Can we rationally double-check something we already know? Those who say “no” endorse the Ignorance Norm, which states that we should not ask a question whose answer we already know, thereby classifying double-checking as improper. Those who say “yes” reject the Ignorance Norm, instead proposing a broader norm that accommodates double-checking. I argue that both positions are unsatisfactory. Instead, I propose a novel solution that offers two key advantages over existing accounts. First, it preserves the Ignorance Norm. Second, it treats double-checking as a proper form of asking questions. The proposed solution draws on insights from speech act theory, arguing for a distinction between the default way of asking questions – governed by the Ignorance Norm – and the practice of double-checking which is subject to a stronger norm. While in default contexts we ask questions to acquire knowledge, in cases of double-checking we seek further epistemic goods, such as certainty or second-order knowledge.

In his recent book, Shared and Institutional Agency, Bratman attempts to defend realism about institutional agency while appealing only to ontologically modest foundations. Here I argue that this ontologically modest foundation leaves Bratman unable to provide plausible accounts of institutional evidence, institutional belief, and the reasons for which institutions believe and act. Given that these phenomena are key to our moral and epistemic evaluation of institutions and their actions, this is a serious failing. Instead, we should defend a more robust realism about institutional agency.

One of the metaepistemology’s most central debates revolves around the question of what the source of epistemic normativity is. Epistemic instrumentalism claims that epistemic normativity is a species of means-ends normativity. One of the most prominent objections against epistemic instrumentalism features cases of epistemic indifference: Cases where there’s evidence that p yet believing that p wouldn’t promote any of the agent’s aims, wants, or needs. Still, there’s an epistemic reason for the agent to believe that p and thus epistemic instrumentalism is false. In response, instrumentalists have modified their views in various ways, with new contributions still forthcoming. Here, we investigate a neglected aspect of this debate: Laypeople’s judgements on cases of epistemic indifference. In two studies, we investigated whether laypeople agree with the verdict in cases of epistemic indifference as well as the key ideas behind the more recent instrumentalist replies. Our findings indicate that a significant amount of participants found it hard to buy into the cases of epistemic indifference as Kelly has constructed them. Participants did generally share Kelly’s judgement in cases of epistemic indifference. Lastly, some instrumentalist replies are well suited to explain participants’ judgements that agents ought to believe in cases of epistemic indifference.

Accounts of common knowledge typically focus on how to represent what agents would know when they achieve common knowledge, instead of asking how agents achieve common knowledge. In this paper, by modifying a definition proposed by David Lewis, I generate a set of conditions the satisfaction of which would entail that a group of agents has common knowledge, properly so-called. I then ask what it would take to satisfy these conditions. I argue that these conditions can be satisfied and common knowledge achieved in the course of a conversation if, but only if, we adopt a particularly strong interpretation of Austin’s claim that the successful performance of a speech act requires the securing of uptake. I then argue that the generalization of this result to conversations involving more than two people requires that the audience to whom a speech act is addressed be able to recognize themselves as the audience of the speech act, in an essentially plural act of recognition. I close by arguing that one of the so-called paradoxes of common knowledge (the coordinated attack problem) in fact gives us some reason to favor Austin’s account of speech acts and therefore some reason to believe that common knowledge can, on occasion, arise.

Critical thinking is supported by a rich and diverse literature, with particularly close ties to argumentation theory and informal logic. It has often been presented in terms of a set of skills and dispositions, with the latter exemplified through the figure of an ideal critical thinker. These accounts of the relevant dispositions are intuitive and tend to emphasize openness, clarity, and a concern for truth. Seemingly running against this impression, it is argued here that an ideal critical thinker can willfully engage in fallacious argumentation. This surprising possibility is grounded in the distinction between thinking and arguing, with the literature on critical thinking being implicitly and rightly limited to the former. The argument draws on an established account of critical thinking dispositions, a simple supporting view of the nature of dispositions, and analogies to familiar phenomena like lying. The result complements existing work on the subject in terms of what a critical thinker should do, contributing to our understanding of the conceptual boundaries of critical thinking and argumentation proper.

Recent experimental epistemology has devoted increasing attention to folk attributions of epistemic justification. Empirical studies have tested whether lay people ascribe epistemic justification in specific lottery-style vignettes (Friedman and Turri 2014, Turri and Friedman 2015, Ebert et al. 2018) and also to more ordinary beliefs (Nolte et al. 2021). In this paper, I highlight three crucial yet hitherto uncritically accepted assumptions of these studies, and I argue that they are untenable. Central to my criticism is the observation that epistemic justification is a philosophical term of art mostly foreign to lay people: as such, it is not suitable for direct empirical testing without being previously introduced. This point reveals a folk conceptual gap between the subject matter of these experimental studies and the conceptual repertoire we can reasonably expect lay people to possess. I elaborate on this worry, and I end on a cautiously optimistic note: after suggesting better strategies to survey folk attributions of epistemic justification, I conclude that the challenge raised by the folk conceptual gap remains difficult but can in principle be addressed.

Proponents of epistocracy claim that amplifying the political power of politically knowledgeable citizens can mitigate some of the harmful effects of widespread political ignorance, since being politically knowledgeable improves one’s ability to make sound political decisions. But many critics of epistocracy suggest that we have no reason to expect it to make better decisions than democracy, for those who are politically knowledgeable can also possess other attributes that compromise their ability to make sound political decisions. This is one version of the Demographic Objection to epistocracy, and in this paper I argue that the reasoning which underlies it generalizes in such a way that it applies not only to epistocracy but also to democracy. Thus, there are demographic objections to both epistocracy and democracy. I argue that such demographic objections to democracy have important and overlooked implications. Among other things, they imply that we should be skeptical about the arguments of epistemic democrats; they count against proposals to democratize extant epistocratic practices and institutions; and they even count against certain democratic reforms taking place within a wholly democratic framework.

It is widely presumed that privacy is ‘factive’, i.e. that it cannot be diminished by accessing or disseminating falsehoods. But if this is so, what wrongs are committed in cases where others access documents of ours (letters, medical records, etc.) which contain false information? In this article, I examine various ways of explaining the wrongfulness of accessing and dissemination falsehoods (defamation; that privacy can be violated without being diminished; ‘control’ accounts of privacy; downstream revelations of truths; that falsehoods diminish ‘propositional’ or ‘attentional’ privacy). I lay out what each of these accounts misses about accessing falsehoods, about privacy, and/or about the right to privacy. I then propose two alternative ways of accounting for the intuitive wrongfulness of accessing and disseminating falsehoods: viewing them as merely ‘attempted’ privacy violations and weakening the truth condition of privacy diminishments.

Higher-order uncertainty is uncertainty about what one’s evidence supports. In many cases, a rational reaction to such uncertainty is to engage in inquiring activities like double-checking or redeliberating, with the aim of securing a firmer grasp of the evidence. An attractive idea is to account for the epistemic impact of higher-order uncertainty in terms of these inquiring activities. However, I argue that zetetic accounts along these lines are, at best, incomplete, because they cannot deal satisfactorily with cases in which higher-order uncertainty persists even if further inquiry is not required (cases at the end of inquiry). In this paper, I put forward a more general account of the impact of higher-order uncertainty. On this view, higher-order uncertainty may defeat propositional justification by undermining one’s access to the relevant evidence. Losing access to some evidence often calls for further inquiry. However, when this further inquiring is ineffective, inadvisable, or merely optional, one may be justified to adopt instead revised attitudes that fit one’s limited access to the evidence. This proposal accounts for the impact of higher-order uncertainty at the end of inquiry and offers an appealing explanation of the relations between this type of uncertainty and inquiry.

A state is luminous if and only if, whenever one is in it, one is in a position to know that one is. A state is bright if and only if, whenever one is in it, one is in a position to believe that one is. Beliefs have long been regarded, both historically and from a contemporary perspective, as luminous and bright. This paper evaluates Timothy Williamson’s influential anti-luminosity arguments as they apply to the luminosity and brightness of belief. While his margin-for-error argument may effectively challenge the luminosity of knowledge, it cannot be straightforwardly extended to undermine either the luminosity or the brightness of belief. Some authors responded to the more general anti-luminosity argument based on a constitutive connection between states and attitudes. An influential reply on Williamson’s behalf by Srinavasan in terms of degrees of confidence opens way to the claim that there is a constitutive connection between confidence and belief. The more general argument, in the specific case of belief, can then be resisted by drawing on independently defensible views of how we form beliefs about our own beliefs.

Standardly, echo chambers are thought to be structures that we should avoid. Agents should keep away from them, to be able to assess a fuller range of evidence and avoid having their confidence in that information manipulated. This paper argues against that standard view. Not only can echo chambers be neutral or good for us, but the existing definitions apply so widely that such chambers are unavoidable. We are all in large numbers of echo chambers at any time – they can be found not just on social media or in political groups, but in almost every social or epistemic group we could categorise ourselves into. Because we are finite and fallible, we cannot escape them and need to exist in them just to get by. The concept, then, does not actually capture something as structurally problematic as the paradigmatic cases would suggest. Our way of using the term in social epistemology needs to change.

What is guilt beyond a reasonable doubt (BARD) for a Bayesian? Is thinking of BARD in terms of probabilities a nonstarter? I propose an account of BARD compatible with Subjective Bayesianism that rejects the view that BARD is met by a threshold probability. BARD is a judgment, not merely about the credal state the factfinder endorses as her own (i.e. not merely as one’s own credence in guilt), but as about alternative possible credences, specifically those the factfinder does not endorse, but finds reasonable. To this end, I employ a Bayesian framework, expounded by Lange (1999), that permits revision of past prior probability assignments. Such a framework presupposes a point of view free from one’s prior from which a prior is judged. A trier-of-fact asks whether doubt persists among any reasonable starting point one might take; if it does, acquittal is warranted.

The sensitivity principle in epistemology has faced numerous, considerable, and relentless challenges since it emerged in Nozick’s Philosophical Explanations (1981). In this paper, I develop a version of sensitivity, based on Dretske’s notion of conclusive reasons (1971), that responds to the complaint that sensitivity is either incompatible with or makes an unprincipled mess of higher-level knowledge. There are three key moves in formulating reasons-based Dretskean sensitivity (RDS). First, sensitivity is conceived in terms of reasons, rather than beliefs, that track the truth. Second, focus shifts from whether S would have those reasons in the relevant counterfactual worlds to whether those reasons would be the case. Third, closer attention is paid to the structure of reasons. Critics of Nozick point out that, typically, even when S knows that they do not have a false belief that p, if S were to have a false belief that p, S would nonetheless believe that they do not have a false belief that p, violating Nozickean sensitivity. I explain how this fact does not preclude higher-level knowledge according to RDS, even if the false belief that p were based on their actual method.

Some philosophers have recently argued that one should not be curious about a question whose answer one knows. This norm is said to follow from the fact that curiosity aims at knowledge. This article contends that the view that curiosity is inappropriate when directed at what is known, though attractive, is false. In fact, we are frequently curious about questions whose answers we know, and this curiosity is entirely appropriate because, along with metacognitive judgments about the contents of memory, it plays an important role in the process by which we successfully retrieve knowledge from memory. If this argument is successful, it reveals that some curiosity-driven inquiries target knowledge that lies within one’s own mind and raises important questions about the status and interpretation of the claim that curiosity aims at knowledge.

What should we believe? One plausible view is that we should believe what is true. Another is that we should believe what is rational to believe. I will argue that both these theses can be accounted for once we add an independently motivated contextualism about normative terms. According to contextualism, the content of ‘ought’ depends on two parameters – a goal and a modal base (or set of possible worlds). It follows that there is a sense in which we should believe truths and a sense in which we should believe what is rational to believe.

Ethics’ reputation for wide-ranging, interminable disagreement, coupled with conciliationism regarding disagreement, has been leveraged as a basis for moral skepticism. The focus of this essay is on this challenge as it has been applied to philosophical ethics. I call the empirical conjecture underwriting the challenge into question – namely, that disagreement is widespread and roughly balanced within ethics – by describing the results of two studies involving over 400 moral philosophers. The studies reveal widespread agreement, and even consensus, on a range of purportedly contentious moral issues – capital punishment, abortion, eating meat, physician-assisted dying, euthanasia, and many others. The evidence the studies provide suggest that the extent of disagreement within ethics that the conciliationist challenge relies upon likely does not exist.

Education aims to improve our innate abilities, teach new skills and habits, and nurture intellectual virtues. Poorly designed or misused generative AI disrupts these educational goals. I propose strategies to design generative AI that aligns with education’s aims. The paper proposes a design for a generative AI tutor that teaches students to question well. I argue that such an AI can also help students learn to lead noble inquiries, achieve deeper understanding, and experience a sense of curiosity and fascination. Students who learn to question effectively through such an AI tutor may also develop crucial intellectual virtues.