Openness is one of the most important principles in scientific inquiry, but there are many good reasons for maintaining secrecy in research, ranging from the desire to protect priority, credit, and intellectual property, to the need to safeguard the privacy of research participants or minimize threats to national or international security. This article examines the clash between openness and secrecy in science in light of some recent developments in information technology, business, and politics, and makes some practical suggestions for resolving conflicts between openness and secrecy.

As sources of knowledge, perception and testimony are both vulnerable to sceptical arguments. To both arguments a Moorean response is possible: both can be refuted by reference to particular things known by perception and testimony. However, lies and dreams are different possibilities and they are different in a way that undercuts the plausibility of a Moorean response to a scepticism of testimony. The condition placed on testimonial knowledge cannot be trivially satisfied in the way the Moorean would suggest. This has substantial implications for any non-sceptical epistemological theory of testimony.

Recently, there has been a debate focusing on the question of whether groups can literally have beliefs. For the purposes of epistemology, however, the key question is whether groups can have knowledge. More specifically, the question is whether “group views” can have the key epistemic features of belief, viz., aiming at truth and being epistemically rational. I argue that, while groups may not have beliefs in the full sense of the word, group views can have these key epistemic features of belief. However, I argue that on Margaret Gilbert's influential “plural subject” account of group belief, group views are unlikely to be epistemically rational.

In order to guide the decisions of real people who want to bring about good epistemic outcomes for themselves and others, we need to understand our epistemic values. In Knowledge in a Social World, Alvin Goldman has proposed an epistemic value theory that allows us to say whether one outcome is epistemically better than another. However, it has been suggested that Goldman's theory is not really an epistemic value theory at all because whether one outcome is epistemically better than another partly depends on our non-epistemic interests. In this paper, I argue that an epistemic value theory that serves the purposes of social epistemology must incorporate non-epistemic interests in much the way that Goldman's theory does. In fact, I argue that Goldman's theory does not go far enough in this direction. In particular, the epistemic value of having a particular true belief should actually be weighted by how interested we are in the topic.

Scientific research is reconstructed as a language game along the lines of Robert Brandom's inferentialism. Researchers are assumed to aim at persuading their colleagues of the validity of some claims. The assertions each scientist is allowed or committed to make depend on her previous claims and on the inferential norms of her research community. A classification of the most relevant types of inferential rules governing such a game is offered, and some ways in which this inferentialist approach can be used for assessing scientific knowledge and practices are explored. Some similarities and differences with a game-theoretic analysis are discussed.

Discussions of conservatism in epistemology often fail to demonstrate that the principle of conservatism is supported by epistemic considerations. In this paper, I hope to show two things. First, there is a defensible version of the principle of conservatism, a version that applies only to what I will call our basic beliefs. Those who deny that conservatism is supported by epistemic considerations do so because they fail to take into account the necessarily social, diachronic and self-correcting nature of our epistemic practice. Second, I will attempt to show how our basic beliefs are justified via this principle of conservatism.