Part of a wider study of family interaction, this chapter focuses on the interactional competence of a person living with dementia and some ways in which her independence is facilitated, and personhood validated, by her interlocutors. Drawing on a corpus of 15 hours of naturally occurring conversation, the study investigates the interactional practices of a woman diagnosed with dementia (Dana) in conversation with a variety of interlocutors including family caregivers, teenage grandchildren and community service providers. This chapter examines sequences of advice-giving, shared reminiscence and occasions of confusion. Dana first draws on a lifetime of expertise as a waitress to advise her granddaughter who has recently begun her first job; second, in a sequence of reminiscence, conversational partners describe a shared experience that Dana is able to assess and engage with despite potentially being unable to remember the details for herself; finally, the analysis shows how the actions of probing and testing can lead to interactional breakdown and confusion, but then note how Dana is able to recover from the situation by moving to a familiar topic and claiming epistemic authority.

My aim in this chapter is to contribute to what the volume calls the ‘third move’ in International Relations norm studies, which explicitly addresses the legitimacy of the norm being studied as well as its influence on practice. I build on the work of those who point to the relevance of classical American Pragmatism, which considers how we know that what we are doing is appropriate once we realise that norms are the product of social and historical practices rather than abstract moral foundations. I trace the Pragmatist’s commitment to deliberative inquiry through the ideas of Charles Peirce and John Dewey and relate it to Antje Wiener’s arguments that normativity is sustained through proactive contestation. While there are overlaps between the two approaches, I argue that Deweyan Pragmatism can help us understand when it is appropriate to defend a norm against contestation. It does this by drawing on what Dewey called a ‘stock of learning’, understood as the background knowledge that has epistemic authority because it is the product of a deliberative and inclusive process of inquiry. I develop this with reference to debates within Pragmatist philosophy before applying it to offer a preliminary assessment of global health norms.

In this chapter, authority and rule are considered as analytical concepts to capture different forms of domination based on recognition. Both concepts involve the social paradox of voluntary subordination, particularly evident concerning global governance and International Organizations (IOs). The chapter discusses three theoretical solutions to the social paradox, thus three conceptualizations of authority. While contracted authority and inscribed authority represent the dominant conceptions in IR, they suffer from several shortcomings. Building on a critique of these variants, the chapter introduces reflexive authority as a third response, which understands authority in global governance as deriving from epistemic foundations that include the permanent monitoring of authorities. Reflexive authority relations involve enlightened and critical subordinates recognizing authority because they acknowledge their limitations. Instead of commands, authority holders send requests to constituencies, who monitor the authorities closely. This recognition of authority as worth observing leads to deference. Primary forms of contestations include non-compliance, delegitimation, and dissidence, which aim at different targets.

A widely shared expectation of science is that it speaks authoritatively about how the physical world works and therefore about what the consequences of different human actions and policy interventions are likely to be in that world. Science, and therefore the scientist, is believed to offer public life something different – something more truthful and hence more authoritative – than offered by politicians, journalists, lawyers, priests, or celebrities. Scientists ‘reaching a consensus’ and ‘speaking with one voice’ are integral to science’s projection of epistemic authority. This is especially the case with the IPCC, where its authority is perceived to rest on its communication of a scientific consensus. This chapter first summarises the nature of consensus-making in science in general, before examining the IPCC’s consensus-seeking practices. It then evaluates some of the arguments for and against the pursuit of consensus by the IPCC and concludes by highlighting some future challenges for the IPCC with respect to its pursuit of consensus.

An additional role the virtues can play involves helping to evaluate (and thereby possibly even guide) conduct. It is here in particular that responsibility or accountability mechanisms often come up short or can at least be said to be naturally limited. Typically, such mechanisms focus on single instances of conduct, divorced from what preceded or inspired them, or then conduct might be such that it can hardly be caught by rules. Some have pleaded strongly for “intelligent accountability,” but the combination of having rules and organs or agents to apply and enforce them as they relate to particular facts makes such an idea well-nigh impossible. In the typical accountability scheme, the act under review usually gets simplified and stylized. This has heuristic benefits in that it simplifies what actually goes on, but these benefits may come at the cost of proper understanding.

This chapter explores why we should think common sense has epistemic authority. First, it lays out exactly what common sense and the supposed epistemic authority of common sense amount to. It then assesses seven proposals that we find in the literature as to why common sense has epistemic authority. They say, respectively, that common-sense beliefs are irresistible; that there are no serious epistemic alternatives to thinking that common-sense beliefs have epistemic authority; that common-sense beliefs are certain, or at least more certain than any alternatives; that common-sense beliefs are instances of knowledge; that common-sense beliefs are vague and ambiguous and, therefore, likely to be true; that common-sense beliefs are the product of a reliable process of cultural evolution; and, finally, that God would not deceive us on such a large scale. The chapter argues that the first five answers are not convincing, not even jointly, but that the sixth answer is and that the seventh reply may well be combined with it.

The introduction asserts that the different causal, spatial, and comparative relations in Plato's Timaeus generated a model of knowledge that denies a strict separation between the disciplines. I contrast the dialogue's epistemic vision with the prevailing hierarchies of knowledge developed by ancient thinkers, including Plato himself, which ranks medicine below philosophy because it is a technē ('art'), deals with the body, and its practitioners were often enslaved or freedpersons. I argue that Galen's expansive refiguring of medicine's boundaries -- his 'boundary work' -- is part of a tactic to improve his profession's credibility and his own authority. After outlining my approach to science as a discursive practice, I consider how Galen's philosophical training enabled him to exploit the epistemic possibilities of the Timaeus, which seems to recognize that knowledge can be divided and bounded differently by each knower. I conclude by proposing that Galen’s own role in interfacing Arabic readers with the dialogue called for Arabic doctors and philosophers to reevaluate their own categories and taxonomies of knowledge, which had been shaped by late-antique epistemologies.

This chapter explores the expert–novice construct through an investigation of classroom discourse focusing on four international graduate students in an MA program in TESOL at a US university. It examines the contingent and shifting nature of expert–novice in two teaching methods courses, which were situated at a nexus of multiple communities of practice: the classrooms, the program, graduate school, the TESOL profession, etc. Microanalysis of classroom interactions reveals how instructors ascribed knowledge to students and positioned them along a continuum of expertise, and considers how focal students’ identities as nonnative speakers of English shaped this positioning. Classroom practices are juxtaposed against focal students’ self-representations as displayed in interviews and classroom behavior as they validated, resisted, or negotiated their positioning. The chapter reflects on the impact of these expert–novice identifications on focal students’ socialization as well as implications of a more dynamic and fluid conceptualization of expert–novice for the study of academic discourse socialization.

Epistemic trust is an axiom of dialogical epistemology. It refers to the ethical relation between the Ego-Alter and has deep roots in daily life. Epistemic trust makes sense only in relation to its opposite, whether distrust, mistrust, doubt, risk or danger. I have explored two basic and mutually overlapping forms of epistemic trust/distrust. One form concerns the participants’ presupposition, or the lack of it that they live in a temporarily shared social world comprising a common ground for understanding and interpretation of their social reality. The other form refers to the capacity and readiness of participants (or the lack of it) to learn and accept knowledge and experience from one another. When established, epistemic trust is implicitly taken for granted, and it forms the common ground for understanding of the social reality, of common values and intentions to aim at ‘good life’. Epistemic trust is historically and culturally embedded and it ranges from micro-social to macro-social forms. The chapter discusses epistemic trust focusing on authority and positions of trust, on communicative contracts of secrets and non-disclosure, the hermeneutics of trust and the hermeneutics of suspicion. It shows some examples of complex relations of trust/distrust, such as the dialogicality of confession.

This Chapter is concerned with axioms and concepts of dialogical epistemology derived from the Ego-Alter interdependence. This interdependence is always about something, i.e. about objects or events, or about reflections on the Self’s and the Other(s)’ thoughts, imaginations and actions. I have referred to triangular relations between the Ego-Alter-Object in two ways. First, following Serge Moscovici’s ideas, there is a triangular relation between the Ego-Alter-Object of knowledge. Second, following the ideas of the anthropologist Louis Dumont, I have introduced the consumerist triadic relation the Ego-Alter-Thing of desire. Ethics in these two kinds of triangle follows different routes. In the former case, ethical relations between the Ego-Alter stem directly from intersubjectivity and the search for social recognition as the primary ontological relations. In the latter case, the ethical relations between the Ego-Alter are masked by the apparent priority given to the relation between the Self and the Thing of desire. In this case, the Ego’s search for social recognition, which superficially appears as craving for the Thing of desire, is in fact the desire for the desire of the Other’s desire. In other words, obtaining Objects of Others provides the Self with a social status and thus, with illusory social recognition.