We offer a theory of contrarians such as Socrates, Martin Luther, and Thoreau, and explain how contrarianism can function as an epistemic virtue. On our view, contrarians don’t just dissent from orthodoxy, but from a specific ingroup, and in a specific domain. Contrarians must also have some independent perspective that animates their dissent rather than parroting others, and they must express their dissent publicly, which will often produce alienation or reprisals. Finally, contrarianism isn’t bloodless inquiry; contrarians are animated by contempt for conformism and herd-behavior. The virtues of contrarianism include the ability to disrupt epistemic bubbles and echo-chambers that have formed among our ingroup, and contributing an adversarial element to our social epistemology, familiar from the legal system. But our account also has the resources to explain how contrarianism can spill over into a vice, since it is a trait like kindness or skepticism that requires judicious application.

This article aims to offer a systematic account of pathologies of collective attention. It reconstructs attention, salience, and affordance as interlocking notions through which both subjects and collectives become oriented toward the world in specific ways, before turning to ideology, propaganda, and conspiracism as cases of pernicious attentional dysfunction. Drawing on both analytic epistemology and the tradition of critical theory, I argue that these phenomena are distortions in the way groups pay attention and saliences are misvalued. Taking up the notion of social pathology from the tradition of critical theory, the paper reinterprets it as a metaphor for those modes of collective life that obstruct attuned responsiveness to reality and brings it into dialogue with more recent debates on “negative” epistemic properties in (analytic) epistemology.

Consider the paranoid parent who hires a babysitter and then monitors her via a nanny-cam while out for dinner. Despite what she may say, it is intuitive that she fails to trust the babysitter. Why is this the case? One response has been to propose a constraint against inquiring while trusting. This paper argues that this constraint fails to explain other intuitive instances of a failure of trust owing to epistemic features of the trustor. In light of this, the arguments here suggest the need to adopt an additional constraint. One tempting hypothesis is a constraint against knowing while trusting. This proposal has explanatory advantages but also comes with its problems. This paper will first consider the hypothesis that when one trusts, one cannot know. In responding to objections, it will ultimately argue for a trust-based certainty constraint. The paper thus establishes the need for an additional epistemic condition on trusting and concludes that the trust-based certainty constraint is the most appropriate.

Can predictable impairments of epistemic performance constitute injustice in the absence of harassment, manipulation, or prejudicial credibility deflation? I use this question to examine a case drawn from ordinary intellectual exchange: in mixed-sex settings, some male speakers may be distracted by the perceived attractiveness of a female interlocutor, with consequences for how their arguments are received. I argue that, in the stipulated case, the man has not suffered an injustice and the woman has not wronged him. The philosophical puzzle is why that verdict is correct, given a tempting inferential pattern in recent work on epistemic injustice from patterned epistemic disadvantage, especially when identity-linked, to an injustice verdict. I argue that injustice ascriptions require epistemic harm, wrong-making features, and accountability. The resulting framework distinguishes epistemic misfortune and thin unfairness from genuine epistemic injustice and helps assess contemporary disputes about the scope of the concept.

Virtue epistemologists have analyzed individual intellectual virtues such as intellectual humility and perseverance, but intellectual generosity remains relatively under-explored. This may be because intellectual generosity seems simpler and less impactful than other virtues, but in this paper, I argue it is more complex and significant than it might first appear. More precisely, I use case studies from mathematics to show that sharing intellectual goods, the core activity of intellectual generosity, is often complicated and challenging, especially when sharing with large groups. Further, I show that intellectual generosity can have important and long-lasting beneficial consequences for entire research areas, both in terms of generating new discoveries and improving the intellectual climate. Additionally, I suggest a practical way for agents to cultivate intellectual generosity and show that there is a connection between intellectual generosity and intellectual courage in the context of mathematics.

The COVID-19 pandemic has illustrated the importance of public support for non-pharmaceutical public health interventions and the perils of rampant spread of misinformed and conspiratorial beliefs. Open-minded epistemic attitudes may be associated with adherence to public health recommendations and protect against holding false beliefs. In a large (N = 46,745 from 68 countries) global sample collected during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic, we find that a six-item self-report measure of open-mindedness predicts decreased belief in COVID-19 conspiracy theories, increased physical distancing, increased engagement in recommended hygienic behaviors, and increased support for public health policies that aimed at decreasing COVID-19 transmission. In fact, out of 17 individual difference measures that we examined, open-mindedness proved to be the strongest or among the strongest predictors of rejecting conspiracy beliefs, of supporting physical distancing and public health policies, and of engaging in physical hygiene behaviors. In exploratory analyses of the open-mindedness measure, we found that public health support is associated with a learning-orientedfactor while conspiratorial beliefs were associated with a threat-oriented factor. These results suggest that it will be important to investigate whether open-mindedness can be cultivated or encouraged through educational or other interventions to ensure that public health is protected and that conspiracy theories do not spread.

Moral disagreement is often taken to undermine claims of moral knowledge. Here, I try to show this widely held view is not true of all moral disagreements. Imagine you encounter MJ. MJ is devoted to excellence in basketball, and he excels at it in a way very few ever have. However, this single-minded pursuit blinds him to other considerations. He is indifferent to larger moral issues and expresses toxic masculinity in his interactions with others. He demeans and degrades others to win basketball games. Suppose you know that, even in ideal conditions, you would not agree on how to live. You have incompatible values. However, you do not think MJ is a fool or evil. You find his achievements to be inspiring. He has his faults but leads a good life. Now, imagine that MJ becomes familiar with your life. He is puzzled by your obsession with philosophy and thinks you are too morally sensitive. Nevertheless, he finds something to appreciate in your life. A person you admire with different fundamental values admires you. As long as you accept that there are better and worse ways of moral thinking, you can accept this moral epistemology regardless of your moral metaphysics.

The division of cognitive labor leads to what Barry has recently called epistemic alienation: a problematic separation of individuals from epistemic goods. According to Barry, individuals are alienated from epistemic virtues because an efficient division of cognitive labor requires them to manifest a lack of virtues. I argue that this is a mistaken diagnosis of the source of epistemic alienation. Participating in high-functioning collectives does not prevent individuals from being robustly virtuous; rather, our cognitive limitations make it impossible for us to live up to the highest standards of epistemic conduct. Collectives transcend these cognitive limitations to achieve what individuals cannot by harnessing those same limitations in their members. Furthermore, I argue that we should distinguish the epistemic weaknesses that facilitate the division of cognitive labor from those that result from the division of labor. Only the latter are aspects of epistemic alienation. By dividing our cognitive labor over larger populations of agents and artifacts, we have massively accelerated our rate of epistemic productivity but have thereby created conditions that are variously inhospitable for the thinking of individuals by alienating them from the products, processes, and environments of inquiry. These forms of separation are problematic insofar as they amplify intellectual vices, incapacitate reason, and induce cognitive biases.

An agent’s epistemic prospects depend on a combination of that agent’s individual characteristics and features of that agent’s epistemic environment. Such factors cannot always be cleanly separated. Often, individual characteristics impact agents’ epistemic prospects by shaping the epistemic environments in which individuals find themselves. In particular, features of individuals often repel or attract certain sorts of information, a phenomenon I label epistemic magnetism. I argue that epistemic magnetism is a ubiquitous and underrecognized phenomenon that sometimes promotes and sometimes frustrates the achievement of positive epistemic outcomes. Then, I consider a series of simple proposals concerning what distinguishes between beneficial and harmful forms of epistemic magnetism. I argue that these proposals cannot capture the impacts of epistemic magnetism. Instead, I offer a series of principles that serve to roughly characterize the consequences of this phenomenon. I conclude with some remarks on why epistemologists have thus far tended to overlook epistemic magnetism.

This response addresses critical engagements with The Epistemology of Disaster and Social Change, defending and expanding its core argument: that disasters generate epistemic opportunities capable of reshaping societies, for better or worse. Drawing from feminist and standpoint epistemologies, the authors develop a heuristic of the epistemic watershed to map how positionality, rupture, and solidarity produce or inhibit liberatory change. They confront critiques of epistemic uptake, emphasizing the ethical costs of appropriating marginalized knowledge while asserting its centrality to just disaster response. Case studies from the Altadena wildfires and post-Maria Puerto Rico illustrate how queer and Black feminist practices of survival, refusal, and community-building challenge dominant imaginaries and enable democratic transformation. Acknowledging the real harms of epistemic extraction and backlash, the authors argue for coalitional knowledge practices as essential in moments of crisis. Ultimately, they insist that disaster must be reimagined not as a neutral rupture but as a battleground for justice-oriented futures.

An aspect of the Indigenous struggle against colonial oppression is the struggle for the inclusion of their knowledge in policymaking. Perceived as epistemically inferior to science, Indigenous knowledge and subsequently interests are systematically excluded in science-based policy. This article advances an anti-colonial political philosophy of science. As Indigenous knowledge feeds into the necessary political value judgments in policy-relevant science, Indigenous knowledge inclusion, I contend, should be treated as a political, not solely epistemic, matter. I further argue that Indigenous peoples, not just scientists, should have the power to make such political value judgments given the politics of representation under coloniality.

Epistemic injustice theorists have proposed various strategies for resisting oppressive knowledge structures, with José Medina’s concept of epistemic friction and the principle of acknowledgement and engagement standing as a central model. However, this paper argues that such strategies can unintentionally impose epistemic and emotional burdens on the very subjects they aim to empower. In this paper, I illustrate the importance of undertaking qualitative empirical research into epistemic injustice, particularly resistance. Drawing on original qualitative interviews with LGBTQIA+ individuals, allies, and parents of transgender children, I identify the burden that is often placed on them to be educators of their own sexuality and/or identity. I also offer alternative suggestions for resistance, including redistributing the labour of education to allies and creating a space for indirect engagement via entertainment and social media. This paper integrates empirical research with normative theory to expose how resistance efforts can reproduce structural inequalities – and how they might be transformed.

Our politics are increasingly polarised. Polarisation takes many forms. One is increasing clustering, whereby people hold down-the-line liberal or conservative views on a wide range of orthogonal issues. Some philosophers think that such clustering is indicative of irrationality, and so finding yourself in one of several clusters gives you evidence that not all your political beliefs are true. I argue that the reverse is true, presenting a simple model of belief-formation in which finding yourself in one of several clusters of opinion on orthogonal issues should increase, rather than decrease, your confidence that all your beliefs are true.

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.

Often, accounts of epistemic injustice either conflate epistemic harming with epistemic wronging or assume epistemic injustice is grounded in instances of epistemic harm. Recently, Dunne and Kotsonis (2024) have argued that neither conflation nor grounding make sense; the two are separate phenomena and have attempted to show how the two relate to one another. I argue this approach is mistaken: rather than just distinguish epistemic harming and wronging, instead we should question the very existence of epistemic harm. First, I discuss the relationship between epistemic harm and epistemic wrong and briefly summarize the ways in which they come apart. While I argue that Dunne and Kotsonis’ arguments are unsuccessful, I offer a new argument to the same effect, showing that current accounts of epistemic harm are underinclusive with respect to epistemic wronging. Second, I show that, generally, wronging does not require harming. Finally, I give us reason to believe that indeed, epistemic harm doesn’t exist: I argue that the notion of intrinsically epistemic harm is suspect, and does not fit within extant theorization on harm more generally and that we, therefore, ought to abandon it entirely: like the general case, epistemic wrong can exist without epistemic harm. To modify a slogan proposed by Bradley, we should do away with epistemic harm.

The thesis that testimony is the sole foundational source of justification for moral belief will strike many as ridiculous and a non-starter for theorizing about the justification of moral beliefs. Call this thesis testimonial foundationalism. This paper argues that testimonial foundationalism deserves to be taken seriously as a live option in moral epistemology. First, I argue that if we think non-moral testimony can propositionally justify belief, then we should think that moral testimony doing the same is no more problematic. Second, I show that there are good prima facie reasons to hold testimony as the unique source of propositional justification for moral belief: Testimonial foundationalism requires fewer metaphysical commitments, gives the best explanation of our practices in moral education, and there are no special reasons stemming from skeptical challenges pushing us to reject the thesis. Finally, I tackle the “obvious objection,” which argues that in order to successfully testify to a moral fact, the testifier must first know that moral fact, but it is impossible for the first testifier to have moral knowledge by the lights of testimonial foundationalism. I conclude with an upshot of the paper, which is that it reveals there to be two independent projects in moral epistemology: providing a theory of justification for moral belief, and providing a theory of the reliability of our moral beliefs.

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.

Many AI development organizations advertise that they have offices of ethics that facilitate ethical AI. However, concerns have been raised that these offices are merely symbolic and do not actually promote ethics. We address the question of how we can know whether an organization is engaging in ethics washing in this way. We articulate an account of organizational power, and we argue that ethics offices that have power are not merely symbolic. Furthermore, we develop a framework for assessing whether an organization has an empowered ethics office—and, thus, is not ethics washing via a symbolic ethics office.

This paper argues that we are not just social epistemic creatures because we operate in social contexts. We are social epistemic creatures because of the nature of our epistemic cognitive capacities. In The Enigma of Reason, Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber develop and defend the view that reasoning is a social competence that yields epistemic benefits for individuals through social interaction with others. I argue an epistemological consequence of their position is that, when beliefs are formed and sustained by dialogical deliberation, the relevant justification-conferring process doesn’t occur solely within the cognition of the subject whose belief is under evaluation. Rather, it extends to include her interactive engagement with other deliberative participants. I argue this demonstrates that not all justification-conferring is evidential. As such, the analysis not only supports reconceiving the process reliabilist’s notion of justification-conferring processes; it also serves as an argument against evidentialism. A goal of this paper is to demonstrate that social epistemology isn’t merely a siloed offshoot of traditional epistemology. Even when approaching social epistemology using a conservative methodology, our investigation has serious implications for fundamental questions concerning epistemic normativity.