Critical Replies are engagements with articles recently published in Social Epistemology.
In “Is Conspiracy Theorising Irrational?” (Levy 2019) I argued that conspiratorial ideation—defined as the acceptance (not the generation) of conspiracy theories—might be much more rational than we tend to think. I suggested such ideation might be subjectively rational—rational for the… Read More ›
Neil Levy (2019) provides several new angles on the long-standing question about the rationality, or lack thereof, of people who accept objectively unwarranted conspiracy theories. Levy’s position rests on two arguments. First, accepting conspiracy theories is subjectively rational for many… Read More ›
In their introduction to this special issue, Alfano and Klein (2019) pose two neatly contrasting questions for social epistemologists who want to take our epistemic networks seriously. First, what sort of individual epistemic properties should we cultivate, given the social… Read More ›
This response builds on some of the issues that Jason Tyndal raises in ‘Public Reason Liberalism and the Certification of Scientific Claims’ (2019b), itself a reply to my paper ‘What Facts Should be Treated as ‘Fixed’ in Public Justification?’ (Reid… Read More ›
Scientism is defined by those who reject it as a brace of theses: 1. The unwarranted confidence in the methods of science as the only way to secure knowledge; 2. The unwarranted acceptance of the implications of contemporary natural science… Read More ›
Richard Healey makes four useful comments on my paper (2019a) where I criticized Bas van Fraassen’s positions. The four comments concern the issues of whether ‘disbelief’ is appropriate or inappropriate to characterize van Fraassen’s position, what the relationship between a… Read More ›
It is often remarked that solutions must be social, not technological. Yet this surely must mean that the problems should also be deemed social, and not technological. In their article, ‘Challenges to Public Universities: Digitalisation, Commodification and Precarity’ (2019), Holmwood… Read More ›
A little while ago, historian of science Nathaniel Comfort wrote a piece for Nature in which he gives an overview of historically shifting senses of identity—both human and personal—that have accompanied changes in scientific understanding of human biology. He argues… Read More ›
In “A Rational Reconstruction of the L’Aquila Case: How Non-denial Turns into Acceptance,” Christian J. Feldbacher-Escamilla (2019) revisits the L’Aquila earthquake controversy, linking public dismissal of seismic risk to scientists’ failure to explicitly reject politicians’ misstatements. This analysis stems from… Read More ›
This year-end reflection will return to the state of social epistemology and how it might go forward in light of the post-truth condition. Its point of departure is threefold. First is the recent assessment made by our field’s ‘honest broker’,… Read More ›