You can learn a lot by reading books about post-truth, but conclusive answers on several key issues remain elusive. In 2016, two events shocked many observers. The first was the passing of the Brexit referendum in Britain… [please read below… Read More ›
Bas van Fraassen (2017) argues that we are rational to believe and disbelieve T,[1] a scientific theory that best explains phenomena, relying on the English view of rationality. In addition, he thinks that the belief of T is supererogatory. As… Read More ›
My recent paper published (2019) in Social Epistemology has attracted responses from Clevis Headley and Melanie Otto working respectively in the areas of Africana Philosophy and Literature. The fact that an essay on two 20th century Caribbean intellectuals evoked critical… Read More ›
In “The Quinean Assumption: The Case for Science as Public Reason” (Bellolio 2019), I argue that liberals need to introduce a crucial assumption into the argument that scientific reasons are public in the Rawlsian sense. This assumption—taken from W.V.O. Quine’s… Read More ›
Stephen Hawking declared the death of philosophy. Was he right? Has science rendered philosophy obsolete? Should we be looking to science to answer the biggest questions, or are there areas of understanding that science cannot reach that philosophy can? What… Read More ›
The central question of this provocative essay is one that drives most inquiry in rhetorical epistemology: How do those who know things talk with those who do not, and how do the latter evaluate the merits of what the former… Read More ›
An argument without an audience is pointless, and an argument without an arguer is no more than a potential set of sentences. In his response to my earlier paper (Hinton 2019) on the ability of argumentation theory to deal with… Read More ›
In Vices of the Mind: From the Intellectual to the Political, I reflect on the claim that personal qualities like closed-mindedness, prejudice and wishful thinking are epistemic vices. This is not, in itself, a controversial claim. The interesting question is:… Read More ›
“And so I said to them, why don’t we just call it education?” This statement, delivered with an exasperated laugh and the tiniest of smirks, came from a former colleague who had recently returned from an interdisciplinary conference. He was… Read More ›
David Coady (2019), in his contribution to this issue, joins a small but growing number of people expressing misgivings about the current hype surrounding fake news, alternative facts, and other post-truthy phenomena in society and academia (cf. also Habgood-Coote 2019)…. Read More ›