What, if anything, can be morally objectionable about the practice of epistemic partiality commonly associated with personal friendship? Recently, Jack Warman has argued that it may lead us to insult non-friends and perpetuate testimonial injustice against them by refusing their relevant testimony about our friends. In this article, we challenge Warman’s view on three grounds. First, we show that it underspecifies the conditions under which refusal of non-friends’ testimony counts as insulting. Second, we argue that epistemic partiality, as discussed in the literature, does not in fact require or lead individuals to refuse non-friends’ testimony in an insulting way. Third, we show that Warman’s two arguments concerning the moral wrongness of epistemic partiality assign such wrongness in two competing ways and thus turn out to be incompatible with each other. Finally, we go beyond Warman’s proposal to consider whether epistemic partiality may generate epistemic injustice in another way, by bestowing friends with credibility excesses.
Are beliefs subject to moral norms? Doxastic moralists argue that we can morally wrong others by what we believe about them – say, by holding racially prejudiced beliefs. Opponents argue that we cannot morally wrong others by holding beliefs: it only seems as if beliefs can wrong others because beliefs are connected to wrongful inquiry, attention, or assertion. Such debunking explanations face a problem: they cannot explain moralist intuitions concerning our accountability practices when there are no blameworthy actions in belief’s vicinity. I propose that this problem can be solved by appealing to epistemic accountability practices, such as epistemic blame and epistemic atonement. A belief can be epistemically blameworthy even if there was no blameworthy action in its vicinity; and this calls for practices of redress that resemble moral practices. In this way, endorsing our epistemic sociality – i.e., acknowledging how we hold each other epistemically accountable for beliefs – undermines a main motivation for moralizing beliefs.
Two skeptical challenges have recently been raised against the existence of epistemic blame. One challenge argues that all seeming instances of epistemic blame are nothing more than moral blame in disguise. The second challenge asserts that epistemic blame is in fact nothing more than mere negative evaluation. I aim to simultaneously defend the existence of epistemic blame against both forms of skepticism. But rather than directly defending epistemic blame, I build an indirect case for the phenomenon’s existence. To do so, I return to the moral domain and examine three of what I call blame’s neighboring phenomena: excuses, exemptions, and the objective attitude. I develop domain-generalizable connections between each of these phenomena and blame. Next, I return to the epistemic domain, providing examples of excuses, exemptions, and objective attitudes being offered or adopted in response to poor epistemic performances. Given our derived evidentiary connections, I argue that the presence of these phenomena in the epistemic domain is compelling evidence for the existence of epistemic blame.
Can predictable impairments of epistemic performance constitute injustice in the absence of harassment, manipulation, or prejudicial credibility deflation? I use this question to examine a case drawn from ordinary intellectual exchange: in mixed-sex settings, some male speakers may be distracted by the perceived attractiveness of a female interlocutor, with consequences for how their arguments are received. I argue that, in the stipulated case, the man has not suffered an injustice and the woman has not wronged him. The philosophical puzzle is why that verdict is correct, given a tempting inferential pattern in recent work on epistemic injustice from patterned epistemic disadvantage, especially when identity-linked, to an injustice verdict. I argue that injustice ascriptions require epistemic harm, wrong-making features, and accountability. The resulting framework distinguishes epistemic misfortune and thin unfairness from genuine epistemic injustice and helps assess contemporary disputes about the scope of the concept.
Arata Hamawaki proposes that external world skepticism arises from dissatisfaction with the limitations of ordinary epistemic life. He offers a Davidson-style transcendental argument in response, urges that certain views of perceptual knowledge lead to skepticism, and suggests that we can’t properly claim to know there is an external world. I address each of these charges. After reviewing failings in Barry Stroud’s attempt to get skepticism going, I explain why dissatisfaction with the limitations of ordinary epistemic life does not lead to a reasonable skeptical conclusion. The Davidson-style argument is not needed for a satisfactory response. It risks obscuring our epistemic fallibility and vulnerability and perhaps expresses a yearning for more security than we can have. Finally, there is no good argument for the claim that we can’t properly claim to know that there is a world outside of our minds. An appendix addresses considerations about perceptual knowledge.
Adam Leite· International Journal for th...· 0 citations
Standards permissivism claims that multiple agents can be equally rational in holding different doxastic attitudes to the same proposition while having the same evidence because of differences in their epistemic standards. I argue that a successful account of standards permissivism should meet two explanatory goals. First, it should explain how we can regard epistemic standards that lead to different doxastic attitudes from one’s own as no less expectedly accuracy-conducive overall. Second, it should explain why we have reason to stick to our own standards when we regard other rational standards as no less expectedly accuracy-conducive. I consider and reject two accounts of standards permissivism that seem to satisfy these goals—Robert Mark Simpson’s (2017) cognitive abilities account and Laura Frances Callahan’s (2021) epistemic existentialism account—before proposing my own. I argue that the commitments and choices individuals have made in regard to their particular epistemic standards can give non-arbitrary reasons to stick to those standards, because such choices have refined and filled in those standards and molded each individual’s cognitive abilities such that their standards are the most expectedly accuracy-conducive for them. Nonetheless, they can regard other agents’ different standards as no less expectedly accuracy-conducive overall, because other agents have filled in and become more adept with their own standards that meet certain minimal criteria of rationality.
Graham Curtiss-Rowlands· Synthese· 0 citations
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