Search

Chapter 3 explores the prospects for resisting the sorts of arguments in which religious diversity or disagreement seem to support skepticism regarding justified (or rational) religious belief. Those religious believers who would resist can (i) argue that the principles that convict the faithful of irrationality overreach, and would establish a more widespread skepticism about rational belief; (ii) downgrade their disagreeing interlocutor(s); (iii) appeal to epistemic permissivism; or (iv) argue that the believer is no worse off, epistemically speaking, than the atheist or agnostic non-believer. After presenting what the present author regards as the best version of the argument from diversity or disagreement, the chapter argues that any believer who hopes for truth will not get much solace from any of these responses.

This chapter proposes a particular program for Social Epistemology to pursue, according to which social epistemology is the systematic exploration of the epistemic significance of other minds. Three questions are fundamental to this exploration: (1) what are the varieties of ways we rely on others in information acquisition, storage, processing, assessment, and transmission? (2) With respect to each of these sorts of ways we rely on others, what is the epistemic significance of the fact that we do so rely? And (3) what are appropriate norms for the assessment of such acts of reliance? Some of these norms will be norms of inquiry, and it is here where we will see the face of epistemic agency in social epistemology.

The aim of this chapter is to articulate and defend a particular role for ethico-political values in social epistemology research. After describing a research program for social epistemology, it goes on to argue that by the lights of this research program, there is an important role to be played by ethico-political values in knowledge communities, and (correspondingly) an important role in social epistemological research in describing the values inhering in particular knowledge communities. It concludes by noting how, even as it expands its focus beyond the traditional one to include descriptions of our “knowledge practices,” this sort of project relates to some of the core questions that have been pursued by traditional epistemology.

This chapter defends the claim that, when we rely on other speakers by accepting what they tell us, our reliance on them differs in epistemically relevant ways from our reliance on instruments. The focus here is on what is distinctive of our reliance on instruments. The chapter’s key notions will be those of our social practices, the normative expectations that are sanctioned by those practices, and the epistemically engineered environments constituted by some of these practices. With these notions in mind, it will argue that one’s reliance on instruments, while relevantly different (epistemically speaking) from one’s reliance on other speakers, can nevertheless manifest a kind of epistemic dependence which epistemological theory can and should acknowledge.

This chapter offers a conception of social epistemology for those who are not already committed. It aims to present a conception of social epistemology that properly acknowledges both the normative and the descriptive dimensions of our knowledge communities. The chapter deals with a brief discussion of the point of and motivation behind a distinctly “social” epistemology. It suggests how social epistemology looks from the vantage point of those who take this picture seriously. The chapter utilises “epistemic subject” to refer to the sort of entity of whom we can intelligibly ascribe knowledge and other epistemic states. It highlights the various roles that epistemic subjects play in acquiring, processing, storing, transmitting, or assessing information. The chapter provides the rationale for a distinctly social epistemology: social epistemology ought to be the systematic investigation into the epistemic significance of other minds. It shows that the pursuit of social epistemology is the attempt to come to terms with the epistemic significance of other minds.

This chapter explores how our dependence on others in testimony differs from our reliance on instruments. The key difference lies in the presumption of responsibility in play when we depend on others’ say-so. In this respect, at least, there appears to be something epistemically distinctive about relying on another epistemic agent. The aim of the chapter is to develop this point in a way that captures the sort of reliance that the author takes to be at issue when we take the word of another speaker. This reliance reflects our dependence on the speaker as an epistemic agent in her own right; and the burden of the present proposal is to argue that this fact ought to be accommodated within any adequate epistemology of testimony.

This chapter builds on the author’s programmatic approach to research in social epistemology, according to which such research involves the systematic investigation of the epistemic significance of other minds. This research program is developed by appeal to the thesis of the Division of Epistemic Labor. After formulating this thesis as a thesis of epistemic dependence, the chapter illustrates several ways in which individual subjects are epistemically dependent on one or more of the members of their community in the process of knowledge acquisition. Such an account supports various conclusions about the cognitively distributed nature of some knowledge acquisition, and the chapter ends with these.

This book collects twelve recent papers by the author on social epistemology. Roughly half of them propose a research program for social epistemology—including an animating vision, foundational questions, and core concepts—and the other half are applications of this vision to particular topics. The author characterizes the research program itself as the exploration of the epistemic significance of other minds. Such a program will enumerate the various ways in which we depend epistemically on others, it will describe the proper way to evaluate beliefs according to the sort of dependence they exhibit, and it will provide the basis for identifying and characterizing various dysfunctions of our epistemic communities. The book suggests that several core concepts will be helpful as part of this exploration: epistemic dependence (direct and diffuse); entitlements (epistemic as well as those deriving from our social practices); the normative expectations we have of one another as epistemic subjects; and the socio-epistemic practices in which we participate. It goes on to put this program and these concepts into practice by exploring such topics as the epistemic agency exhibited in inquiry, the practices that constitute news coverage, the basis for allegations of what we or others should have known, how reliance on another’s testimony contrasts with reliance on an instrument, our reliance on others as consumers of testimony, and the epistemic upshot of non-epistemic social norms (whether these are moral, political, professional, or relationship-based).

This chapter argues that there are cases in which a subject, S, should have known that p, even though, given her state of evidence at the time, she was in no position to know it. In particular, S should have known that p when (i) another person has, or would have, legitimate expectations regarding S’s epistemic condition, (ii) the satisfaction of these expectations would require that S knows that p, and (iii) S fails to know that p. I argue that these three conditions are sometimes jointly satisfied. There are (at least) two main sources of legitimate expectations regarding another’s epistemic condition: participation in a legitimate social practice; and moral and epistemic expectations more generally. In developing my position on this score, I will have an opportunity (i) to contrast practice-generated entitlements to expect with epistemic reasons to believe; (ii) to compare the “should have known” phenomenon with the phenomenon of culpable ignorance; and finally (iii) to suggest the bearing of the “should have known” phenomenon to epistemology itself.

This chapter discusses the nature of various forms of epistemic injustice, as seen from the angle of social epistemology. To do so, it relies on the author’s previously developed approach to social epistemology. More specifically, it focuses on the variety of norms that inform our socio-epistemic practices. It is in connection with such norms that we see the potential for a variety of distinct forms of epistemic injustice. These injustices can arise from the norms themselves (as when the norms themselves are part and parcel of a practice which itself is unfair), from the application of those norms (as when the practice itself is unfairly implemented), or with the access others have to participate in the shaping of those norms (as when certain people are unfairly excluded).

This chapter argues that the nature of our epistemic entitlement to rely on certain belief-forming processes—perception, memory, reasoning, and perhaps others—is not restricted to one’s own belief-forming processes. It argues as well that we can have access to the outputs of others’ processes, in the form of their assertions. These two points support the conclusion that epistemic entitlements are “interpersonal.” It then proceeds to argue that this opens the way for a non-standard version of anti-reductionism in the epistemology of testimony, and a more “extended” epistemology—one that calls into question the epistemic significance that has traditionally been ascribed to the boundaries separating individual subjects.

Broadly speaking, social epistemology is the study of the social dimensions of knowledge: its production and acquisition, its certification, its storage, and its dissemination in a population. While this topic itself may well be as old as philosophical ruminations on knowledge itself, social epistemology has emerged as a cohesive subdiscipline only in the last two or three decades. In that time it has acquired an academic prominence and has attracted a self-identifying (albeit loose-knit) community of researchers....

This chapter argues that there are cases in which a speaker S’s observation of the fact that her assertion that p is accepted by another person enhances the strength of S’s own epistemic position with respect to p, as compared to S’s strength of epistemic position with respect to p prior to having made the assertion. It concludes by noting that the sorts of consideration that underwrite this (happy) possibility may go some distance toward explaining several (unhappy) aspects of our group life as epistemic subjects—in particular, groupthink and group polarization.

In this paper I will be appealing to a prior grasp of the normativity of knowledge itself—its role in entitling a subject to confidence and in authorizing others to believe on the strength of one’s epistemic standing—to shed light on the nature and scope of defeat. The strategy will be to focus on cases in which an otherwise epistemically well-positioned subject fails to enjoy these normative standings, and to argue that the best explanation is the presence of defeaters. In ordinary cases, this strategy yields results that are not particularly interesting: in such cases the allegation of relevant defeaters will be greeted with a yawn. The interest of the present paper lies in its use of this strategy to motivate the allegation of a type of defeat that is decidedly more controversial: so-called normative defeat (a term I borrow from Lackey (1999)). Highlighting this type of defeat underscores a social dimension to knowledge that the literature typically overlooks or ignores.

This chapter aims to characterize the nature of what the author calls ‘conversational pressure’. It conceives of such pressure in terms of a distinctive class of normative expectations that are generated by the performance of speech acts in the course of a speech exchange. After making the case that this constitutes a distinctive phenomenon in its own right, the chapter argues that such pressure bears not only on audiences but on speakers as well. It goes on to provide the framework in terms of which the author pursues this topic in the remainder of the book.

This book aims to explore the scope, sources, and nature of the normative expectations that are generated by participants in speech exchanges. Such expectations, I argue, are warranted by the performance of speech acts: the performance of these acts entitles an audience to expect certain things of the speaker, even as these performances also entitle the speaker to expect certain things of her audience. The account I propose postulates two fundamental types of normativity involved in these expectations: epistemic normativity, wherein subjects are expected to live up to certain epistemological standards, whether in the production of or in the reaction to speech acts; and interpersonal normativity, wherein subjects are expected to live up to certain standards of interpersonal conduct (including but not limited to the standards of ethics). In the course of defending the account, the book explores such topics as the normative significance of acts of address, the epistemic costs of politeness, the bearing of epistemic injustice on the epistemology of testimony, the normative pressure friendship exerts on belief, the nature of epistemic trust, the significance of conversational silence, and the evils of silencing.

Others’ public reactions to a mutually observed assertion are a significance source of evidence: the fact that our trusted fellows have accepted an assertion can provide us with additional (higher-order) evidence of the acceptability of the assertion. This chapter argues that this familiar phenomenon has implications that are much more far-reaching than has heretofore been recognized. Some of the news is good: the uptake of public uptake underwrites something in the vicinity of a kind of legitimate epistemic bootstrapping, in that there can be cases in which one’s own epistemic position with respect to a proposition improves on observing that others have accepted one’s assertion of that proposition. But other news is not good: some of the very same features that give rise to the possibility of legitimate epistemic bootstrapping also explain several unhappy aspects of our group life as epistemic subjects, such as groupthink and group polarization.

There are various ways through which we try to capture another person’s attention. One of these ways is to address them. After trying to highlight what it is to address another person, the chapter argues that doing so generates a reason (for you, as addressee) to attend to the act. When the act of address is a speech act, matters are further complicated by the expectations parties bring, and are entitled to bring, to an (anticipated) speech exchange. If this is correct, then the act of address itself generates the most basic form of conversational pressure: in cooperative exchanges speakers who address an audience have a claim on the audience’s attention. To fail to attend to a speaker who addresses you and whose claim on your attention is part of a (would-be) cooperative exchange, the chapter argues, is to disrespect her as a rational subject.

In conversations that take place under conditions of oppression, an audience’s silence typically reflects many things other than acceptance. This chapter argues that this point can be accommodated by an account that postulates a prima facie entitlement to regard another’s silence as indicating acceptance. What is more, the postulation of a prima facie entitlement (as part of our conversational practices) can be defended in two ways. First, the entitlement itself is part of the best explanation of the pervasiveness of the oppression, as well as of the nature of the wrongs of silencing that such oppression brings in its wake. Second, the entitlement is part of the solution to the problem of silencing itself: though the costs of silencing are disproportionately (and unfairly) borne by those who are silenced, these costs affect all of us; and the best way to address the problem involves seeing its source in (a misapplication of) the normative features of our conversational practices themselves.

It has been alleged that we should be epistemically partial to our friends, that is, that there are cases in which the demands of friendship would require one to give a friend the benefit of the doubt, and thereby come to believe something in violation of ordinary epistemic standards on justified or responsible belief. The burden of this chapter is to argue against this idea. It argues that the impression of epistemic partiality in friendship dissipates once we acknowledge the sorts of practical and epistemic reasons that are generated by our values: value-reflecting reasons. Unlike other proposals seeking to resist the arguments for epistemic partiality, the present proposal has the virtue of remaining neutral with respect to two controversial epistemic doctrines (Uniqueness and Pragmatic Encroachment); and it has the further virtue of being able to offer a unified account of the various forms of normative pressure in play when we consider information regarding a friend or loved one.

This chapter argues for a distinctive kind of conversational pressure bearing distinctly on audiences to a mutually observed statement or assertion: the normative pressure to signal when one disagrees. The argument for this conclusion appeals to two main claims: first, that conversational participants are entitled to expect cooperation from other participants; and second, that silent rejection of a public statement is marked as uncooperative. The result is that conversational participants are (presumptively but defeasibly) entitled to expect no silent rejection of a mutually observed statement, and this expectation gives participants a (practical) reason to indicate any disagreement or doubts when they observe such a statement. This argument avoids objections levelled against Pettit’s account of the significance of conversational silence. The chapter concludes by addressing the variety of contexts in which the entitlement to expect no silent rejection is itself defeated (including but not limited to conditions of oppression or ‘silencing’).

Given a speaker who tells one that p, there are ways of responding to what one is told whereby one wrongs (or does an injustice to) the speaker. This motivates the idea that a speaker is entitled to expect that her say-so not be responded to in those ways. Chapter 3 argued that this sort of normative expectation is the key to understanding the conversational pressure that bears on an audience who is told that p. Chapter 4 considers recent attempts to understand the source and scope of the speaker’s normative expectation. It argues that all extant attempts fail in this regard. The lesson that it takes from these failures concerns the main challenge of providing what is wanted: our account must illuminate how the interpersonal and pragmatic dimensions of the speech acts of telling and testifying interact with the epistemological dimension of testimony.

This chapter draws together the various lessons in the previous chapters. It concludes that speech exchanges exhibit two fundamental sorts of normativity—epistemic and interpersonal—and that the relationship between them is more complicated than has heretofore been appreciated.

This chapter addresses the prospects of using anti-reductionism in the epistemology of testimony to establish that speakers are entitled to expect to be presumed trustworthy when they testify. If it exists, such a connection between the epistemology of testimony and the interpersonal normativity of (epistemic) trust would be of great interest. In addition, such a connection would suggest that the interpersonal and epistemic dimensions of conversational pressure are more intimately linked than the author has so far acknowledged. After proposing what he regards as the best attempt at arguing from the epistemological claim to the interpersonal claim, the author concludes that its prospects for success depend on an epistemological assumption that has not yet been discussed in this connection. The guess is that this will come as an unpleasant surprise to those who find themselves sympathetic to the idea of arguing from the one to the other.

This chapter identifies a form of conversational pressure that is downstream from one’s recognition of being addressed: the pressure that is brought to bear on one when one is addressed by a speaker who advances a claim. It argues that this pressure doesn’t ultimately depend on one’s being addressed at all; rather, it is a normative pressure that obtains whenever one observes an assertion being made. The normative pressure in question is of two main types: interpersonal and epistemic. The chapter goes on to identify five constraints that any adequate account of this pressure will need to address.

This chapter investigates some of the epistemic cost of politeness. One obvious cost has to do with lost opportunities for correcting errors: communities that are polite will tend to allow known falsehoods to pass without comment. But this chapter will focus on another, less familiar epistemic cost of politeness: communities that are polite sap the signaling potential of conversational silence, thereby losing out on the prospects of a cheap way to distribute the burden of testimonial monitoring. We do not claim that these costs should prompt us to give up our commitment to politeness; only to recognize the cost, in the spirit of an honest accounting.

This chapter offers a positive account of the speaker’s expectation of proper treatment (when she testifies that p). It does so in terms of the job that the speaker purports to be performing qua testifier, and the expectations she is entitled to have in virtue of the purport of that act. After noting that assertion is the speech act tailor made to enable a speaker to perform the type of job associated with acts of testifying, the chapter argues that it is the expectations one is entitled to have in making an assertion that generate the relevant conversational pressures. This makes clear how the pragmatic and interpersonal dimensions of this type of act interact with the epistemological dimension of testimonial transactions.

A mental state is luminous if and only if being in a state of that kind always puts one in a position to know that one is in the state. This chapter is a critique of Timothy Williamson’s margin-of-error argument that no nontrivial states are luminous in this sense. While I agree with Williamson’s rejection of a Cartesian internalist conception of the mind, I argue that an externalist conception (one based on information theory) can be reconciled with the luminosity of intentional mental states such as knowledge. My argument, which uses an artificial and simplified model of knowledge, is not a direct rebuttal to his argument, as applied to a more realistic notion of the knowledge of human beings, but I argue that it shows that a luminosity assumption is compatible with externalism about knowledge, and it suggest an intuitively plausible strategy for resisting his argument.

In their chapter “Knowledge, Practical Adequacy, and Stakes,” Charity Anderson and John Hawthorne present several challenges to the doctrine of pragmatic encroachment. In this brief reply to their chapter two things are aimed at. First, the chapter argues that there is a sense in which their case against pragmatic encroachment is a bit weaker, and another sense in which that case is much stronger, than Anderson and Hawthorne’s own argument would suggest. Second, the chapter highlights and then builds upon their extremely interesting reflections on one sort of practical matter that has not received proper attention in the literature: the epistemic significance of double-checking. This is done with an eye towards pointing in the direction of further work.

This chapter explores the nature of the sort of reason another’s say-so or testimony provides. The key question concerns the epistemic significance of S’s having testified that p. According to the reductionist view, the epistemic significance of another’s say-so is reduced to the epistemic significance of the audience’s reasons to think that say-so was reliable. Anti-reductionism, by contrast, holds that testimony that p stands by default, in a way analogous to S’s having perceived that p standing by default as a defeasible reason to believe that p. In this chapter I develop the case for each position, and the topic is connected to other issues at the heart of the epistemology of testimony.

This chapter addresses the main roadblock to offering an account of the distinctly epistemic standards governing knowledge, once we assume that these involve both a reliability and a responsibility dimension. The problem is that no such account of epistemic justification can be unified and well motivated. Against this, the author argues that the key to providing such an account is to recognize a feature of evaluative assessment generally. It is argued that assessments of epistemic justification—and hence of epistemic propriety—involve two distinct determinations, one concerning whether the explicit epistemic criteria were satisfied, the other concerning whether the general expectations we bring to bear in epistemic assessment were satisfied.

We expect certain things of each other as epistemic subjects, and it is the normativity of these expectations that underwrites the normativity of epistemic assessment itself. In developing this claim Sanford C. Goldberg aims to honor the insights of both internalist and externalist approaches to epistemic justification. With the internalist he embraces the idea that knowledgeable belief requires belief that is formed and maintained in an epistemically responsible fashion; with the externalist he embraces the idea that knowledgeable belief requires belief that is formed and sustained through a reliable process. In this book Goldberg proposes to marry these two dimensions into a single account of the standards of epistemic assessment. This marriage reflects our profound and ineliminable dependence on one another for what we know of the world—a dependence which is rationalized by the expectations we are entitled to have of one another as epistemic subjects. The expectations in question are those through which we hold each other accountable to standards of both (epistemic) reliability and (epistemic) responsibility. The resulting theory has far-reaching implications not only for the theory of epistemic normativity, but also for our understanding of epistemic defeat, the theory of epistemic responsibility, and for a full appreciation of the various social dimensions of knowledge.

This book concerns the nature of epistemic assessment as traditionally construed—that is, the sort of assessment that pertains to whether a given subject’s belief amounts to knowledge. My guiding ideas are three: such assessment is normative; it is sensitive to social factors; and these two features are intimately related to one another. My overarching aim is to articulate and defend these ideas....

This chapter develops an account of how our epistemic expectations of one another bear on epistemic assessment itself. It argues that a failure to live up to the epistemic responsibilities assigned to us in legitimate social practices puts one’s belief at risk of epistemic impropriety. Whether one’s belief is epistemically improper owing to a failure of epistemic responsibility depends on what would have been the case had one fulfilled all of one’s responsibilities. If the result would have been a belief that failed to satisfy what have previously been identified as the core criteria for knowledge, then one’s belief fails to be epistemically proper. In the course of bringing this out, the author addresses the literature on culpable ignorance, introduces the notion of epistemic strict liability, and distinguishes the risk of epistemic impropriety from epistemic impropriety itself. The result is an account of the conditions on normative defeat.

Chapter 3 deals with the first issue one faces in the task of articulating the explicit epistemic criteria for belief: the problem of the criterion. It is tempting to suppose that a belief can be normatively proper from the epistemic point of view only if the believer can certify for herself the reliability of every belief-forming process on which she relied. But insisting on this quickly leads to the threat of an infinite regress. This chapter defends a foundationalist response to this problem, according to which we enjoy a default (albeit defeasible) permission to rely on certain cognitive processes in belief-formation. These are processes that satisfy what the author calls the Reliabilist Rationale. Importantly, our permissions here are social: any one of us is permitted to rely on any token process that satisfies this rationale, whether the token process resides in one’s own mind/brain or that of another epistemic subject.

This chapter argues that the sort of normativity that is at the heart of epistemology is the sort of normativity involved in assessments of whether a subject’s belief satisfies the distinctly epistemic standards on knowledge. It introduces the term ‘epistemically proper’ to designate the status a belief has when it satisfies these standards. The author argues against the view that nothing short of knowledge itself can provide the standards, and proceeds to argue for the view that the theory of epistemic justification is in the business of articulating the relevant standards. Appealing to his construal of the internalism/externalism dispute in the theory of justification, the author concludes by motivating a desideratum on any such account: it should regard epistemic propriety as involving both a reliability dimension and a responsibilist dimension.

This chapter addresses a host of worries that one might have about this book’s account of epistemic propriety and epistemic responsibility. Chief among these are worries about the threat of social relativism in epistemic assessment, the threat of an overly context-sensitive account of epistemic propriety and epistemic responsibility, the challenge to vindicate that one can be epistemically responsible even while alone on a desert island (and so when systematically isolated from others), and the lack of engagement in the book’s account of epistemic responsibility with any discussion of doxastic voluntarism or doxastic control. The author concludes that none of the worries should lead us to reject the proposal on offer.