In “Regulating Social Media as a Public Good: Limiting Epistemic Segregation” (2023), Toby Handfield tackles a well-known problematic aspect of widespread social media use: the formation of ideologically monotone and insulated social networks. Handfield argues that we can take some… Read More ›
In “Fake News vs. Echo Chambers” (2021) I argue that some kinds of attitudes that make it easier to resist fake news also make it more difficult to exit echo chambers. Closed-mindedness makes it easier to resist fake news. But… Read More ›
Abstract It’s intuitive to think that (a) the more sure you are of something, the harder it’ll be to change your mind about it, and (b) you can’t be open-minded about something if you’re very sure about it. If these… Read More ›
C. Thi Nguyen’s (2020) recent account of echo chambers as social epistemic structures that actively exclude outsiders’ voices has sparked debate on the connection between echo chambers and epistemic injustice (Santos 2021; Catala 2021; Elzinga 2021). In this paper I… Read More ›
The connections between echo chambers, on the one hand, and epistemic injustice and ignorance, on the other hand, are important to identify and theorize, and have indeed started to draw the attention of philosophers working on these issues (Nguyen 2020;… Read More ›
Belief polarization, misinformation, and distrust in scientific expertise are on the rise in democracies across the globe. These worrying trends have been accompanied by some new, or at least newly appropriated, phrases to describe them. The spread of misinformation is… Read More ›
Understanding is a demanding epistemic state. It involves not just knowledge that things are thus and so, but grasping the reasons why and seeing how things hang together. Gaining understanding, then, requires some amount of inquiry. Much of our inquiries… Read More ›
Kenneth Boyd’s paper “Epistemically Pernicious Groups and the Groupstrapping Problem” (2019) is an excellent example of how philosophers can contribute to social sciences through conceptual engineering. Boyd introduces what he calls groupstrapping. The idea begins with the claim that groups… Read More ›