A belief is debased when believing is given a basis that is not proper for knowledge, such as wishful thinking or superstition. The possibility of a debasing demon is the possibility of a maximally powerful agent who aims to prevent knowledge by debasing beliefs. Jonathan Schaffer contends that the debasing demon is a threat to all knowledge. Schaffer does not assess the strength of the skeptical challenge from debasing. It is argued here that debasing does not strengthen any case for skepticism. A debasing demon is possible. We should acknowledge that our beliefs could have been debased, and that this could have been done in an introspectively undetectable way. But acknowledging this leaves us in a position to know that our apparent knowledge is genuine. It does not enhance any reason to think that we lack knowledge.

According to transmission theories of testimony, a listener's belief in a speaker's testimony can be supported by the speaker's justification for what she says. The most powerful objection to transmission theories is Jennifer Lackey's persistent believer case. I argue that important features about the epistemology of testimony reveal how transmission theories can account for Lackey's case. Specifically, I argue that transmission theorists should hold that transmission happens only if a listener believes a speaker's testimony based on the presumption that the speaker has justification for what she says. If this does not happen in the persistent believer case, then the case is no counterexample to transmission. If this does happen in the persistent believer case, then there is an available framework for rejecting the idea that the listener's belief is in fact justified.

I outline what I call the ‘deniability problem’, explain why it is problematic, and identify the range of utterances to which it applies (using religious discourse as an example). The problem is as follows: To assign content to many utterances audiences must rely on their contextual knowledge. This generates a lot of scope for error. Thus, speakers are able to make assertions and deny responsibility for the proposition asserted, claiming that the audience made a mistake. I outline the problem (a limited version of which Fricker 2012 discusses), before explaining why it is problematic. Firstly it blocks testimonial knowledge according to assurance views. Secondly it prevents epistemic buck passing (the importance of which is emphasized by Goldberg 2006 and McMyler 2013). Finally, it removes a key disincentive to dishonesty. The recent literature on context sensitivity (particularly Cappelen and Lepore 2004) seems to entail that the problem applies to a very wide range of utterances. I consider a series of responses which fail to provide a solution, but which help us narrow down the scope of the problem.

A growing number of authors defend putative examples of knowledge from falsehood (KFF), inferential knowledge based in a critical or essential way on false premises, and they argue that KFF has important implications for many areas of epistemology (whether evidence can be false, the Gettier debate, defeasibility theories of knowledge, etc.). I argue, however, that there is no KFF, because in any supposed example either the falsehood does not contribute to the knowledge or the subject lacks knowledge. In particular, I show that if the subject actually has knowledge in putative KFF cases, then there is always a veridical evidential path meeting the basing conditions that accounts for her knowledge; if there is no such path, then the subject is in a type of Gettier case. All the recent arguments that rely on KFF are therefore based on a mistake.

In this paper, I make explicit some implicit commitments to realism and conceptualism in recent work in social epistemology exemplified by Miranda Fricker and Charles Mills. I offer a survey of recent writings at the intersection of social epistemology, feminism, and critical race theory, showing that commitments to realism and conceptualism are at once implied yet undertheorized in the existing literature. I go on to offer an explicit defense of these commitments by drawing from the epistemological framework of John McDowell, demonstrating the relevance of the metaphor of the “space of reasons” for theorizing and criticizing instances of epistemic injustice. I then point out how McDowell’s own view requires expansion and revision in light of Mills' concept of “epistemologies of ignorance.” I conclude that, when their strengths are used to make up for each others' weaknesses, Mills and McDowell’s positions mutually reinforce one another, producing a powerful model for theorizing instances of systematic ignorance and false belief.

The field of experimental philosophy has received considerable attention, essentially for producing results that seem highly counter-intuitive and at the same time question some of the fundamental methods used in philosophy. One of the earlier influential papers that gave rise to the experimental philosophy movement titled ‘Normativity and Epistemic Intuitions’ by Jonathan M. Weinberg, Shaun Nichols and Stephen Stich (2001), reported that respondents displayed different epistemic intuitions depending on their ethnic background as well as socioeconomic status. These findings, if robust, would have important implications for philosophical methodology in general and epistemology in particular. Because of the important implication of its findings, Weinberg et al. (2001) has been very influential – currently with more than four hundred citations – and the subject of extensive debate. Despite the paper's significance and despite all the debates this paper has generated, there has not been a replication attempt of its experiments. We collected data from four different sources (two on-line and two in-person) to replicate the experiments. Despite several different data sets and in various cases larger sample sizes, we failed to detect significant differences between the above-mentioned groups. Our results suggest that epistemic intuitions are more uniform across ethnic and socioeconomic groups than Weinberg et al. (2001) indicates. Given our data, we believe that the notion of differences in epistemic intuitions among different ethnic and socioeconomic groups advanced by Weinberg et al. (2001) and accepted by many researchers needs to be corrected.

We discuss the role of practical costs in the epistemic justification of a novice choosing expert advice, taking as a case study the choice of an expert statistician by a lay politician. First, we refine Goldman's criteria for the assessment of this choice, showing how the costs of not being impartial impinge on the epistemic justification of the different actors involved in the choice. Then, drawing on two case studies, we discuss in which institutional setting the costs of partiality can play an epistemic role. This way we intend to show how the sociological explanation of the choice of experts can incorporate its epistemic justification.