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 ›
Johnny Brennan
Coalitions of Trust: Using Epistemic Teams to Identify Experts, Jamie Carlin Watson
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 ›
Finding the Snark Together: A Response to Watson and Hinton, Johnny Brennan
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 ›
Can Novices be Taught to Choose Trustworthy Experts? Optimism for Reasoning—A Reply to Johnny Brennan, Martin Hinton
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 ›
Hunting the Expert: The Precarious Epistemic Position of a Novice, Jamie Carlin Watson
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 ›