Critical Replies are engagements with articles recently published in Social Epistemology.
Belief polarization, misinformation, and distrust in scientific expertise are on the rise in democracies across the globe. These worrying trends have been accompanied by some new, or at least newly appropriated, phrases to describe them. The spread of misinformation is… Read More ›
Chris Drain’s response “Ideality and Cognitive Development” (2020) to my “The Match of Ideals” (2020) aims for further analysis of the phylogenesis of conceptual cognition. Drain suggests complementing Vygotsky’s and Leontiev’s accounts of higher mental functions and specifically human consciousness… Read More ›
Abstract In this paper, I reply to Seungbae Park’s (2020) critique of the view I defend in Chapter 6 of The Relativity of Theory: Key Positions and Arguments in the Contemporary Scientific Realism/Antirealism Debate (Cham: Springer, 2020), namely, Relative Realism…. Read More ›
Seumas Miller (2020) develops a rich set of interconnected views on abilities, joint abilities, knowing-how, joint knowing-how, epistemic abilities, joint epistemic abilities, and collective knowledge. As this list indicates, Miller covers quite a lot of ground in his paper, and… Read More ›
Abstract Scientific realists claim that the best of successful rival theories is (approximately) true. Relative realists object that we cannot make the absolute judgment that a theory is successful, and that we can only make the relative judgment that it… Read More ›
Education has a plurality of aims, one of which is to increase knowledge and decrease ignorance. The relation between knowledge and ignorance, however, turns out to be surprisingly complicated. Sometimes ignorance is actively held in place by various forces that… Read More ›
Introduction I’m honoured by Chris Ranalli’s (2020) thought-provoking response to my recent article, “The Epistemic Benefits of Worldview Disagreement” (2020a), which is an expansion of ideas found in my book, The Epistemic Benefits of Disagreement (2020b). I’m also grateful to… Read More ›
In ‘The Humility Heuristic Or: People Worth Trusting Admit to What They Don’t Know,’ Mattias Skipper defends a heuristic for identifying trustworthy people. In slogan form, the Humility Heuristic says that people worth trusting admit to what they don’t know…. Read More ›
“The Scientism Debate” in Summary In his article “The Scientism Debate: A Battle for the Soul of Philosophy?” (2019), Moti Mizrahi sets out to empirically test two hypotheses that putatively explain why philosophers find scientism threatening. The hypotheses are: H1:… Read More ›
In his recent article, Siyaves Azeri (2020) responds to “Wigner’s riddle,” i.e., how it is that mathematics can be so “unreasonably” effective at explaining physical law, especially considering how so many advanced mathematical concepts—unlike those of elementary arithmetic and geometry—originate so… Read More ›