In “Caliphate’ and the Problem of Testimony,” Beba Cibralic (2020) argues that the New York Times (NYT) podcast Caliphate represents an epistemic failure that is similar in kind to its failures in reporting on weapons of mass destruction in the… Read More ›
Critical Replies
Critical Replies are engagements with articles recently published in Social Epistemology.
Emancipatory Activist Movements Can Build Collective Intellectual Self-Trust—But Not Always in Ways We Would Like, Inkeri Koskinen
Nadja El Kassar (2020) argues that intellectual self-trust, both individual and especially collective, is a central tool for countering epistemic injustice. It can help individuals and collectives to defend themselves against the effects of epistemic injustice, and especially collective intellectual… Read More ›
How to be an Inconvenient Scientist? A Reply to Berry Tholen, Alexander Ruser
Priests of Truth or Academic Citizens? The scholar is destined in a peculiar manner for society: his class, more than any other, exists only through society and for society— it is thus his peculiar duty to cultivate the social talents,—an… Read More ›
A Brief Reply to Blas Radi from Fernando Rudy-Hiller
Fernando Rudy-Hiller is the Editor of Diánoia Philosophy Review. He offered the following brief reply to Blas Radi’s article “Epistemic Responsibility and Culpable Ignorance: About Editorial and Peer Review in Practical Philosophy.” “Regarding the allegations contained in Blas Radi’s piece about… Read More ›
Trusting Oneself Through Others: El Kassar on Intellectual Self-Trust, Matthew Congdon
In a pair of recent and illuminating articles, Nadja El Kassar develops a notion of intellectual self-trust and argues that it should play a central role in theorizing epistemic agency under oppression. Though the two articles focus on different theoretical… Read More ›
Echo Chambers and Crisis Epistemology: A Reply to Santos, Benjamin Elzinga
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 ›
On Reality of Thinking: A Response to Chris Drain’s “Ideality and Cognitive Development”, Siyaves Azeri
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 ›
In Defense of Relative Realism: A Reply to Park, Moti Mizrahi
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 on Knowing-How and Joint Abilities, Yuri Cath
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 ›
The Appearance and the Reality of a Scientific Theory, Seungbae Park
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 ›