In a pair of recent and illuminating articles, Nadja El Kassar develops a notion of intellectual self-trust and argues that it should play a central role in theorizing epistemic agency under oppression. Though the two articles focus on different theoretical… Read More ›
In 2004, the New York Times apologised for its misleading reporting on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. After an internal review, the Times acknowledged the swamp of mistakes that resulted in the spread of misinformation: journalists did not confirm… 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 ›
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 ›
The average Australian spends almost 10 hours a week on social media; a majority report that checking Facebook is one of the first things they do in the morning (Sensis 2017). Recent revelations about fake news and extremist sentiments spread… Read More ›
In a game of telephone, or as we called it “whisper down the lane”, someone whispers a sentence to someone else, and then that person whispers it to yet another person, and on and on it goes until the end… Read More ›
Here’s a plausible definition of an ally: an individual who supports a non-dominant group’s pursuit of their justice-based interests. One way to develop a more detailed theory of an ally is by specifying ‘support a non-dominant group’s pursuit of their… Read More ›
Here’s what we’re all desperately trying to explain: certain groups seem to have a wildly over-inflated devotion to their beliefs. Such groups seem to flourish online. Their members seem to resist very good contrary evidence, and to slowly become more… Read More ›