C. Thi Nguyen's (2020) recent account of echo chambers as social epistemic structures that actively exclude outsiders’ voices has sparked debate on the connection between echo chambers and epistemic injustice (Santos 2021; Catala 2021; Elzinga 2021).In this paper I am mainly concerned with the connection between echo chambers and testimonial injustice, understood as an instance whereby a speaker receives less epistemic credibility than they deserve, due to a prejudice in the hearer (Fricker 2007). In her reconstruction of the types of (...) testimonial injustice, Catala implicitly equates incidental testimonial injustice as resulting from epistemic prejudice and systematic testimonial injustice as resulting from identity prejudice. As I will argue, there as certain cases that fall in between these interpretations, namely instances of incidental testimonial injustice, whereby the impact on the speaker is localized, but where the credibility deficit nevertheless results from identity prejudice. One example of how this can manifest is the structural distrust against health-care experts in anti-vaccination echo-chambers, wherein said experts’ testimony is dismissed due to unwarranted assumptions regarding their motives qua their social type. To understand the importance and severity of the testimonial injustices in echo chambers, we need to look beyond the specific harms that are done to the targeted speakers and the immediate loss of knowledge, but also take into account the consequences for fairness in public deliberation—the latter being a fundamental condition for procedural democratic legitimacy. (shrink)

In response to widespread voter ignorance, Jason Brennan argues for a voting ethics that can be summarized as one negative duty: do not vote badly. The implication that abstaining is always permissible entails no incentive for citizens to become competent voters or to vote once competent. Following the Condorcet Jury Theorem, this can lead to suboptimal outcomes, suggesting that voter turnout should concern instrumentalist epistemic accounts of democratic legitimacy. This could be addressed by adding two positive voting duties: to make (...) an effort to become a competent voter; and, once competent, to vote. (shrink)

This cumulative dissertation comprises four articles addressing questions related to the socalled ‘epistemic crisis of democracy’, in particular regarding widespread contestation of expertise and denial of scientific consensus. These phenomena are worrisome for (deliberative) epistemic democrats, as they can undermine the epistemic merits of democracy. These worries are typically only understood in veristic consequentialist terms, or as instrumental concerns for democracy, leading to suboptimal outcomes. But this picture, I argue, is incomplete. This dissertation utilizes tools from the social epistemology of (...) testimony to analyse the epistemic crisis from a novel perspective and locates issues that have so far remained underexplored. The following research question guides this inquiry: How does the contemporary (online) epistemic environment affect testimonial exchange of political information, and what are the implications of these changes for epistemic democracy? Article 1-3 provide a deeper understanding of the epistemic challenges citizens face when gathering political information. Article 1, ‘Public Credibility Dysfunction and Unreliable, Unsafe Political Beliefs’, discusses how our (online) epistemic environment thwarts citizens ability to make apt credibility appraisals. It further argues that the widespread failure of credibility monitoring and policing, what I call ‘public credibility dysfunction’, not only explains widespread ignorance and increasing false beliefs, but also affects the epistemic status of our true beliefs. Article 2 and 3 illustrate how public credibility dysfunction frustrates public uptake of expert-testimony. Article 2, ‘Echo Chambers, Epistemic Injustice and Anti-Intellectualism’, discusses conceptual links between testimonial injustice and echo chambers, and how the latter can cause dismissal of experttestimony on politically sensitive topics (e.g. vaccination). Article 3, ‘Testimonial Injustice Without Social Injustice: Rejection of Expert-Testimony as Morally Significant Epistemic Negligence’, builds on these insights and provides a broader account of testimonial injustice, that acknowledges how (epistemically) privileged groups (i.e. experts) can be treated unjustly in testimonial exchange. Article 4 ‘Procedural Epistemic Democracy and Virtue-based Citizen Competence’, argues that procedural views are not irrelevant for discussions of challenges to epistemic democracy. It provides a broader understanding of citizen competence that includes virtue-based epistemic responsibilities, and argues that procedural accounts of epistemic democracy can generate such responsibilities by employing a procedural account of social epistemology. (shrink)

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 (...) the Responsibility Problem, by arguing that vice-epistemologists can embrace route (2b) without problematic implications. In applying Miranda Fricker’s ‘no-fault responsibility’ to the card-carrying feminist case, I defend the following three claims: First, Battaly’s analysis of the card-carrying feminist case is flawed, because it fails to acknowledge that the vice of testimonial injustice and implicit prejudice are conceptually distinct. Second, excluding implicit prejudice as a vice is actually compatible with Fricker’s theoretical commitments. Third, contrary to what much of the literature seems to assume, it isn’t that problematic to exclude (individual) implicit bias as a vice, or to assign equal responsibility for implicit prejudice as for cognitive defects like impaired vision. (shrink)