Open science is good for both epistemic and social reasons, but in nonobvious ways, it can have detrimental epistemic side effects. Drawing on case studies and the social epistemology of science, I show how practices intended to increase transparency, communication, and information sharing in science can backfire. We should not reject Open Science, just implement it carefully. I argue that we can do so by treating openness as a governing value in science, and thus, that our pursuit of openness needs to be balanced against our pursuit of the whole scheme of values that govern science.

The most popular position in the moral luck debate is to reject resultant moral luck while accepting the possibility of other types of moral luck. But it is unclear whether this position is stable. Some argue that luck is luck and if it is relevant for moral responsibility anywhere, it is relevant everywhere, and vice versa. Some argue that given the similarities between circumstantial moral luck and resultant moral luck, there is good evidence that if the former exists, so does the latter. The challenge is especially pressing for the large group that exclusively deny resultant moral luck. I argue that rejecting resultant moral luck alone is a stable and plausible position. This is because, in a nutshell, the other types of luck can but the results of an action cannot affect what makes one morally responsible.

A traditional view holds that ignorance is simply the absence of knowledge. This view has recently been challenged by the Normative Account, which sees ignorance as involving a normative failure. In this paper, we argue that both perspectives capture important insights. Drawing on three empirical studies, we propose a two-senses account of ignorance, according to which there exist two notions of ignorance: one normative, the other non-normative. We also offer a new explanation of the normative aspect. Our findings suggest that what is negative in being ignorant lies in the expectation that one ought to know the relevant fact.

What is epistemically required of the rationally hopeful? In this paper, I propose that, as a subject becomes hopeful that p, she also adopts an inquiring attitude toward the question of whether p. Moreover, remaining rationally hopeful requires maintaining an inquiring attitude toward those possibilities we are hopeful about. On top of being led by a particular practical goal (that of attaining p), I suggest that the hopeful agent is also led by the epistemic goal of knowing whether p. Adding the “inquiry” criteria to rational hopefulness helps explain our intuition that there is something wrong with being hopeful that p and not disposed to inquire into whether p. It also helps us further distinguish hopefulness from other positive attitudes we adopt in the face of uncertainty, such as optimism, and faith.

According to Charles Travis, Frege’s principle to “always to sharply separate the psychological from the logical, the subjective from the objective” involves a move called “the fundamental abstraction.” I try to explain what this abstraction is and why it is interesting. I then raise a problem for it, and describe what I think is a better way to understand Frege’s principle.

Although the harm-reduction approach to policy is most familiar from debates over public health and drug abuse, it provides a perfectly general framework for thinking about normative aspects of policy in non-ideal contexts. This paper seeks to apply a generalized harm reduction approach to the problem of attitudinal racism. Psychological research suggests that racism is unlikely to be completely eradicated, as a result of which a zero-tolerance approach risks becoming both counterproductive and overly punitive. Harm reduction recommends minimization of prevalence with respect to the primary phenomenon combined with attenuation of impact for the ineliminable portion.

Despite the affinity of monism and monotheism—and despite monism’s recent philosophical renaissance—few have defended the conjunction of the two claims, of what we might call ‘theistic monism’. I argue, first, that monism and monotheism are consistent, and second, that each one provides good reasons to accept the other one. Monotheists, qua monotheists, have good reason to be monists; and monists, qua monists, have good reason to be monotheists. There should be much greater overlap between the monist camp and the monotheist camp than there is at present.

Standard conceptions of discrimination cannot account for all that is morally wrong about discrimination, as they cannot explain how individual acts of discrimination wrong not only their direct target but also all members of the targeted social group. In response to this lacuna, I develop a comprehensive account according to which discrimination consists of two interdependent wrongs: to discriminate against B, A must, first, treat B worse than C in a way that is grave enough to make this differential treatment morally wrong; and second, A must do so in a way that is disrespectful to B and to the social group B is perceived to belong to.

I introduce the book symposium’s five contributors.

I argue that Charles Travis’s interpretation of Frege, in Frege: The Pure Business of Being True, as consistent with Travis’s conception of occasion-sensitivity does not in fact require any modal notions, and so is consistent with the amodalist interpretation of Frege I elaborate in Necessity Lost.

Value transparency is thought to promote trust in scientific expertise. Yet, transparency is a complex concept. I will argue that transparency requirements come with a varying extent of engagement: merely disclosing information, providing information that is publicly accessible, or having additional mechanisms for criticism in place. It is often not clear in which sense transparency requirements are to be understood in the context of trust in expertise. However, each sense can backfire in different ways. Merely talking about transparency in a general sense hides these possible trade-offs. This furthermore shows that requiring transparency may come with a greater regulatory force.

We argue that libertarianism (roughly, the thesis that we have indeterministic, libertarian free will) is compatible with God’s infallible foreknowledge. We use eternalism (roughly, the thesis that reality is a 4-dimensional block and that past, present, and future objects exist) as an explanatory stepping stone between libertarianism and God’s foreknowledge: eternalism entails that (and comes close to explaining how) an omniscient God would know what we decide in the future even if we have libertarian free will. This account also explains what is wrong with standard fatalist arguments for the incompatibility of free will and God’s foreknowledge.

Epistemic paternalism involves interfering with the inquiry of others, without their consent, for their own epistemic good. Recently, such paternalism has been discussed as a method of getting the public to have more accurate views on important policy matters. Here, I discuss a novel problem for such paternalism—epistemic spillovers. The problem arises because what matters for rational belief is one’s total evidence, and further, individual pieces of evidence can have complex interactions. Because of this, justified epistemic paternalism requires the would-be paternalist to be in an unusually strong epistemic position, one that most would-be paternalists are unlikely to meet.

We offer a novel analysis of conspiracy theorizing, according to which conspiracy theory communities are engaged in collective projects of storytelling. Other recent accounts start by analyzing individual conspiracy theorists’ psychologies. We argue that a more explanatorily unifying account emerges when we start by analyzing conspiracy theorizing as a social practice. This helps us better account for conspiracy theorists’ psychological heterogeneity. Some individual theorists care about uncovering the truth, while others incorporate truth into their theorizing in subtler ways; viewed as a social phenomenon, though, the function of conspiracy theorizing is not to discover the truth, but to tell good stories.

How should you respond to higher-order evidence which says that you have made a mistake in the reasoning from your first-order evidence? It is highly plausible that you should reduce your confidence in your first-order reasoning. However, attempts to precisely formulate how this works have run into problems. I will argue that we should appeal to an independently motivated normative contextualism. That is, normative words like ‘ought’ and ‘reason’ have a different reference in different contexts. The result is that different answers to our question are true in different contexts.

Many theorists note the important role that wonder can play in our lives. Yet, little attention has been given to the associated character virtue; characterizations of it do not go much further than basic sketches that draw on Aristotle’s view about emotional dispositions that are proper to virtue. This paper fleshes out such sketches, which helps us understand what type of virtue this trait is. The account of virtuous wonder I develop here vindicates brief suggestions in the literature that this trait is an intellectual and aesthetic virtue and reveals in what sense it is a moral and environmental virtue.

This paper is a response to Hutchinson from Travis.

The Molyneux question asks: would a blind person, who knows spheres and cubes only from touch, be able to recognize these shapes visually immediately upon becoming sighted, without touching them? Molyneux himself answered no. Locke accepted Molyneux’s negative answer. However, Locke’s answer appears inconsistent with the doctrine of common sensibles, according to which some ideas are given in more than one sense modality. Motivated by alleviating this tension, philosophers have put forth several interpretations of Locke’s views on shape perception. Here, I motivate a novel interpretation of Locke that can better resolve the tension.

Hinge epistemology’s main claim to fame lies with its purported advantages in dealing with the problem of radical skepticism. In this paper, I argue that two of its most prominent formulations, due to Annalisa Coliva and Duncan Pritchard, are unsuccessful. To the extent that hinge epistemology represents one of the most relevant options available to internalists to avoid skeptical collapse, the results of this discussion contribute to cast a grim light on the chances of a successful defense of internalist epistemic justification more in general.

In legal proceedings, a fact-finder needs to decide whether a defendant is guilty, or not, based on probabilistic evidence. We defend the thesis that the defendant should be found guilty just in case it is rational for the fact-finder to believe that the defendant is guilty. We draw on Leitgeb’s stability theory for an appropriate notion of rational belief and show how our thesis solves the problem of statistical evidence. Finally, we defend our account of legal proof against challenges from Staffel and compare it to a recent competitor put forth by Moss.