Author Archives
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Measuring Public Pathology: A Brief Response to Dentith on Wagner-Egger et al.’s “Why Conspiracy Theories are ‘Oxymorons…’,” or “Just Asking Some Questions,” Lee Basham
Wagner-Egger et al. still argue that public doubts and conspiratorial concerns represent a mass pathology in need of a mass psychological cure. This is known as the “pathologizing project”. I acknowledge the soundness of M R.X. Dentith’s analytical critique of… Read More ›
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Exploring Epistemic Vices: A Review of Quassim Cassam’s Vices of the Mind, Benjamin Beatson, Valerie Joly Chock, Jamie Lang, Jonathan Matheson
In Vices of the Mind, Cassam provides an accessible, engaging, and timely introduction to the nature of epistemic vices and what we can do about them. Cassam provides an account of epistemic vices and explores three broad types of epistemic… Read More ›
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“An Experiment in the Technique of Awakening”—A Response to Duane Edwards, Melanie Otto
The historian and political activist Walter Rodney and the novelist and poet Wilson Harris are not often set in conversation with each other. Yet despite their very different disciplinary backgrounds and the great disparities in their approach to politics, Rodney… Read More ›
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Experts, Citizens, and Evidence: Who Manages What? Ivan E. Gómez-Aguliar
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has an unusual daily routine. Monday through Friday he leads a press conference from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. He fields a range of questions on his government’s new policies. Almost a month ago,… Read More ›
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Developing a Model of Groupstrapping: A Response to Baumgaertner and Nguyen, Kenneth Boyd
In their responses to my article “Epistemically Pernicious Groups and the Groupstrapping Problem” (Boyd 2018), Bert Baumgaertner (“Groupstrapping, Boostrapping, and Oops-strapping: A Reply to Boyd”) and C. Thi Nguyen (“Group-strapping, Bubble, or Echo Chamber?”) have raised interesting questions and opened… Read More ›
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Science, State Neutrality, and the Neutrality of Philosophy: A Reply to Bellolio, Gabriele Badano
In ‘The Quinean Assumption: The Case for Science as Public Reason’, Cristóbal Bellolio takes a close look at John Rawls’s hugely influential theory of public reason–in essence, a theory of how debates leading to legally binding political decisions should be… Read More ›
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Objective Expertise and Functionalist Constraints: A Comment on Croce, Christian Quast
Any conceptual investigation into a given phenomenon may fail in several ways. It may be, for instance, inconsistent, too inclusive or exclusive, or even materially inappropriate. In a recent reply, Michel Croce raises all of these objections to what I… Read More ›
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Call for Dialogue: Neoliberalism, Technocracy and Higher Education
The Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective invites a dialogue on issues in higher education involving the audit culture, authoritarianism, neoliberalism, and technocracy. These issues are addressed in a special issue of Social Epistemology (33 (4): 2019), “Neoliberalism, Technocracy and… Read More ›
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The Feudal University in the Age of Gaming the System, Justin Cruickshank
One wonders if Paul Riceour is turning in his grave as the hermeneutics of suspicion leaves Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud to become a statist project. Out goes ideology, resentment, and the workings of id, which function as the suspicious origins… Read More ›
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The Iniquity of the Conspiracy Inquirers, M R. X. Dentith
In late 2017, I approached the publishers Rowman and Littlefield with a proposal for a book on the latest work on conspiracy theory theory (the study of conspiracy theory), which would take as its basis a series of replies and… Read More ›
