In a recent paper, María Pía Méndez (2022) offers an epistemic critique of epistocracy according to which the sort of politically well-informed but homogenous groups of citizens that would be empowered under epistocracy would lack reliable access to information about… Read More ›
The core of Cyril Hédoin’s (2021) essay is a critique of a recent article by Julian Reiss (2019), which claims to offer an “epistemic critique” of epistocracy.[1] As Hédoin explains in §I, in short, Reiss offers two reasons that epistocracy… Read More ›
In ‘The Humility Heuristic Or: People Worth Trusting Admit to What They Don’t Know,’ Mattias Skipper defends a heuristic for identifying trustworthy people. In slogan form, the Humility Heuristic says that people worth trusting admit to what they don’t know…. Read More ›
I appreciate the opportunity to continue this conversation on how non-experts might identify and, thereby, come to trust experts. While so much of contemporary philosophical discussion might be called destructive—attempts to defeat an “opponent’s” claims through counterexample—this forum has been… Read More ›
We enter this conversation precisely to continue this productive exchange on the lessons to be learned from L’Aquila, grounding our response to both DeVasto and Felbacher-Escamilla on our previous work about the same case published in 2019 in Rhetoric &… Read More ›
I would like to begin by thanking Jamie Watson (2020) and Martin Hinton (2020) for their charitable treatments of my paper (2020) and their illuminating replies. They are right to even further temper my already reserved optimism about novices’ capabilities… Read More ›
In his article “Can Novices Trust Themselves to Choose Trustworthy Experts? Reasons for (Reserved) Optimism” (2020), Johnny Brennan does two things. He illustrates the problem of the identification of experts, which has caused a great deal of head-scratching for scholars… Read More ›
In Lewis Carroll’s poem, “The Hunting of the Snark,” ten adventurers set out to find an elusive, likely dangerous, and possibly mythical, creature called a “Snark.” They plot their course with a map that shows only ocean—no land—and their captain… Read More ›
I would like to thank Danielle DeVasto for her careful discussion of my (2019) reconstruction and for putting it into the broader context of research on the L’Aquila 2009 case. Before coming to the above outlined discussion of overflow, its… Read More ›
The intimate relationship between expertise and ethos is mediated by rhetoric. Complex articulations of these social, political, and rhetorical relationships are found in Reddit’s r/science Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) series that allows a scientific expert to engage in an online question-and-answer period… Read More ›