An argument without an audience is pointless, and an argument without an arguer is no more than a potential set of sentences. In his response to my earlier paper (Hinton 2019) on the ability of argumentation theory to deal with… Read More ›
Critical Replies
Critical Replies are engagements with articles recently published in Social Epistemology.
Epistemic Vices and Epistemic Ends: A Reply to Beatson, Joly Chock, Lang, and Matheson, Quassim Cassam
In Vices of the Mind: From the Intellectual to the Political, I reflect on the claim that personal qualities like closed-mindedness, prejudice and wishful thinking are epistemic vices. This is not, in itself, a controversial claim. The interesting question is:… Read More ›
So What if ‘Fake News’ is Fake News? Jeroen de Ridder
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 ›
Reply to Claus-Christian Carbon: “Conspiracy Theory,” a Valid World-Shaping Scientific and Analytic Category, Lee Basham
“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 ›
The Philosophy of Taking Conspiracy Theories Seriously, Ori Freiman
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 ›
A Response to “Uptake of a Conspiracy Theory Attribution: Part 1 and 2” by Brian Martin, Samantha Vanderslott
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 ›
Chain Reaction: Critical Theory Needs Critical Mass—Contradiction, Crisis and the Value-Form, Mike Neary
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 ›
The Aims of Reliable Knowledge: A Reply to Seungbae Park, Richard A. Healey
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 ›
Debating the Computerization of Financial Markets: A Reply to Gasparin, Schinckus, & Green, Franck Jovanovic
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 ›
Measuring Public Pathology: A Brief Response to Dentith on Wagner-Egger et al.’s “Why Conspiracy Theories are ‘Oxymorons…’,” or “Just Asking Some Questions,” Lee Basham
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 ›
