A number of philosophers have recently argued that there is such a thing as ‘epistemic blame’: blame targeted at epistemic norm violations qua epistemic norm violations. However, Smartt (2024) and Matheson and Milam (2022) have recently provided several arguments in favour of thinking epistemic blame either doesn’t exist or is never justified. This paper argues that these challenges are unsuccessful and along the way evaluates the prospects for various accounts of epistemic blame. It also reflects on the dialectic between sceptics and realists about epistemic blame and what choice points are available for moving the debate forward.

While the claim that moral ignorance exculpates is quite controversial, the parallel claim with respect to non-moral ignorance seems to be universally accepted. As a starting point, we can state this claim as follows:

Non-moral Ignorance Exculpates: If an agent did everything that could be reasonably expected of her to inquire into some empirical issue as to whether P, the seeming truth of P played the appropriate role in the agent’s motivation to Φ, and the agent would not have merited blame for Φ-ing if P had been the case, then the agent does not merit blame for Φ-ing.

In this paper, I aim to accomplish two tasks. First, I argue that NMIE is false in certain cases in which, by Φ-ing, the agent violates a course-grained, reasonable community norm without knowing that doing so is in everyone’s best interests. Second, I argue that, while moral ignorance, like non-moral ignorance, does not exculpate when community norms are violated in this manner, it does exculpate when they are not. With these two tasks accomplished, we will see the striking parallels in the manner in which both moral and non-moral ignorance exculpate.

According to accounts like Alexander Bird’s Minimal Functional Account of social knowledge, various groups like those within the sciences can socially know that <p>, even if no particular individual within that group knows that <p>. Bird’s primary example of a group that has such knowledge is the community of semiconductor physicists – which, as he contends, is sufficiently functionally integrated to satisfy accounts like his own. But, what about specialist communities within philosophy? Do they satisfy accounts like Bird’s own? Should they? As I will suggest in this article, some of them should, but do not appear to do so – at least, as of yet.

Some people act despite knowing their actions are wrong. Others know and do the right thing. This paper focuses on people who rightly believe that gaining specific knowledge would be enough to motivate moral action but remain strategically ignorant due to self-interest. This paper argues that such individuals have a moral obligation to acquire the salient knowledge given the following applies: first, such individuals are aware of the morally efficacious knowledge; and second, the efficacious knowledge is accessible to them. Then, we examine similarities and differences between morally mandatory knowledge and culpable ignorance. Finally, morally mandatory knowledge shows that ignorance can result from deficient moral character.

This paper introduces the concept of self-fulfilling testimonial injustice: a distinctive form of epistemic injustice whereby credibility deficits become true by shaping the very conditions that sustain them. Much of the literature on testimonial injustice has rightly emphasized cases in which credibility deficits are rooted in false beliefs, themselves underwritten by ethically bad affective investments. Yet such a focus risks obscuring a structurally significant variant: namely, those credibility deficits that are rendered true through self-fulfilling mechanisms. Drawing on insights from economics and psychology, I distinguish between motivated cognition-based and cognitive bias-based testimonial injustice, which together furnish the background conditions under which self-fulfilling testimonial injustice can take hold. I develop this account by drawing on both theoretical and experimental work on labor market discrimination, which illuminates the ways in which credibility deficits may become self-fulfillingly entrenched. Finally, I explore the distinctive harms of this form of injustice, focusing on its corrosive effects on epistemic self-confidence or self-trust and epistemic self-esteem, and suggest that its insidiousness and relative invisibility render it both difficult to detect and potentially more pervasive than has hitherto been acknowledged.

Would you prioritize assembling a group of more competent individuals or a more diverse group? According to the well-known Diversity-Trumps-Ability Theorem (DTA), when two groups of similar size are compared, the more diverse group generally outperforms the more competent group. Despite considerable criticism regarding the DTA’s mathematical rigor, it has sparked substantial interdisciplinary discussion. While most research on the DTA focuses on its implications within specific fields or on empirical simulations to test its validity, we aim to establish precise conditions under which diversity indeed surpasses ability in a particular decision-making context: voting. To this end, we integrate the DTA into a voting model inspired by the Condorcet Jury Theorem (CJT) and model diversity based on the classic dependency model in the CJT literature, namely the influence of an opinion leader.

The topic of absences and their ontological status has long been the focus of intense philosophical debate. Recent years have witnessed the burgeoning of a related discussion concerning the phenomenon of experiencing absences. A lot of this discussion revolves around the question of whether such experiences are best construed as literal perceptions or as some other kind of mental state. Rather than try to settle that ongoing debate, I take as my starting point a claim that seems to be granted by virtually all of the participants in that debate, namely, that experiences of absence are capable of representing reality accurately and of misrepresenting reality. But if they can represent reality accurately, they can do so in a manner that is merely a lucky coincidence and they can do so in a way that is noncoincidental, and I offer reasons for thinking that the latter is more valuable than the former. The burden of this paper, then, is to try to offer an account of the conditions under which absence experiences can be noncoincidentally accurate representations of reality – something that only one other author in the current literature has thus far attempted. To begin with, Section 1 outlines various kinds of experiences of absence and singles out the kind that will be my focus throughout the rest of the paper. In Section 2, I survey the current debate over whether experiences of absence are best construed as perceptual or as something else, and I outline several assumptions I shall be making in the remainder of the paper. Section 3 motivates the project of trying to understand the conditions in which experiences of absence are noncoincidentally accurate, and Sections 4–5 develop an account of those conditions. Finally, in Section 6, I discuss the connections between experiences of absence and justifiedly believing and knowing that a given object is absent from a given location.

In this article, I present a modified reliabilist theory of knowledge which purports to solve many of the problems currently facing standard reliabilism. With the help of a dispositionally construed reliabilist theory of knowledge and justification (DRK and DRJ), tentative responses to the following problems for reliabilism are offered: The New Evil Demon Problem, The Clairvoyance Problem, The Mr. Truetemp Problem, The Gettier Problem, Barn Cases (Brandom’s and Goldman’s), and The Lottery Problem. Lastly, I argue that, despite diverging from the letter of standard reliabilism, DRK and DRJ remain within the spirit of reliabilist epistemology

Argumentation is often conceived as a rational response to disagreement, even when it does not resolve differences of opinion. Arguing in the face of disagreement has, however, distinctive epistemic effects. Sometimes argumentation achieves convergence of opinion or at least the mutual recognition that a more thorough inquiry is required. But facing disagreement, participants of argumentative exchanges quite often remain steadfast in their initial views or even radicalize them. Can we make sense of these latter situations? To account for their occurrence, it is common to point out that people’s ability to argue is flawed, that an “argumentative culture” is lacking, and that emotional and other non-rational factors often interfere in confrontative situations. But these suggestions do not amount to a thorough satisfactory explanation. In this paper, I provide the outline of a purely epistemic account of these peculiar effects of argumentation in the face of disagreement. I argue that probabilistic models of degrees of confidence (or “credences”) can shed light on the conditions that give rise to several of these effects. This could provide some guidance on how to avoid them.

The view that epistemic peers should conciliate in cases of disagreement – the Conciliatory View – had been an important view in the early days of the peer disagreement debate. Over the years, however, the view has been the target of severe criticism; an “obituary” was already written for the view, and, as a recent proclamation has it, there is “no hope” for it. In this paper, I will argue that we should keep the hope alive by defending the Conciliatory View of peer disagreement. The primary strategy of my defense will be to separate the claims made by the view specific to peer disagreement and claims that concern higher-order evidence more generally. This separation allows us to see which problems cannot be addressed in the context of peer disagreement alone. As I will argue, the upshot of making this distinction is that although the jury is still out on whether higher-order evidence should affect our first-order doxastic states, the Conciliatory View likely follows if it does.

Disinformation is a growing epistemic threat, yet its connection to understanding remains underexplored. In this paper, I argue that understanding – specifically, understanding how things work and why they work the way they do – can, all else being equal, shield individuals from disinformation campaigns. Conversely, a lack of such understanding makes one particularly vulnerable. Drawing on Simion’s (2023) characterization of disinformation as content that has a disposition to generate or increase ignorance, I propose that disinformation frequently exploits a preexisting lack of understanding. I consider an important objection – that since understanding is typically difficult to acquire, we might rely on deferring to experts. However, I argue that in epistemically polluted environments, where expertise is systematically mimicked, deference alone provides no reliable safeguard. I conclude by briefly reflecting on strategies for addressing these challenges, emphasizing both the need for promoting understanding and for cleaning up the epistemic environment.

This paper examines mediators’ epistemic obligations during expert interviews. Drawing on science communication, journalism ethics, and social epistemology, I argue that mediators have an epistemic duty to ask good questions of experts. After outlining how expert testimony can harm audiences epistemically and providing a normative framework for mediators’ duty to inform, I examine three strategies to discharge this duty. The credentials monitoring approach, which limits mediators’ role in verifying experts’ qualifications and competence, fails to prevent harmful testimony from genuine experts. The interference approach, which requires mediators to challenge expert claims directly, imposes unrealistically high epistemic standards on mediators and risks counterproductive non-peer disagreements. I propose an alternative: the good questioning approach. By asking expanding and contesting questions that prompt experts to justify claims and make evidence accessible, mediators can fulfill their epistemic duty without needing domain-specific expertise. This framework enhances our understanding of distributed epistemic responsibility in public scientific discourse and offers practical guidance for improving journalistic practice in expert interviews.

This paper demonstrates that institutional testimonial injustice occurs when an institution commits collective ignorance of a proposition that ought to be believed in light of reliable testimonial evidence due to a vicious institutional ethos, so that some employees who testify the proposition are compromised in their capacity as testifiers. First, I demonstrate that an institution as a group epistemic agent fails to rationally form testimonial belief only if the majority of operative members in the institution fails to believe a proposition based on reliable testimonial evidence and instead accept other propositions as an official position through considerations other than the epistemic considerations. Second, I demonstrate that the operative members’ decision (to accept other propositions) and non-operative members’ conformity to the decision mainly result from a vicious institutional ethos. Third, I argue that due to such a vicious ethos, an institution commits collective ignorance—that is, the operative members are disbelievingly, suspendingly or pre-emptively ignorant of a proposition that ought to be believed in light of evidence, while non-operative members are complicitly ignorant of it in consonance with the operative members’ decision.

The responsible and reliable use of web-based technologies is unquestionably crucial in the era of information abundance. Strategies aimed at mitigating false and misleading content online can be divided into structuralist and educational approaches. In this paper, we aim to demonstrate that most proponents of these strategies overlook the active role of users in web-based information and communication channels. They generally tend to view internet users as passive recipients of information who require external regulation and guidance to discern between reliable and unreliable online information in making well-informed judgments. What we aim to show is that responsible and meaningful engagement with information online encompasses much more than the existing proposals within demarcation approaches. It entails developing abilities that can be characterised as ‘third-order assessments’, which can help users not only to minimise the negative factors undermining the reliable use of information technology but also in ensuring reliable and responsible use of its communicative aspects. The paper concludes by offering suggestions on cultivating these skills and proposes their integration into school curricula.

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.

In recent years, the topic of deep disagreement has gained considerable interest. A central question in the debate is metaphysical and concerns the very nature of deep disagreement. The so-called metaphysical program aims to provide ways of arbitrating between the different conceptions of the nature of deep disagreements provided by scholarship. Two possible ways of implementing the metaphysical program are examined. The first approach interprets theoretical concepts as descriptions of the lay concept of deep disagreement and employs the method of cases to arbitrate between them. The second approach regards theoretical concepts as revisions of the lay concept of deep disagreement, relying on the criteria provided by revisionary analysis for their assessment. Both alternatives are rejected as inadequate. Theoretical models of deep disagreement are better conceived as explanatory analyses of the lay concept. A consequence of this is that the different accounts of the nature of the phenomenon are not mutually exclusive, as practitioners of the metaphysical program often assume. A second implication is that the concept of deep disagreement is not methodologically dispensable, as some recent critics of the metaphysical program have argued.

The preface paradox is often taken to show that beliefs can be individually rational but jointly inconsistent. However, this received conflict between rationality and consistency is unfounded. This paper seeks to show that no rational beliefs are actually inconsistent in the preface paradox

It is not unusual to find the content of an epistemic agent’s utterance unwanted and immediately reject such an utterance because it elicits a repulsive reaction in us. What could explain this sort of reaction to a speaker’s utterance? In this paper, I propose an “epistemic disgust” concept to explain this reaction to a speaker’s utterance. Epistemic disgust refers to a phenomenon whereby an epistemic agent is repulsed by a speaker’s utterance either due to the speaker’s personality or the content of the speaker’s utterance, thus causing the agent to reject the speaker’s utterance from contributing to her epistemic system.

In the present paper, we consider the implications of our work on the logical priority of the epistemic, the thesis that persons’ options are determined in the first instance by their relevant knowledge and ignorance, for the legitimacy of claims that some decision-maker bear an unconditional obligation to make a particular decision or perform a specific action (i.e., categorical obligation attributions). We argue that the logical priority of the epistemic implies that many such attributions are misplaced, if not erroneous. We defend Naturalistic Moral Error Theory, a novel theory which, though it bears many of the same consequences for moral discourse, is distinct in its metaphysical implications from J. L. Mackie’s (1977) famous moral error theory.