Critical Replies are engagements with articles recently published in Social Epistemology.
It is often remarked that solutions must be social, not technological. Yet this surely must mean that the problems should also be deemed social, and not technological. In their article, ‘Challenges to Public Universities: Digitalisation, Commodification and Precarity’ (2019), Holmwood… Read More ›
A little while ago, historian of science Nathaniel Comfort wrote a piece for Nature in which he gives an overview of historically shifting senses of identity—both human and personal—that have accompanied changes in scientific understanding of human biology. He argues… Read More ›
In “A Rational Reconstruction of the L’Aquila Case: How Non-denial Turns into Acceptance,” Christian J. Feldbacher-Escamilla (2019) revisits the L’Aquila earthquake controversy, linking public dismissal of seismic risk to scientists’ failure to explicitly reject politicians’ misstatements. This analysis stems from… Read More ›
This year-end reflection will return to the state of social epistemology and how it might go forward in light of the post-truth condition. Its point of departure is threefold. First is the recent assessment made by our field’s ‘honest broker’,… Read More ›
The history of the university has been read as a cycle of foundational paradigm shifts, wherein emergent socio-cultural forces destroy dominant-hegemonic university problematics and rebuild the institution in their own image. Most famously, Bill Readings (1999, 54) identifies a sequence… Read More ›
The intimate relationship between expertise and ethos is mediated by rhetoric. Complex articulations of these social, political, and rhetorical relationships are found in Reddit’s r/science Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) series that allows a scientific expert to engage in an online question-and-answer period… Read More ›
Moti Mizrahi’s “The Scientism Debate: A Battle for the Soul of Philosophy?” frames the introduction of scientific methods into philosophy as scientism (specifically a kind of weak scientism). This contrasts with the view that scientific methods only have their place… Read More ›
I thank Seungbae for his spirited and enjoyable reply (2019a) to my comments (2019) on his article (2019). Here, I make four brief points in response … [please read below the rest of the article]. Article Citation: Healey, Richard A…. Read More ›
It is tempting to accept the studies de Ridder (2019) cites in support of my position that the fake news scare has been “overhyped”. However, since I have argued there is no fake news problem at all, I cannot accept… Read More ›
Is the debate about scientism ‘a battle for the soul of philosophy’, as Moti Mizrahi (2019) contends? If it is, it is unlikely that the proponents of scientism would be inclined to put it this way … [please read below… Read More ›
