Critical Replies are engagements with articles recently published in Social Epistemology.
Some terms are harmful. Take slurs. The use of slurs can promote and sustain connections between concepts and stereotypes that harm innocent people. A slur for African Americans, for example, may be harmful even if that slur does not license… Read More ›
It is highly unusual for philosophers to agree about anything. And yet, philosophers of conspiracy theories seem to have achieved this remarkable feat. For more than a decade, a campaign has been waged against a position called “generalism”. Originally coined… Read More ›
Caroline Bollen’s “Towards a Clear and Fair Conceptualization of Empathy” (2023) raises important questions about whether current academic approaches to empathy wrongly imply that neurodivergent people (especially those with autism) are morally inferior. Bollen offers a novel understanding of empathy… Read More ›
Lee Basham’s article is wildly inaccurate.[1] I do not mean that he has marshaled poor arguments against my positions; I mean that the positions he is arguing against are not mine in the first place. He attributes opinions to me… Read More ›
Wish politicians looked out for miners instead of minors on some island somewhere. … They want to have total control, know what you think, know what you do. — Oliver Anthony Jesse Walker’s background premise is that we are paranoiacs…. Read More ›
Liam Kofi Bright and Remco Heesen (2023) seek to identify a more pragmatic and fruitful criterion for demarcating academic from commercial research. Having described the limitations of criteria based on epistemic success they propose adopting the Mertonian social norm of… Read More ›
Lee Basham asks how I define “conspiracy theory.”[1] I have a rather broad-church definition: I use the phrase to mean any theory that posits a conspiracy. I do not think a theory needs to be implausible, fringy, or false to… Read More ›
Jesse Walker is a prolific and accomplished writer with the Reason Foundation, a group associated with a certain Nozick-like political-economic libertarianism and a general impatience with skepticism about our underlying political and economic systems in the West. It’s encouraging to… Read More ›
While passing through Grants, New Mexico, you will see haunting bumper stickers. The town is for the most part the picture of poverty. But there is a powerful back-story, the near-by Ambrosia Lake Uranium mines. The old, local restaurants, now… Read More ›
I am very grateful to Ann-Sophie Barwich for taking the time to comment on my work in her paper ‘Between Electrical Light Switches and Panpsychism: Scientism and the Responsibilities of the Humanities in the Twenty-First Century’ (2022; unless otherwise stated… Read More ›