This paper concerns the problem of determining whom one should trust and how much in complex testimonial exchanges featuring conflicting reports, unclear communication, and higher-order evidence bearing on the reliability of a speaker. Drawing on a Bayesian model of source reliability, I argue for testimonial underdetermination: the claim that testimonial exchanges can underdetermine whom one ought to trust and how much. The argument proceeds by showing that assessments of a source’s reliability are made relative to reference classes – sets of testimonial exchanges sharing features relevant for predicting the source’s reliability. In complex cases, an agent’s evidence may fail to determine which among several plausible reference classes is most appropriate, where different reference classes underwrite different degrees of trust. I then contend that testimonial underdetermination supports a form of synchronic intrapersonal permissivism about trust: an agent’s evidence may permit her to adopt any of several incompatible degrees of trust in a speaker. I conclude that when purely epistemic considerations underdetermine trust, practical considerations may guide one’s choice between different epistemically permissible options, putting pressure on the idea that we can have a pure epistemology of trust that applies to real-life, complex cases involving non-ideal agents.

Teleparallel Gravity (TPG) is an alternative, but empirically equivalent, spacetime theory to General Relativity. In its modern formulation, TPG purports to be both a gauge theory of translations (G), as well as locally Lorentz-invariant (L). However, the reasoning invoked in order to implement (L) and (G) is often involved. As such, clarification of the reasoning upon which TPG proponents rely in constructing their theory is sorely needed. The present paper will address this need. It will also offer a succinct methodolog ical assessment of TPG as a theory per se.

In this précis of Radical Skepticism and Epistemic Intuition (Oxford 2021), I highlight the book’s main lines of argument and provide an overview of each of the book’s three parts. I explain how: part I identifies the best kind of argument for radical skepticism and objects to one of the two main ways of responding to it; part II presents my version of the other main way of responding to that skeptical argument (a version that relies heavily on epistemic intuition); and part III defends epistemic intuition (and, thereby, my response to radical skepticism) from several important objections.

This article summarizes how problems in formalizing scientific inference led to the production of social accounts of science, offering Helen Longino’s feminist contextual empiricism as a way forward. Rather than focus on rules of inference that connect knowledge-claims, Longino constructs norms for knowledge-producing communities which, when followed, ensure equitable dialogue and transformative criticism. It is further argued communities engaged in Christian systematic theology would benefit from developing a similar set of norms, given that theological inference is similarly rooted in social cognition and faces many problems analogous to those with which Longino is concerned. Finally, the extent to which Longino’s norms may serve as a starting point for theological communities is explored.

P. Kyle Stanford’s Exceeding our Grasp (2006) shows how the problem of unconceived alternatives presents a significant challenge to realism. Stanford argues that the history of science offers repeated instances of scientists failing to conceptualize rational alternatives to ruling scientific doctrines, implying that our present scientific theories are likely to be similarly underdetermined. This article extends Stanford’s argument and provides it with a longer history. It shows how the principle of unconceived alternatives was explicitly deployed during the medieval and early modern periods to undermine scientific realism in particular cases. These arguments typically made reference to divine omnipotence and the principle that God could have produced phenomena in numerous ways inconceivable to finite human minds. In this theological register, unconceived alternatives offered a way of minimizing potential tensions between theological doctrines and prevailing scientific theories. The article concludes with some brief reflections on the applicability of the principle of unconceived alternatives to conceptions of God.

The fragmentation of the archaeological record presents methodological challenges: as researchers analyse and construct models, they do not (and in most cases cannot and will not) know what is missing. Here, the author argues that these gaps are one of the field's greatest strengths; they force practitioners to be reflective in their understanding of, and approach to, studying the material traces of past people's lives and to make space for ways of being foreign to present reality. The uncertainty of a past in ruins is a place of possibility that empowers us all to imagine and to work towards a better future.

Epistemological disjunctivism (ED) has been thought to solve the conditionality problem for epistemic externalism. This problem arises from externalists’ characterization of our epistemic standings as conditional on the obtaining of worldly facts which we lack any reflective access to. ED is meant to avoid the conditionality problem by explicating subjects’ perceptual knowledge in paradigmatic cases of perceptual knowledge via their possession of perceptual reasons that are both factive and reflectively accessible. I argue that ED's account of reflectively accessible factive perceptual reasons is also prey to the conditionality problem. After that, I submit that Stroud's influential formulation of the conditionality problem relies on a methodological requirement that is potentially dissociable from ED. So, it is possible to put ED in the service of a more modest anti-skeptical strategy. I close by suggesting that this modest anti-skeptical strategy successfully undercuts the underdetermination-based skeptical paradox. Nevertheless, it does not have substantial advantages over some forms of epistemic externalism.

This paper is meant to link the philosophical debate concerning the underdetermination of theories by evidence with a rather significant socio-political issue that has been taking place in Canada over the past few years: the so-called ‘death of evidence’ controversy. It places this debate within a broader philosophical framework by discussing the connection between evidence and theory; by bringing out the role of epistemic values in the so-called scientific method; and by examining the role of social values in science. While it should be admitted that social values play an important role in science, the key question for anyone who advocates this view is: what and whose values? The way it is answered makes an important epistemic difference to how the relation between evidence and theory is appraised. I first review various arguments for the claim that evidence underdetermines theory and shows their presuppositions and limitations, using conceptual analysis and historical examples. After broaching the relation between evidence and method in science by highlighting the need to incorporate epistemic values into the scientific method, my discussion focuses on recent arguments for the role of social values in science. Finally, I address the implications of the approach outlined for the current ‘death of evidence’ debate in Canada.