Emmalon Davis has offered an insightful analysis of an under-theorized form of epistemic oppression called epistemic appropriation. This occurs when an epistemic resource developed within marginalized situatedness gains inter-communal uptake, but the author of the epistemic resource is unacknowledged. In this paper, I argue that Davis's definition of epistemic appropriation is not exhaustive. In particular, she misses out on explaining cases of epistemic appropriation in which an intra-communal epistemic resource is obscured through inter-communal uptake. Being attentive to this form of epistemic appropriation allows us to identify unique forms of epistemic oppression that emerge as a result of socially maintained active ignorance.

Critics of conspiracy theories often charge that such theories are implausible because conspiracies of the kind they allege tend to fail. Thus, according to these critics, conspiracy theories that have been around for a while would have been, in all likelihood, already exposed if they had been real. So, they reason, they probably are not. In this article, I maintain that the arguments in support of this view are unconvincing. I do so by examining a list of four sources recently cited in support of the claim that conspiracies tend to fail. I pay special attention to two of these sources, an article by Brian Keeley, and, especially, an article by David Grimes, which is perhaps the single “best” article in support of the idea that conspiracies tend to fail. That is, it offers the most explicit and elaborate attempt to establish this view. Further, that article has garnered significant (uncritical) attention in the mainstream press. I argue that Grimes's argument does not succeed, that the common assertion that conspiracies tend to fail remains poorly supported, and that there are good reasons to think that at least some types of conspiracies do not tend to fail.

Accessibilism is a version of epistemic internalism on which justification is determined by what is accessible to the subject. I argue that misunderstandings of accessibilism have hinged on a failure to appreciate an ambiguity in the phrase ‘what is accessible to the subject’. I first show that this phrase may either refer to the very things accessible to the subject, or instead to the facts about which things are accessible to her. I then discuss Ralph Wedgwood's (2002: 350–2) argument that accessibilism absurdly implies that an infinite regress of facts, each more complex than the last, must be accessible to the subject. I show that this regress objection only threatens the ‘very things’ disambiguation of accessibilism, not the ‘facts about’ disambiguation. After this, I discuss the relationships between the motivations for accessibilism and these two disambiguations. We will see that these motivations appear to support each disambiguation. But I will argue this appearance depends on a mistake. Just as only the ‘facts about’ disambiguation escapes the regress objection, it is also the only disambiguation which enjoys genuine support from the motivations for accessibilism. For these reasons, I recommend that future discussions of accessibilism focus on the ‘facts about’ disambiguation.

Solidarity is supposed to facilitate collective action. We argue that it can also help overcome false consciousness. Groups practice ‘epistemic solidarity’ if they pool information about what is in their true interest and how to vote accordingly. The more numerous ‘Masses’ can in this way overcome the ‘Elites,’ but only if they are minimally confident with whom they share the same interests and only if they are (perhaps only just) better-than-random in voting for the alternative that promotes their interests. Being more cohesive and more competent than the Masses, the Elites can employ the same strategy perhaps all the more effectively. But so long as the Masses practice epistemic solidarity they will almost always win, whether or not the Elites do. By enriching the traditional framework of the Condorcet Jury Theorem with group-specific standards of correctness, we investigate how groups can organize to support the alternatives truly in their interests.

Whether it seems that you know something depends in part upon practical factors. When the stakes are low, it can seem to you that you know that p, but when the stakes go up it'll seem to you that you don't. The apparent sensitivity of knowledge to stakes presents a serious challenge to epistemologists who endorse a stable semantics for knowledge attributions and reject the idea that whether you know something depends on how much is at stake. After arguing that previous attempts to meet this challenge fall short, I offer a new solution: the unassertability account. The account starts with the observation that high stakes subjects aren't in an epistemic position to assert. We generally presuppose that knowing is sufficient for epistemically proper assertion, but this presupposition only stands up to scrutiny if we draw a distinction between two notions of epistemic propriety, and we shouldn't expect ordinary speakers to draw it. A subject in a high stakes situation who fails to draw the distinction will be led by the sufficiency claim to treat anything she isn't in a position to assert as something she isn't in a position to know. The sensitivity of epistemically proper assertion to practical factors explains the merely apparent sensitivity of knowledge to stakes.

In “Reasons to Believe and Reasons to Act,” Stewart Cohen argues that balance of reasons accounts of rational action get the wrong results when applied to doxastic attitudes, and that there are therefore important differences between reasons to believe and reasons to act. In this paper, I argue that balance of reasons accounts of rational action get the right results when applied to the cases that Cohen considers, and that these results highlight interesting similarities between reasons to believe and reasons to act. I also consider an argument for Cohen's conclusion based on the principle that Adler, Moran, Shah, Velleman and others call “transparency.” I resist this argument by explaining why transparency is itself doubtful.

There are two plausible constraints on knowledge: (i) knowledge is closed under competent deduction; and (ii) knowledge answers to a safety condition. However, various authors, including Kvanvig (2004), Murphy (2005, 2006) and Alspector-Kelly (2011), argue that beliefs competently deduced from knowledge can sometimes fail to be safe. This paper responds that one can uphold (i) and (ii) by relativizing safety to methods and argues further that in order to do so, methods should be individuated externally.

The “problem of memory” in epistemology is concerned with whether and how we could have knowledge, or at least justification, for trusting our apparent memories. I defend an inductive solution – more precisely, an abductive solution – to the problem. A natural worry is that any such solution would be circular, for it would have to depend on memory. I argue that belief in the reliability of memory can be justified from the armchair, without relying on memory. The justification is, roughly, that my having the sort of experience that my apparent memory should lead me to expect is best explained by the hypothesis that my memories are reliable. My solution is inspired by Harrod's (1942) inductive solution. Coburn (1960) argued that Harrod's solution contains a fatal flaw. I show that my solution is not vulnerable to Coburn's objection, and respond to a number of other, recent and likely objections.

Interest in the Keynesian concept of evidential weight has led to divergent views concerning the burden of proof in adjudication. It is argued that Keynes's concept is properly engaged only in the context of one special kind of decision, the decision whether or not the evidence is ripe for a decision on the underlying merits, whether the latter decision is based on probability, relative plausibility, coherence or otherwise. As a general matter, this question of ripeness is appropriately assigned to the judiciary for resolution as part of the burden of production, rather than to the jury or other factfinder as part of the burden of persuasion.

The standard interpretation of Hume on testimony takes him to be a reductionist; justification of beliefs from testimony ultimately depends on one's own first-person experience. Yet Hume's main discussions of testimony in the Treatise and first Enquiry suggest a social account. Hume appeals to shared experience and develops norms of belief from testimony that are not reductionist. It is argued that the reductionist interpretation rests on an overly narrow view of Hume's theory of ideas. By attending to such mechanisms of the imagination as abstraction and fictions, it is shown that Hume's theory of ideas does not forestall a non-reductionist social epistemology.

Typically, expert judgments are regarded by laypeople as highly trustworthy. However, expert assertions that strike the layperson as obviously false or outrageous, seem to give one a perfect reason to dispute that this judgment manifests expertise. In this paper, I will defend four claims. First, I will deliver an argument in support of the preemption view on expert judgments according to which we should not rationally use our own domain-specific reasons in the face of expert testimony. Second, I will argue that the preemption view does not leave room for rejecting an expert judgment simply because it is outrageous. Third and finally, I will argue that outrageous expert judgments are ambiguous. Whereas some of them should be rationally rejected by laypeople, others are true and rationally acceptable. So, being outrageous is not, in and of itself, a reason to reject the judgment. Finally, I will argue that there are resources available to the preemption view that enable the layperson to reject some but not all outrageous expert judgments. This is sufficient to overcome the challenge from outrageous expert judgments to the preemption view.

Robert Aumann argues that common knowledge of rationality implies backward induction in finite games of perfect information. I have argued that it does not. A literature now exists in which various formal arguments are offered in support of both positions. This paper argues that Aumann's claim can be justified if knowledge is suitably reinterpreted.

Miranda Fricker's Epistemic Injustice is a wide-ranging and important book on a much-neglected topic: the injustice involved in cases in which distrust arises out of prejudice. Fricker has some important things to say about this sort of injustice: its nature, how it arises, what sustains it, and the unhappy outcomes associated with it for the victim and the society in which it takes place. In the course of developing this account, Fricker also develops an account of the epistemology of testimony. Focusing my attention on that account, my central claims are two. First, at least some of Fricker's arguments against existing (inferentialist and non-inferentialist) views in the epistemology of testimony are less than fully persuasive, and the (non-inferentialist) view she ends up endorsing is not all that different from the views she criticizes. Second, her reasons for harboring doubts regarding the role of a principle of default entitlement within a non-inferentialist account are not persuasive. Neither of these claims affects the overall argument Fricker is trying to run. Rather, they suggest that Fricker may have picked more fights than she needed to in the epistemology of testimony. If so, we have reason to detach Fricker's important work on epistemic injustice from some of the details of the story she tells regarding the epistemology of testimony.

The genus problem of populism presents one of the most vexing conceptual questions across the social sciences: Some theorists believe that populism is nothing more than an assembly of discursive patterns, while others maintain that populism is a strategy to gain political power. Then there are those that argue that populism is a thin ideology that lacks a coherent set of guiding principles. The paper intervenes in this debate in two ways: First, it offers a methodological apparatus for evaluating and developing contested concepts such as populism. Second, it puts forward and defends the claim that populism can be fruitfully understood as a coherent ideology that rests on four foundational principles. These principles, I will argue, are necessary for explaining the paradigmatic beliefs and dispositions exhibited by exponents of populism. One of the key characteristics of populism, on the account developed in this paper, is its peculiar epistemic stance.

This paper examines several recent positions on the nature of testimony and argues that all are unsatisfactory. The first section argues against narrow, broad, and moderate views. The second section argues against Jennifer Lackey's recent analysis of testimony. Her position is supposed to avoid the problems of the prior accounts, but still suffers from two problems. After discussing those problems, this paper offers and defends an alternative analysis of testimony.

By lopsided majorities, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a series of cases, persistently commanded the lower courts to condition the admission of proffered expert testimony on the demonstrated validity of the proponents’ claims of expertise. In at least one broad area–the so-called forensic sciences–the courts below have largely evaded the Supreme Court's holdings. This paper aims to try to explain this massive defiance by the lower courts in terms of social epistemology.

In this paper I argue that epistemically normative claims regarding what one is permitted or required to believe (or to refrain from believing) are sometimes true in virtue of what we owe one another as social creatures. I do not here pursue a reduction of these epistemically normative claims to claims asserting one or another (ethical or social) interpersonal obligation, though I highlight some resources for those who would pursue such a reduction.

Pragmatic encroachment theories have a problem with evidence. On the one hand, the arguments that knowledge is interest-relative look like they will generalise to show that evidence too is interest-relative. On the other hand, our best story of how interests affect knowledge presupposes an interest-invariant notion of evidence. This paper sketches a theory of evidence that is interest-relative, but which allows that ‘best story’ to go through with minimal changes. The evidence someone has is just what evidence a radical interpreter says they have. And a radical interpreter is playing a kind of game with the person they are interpreting. The cases that pose problems for pragmatic encroachment theorists involve coordination games between the interpreter and the interpretee, and like most coordination games they have multiple equilibria. The best solution to these games involves the notion of risk-dominant equilibria. So the evidence the person has is the evidence the interpreter says they have in the risk-dominant equilibria. This will be interest-relative, but consistent with the ‘best story' about how interests usually affect knowledge.

Under the traditional system of peer-reviewed publication, the degree of prestige conferred to authors by successful publication is tied to the degree of the intellectual rigor of its peer review process: ambitious scientists do well professionally by doing well epistemically. As a result, we should expect journal editors, in their dual role as epistemic evaluators and prestige-allocators, to have the power to motivate improved author behavior through the tightening of publication requirements. Contrary to this expectation, I will argue that the publication bias literature in academic medicine demonstrates that editor interventions have had limited effectiveness in improving the health of the publication and trial registration record, suggesting that much stronger interventions are needed.

Standpoint epistemologies are based on two central theses: the situated knowledge thesis and the thesis of epistemic privilege. The bias paradox suggests that there is a tension between these two notions, in the sense that they are self-contradictory. In this paper, I aim to defend standpoint epistemologies from this challenge. This defense is based on a distinction between subjective and objective justifications. According to the former, a subject S is subjectively justified in believing a proposition P iff S's belief in P coheres with S's pre-existing beliefs. According to the latter, a subject S is objectively justified in believing a proposition P iff S's subjective justification is truth-conducive. I argue that, if the situated knowledge thesis is spelled out in terms of subjective justification, and if the thesis of epistemic privilege is spelled out in terms of objective justification, then there is no contradiction. If this line of thought is correct, then the bias paradox does not show that standpoint epistemologies are self-contradictory.