In a recent paper, Christian List (2014) has argued for the compatibilism of free will and determinism. Drawing on a distinction between physical possibility (used in defining determinism) and agential possibility (used in defining free will), List constructs a formal two-level model in which the two concepts are consistent. This paper's first contribution is to show that though List's model is formally consistent, philosophically it falls short of establishing a satisfactory compatibilist position. Ensuingly, an analysis of the shortcomings of the model leads to the identification of a controversial epistemological assumption implicit in the statements of both compatibilist and incompatibilist positions. Arguing that this assumption is not currently satisfied, the paper's second contribution is to show that neither the compatibilist nor the incompatibilist position is presently well-founded.

According to many philosophers there are only pro tanto oughts to believe relative to a standard of assessment: there are epistemic oughts to believe, moral oughts to believe, prudential oughts to believe etc. But there are no oughts to believe simpliciter. Many of the same philosophers who hold this view, also hold that ought to believe is to be understood deontologically – such that if S violates such an ought without excuse, S is blameworthy for doing so. I here argue that on a deontological understanding of ought to believe there must be ought to believe simpliciter and that it is the violation of this ought that determines whether we are to blame for our beliefs.

Recent epistemology has witnessed a substantial opposition between two competing approaches to capturing the notion of non-accidentality in the analysis of knowledge: the explanationist and the modalist. According to the latest advocates of the former (e.g., Bogardus and Perrin 2020), S knows that p if and only if S believes that p because p is true. According to champions of the latter (e.g., safety and sensitivity theorists), S knows that p if and only if S's belief that p is true in a relevant set of possible worlds. Because Bogardus and Perrin's explanationism promises to deliver a plausible analysis of knowledge without any need for modal notions, it is an elegant proposal with prima facie appeal. However, such version of explanationism ultimately does not live up to its promises: in this paper, I raise some objections to their explanationist analysis of knowledge while showing that modalism is in much better shape than they think. In particular, I argue that their explanationist condition generates the wrong results in Gettier cases and fake-barn cases. I also offer and defend a novel version of modalism: I introduce a refined safety condition which is shown to successfully handle the same Gettier cases that beset Bogardus and Perrin's version of explanationism. The paper concludes with a reassessment of the explanationist's initial ambition to provide an analysis of knowledge without modal notions. The upshot will be that even if the prospects for such analysis remain dim, our money should be on the modalist, not the explanationist.

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.

There is an undeniable tendency to dismiss women's sexual assault allegations out of hand. However, this tendency is not monolithic – allegations that black men have raped white women are often met with deadly seriousness. I argue that contemporary rape culture is characterized by the interplay between rape myths that minimize rape, and myths that catastrophize rape. Together, these two sets of rape myths distort the epistemic resources that people use when assessing rape allegations. These distortions result in the unjust exoneration of people we cannot conceive of as monstrous, while making it too easy to believe that some marginalized people could be rapists. I also argue that rape myths enable a novel kind of epistemic injustice. This injustice concerns how our assessments of trustworthiness and our assessments of plausibility interact. I argue that rape myths can result in runaway credibility deflations that can explain both why people fail to believe most women, and also why people may unjustly believe false allegations that white women have been raped by black men.

The utterance “I am humble” is thought to be paradoxical because a speaker implies that they know they are virtuous or reveals an aim to impress others – a decidedly non-humble aim. Such worries lead to the seemingly absurd conclusion that a humble person cannot properly assert that they are humble. In this paper, I reconstruct and evaluate three purported paradoxes of humility concerning its self-attribution, knowledge and belief about our own virtue, and humility's value. I argue that humility is not genuinely paradoxical and that these puzzles do not have meaningful implications for its conceptual analyses. I instead offer error theoretical explanations of humility's apparent paradoxicality.

In the paper I introduce and discuss the interpretative procedure; a stage of investigation in thought experiments in which it is determined which states of affairs are genuine realizations of the described story. I show how incorporating the interpretative procedure to the reconstruction of a certain kind of thought experiments, i.e., the method of cases, provides a solution to the so-called problem of deviant realizations. According to this problem it is hard to formulate the logical structure of the method of cases that excludes far-fetched interpretations of a particular thought experiment's description that are inconsistent with the expected conclusion of the experiment. As I show, if we agree that the interpretative procedure precedes the act of establishing whether the thing which is at issue (e.g., knowledge) appears within a certain state of affairs, deviant realizations could be ruled out, since within interpretative procedure we establish the set of states of affairs that are compatible with the intentions of the author of the thought experiment. In the paper I provide a general explanation of how this task could be fulfilled by semantic intuitions and discuss their contextual dependence.

When laypersons are presented with scientific information which seeks to modify their way of life, they are expected to believe, suspend belief, or reject it. Second-order assessment of scientific experts helps laypersons to make an informed decision in such situations. This is an assessment of the trustworthiness of the person making the scientific claim. In this paper I challenge the optimistic view of Anderson (2011), regarding the ease with which laypersons can perform second-order assessment of experts, by pointing out some of the obstacles that may prevent laypersons from arriving at an informed decision through this means. By showing that laypersons cannot easily perform second-order assessment of experts, I make a case for sharing epistemic burdens in science communication by using Lackey's (2006) concept of dualism in the epistemology of testimony and Irzik and Kurtulmus’ (2019) work on public epistemic trust in science, as a guide. I invite experts to bear a greater share of the epistemic burden when communicating with laypersons because of their privileged epistemic condition vis-à-vis laypersons.

A group is lying when it makes a statement that it believes to be untrue but wants the addressee(s) to believe. But how can we distinguish statements that the group believes to be untrue from honest group statements based on mistaken beliefs or confusion within the group? I will suggest a narrative constraint for honest group statements, made up of two components. Narrative coherence requires that a new group statement should not conflict with group knowledge on the matter, or beliefs of relevant operative subgroups, unless a coherent rationale is given. Narrative intention looks at the process of gathering new evidence on the area of expertise of the group and requires that the group position behind the statement is formed in good faith. The narrative constraint will help to distinguish group lies from more innocent erroneous statements of group beliefs when there is an internal disagreement within the group, including in cases involving spokespersons.

We report a solution to an open problem regarding the axiomatization of the convex hull of a type of nonclassical evaluations. We then investigate the meaning of this result for the larger context of the relation between rational credence functions and nonclassical probability. We claim that the notions of bets and Dutch Books typically employed in formal epistemology are of doubtful use outside the realm of classical logic, eventually proposing two novel ways of understanding Dutch Books in nonclassical settings.

Belief polarization (BP) is widely seen to threaten havoc on our shared political lives. It is often assumed that BP is the product of epistemically irrational behaviors at the individual level. After distinguishing between BP as it occurs in intra-group and inter-group settings, this paper argues that neither process necessarily reflects individual epistemic irrationality. It is true that these processes can work in tandem to produce so-called “echo chambers.” But while echo chambers are often problematic from the point of view of collective rationality, it doesn't follow that individuals are doing anything wrong, epistemically speaking, in seeking them out. In non-ideal socio-epistemic contexts, echo chamber construction might provide one's best defense against systematic misinformation and deception.

The so-called paradox of dogmatism has it that it seems that one is both entitled and not entitled to ignore evidence against what one knows. By knowing something, one knows it to be true, and one also knows that there can be no non-misleading evidence against what is true. But to ignore evidence against what one believes – and, surely, one believes what one knows – is to be dogmatic, something one should not be. I argue that there is no genuine paradox here. One's attitude to evidence is governed not by what one knows but by what one thinks one knows. Thinking that one knows something does not entail that it is true. Knowing this, one knows that there may be non-misleading evidence against what one thinks one knows and should be open to examining what purports to be evidence against it.

According to an argument that I will call the argument from loose lips, we can safely reject certain notorious conspiracy theories because they posit conspiracies that would be nearly impossible to keep secret. I distinguish between three versions of this argument: the epistemic argument, the alethic argument, and the statistical argument. I, then, discuss several limitations of the argument from loose lips. The first limitation is that only the statistical argument can be applied to new conspiracy theories. The second limitation is that no version of the argument suffices to rule out the existence of small initial conspiracies that have no need to add further conspirators. The third limitation is that no version of the argument is dialectically efficacious in the context of arguing with the relevant conspiracy theorists because nothing is said to address the alleged evidence that they cite.

A prominent question in social epistemology concerns the epistemic profile of groups. While inflationists and deflationists agree that groups are fit to constitute knowers, they disagree about whether group knowledge is reducible to knowledge of their individual members. This paper develops and defends a weak inflationist view according to which some, but not all, group knowledge is over and above any knowledge of their members. This view sits between the deflationist view that all group knowledge is reducible to individual knowledge, and the strong inflationist view that some such knowledge even fails to supervene on features of individuals. Thus, some group knowledge is irreducible, but all such knowledge is anchored in, and so doesn't float freely from, individual features.

Evidence is often taken to be “normative” for doxastic agents. What accounts for the normativity of evidence? According to the view that I'll call “evidential minimalism”, there is a close connection between strong evidence for the truth of p and a normative reason to believe p: evidence is either itself a normative reason for belief, or evidence gives rise to such a reason when certain other minimal conditions are met. In this paper, I argue against evidential minimalism. I will argue that there are cases where: (i) an individual S possesses strong evidence E for the truth of p at time t, (ii) all other minimal conditions for the normativity of E are met at t, (iii) S doesn't believe p at t, yet (iv) S isn't open to any form of criticism on account of (i)–(iii) at t. I will then formulate a plausible linking claim connecting openness to criticism and the existence of normative reasons for belief. The minimalist can either accept or reject this linking claim. I will argue that, either way, the minimalist view falters.

Beebe and Buckwalter (2010) made the surprising discovery that people are more inclined to attribute knowledge when norms are violated than when they are conformed to. The epistemic side-effect effect (ESEE) is the analogue of the Knobe effect (Knobe 2003a). ESEE was replicated in a number of experiments. It was also studied under various conditions. We have carried out a meta-analysis of research on ESEE. The results suggest that ESEE is a robust finding but its magnitude is highly variable. Two study-level covariates influence its size: the subject of the knowledge attribution (agent vs third-party) and the type of norm that is violated or complied with. The effect size is not influenced, however, by the manipulation of chances, by whether the story is about a side effect or not, by language or by question phrasing. The impact of the Gettierization of the story is marginally significant.

Can you rationally double-check what you already know? In this paper, I argue that you can. Agents can know that something is true and rationally double-check it at the very same time. I defend my position by considering a wide variety of cases where agents double-check their beliefs to gain epistemic improvements beyond knowledge. These include certainty, epistemic resilience, and sensitivity to error. Although this phenomenon is widespread, my proposal faces two types of challenges. First, some have defended ignorance norms, on which agents are only allowed to inquire about things they don't already know. Second – motivated by strong conceptions of belief or pragmatic encroachment – some have argued that double-checking destroys knowledge. I argue that these competing views fail to capture both the epistemic value of double-checking and the many reasons why agents might double-check. Moreover, they rely on overly strong assumptions about what inquiry, knowledge, or belief requires. Finally, I marshal linguistic data in favor of the compatibility of knowledge and double-checking.

Instances of epistemic injustice elicit resistance, anger, despair, frustration or cognate emotional responses from their victims. This sort of response to the epistemic injustices that accompanied historical systems of oppression such as colonialism, for example, is normal. However, if their victims have internalised these oppressive situations, we could get the counterintuitive response of appreciation. In this paper, I argue for the phenomenon of appreciative silencing to make sense of instances like this. This is a form of epistemic silencing that happens when the accepted hegemonic intuitions of the oppressed are formed/influenced by the ideologies of the oppressors over time. Here, we have a resilient, oppressive and hegemonic epistemic system. Put together, it creates a variant of epistemic injustice and silencing that is obscure since its victims are neither resistant nor aware of the injustice they face but are appreciative.

The overlap between virtue epistemology and the philosophy of education has been dominated by discussions of the epistemic qualities of good learners, that is, the intellectual virtues that must be nurtured in students. Not much has been said about the epistemic qualities of good teachers expressed in virtue-theoretic terms. This paper offers a preliminary account of such qualities, which are designated as pedagogical virtues. I use Battaly's pluralist conception of intellectual virtue as a starting point, then describe a pedagogical virtue as an intellectual virtue with an other-regarding success or motivational component. I end with an elucidation of the pedagogical versions of two mainstream intellectual virtues, perseverance and inquisitiveness.

It is a platitude that belief is subject to a standard of correctness: a belief is correct if and only if it is true. But not all standards of correctness are authoritative or binding. Some standards of correctness may be arbitrary, unjustified or outrightly wrong. Given this, one challenge to proponents of the truth norm of belief, is to answer what Korsgaard (1996) calls ‘the normative question’. Is the truth norm of belief authoritative or binding regarding what one ought to or may believe? If so, what grounds its authority? The aim of this paper is to offer a novel answer to the grounding challenge on a reason-based normative framework. I develop and defend a practice-based account of the truth norm, according to which, the authority of the truth norm of belief is grounded in what I call the T-practice, a justified social practice that functions to facilitate knowledge production, maintenance, and social cooperation.