)
The Nature of Testimony (106)
Epistemic Deference (12)
Testimonial Injustice* (14)
Testimony, Misc (257)
Disagreement (1,062 | 25)
Disagreement in Philosophy* (244)
Deep Disagreement (34)
Ontological Disagreement* (118)
Peer Disagreement (27)
Moral Disagreement* (286)
Verbal Disputes (62)
Epistemic Permissivism* (114)
Belief Polarization (11)
Disagreement, Misc (143)
Collective Epistemology (427 | 424)
Collective Belief* (125)
Collective Intentionality* (919)
Judgment Aggregation* (253)
Social Choice Theory* (827 | 269)
Epistemic Injustice (569 | 512)
Political Epistemology* (346)
Trust* (1,436)
Social Epistemology, Miscellaneous (1,825 | 1,066)
Argument* (800)
Conspiracy Theories (229)
Epistemic Relativism* (612 | 152)
Extended Epistemology* (71)
Fake News* (57)
Feminist Epistemology* (903)
Formal Social Epistemology* (349 | 177)
Sociology of Knowledge (477)
Sociology of Science* (4,021)
See also
- Ethics of Belief (685)
- Epistemic Normativity (4,046 | 313)
History/traditions: Social Epistemology
Contents
8623 found
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| 1 — 50 / 8623 |
Material to categorize
- Normativity in cases of Epistemic Indifference.Basil Müller & Rodrigo Díaz - forthcoming - Episteme:1-18.One of the metaepistemology’s most central debates revolves around the question of what the source of epistemic normativity is. Epistemic instrumentalism claims that epistemic normativity is a species of means-ends normativity. One of the most prominent objections against epistemic instrumentalism features cases of epistemic indifference: Cases where there’s evidence that p yet believing that p wouldn’t promote any of the agent’s aims, wants, or needs. Still, there’s an epistemic reason for the agent to believe that p and thus epistemic instrumentalism (...)
- Skeptical Disagreement is a Kind of Deep Disagreement.Rogelio Miranda Vilchis - forthcoming - Episteme:1-15.The aim of this paper is to expose the intimate relationship between deep disagreements and skepticism. Philosophers have explored how deep disagreements lead to skepticism about their resolution at the metalevel (about whether one knows that P), but they have paid little attention to how they also lead to first- or object-level skepticism (about whether P is the case) and how skepticism also produces deep disagreements. I show how engaging in a discussion about any topic against a radical skeptic position (...)
- Miti chœ̄ng sangkhom khō̜ng khwāmrū: yānnawitthayā chœ̄ng sangkhom.Sirapraphā Chawanayān - 2021 - Krung Thēp: Samnakphim Čhulālongkō̜nmahāwitthayālai.Remove from this listExport citation
Bookmark - On the Censorship of Conspiracy Theories.Fred Matthews - 2025 - Social Epistemology (N/A):1-14.Is it permissible for the state to censor or suppress conspiracy theories, even within liberal democracies? According to a number of political and legal theorists, it is. In this paper, I will argue that the state may sometimes censor conspiracy theories, but it should be permitted to do so only after very strict conditions have been met. I shall first offer some brief thoughts about the definition of ‘conspiracy theory’. I will then critique one existing attempt to address this issue (...)
- Credibility excess as an epistemic injustice.Keith Dyck - forthcoming - Episteme:1-12.According to Fricker’s (2007) seminal account, an epistemic injustice is done when, based on prejudice, a hearer ascribes to a speaker a level of credibility below what they deserve. When prejudice results in credibility excess, however, Fricker contends no similar injustice takes place. In this paper, I will challenge the second of these claims. Using a modified version of Zollman’s (2007) two-armed bandit model, I will show how the systematic over-ascription of credibility within a dominant group can produce epistemic advantages (...)
- Gratitude and the web of knowledge.Adam Green - forthcoming - Episteme:1-16.Epistemic trust in others frequently cannot be disentangled from interpersonal trust more generally, but the epistemic implications of how we affectively express our trust in others are under-investigated. This essay claims that gratitude, despite its empirically undeniable importance to human flourishing generally, is also important epistemically and in several intersecting ways. To be grateful to a person is to represent the world differently in key respects. Gratitude, even if it is for past non-epistemic benefits, should play an important role in (...)
- Bratman on institutional agency.Jessica Brown - forthcoming - Episteme:1-11.In his recent book, Shared and Institutional Agency, Bratman attempts to defend realism about institutional agency while appealing only to ontologically modest foundations. Here I argue that this ontologically modest foundation leaves Bratman unable to provide plausible accounts of institutional evidence, institutional belief, and the reasons for which institutions believe and act. Given that these phenomena are key to our moral and epistemic evaluation of institutions and their actions, this is a serious failing. Instead, we should defend a more robust (...)
- From SSI to contextualism.Simon Langford - forthcoming - Episteme:1-14.Subject-Sensitive Invariantism (SSI) and Epistemic Contextualism (EC) are rival theories in epistemology. Both involve shifting epistemic standards, but they differ in how they explain this shiftiness. SSI is primarily a metaphysical thesis about the knowledge relation, whereas EC is primarily a semantic thesis about knowledge attributions. This paper revisits some of the central problems faced by SSI, especially those concerning Dutch books and third-person knowledge ascriptions. The main aim is to show that existing responses that stay true to SSI do (...)
- Institutional epistemology and extreme inequality: knowledge and governance in a non-ideal world.Marco-Luka Zubčić - 2025 - Lanham: Lexington Books.Reconciling theories of intelligent institutional systems in experimentalist open democracy and pluralist liberalism, Institutional Epistemology and Extreme Inequality argues that protecting freedom from poverty and limiting private wealth are the necessary conditions for reliable social learning and problem-solving.Remove from this listExport citation Bookmark
- Political epistemology: an introduction.Michael Hannon & Elise Woodard - 2025 - New York, NY: Routledge.This book provides an accessible yet rigorous introduction to political epistemology. It investigates some of the central topics, questions, and problems in political epistemology, such as: the role of truth in politics, the epistemology of political disagreement, voter ignorance, political irrationality, distrust of experts, the epistemic value of democracy, and epistocracy.
- Standpoint epistemology in science.Kristen Intemann - 2025 - In Jennifer Lackey & Aidan McGlynn (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Social Epistemology. New York, NY, United States of America: Oxford University Press.Remove from this listExport citation Bookmark
- Epistemic reparations.Jennifer Lackey - 2025 - In Jennifer Lackey & Aidan McGlynn (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Social Epistemology. New York, NY, United States of America: Oxford University Press.Remove from this listExport citation Bookmark
- Assertion.Christoph Kelp & Mona Simion - 2025 - In Jennifer Lackey & Aidan McGlynn (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Social Epistemology. New York, NY, United States of America: Oxford University Press.Remove from this listExport citation Bookmark
- Social virtue epistemology and epistemic exactingness.Keith Raymond Harris - forthcoming - Episteme:1-16.Who deserves credit for epistemic successes, and who is to blame for epistemic failures? Extreme views, which would place responsibility either solely on the individual or solely on the individual’s surrounding environment, are not plausible. Recently, progress has been made toward articulating virtue epistemology as a suitable middle ground. A socio-environmentally oriented virtue epistemology can recognize that an individual’s traits play an important role in shaping what that individual believes, while also recognizing that some of the most efficacious individual traits (...)
- A Defense of Doxastic Defeaters.Marco Tiozzo - forthcoming - Episteme:1-8.A defeater is, very broadly, a consideration that reduces or completely takes away justification from a subject’s belief about a certain proposition. According to a widely endorsed view, justifiers and defeaters require evidential support. However, a number of philosophers argue that unjustified beliefs can serve as defeaters as well. Call the former type of defeater an ‘evidential defeater’ and the latter a ‘doxastic defeater’. Doxastic defeaters are highly controversial. First of all, they seem to be flatly incompatible with evidentialism. Moreover (...)
- Why the marketplace of ideas needs more markets.Bartlomiej Chomanski - forthcoming - Episteme:1-18.It is frequently argued that false and misleading claims, spread primarily on social media, are a serious problem in need of urgent response. Current strategies to address the problem – relying on fact-checks, source labeling, limits on the visibility of certain claims, and, ultimately, content removals – face two serious shortcomings: they are ineffective and biased. Consequently, it is reasonable to want to seek alternatives. This paper provides one: to address the problems with misinformation, social media platforms should abandon third-party (...)
- Conspiracy Theories and Religious Worldviews: Unraveling a Complex Relationship.Jacob Hesse & Christian Weidemann - forthcoming - Episteme:1-20.After offering a definition of “conspiracy theory” and highlighting some interesting interconnections between conspiracy theories and religious worldviews, we turn to epistemologically relevant analogies. Proponents of conspiracy theories and religions have often been accused of the same biases and epistemic vices, e.g., gullibility, hypersensitive proneness to personal explanations, or overemphasis on holistic thinking. So-called Generalism is best understood as the thesis that conspiracy theories are guilty until proven innocent because they share certain “bunkum-making properties.” However, we argue for the particularist (...)
- Metaphysical ecumenicalism and Moore’s proof.Chris Ranalli & Mark Walker - forthcoming - Episteme:1-21.You have hands, but does it follow that there’s an external material world? Moore thought so. However, we argue that this is a mistake. We defend the Ecumenical View, on which ordinary object terms like “hands” are metaphysically ecumenical, akin to the way that terms like “table” are physically ecumenical: just as there are wooden, metal, or plastic tables, so too there can be material, virtual, or immaterial hands. Moore’s position, however, is metaphysically sectarian: the semantics of “hands” requires a (...)
- Deferring to Experts and Thinking for Oneself.Thomas Grundmann - forthcoming - Social Epistemology.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 (...)
- Maintaining Reprehensibility for Epistemic Vice: Responsibility for Implicit Bias as Non-vicious Conduct.Carline Julie Francis Klijnman - 2025 - Episteme:1-10.Heather Battaly has argued that vice-epistemology has a Responsibility Problem. From analysing the ‘card-carrying feminist’ committing testimonial injustice due to implicit gender bias, Battaly argues that non-voluntarist vice-epistemologists are committed to either (1) counting some vices as blameworthy yet not reprehensible, or (2) holding agents equally responsible for cognitive defects as for implicit bias. This in turn implies that (2a) epistemic vices include certain cognitive defects or (2b) that implicit bias is excluded as epistemic vice. This paper aims to deflate (...)
- Why the marketplace of ideas needs more markets.Bartek Chomanski - 2025 - Episteme.It is frequently argued that false and misleading claims, spread primarily on social media, are a serious problem in need of urgent response. Current strategies to address the problem – relying on fact-checks, source labeling, limits on the visibility of certain claims, and, ultimately, content removals – face two serious shortcomings: they are ineffective and biased. Consequently, it is reasonable to want to seek alternatives. This paper provides one: to address the problems with misinformation, social media platforms should abandon third-party (...)
- Maintaining Reprehensibility for Epistemic Vice: Responsibility for Implicit Bias as Non-vicious Conduct.Carline Julie Francis Klijnman - forthcoming - Episteme:1-10.Heather Battaly has argued that vice-epistemology has a Responsibility Problem. From analysing the ‘card-carrying feminist’ committing testimonial injustice due to implicit gender bias, Battaly argues that non-voluntarist vice-epistemologists are committed to either (1) counting some vices as blameworthy yet not reprehensible, or (2) holding agents equally responsible for cognitive defects as for implicit bias. This in turn implies that (2a) epistemic vices include certain cognitive defects or (2b) that implicit bias is excluded as epistemic vice. This paper aims to deflate (...)
- Beyond testimony: Sharing epistemic resources.Aron Edidin - forthcoming - Episteme:1-11.We acquire from others many of our epistemic resources – individual items of propositional knowledge but also evidential standards, perceptual sensibilities, and the overarching perspectives that include beliefs, standards, and sensibilities together. Knowledge from testimony, which is one category of acquisition of epistemic resources from others, has been studied extensively by epistemologists. We can begin to explore the wider realm of epistemic sharing by varying the characteristic features of testimony. Eleven dimensions of variation provide some structure to this domain. The (...)
- Sexist Beliefs in a Sexist World: Exploring the Causal Role of Sexism in Sexist Beliefs.Anna Brinkerhoff - forthcoming - Episteme:1-19.The claim that prejudice causes prejudiced beliefs is a familiar one. Call it the causal claim. In this paper, I turn to sexism and sexist beliefs to explore the causal claim within the context of current debates in the ethics of beliefs about moral encroachment on epistemic rationality. My goal is to consider and arbitrate between plausible ways of fleshing out the idea that the non-doxastic dimensions of sexism (including its motivational and affective components as well as its structural and (...)
- The epistemic dangers of journalistic balance.Giulia Terzian - forthcoming - Episteme:1-21.The newsroom routine prescribing that public interest disagreements be covered in a balanced fashion is a cornerstone of informative journalism, particularly in the Anglo-American world. Balanced reporting has been frequently criticised by journalism and communication scholars on multiple grounds; most notoriously, for its tendency to devolve into false balance, whereby a viewpoint conflict is improperly portrayed as a dispute between epistemic equals. Moreover, a widely shared intuition is that peddlers of false balance are deserving of blame. This seems right; if (...)
- Topic-sensitivity and the hyperintensionality of knowledge.Niccolò Rossi & Sven Rosenkranz - forthcoming - Episteme:1-14.It is natural to assume that knowledge, like belief, creates a hyperintensional context, that is, that knowledge ascriptions do not allow for substitution of necessarily equivalent prejacents salva veritate. There exist a variety of different proposals for modelling the phenomenon. In the last years, the topic-sensitive approach to the hyperintensionality of knowledge has gained considerable traction. It promises to provide a natural account of why knowledge fails to be closed under necessary equivalence in terms of differences in subject matter. Here, (...)
- On trusting chatbots.P. D. Magnus - forthcoming - Episteme.This paper focuses on the epistemic situation one faces when using a Large Language Model based chatbot like ChatGPT: When reading the output of the chatbot, how should one decide whether or not to believe it? By surveying strategies we use with other, more familiar sources of information, I argue that chatbots present a novel challenge. This makes the question of how one could trust a chatbot especially vexing.
- Inquiring for yourself for others.Benjamin Winokur - forthcoming - Episteme:1-16.Why should you inquire for yourself as a novice in a domain of inquiry when, for most questions within most domains, there are established experts to consult instead? In the face of this question, recent discussants of “autonomous-yet-novice” inquiry have sought to defend its epistemic value for the inquirer. Here I argue that autonomous-yet-novice inquiry can also be epistemically beneficial for agents other than the inquirer herself. Paradigm cases are those in which one agent improves her zetetic skills or virtues (...)
- What is the point of free speech?Hrishikesh Joshi - forthcoming - Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues.
- (Re)Constructing Technological Society by Taking Social Construction Even More Seriously 1.E. J. Woodhouse - 2005 - Social Epistemology 19 (2):199-223.After recognizing that technologies are socially constructed, questions arise concerning how technologies should be constructed, by what processes, and granting how much influence to whom. Because partisanship, uncertainty, and disagreement are inevitable in trying to answer these questions, reconstructivist scholarship should embrace the desirability of thoughtful partisanship, should focus on strategies for coping intelligently with uncertainties, and should make central the study of social processes for coping with disagreement regarding technoscience and its utilization. That often will entail siding with have‐nots, (...)
- Safety, Lotteries, and Failures of the Imagination.Anaid Ochoa - forthcoming - Episteme.Safety accounts of knowledge intend to explain why certain true and intuitively justified beliefs fail to be knowledge in terms of such beliefs falling prey to a modal veritic type of luck. In particular, they explain why true and intuitively justified beliefs in “lottery propositions” (highly likely propositions reporting that a particular statistical outcome obtains) are not knowledge. In this paper, I argue that there is a type of case involving lottery propositions that inevitably lies beyond the scope of any (...)Remove from this listExport citation Bookmark
- Treating people as individuals and as members of groups.Lauritz Aastrup Munch & Nicolai Knudsen - 2024 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 110 (1):253-272.Many believe that we ought to treat people as individuals and that this form of treatment is in some sense incompatible with treating people as members of groups. Yet, the relation between these two kinds of treatments is elusive. In this paper, we develop a novel account of the normative requirement to treat people as individuals. According to this account, treating people as individuals requires treating people as agents in the appropriate capacity. We call this the Agency Attunement Account. This (...)
- Artificial Epistemic Authorities.Rico Hauswald - forthcoming - Social Epistemology.While AI systems are increasingly assuming roles traditionally occupied by human epistemic authorities (EAs), their epistemological status remains unclear. This paper aims to address this lacuna by assessing the potential for AI systems to be recognized as artificial epistemic authorities. In a first step, I examine the arguments against considering AI systems as EAs, in particular the established model of EAs as engaging in intentional belief transfer via testimony to laypeople – a process seemingly inapplicable to intentionless and beliefless AI. (...)
- Softness: An Ecological Paradigm for Embodied Technological Intelligence.Laura Tripaldi - forthcoming - Social Epistemology.This paper explores the rise of agential materialism in humanities and science and its influence on technological progress, proposing ‘softness’ as a paradigm for designing increasingly ‘agentised’ technologies. Soft technologies – defined by plastic embodiments, self-organisation, and multi-scalar material design – challenge hegemonic visions of machines as rigid, unfeeling, and subordinate to human control. Case studies in soft and biohybrid robotics, wetware computing, and nanotechnology demonstrate how emerging soft technologies embody unprecedented forms of artificial agency and outline future possibilities for (...)
- Mo ben yu lan tu : yi shi xin lun.Nongjian Zhou - 1988 - Beijing: People's Publishing House.摹本与蓝图 : 意识新论 / Mo ben yu lan tu : yi shi xin lun Authors:周农建. / Zhou Nongjian, Nongjian Zhou Print Book, Chinese, 1988 Publisher: 人民出版社, [Peking], 1988 Copy and Blueprint: A New Theory of Consciousness People's Publishing House, 1988 ISBN: 7010000689, 9787010000688 245 pages.Remove from this listExport citation Bookmark
- The No-Defeater Clause.Simon Graf - forthcoming - Episteme.Rational or epistemically justified beliefs are often said to be defeasible. That is, beliefs that have some otherwise justification conferring property can lose their epistemic status because they are defeated by some evidence possessed by the believer or due to some external facts about the believer’s epistemic environment. Accordingly, many have argued that we need to add a so-called no defeater clause to any theory of epistemic justification. In this paper, I will survey various possible evidentialist as well as responsibilitst (...)
- A common measure: Hobbes on the epistemic functions of public reason.Amy M. Schmitter - forthcoming - Southern Journal of Philosophy.Thomas Hobbes claims that the sovereign of a commonwealth provides a “common measure,” determining what counts as right reason for its subjects. As a form of public reason, this is often taken to be a purely political notion. I maintain that Hobbes holds that the public reason of the sovereign also provides a number of epistemic benefits both to the commonwealth and to individuals. Some are a matter of providing conditions that allow for the social growth of knowledge (particularly what (...)
- Education, A Thin Concept with A Thick Skin: What Do Supervillains and Anti-Heroes Teach Us About Virtuous Action-Guidedness?Shadi Heidarifar - forthcoming - Episteme.Education as a Thick Epistemic Concept (ETEC) is a thick epistemology project that highlights the role of education in both epistemic virtues acquirement and motivation. In this paper, I argue that ETEC is not satisfactory because it relies on a version of Virtue Responsibilism (VR) that is also not plausible, in so far as it relies on the premise that both the motivation and the action-guidedness of epistemic and moral virtues are unified. By rejecting this unification premise, I show that (...)
- Poverty Relief as a Rule-Based Discovery Procedure: Is Universal Basic Income Compatible with a Hayekian Welfare State?Otto Lehto - 2023 - In Alicja Sielska (ed.), Transition economies in Central and Eastern Europe: Austrian perspectives. London: Routledge. pp. 140-154.What does effective poverty relief entail? How are we to assess the capacity of advanced industrialized societies to solve the problem of poverty? What role, if any, is left for the welfare state? This chapter argues that poverty relief, far from being primarily a matter of post hoc redistribution, primarily consists in a Hayekian-Schumpeterian discovery (or innovation) procedure whereby the problems of the poor are continuously discovered, identified, and eventually solved from the bottom up. This suggests new avenues for reform. (...)
- Open-mindedness and Epistemic Dependence.Marcelo Cabral - 2024 - Revista PERI 16 (02):89-105.Given the inevitability of our social dependencies, some social epistemologists have defended that dogmatism, rather than open-mindedness, is the more appropriate cognitive habit for laypeople to acquire good beliefs in specialized like the sciences. They claim that dogmatically relying on experts’ deliverances, rather than exercising one’s own intellectual virtues, like open-mindedness, is the best epistemic strategy for maximizing the acquisition of true beliefs and avoiding false ones. In this paper, I challenge this view by arguing that open-mindedness is a valuable (...)
- Scepticism About Epistemic Blame Scepticism.Adam Piovarchy - forthcoming - Episteme.A number of philosophers have recently argued that there is such a thing as ‘epistemic blame’: blame targeted at epistemic norm violations qua epistemic norm violations. However, Smartt (2024) and Matheson and Milam (2022) have recently provided several arguments in favour of thinking epistemic blame either doesn’t exist, or is never justified. This paper argues these challenges are unsuccessful, and along the way evaluates the prospects for various accounts of epistemic blame. It also reflects on the dialectic between sceptics and (...)
- Social Evidence Tampering and the Epistemology of Content Moderation.Keith Raymond Harris - 2024 - Topoi 43 (5):1421-1431.Social media misinformation is widely thought to pose a host of threats to the acquisition of knowledge. One response to these threats is to remove misleading information from social media and to de-platform those who spread it. While content moderation of this sort has been criticized on various grounds—including potential incompatibility with free expression—the epistemic case for the removal of misinformation from social media has received little scrutiny. Here, I provide an overview of some costs and benefits of the removal (...)
- Hacking Reality: Propaganda and Epistemology in Online Environments.Eric D. Berg - 2024 - Dissertation, University of ConnecticutThis dissertation presents a theory of online propaganda and radicalization which highlights the interaction between communication, epistemology, and technology. The central focus is providing an analysis of online media communications, content posted on social media platforms and transmitted by automated recommendation systems, which better explains how propaganda and radicalization have adapted so well to this technological environment. First, propaganda is interpreted as a unique approach to communication which manipulates the expectations an audience has of successful communications, and not simply as (...)
- Generous Virtues: Rethinking the Value of Intellectual Virtues in Social Terms.Dominik Jarczewski - 2024 - Ad Americam 25:23-39.The classical Virtue Epistemology, one of the most interesting contributions of late 20th century American philosophy, proposed to analyze knowledge and epistemic evaluation in general in terms of intellectual virtues. In this approach, these virtues were understood as faculties or personal traits that contribute to the production of knowledge and other epistemic goods. However, the value of some plausible candidates for intellectual virtues, which can be called “generous virtues,” cannot be explained in those terms. This paper proposes a novel account (...)
- Rethinking the right to know and the case for restorative epistemic reparation.Melanie Altanian - 2024 - Wiley: Journal of Social Philosophy 55 (4):728-745.THIS PUBLICATION IS AVAILABLE OPEN ACCESS. The United Nations Commission on Human Rights acknowledges the Right to Know as part of state obligations to combat impunity and thereby protect and promote human rights in the aftermath of “serious crimes under international law”. In light of such an institutionally acknowledged epistemic right of victims, this paper explores the normative foundations of the idea of epistemic reparation in the aftermath of genocide. I argue that such epistemic reparation requires not only fulfilment of (...)
- Epistemic Character Damage and Normative Contextualism.Alice Monypenny - 2024 - Journal of Philosophical Research 49:49-70.Recent proposals for a “critical character epistemology” attend to the ways in which environments, institutions, social practices, and relationships promote the development of epistemic vice whilst acknowledging that the contexts of differently situated agents demand different epistemic character traits. I argue that a tension arises between two features of critical character epistemology: the classification as “epistemically corrupting” of environments, institutions, or structures which promote the development of epistemic vice; and commitment to normative contextualism—the doctrine that the normative status (the status (...)
- Truth as Force: A Materialist Picture.Frieder Vogelmann - forthcoming - Social Epistemology.Truth is a contested concept, yet the current contest takes place within an idealistic picture that accords all conceptions of truth three features: truth is singular, atemporal and independent. Because of these features, conceptions of truth within the idealist picture are ‘sovereign’ conceptions of truth that lead to serious obstacles in different parts of philosophy, e.g. regarding the concept of normativity or the relationship between truth and politics. The article makes a case for changing the underlying philosophical picture in which (...)
- filósofas analíticas contemporâneas.Eduarda Calado Barbosa & Rodrigo Lastra Cid (eds.) - 2022 - Pelotas: Dissertatio - editora UFPel.
- Are There Demographic Objections to Democracy?Adam F. Gibbons - forthcoming - Episteme.Proponents of epistocracy claim that amplifying the political power of politically knowledgeable citizens can mitigate some of the harmful effects of widespread political ignorance, since being politically knowledgeable improves one’s ability to make sound political decisions. But many critics of epistocracy suggest that we have no reason to expect it to make better decisions than democracy, for those who are politically knowledgeable can also possess other attributes that compromise their ability to make sound political decisions. This is one version of (...)
- Phronetic Risk in Research Agenda Setting – the Case of Nutrition Science and Public Health.Saana Jukola - forthcoming - Social Epistemology.Justin Biddle and Quill Kukla have introduced the concept of phronetic risk to refer to epistemic risks emerging in activities that either are conditions for empirical reasoning or included in empirical reasoning and that have to be weighted according to different values and interests. In this paper, I show how a phronetic risk arises in research agenda setting. Given the prevalence of noncommunicable diseases associated with diet, there is a need for science-based nutritional public health interventions. However, how the relation (...)
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