I wish to advocate a reorientation of epistemology. Lest anyone maintain that the enterprise I urge is not epistemology at all (even part of epistemology), I call this enterprise by a slightly different name: epistemics. Despite this terminological concession, I believe that the inquiry I advocate is significantly continuous with traditional epistemology. Like much of past epistemology, it would seek to regulate or guide our intellectual activities. It would try to lay down principles or suggestions for how to conduct (...) our cognitive affairs. The contrast with traditional epistemology – at least "analytic" epistemology of the twentieth century – would be its close alliance with the psychology of cognition. The basic premise of epistemics is that one cannot give the best advice about intellectual operations without detailed information about mental processes. Since these processes are most illuminatingly studied by cognitive psychology, epistemics would go hand in hand with empirical investigation of our "information-processing" mechanisms. (shrink)

Forensic science error rates are needlessly high. Applying the perspective of veritistic social epistemology to forensic science could produce new institutional designs that would lower forensic error rates. We make such an application through experiments in the laboratory with human subjects. Redundancy is the key to error prevention, discovery, and elimination. In the “monopoly epistemics” characterizing forensics today, one privileged actor is asked to identify the truth. In “democratic epistemics,” several independent parties are asked. In an experiment contrasting (...) them, democratic epistemics reduced the rate at which biased observers obscured the truth by two-thirds. These results highlight, first, the potential of “epistemic systems design,” which employs the techniques of economic systems design to address issues of veracity rather than efficiency, and second, the value of “experimental epistemology,” which employs experimental techniques in the study of science. (shrink)

J. Angelo Corlett suggests a revision in the scope of social epistemics as I have depicted it. Specifically, he suggests that social epistemics should encompass questions about certain psychological processes – viz. social cognitive processes – whereas my original proposal assigned the task of evaluating psychological processes to individual epistemics only. How compelling is this suggestion, and how consonant is it with the general program of epistemics?

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.1 (2003) 32-39 [Access article in PDF] Aesthetics, Epistemics, and Feminist Theory Jane Duran Recent feminist analysts of aesthetics and analytic aesthetics in particular seem to have come to the conclusion that the redemption of formulated aesthetic theory from the feminist point of view is a difficult and recondite task. 1 If analytic aesthetics now looks problematic, qua fruitful philosophical enterprise, its future (...) appears bleaker still when the intersection of the androcentric nature of analytic philosophy and the larger feminist project, frequently articulated in other than analytic terms, is examined.In this essay I will assume that there is some future for analytic aesthetics, and I will not dispute the basic assumption that any portion of analytic theory is somewhat immiscible with feminist points of view. My concern, rather, will be to try to show what it is specifically in the nature of analytic theory, both aesthetic and otherwise, which renders it of dubious value to the feminist critique (at least on first blush). Although in the past feminist theorists have tried to characterize the androcentric nature of analytic philosophy on the whole in rather striking terms,it is not clear that these terms have been precise enough. 2 Further, it is not clear that analytic modes are obviously unusable for feminist theory or for the development of a still nascent feminist aesthetics, although what one wants to say here is that this task is a terribly danger-fraught one. 3My goal here is twofold: first, to articulate what precisely it is aboutanalytic aesthetics (or any portion of analytic theory, for that matter) thatmakes it a hindrance — at least preliminarily — to the development of feminist views. In order to do this I will need to examine a relatively uncharted area in the literature, that is the parallel between much of analytic aesthetic theory and analytic epistemology. The second portion of my task will runsomewhat contrary to conventional wisdom: having delineated the mostmasculinist parts of analytic endeavors, I inquire if there is, indeed, anypart of rigorously articulated analytic theory that could lend itself to the development of a feminist aesthetic. [End Page 32] Analytic Philosophy and Aesthetics Analytic aesthetics, like analytic philosophy taken as a whole, has often proceeded as if the development of conceptual clarification and theoretical rigor could do much to "solve" or dissolve aesthetic problems. George Dickie's introductory work, for example, presents the student with a number of difficult areas in aesthetics, and then proceeds to address these areas in much the same manner that other contemporary texts employ for the discussion of issues in ethics, epistemology, or metaphysics.In discussing symbolism, Dickie first attempts to clarify the use of theterm, and then notes that there are problematic areas with regard to whether or not a work of art can both contain a symbol and serve itself as a symbol simultaneously. A symbol "stands for" in some establishable way that which it symbolizes. A symbol serves to transfer someone's thought to something other than itself, and the transfer is not a random association. The transfer depends upon certain features of the symbol which give it a place in a certain meaning system. 4I cite this material as exemplary because the flavor of analytic aesthetics is remarkably similar to the flavor of analytic philosophy as a whole. We sometimes need to remind ourselves that the techniques of analysis developed in the earlier part of this century relied on breakthroughs in logic and formal representation which allowed for a certain precision in matching symbol to thing signified. The original hope of philosophers working at the time of Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore had been to develop something close to a logically perfect language with a one-to-one relationship between signifier and signified. However without merit this somewhat arcane task, its goals infused much of the philosophizing that followed it, and even the ordinary language school was, of course, indirectly an offshoot of this work. Nicholas Wolterstorff, for example, notes that "analytic philosophy was to be 'scientific philosophy'....The goal of the analytic philosopher... (shrink)

A conception of social epistemology is articulated with links to studies of science and opinion in such disciplines as history, sociology, and political science. The conception is evaluative, though, rather than purely descriptive. Three types of evaluative approaches are examined but rejected: relativism, consensualism, and expertism. A fourth, truth-linked, approach to intellectual evaluation is then advocated: social procedures should be appraised by their propensity to foster true belief. Standards of evaluation in social epistemics would be much the same as (...) those in individual epistemics, only the objects of evaluation would be interpersonal patterns of judgment and communication, and institutional practices that bear on opinion formation. (shrink)

The concept of an ecological niche (econiche) has been used in a variety of ways, some of which are incompatible with a relational or functional interpretation of the term. This essay seeks to standardize usage by limiting the concept to functional relations between organisms and their surroundings, and to revise the concept to include epistemic relations. For most organisms, epistemics are a vital aspect of their functional relationships to their surroundings and, hence, a major determinant of their econiche. Rejecting (...) the traditional dualism of organism and environment, an econiche is defined as the reciprocal (dual) of a functionally specified class of organisms (FSTU). From this perspective, an econiche necessarily implies a certain type of organism, and a class of functionally similar organisms implies a special econiche.The econiche concept is also discussed in relation to other ecological terms that reflect the distributional patterns of organisms, such as habitat, and the concept of an empty niche is criticized. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss substance-induced visions and consider their epistemic status, meaning, and modes of proper interpretation. I focus on the visions induced by ayahuasca, a powerful psychoactive plant-made brew that has had a central status and role in the indigenous tribal cultures of the upper Amazonian region. The brew is especially famous for the visions seen with it. These are often coupled with personal psychological insights, mentations concerning topics of special significance to one, intellectual (notably, philosophical and metaphysical) (...) ideations, as well as powerful religious and spiritual sentiments. Thus, under the intoxication, people often feel that they gain significant knowledge and understanding. The present discussion takes a cognitive-phenomenological perspective coupled with a philosophical analysis of the various epistemological questions at hand. (shrink)

The semantic theory of expressivism has been applied within metaethics to evaluative words like ‘good’ and ‘wrong’, within epistemology to words like ‘knows’, and within the philosophy of language, to words like ‘true’, to epistemic modals like ‘might’, ‘must’, and ‘probably’, and to indicative conditionals. For each topic, expressivism promises the advantage of giving us the resources to say what sentences involving these words mean by telling us what it is to believe these things, rather than by telling us what (...) it would be for them to be true. This, in turn, absolves these theories of the burden of holding that there is any general answer to what it is for these sentences to be true. However, expressivism is famously subject to a deep and general problem about how to account for the meanings of complex sentences – a problem variously known as the ‘Frege-Geach’ or ‘embedding’ problem. In this paper I will be interested in whether there are reasons to think that the embedding problem looks less difficult for some of these applications for expressivism, than for others. In particular, in this paper I will be interested in the prospects for expressivism about what I will call epistemics – a class which I take to include epistemic modals like ‘might’ and ‘must’, sentential adverbs like ‘probably’, adjectives like ‘likely’ and ‘improbable’, and so-called ‘open’ indicative conditionals like ‘if the Fed doesn’t intervene, then the economy will enter a deflationary spiral’. There are several reasons to be particularly interested in expressivism about epistemics, relating both to the philosophical payoffs of such a view, and relating to the technical prospects for making it work. In other work I’ve touched on the especially interesting philosophical payoffs which make expressivism about epistemics interesting; in this paper I will be interested primarily in evaluating the possibility that there are better prospects for making expressivism about epistemics work than there are for making expressivism work about other topics. There are two main reasons why one might suspect that expressivism about epistemics will have better prospects than expressivism about many other topics, including in metaethics.. (shrink)

In 2016, Discourse Studies published a special issue on the ‘epistemics of epistemics’ comprising six papers, all of which took issue with a strand of my research on how knowledge claims are asserted, implemented and contested through facets of turn design and sequence organization. Apparently coordinated through some years of discussion, the critique is nonetheless somewhat confused and confusing. In this article, I take up some of more prominent elements of the critique: my work is ‘cognitivist’ substituting causal (...) psychological analysis for the classic conversation analytic focus on the normative accountability of social action, my work devalues and indeed flouts basic tenets of CA methodology such as the ‘next-turn proof procedure’, my analysis of epistemic stance introduces unwarranted themes of conflict and hostility into CA thinking, various concepts that I have introduced involve the invocation of ‘hidden orders’ of social conduct that is inimical to the traditions of our field and that my work rests on an unwarranted ‘informationism’ – the discredited idea that much of human interaction is driven by a need to traffic in information. In this rebuttal, I refute all of these commentaries and correct many other ancillary mistakes of representation and reasoning that inhabit these papers. (shrink)

This article provides an empirical demonstration of the saliency of epistemics to two core conversational organizations, turn-taking and repair. To that end, I examine cases in which a participant of a multiparty conversation intervenes into a repair sequence to respond to a repair initiation addressed to the trouble-source speaker, that is, in violation of the turn-taking rules, without having an epistemically grounded entitlement to do so. I show that such interventions enact a range of corrective actions vis-a-vis the repair (...) initiation, such as contesting and correcting assumptions or understandings conveyed by the repair initiation. In providing these corrections ‘out of turn’, the intervening speakers demonstrate their own attentive recipiency or cultural expertise and, at the same time, expose the repair initiator’s interactional faux pas. The analysis demonstrates the procedural consequentiality of epistemic considerations for the interlocutors – and, thus, the necessity to incorporate them into an empirically grounded analysis of their actions. (shrink)

We carry out the Karttunen-Stalnaker pragmatic account of presupposition projection within a state-of-the art version of dynamic epistemic logic. It turns out that the basic projection facts can all be derived from a Gricean maxim ‘be informative’. This sheds light on a recent controversy on the appropriateness of dynamic semantics as a tool for analysing presupposition.

The Holocaust was a rupture in civilisation – a Zivilisationsbruch –, a shattering of ontological certainty. The perception of the event enshrined in the notion of “rupture in civilisation” is the result of both the historical and the conceptual engagement with the event. Its manifest content seeks to combine two ways of discerning which are in fact opposed to one another: a particular one and a universal one. The particular perspective reflects the experience undergone by Jews as Jews of having (...) been destroyed everywhere and solely because of their belonging, i.e. because of their alleged origin. It was hence the experience of being exposed to total extermination without any reason. Never before had anything of this kind taken place: a rupture in civilisation, carried out upon the Jews. The significance of the concept is further-reaching, however. The concept of rupture in civilisation seeks to denote the indeed singular circumstance of the extermination of human persons by human persons as the transgression of all the ethical and instrumental limits of comportment which had hitherto been considered as certain and secure. Transgression of this kind marks a rupture in civilisation that is carried out upon all humankind. The phenomenon of the crime against humanity experienced by the Jews can, however, be split and regarded from those two opposing perspectives: one that argues historically and that is above all adopted by the victims, while the other is an anthropologically inclined perception of the events which rather reaches further into a universal domain. The latter focuses on the significance of the events for the species as such. These perspectives are necessarily unequal. They may even work against other. (shrink)

Recent years have witnessed impressive leaps forward in modelling the dynamics of inquiry. Different models have been suggested to fathom various aspects of the reasoning processes relevant to inquiry; belief revision, dynamic epistemic and doxastic logics, stit-theory, logics of action, intention and doxastic voluntarism—in general, logics and formal models for – using an adequately covering term coined by Parikh – social software [Par02]. Many of these logics and formal frameworks rely on combining different modal logics in the realization that inquiry (...) incorporates a multiplicity of parameters including time, change, relevant alternatives, epistemological forcing and learning just to mention a few. The result: Multi-modal systems. (shrink)

Although advice is routinely offered in ordinary conversation, commentators and analysts have treated it as a special or delicate type of action, noticing a number of challenges associated with both providing and receiving it. In this article, I first describe the most basic social-sequential context for giving advice and explicate how the formulations speakers use to offer advice are adapted to the distinct epistemic configurations that characterize that context. Drawing on Jefferson and Lee’s observations regarding ‘troubles tellings’, I argue that (...) speakers typically offer advice when a co-participant reports an insoluble trouble or problem to one who possess special knowledge about the domain of trouble. I show how this epistemic configuration constitutes a ‘home environment’ for advice-giving and discuss how speakers vary the design of their advice to adapt to the sequential environments that entail different epistemic configurations. Finally, I consider how alternative, contrasting responses to advice manage the epistemic framework set in motion by advice-giving. (shrink)

This article critically examines the relations between epistemics in conversation analysis and linguistic and cognitivist conceptions of communicative interaction that emphasize information and information transfer. The epistemic program adheres to the focus on recorded instances of talk-in-interaction that is characteristic of CA, explicitly identifies its theoretical origins with ethnomethodology, and points to implications of its research for the social distribution of knowledge. However, despite such affiliations with CA and ethnomethodology, the EP is cognitivist in the way it emphasizes information (...) exchange as an underlying, extrasituational ‘driver’ in social interaction. To document how the EP draws upon cognitivist conceptions of information and knowledge, we review examples from the corpus of transcripts analyzed in key publications on epistemics. Our re-analysis casts doubt upon the way EP analysis invokes an underlying order that supposedly drives the evident sequential organization of those transcripts. (shrink)

Epistemic instrumentalists seek to understand the normativity of epistemic norms on the model practical instrumental norms governing the relation between aims and means. Non-instrumentalists often object that this commits instrumentalists to implausible epistemic assessments. I argue that this objection presupposes an implausibly strong interpretation of epistemic norms. Once we realize that epistemic norms should be understood in terms of permissibility rather than obligation, and that evidence only occasionally provide normative reasons for belief, an instrumentalist account becomes available that delivers the (...) correct epistemic verdicts. On this account, epistemic permissibility can be understood on the model of the wide-scope instrumental norm for instrumental rationality, while normative evidential reasons for belief can be understood in terms of instrumental transmission. (shrink)

Epistemic instrumentalists face a puzzle. In brief, the puzzle is that if the reason there is to believe in accord with the evidence depends, as the instrumentalist says it does, on agents’ idiosyncratic interests, then there is no reason to expect that this reason is universal. Here, I identify and explain two strategies instrumentalists have used to try and solve this puzzle. I then argue that we should find these strategies wanting. Faced with the failure of these strategies, I articulate (...) a heretofore neglected solution on behalf of instrumentalism. (shrink)

We survey several ways in which the structures and norms of medicine and healthcare can generate epistemic injustice.

This paper examines how expertise is treated as a separable domain of epistemics by looking at simulated intensive care shift-handovers between resident physicians. In these handovers, medical information about a patient is transferred from an outgoing physician to an incoming physician. These handovers contain different interactional activities, such as discussing the patient identifiers, giving a clinical impression, and discussing tasks and focus points. We found that with respect to knowledge about the patient, the OPs display an orientation to a (...) knowledge imbalance, but with respect to procedures, reasoning, and activities, they display an orientation to a knowledge balance. We use ‘expertise’ to refer to this latter type of knowledge. ‘Expertise’ differs from, and adds to, how knowledge is often treated in epistemics in that it is concerned with professional competence or ‘knowing how’. In terms of epistemics, the participants in the handovers orient to a steep epistemic or knowledge gradient when it concerns the patient, while simultaneously displaying an orientation to a horizontal expertise gradient. (shrink)

Although ecumenical dialogue has highlighted many commonalities between Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox, many issues still remain contentious. One often recurring suspicion is that the Protestant idea of sola scriptura inevitably leads to an individualistic religiosity, neglecting the importance of the divinely guided Christian tradition and Christian church teaching for understanding the Bible. In this article, I relate this critique to the idea of “epistemic egoism”, as defined by Linda Zagzebski, and develop an alternative Protestant social epistemology based on tradition as (...) the “democracy of the dead”, error-corrected by sola scriptura. I test this Protestant theological epistemology against two recent criticisms: (1) the “Conciliar Argument Against Protestantism” (CAAP), arguing that Protestantism fails to provide consistent criteria for valuing conciliar authority as a guide to biblical interpretation, and (2) the “Scriptural Argument Against Dogmatic Protestantism”, arguing that sola scriptura, when understood in light of theological disagreement, ultimately becomes self-refuting in the absence of properly guiding theological authority. I argue, however, that sola scriptura is compatible with assigning an important epistemic role to both tradition and community, and that Protestant principles of theological reasoning can be defended further using recent theories in social epistemology. (shrink)

Epistemic exploitation occurs when privileged persons compel marginalized persons to educate them about the nature of their oppression. I argue that epistemic exploitation is marked by unrecognized, uncompensated, emotionally taxing, coerced epistemic labor. The coercive and exploitative aspects of the phenomenon are exemplified by the unpaid nature of the educational labor and its associated opportunity costs, the double bind that marginalized persons must navigate when faced with the demand to educate, and the need for additional labor created by the default (...) skepticism of the privileged. I explore the connections between epistemic exploitation and the two varieties of epistemic injustice that Fricker (2007) identifies, testimonial and hermeneutical injustice. I situate epistemic exploitation within Dotson’s (2012; 2014) framework of epistemic oppression, and I address the role that epistemic exploitation plays in maintaining active ignorance and upholding dominant epistemic frameworks. (shrink)

Recent work in naturalised epistemology has focused almost exclusively on the intersection of cognitive psychology and theory of knowledge; work from sociolinguistics is just now beginning to gain ground. At the same time, feminist epistemologies have striven to articulate the precise paths of connectedness and relatedness that gynocentric theory standardly postulates as being characteristic of female ways of knowing. This paper attempts to articulate the intersection of sociolinguistically naturalised epistemology and feminist theory of knowledge. A model of gynocentrically centred justification (...) is presented, and it is concluded that the intersection of these areas is a rich and rewarding one. (shrink)

I explain what haecceities are and the role they play in our thought and talk about specific individual things, whether those things are concrete or abstract. Everything that can be referred to by using a singular term has a haecceity. I distinguish between singular terms and general terms, on the one hand, and subject terms and predicate terms, on the other. I distinguish three types of sentence: singular predications; general predications; and singular quantifications. I show how singular predications can be (...) eliminated without loss of content, provided we have singular quantifications as well as general predications. This should not be confused with Quine’s “elimination of singular terms.” I say a few words about propositions. (shrink)

The article considers the thesis of epistemic dependence, which problematizes the current ideas about the nature of knowledge, its historical and methodological premises. It shows both undesirable consequences of its uncritical acceptance (such as a possible gap between knowledge and understanding) and the possibility of its interpretation in a more general social context, as a conflict of epistemic interests. It also highlights the need to consider this phenomenon in the analysis of collective knowledge and collective rationality.

The aim of this book is to answer two important questions about the issue of normativity in epistemology: Why are epistemic reasons evidential, and what makes epistemic reasons and rationality normative? Bondy's argument proceeds on the assumption that epistemic rationality goes hand in hand with basing beliefs on good evidence. The opening chapters defend a mental-state ontology of reasons, a deflationary account of how kinds of reasons are distinguished, and a deliberative guidance constraint on normative reasons. They also argue in (...) favor of doxastic voluntarism—the view that beliefs are subject to our direct voluntary control—and embrace the controversial view that voluntarism bears directly on the question of what kinds of things count as reasons for believing. The final three chapters of the book feature a noteworthy critique of the instrumental conception of the nature of epistemic rationality, as well as a defense of the instrumental normativity of epistemic rationality. The final chapter defends the view that epistemic reasons and rationality are normative for us when we have normative reason to get to the truth with respect to some proposition, and it provides a response to the swamping problem for monistic accounts of value. (shrink)