Critical Replies are engagements with articles recently published in Social Epistemology.
David Coady (2019), in his contribution to this issue, joins a small but growing number of people expressing misgivings about the current hype surrounding fake news, alternative facts, and other post-truthy phenomena in society and academia (cf. also Habgood-Coote 2019)…. Read More ›
“Conspiracy theories” are reviled by some, typically “elites” of limited kinds—political, corporate media and academic—and in many cases suspected to be true and even believed by far, far more people. This reality puzzles some, reassures others … [please read below… Read More ›
During the last few decades, the proliferation of interest in conspiracy theories has grown tremendously. What was once a niche interest of the very few is now a widespread phenomenon in our culture—from political campaigns and mainstream news, to the… Read More ›
The two-part article by Brian Martin contains two main points. The first is his argument of Conspiracy Theory Attribution (CTA) as a method of denigration, which I have little to disagree with. The second is the example given of the… Read More ›
Krystian Szadkowski and Jakub Krzeski have written a significant paper, In, Against and Beyond: A Marxist Critique for Higher Education in Crisis (2019), setting out a critical framework ‘to render visible what lies beyond the current form of higher education’ (1)…. Read More ›
As a scientific realist, Seungbae Park in his (2019) paper “The Disastrous Implications of the ‘English’ View of Rationality in a Social World” seeks to repel an anti-realist attack from Bas Van Fraassen by turning his opponent’s new epistemology against… Read More ›
Gasparin, Schinckus, & Green (2019) discuss a stimulating idea regarding financial flash crashes: regulators based their decisions on a framework inherited from the financial economics mainstream, while its models and theories haven’t demonstrated their capability to forecast and prevent such… Read More ›
Wagner-Egger et al. still argue that public doubts and conspiratorial concerns represent a mass pathology in need of a mass psychological cure. This is known as the “pathologizing project”. I acknowledge the soundness of M R.X. Dentith’s analytical critique of… Read More ›
The historian and political activist Walter Rodney and the novelist and poet Wilson Harris are not often set in conversation with each other. Yet despite their very different disciplinary backgrounds and the great disparities in their approach to politics, Rodney… Read More ›
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has an unusual daily routine. Monday through Friday he leads a press conference from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. He fields a range of questions on his government’s new policies. Almost a month ago,… Read More ›
