This paper examines three programmatic responses to the problem of cognitive bias: virtue epistemology, epistemic paternalism, and epistemic collectivism. Each of these programmes focuses on a single level of epistemic analysis: virtue theorists on individuals, paternalists on environments, and collectivists on groups. I argue that this is a mistake in light of the fact that cognitive biases arise from interactions between these three domains. Consequently, epistemologists should spend less time defending these programmes, and more time coordinating them. This paper offers empirically based arguments for the interactionist approach, and contends that its adoption is an essential step for minimizing bias in empirical science.

Should a philosophical account of perceptual knowledge accord a justificatory role to sensory experiences? This discussion raises problems for an affirmative answer and sets out an alternative account on which justified belief is conceived as well-founded belief and well-foundedness is taken to depend on knowledge. A key part of the discussion draws on a conception of perceptual-recognitional abilities to account for how perception gives rise both to perceptual knowledge and to well-founded belief.

Democracy has recently been criticized by several philosophers on grounds of poor epistemic performance. The proposed alternative – epistocracy – faces criticism for failing to uphold and express the core democratic values of civic equality and individual autonomy. In response, proposals have been offered that try to achieve epistocratic performance while retaining democratic inclusion. This paper raises two problems for such proposals, relating to the selection of experts and the incentive-compatibility of the system. Given these failures, I sketch what I call the Wiki-Model. I argue that the Wiki-Model (i) has desirable epistemic properties; (ii) realizes our democratic ideals; while also (iii) avoiding the two problems that other hybrid models face.

In this paper, I argue that, contrary to popular opinion, there is good reason to think that the qualities that make people good reasoners also make them better off. I will focus specifically on epistemic virtue: roughly, the kind of character in virtue of which one is excellently oriented towards epistemic goods. I propose that epistemic virtue is importantly implicated in the realization of some of the goods that are widely believed to be instrumental to, or even constitutive of, well-being. Here I focus on one such good: friendship.

One challenge for moderate invariantists is to explain why we tend to deny knowledge to subjects in high stakes when the target propositions seem to be inappropriate premises for practical reasoning. According to an account suggested by Williamson, our intuitive judgments are erroneous due to an alleged failure to acknowledge the distinction between first-order and higher-order knowledge: the high-stakes subject lacks the latter but possesses the former. In this paper, I provide three objections to Williamson's account: (i) his account delivers counterintuitive verdicts about what it is appropriate for a high-stakes subject to do; (ii) the high-stakes subject doesn't need iterated knowledge in order to be regarded as appropriately relying on the relevant proposition in practical reasoning; (iii) Williamson's account doesn't provide a good explanation of why the high-stakes subject would be blameworthy if she were relying on the relevant proposition in her practical reasoning.

The Uniqueness thesis says that any body of evidence E uniquely determines which doxastic attitude is rationally permissible regarding some proposition P. Permissivists deny Uniqueness. They are charged with arbitrarily favouring one doxastic attitude out of the set of attitudes they regard as rationally permissible. Simpson (Episteme, 2017) claims that an appeal to differences in cognitive abilities can remove the arbitrariness. I argue that it can't. Impermissivists face a challenge of their own: The problem of fine distinctions. I suggest that meeting this challenge requires impermissivists to loosen up at higher levels – when comparing belief-forming systems that differ in the fineness of their doxastic outputs. This more relaxed take on Uniqueness is a kind of ‘intraspecies impermissivism’.

According to assurance views of testimonial justification, in virtue of the act of testifying a speaker provides an assurance of the truth of what she asserts to the addressee. This assurance provides a special justificatory force and a distinctive normative status to the addressee. It is thought to explain certain asymmetries between addressees and other unintended hearers (bystanders and eavesdroppers), such as the phenomenon that the addressee has a right to blame the speaker for conveying a falsehood but unintended hearers do not, and the phenomenon that the addressee may deflect challenges to his testimonial belief to the speaker but unintended hearers may not. Here I argue that we can do a better job explaining the normative statuses associated with testimony by reference to epistemic norms of assertion and privacy norms. Following Sanford Goldberg, I argue that epistemic norms of assertion, according to which sincere assertion is appropriate only when the asserter possesses certain epistemic goods, can be ‘put to work’ to explain the normative statuses associated with testimony. When these norms are violated, they give hearers the right to blame the speaker, and they also explain why the speaker takes responsibility for the justification of the statement asserted. Norms of privacy, on the other hand, directly exclude eavesdroppers and bystanders from an informational exchange, implying that they have no standing to do many of the things, such as issue challenges or questions to the speaker, that would be normal for conversational participants. This explains asymmetries of normative status associated with testimony in a way logically independent of speaker assurance.

We frequently make judgments about the world. Juries make judgments about whether defendants are guilty. Umpires make judgments about whether pitches are strikes. Tenure committees make judgments about whether professors deserve tenure. We typically want these judgments about the world to have good epistemic properties. We would like our judgments to be true rather than false, for example. We would also like our judgments to be consistent with each other; and we would like to have good reasons for our judgments. This paper will be concerned with how we can make judgments that have such good epistemic properties.

Modern epistemic questions have largely been focused around the individual and her ability to acquire knowledge autonomously. More recently epistemologists have begun to look more broadly in providing accounts of knowledge by considering its social context, where the individual depends on others for true beliefs. Hardwig explains the effect of this shift starkly, arguing that to reject epistemic dependency is to deny certain true beliefs widely held throughout society and, more specifically, it is to deny that science and scholarship can provide true belief. Alternatively, Hardwig argues that beliefs could be granted to communities or groups but denied to individuals. This paper approaches these broad assertions using a group agency model from List and Pettit. Through a discussion of the ‘epistemic desideratum’ of group agents, I conclude that List and Pettit give us reason to accept some of Hardwig's concerns, but that attributing beliefs to groups does not require us to deny them to individuals, rather an individual can use a group agent as a source of epistemic dependence.

In the real world, there can be constraints on rational decision-making: there can be limitations on what I can know and on what you can know. There can also be constraints on my ability to deliberate or on your ability to deliberate. It is useful to know what the norms of rational deliberation should be in ideal contexts, for fully informed agents, in an ideal world. But it is also useful to know what the norms of rational deliberation should be in the actual world, in non-ideal contexts, for imperfectly informed agents, especially for big, life-changing decisions. That is, we want to know how to deliberate as best we can, given the real-world limitations on what we can know, and given real-world limitations on how we are able to deliberate. In this paper, our concern is with the norms of rational deliberation in certain, important, non-ideal contexts, where the reasoning occurs from the agent's first person, subjective point of view. The norms governing the process of deliberation for real people in the sorts of non-ideal contexts we'll consider need to reflect the way that real agents, with an incomplete grasp on the facts and an imperfect ability to deliberate, can be expected to proceed. Our central contention is that framing and exploring the deliberative process from the first person perspective allows us to uncover and explore important, real-world constraints on boundedly rational agents deliberating from the subjective perspective.

According to one sort of epistemic relativist, normative epistemic claims (e.g., evidence E justifies hypothesis H) are never true or false simpliciter, but only relative to one or another epistemic system. In chapter 6 of Fear of Knowledge, Paul Boghossian objects to this view on the ground that its central notions cannot be explained, and that it cannot account for the normativity of epistemic discourse. This paper explores how the dogged relativist might respond.

Christian List and Philip Pettit (henceforth LP) argue that groups of people can be agents – beings that believe, desire and act. Their account combines a non-reductive realist view of group attitudes, on which groups literally have attitudes that cannot be analyzed in terms of the attitudes of their members, with methodological individualism, on which good explanations of group-level phenomena should not posit forces above individual attitudes and behaviors. I then discuss the main normative conclusion that LP draw from the claim that group agents exist: that we ought morally to grant legal rights and responsibilities to group agents, but that group rights should be more limited than individual rights. I argue that when it comes to the fitness of group agents to bear legal rights and responsibilities, LP can draw support from nonreductionist views elsewhere, particularly in the philosophy of mind. I raise some objections to LP's views about the value of granting legal rights and responsibilities to group agents.

While many philosophers have agreed that evidence of disagreement is a kind of higher-order evidence, this has not yet resulted in formally precise higher-order approaches to the problem of disagreement. In this paper, we outline a simple formal framework for determining the epistemic significance of a body of higher-order evidence, and use this framework to motivate a novel interpretation of the popular “equal weight view” of peer disagreement – we call it the Variably Equal Weight View (VEW). We show that VEW differs from the standard Split the Difference (SD) interpretation of the equal weight view in almost all cases of peer disagreement, and use our formal framework to explain why SD has seemed attractive but is in fact misguided. A desirable feature of VEW, we argue, is that it gives rise to plausible instances of synergy – an effect whereby the parties to a disagreement should become more (or less) confident in the disputed proposition than any of them were prior to disagreement. Lastly, we show how VEW may be generalized to cases of non-peer disagreement.

Epistemologists focus primarily on cases of knowledge, belief, or credence where the evidence which one possesses, or on which one is relying, plays a fundamental role in the epistemic or normative status of one's doxastic state. Recent work in epistemology goes beyond the evidence one possesses to consider the relevance for such statuses of evidence which one does not possess, particularly when there is a sense in which one should have had some evidence. I focus here on Sanford Goldberg's approach (“Should Have Known,” Synthese, Forthcoming; and “On the Epistemic Significance of Evidence You Should Have Had,” Episteme, 2016, this issue); but the discussion will interest anyone working on epistemic defeat.

Social epistemology is a burgeoning branch of contemporary epistemology. Since the 1970s, philosophers have taken an ever-increasing interest in such topics as the epistemic value of testimony, the nature and function of expertise, the proper distribution of cognitive labor and resources among individuals in communities, and the status of group reasoning and knowledge. This trend emerged against the resistance of the widely shared view that social considerations are largely irrelevant to epistemological concerns. The trend was stimulated by diverse approaches to the study of knowledge, in such fields as library science, educational theory, the sociology of science, and economics, and within philosophy itself, in the decades preceding the 1980s. To name only a few influences within philosophy, W. V. Quine promoted a naturalistic approach to knowledge, and many who accepted the relevance of nature to epistemology found it sensible to accept the relevance of social factors as well. Thomas S. Kuhn suggested that social factors precipitate revolutionary conceptual and doctrinal changes in the history of science. And feminist epistemologists uncovered the importance of gender differences in knowledge – a species of social factor.

Social epistemology is autonomous: When applied to the same evidential situations, the principles of social rationality and the principles of individual rationality sometimes recommend inconsistent beliefs. If we stipulate that reasoning rationally from justified beliefs to a true belief is normally sufficient for knowledge, the autonomy thesis implies that some knowledge is essentially social. When the principles of social and individual rationality are applied to justified evidence and recommend inconsistent beliefs and the belief endorsed by social rationality is true, then that true belief would be an instance of social knowledge but not individual knowledge.

Attributor contextualism and subject-sensitive invariantism both suggest ways in which our concept of knowledge depends on a context. Both offer approaches that incorporate traditionally non-epistemic elements into our standards for knowledge. But neither can account for the fact that the social role of a subject affects the standards that the subject must meet in order to warrant a knowledge attribution. I illustrate the dependence of the standards for knowledge on the social roles of the knower with three types of examples–focusing on knowledge attribution, action, and a mix of the two–and show why neither attributor contextualism nor subject-sensitive invariantism can explain them. I then suggest that subject-sensitive invariantism should be supplemented with insights from virtue epistemology so that it can explain the dependence of the standards of knowledge on social roles. This supplementation of subject-sensitive invariantism helps to solve a persistent problem facing that theory: the case of knowledge attributions made by those in high-stakes contexts about subjects in low-stakes contexts.

Miranda Fricker's original presentation of Hermeneutical Injustice left open theoretical choice points leading to criticisms and subsequent clarifications with the resulting dialectic appearing largely verbal. The absence of perspicuous exposition of hallmarks of Hermeneutical Injustice might suggest scenarios exhibiting some – but not all – such hallmarks are within its purview when they are not. The lack of clear hallmarks of Hermeneutical Injustice, moreover, obscures both the extent to which Fricker's proposed remedy Hermeneutical Justice – roughly, virtuous communicative practices – adequately addresses the injustice, and the accuracy of criticisms suggesting that Hermeneutical Justice is insufficient to the task. In what follows, after briefly defending necessary and sufficient conditions for what I take to be the best candidate interpretation of Hermeneutical Injustice, I build on recent work on moral responsibility to construct and defend a rigorous explication of Hermeneutical Justice.

The Ostrogorski paradox and the discursive dilemma are seemingly unrelated paradoxes of aggregation. The former is discussed in traditional social choice theory, while the latter is at the core of the new literature on judgment aggregation. Both paradoxes arise when, in a group, each individual consistently makes a judgment, or expresses a preference, (in the form of yes or no) over specific propositions, and the collective outcome is in some respect inconsistent. While the result is logically inconsistent in the case of the discursive paradox, it is not stable with respect to the level of aggregation in the case of the Ostrogorski paradox. In the following I argue that, despite these differences, the two problems have a similar structure. My conclusion will be twofold: on the one hand, the similarities between the paradoxes support the claim that these problems should be tackled using the same aggregation procedure; on the other hand, applying the same procedure to these paradoxes will help clarify the strengths and weaknesses of the aggregation method itself. More specifically, I will show that an operator defined in artificial intelligence to merge belief bases can deal with both paradoxes.

Taking seriously the social dimensions of knowledge puts pressure on the assumption that epistemic agents can usefully be thought of as autonomous, interchangeable individuals, capable, insofar as they are rational and objective, of transcending the specificities of personal history, experience, and context. If this idealization is abandoned as the point of departure for epistemic inquiry, then differences among situated knowers come sharply into focus. These include differences in cognitive capacity, experience, and expertise; in access to information and the heuristics that make it intelligible; and in motivating interests and orienting standpoint. Dissent takes on rather different significance, as a potentially productive feature of epistemic life rather than evidence of a failure of aperspectivality or an indication of error. The central questions are, then, what forms of diversity are epistemically consequential, and how can they best be deployed to ensure that the beliefs we warrant as knowledge are as well grounded and truth-tracking as possible.