Author Archives

• Epistemic Vices and Epistemic Ends: A Reply to Beatson, Joly Chock, Lang, and Matheson, Quassim Cassam

  By SERRC on October 21, 2019 • ( 0 )

  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 ›

• Collaborative Review Part 3: What Makes Interdisciplinarity Unique? Kari Zacharias

  By SERRC on October 18, 2019 • ( 0 )

  “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 ›

• So What if ‘Fake News’ is Fake News? Jeroen de Ridder

  By SERRC on October 17, 2019 • ( 0 )

  

  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 ›

• The Uncomfortable Transformation of Discomfort in the Neoliberal Higher Education Context, Emma Craddock

  By SERRC on October 16, 2019 • ( 0 )

  

  The neoliberalisation of Higher Education has led to the creation of a landscape where students are increasingly perceived by both university administration and themselves as consumers of a product, while metrics are sought to quantify teaching quality in the form… Read More ›

• The Fork in the Road for the Future of Humanity, Steve Fuller

  By SERRC on October 15, 2019 • ( 0 )

  On 25 September 2019, Steve Fuller gave a Codex Talk at the Royal Society of London, commemorating the ‘world’s top 50 innovators’ on the 500th anniversary of the death of Leonardo da Vinci. Da Vinci authored the ‘Codex’ in question,… Read More ›

• The Neoliberal University and the Common Good, Raphael Sassower

  By SERRC on October 14, 2019 • ( 0 )

  

  The intense “audit culture” and digitally enhanced monitoring of faculty’s production resembles the “pre-neoliberal” or “feudal university” as much as the neoliberal university (Cruickshank 2019). Is higher education no different from other institutions plagued by the neoliberal regime of economizing… Read More ›

• Geographies of the Knowledge Economy on the Semi-Periphery: The Contradictions of Neoliberalisation and Precarity in Portugal, Adam Standring and Simone Tulumello

  By SERRC on October 11, 2019 • ( 0 )

  

  The recent special issue of Social Epistemology (33.4, 2019) and the ongoing debates in the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective (SERRC) point to many of the challenges faced by universities as sites of knowledge production and dissemination situated both… Read More ›

• The Accident of Accessibility: How the Data of the TEF Creates Neoliberal Subjects, Liz Morrish

  By SERRC on October 10, 2019 • ( 0 )

  

  The stress occasioned by constant demands for academics to submit to evaluation has been well documented (Loveday 2018, https://bit.ly/316NfXU; Morrish 2019, https://bit.ly/2XQD8Jr), nevertheless the bureaucratic appetite for surveillance is fed by the ease of accessing quantifiable data. This post looks… Read More ›

• Is Conspiracy Theorising Irrational? Neil Levy

  By SERRC on October 9, 2019 • ( 1 )

  

  Conspiratorial ideation—as I will call the disposition to be accepting of unwarranted conspiracy theories—is widely regarded as a product of irrationality or epistemic vice. I argue that it is not: the dispositions that underlie it are not rationally criticisable. Some… Read More ›

• Algorithm-Based Illusions of Understanding, Jeroen de Ridder

  By SERRC on October 8, 2019 • ( 1 )

  

  Understanding is a demanding epistemic state. It involves not just knowledge that things are thus and so, but grasping the reasons why and seeing how things hang together. Gaining understanding, then, requires some amount of inquiry. Much of our inquiries… Read More ›