In this paper, I argue against certain positive epistemic norms, that is, norms that state sufficient conditions for being obligated to believe something. In particular, I argue against positive epistemic norms where the sufficient conditions involve being in a position to know. Such norms face two kinds of problems: they make demands that exceed our cognitive capacity, and they yield obligations and permissions to believe that seem irrational.

Despite the vast literature on deliberative democracy, comparatively little has been said about the kind of journalism that best suits it. Drawing on insights from deliberative theorists and communication scholars, I suggest that the core function of deliberative journalism is to promote high-quality democratic deliberation. I then identify and explicate four key duties that journalists should honor to fulfill this function. The general duty of deliberative gatekeeping commands journalists to select the contents with the greatest potential to foster quality deliberation. The selection of issues is regulated by the duty to set a deliberative agenda, which requires journalists to report only on issues worth deliberating about. The selection and communication of information is regulated by the duty to explain, which commands journalists to make issues understandable to their audiences, and the duty to promote public reasoning, which commands journalists to actively stimulate their audiences’ engagement in deliberations. Finally, to clarify the distinctiveness of deliberative journalism, I contrast this ideal with the ideals of objective reporting, partisan journalism, watchdog journalism, commercial journalism, and public journalism.

Many scholars have characterized conspiracy theories as self-sealing. That is, they are immune to disconfirmation, since conspiracy can always explain away counterevidence. This is thought to make belief in them irrational. However, the potential to escape disconfirmation by modification of a theory, or of related auxiliary hypotheses, is a feature common to all theories, including scientific theories. Further, attempts to rescue theories from disconfirmation often come at an epistemic cost. More specifically, such attempts, to the degree they seem ad hoc, tend to lower the theory’s credibility. Those who characterize conspiracy theories as “self-sealing” tend to ignore the implication of this. Namely, the fact that conspiracy theories may theoretically resist refutation (a fact shared by all theories) does not mean that they are immune to all standards of evaluation. Individual conspiracy theories should be evaluated on their various individual qualities. This includes the degree to which a particular conspiracy theory depends on positing an implausible cover-up. Such a dependence is, indeed, a consideration that may potentially weigh heavily against that individual theory. But such a judgment will need to take into account the reasons given in support of the particular postulated cover-up, as well as other relevant considerations.

This essay raises a novel objection against Kearns & Star’s (Kearns S. and Star D. 2008. ‘Reasons: Explanations or Evidence?’ Ethics 119(1), 31–56; Kearns S. and Star D. 2009. ‘Reasons as Evidence.’ Oxford Studies in Metaethics 4: 215–42.) influential account of normative reasons – the Reasons as Evidence (short: RaE) view. The RaE view’s basic idea is that normative reasons can be analysed in terms of another concept, namely evidence for ought-propositions. This view, I argue, faces an ‘asymmetry charge’. That is, evidence for ought-propositions and reasons relate differently to (potential) ought-facts and behave differently in our deliberations about what we ought to ‘do’ (in a broad sense, including action and belief). On the one hand, normative reasons, if sufficiently strong, are connected to a determinate ought (statement). On the other hand, evidence for ought-statements, even if strong and assessed correctly, can be misleading. I consider potential replies to the alleged asymmetry of reasons and evidence for ought-propositions – either accommodating it or explaining it away. These replies, based on different (perspectivist and objectivist) accounts of ‘ought’, however, are inconsistent with the RaE view – or so I argue. This essay focuses on epistemic normativity, i.e. on reasons and oughts that are concerned with beliefs (not actions). I think, however, that similar arguments could be made about cases of practical normativity (concerned with action) as well.

What grounds epistemic normativity? Or, in other words, why should agents follow epistemic norms? A popular view about the source of epistemic normativity is instrumentalism. This view holds that epistemic norms gain their authority by being conducive to other things we place value in, such as survival or practical reasoning. In this paper, I explore an alternative view, which is inspired by Christine Korsgaard’s account of the source of moral normativity. This view claims that the authority of epistemic norms is grounded in the self-identities of agents and thereby ultimately in the value of humanity. I will argue that the account sketched in this paper enjoys crucial advantages over alternative accounts that have been proposed in recent literature – in particular those that develop Kant-inspired accounts of epistemic normativity.

While research on oppression has focused on the various ways in which oppressed or marginalized individuals are disadvantaged, standpoint epistemologists have long been arguing that the standpoints achieved from oppressed social locations can provide the marginalized with an epistemic advantage. While in themselves laudable, we venture, discussions of the advantage thesis tend to continue a tradition in mainstream epistemology that undermines the crucial role affectivity plays in disclosing facts about the world by framing the debate in purely epistemic terms. Bringing standpoint theory into conversation with contemporary philosophy of emotions, we argue, allows us to recognize the epistemic value of emotions and to see that some knowledge the marginalized can gain about the workings of oppression while cultivating their standpoint is at root fundamentally and irreducibly affective. This lends not only more credibility to the advantage thesis in general, but it also allows to arbitrate between two different readings of this thesis that are currently a matter of controversy: marginalized standpoints afford knowledge that is, due to its fundamentally affective nature, not just easier for the marginalized than the dominant to obtain, but in principle inaccessible to the dominant.

Traditional philosophy of religion has been put under pressure to reform from different theoretical camps in the last few decades. One of the most salient charges is that the focus on belief as the mark of religion fails to capture a wide variety of religious phenomena and practices, particularly those outside of the Abrahamitic traditions. As a response to this challenge, this article proposes and develops the notion of religious alief as an additional analytical tool to conceptualize religious phenomena that elude characterization in terms of belief. This article first introduces religious aliefs as largely automatic, habitual mental states that influence behavior, feelings, and attitudes, even when a person does not hold an overt or tacit belief in the supernatural content involved. Subsequently, this article argues that religious phenomena such as apotropaic rituals, purification rituals, spontaneous prayer in crisis, jinx (and other folk-religious notions), certain taboos, and the recently coined Somethingism can be explained in terms of religious aliefs.

Moral disagreement is often taken to undermine claims of moral knowledge. Here, I try to show this widely held view is not true of all moral disagreements. Imagine you encounter MJ. MJ is devoted to excellence in basketball, and he excels at it in a way very few ever have. However, this single-minded pursuit blinds him to other considerations. He is indifferent to larger moral issues and expresses toxic masculinity in his interactions with others. He demeans and degrades others to win basketball games. Suppose you know that, even in ideal conditions, you would not agree on how to live. You have incompatible values. However, you do not think MJ is a fool or evil. You find his achievements to be inspiring. He has his faults but leads a good life. Now, imagine that MJ becomes familiar with your life. He is puzzled by your obsession with philosophy and thinks you are too morally sensitive. Nevertheless, he finds something to appreciate in your life. A person you admire with different fundamental values admires you. As long as you accept that there are better and worse ways of moral thinking, you can accept this moral epistemology regardless of your moral metaphysics.

In recent epistemology, introspection principles are commonly rejected. One of the central reasons for this is the adoption of Williamson’s anti-luminosity arguments (1996, 2000) and the popularity of the associated epistemic externalist position. This rejection, however, comes with theoretical costs concerning the applications of introspection principles in epistemic and doxastic logic and modeling cooperative behavior. In this paper, I provide a way to solve this dilemma by arguing that the principle KB – expressing one’s privileged knowledge of their beliefs – remains unscathed by Williamson’s argument while saving the important theoretical applications introspective principles are used for. I propose a way of justifying KB and rejecting KK on principled grounds using Byrne’s (Byrne, A. (2005). ‘Introspection.’ Philosophical Topics 33(1), 79–104., Byrne, A. (2018). Transparency and Self-Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press.) transparency account of introspection, improving upon a previous attempt by Das and Salow (Das, N. and Salow, B. (2018). ‘Transparency and the KK Principle.’ Noûs 52(1), 3–23.). This defense of KB, unlike many in the literature, is consistent with epistemic externalism and allows one to reject the problematic KK principle and maintain that non-introspective knowledge is guided by Williamson’s margin-for-error principle.

John Dewey holds that uncertainty is a central feature of the concrete interaction between organism and environment, and he mobilizes this diagnosis to explain both the emergence of inquiry and the persistence of speculative and abstract philosophies. However, we show that material reality is not uncertain and that the quest for certainty cannot explain the flight from the concrete, but should explain a return to it. Drawing on historical, philosophical, and sociological sources (most notably Edgar Zilsel’s thesis and the embodied knowledge of artisans) we invert Dewey’s interpretative framework: epistemic uncertainty arises not from material reality, but from theoretical abstraction. This reinterpretation enables a reformulation of Dewey’s critique of dualism and provides the basis for a pragmatist epistemology grounded in the relative stability of practical experience. Finally, it opens the way for a reconsideration of the foundations of democracy from a non-relativistic perspective.

Despite years of efforts to combat disinformation, we remain far from a satisfactory set of solutions. The rise of generative AI, which enables the creation of highly credible fake content at scale, suggests that the problem is likely to grow even more severe. Lessons from the recent pandemic also call for a reconsideration of how disinformation should be addressed. This paper proposes a new approach that focuses not only on regulating everyone who spreads false information, but also on those who hold epistemic power – individuals with the capacity to shape what others know or believe. Such a strategy has the potential to move the debate forward, as it avoids the most common objection to disinformation regulation: the fear of widespread censorship. The paper argues that an individual’s epistemic position can justifiably differentiate their legal duties, and that those who possess epistemic power should bear corresponding legal – specifically, criminal – responsibility for the abuse of that power in spreading disinformation.

The division of cognitive labor leads to what Barry has recently called epistemic alienation: a problematic separation of individuals from epistemic goods. According to Barry, individuals are alienated from epistemic virtues because an efficient division of cognitive labor requires them to manifest a lack of virtues. I argue that this is a mistaken diagnosis of the source of epistemic alienation. Participating in high-functioning collectives does not prevent individuals from being robustly virtuous; rather, our cognitive limitations make it impossible for us to live up to the highest standards of epistemic conduct. Collectives transcend these cognitive limitations to achieve what individuals cannot by harnessing those same limitations in their members. Furthermore, I argue that we should distinguish the epistemic weaknesses that facilitate the division of cognitive labor from those that result from the division of labor. Only the latter are aspects of epistemic alienation. By dividing our cognitive labor over larger populations of agents and artifacts, we have massively accelerated our rate of epistemic productivity but have thereby created conditions that are variously inhospitable for the thinking of individuals by alienating them from the products, processes, and environments of inquiry. These forms of separation are problematic insofar as they amplify intellectual vices, incapacitate reason, and induce cognitive biases.

In this paper, I argue that reactive feelings such as betrayal and personal disappointment are not inherent to the attitude of trust. Instead, such feelings are better understood as responses to impairments in relationships. Trust, I propose, is a fully doxastic mechanism that fundamentally consists of the belief that the trustee will follow through on the norms constitutive of the relationship, such that a breach of trust directly calls only for an epistemic reassessment of the trustee’s trustworthiness. I further show that what warrants reactive feelings is not the mere fact of trust being broken, but whether, through the violation of trust, the person reveals a disregard for the relationship.

This article focuses on how to answer the question: How can we better characterize the more significant epistemic advantages in knowledge-how of the members of oppressed social groups who are participating within scientific communities? My approach diverges from previous ways of answering this question by focusing on the epistemic advantages that are associated with the processes of critical reflection through which agents develop their conceptual frameworks. In particular, I argue that developing multiple, conflicting conceptual frameworks gives agents epistemic advantages in their abilities to both identify potentially problematic assumptions of these frameworks and to improve upon those assumptions that are judged to be problematic. That is to say, this paper aims to show both that there is a scientifically relevant knowledge-how of critically reflecting on the under-examined assumptions within one’s conceptual frameworks and that insider-outsider members of scientific communities will have certain epistemic advantages when it comes to developing this knowledge-how.

What does decolonial justice require in response to the epistemic devastation of colonisation? Recent work proposes restoring lost epistemic status or compensating victims with epistemic goods. I argue that neither restitution nor compensation is a viable response to the destruction of Indigenous knowledge systems. Drawing on international law and reparations theory, I show that these frameworks neglect the role of proportionality as a normative constraint on adequate redress. Once this constraint is taken seriously, it becomes clear that the logic of repair is incompatible with the aims of decolonisation.

Open-mindedness requires us to be receptive to new evidence that contradicts our own views. Laurie Paul (2021) argues that there are situations in which we should, in fact, avoid exposure to putative evidence, as it may undermine our rational abilities. One example she discusses is the sensus divinitatis (SD) as a transformative experience. If an atheist agrees to be exposed to this experience, he may become a theist and, by his pre-transformation atheistic standards, irrational. Paul contends that we have valid reasons to avoid encountering putative evidence in these circumstances. This paper will argue that there are rational strategies to help us determine whether to expose ourselves to transformative experiences like the SD.

The Dogmatism Paradox begins with the claim that I know some proposition p and uses apparently good reasoning to draw a seemingly irrational dogmatic conclusion: that I should therefore dismiss any new evidence against p. A standard solution to this paradox is to note that when I acquire new evidence against p, that evidence defeats my justification for believing p. As a result, I no longer know that p, and so the reasoning used to generate the paradox begins with a false premise.

By appealing to recent work in social epistemology by Endre Begby and C. Thi Nguyen, I develop a new, stronger version of the Dogmatism Paradox that is immune to this standard solution. This version of the Dogmatism Paradox has significant consequences for contemporary polarized political disagreements, in which subjects on both sides of the disagreement have reason to distrust new evidence against their beliefs. So, unless the paradox can be solved, many political disagreements in sufficiently polarized communities will turn out to be rationally intractable in the sense that agreement can only be reached by one side irrationally revising their beliefs.

In this article, I present a potential counterexample to Lackey’s Group Agent Account of group beliefs. I argue that cases of pluralistic ignorance pose a problem for Lackey’s Group Agent Account because, in such cases, it systematically yields the wrong ascriptions of belief. I then discuss two ways to improve the Group Agent Account, which I call the Group Agent Account with Open Expression and the Group Agent Account with Sincere Open Expression, that make it immune to the pluralistic ignorance problem. However, I argue that the Group Agent Account with Open Expression and the Group Agent Account with Sincere Open Expression face their own problems that cannot be straightforwardly solved. I conclude by arguing that pluralistic ignorance is not a minor problem but one that generally affects summative approaches, such as the Group Agent Account, and provides evidence in support of nonsummative accounts of group beliefs.

Traditionally, many have imposed higher-order requirements on epistemic justification. That is, many have argued that for a belief to be epistemically justified, it not only needs to satisfy first-order requirements, such as being formed via a reliable process or supported by sufficient evidence, but also some higher-order requirement that bears on the way the belief is formed. For example, BonJour has famously argued that a clairvoyance belief, however reliable, is not justified unless one also has a justified belief that one’s beliefs formed via clairvoyance are reliable. More recently, some have argued for higher-order requirements for inferentially justified beliefs. That is, for example, that inferential beliefs are only justified if we take the reasons for which those beliefs are formed to support the belief. While there is a common underlying theme, these proposals differ with respect to the kind of higher-order state they require. Some proposals require (justified) higher-order beliefs, while others require higher-order evidence or higher-order awareness. This paper sets out to systematically discuss different kinds of higher-order requirements and the objections they face. While I will argue that there are good reasons to think that epistemic justification needs a built-in higher-order requirement, I will argue that only so-called evidential requirements are able to guard off well-known objections. In so doing, I will directly build on my previous work on evidentialist no-defeater clauses. In particular, I will demonstrate that such clauses can be understood as general higher-order requirements of epistemic justification.

Fricker’s influential account of epistemic justice has turned feminist epistemology into one of the most vibrant and fertile subfields in feminist philosophy in recent decades. Even scholars critical of its limitations have utilized Fricker’s account as a base from which to launch their own theories of epistemic justice. I refer to theories of epistemic justice developed or inspired by Fricker Frickerian accounts of epistemic justice (FAEJ). Their influence is so wide-ranging that some now claim that these accounts can be conducive to promoting decoloniality. The aim of this paper is to critically assess this claim. To accomplish this aim, this paper starts with a conceptual clarification of “decoloniality” in accordance with Latin American decolonial theory. It then critically assesses three aspects of the claim that FAEJ can be conducive to decoloniality: first, the types of epistemic injustice in these accounts relevant to decoloniality; second, the application of these types of epistemic injustice to different stages of coloniality; and third, whether FAEJ can advance programs of decoloniality. After demonstrating that FAEJ cannot promote decoloniality, this paper concludes with a brief examination of how decoloniality can be promoted.