A few months into the pandemic, and I was surprised so many people explicitly rejected expert advice. Mostly, I was shocked by their arguments: they said that scientists keep changing their minds; that not all scientists agree on what we… Read More ›
Critical Replies
Critical Replies are engagements with articles recently published in Social Epistemology.
A Critical Response to Renteria-Uriarte’s “Counteracting Epistemic Oppression through Social Myths”, Dennis Masaka
Abstract In this article, I seek to engage Xabier Renteria-Uriarte’s contention that social myth of the oppressed people help them to launch struggles to recover or retain their social identity, culture and knowledges against the threats posed by state power… Read More ›
Algorithmic Opinion Mining and the History of Philosophy: A Response to Mizrahi’s For and Against Scientism, Andreas Vrahimis
As Moti Mizrahi’s editorial introduction points out, For and Against Scientism ‘arises from an exchange between several scholars over the pages of the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective’ (Mizrahi 2022, 18) in response to Mizrahi (2019). Mizrahi (2019) defended… Read More ›
Ethical Silence, Moral Framing, and Role of the Humanities against Disinformation: A Final Reply to Pongiglione and Martini, Lawrence Torcello
Venus may once have had an atmosphere more congenial to life than its current greenhouse conditions. This fact is, however, vacant of ethical consequence. We have no cause to believe sentient beings ever lived on Venus, let alone that an… Read More ›
Mitigation and Linguistic Epistemic Tolerance as Requirements for Linguistically Inclusive Science: A Dialogue with Vitaly Pronskikh, Aleksandra Vučković and Vlasta Sikimić
In our paper “How to Fight Linguistic Injustice in Science: Equity Measures and Mitigating Agents” (2023), we discuss the challenges that non-native English speakers face in communicating their scientific findings. We explored several obstacles they/we encounter, with the most severe… Read More ›
Group Dispositional Belief, Information Possession, and “Epistemic Explosion”: A Further Reply to Jesper Kallestrup, Avram Hiller and R. Wolfe Randall
On a non-summative, non-supervenient (NSNS) account of group knowledge, a group may know that p without any members knowing or even believing that p. Additionally, group knowledge does not supervene on the mental states of the individual members of the… Read More ›
Reply to Jeroen de Ridder’s “Online Illusions of Understanding”, Justin McBrayer
Professor de Ridder (2022) argues that while online informational environments are epistemically good in some ways, they also have an epistemic flaw: they create illusions of understanding instead of the real McCoy. … [please read below the rest of the… Read More ›
Good Science is Communist: A Reply to Bright and Heesen, Matthew J. Brown
Liam Kofi Bright and Remco Heesen (2023) raise a familiar and deeply troubling problem: commercial research is widespread in contemporary science, but epistemically problematic in various ways. Commercial research violates various core norms of science and has as one of… Read More ›
The Scope of Woke: A Reply to Atkins, Lacey J. Davidson
A person needs only spend a little time on the internet or watching the news to observe that some people think it is bad to be woke. For example, from my home state of Indiana, Congressman Jim Banks pledged to… Read More ›
Paradoxical Teaching and the Art of Pedagogically Demonstrating Intellectual Humility, Brian Robinson
Can a teacher act intellectually humble and then point to that action as a good example of intellect humility for students to emulate? This is the question to which Noel Clemente draws our attention in his recent paper (2023). The… Read More ›