Lee Basham’s recent piece “An Autopsy of the Origins of HIV/AIDS” (2022) has some astonishingly provocative subject matter, so much as to overcome the force of his overall argument. He makes a true point: investigation into real scientific and medical… Read More ›
Critical Replies
Critical Replies are engagements with articles recently published in Social Epistemology.
Deadnames and Missing Chiralities: A Response to Steve Fuller’s “The Problem of Cishumanism”, Joshua Earle
“Cisgender,” is a term first attributed to German sexologist Volkmar Sigusch and his coining of the term “cis-sexual” in the mid 1990’s (Sigusch 1995). In a 2015 interview (German language, found here) Sigusch explains his reasoning for the coinage, citing… Read More ›
The Constitutive Claim: Payoffs and Perils, Erin Beeghly
I want to thank Alex Madva (2021) for his thoughtful response and for inviting me to say more about the everyday implications of my arguments. In “Stereotyping as Discrimination: Why Thoughts Can Be Discriminatory” (2021), I propose that stereotyping someone—even… Read More ›
Fake News and Epistemic Criticizability: Reflections on Croce and Piazza, Alex Worsnip
In recent philosophical and social-scientific discussions of fake news and misinformation, it’s become common to suggest that we should not focus on the purported epistemic vices of the individuals who fall prey to the misinformation in question, but rather on… Read More ›
Can Standpoint Epistemology Avoid Inconsistency, Circularity, and Unnecessariness? A Comment on Ashton’s Remarks about Epistemic Privilege, Part II, Claudio Javier Cormick
Section 4: Back to a Relativistic Understanding of Standpoint Theory? The Problem of Circularity and, yet another one, Unnecessariness Now, if the standpoint thesis cannot plausibly be weakened so that it leaves room for a neutral ranking of standpoints (that… Read More ›
Can Standpoint Epistemology Avoid Inconsistency, Circularity, and Unnecessariness? A Comment on Ashton’s Remarks about Epistemic Privilege, Part I, Claudio Javier Cormick
In two provocative and interesting articles (Ashton 2019, 2020),[1] Natalie Ashton argues that standpoint epistemologies, though are not presented by their own authors as cases of epistemic relativism, are in fact relativistic, in a sense she reconstructs on the basis… Read More ›
Confronting Fake News Through Non-Ideal Epistemology: A Reply to Croce and Piazza, Regina Rini
In their paper arguing that ‘educational’ solutions to fake news are superior to ‘structural’ solutions, Michel Croce and Tommaso Piazza (2021) challenge my earlier (Rini 2017) claim that the spread of fake news results (partly) from an individually reasonable practice… Read More ›
Doing Things with Facts: A Response to Lukianova and Tolochin, Benjamin J. Pauli
Sometime last year, I had the pleasure of reviewing Ekaterina Lukianova and Igor Tolochin’s “Citizens in Search of Facts: A Case Study from the Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review on Measure 82” (2022). This response offers an opportunity to return to… Read More ›
Immanent Critique: The Role of Researchers and Participants in the Particular Universal Conundrum, Benno Herzog
Critique is back on the agenda of mainstream social science. There was a time when only a minority of social scientists considered critique as the aim of academic work. “Serious sciences”, according to the conviction in large parts of academia,… Read More ›
Testimonial Smothering’s Non-Epistemic Motives: A Reply to Goetze and Lee, Eric Bayruns García
In her article, J. Y. Lee (2021a) presented anticipatory epistemic injustice. A subject suffers anticipatory epistemic injustice if she suppresses her testimony because she anticipates that she will face negative consequences due to her membership in a non-dominant identity group… Read More ›