By lopsided majorities, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a series of cases, persistently commanded the lower courts to condition the admission of proffered expert testimony on the demonstrated validity of the proponents’ claims of expertise. In at least one broad area–the so-called forensic sciences–the courts below have largely evaded the Supreme Court's holdings. This paper aims to try to explain this massive defiance by the lower courts in terms of social epistemology.

Jennifer Lackey (2016) challenged group acceptance accounts of justification by arguing that these accounts make the possession of evidence arbitrary and hence lead to illegitimate manipulation of the group's evidence. She proposes that the only way out is to rely on the epistemic propriety of the individual group members, which leads to a dilemma for group acceptance views: either they are wrong about justification, or they cease to rely only on group acceptances. I argue that there is a third option based on general expectations of epistemic propriety that restricts the group's maximal justification. A group cannot be more justified than any individual in the group's position could be expected to be. I motivate this solution by a discussion of normative defeat and epistemic expectations as proposed by Goldberg (2018).

Standpoint epistemologies are based on two central theses: the situated knowledge thesis and the thesis of epistemic privilege. The bias paradox suggests that there is a tension between these two notions, in the sense that they are self-contradictory. In this paper, I aim to defend standpoint epistemologies from this challenge. This defense is based on a distinction between subjective and objective justifications. According to the former, a subject S is subjectively justified in believing a proposition P iff S's belief in P coheres with S's pre-existing beliefs. According to the latter, a subject S is objectively justified in believing a proposition P iff S's subjective justification is truth-conducive. I argue that, if the situated knowledge thesis is spelled out in terms of subjective justification, and if the thesis of epistemic privilege is spelled out in terms of objective justification, then there is no contradiction. If this line of thought is correct, then the bias paradox does not show that standpoint epistemologies are self-contradictory.

White (2015) proposes an a priori justification of the reliability of inductive prediction methods based on his thesis of induction-friendliness. It asserts that there are by far more induction-friendly event sequences than induction-unfriendly event sequences. In this paper I contrast White's thesis with the famous no free lunch (NFL) theorem. I explain two versions of this theorem, the strong NFL theorem applying to binary and the weak NFL theorem applying to real-valued predictions. I show that both versions refute the thesis of induction-friendliness. In the conclusion I argue that an a priori justification of the reliability of induction based on a uniform probability distribution over possible event sequences is impossible. In the outlook I consider two alternative approaches: (i) justification externalism and (ii) optimality justifications.

The key concept of this contribution is that of aptness, or success that manifests the agent’s competence. This concept is used in an attempt to gain philosophical understanding not only of knowledge but also of perception and of intentional action.

When relying on someone whom we take to be an epistemic authority, should we believe preemptively what she does or not? According to Linda Zagzebski, the answer to this question is yes: beliefs formed on the basis of what an authority believes can be epistemically rational, where “[w]hat is essential to authority is that it is a normative power that generates reasons for others to do or to believe something preemptively” (Zagzebski 2012: 102). In a recent paper in this journal, Sarah Wright takes issue with this thesis, but defends a relativized version of it. Here I show that as a general policy – even relative to certain kinds of cases, such as those involving agreement or disagreement – we should neither always add nor replace our reasons with those provided by an authority. Thus, we should never believe preemptively.

I argue that patients who suffer genital surgery to ‘disambiguate’ their sexual anatomy, a practice labelled ‘intersex genital mutilation’ (IGM) by intersex advocates, can be understood as victims of hermeneutical injustice in the sense elaborated by Miranda Fricker. This claim is clarified and defended from two objections. I further argue that a particular subset of cases of IGM-based hermeneutical injustice instantiate a novel form of hermeneutical injustice, which I call deception-based hermeneutical injustice. I highlight how this differs from central types of hermeneutical injustice in the literature and trace its harms.

This paper concerns the relationship between epistemology and radically extended cognition. Radically extended cognition (REC) – as advanced by Andy Clark and David Chalmers – is cognition that is partly located outside the biological boundaries of the cognizing subject. Epistemologists have begun to wonder whether REC has any consequences for theories of knowledge. For instance, while Duncan Pritchard suggests that REC might have implications for which virtue epistemology is acceptable, J. Adam Carter wonders whether REC threatens anti-luck epistemology. In this paper, I argue that the possibility of REC has no systematic consequences for theorizing in epistemology. I suggest an alternative relationship between the two: epistemology can play a role in diagnosing cases of REC. Thus, by establishing that entities partially located outside biological boundaries don't play certain epistemic roles, one can establish that they don't play the related cognitive roles either. I conclude the paper by illustrating this last point.

Although John Stuart Mill places considerable emphasis on three information signalling devices – debate, votes and prices – he remains curiously sceptical about the prospects of institutional or social epistemology. In this paper, I explore Mill's modest scepticism about institutional epistemology and compare and contrast that with the attitudes of liberal theorists such as F. A. Hayek and John Dewey who are much more enthusiastic about the prospects of social epistemology as part of their defences of liberalism. The paper examines the extent to which Hayek and Dewey ignore concerns originally raised by Mill. I conclude that Mill's modest scepticism is reflected in the epistemological abstinence of contemporary liberal philosophers such as John Rawls, and that his elevation of philosophy over democracy remains a challenge to contemporary defenders of the political value of social or institutional epistemology.

As a strategy for exploring the relationship between understanding and knowledge, we consider whether epistemic luck – which is typically thought to undermine knowledge – undermines understanding. Questions about the etiology of understanding have also been at the heart of recent theoretical debates within epistemology. Kvanvig (2003) put forward the argument that there could be lucky understanding and produced an example that he deemed persuasive. Grimm (2006) responded with a case that, he argued, demonstrated that there could not be lucky understanding. In this paper, we empirically examine how participants' patterns of understanding attributions line up with the predictions of Kvanvig and Grimm. We argue that the data challenge Kvanvig's position. People do not differentiate between knowing-why and understanding-why on the basis of proper etiology: attributions of knowledge and understanding involve comparable (and minimal) roles for epistemic luck. We thus posit that folk knowledge and understanding are etiologically symmetrical.

The Science Wars have not involved any violence, nor even threats of violence. Thus the label “wars” for this series of discussions, mostly one-sided and mostly located within the academy, is something of an overblown metaphor. Nonetheless, I will suggest that there are some respects in which the metaphor is appropriate. The Science Wars involve territory, albeit a metaphorical kind of territory. They inspire work that can be best interpreted as ideological, a result of disciplinary interests. Moreover, fellow participants in the wars and others reward that ideological work.

My goal in this is to display efforts to maintain a discipline's epistemic authority, the recognition that members of that discipline have legitimate claims to knowledge on a subject. The central section of the paper takes the form of a discussion of one recent contribution to the Science Wars, James Robert Brown's Who Rules in Science? My argument is at least somewhat generalizable beyond this book, and it therefore points to interesting phenomena related to epistemic authority.

Although radical forms of relativism are perhaps beyond the epistemological pale, I argue here that a more moderate form may be plausible, and articulate the conditions under which moderate epistemic relativism could well serve our epistemic goals. In particular, as a result of our limitations as human cognizers, we find ourselves needing to investigate the dappled and difficult world by means of competing communities of highly specialized researchers. We would do well, I argue, to admit of the existence of unresolvable disputes between such communities, but only so long as there is a sufficient amount of fruitful exchange between them as well. I close with some speculation about when it is or is not legitimate to make an “appeal to discipline”: responding to another’s argument by saying something like, “we should do it this way, because we are philosophers (/linguists/psychologists/…), and that’s just what we do”.

The epistemological analysis offered in this paper reveals that a combination of pieces of evidence, none of them sufficient by itself to warrant a causal conclusion to the legally required degree of proof, may do so jointly. The legal analysis offered here, interlocking with this, reveals that Daubert’s requirement that courts screen each item of scientific expert testimony for reliability can actually impede the process of arriving at the conclusion most warranted by the evidence proffered.

Common knowledge is usually defined as a state in which everyone knows that p, everyone knows that everyone knows that p, and so on, ad infinitum. This definition is usually attributed to David Lewis, despite the fact that his own formulation bears no resemblance to common knowledge as it is usually understood. In this paper, I argue that this concept of common knowledge requires revision. Contrary to usual practice, it turns out to be difficult to model formally because existing models fail to distinguish between full-blown common knowledge and merely finite levels of interactive knowledge. Conceptually, the concept is incompatible with Lewis's intended purpose and obscures the explanatory role played by rational choice models. I propose that the concept of common knowledge be brought better into alignment with Lewis's actual formulation. This reconceptualization of common knowledge suggests a greater focus on explanations that make recourse to the cognitive constraints of real-world agents.

Eyewitnesses are susceptible to recollecting that they experienced an event in a way that is consistent with false information provided to them after the event. The effect is commonly called the misinformation effect. Because jurors tend to find eyewitness testimony compelling and persuasive, it is argued that jurors are likely to give inappropriate credence to eyewitness testimony, judging it to be reliable when it is not. It is argued that jurors should be informed about psychological findings on the misinformation effect, to ensure that they lower the credence that they give to eyewitness testimony to reflect the unreliability of human memory that is demonstrated by the effect. Here I present a new argument, the overcritical juror argument, to support the conclusion that eyewitnesses are likely to make inappropriate credence assignments to eyewitness testimony. Whereas previously authors have argued that jurors will tend to give too much credence to eyewitness testimony, I identify circumstances in which jurors will give too little credence to some pieces of testimony. In my view jurors should be informed by psychological findings relating to the misinformation effect to ensure that they do not lower the credence that they give to eyewitness testimony when they should not.

This article is an exercise in the virtue epistemology of the internet, an area of applied virtue epistemology that investigates how online environments impact the development of intellectual virtues, and how intellectual virtues manifest within online environments. I examine online echo chambers and epistemic bubbles (Nguyen 2020, Episteme 17(2), 141–61), exploring the conceptual relationship between these online environments and the virtue of open-mindedness (Battaly 2018b, Episteme 15(3), 261–82). The article answers two key individual-level, virtue epistemic questions: (Q1) How does immersion in online echo chambers and epistemic bubbles affect the cultivation and preservation of open-mindedness, and (Q2) Is it always intellectually virtuous to exhibit open-mindedness in the context of online echo chambers and epistemic bubbles? In response to Q1, I contend that both online echo chambers and online epistemic bubbles threaten to undermine the cultivation and preservation of open-mindedness, albeit via different mechanisms and to different degrees. In response to Q2, I affirm that both a deficiency and excess of open-mindedness can be virtuous in these online environments, depending on the epistemic orientation of the digital user.

Epistemological Disjunctivism is a view about paradigm cases of perceptual knowledge. Duncan Pritchard claims that it is particularly well suited to accounting for internalist and externalist intuitions. A number of authors have disputed this claim, arguing that there are problems for Pritchard's way with internalist intuitions. I share the worry. However, I don't think it has been expressed as effectively as it can be. My aim in this paper is to present a new way of formulating the worry, in terms of an “explanatory challenge”. The explanatory challenge is a simple, yet powerful and illuminating challenge for Epistemological Disjunctivism. It is illuminating in the sense that it shows us why Epistemological Disjunctivism must take on certain internalistically problematic commitments. A secondary aim of this paper is to examine whether the recently much-discussed distinction between justifications and excuses in epistemology can support an adequate response. I will argue that it cannot.

This book symposium on Accuracy and the Laws of Credence consists of an overview of the book’s argument by the author, Richard Pettigrew, together with four commentaries on different aspects of that argument. Ben Levinstein challenges the characterisation of the legitimate measures of inaccuracy that plays a central role in the arguments of the book. Julia Staffel asks whether the arguments of the book are compatible with an ontology of doxastic states that includes full beliefs as well as credences. Fabrizio Cariani raises concerns about the argument offered in the book for various chance-credence principles. And Sophie Horowitz questions the assumptions at play in the book’s argument for the Principle of Indifference, as well as asking how the various laws of credence considered in the book relate to one another.

I argue racial injustice undermines the reliability of news source reports in the information domain of racial injustice. I argue that this in turn undermines subjects’ doxastic justification in inferences they base on these news sources in the racial injustice information domain. I explain that racial injustice does this undermining through the effect of racial prejudice on news organizations’ members and the effect of society's racially unjust structure on non-dominant racial group-controlled news sources.

This note documents Aumann's reason for omitting the “empty shells” argument for the common prior assumption from the final version of “Correlated Equilibrium as an Expression of Bayesian Rationality.” It then continues to discuss the argument and concludes that rational entities cannot learn their own identity; if they do not know it a priori, they never will.