It is common for caregivers of the cognitively disabled to speak on behalf of their charges who cannot speak for themselves. Their testimony, however, is often dismissed either because of doubt about their having relevant expertise or because of worries that they are blinded by love. This paper is positioned against such dismissals. I argue that good caregivers are uniquely positioned to offer reliable and often insightful testimony about the well-being of their charges and so ought to be taken more seriously. I argue first for the reliability of caregiver testimony via a phenomenological account, which reveals that accuracy is constitutive of good caregiving. I then argue further that caregiver testimony can be especially insightful because the love that is characteristic of good caregiving may be semi-transformative, facilitating insight into cognitively disabled lives in a way that cannot be achieved through more detached forms of engagement.

In the wake of the explosion of the “comfort women” issue, with the help of lawyers and activists, Chinese comfort women instigated four class-action lawsuits against the Japanese government. However, how the lawyers represented the history of comfort women and what happened in the courtroom have remained obscure. Unlike the conventional verdict-centered approach to civilian trials involving comfort women, this research adopts a procedural approach by delving into the court transcripts, legal briefs, and other evidentiary materials tendered to the court. It argues that although the plaintiffs lost every case, through the court proceedings the victims and their lawyers managed to carve out an official space for knowledge transmission and recognition. These proceedings have the potential to serve as an exemplary model for future civil trials adjudicating injustices (historical or otherwise) involving sexual and gender-based violence.

Standardly, echo chambers are thought to be structures that we should avoid. Agents should keep away from them, to be able to assess a fuller range of evidence and avoid having their confidence in that information manipulated. This paper argues against that standard view. Not only can echo chambers be neutral or good for us, but the existing definitions apply so widely that such chambers are unavoidable. We are all in large numbers of echo chambers at any time – they can be found not just on social media or in political groups, but in almost every social or epistemic group we could categorise ourselves into. Because we are finite and fallible, we cannot escape them and need to exist in them just to get by. The concept, then, does not actually capture something as structurally problematic as the paradigmatic cases would suggest. Our way of using the term in social epistemology needs to change.

Slavery persisted in Morocco well into the twentieth century and throughout the French Protectorate (1912–56), long after it was abolished in other French-occupied territories (1848). While work by historians has illuminated a previously shadowy history of race and slavery in Morocco, less attention has been paid to the growing corpus of literary texts representing enslaved subjectivities under the Protectorate. Through their literary excavations of the slave past, such works retell the history of Moroccan slavery from the perspective of those most affected. This essay takes translator Nouzha Fassi Fihri’s Dada l’Yakout (2010) as a case in point. Although marketed as a novel, the text is also a dense oral history that channels the voice of an enslaved woman who really existed: Jmia, who was abducted as a child at the beginning of the twentieth century and died in 1975. Considered as “Moroccan other-archive” (El Guabli 2023) and imaginative archeology, literary works chart a way forward for reckoning with the enduring legacies of slavery and the slave trade in Morocco.

Epistemic trust in others frequently cannot be disentangled from interpersonal trust more generally, but the epistemic implications of how we affectively express our trust in others are under-investigated. This essay claims that gratitude, despite its empirically undeniable importance to human flourishing generally, is also important epistemically and in several intersecting ways. To be grateful to a person is to represent the world differently in key respects. Gratitude, even if it is for past non-epistemic benefits, should play an important role in shaping who we epistemically rely on. Gratitude for specifically epistemic benefits is an important way in which we show our attunement to epistemic value and contribute to the incentive structures that make much of our public knowledge and informational ecosystems possible. Likewise, ingratitude is a crippling epistemic vice that renders our dependence on quality sources of information fragile and vulnerable to capture by misinformation.

Who deserves credit for epistemic successes, and who is to blame for epistemic failures? Extreme views, which would place responsibility either solely on the individual or solely on the individual’s surrounding environment, are not plausible. Recently, progress has been made toward articulating virtue epistemology as a suitable middle ground. A socio-environmentally oriented virtue epistemology can recognize that an individual’s traits play an important role in shaping what that individual believes, while also recognizing that some of the most efficacious individual traits have to do with how individuals structure their epistemic environments and how they respond to information received within these environments. I contribute to the development of such an epistemology by introducing and elucidating the virtue of epistemic exactingness, which is characterized by a motivation to regulate the epistemically significant conduct of others.

We acquire from others many of our epistemic resources – individual items of propositional knowledge but also evidential standards, perceptual sensibilities, and the overarching perspectives that include beliefs, standards, and sensibilities together. Knowledge from testimony, which is one category of acquisition of epistemic resources from others, has been studied extensively by epistemologists. We can begin to explore the wider realm of epistemic sharing by varying the characteristic features of testimony. Eleven dimensions of variation provide some structure to this domain. The interactive complexity of the dimensions suggests a virtue epistemological approach to the evaluation of patterns of receptivity to the variety of sharings that we confront as knowers.

Interpersonalist theories of testimony have the theoretical virtue of giving room to the characteristic interpersonal features of testimonial exchange among persons. Nonetheless, it has been argued that they are at a serious disadvantage when it comes to accounting for the way in which testimonial beliefs may be epistemically justified. In this paper, we defend the epistemological credentials of interpersonalism, emphasizing that it is inseparable from the acceptance of non-evidential epistemic reasons to believe, which demands proper conceptual elaborations on the notions of epistemic reasons and of epistemic justification. We offer a proper reading of epistemic reason, and we defend non-purism on justification as the adequate way to conceive the epistemic proposal of interpersonalism on testimony, realizing that only this combination is capable of apprehending certain cases in which there seems to be no way to rule out the idea that the assurance offered by the testifier offers an epistemic reason to believe that it is not evidential.

I argue that a general feature of human psychology provides strong reason to modify or reject anti-reductionism about the epistemology of testimony. Because of the work of what I call “the background” (which is a collection of all of an individual's synthetizations, summarizations, memories of experiences, beliefs, etc.) we cannot help but form testimonial beliefs on the basis of a testifier's say so along with additional evidence, concepts, beliefs, and so on. Given that we arrive at testimonial beliefs through the work of the background, to be justified in holding a testimonial belief, we must not only have a rational speaker's say so, but we must also form such beliefs in a right way. If this is right, then, contrary to typical anti-reductionism, justified testimonial beliefs require more than just a trustworthy testifier's say so – another requirement is that they are formed in a right way.

The fact that each of us has significantly greater confidence in the claims of co-partisans – those belonging to groups with which we identify – explains, in large part, why so many people believe a significant amount of the misinformation they encounter. It's natural to assume that such misinformed partisan beliefs typically involve a rational failure of some kind, and philosophers and psychologists have defended various accounts of the nature of the rational failure purportedly involved. I argue that none of the standard diagnoses of the irrationality of misinformed partisan beliefs is convincing, but I also argue that we ought to reject attempts to characterize these beliefs as rational or consistent with epistemic virtue. Accordingly, I defend an alternative diagnosis of the relevant epistemic error. Specifically, I maintain that such beliefs typically result when an individual evaluating testimony assigns more weight to co-partisanship than he ought to under the circumstances, and consequently believes the testimony of co-partisans when better alternatives are available.

The synodal way invites the Church to understand itself as the People of God journeying together in faith. Giving testimony is proposed here as a way of reflecting upon that journey. The Charismatic practice of giving testimony is examined as a form of reflexive faith experience. Examined in terms of witness, desire and story, the faith experience of the individual is explored for its communal, ecclesial context, and the theological contribution it makes. The discernment that links personal, spiritual experience to communal faith and practice is then investigated in the light of conciliar teaching to propose, in conclusion, how this might be undertaken in a parish setting.