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  • Against Radical Epistemic Environmentalism (Or Why Uncritically Deferring to Authority is Still Irrational)

  • Robert Mark Simpson, Toby Handfield
  • Journal:
    Episteme , First View
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    28 April 2025, pp. 1-15
    • Article
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  • Neil Levy’s book Bad Beliefs defends a prima facie attractive approach to social epistemic policy – namely, an environmental approach, which prioritises the curation of a truth-conducive information environment above the inculcation of individual criti cal thinking abilities and epistemic virtues. However, Levy’s defence of this approach is grounded in a surprising and provocative claim about the rationality of deference. His claim is that it’s rational for people to unquestioningly defer to putative authorities, because these authorities hold expert status. As friends of the environmental approach, we try to show why it will be better for that approach to not be argumentatively grounded in this revisionist claim about when and why deference is rational. We identify both theoretical and practical problems that this claim gives rise to.