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When solving a complex problem in a group, should group members always choose the best available solution that they are aware of? In this paper, I build simulation models to show that, perhaps surprisingly, a group of agents who individually randomly follow a better available solution than their own can end up outperforming a group of agents who individually always follow the best available solution. This result has implications for the feminist philosophy of science and social epistemology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent approaches to the social epistemology of belief formation have appealed to an epidemiological model, on which the mechanisms explaining how we form beliefs from our society or community along the lines of infectious disease. More specifically, Alvin Goldman (2001) proposes an etiology of (social) belief along the lines of an epistemological epidemiology. On this "contagion model," beliefs are construed as diseases that infect people via some socio-epistemic community. This paper reconsiders Goldman's epidemiological approach in terms of epistemic trust. By focusing on beliefs as diseases, Goldman misconstrues and underestimates the central role that epistemic trust plays in their formation (maintenance, revision, etc.). I suggest that we put trust, accordingly, as the center of an epidemiological model of social doxology—epistemic trust, rather than beliefs, is the disease with which one is infected. So, contra Goldman, beliefs themselves aren't the disease—they are symptoms. Trust, on this approach, can be viewed as a pathology. This point connects Annette Baier's (1994) work on moral trust—taking a cue from her "pathologies of trust." The real pathology centered in social doxology is the epistemic trust manifested by those beliefs. Accordingly, I shall explore (and tentatively defend) an epidemiological model for such "pathological" epistemic trust inspired by Baier's work on moral trust, one which can more adequately account for the infectious epistemic trust at work in social belief formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deepfakes and other forms of synthetic media are widely regarded as serious threats to our knowledge of the world. Various technological responses to these threats have been proposed. The reactive approach proposes to use artificial intelligence to identify synthetic media. The proactive approach proposes to use blockchain and related technologies to create immutable records of verified media content. I argue that both approaches, but especially the reactive approach, are vulnerable to a problem analogous to the ancient problem of the criterion—a line of argument with skeptical implications. I argue that, while the proactive approach is relatively resistant to this objection, it faces its own serious challenges. In short, the proactive approach would place a heavy burden on users to verify their own content, a burden that is exacerbated by and is likely to exacerbate existing inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The primary objective of this paper is to nuance our understanding of how a knowledge-centred injustice can manifest in planning. To do so, the paper draws upon the concept of “epistemic injustice” from the field of social epistemology. Epistemic injustice occurs when certain voices are unjustly discredited and/or systemically marginalised. Recognising and addressing epistemic injustice is crucial as it can generate unjust harms in planning decision-making, as well as perpetuate institutionalised prejudice. The paper seeks to enhance our understanding of “epistemic injustice” by presenting a framework for identifying: (1) the conditions to be met for it to manifest; (2) how meeting different conditions generates different degrees of harm; and (3) detailing how meeting certain conditions may help to perpetuate institutionalised prejudice. The paper references a case of planning conflict in an informal settlement in Iran to illustrate the workings of this framework. The benefits and limitations of the framework are discussed. Suggestions for further research are identified. This paper contributes to the field by providing a framework for refining our theoretical understanding of epistemic injustice in planning and offering a practical illustration of the framework’s use in a context that is comparatively underrepresented in planning research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Christian churches generally consider the Bible of primary importance for determining Christian doctrine, but differ on the relative importance of tradition and church teaching for understanding Scripture. The issue is central for fundamental theology and ecumenical discussions, but the importance of testimony and authority for beliefs have also, in recent decades, been investigated philosophically in the discipline of social epistemology. While some have applied social epistemology to religious issues generally, it has generally not yet been applied to ecumenical issues. As the epistemological importance of traditions and communities gains philosophical recognition, this also creates the need for renewed study of what this might mean in a religious context. In this article, this task is undertaken particularly by showing what two competing models of expertise, the pre-emption view and the expert-as-advisor view, might mean in an ecumenical context and for the sometimes-polemical exchanges between Catholics and Protestants. The article showcases what sorts of features a Protestant social epistemology might have, and the implications of our account of epistemic authority for the doctrine of sola scriptura. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political epistemology has become a popular field of research in recent years. It sets itself the ambitious task to intertwine epistemology with social and political theory in order to do justice to the relationships between truth and politics, or reason and power. Yet many contributions either expand arguments and concepts from traditional epistemology to political phenomena or use existing theories and frameworks from social and political theory to address the politics of epistemological questions. The former approach (prominent, e.g., in the epistemic injustice debate) leads to an epistemisation of political phenomena and concepts coupled with their de‐politicization, the latter approach (prominent, e.g., in Frankfurt School critical theory) leads to a politicization of epistemic phenomena and concepts coupled with their de‐epistemisation. Instead, it is argued that political epistemology requires reworking even basic concepts, due to its three foundational commitments: It is committed to the claim that socio‐material conditions of existence matter epistemically (minimal materialism), to the self‐reflection of the socio‐material conditions of political epistemology's own arguments and theories (radical self‐reflexivity), and to a specific form of epistemic humility (epistemic non‐sovereignty). Using the notion of normativity as an exemplary problem, the article closes by highlighting the difficulty of maintaining these three commitments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the concept of epistemic corruption and its relationship to non-ideal epistemology, focusing on the development and persistence of epistemic vices. It explores how social and environmental factors can influence the acquisition and reinforcement of epistemic vices, such as arrogance and closed-mindedness. The author suggests that understanding epistemic corruption is crucial for connecting character epistemology and social epistemology, highlighting the complexity of individual responsibility for epistemic vices. The article emphasizes the need for nuanced explanations of the origins and dynamics of epistemic vices in diverse social contexts, offering insights into the challenges of maintaining epistemic virtue in a corrupting world. [Extracted from the article]

Imagine that the judgments of some individuals on some issues are aggregated into collective judgments. Social deliberation about the issues prior to aggregation can lead to improved judgments, at both the individual and the collective level. In this paper I argue that the epistemic justification for a social deliberation design depends on the chosen judgment aggregation rule, and vice versa. This claim consists of two parts. First, the epistemic superiority of one deliberation design over another or over the absence of any deliberation depends on which procedure is subsequently used to aggregate individual judgments. Second, the epistemic superiority of one aggregation procedure over another depends on how the preceding social deliberation was designed. In short, the choice of deliberation design and of aggregation rule are intertwined. This claim is substantiated by two models. Both models display a tragic rise in competence: social deliberation raises individual competence while reducing collective competence. Here, individual and social epistemology come interestingly apart. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of social media has correlated with an increase in political polarization, which many perceive as a threat to public discourse and democratic governance. This paper presents a framework, drawing on social epistemology and the economic theory of public goods, to explain how social media can contribute to polarization, making us collectively poorer, even while it provides a preferable media experience for individual consumers. Collective knowledge and consensus is best served by having richly connected networks that are epistemically integrated: individuals with diverse levels of expertise should be relatively well connected to each other. In epistemically segregated networks, by contrast, we have reason to predict collective epistemic failures. Expert knowledge will be isolated from the majority, leading average opinion to be less informed than is socially optimal, and entrenching disagreements. Because social media enables users to very easily adopt homophilous network connections – connections to those with similar opinions, education levels, and social backgrounds – it is likely to have increased epistemic segregation compared to older media platforms. The paper explains the theoretical foundations of these predictions, and sketches regulatory measures – such as taxes – that might be employed to preserve the public good of a well integrated social media network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper suggests that virtue epistemology can help decide how to respond to conflicts between different epistemic goals for social media. It is a contribution to critical epistemology of social media insofar as it supplements system-level consideration with insights from individualist epistemology. In particular, whereas the proposal of critical social epistemology of social media by Joshua Habgood-Coote suggests that conflicts between epistemic goals of social media have to be solved by ethical consideration, I suggest that virtue epistemology can also solve at least some of these conflicts fully within the epistemic realm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay introduces a thematic issue of Transcultural Psychiatry presenting selected papers from the 2022 McGill Advanced Study Institute in Cultural Psychiatry on "The Fragility of Truth: Social Epistemology in a Time of Polarization and Pandemic." The COVID-19 pandemic, political polarization, and the climate crisis have revealed that large segments of the population do not trust the best available knowledge and expertise in making vital decisions regarding their health, the governance of society, and the fate of the planet. What guides information-seeking, trust in authority, and decision-making in each of these domains? Articles in this issue include case studies of the dynamics of misinformation and disinformation; the adaptive functions and pathologies of belief, paranoia, and conspiracy theories; and strategies to foster and maintain diverse knowledge ecologies. Efforts to understand the psychological dynamics of pathological conviction have something useful to teach us about our vulnerability as knowers and believers. However, this individual psychological account needs to be supplemented with a broader social view of the politics of knowledge and epistemic authority that can inform efforts to create healthy information ecologies and strengthen the civic institutions and practices needed to provide well-informed pictures of the world as a basis for deliberative democracy, pluralism, and co-existence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent challenges to scientific authority in relation to the COVID pandemic, climate change, and the proliferation of conspiracy theories raise questions about the nature of knowledge and conviction. This article considers problems of social epistemology that are central to current predicaments about popular or public knowledge and the status of science. From the perspective of social epistemology, knowing and believing are not simply individual cognitive processes but based on participation in social systems, networks, and niches. As such, knowledge and conviction can be understood in terms of the dynamics of epistemic communities, which create specific forms of authority, norms, and practices that include styles of reasoning, habits of thought and modes of legitimation. Efforts to understand the dynamics of delusion and pathological conviction have something useful to teach us about our vulnerability as knowers and believers. However, this individual psychological account needs to be supplemented with a broader social view of the politics of knowledge that can inform efforts to create a healthy information ecology and strengthen the civil institutions that allow us to ground our action in well-informed picture of the world oriented toward mutual recognition, respect, diversity, and coexistence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I contend that the history of the development of 20th-century analytic philosophy is characterized by three main phases: (a) the turn towards analysis, (b) the linguistic turn, and (c) the naturalistic turn. In this article, I examine whether the recent interest in sub-disciplines such as (1) social epistemology, (2) social ontology, and the methods of "conceptual engineering" applied in fields like (3) philosophy of language, indicates that the current phase of development in analytic philosophy could be termed (d) the social turn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Efforts to raise awareness about foreign disinformation might accidentally increase distrust towards legitimate media. We argue that state discourse on disinformation is comparable to strategic framing in journalists' coverage of political events, and that it might imbue audiences with cynicism. Furthermore, in contrast to an experimental paradigm that depicts disinformation audiences as passive, we suggest that news consumers actively appropriate and produce content themselves. Conceptualising media content as 'strategic' rather than sincere might influence audiences to share and produce media content strategically. This Machiavellian tendency leads to similar effects on bias as motivated reasoning. Most accounts of motivated reasoning assume that limits of psychological processing are the reasons for biased judgements of what is true and fake, however, we argue that biases can also be due to culturally acquired second-order beliefs about knowledge. To explain this, we build on ideas about 'folk epistemology' and propose the term 'strategic epistemology towards media'. Resistance-building efforts against disinformation risk promoting such a strategic epistemology towards media and this can have harmful effects on democratic dialogue. To avoid this, educational interventions should be premised on social epistemology rather than experimental psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We argue that one is likely to accept what a speaker says when the expected utility of accepting their testimony is greater than the expected utility of continuing inquiry. One virtue of our hypothesis is that it allows us to explain why confidence in experts has declined in recent years. In a traditional media landscape expert testimony is easy to find, and alternative sources of information are relatively costly to access. Hence, practical considerations largely favour accepting expert testimony. But on social media, alternative information is easy to find, and it is often practically rational to accept this information rather than to search for (and identify) genuinely expert testimony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Misinformation in various guises has become a significant concern in contemporary society and it has been implicated in several high-impact political events over the past years, including Brexit, the 2016 American elections, and bungled policy responses to the Covid-19 pandemic in some countries. In this paper, I draw on resources from contemporary social epistemology to clarify why and how misinformation is epistemically bad. I argue that its negative effects extend far beyond the obvious ones of duping individuals with false or misleading beliefs. Misinformation has systemic effects on our information environments, making all of us worse off, including the epistemically vigilant. This paper does not offer measures or policies to fight misinformation, but aims to contribute to the prior goal of better understanding what's bad about misinformation. In doing so, it lays the groundwork for ameliorative projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that individuating practices are produced through iterative processes of community and agent-level interactions. This claim will be demonstrated by using three case studies from biology: The structuring of data categories for data collection tables and models; establishing spatial and temporal threshold markers or limits; and the comparative use of phenomenal characteristics as cues for object identification. By drawing from examples of data classification and comparative analysis in the biological sciences, I offer a view about ‘individuation’ as double-barreled according to the method of co-constitutive conceptual analysis. Specifically, the capacity—i.e., the ability to individuate—is co-constituted by community level choices and agent applications: Individuation’s evidential role is generated, revised, and refined by scientific communities and their members through an iterative process of community and agent-level interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Experts are sharply divided concerning the prevalence and influence of misinformation. Some have emphasized the severe epistemic and political threats posed by misinformation and have argued that some such threats have been realized in the real world. Others have argued that such concerns overstate the prevalence of misinformation and the gullibility of ordinary persons. Rather than taking a stand on this issue, I consider what would follow from the supposition that this latter perspective is correct. I argue that, if the prevalence and influence of misinformation are indeed overstated, then many reports as to the prevalence and influence of misinformation constitute a kind of higher-order misinformation. I argue that higher-order misinformation presents its own challenges. In particular, higher-order misinformation, ironically, would lend credibility to the very misinformation whose influence it exaggerates. Additionally, higher-order misinformation would lead to underestimations of the reasons favoring opposing views. In short, higher-order misinformation constitutes misleading higher-order evidence concerning the quality of the evidence on which individuals form their beliefs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The editorial "Introduction: Philosophical Discussions with Pragma-Dialectics" published in the journal "Topoi: An International Review of Philosophy" commemorates the anniversaries of two seminal works in argumentation theory. The special issue explores the philosophy of argument underlying pragma-dialectical theory, emphasizing the pragmatic perspective on argumentation. The pragma-dialectical approach defines argumentation as a speech act, focusing on actions in context and normative standards of rationality. The editorial highlights the significant role pragma-dialectics has played in contemporary argumentation studies and its ongoing impact on philosophical inquiry. [Extracted from the article]

This paper discusses disadvantaging situations that deaf students encounter in higher education in Sweden. We report two recent cases of deaf students’ academic welfare being put at risk. We foreground in these cases the ‘odd situations’ that arise when provisions that fail to access the particular nature of deaf experience also fail to secure deaf students’ participation rights, to be and become the deaf person they wish to be, lead the life they wish to live, and so on. Often, the ‘oddness’ of the situations that arise is in part indicated by no-one involved lacking in good intentions or not doing their very best: there is no lack of good will, but a lack of shared understanding. What deaf students know differently is rarely present in deliberation and not part of forward planning. We infer that situations of this sort reflect epistemic injustice. We propose that this form of formative epistemic injustice – educators not taking on board what deaf students know – can perhaps be overcome by higher education institutions proactively involving deaf students in matters that concern both them and future deaf students.

Digital media have fundamentally altered how knowledge is produced and distributed, often being blamed for contemporary democratic problems. This short essay examines recent contributions to normative democratic theory, focusing on three questions: 1) characterization of media-related threats, 2) media and communication aspects supportive of democracy, and 3) diagnosis of democracy's core challenges. Our reading reveals that while digital media is seen to contribute to the epistemic crisis, the core problem can be traced back to the profound impact of communicative capitalism on our epistemic infrastructures. We call for political communication scholars to prioritize the study of epistemic inequalities by critically examining and addressing the pervasive influence of market logic in both our work and the subject of study. In doing so, we can make an empirically informed contribution to democratic theory's quest to defend democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an overview of ideas and arguments developed in my book Prejudice: A Study in Non-Ideal (Oxford University Press, 2021; paperback edition, 2022). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I argue that data-sharing risks becoming epistemically extractivist and is a practice sensitive to Linda Martín Alcoff´s challenges for extractivist epistemologies. I situate data-sharing as a socio-epistemic practice that gives rise to ethical and epistemic challenges. I draw on the findings of an institutional ethnography of an international social science research project to identify several ethical and epistemic concerns, including epistemic extractivism. I identify Alcoff's first and second challenge for extractivist epistemologies in the findings of the empirical investigation and argue that they are important considerations for the ethics and socio-epistemological functioning of data-sharing in social science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Moral grandstanding is the use of moral talk for self-promotion. Recent philosophical work assumes that people can often accurately identify instances of grandstanding. In contrast, we argue that people are generally unable to reliably recognize instances of grandstanding and that we are typically unjustified in judging that others are grandstanding as a result. From there we argue that, under most circumstances, to judge others as grandstanders is to fail to act with proper intellectual humility. We then examine the significance of these conclusions for moral discourse. More specifically, we propose that moral discourse should focus on others' stated reasons and whether their actions manifest respect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I draw attention to the phenomenon of warranted epistemic blame in order to pose a challenge for most forms of epistemic instrumentalism, which is the view that all of the demands of epistemic normativity are requirements of instrumental rationality. Because of the way in which the instrumentalist takes the force of one’s epistemic reasons to derive from one’s own individually held ends, the instrumentalist faces unique difficulties in explaining our standing to blame one another for violations of epistemic norms. In many cases, it is unclear why, according to the instrumentalist, we might be entitled to others’ adherence to epistemic norms at all. This is a serious problem. The upshot is that theorists of epistemic normativity should be prepared reject most forms of epistemic instrumentalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People are manifestly polarized. On many topics, extreme perspectives are much easier to find than ‘reasonable’, ‘moderate’ perspectives. A natural reaction to this situation is that something epistemically irrational is afoot. Here, I question this natural reaction. I argue that often polarization is epistemically innocuous. In particular, I argue that certain mechanisms that underlie polarization are rational, and polarized beliefs are often fully justified. Additionally, even reflective subjects, who recognize themselves as in a polarized or polarizing situation shouldn’t necessarily reduce confidence in the relevant beliefs. Finally, I draw attention to some often overlooked epistemic benefits associated with polarization. A fuller understanding of the epistemology of polarization requires incorporating both the potential costs and the potential benefits, and being more precise about exactly what is—and is not—epistemically objectionable in these situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The social epistemology of science has adopted agent-based computer simulations as one of its core methods for investigating the dynamics of scientific inquiry. The epistemic status of these highly idealized models is currently under active debate in which they are often associated either with predictive or the argumentative functions. These two functions roughly correspond to interpreting simulations as virtual experiments or formalized thought experiments, respectively. This paper advances the argumentative account of modeling by proposing that models serve as a means to (re)conceptualize the macro-level dynamics of complex social epistemic interactions. I apply results from the epistemology of scientific modeling and the psychology of mental simulation to the ongoing debate in the social epistemology of science. Instead of considering simulation models as predictive devices, I view them as artifacts that exemplify abstract hypothetical properties of complex social epistemic processes in order to advance scientific understanding, hypothesis formation, and communication. Models need not be accurate representations to serve these purposes. They should be regarded as pragmatic cognitive tools that engender rather than replace intuitions in philosophical reasoning and argumentation. Furthermore, I aim to explain why the community tends to converge around few model templates: Since models have the potential to transform our intuitive comprehension of the subject of inquiry, successful models may literally capture the imagination of the modeling community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of International Anatolian Journal of Social Sciences / Uluslararasi Anadolu Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi is the property of Uluslararasi Anadolu Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Central to the particularist project, one that has become the consensus in the philosophy of conspiracy theory theory, is the claim that a general dismissal of these things called `conspiracy theories' is unsustainable. That is, if we want to say a conspiracy theory is suspicious such that we should not believe it, then we have to engage in at least some investigation of it. Particularists have detailed just why a general attitude of skepticism towards conspiracy theories is implausible; they have, in effect, created the case against generalism. The case for particularism, then, has largely been about challenging and rebutting generalist arguments. But what of the bigger picture? If particularists argue that we should not assume conspiracy theories are mad, bad, or dangerous but, rather, investigate them, then how should we go about that investigation? In this paper I describe (some) of the preliminary concerns the particularist (and the generalist) needs to account for when developing an ethics of investigation into these things called `conspiracy theories.' Whilst this paper does not provide a framework for the investigation of conspiracy theories, it provides the framework for such a framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Educational research has pointed out the mediating role of professors' intuitive epistemologies in the teachinglearning processes of science. However, we find that research in this regard is scarce despite being essential to achieve changes in the teaching of natural and social sciences. The objective of this work is to examine the epistemological positions of teachers in the fields of science and philosophy to determine if the epistemological positions they hold vary depending on the domain of knowledge. To carry out this research, we used an instrument that consists of two parts: 1) items adapted from questionnaires in use about intuitive and self - developed epistemologies and 2) items from the Literature Epistemic Cognition Scale (LECS) questionnaire adapted to evaluate epistemic cognition in the context of philosophy. The data collected indicate that the participants in this research maintain a constant epistemological orientation in both the domain of science and philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under conditions of high social and political polarization, expressing political anger online toward systemic injustice faces an apparent trilemma: Express none but lose anger's valuable goods; express anger to heterogeneous audiences but risk aggravating inter-group polarization; or express anger to like-minded people but succumb to the epistemic pitfalls and extremist tendencies inherent to homogeneous groups. Solving the trilemma requires cultivating an online environment as a deliberative system composed of four kinds of groups—each with distinct purposes and norms. I argue that applying empirically-guided design principles to this systems framework provides political anger a place where its powers can serve justice without damaging the epistemic, ethical, emotional, and community resources required for a democratic path to correcting systemic injustice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses how multiple individual credences on logically related issues should be aggregated into collective binary beliefs. We call this binarizing belief aggregation. It is vulnerable to dilemmas such as the discursive dilemma or the lottery paradox: proposition-wise independent aggregation can generate inconsistent or not deductively closed collective judgments. Addressing this challenge using the familiar axiomatic approach, we introduce general conditions on a binarizing belief aggregation rule, including rationality conditions on individual inputs and collective outputs, and determine which rules (if any) satisfy different combinations of these conditions. Furthermore, we analyze similarities and differences between our proofs and other related proofs in the literature and conclude that the problem of binarizing belief aggregation is a free-standing aggregation problem not reducible to judgment aggregation or probabilistic opinion pooling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ+) people are experiencing increasingly varied visibility on social media due to ongoing digitalization. In this paper, I draw on social epistemology and phenomenological accounts of the digital (Frost-Arnold in: Lackey (ed) The epistemic dangers of context collapse online, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2021; Krueger and Osler in Philos Topics 47(2):205–231, 2019; Hine in: Ethnography for the internet: embedded, embodied and everyday, Bloomsbury, London, 2015), and argue that, for LGBTQ+ individuals, social media provides a space for connecting with people with shared lived experiences. This, in turn, makes it possible for social media to enable feelings of belonging. By interacting with other LGBTQ+ people online, LGBTQ+ individuals are enabled to imagine their own being in the world and to feel like they belong. This is especially important when we consider that, for LGBTQ+ identities, it may be more complicated to feel connected due to marginalization and (fear of) discrimination. This paper not only draws on literature from phenomenology and social epistemology on the digital, but also presents and analyzes interviews that were conducted in order to explore the social media experiences of LGBTQ+ people through a phenomenology and social epistemology informed framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Philosophers who study conspiracy theories have increasingly addressed the questions of where conspiracy theories come from, what such theories do, and what to do about them. This essay serves as a commentary on the answers to these questions offered by contributors to this special issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Partisan epistemology – individuals granting greater credibility to co-partisan sources in evaluating information – is often taken to be evidence of directionally motivated reasoning in which concerns about group membership override concerns about accuracy. Against this dominant view, I outline a novel accuracy-based account of this mode of reasoning. According to this account, partisan epistemology stems from the inference that co-partisans are more likely to be right as they have superior epistemic access to the relevant facts and seek to realize the correct values. I argue that this theory fits better with relevant findings than motivated-reasoning theories of partisan epistemology. Finally, I suggest it has adequate explanatory power vis-à-vis patterns of misinformation belief. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How should we think about the ways search engines can go wrong? Following the publication of Safiya Noble's Algorithms of Oppression (Noble, 2018), a view has emerged that racist, sexist, and other problematic results should be thought of as indicative of algorithmic bias. In this paper, I offer an alternative angle on these results, building on Noble's suggestion that search engines are complicit in a racial contract (Mills, 1997). I argue that racist and sexist results should be thought of as part of the workings of the social system of white ignorance. Along the way, I will argue that we should think about search engines not as sources of testimony, but as information-classification systems, and make a preliminary case for the importance of the social epistemology of technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The project of veristic social epistemology is based on the evaluation of social practices directed at acquiring knowledge and avoiding error. This research aims to analyse the social and technological dimensions of information processes. A number of practices in the network environment have a significant impact on the cognitive processes of individuals. They give rise to the acquisition of both true and false beliefs, ranging from reliable information practices to unreliable disinformation practices. The prevalence of phenomena such as echo chambers, fake news, clickbait or deepfakes indicates that the condition of the contemporary infosphere is under serious threat. Disinformation processes, reinforced by technological progress, prompt reflection on the reliability of social practices. In addition to the strictly veristic consequences, the importance of the phenomenon of epistemic injustice should also be pointed out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article identifies two tendencies in left-wing approaches toward the social sciences. The first expresses skepticism towards science as a kind of product of the ruling ideology that solely reproduces the status quo. The second worries about the capacity of scientific inquiry to actually change people's ingrained beliefs and prejudices. Antonio Gramsci and W.E.B. Du Bois are representative of these two diverging approaches. Their views on science, however, offer more commonalities than at first meet the eye. They are both critical of sociological traditions that seek to discover universal laws of society, arguing that such an approach fails to grasp the complexity of causality and the role of human action in shaping their lives and history. On the other hand, both see the potential for rigorous and nuanced scientific analysis to offer grounds for concrete action and warn off wishful thinking. By combining their views, this article presents a conception of the role and potential of social scientific inquiry for progressive movements toward social change that navigates between the double-sided concerns represented by Gramsci and Du Bois. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Terms such as 'fake news' and 'post-truth' circulate freely today within the popular lexicon. It is an environment where objective facts have 'become less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief' (OED). Central here is to understand the conceptual grounding of subjective opinion as a historically specific epistemological structure of social communication. My paper will draw on the Hegelian tradition of critical theory that has in unique ways unified an analysis of the nexus between socio-economic structures and epistemological frameworks. Here I name opinion as a historically specific epistemological structure of self-certainty, which receives validation within what Adorno called the Halbbildung of industrial culture, a form of social consciousness cultivated by the spread of information and economic imperative. It will be argued that the concept of opinion becomes a vital question for understanding, in this 'post-truth' landscape, current standards of instantaneous communication and cultural transmission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes epistemic environmentalism as a novel framework for accounting for the contribution of the environment – broadly construed – to epistemic standings and which can be used to improve or protect epistemic environments. The contribution of the environment to epistemic standings is explained through recent developments in epistemology and cognitive science, including embodied cognition, embedded cognition, extended cognition and distributed cognition. The paper examines how these developments support epistemic environmentalism, as well as contributes theoretical resources to make epistemic assessments of dynamic environments. The epistemic environmentalist procedure from the assessment of an individual environment to changes made to that environment based on promoting the attainment of epistemic goods is also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the social epistemology of scientific knowledge, it is largely accepted that relationships of trust, not just reliance, are necessary in contemporary collaborative science characterised by relationships of opaque epistemic dependence. Such relationships of trust are taken to be possible only between agents who can be held accountable for their actions. But today, knowledge production in many fields makes use of AI applications that are epistemically opaque in an essential manner. This creates a problem for the social epistemology of scientific knowledge, as scientists are now epistemically dependent on AI applications that are not agents, and therefore not appropriate candidates for trust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, some scholars have argued that testimonial injustice may not only be due to prejudice toward the speaker, but also prejudice toward the content of what the speaker says. I argue that such accounts do not merely expand our picture of epistemic injustice, but give us reason to radically revise our approach to reducing testimonial injustice. The dominant conception of this project focuses on reducing speaker prejudice. But even if one were to successfully do so, the frequency of content prejudice means that one would still commit testimonial injustice in many of the same circumstances. I argue that we must reorient the project of reducing testimonial injustice toward critiquing the ideologies that produce it. I conclude with a sketch of what such a research program might look like. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Psicoperspectivas is the property of Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso, Escuela de Psicologia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Some debates about the role of non-epistemic values in science discuss the so-called Value-Free Ideal together with the autonomy thesis, to the point that they may be assumed to be intertwined. As I will argue in this article, the two are independent from one another, are supported by different arguments, and ought to be disentangled. I will also show that the arguments against value-freedom and supporting a value-laden conception of science, are different from the arguments against autonomy, which support democratized science. Moreover, while some of the arguments against autonomy and for democratized science may actually be consistent with value-freedom, they conflict with some philosophical views about the internal diversity of well-designed epistemic communities. This article distinguishes the Value-Free Ideal and the autonomy thesis, as well as their antitheses, and investigates their relations to some of the socio-epistemological models of the social organization of scientific research. Its aim is to make explicit some incompatibilities between different normative frameworks developed in philosophy of science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues for two propositions. (I) Large asymmetries of power, status and influence exist between economists. These asymmetries constitute a hierarchy that is steeper than it could be and steeper than hierarchies in other disciplines. (II) This situation has potentially significant epistemic consequences. I collect data on the social organization of economics to show (I). I then argue that the hierarchy in economics heightens conservative selection biases, restricts criticism between economists and disincentivizes the development of novel research. These factors together constrain economics' capacity to develop new beliefs and reduce the likelihood that its outputs will be true. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]