Articles are stand-alone contributions to SERRC.
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 ›
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 ›
There is a growing body of literature, both popular and academic—including Alfano and Klein and Meyer’s contributions to this special issue—that holds that the world (or at least the Western World) is facing a new and growing problem that goes… Read More ›
The average Australian spends almost 10 hours a week on social media; a majority report that checking Facebook is one of the first things they do in the morning (Sensis 2017). Recent revelations about fake news and extremist sentiments spread… Read More ›
Fake news and conspiracy theories spreading over the internet are a major challenge to public debate. How can we address this challenge? I focus on the dispositions of individuals, as there is some evidence that there are strong individual differences… Read More ›
In a game of telephone, or as we called it “whisper down the lane”, someone whispers a sentence to someone else, and then that person whispers it to yet another person, and on and on it goes until the end… Read More ›
One of the first things that comes to mind when we think of the special issue’s theme, “Trust in a Social and Digital World” is the epidemic of ‘fake news’ and a cluster of trust-relevant vices we commonly associate with… Read More ›
Here’s a plausible definition of an ally: an individual who supports a non-dominant group’s pursuit of their justice-based interests. One way to develop a more detailed theory of an ally is by specifying ‘support a non-dominant group’s pursuit of their… Read More ›
“Conspiracy theories” are reviled by some, typically “elites” of limited kinds—political, corporate media and academic—and in many cases suspected to be true and even believed by far, far more people. This reality puzzles some, reassures others … [please read below… Read More ›
It is now fashionable to condemn our species’ exalted self-regard for precipitating that apocalypse in waiting known as the ‘Anthropocene’. Nevertheless, I shall heretically argue that we really know more than we normally think we do. But I don’t mean… Read More ›