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People with disabilities in Palestine constitute approximately 2.5% of the general population according to the Palestinian centre bureau of statistics latest census in 2020. Although disability has gained prominence in Palestine in recent years, especially after the signing and ratification of the United Nation Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities (UNCRPD, 2014), people with disabilities in Palestine remain the most marginalised and vulnerable group within Palestinian society. People with disabilities still face a high degree of social marginalisation, lack access to basic services, and must contend with the near absence of a holistic mainstream inclusive education system that can grant them access to equal, equitable and just education opportunities in line with the United Nations Social Development Goal Number 4 (Quality of education). In this thesis, I employ Fricker's (2007) philosophical construct of epistemic injustice, supplemented by Medina's (2012) account of epistemology of resistance to provide a more profound understanding of this specific kind of injustice. I present the two forms of epistemic injustice, namely testimonial injustice which happens when a hearer receives less credibility than they should; and hermeneutical injustice which happens when a group of individuals are unable to name or convey the injustice they experience because of obstructions to their general experience and knowledge I explore how the social and political power structures in Palestine impact the production and maintenance of stereotypes which in turn translates into epistemic injustices against Palestinians in general, and woman with disabilities in particular. Drawing on the women's testimonies, I discuss how testimonial and hermeneutical injustices are manifested in speaker and hearer relations, and how the harms impact young women's access to education as well as the hermeneutical marginalisation of the Palestinian population caused by the Israeli restrictions.

Contemporary radical right political parties, organisations, and members represent a serious threat to society. While a considerable amount of research has assessed the threat they pose and how we might respond to it, little attention has been paid to the epistemic activities of members of the radical right and how they may restrict the circulation of epistemic goods necessary for the development and modification of effective responses. In this thesis, I explore the possibility that members of the radical right suffer epistemic injustice. I maintain that there is a strong reason for affirming this possibility according to how members of the radical right engage and are treated during epistemic activities. Additionally, I provide insight into why this epistemic injustice is significant and how we might address it. Epistemic injustice is a relatively new theory in philosophy. By combining three spheres of philosophy, namely the epistemic, the political, and the ethical, epistemic injustice investigates how common epistemic practices may function such that injustice is inflicted on people bearing particular social identities. That is, people are unfairly undermined in their capacities as knowers, mistreating them in relation to knowledge, understanding and participation in communicative practices. I argue that members of the radical right suffer two forms of epistemic injustice. Firstly, they suffer testimonial injustice when their credibility is determined and subsequently diminished because of the negative identity-prejudicial stereotype (NIPS) that overlooks the ideological features on which the radical right and the extreme right differ and the framework set out to reflect them. By applying Iris Marion Young's social connection model (SCM), I locate those causally connected to the testimonial injustice as being responsible for addressing it. Secondly, members of the radical right suffer hermeneutical injustice because the collective epistemic repertoire is not receptive to the requisite epistemic resource that captures their societally pessimistic and nostalgic worldview. By utilising Young's SCM, I identify those who contribute to maintaining the structural phenomenon that carries the hermeneutical injustice as being responsible for addressing it. Finally, I investigate what follows from the epistemic injustice the radical right suffers in terms of remedial action. I recommend that in order to address the epistemic injustice they suffer, we ought to address the structural dimensions that carry it. I maintain that my investigation into the epistemic injustice that I argue members of the radical right suffer is significant because of the tripartite harms it causes. Specifically, those who suffer epistemic injustice and those complicit in the perpetration of epistemic injustice suffer because of it, while the epistemic system is damaged by it. Whilst the harm that those subject to and complicit in the perpetration suffer is of interest, I insist that the damage to the epistemic system is a crucial concern for self-interested reasons. Essentially, the epistemic injustice that the radical right suffers restricts the circulation of epistemic goods pertaining to their worldview and ideology. I propose that this restriction of epistemic goods can indirectly cause practical disadvantages for everyone who participates in the epistemic system when developing and modifying effective responses to the radical right. Therefore, impeding our ability to challenge the radical right appropriately and respond to the seeds of hate and division they sow within society.

The inclusion of student voices in pedagogical practice has been on educational agendas for decades. Nevertheless, student voices remain excluded. Situated within the philosophy of education, this conceptual study constructs a theoretical account that provides one way to understand why student voices in higher education are excluded from pedagogical practice. Using the literature from decolonial thinking and the epistemology of testimony to decolonize Miranda Fricker's (2007) account of epistemic injustice, this thesis examines the role of knowledge in epistemic practices and how it functions in higher education testimony to dominate, silence, and obscure student voices.

When students contest an education system they experience as oppressive, what do they imagine could exist instead? This dissertation explores the intersection of politics, education, and the imagination amongst students who mobilised in Brazil and South Africa during the 2015-2016 protest waves. The study focuses on how students learnt from their activism, reimagining both education and society more widely. In Brazil, it focuses on the activity of high school students in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro during the 'Primavera Secundarista' (Student Spring). Here, primarily through school occupations, students fought to keep their schools open, supported their striking teachers, and called attention to a crumbling public school system. Simultaneously, they challenged various forms of oppression and questioned the purpose of schooling in an unequal, exploitative society. In South Africa, it focuses on university students in Johannesburg and Cape Town during '#FeesMustFall' and affiliated campaigns. These students exposed problems of university access and funding, decolonising education, and exploitative labour practices in universities, particularly outsourcing workers. They questioned the ‘post-Apartheid’ social order, continued racism and racialised capitalism, and how universities reproduce these conditions. The dissertation draws on 9 months of fieldwork across four cities, primarily encompassing interviews with student participants and staff working in solidarity, documents and statements produced by participants, and both journalistic and academic articles that have reflected on these processes. It tracks the precursors to and eruption of the mobilisations, how the students involved reconfigured existing coalitions and groups, ran their own educational projects, and in the process challenged ideas and practices of education, thereby shaping their own perspectives. Drawing on literature about the imagination and social movement learning, I argue that students reimagined education conceptually and practically. They challenged the existing education systems, while addressing their experiences of alienation, marginalisation, and exclusion. In doing so, they constructed dialogical, thoughtful spaces of teaching and learning, interrogating the educational system in which they were embedded. Students who took part in politicised collective action over 2015-16 were thus shaped by their experiences, emerging with different perspectives on education and society.

The view that philosophers should stop trying to analyse the nature of "experience" and focus instead on our linguistic and social practices is central to the philosophical project of neo-pragmatism. In this thesis I respond to arguments made to this effect by Richard Rorty, both in his 'Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature' (1979) and in his later political writings. Rorty is unique among neo-pragmatists in his decision, in his later work, to present this argument as a political one. This move is exemplified by his combination of Wilfrid Sellars' critique of the "Myth of the Given" with a critique of metaphysical "authoritarianism." Rorty argues that abandoning philosophical questions about experience would support pluralist democratic politics by rejecting the idea that there are sources of epistemic authority that stand outside our relationships with other people. This thesis contends that, while Rorty's concerns about metaphysical authoritarianism are justified, his rejection of philosophical experience talk in its entirety may harm marginalised groups. I draw on critiques of Rorty from feminist theorists such as Linda Alcoff and Sonia Kruks in order to argue that Rorty's linguistic turn undermines our ability to deal with situations of "maximal hermeneutical injustice," Miranda Fricker's term for situations in which a marginalised individual or group is harmed by the insufficiency of their linguistic resources for making sense of their experience. I conclude by offering an alternative concept of experience taken from French poststructuralist Gilles Deleuze. This concept provides the resources needed for dealing with situations of maximal hermeneutical injustice without falling into the trap of empiricist givenism. Through his revision of Kantian faculty theory and his theory of "expressionism," Deleuze allows us to talk about the experiential causes of our beliefs, desires and actions without ever treating "experience" as something that justifies beliefs. This enables us to critically examine the relationship between our experiences and our language and to assess whether the latter is adequate, without assuming that experience has contents which are communicated to our linguistic faculties.

Economics plays a significant role in decision-making in contemporary western societies, but its role is increasingly questioned. A recurring topic among the challenges raised by critics is that economics as a discipline lacks sufficient pluralism. That is, it fails to enable, encourage, and respect the use of different ontologies, methodologies, theories, and/or schools of thought to study economic reality. Has this been a productive critique? Does talk about pluralism help identify genuine problems in the discipline? Pluralism in economics could draw support from the current consensus in philosophy that pluralism in science is a good thing. I argue, however, that the claim that economic research is insufficiently pluralist is unlikely to convince economists who believe economics is already pluralist enough and that it does not offer unambiguous recommendations for change. This is because there are too many legitimate ways to interpret how pluralism maps to practice. There are numerous variables that pluralist ideals might focus on-the things that they seek multiple rather than one of-and different interpretations of how many of those variables economics has in practice. Yet, as I go on to argue, this does not mean that talk of pluralism is entirely beside the point, since the reasons pluralists offer for their ideals do help to identify genuine problems in economics. The social epistemic strategies that arguments for pluralism recommend point us to three concrete issues in the way economic research is organised: gender imbalances, a steep internal hierarchy, and a dismissive attitude to outsiders. I show that economic research could be more progressive, representative of the interests of those in society, accepted, and legitimate and less likely to fall into bias if the discipline alleviated its gender imbalances, if it were less hierarchical, and if it had a healthier relationship with outsiders. In chapter 1, I outline the debate about pluralism in economics and explain how my thesis utilises a novel approach to social epistemology to offer a way out of the impasse in which that the debate presently resides. In chapter 2, I explain the different philosophical arguments for pluralism in science and categorise them using the variables they focus on and the reasons they give for pluralism. In chapter 3, I argue that interpreting pluralism as a particular arrangement of variables for economics to attain does not lead to unambiguous recommendations for change because it leaves too much open. Yet, I go on to argue, in chapter 4, that drawing on the reasons for pluralism can provide a set of heuristics for piecemeal evaluations of the social epistemic practices in economics. In chapters 5, 6, and 7, I apply these heuristics to economics. I provide evidence that [a] women are outnumbered in economics and face an adverse environment in the discipline, that [b] economics is steeply hierarchical, and that [c] economists form an in-group that assumes superiority and frequently dismisses outside voices. I argue that these three features of economic research block avenues for productive forms of feedback (mechanisms that help to challenge, justify, and refine scientific knowledge), block the interests of certain perspectives being heard, and block public scrutiny of the decisions made by economists.

This thesis contributes to sociological accounts of critique and, more broadly, to accounts of the relationship between knowledge and the social conditions of its production. It begins with a theoretical exploration of the tension between Bourdieu's concept of sociological reflexivity and Boltanski's sociology of critique, including the epistemic and political position from which knowledge claims in social sciences can be made and justified. This question becomes particularly important when the authority of such claims rests on the possibility of a conceptual distinction between the subject of knowledge (the 'knower') and their object (the 'social'). The empirical part of the thesis provides an analysis of this process through the case of the critique of neoliberalism in UK higher education and research between 1997 and 2017. Intellectual interventions (books, articles, and other public statements) offering critical accounts of the transformation of universities are interpreted as forms of intellectual positioning, speech-acts that assign properties to objects and actors in the social realm. Through a qualitative analysis of interventions and interviews, the thesis reconstructs ontological assumptions entailed in forms of positioning, particularly those pertaining to the justification of epistemic authority of academics in the political and historical context of post-WWII Britain. The thesis uses these findings to situate the questions of knowledge, critique, and the role of social sciences within the longer discussion about the relationship between 'thinking' and 'doing'. Focusing on the relationship between positionality and positioning, the thesis shows how subject-object relationships form a fundamental part of the production of both critique and knowledge about its object.

This document summarises the submitted research which has investigated online knowledge exchange and related it to the philosophical field of social epistemology. The broad aims have been: firstly to investigate what social epistemology theory can offer in the way of guidance and evaluative frameworks for the design of knowledge systems; and secondly, to determine what the empirical study of knowledge exchange platforms can tell us about epistemology as emerging from online practice. The submitted work consists of six papers that are a mixture of review/position papers and reports of empirical investigation. These have been published in information science journals and conference proceedings. However, following the established tradition of information science, the work is positioned as being cross disciplinary in ambition. After introducing the submitted papers and the inspiration for the research, the main theoretical positions of the research are outlined and justified. These were a naturalised social epistemological position, inspired by Alvin Goldman, but widened to a situated and systems-oriented view. The naturalised view of epistemology allows for consideration of evidence from psychology, and here some key theories in social and cognitive psychology are outlined. Finally, as the subject is human-computer-human interaction, the sociotechnical setting is established. Further, the main platforms of study in the empirical work — social question answering systems — are introduced and described. The main methodology and research approaches followed are presented next. A mixed methods philosophy was deemed suitable for this area of research and — alongside the review work — the broad web science method of combining network and data investigation with qualitative methods is justified. Review work included early collaborations with an information scientist and a philosopher which helped to bring together and clarify epistemological and sociotechnical themes. The discussion section presents some of the main themes and conclusions of the submitted work, including: 1) The identification of knowledge patterns and practices online; 2) Criteria for online knowledge exchange distilled from the social epistemology literature; 3) Some triangulations where theory from philosophy and psychology seemed to corroborate and serve to explain online behaviour; 4) Socio-temporal aspects to online knowledge exchange that are perhaps under developed in philosophy but apparent in practice; 5) Credibility cues and bias, seen as crucial to a rounded study of user interaction with online sources; and finally 6) Interventions suggested by the research which would aim to raise the quality and effectiveness of social media knowledge systems. Finally, conclusions and suggestions for further work are presented. These follow on from the submitted strands of research and present possibilities for how the work may be extended and improved upon. In common with the research, these combine philosophy, modelling, interaction design and qualitative methods. Such a combination is seen as essential to developing an enhanced understanding of how the web serves and could serve as a platform for human knowledge.

How are beliefs about the nature of knowledge reflected and reproduced in language use? It is clear that some linguistic resources, e.g. the modal verbs may and must, indicate one’s epistemic stance with respect to a proposition, i.e. one’s judgement of how likely it is to be true. What is less clear is how the use of such resources relates to speakers’ beliefs about the nature of knowledge per se, i.e. their epistemic policies (Teller 2004). To investigate the putative relationship between epistemological variation and linguistic variation, I examine samples of written and spoken English from a community that is particularly epistemologically diverse: academia. I synthesize research on social epistemology, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and Academic English (AE) to propose an explanatory model of variability in the expression of epistemic stance. Then, using AE as a case study, I evaluate the predictions of this model both quantitatively via corpus analysis of research articles and regression modelling of interview data, as well as qualitatively via analysis of discursive practices in terms of experience-organizing frames (Goffman 1974) and the semiotic notion of indexicality (e.g. Irvine 2001), whereby ideological differences produce, and are reproduced by, linguistic differences. This research makes contributions to a number of fields. It questions the analytic validity of disciplinarity, providing support for a unifying theory of variation in AE based instead on an epistemologically principled analysis of institutional language use. The indexical basis of sociolinguistic research on language and belief/identity is problematized by attending to epistemological context; the ramifications of this will be explored in future research. I develop a linguistic metric of epistemic belief, offering a means of developing a quantitative social epistemology to complement that field’s highly articulated theoretical work. Applications beyond academia are possible in areas concerned with knowledge management and transfer, such as public health.

The aim of the present thesis is to reconcile two opposing intuitions; one originating from mainstream individualistic epistemology and the other one from social epistemology. In particular, conceiving of knowledge as a cognitive phenomenon, mainstream epistemologists focus on the individual as the proper epistemic subject. Yet, clearly, knowledge-acquisition many times appears to be a social process and, sometimes, to such an extent—as in the case of scientific knowledge—that it has been argued there might be knowledge that is not possessed by any individual alone. In order to make sense of such contradictory claims, I combine virtue reliabilism in mainstream epistemology with two hypotheses from externalist philosophy of mind, viz., the extended and distributed cognition hypotheses. Reading virtue reliabilism along the lines suggested by the hypothesis of extended cognition allows for a weak anti-individualistic understanding of knowledge, which has already been suggested on the basis of considerations about testimonial knowledge: knowledge, many times, has a dual nature; it is both social and individual. Provided, however, the possibility of distributed cognition and group agency, we can go even further by making a case for a robust version of antiindividualism in mainstream epistemology. This is because knowledge may not always be the product of any individual’s cognitive ability and, thereby, not creditable to any individual alone. Knowledge, instead, might be the product of an epistemic group agent’s collective cognitive ability and, thus, attributable only to the group as a whole. Still, however, being able—on the basis of the hypothesis of distributed cognition—to recognize a group as a cognitive subject in itself allows for proponents of virtue reliabilism to legitimately apply their individualistic theory of knowledge to such extreme cases as well. Put another way, mainstream individualistic epistemologists now have the means to make sense of the claim that p is known by S, even though it is not known by any individual alone.

This dissertation is a contribution to two fields of study: applied social epistemology and the philosophy of technology. That is, it is a philosophical study, based on empirical fieldwork research, of social and technical knowledge. Social knowledge here is defined as knowledge acquired through the interactions between epistemic agents and social institutions. Technical knowledge is here defined as knowledge about technical artefacts (including how to design, produce, and operate them). I argue that the two must be considered collectively both in the sense that they are best considered in the light of collectivist approaches to knowledge and in the sense that they must be considered together as part of the same analysis. An analysis solely of the interactions between human epistemic agents operating within social institutions does not give adequate credit to the technological artefacts that help to produce knowledge; an analysis of technical knowledge which does not include an analysis of how that technical knowledge is generated within a rich and complex social network would be similarly incomplete. I argue that it is often inappropriate to separate analyses of technical knowledge from social knowledge and that although not all social knowledge is technical knowledge, all technical knowledge is, by definition, social. Further, the influence of technology on epistemic cultures is so pervasive that it also forms or 'envelops' what we consider to be an epistemic agent.

This thesis argues for a dualistic, epistemological, framework for the study of legitimacy which recognises the different ways it might be understood to exist, and as such be managed, within organisations. It is based on an ethnography of a Scottish professional theatre, Dundee Rep, undertaken over a 30 month period. The research adopts a social constructionist ontology and an epistemological framework based on the knowing that / knowing how framework of Gilbert Ryle to present three accounts of the legitimacy of the theatre – as belonging, becoming and integrated- and to challenge the notion implicit in the organisation studies literature that legitimacy is treated (and should be treated) as a belonging by organisations. The proposed integrated epistemological framing of legitimacy explains how notions of legitimacy as an emergent, negotiated perception and as a competitive resource possessed are both crucial to developing an integrated understanding of how legitimacy is produced at the organisational level.

In this thesis, I argue the Model Minority Stereotype (MMS) of Asian Americans is a systematic hermeneutical injustice, and I justify a previously unrecognized distinction within the literature: positive and negative hermeneutical injustices. To show that the MMS is a systematic hermeneutical injustice, I argue that: (1) the MMS renders a significant area of one’s interests difficult to interpret by collective understanding (the hermeneutical disadvantage); (2) this hermeneutical disadvantage excludes Asian American’s from equal hermeneutical participation (the hermeneutical marginalization and injustice); and (3) the resultant hermeneutical injustice contributes to continuing structural prejudice against Asian Americans and is part of a larger pattern of social powerlessness (the ‘systematic’ part of a systematic hermeneutical injustice). The distinction between a positive and negative systematic hermeneutical injustice is whether the hermeneutical disadvantage occurs because of the imposition of a hermeneutical resource or the lack of a hermeneutical resource.

How do social identities and social injustice impact knowledge production in a group? Does diversity improve group learning? In what ways? How do we promote such diversity? These are the kinds of questions I tackle in my dissertation, which is situated at the intersection of social epistemology, network modeling, and the philosophy of race and gender.A theme running through my findings is that having a diversity of approaches within a group can facilitate the production of better knowledge. I propose three novel mechanisms that lead to epistemically-beneficial diversity and use agent-based models to investigate their often surprising downstream consequences. I show that (1) marginalized social groups sometimes develop better beliefs because their testimony is devalued by dominant groups; (2) industrial scientists can gain epistemic benefits by failing to share their research; and (3) a group can ultimately learn better when its members explore many, possibly sub-optimal, solutions to a problem instead of always choosing the best available solution.

In this dissertation I argue that philosophical theorizing about moral responsibility has not paid sufficient attention to the epistemic dimensions of our practices of responsibility. This dissertation asks how we pursue justification and agreement about moral responsibility in our actual social practices, and, finding those pursuits often less than ideal, further asks how we ought to do so. In chapter one I seek to vindicate these claims by reviewing the extant moral responsibility literature, pointing out at various junctures what I call “paths not taken” and “epistemic lacunae.” In chapter two I engage with work in contemporary social, cognitive, and moral psychology to sketch a picture of how we actually pursue judgments about responsibility, psychologically speaking. With this “ping-pong” model in hand, I identify some particularly common and robust “epistemic disruptors” that undermine our ability to hold one another responsible in the ways which philosophical theories often imagine. In particular, I focus on the way in which blame judgments are susceptible to these disruptions. Given this set up, chapters three and four of the dissertation deal with some practical upshots for the ethics of blame. In chapter three I argue for introducing the norm of Powerful Restraint, which suggests that in contexts where there are large gaps in social power, the powerful should refrain from blaming downward. In chapter four I further motivate this kind of revisionism and asymmetry, focusing on the ways in which our currently constituted practices of responsibility intersect with issues in the contemporary literatures on pragmatic encroachment and cultivated ignorance.

Epistemic polarization arises when the statistical dispersion of a population's beliefs increases, especially when all agents update on exactly the same evidence. Factionalization arises when not just one belief, but many different beliefs become correlated across a population. Polarization and factionalization have generally been viewed as examples of human irrationality. In this dissertation I study the phenomena of epistemic convergence, polarization and factionalization for ideally rational agents, with multiple, probabilistically related beliefs. I demonstrate that rational belief polarization arises very naturally for such agents, even when they update on identical evidence. I demonstrate that probabilistic relations between beliefs can drive various kinds of belief convergence, polarization, and factionalization. Importantly, polarization and factionalization arise generically, without needing specific initial conditions. Under certain circumstances, polarization can even be rationally anticipated in advance. Furthermore, I show that a population of rational agents, should always expect their beliefs to either converge or factionalize under certain conditions.

This paper responds to Jason Brennan’s prominent critique of democracy. Brennan argues that the average citizen is ignorant and irrational, and votes incompetently, exercising illegitimate authority over her neighbors, thereby violating their right against subjection to incompetent government. He concludes that society should replace democracy with epistocracy; the rule of the educated. After clarifying the requirements of Brennan’s proposal, I present two lines of defense for democratic theorists, both compatible with the competence principle at the heart of Brennan’s argument. First, democracy can satisfy the standards of competence proposed by Brennan through institutional changes. And second, epistocracy falls short of its own epistemic standards by excluding voters, despite the place of voters in the division of political labor. I conclude that Brennan’s argument does not undermine democracy’s legitimacy, and in fact speaks against his epistocratic alternative.

This dissertation is a collection of three papers – “Knowing Oneself for Others,” “Stereotype Threat and the Value of Self-Knowledge,” and “Self-Knowledge, Epistemic Work, and Injustice” – in which I address the connections between self-knowledge production and social inequality. I explain, using a variety of contemporary political and cultural examples, that marginalized individuals are more likely to be required to know certain things about themselves than socially privileged individuals, especially about those aspects of their lives and identities which are essential to their being marginalized. I argue that this should make us rethink our basic understanding of epistemic injustice, which is typically thought of as involving the prevention of marginalized individuals from producing knowledge. More specifically, in “Knowing Oneself for Others,” I introduce the notion of “compulsory self-disclosure,” a social phenomenon in which an individual is forced to reveal things about themselves, often in ways that further contribute to their oppression. “Stereotype Threat and the Value of Self-Knowledge” addresses how self-ignorance can actually be desirable for individuals facing stereotype threat, and I argue that treating stereotype threat as an epistemic injustice issue can actually harm rather than help individuals in certain cases. Finally, in “Self-Knowledge, Epistemic Work, and Injustice,” I assess the reasoning behind the assumption that marginalized people are self-ignorant; I argue that we need to appreciate the central role that epistemic work plays in self-knowledge production to understand why the standard assumption about marginalized self-ignorance is misguided. Ultimately, I would have us think of self-knowledge production as not just epistemic work but as work that is often emotionally difficult and even metaphysically transformative – coming to have self-knowledge in certain ways can quite literally change who you are. In light of this, the overarching aim of this work is to argue for there being an inextricable link between an individual’s knowledge of themselves and their social status, as well as to discourage readers from thinking of the production of self-knowledge as inherently desirable or as a wholly epistemic issue.

Since its initial proposal, epistemologists have suggested various theories for how the problem of peer disagreement might be resolved, followed by numerous critical and supporting assessments of these proposals. Little attention, however, has been paid to the other side of this issue. In this dissertation, I propose there is an apparent inverse symmetry of sorts between the problem of disagreement and the flip-side of that issue, which I call the assurance of agreement. I argue that a unified theory is needed to deal with both the disagreement and agreement sides of the overarching picture. This theory should not merely address the question of disagreement and agreement between peers but should also extend to inferiors and superiors as well. Such a theory should also include a means for updating one’s confidence in such cases. In contribution to this effort, I propose a model for belief updating that is agnostic to the underlying view and is suitable for cases of agreement (or disagreement). I show how the proposed model can be expanded for use in cases of agreement involving peers, inferiors, and superiors. I then expand this discussion to show how the model can also be used in cases of consensus, which leads to the development of a consensus gentium argument for the reasonable belief in the existence of God. In chapter 1, I make a case for the need for a unified theory, and I propose a theory-agnostic model for updating in cases of agreement and disagreement. In chapter 2, I make a case for updating based on the agreement of superiors and inferiors and show how the model can be adjusted for these cases. Finally, in chapter 3, I set the stage for a consensus gentium argument and develop the argument using a modified version of the previously developed model.

What is the right statistical theory for scientific practice? What are the distinctive dynamics of social learning and conformity? And what can disagreement between theoretical models teach us? This dissertation consists of essays that engage just these questions.Chapter 1 examines explanations for a broadly maligned research practice, HARKing, which has been called one of the ‘four horsemen’ of the replication crisis in the social and biomedical sciences (alongside publication bias, low statistical power, and p-hacking). In it, I demonstrate how classical accounts of why HARKing undermines the reliability of scientific findings must be wrong, and proffer what I take to be the correct, Bayesian account for when and why HARKing is in fact bad. Further, I consider the implications of all this for a prominent proposal for methodological reform in the context of the replication crisis.Chapter 2 consists of more exploratory work, produced in collaboration with my colleague Cole Williams. We propose a simple model of social learning on networks under the influence of conformity bias. In our model, heterogeneous agents express public opinions where those expressions are driven by the competing priorities of accuracy and of conformity to one’s peers. Agents learn, by Bayesian conditionalization, from private evidence from nature, and from the public declarations of other agents. Our key findings are that networks that produce configurations of social relation- ships that sustain a diversity of opinions empower honest communication and more accurate beliefs and that the networks that do this best turn out to be those which are both less centralized and less connected.Finally, chapter 3 consists of elucidating the relationship between two key models in evolutionary game theory–the replicator dynamics and Moran process. These models are connected by a mean-field relation- ship—the former describes the expected behavior of the latter. However, there are conditions under which their predictions diverge. I demonstrate that the divergence between their predictions is a function of standard techniques used in their analysis, and of differences in the idealizations involved in each. My analysis reveals problems for stochastic stability analysis in a broad class of games. I demonstrate a novel domain of agreement between the dynamics and consider a simple moral for scientific modeling.

Much of our knowledge of the world depends on the testimony of experts. Experts sometimes change their minds and disagree with each other. What ought a novice do when an expert changes their mind? This dissertation provides an account of when expert conversion is epistemically significant and how the novice ought to rationally defer to expert conversion. In answering when expert conversion is epistemically significant, I provide a diagnostic tool that emphasizes that epistemically significant expert conversion seems to be evidence-based and that there is an absence of cognitive biases on the part of the converting expert. In answering how the novice ought to rationally defer to a converting expert I give two principles. First, I give a principle for determining when an expert is trustworthy. Second, I answer under what further conditions a novice rationally or legitimately trusts in a converting expert.

If liberal democratic theory requires that policy conform with citizens’ beliefs, then democracy seems to require bad policy when citizens hold false beliefs. To escape this problem, public reason liberals advocate epistemic idealization: Citizens’ false beliefs, bad inferences, and informational deficits are corrected in order to uncover the genuine reasons citizens hold. Politically legitimate policy must conform with citizens’ idealized reasons rather than their messy unreflective reasons. But advocates of idealization disagree over how much idealization is permissible. I focus on moderate idealizers like Gaus (2011) and Vallier (2014, 2018). They hold that the upward bound of idealization is set by the beliefs a real-world citizen could arrive at by sound deliberative route from their existing belief-value sets with a “reasonable” amount of effort. Vallier and Gaus created their models before widespread social media use, echo chambers, high social and political polarization, and all the epistemic problems these create. For this reason, I argue, their models are understandably inadequate for addressing the vicious epistemic environments many citizens currently inhabit and the empirical beliefs they acquire from them. Contemporary moderate idealizers should adopt the exclusion principle whereby we permissibly exclude from policy considerations deeply held empirical beliefs when they contradict a consensus of relevant experts in a mature science—even if they survive moderate idealization. Incorporating this principle generates better policy outcomes and better supports pre-theoretical intuitions about political legitimacy. Chapter 1, argues that, under these conditions, Vallier’s moderate idealization leads to normatively and epistemically bad policy, and that the exclusion principle solves this problem from within the commitments of political liberalism. Chapter 2 argues that Gausian moderate idealization also leads to normatively and epistemically bad policy when epistemically vicious environments are widespread. Finally, Chapter 3 applies these arguments to vaccine policy and demonstrates that (a) neither Gaus nor Vallier’s models generate acceptable publicly justified immunization policy; (b) moderate idealizers must adopt the exclusion principle in order to do so and, more broadly, to satisfy pre-theoretical intuitions about political legitimacy; and (c) the exclusion principle can be justified from within public reason liberalism.

My dissertation explores prejudice, particularly what makes prejudices resistant to change, and the impact of prejudice in the world, such as how prejudice influences our norms and practices of privacy. In the first chapter, I engage with a common view of prejudice, ‘the Bad Emotion view,’ which claims prejudices are negative stereotypes driven by bad emotions. These bad emotions cause the agent to act irrationally in the face of counterevidence and partly explain prejudice’s epistemic resilience. I argue that some prejudices don’t involve bad emotions at all, and many prejudices involve emotional complexity. A common assumption about prejudices is that they involve an epistemic mistake – namely, an unjustified belief. However, some who endorse the view that prejudices are stereotypes argue that prejudices can be justified. In my second chapter, I argue that the epistemic problem of prejudice is not a failure to justify beliefs (though many prejudices will be unjustified). To find the epistemic mistake involved in prejudice, we need to look beyond stereotypes and their logical structures: we need to look to the larger belief structure that the stereotype is housed in, and some prejudices might not even involve stereotypes at all. Instead, I argue that the epistemic problem with prejudices is their epistemic resilience. I advance a novel account of prejudice which holds that they are conceptual frameworks — networks of beliefs, methods, assumptions and concepts. I argue that these conceptual frameworks of prejudice are motivated by supporting an agent’s (perceived) interests. In the third chapter, I look into the connection between privacy and social epistemology. I argue that a prominent theory of privacy developed by Helen Nissenbaum, Contextual Integrity, does not account for how unjust social power relations shape the norms and practices surrounding privacy. I argue that privacy violations are both more pervasive and harmful for marginalized groups. Many privacy violations are caused by epistemic injustices, such as, when distrust for a marginalized group causes someone to look for more information. I claim there is a particular kind of privacy violation caused by epistemic injustice which I call ‘knowledge entitlements.’

This paper attempts to answer a theoretical question: How can ordinary people reliably gain knowledge from an epistemic system—a social system designed to have knowledge—whose interests may not align with theirs? I begin by constructing a model in which ordinary people attempt to gain knowledge from an epistemic system. I argue that people can gain knowledge from an epistemic system, but this possibility depends on the level of trust people have in the epistemic system. I then modify the model to represent the epistemic relationship between ordinary people and epistemic systems in a minimally-democratic society. I argue that a democratic society requires that its citizens be able to access knowledge within public epistemic systems, insofar as that knowledge is necessary for informed, critical thinking about important public matters. I conclude by pointing out how distrust between epistemic systems can prevent the required distribution of knowledge to ordinary people.

As social creatures, we lean on the work of others to epistemically situate ourselves in our complex environments. A particularly important instance of our epistemic reliance on others is our dependence on epistemic authorities: those who hold some normative power over our epistemic behaviour. Often, accounts of such epistemic authority suggest that it is constituted by a connection to a certain set of true beliefs. I provide an alternative account that roots epistemic authority in an individual’s superior ability to participate in a certain kind of epistemic practice. Such a view better accounts for the variety of ways in which we engage with epistemic authorities: as sources of knowledge, as providers of understanding, as intellectual collaborators, and as pedagogues and guides. With this account in hand, I put it to work: first, in providing an account of what is required of an epistemic agent to remain epistemically autonomous, and epistemically responsible, when dealing with an epistemic authority; secondly, in establishing the role of epistemic humility in ensuring that relationships of epistemic authority function in an epistemically successful fashion.

This dissertation offers a normative account of policy analysis based on the idea that policy analysis must enable reasoned deliberation among equal citizens. It gives policy analysis a normative core, emphasizing the value of deliberation both as a means to govern on free and equal terms of social cooperation and as a means to make better public decisions. Policy analysis is one institution in a basic structure designed to make democratic deliberation possible.Policy analysis is situated within the institutional structure of democracy by defining three roles for unelected analysts: (1) informing public deliberation, (2) ensuring policy justification, and (3) serving as a symbol of democratic legitimacy. These roles require analysts to be neutral, but not in a technical or objective sense. Rather, analysts can and must be held accountable for looking outward to collect evidence on all minimally acceptable reasons that citizens and policy makers believe to be relevant. In so doing, policy analysis is standardized and impersonal, without unjustifiably limiting public deliberations to only quantifiable impacts.The dissertation charts a middle path between a purely quantitative approach to policy analysis and an argumentative approach, where all analysis is political argument. It does so through the mechanism of professional ethics, assigning analysts a duty to be comprehensively neutral. This standard acknowledges that analysis can never be value-free, but it does not abandon neutrality as a goal. Instead, it asks analysts to prepare citizens and policy makers to weigh controversial evidence and questions of equity. Taken together, the articles of this dissertation show how careful institutional design can enable an epistemic division of labor among experts, analysts, and citizens, while holding those professionals accountable for enabling deliberation on complex issues of public concern.

Epistemic injustices are the distinctly epistemic harms and wrongs which undermine or depreciate our capacities knowers. This dissertation develops a theory of epistemic injustice and justice which accounts for excesses in epistemic goods as a source of epistemic injustice. This is a theory of epistemic overload as epistemic injustice. The dissertation can be divided into three parts: 1) motivational, 2) theoretical, 3) applications and implications. First, Chapters 1 and 2 motivate the study of epistemic injustice and epistemic overload. Chapter 1 identifies a gap in the literature on epistemic injustice concerning excesses in epistemic goods as sources of epistemic injustice while canvassing the major themes and debates of the field. Chapter 2 levels an objection to ‘proper’ epistemology, thereby providing an indirect defense of the study of epistemic injustice. Second, theoretical development occurs in are Chapters 3, 4, 5, 6. Chapter 3 initiates the argument for epistemic overload, while Chapter 4 extends the case for epistemic overload, identifying several epistemic injustices arising from excesses of understanding, credibility, and truth. Chapter 5 explains the oversights of prior theorists by developing a more descriptively adequate account of social epistemics that explains the many sites of epistemic injustice. Chapter 6 develops a two-stage contractualist theory of epistemic in/justice to explain the bad-making features of epistemic injustices and generates the duty of epistemic charity. The third part of the dissertation applies the findings of earlier chapters to contemporary practical and theoretical problems. Chapter 7 employs the contractualist reasoning of Chapter 6 to address and ameliorate problems from excesses in the uptake and circulation of hermeneutical resources and true-beliefs. Chapter 8 considers the mutual dependence relations between political phenomena and epistemic in/justice, showing that accounts of political justice depend upon or presuppose epistemic justice. Finally, Chapter 9 applies epistemic overload to the use of big data technologies in the context of predive policing algorithms. An abductive argument concludes that the introduction of the “Strategic Subjects List” as part of a Chicago policing initiative in 2013 introduced understandings which likely contributed to gun-violence in Chicago and which constitutes an epistemic overload. In sum, the dissertation shows the theoretical and practical significance of epistemic overload as epistemic injustice.

Idealization is a necessity. Stripping away levels of complexity makes questions tractable, focuses our attention, and lets us develop comprehensible, testable models. Applying such models, however, requires care and attention to how the idealizations incorporated into their development affect their predictions. In epistemology, we tend to focus on idealizations concerning individual agents' capacities, such as memory, mathematical ability, and so on, when addressing this concern. By contrast, this dissertation focuses on social idealizations, particularly those pertaining to salient social categories like race, sex, and gender. In Chapter II, Privilege and Superiority, we begin with standpoint epistemology, one of the earliest efforts to grapple with the ways that social structures affect our epistemic lives. I argue that, if we interpret standpoint epistemologists' claims as hypotheses about the ways that our social positions affect access to evidence, we can fruitfully employ recent developments in evidence logic to study the consequences. I lay the groundwork for this project, developing a model based on neighborhood semantics for modal logic. Adapting this framework to standpoint epistemology helps to clarify the meaning of terms like "epistemic privilege" and "superior knowledge" and to elucidate the differences between various accounts of standpoint epistemology. I also address a longstanding criticism of these views: Longino's (1990) bias paradox, which suggests that there is no objective position from which to judge the goodness of a particular standpoint. Chapter III, Evidence in a Non-Ideal World, turns to the broader social context, looking at how ideology affects the availability of evidence. Throughout the chapter, I take the formation, justification, and maintenance of racist, sexist, and otherwise oppressive beliefs as a central case. I argue that these beliefs are, at least sometimes, formed as a result of evidential distortion, a structural feature of our epistemic contexts that skews readily available evidence in favor of dominant ideologies. Because they are formed this way, such beliefs will appear justified on prominent accounts of justification, both internalist and externalist. As a result, epistemic norms that fail to account for such non-ideal conditions will deliver verdicts that are not only counter-intuitive, but also morally unpalatable. This, I argue, reveals a kind of structural epistemic injustice, especially where oppressive ideology is involved and suggests the need for epistemic norms that are sensitive to agents' social contexts. Much of the discussion in Chapters II and III depends on social categories like race and gender, arguing that they have a distinctive influence on our epistemic lives. In Chapter IV, I Know You Are, But What Am I?, my co-author and I focus on social categories themselves, distinguishing between self-identity, social identity, and social role. We self-identify as gay or straight, men or women, couch-potatoes or gym rats. Sometimes, these identities affect our social roles---the way we are perceived and treated by others---and sometimes they do not. This relationship between our internal identities and our preferred public perceptions begs for explanation. On our account, this relationship is captured by what we refer to as 'social identity'---roughly, internal identities made available to others. We argue that this account of social identity plays an illuminating role in structural explanation of discrimination and individual behavior, dissolves puzzles surrounding the phenomenon of 'passing', and explains certain moral and political obligations toward individuals.

Hacktivists tend to be an anonymous group of individuals asynchronously distributed across widely different locales around the planet. They frequently use computers and other forms of information and communication technologies (ICT) to advance such digital rights causes as free culture and open access to the Internet, in addition to the open source software movement. Their arguments against the encroachments of intellectual property rights on the digital commons have pitted them against government and corporate institutions with vested security and remunerative interests in the World Wide Web. While a great many studies have been conducted on the sociological and historical implications of the hacktivist phenomenon, few if any have been conducted on the underlying stances and arguments of the hacktivist community and the corporations and governments they frequently oppose. For my research, I have analyzed linguistic framing and metaphor usage in combination with theories of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), Frame Semantics, and Cognitive Linguistics as a means to examine the stances of three principal antagonists in the debate over freedom of information on the Internet: 1) hackers and hacktivists; 2) civil rights groups; and 3) governments and corporations. I have focused in particular on the hacktivist, Aaron Swartz, whose authorship of Guerilla Open Access Manifesto (2015, p. 26) coupled with his act of content liberation when he downloaded millions of academic articles, led to his indictment by the Department of Justice.My eclectic methodology serves to unpack the construction of meaning arising from texts produced by and about hacktivists with a focus on linguistic framing as a tool for analyzing the metaphors that inform stances. Relevant to my study has been the function of metaphorical concepts as ways to create complex frames that in turn capture the attitudes, values, and beliefs that accompany the stances associated with metanarratives and worldviews. Such a methodology has helped elucidate the conflicting epistemological attitude of hacktivists and authorities toward online freedom of information.The findings of my study reveal that the metaphors used to talk about the social epistemology of the Internet lie at the heart of the debate. Lakoff and Johnson’s expansion on Michael Reddy’s conduit metaphor has been meaningfully applied to an interpretation of the Internet itself in order to facilitate an understanding of the significance of the knowledge ecology in the Information Age. My findings show that Reddy’s conduit metaphor is directly implicated in the downfall of Aaron Swartz and provides a cautionary tale for those fighting to preserve public access to the electronic knowledge commons.

Abstract: Providing students with the necessary critical thinking skills to scrutinize knowledge claims is generally recognized as an important educational goal. Many critical thinking textbooks utilize a criteria-based practice of critical thinking whereby a number of criteria are set out for the evaluation of knowledge claims. These critical thinking criteria yield inconclusive results when applied to knowledge claims from Internet sources like Wikipedia. If criteria-based critical thinking practices are to be successfully applied to Wikipedia these criteria either need to be applied in different ways than what the textbooks suggest, or supplemented or replaced by different criteria. These textbooks do not provide a theoretical basis for the selection and application of these criteria, and it is asked if the philosophy of education provides a theory of critical thinking that can provide this guidance. The most well-developed account of critical thinking theory in the philosophy of education is Siegel’s epistemology of critical thinking. Siegel’s account provides theoretical grounding for the project of critical thinking itself, but this theoretical grounding does not provide guidance at the practical level of criteria development and selection. There is thus a gap in the literature of the philosophy of education between theoretical grounding for the critical thinking project itself and theoretical grounding for the criteria that are proposed in the context of this project. In order to fill this gap, attention is turned to the epistemological literature outside of the philosophy of education. The question of testimony, which involves the acceptance of a statement on the basis of another's say-so, has been a central issue in the recent philosophical literature on epistemology. This literature is examined to determine if and how philosophical theories of testimony can be applied to the identified gap in the philosophy of education literature. The result is the development of a testimony-based theory of critical thinking that provides theoretical grounding for the selection and application of critical thinking criteria that in turn address the acceptance of knowledge claims from sources such as Wikipedia.

This thesis documents the development of a narrative epistemology and an associated pedagogic practice around the conflicts that occur in experiential learning settings. The thesis traces a progressive shift away from individualistic accounts of conflicts and dilemmas in learning being primarily embedded in psychological spaces, to a recognition of the importance of the social space - the cultural discourses that shape our everyday activity and interactions. This recognises that conflict is not simply a consequence of difference arising from personality, or other psychological factors, but a consequence of prevailing cultural narratives that instruct/construct us into the identities that we are. This pedagogic practice involves a change from internalising conversations to externalising conversations, thus keeping the discursive space open to the different stories, which are usually silenced by prevailing taken-for-granted explanations. For me, it is this refusal of what we are (i.e. our culturally bestowed identities), and a critique of the forces that shape us, that opens spaces within the social fabric to enable different stories to be heard and appreciated and creates opportunites for new, radical learning to occur.