Coady, D., - Chase, J. (Eds.) (2019) - The Routledge Handbook of Applied Epistemology. Routledge.

i
THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF

APPLIED EPISTEMOLOGY
While applied epistemology has been neglected for much of the twentieth century, it has seen
emerging interest in recent years, with key thinkers in the field helping to put it on the philo-
sophical map. Although it is an old tradition, current technological and social developments
have dramatically changed both the questions it faces and the methodology required to answer
those questions. Recent developments also make it a particularly important and exciting area for
research and teaching in the twenty-first century. The Routledge Handbook of Applied Epistemology
is an outstanding reference source to this exciting subject and the first collection of its kind.
Comprising entries by a team of international contributors, the Handbook is divided into six
main parts:
• The Internet • Epistemic institutions

• Politics • Individual investigators
• Science • Theory and practice in philosophy.
Within these sections, the core topics and debates are presented, analyzed, and set into broader
historical and disciplinary contexts.The central topics covered include: the prehistory of applied
epistemology, expertise and scientific authority, epistemic aspects of political and social phil-
osophy, epistemology and the law, and epistemology and medicine.
Essential reading for students and researchers in epistemology, political philosophy, and
applied ethics, the Handbook will also be very useful for those in related fields, such as law, soci-
ology, and politics.
David Coady is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Tasmania, Australia. He is the
author of What to Believe Now: Applying Epistemology to Contemporary Issues (2012), the co-author of
The Climate Change Debate: An Epistemic and Ethical Enquiry (2013), the editor of Conspiracy Theories:
The Philosophical Debate (2006) and the co-editor of A Companion to Applied Philosophy (2016).
James Chase is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Tasmania, Australia. He

works on epistemology; philosophical logic, particularly as applied to epistemological issues; and
the methodology of analytic philosophy. He is the co-author of Analytic vs Continental (2011)
and the co-editor of Postanalytic and Metacontinental (2010).
ii
ro u tled g e h a n d bo oks i n phi los ophy
Routledge Handbooks in Philosophy are state-of-the-art surveys of emerging, newly refreshed, and
important fields in philosophy, providing accessible yet thorough assessments of key problems,
themes, thinkers, and recent developments in research.
All chapters for each volume are specially commissioned, and written by leading scholars in
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able reference tools for students and researchers seeking a comprehensive overview of new and
exciting topics in philosophy. They are also valuable teaching resources as accompaniments to
textbooks, anthologies, and research-orientated publications.
Also available:
THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF METAETHICS

Edited by Tristram McPherson and David Plunkett
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Routledge-Handbooks-in-Philosophy/book-series/RHP
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THE ROUTLEDGE
HANDBOOK OF
Edited by David Coady and James Chase

iv
First published 2019

by Routledge
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v
CONTENTS
Notes on contributors viii
PART I
Introduction 1
1 The return of applied epistemology 3

James Chase and David Coady
PART II
The Internet 13
2 The World Wide Web 15

Paul Smart and Nigel Shadbolt
3 Wikipedia 28
Karen Frost-Arnold
4 Googling 41
Hanna Kiri Gunn and Michael P. Lynch
5 Adversarial epistemology on the Internet 54

Don Fallis
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Contents
PART III
Politics 69
6 John Stuart Mill on free speech 71

Daniel Halliday and Helen McCabe
7 Epistemic democracy 88
Jason Brennan
8 Epistemic injustice and feminist epistemology 101

Andrea Pitts
9 Propaganda and ideology 115

Randal Marlin
PART IV
Science 129
10 Expertise in climate science 131

Stephen John
11 Evidence-based medicine 142

Robyn Bluhm and Kirstin Borgerson
12 The precautionary principle in medical research and policy:

the case of sponsorship bias 154
Daniel Steel
13 Psychology and conspiracy theories 166

David Coady
PART V
Epistemic institutions 177
14 Legal burdens of proof and statistical evidence 179

Georgi Gardiner
15 Banking and finance: disentangling the epistemic failings of the

2008 financial crisis 196
Lisa Warenski
16 Applied epistemology of education 211

Ben Kotzee
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Contents
PART VI
Individual investigators 231
17 Disagreement 233
Tim Kenyon
18 Forecasting 247
Steve Fuller
19 Rumor 259
Axel Gelfert
20 Gossip 272
Tommaso Bertolotti and Lorenzo Magnani
21 The applied epistemology of conspiracy theories: an overview 284

M R. X. Dentith and Brian L. Keeley
PART VII
Theory and practice in philosophy 295
22 Philosophical expertise 297

Bryan Frances
23 Ethical expertise 307

Christopher Cowley
24 The demise of grand narratives? Postmodernism, power-knowledge,

and applied epistemology 318
Matthew Sharpe
Index 332
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CONTRIBUTORS
Tommaso Bertolotti is post-doctoral fellow in philosophy and adjunct professor of cognitive

philosophy at the University of Pavia, Italy. He also collaborates for research and teaching with
the French engineering school Télécom ParisTech.
Robyn Bluhm is an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at Lyman Briggs

College at Michigan State University, USA. Her research examines inter-related ethical and
epistemological issues in medicine and in neuroscience.
Kirstin Borgerson is an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at Dalhousie

University, Canada. Dr. Borgerson researches and teaches in medical epistemology and medical
ethics.
Jason Brennan is the Robert J. and Elizabeth Flanagan Family Professor of Strategy, Economics,
Ethics, and Public Policy at Georgetown University, USA. He is the author of nine books,
including When All Else Fails (Princeton University Press, 2018), In Defense of Openness, with
Bas van der Vossen (Oxford University Press, 2018), and Against Democracy (Princeton University
Press, 2016).
James Chase is senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Tasmania, Australia. He works
on epistemology, philosophical logic, particularly as applied to epistemological issues, and the
methodology of analytic philosophy. He is the co-author of Analytic vs Continental (2011) and
the co-editor of Postanalytic and Metacontinental (2010).
David Coady is senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Tasmania, Australia. Most
of his current work is on applied philosophy, especially applied epistemology. He has published
on rumor, conspiracy theory, the blogosphere, expertise, and democratic theory. He has also
published on the metaphysics of causation, the philosophy of law, climate change, cricket ethics,
police ethics, and the ethics of horror films. He is the author of What to Believe Now: Applying
Epistemology to Contemporary Issues (2012), the co-author of The Climate Change Debate: An
Epistemic and Ethical Enquiry (2013), the editor of Conspiracy Theories: The Philosophical Debate
(2006) and the co-editor of A Companion to Applied Philosophy (2016).
viii
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Contributors
Christopher Cowley is associate professor at University College Dublin, Ireland. He works

on ethical theory, medical ethics, and the philosophy of criminal law. He has edited volumes on
the philosophy of autobiography and supererogation, and has written a monograph on moral
responsibility.
M R. X. Dentith received their PhD in Philosophy from the University of Auckland, where
they wrote their dissertation on the epistemology of conspiracy theories. Author of the first
single-author book on conspiracy theories by a philosopher, The Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), they have published extensively on the epistemology of conspiracy
theories. They also have a side project developing an account of how we might talk about the
epistemology of secrecy, which should probably be kept from the world until such time it is
ready to be leaked to the public.
Don Fallis is professor of information and adjunct professor of philosophy at the University of
Arizona, USA. His research interests include epistemology and the philosophy of information.
His articles on lying and deception have appeared in the Journal of Philosophy, Philosophical Studies,
Synthese, and the Australasian Journal of Philosophy. He has also discussed lying on Philosophy TV
and in several volumes of the Philosophy and Popular Culture series.
Bryan Frances is a member of the chair of theoretical philosophy at the University of Tartu,
Estonia. He received a €512,660 grant to head a three-year research project starting in February
2018 on “Expertise and Fundamental Controversy in Philosophy and Science” at Tartu. He
works mainly in epistemology and metaphysics, although he has also published in the phil-
osophy of mind, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of religion.
Karen Frost-Arnold is associate professor of philosophy at Hobart and William Smith Colleges
in Geneva, NY, USA. Her research focuses on the epistemology and ethics of trust, social epis-
temology, philosophy of the Internet, philosophy of science, and feminist philosophy.
Steve Fuller is Auguste Comte Professor of Social Epistemology in the Department of Sociology
at the University of Warwick, England. Originally trained in history and philosophy of science,
Fuller is best known for his foundational work in the field of “social epistemology,” which is the
name of a quarterly journal that he founded in 1987 as well as the first of his more than twenty
books. His most recent books are Knowledge: The Philosophical Quest in History (Routledge, 2015),
The Academic Caesar (Sage, 2016) and Post-Truth: Knowledge as a Power Game (Anthem, 2018).
Georgi Gardiner is a junior research fellow at St. John’s College, Oxford University, England.
In August 2019, she will join the Philosophy Department at the University of Tennessee.
She received her PhD from Rutgers University. Before that she studied at the University of
Edinburgh and the Open University.
Axel Gelfert is professor of philosophy at the Technical University of Berlin, Germany, where
he investigates issues at the intersection of social epistemology and the philosophy of science
and technology. He is the author of A Critical Introduction to Testimony (Bloomsbury, 2014) and
How to Do Science with Models (Springer, 2016).
Hanna Kiri Gunn is a feminist social epistemologist at the University of Connecticut, USA,
concerned about the possibility of meaningful democratic deliberation. Recent work has
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Contributors
looked at the ways that the Internet supports or undermines our democratic ideals, in particular
our ability to develop and exercise epistemic and communicative agency.
Daniel Halliday is senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He

works mainly on topics at the intersection of political philosophy and economics, with a special
focus on markets, taxation, and inequality. He is the author of The Inheritance of Wealth: Justice,
Equality, and the Right to Bequeath (Oxford University Press, 2018). Dan is also working on a co-
authored textbook about the moral foundations of capitalism.
Stephen John is currently the Hatton Trust Senior Lecturer in the Philosophy of Public Health
at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, England.
He is particularly interested in the intersection between social epistemology, political phil-
osophy, and philosophy of science.
Brian L. Keeley is professor of philosophy at Pitzer College in Claremont, California, where he

also teaches in the Science,Technology & Society and Neuroscience Programs, as well as serving
as an extended graduate faculty member in philosophy at Claremont Graduate University.
In addition to having edited a volume in the Cambridge University Press Contemporary
Philosophy in Focus series on Paul Churchland, he has published over forty articles, book
chapters, and reviews on topics including the philosophy of neuroscience, the nature of the
senses, artificial life, and the unusual epistemology of contemporary conspiracy theories.
Tim Kenyon is Vice-President, Research, at Brock University in St. Catharines, Canada, and
professor of philosophy at the University of Waterloo, Canada. His research topics include issues
in social epistemology, critical thinking, and language pragmatics.
Ben Kotzee is senior lecturer and director of the Doctoral Program in Education at the
University of Birmingham. He works on topics in the philosophy of education and in profes-
sional ethics. He is the editor of the journal Theory and Research in Education.
Michael P. Lynch is professor of philosophy and director of the Humanities Institute at the
University of Connecticut, USA.
Helen McCabe’s research has mainly looked at the political philosophy of John Stuart Mill,
especially his connections to pre-Marxist socialism (particularly that of Robert Owen, Charles
Fourier, Victor Considerant, Henri Saint- Simon, and Louis Blanc). Helen is increasingly
interested in the nature of his intellectual relationship with Harriet Taylor Mill (whom he
credited as his co-author), and in her independent status as a political philosopher. She holds a
DPhil in politics from Oxford University.
Lorenzo Magnani is full professor of philosophy of science at the University of Pavia, Italy,
where he also chairs the Computational Philosophy Laboratory.Together with Nancy Nersessian
and Paul Thagard, he is among the founders of the model-based reasoning (MBR) community.
Randal Marlin has degrees in philosophy from Princeton (AB), McGill (MA), and Toronto
(PhD). His interest in the philosophy of law began with studies at Oxford in 1961 and an
encounter with Oxford Essays on Jurisprudence, followed by a tutorial with H. L. A. Hart. A par-
allel interest in existentialism and phenomenology eventually led him to study propaganda.
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newgenprepdf
Contributors
Sabbatical leave from Carleton University in Ottawa allowed for a year- long study with
Jacques Ellul at the University of Bordeaux in 1979–80 out of which came a course, Truth and
Propaganda, that he continues to teach following retirement from Carleton in 2001. A former
vice-president of the International Jacques Ellul Society, he is the author of Propaganda and the
Ethics of Persuasion, 2nd ed. (Broadview Press, 2013) and many journalistic and other writings
and civic involvements devoted to promoting truth, peace, and freedom in a world endangered
by technology, technique, and flawed human nature.
Andrea Pitts is assistant professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina, USA.Their
research interests include critical philosophy of race, feminist philosophy, social epistemology,
Latin American and U.S. Latinx philosophy, and critical prison studies.Their publications appear
in Hypatia, Radical Philosophy Review, Inter-American Journal of Philosophy, and IJFAB: International
Journal to Feminist Approaches to Bioethics.
Sir Nigel Shadbolt is principal of Jesus College, Oxford, and a professorial research fellow
in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford, England. He is also
chairman of the Open Data Institute, which he co-founded with Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
Matthew Sharpe is associate professor at Deakin University, Australia. He has published quite
widely, including on critical theory and post-structuralist thinkers.
Paul Smart is a senior research fellow in electronics and computer science at the University of
Southampton, England. His research focuses on the cognitive significance of emerging digital
technologies, especially the role of the Web in shaping human and machine intelligence.
Daniel Steel is associate professor at the University of British Columbia, Canada. He

conducts research on the intersection of values and science on subjects that have implications
for urgent matters of environment or public health. He is the author of Philosophy and the
Precautionary Principle: Science, Evidence and Environmental Policy (Cambridge, 2015) and Across the
Boundaries: Extrapolation in Biology and Social Science (Oxford, 2008) and is co-editor, with Kevin
Elliott, of Current Controversies in Values and Science (Routledge, 2017). He has recently been
awarded a Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Grant (2017–2020) for a project
titled, “Distinct Concepts of Diversity and their Ethical-Epistemic Implications for Science.”
Lisa Warenski, PhD, has published on a range of topics in theoretical epistemology. Her work
in applied epistemology draws from her experience as a corporate loan officer and credit analyst
in major money center banks in New York City.
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1
PART I
Introduction
2
3
1
THE RETURN OF APPLIED
EPISTEMOLOGY
An applied turn in epistemology?

The term ‘applied epistemology’ has been in irregular use for some time. It has occasionally
been associated with pre-existing disciplines or practices: critical thinking, or the informa-
tion sciences, or casuistry.1 But most often it simply invokes an analogy, direct or implicit, with
applied ethics –for instance, when looking for a label for the activities standing to traditional
epistemology and meta-epistemology as applied ethics stands to normative ethics and meta-
ethics (Battersby 1989). And since applied ethics has been a well-known going concern for
decades, the analogy does work by feeding our imagination: it highlights the many ways in
which we might regard philosophical work as constituting applied epistemology. But the fact
that applied ethics was also consciously launched by way of critique of normative ethics and
meta-ethics is also useful; here the analogy flags potential concerns with the way the analytic
epistemological tradition has developed.
In the 1960s and 1970s, analytic ethics faced an internal critique led by such figures as Peter
Singer and James Rachels. According to this critique, the analytic focus on normative and meta-
ethical work had become lopsided, harmfully aloof from practical matters of deciding what to
do, and threatening a kind of self-imposed irrelevance. Instead, ethicists had contributions to
make by way of clarifying popular moral debates, applying ethical theory to important contem-
porary issues, and engaging with political figures, scientists, and the public on ethical matters.This
applied ethical revolution was successful at establishing new ethical practices and bringing other
concerns from the perceived fringe of academic ethics to the center of the stage. Journals such as
Philosophy and Public Affairs appeared, collections of work on applied ethics were published, fields
such as bioethics, environmental ethics, healthcare ethics, and business ethics arose or took newly
determinate shape, and university curricula shifted to accommodate the new focus.
Around the same time, analytic epistemology also faced internal critiques, sounded by
well-known philosophers in two exceptionally widely read and influential works: W. V. O.
Quine’s “Epistemology Naturalized” (originally an address at the 14th International Congress
of Philosophy in 1968, and collected in the 1969 Ontological Relativity and Other Essays) and
Richard Rorty’s 1979 book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Quine’s essay appraises the
foundationalist program within empiricism from Hume to Carnap, but his critique widens
in scope to epistemology as a whole (conceived of as a form of first philosophy). On one
3
4
prominent interpretation of Quine’s project, the traditional agenda of epistemological topics

and the normativity of epistemic concepts are to be jettisoned wholesale, in favor of the new –
and appropriately naturalized –project of descriptive epistemology, a chapter of psychology
bordering on linguistics.2 Quine recommends the psychologist Donald Campbell’s evolutionary
epistemology program as an example. Rorty’s book also takes on traditional epistemology, but
with a wider historical backdrop, and his telling of the tale ends with a different recommenda-
tion. On Rorty’s account, traditional epistemology is a defensive maneuver inaugurated by Kant
and his nineteenth-century followers to keep philosophy in being as an intellectual discipline
in the face of the rampant sciences. The “theory of knowledge,” the very core of philosophy
as it is now to be understood, is to underlie all other disciplinary endeavors, and an epistemo-
logical tradition is then read back into the early modern tradition as a whole, highlighting the
well-known epistemological works of Descartes, Locke, Hume, and so forth. Like Quine, Rorty
thinks this whole apparatus has, by the twentieth century, become dangerously dependent on a
handful of doubtful claims about the nature of sense data and their relations to our knowledge
and the world. But Quine’s descriptive turn to science is also rejected. Instead, Rorty suggests,
epistemology, and its baggage of scheme and content, concept and intuition, should simply
come to an end, replaced by a kind of historically aware study of our conversations, reason-
giving practices, and manners of discourse.
In each case the call to revolution was a mixed success. Quine’s critique targets local aspects of
the epistemological tradition as it presented itself to him, and so while the call for a naturalized
epistemology produced or re-energized many rivals to traditional normative epistemology (such
as evolutionary epistemology), its main impact has been renewal within the normative tradition
itself, prompting, for instance, reliabilist analyses of the concept of justification. (In fact, Quine’s
later writings are themselves much more welcoming of the normative aspects of epistemology
than at least some of the naturalizing projects he inspired.) Rorty’s historical reconstruction
has been very much contested, and whether his final position comes to a viable pragmatism or
a corrosive skepticism is a subject of debate. But in any case, his critique and counterproposal
can also be now seen as part of a wider anti-realist (and in part pragmatist) moment within
analytic philosophy that itself prompted renewal within normative epistemology, at the hands
of philosophers such as Hilary Putnam and Michael Dummett. But in both cases, the particular
details are used to launch a concern about epistemology with its own staying power, that of
irrelevance. A background concern for both Quine and Rorty is that analytic epistemology has
been shaped almost entirely by an interest in the theory of knowledge, its scope, structure and
limits, as those subjects have been understood since at least the early modern period. It has had
rather too little to do with the practices of epistemic agents and communities, and the specific
epistemic problems that might arise out of or for them. So, while the focus of Quine and Rorty
was not specifically the creation of a new sub-discipline, ‘applied epistemology’, the concerns
about relevance made manifest in the ethical case are also present implicitly here.Yet there is no
applied epistemological revolution in the period: no new journals with that focus, no curricular
changes, no new sub-disciplines.
The absence of an applied turn in epistemology to match the applied turn in ethics is espe-
cially puzzling when one considers how many issues of contemporary concern to the gen-
eral public are epistemic in nature. Much of this concern is driven by technological change.
Over the last three decades an information revolution has transformed the ways in which we
acquire knowledge and justify our beliefs. Now when we want to find something out or check
whether something we believe is really true, our first port of call is almost certainly the World
Wide Web (see Smart and Shadbolt, Chapter 2). Once we are there, we will almost certainly
use Wikipedia (see Frost-Arnold, Chapter 3) or Google (see Gunn and Lynch, Chapter 4) or,
4
5
The return of applied epistemology
quite possibly, both. These technological developments have raised new epistemic issues just as
surely as advances in reproductive technology fifty-odd years ago raised new ethical issues. The
latter developments provided much of the impetus for the applied turn in ethics, but the former
changes have so far failed to lead to a comparable turn in epistemology. Such a turn seems both
inevitable and desirable.
Not all developments motivating an applied turn in epistemology (or an epistemic turn
in applied philosophy) are technological, or at any rate, they are not all purely technological.
Political and social developments (which are of course implicated in technological change)
have always raised epistemic issues of their own, which philosophy has traditionally engaged
with. John Stuart Mill’s famous defense of free speech, for example, rests largely on epistemic
principles (see Halliday and McCabe, Chapter 6). More recently, however, epistemology has
tended to be marginalized in political philosophy, which is often thought of as a branch of
ethics. Many applied philosophers have been willing to write about the ethical issues raised by
recent Western military interventions, for example, by appealing to principles of just war theory,
but few have had anything to say about the equally important epistemic issues raised by these
wars, such as the nature of the evidence presented to the public in support of the casus belli or
what we can know about the true motives of the governments prosecuting the wars. Similarly,
the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 prompted many applied philosophers to participate in public
discussion about business ethics and the nature of greed and self-interest, but very few spoke
of the equally important epistemic issues facing financial markets (see Warenski, Chapter 15).
Likewise, the ethics of social phenomena such as gossip, rumor, and propaganda have been much
discussed by applied philosophers, but relatively few of them have been prepared to discuss the
epistemic issues raised by these phenomena (see Bertolotti and Magnani, Chapter 20; Gelfert,
Chapter 19; and Marlin, Chapter 9, respectively).
Although the applied turn in epistemology is not on the scale of the applied turn in ethics, it
would not be true to say that there has been no applied turn at all.There has been a “social turn”
in epistemology over the last two or three decades, and much of the work done under the flag of
“social epistemology” could equally well be classified as “applied epistemology.” Like Monsieur
Jourdain in Molière’s The Bourgeois Gentleman who discovers that he has been speaking prose
his whole life without knowing it, it will come as news to many social epistemologists that they
have been doing applied philosophy without recognizing it by that name. Although applied
epistemology and social epistemology overlap, they are not the same. Not all social epistemology
is particularly applied and not all applied epistemology is particularly social. In applied epistem-
ology we are concerned with practical questions about what we should believe and how we
(individually and collectively) should pursue knowledge, wisdom, and other epistemic values.
Although many of these questions are (in one way or another) social questions, not all of them
are, any more than all questions in applied ethics are social questions.
Applied epistemology in early modern philosophy

We have given a rough indication of what we take applied epistemology to involve; is it possible
to go further? As it’s developed to date, it’s certainly not just the application of pre-existing epis-
temological work to some problem or situation; like ethics, epistemology can sustain case-based
reasoning (casuistry) that fights shy of such principles. Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen (2016) argues
that there are several quite distinct conceptions of ‘applied philosophy’, most clearly present in
work in applied ethics, but all (Lippert-Rasmussen argues) extending to other fields in phil-
osophy. The conceptions Lippert-Rasmussen discusses are clearly applicable to epistemology,
but however useful they are as marking differing conceptions of applied philosophy in general,
5
6
we will take a slightly different approach. On our view, applied epistemology is best thought
of as a family resemblance concept, involving the dimensions that Lippert-Rasmussen usefully
outlines (as rival conceptions), but also perhaps others. As such, we suggest that applied epistem-
ology is a matter of degree, and characterized by one or more of the following:3
(i) a concern for relevance to the ordinary affairs of everyday (non-philosophical) life;
(ii) being addressed to an audience that isn’t exclusively philosophical;
(iii) being addressed to a specific issue arising in a specific context (rather than addressed to
‘timeless’ concerns of skepticism or the analysis of knowledge);
(iv) developing a body of theory with an eye to its action-guiding applications;
(v) bringing a body of pre-existing theory into relation with a problem outside philosophy to
allow us to think differently about that problem;
(vi) being informed by (that is, conditionalizing on) empirical facts in some way;
(vii) seeking to effect social or political change through philosophical work.
Any or all of these factors mark work in epistemology that is at least to some extent applied
rather than theoretical in nature. Some, such as relevance, seem especially central, but none of
these dimensions is plausible as the core of a tight conceptual analysis of applied epistemology,
and seeking to impose such a structure here would be unhelpfully prescriptive.
By this measure, it should not be at all controversial that a great deal of work in applied epis-
temology has been carried out historically. Indeed, many of the classics of epistemology in the
Western tradition can fruitfully be understood as works of applied epistemology from which
the application has been subtracted through historical amnesia. Philosophers in general have
enquired into the nature and limits of knowledge and rational belief, not out of idle curiosity,
but because these issues had a practical significance and because they wanted to contribute to
debates of topical concern. Much philosophical writing in the early modern period is, unsur-
prisingly, written for a more general audience than that of self-avowed philosophers, and seeks
to effect social or political change, or is intended to facilitate thinking about the epistemic
aspects of scientific inquiry or personal conduct. One way in which this happens is in working
out the consequences of a major epistemological claim. In the empiricist tradition, for instance,
the implications of that doctrine for the limits on our knowledge are often invoked practically,
including by the most well-known figures. John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding
has ambitions of this kind –it was prompted by a 1671 discussion about revealed religion, and
a major goal is to chart the middle path between religious authoritarianism (a target in Book
1) and religious enthusiasm (seen off in Book 4). That the epistemology on offer was highly
relevant to questions about religious belief was immediately apparent, and as a result the Essay
was the subject of much controversy. Berkeley brings his own empiricism to bear in offering a
resolution of a contemporary scientific problem (Barrow’s objection to the geometric theory of
vision) in his Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision of 1709, and in rejecting Newtonian accounts
of absolute space, time, and motion in his De Motu of 1721. And Hume’s essay “Of Miracles”
(published as Section X of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding) rests his well-known
case on a principle of evidence drawn from his empiricist epistemology. A second notable fea-
ture of early modern epistemological work is that not all of it is third personal in nature in the
way analytic epistemology, and even post-Kantian epistemology as a whole, has generally been.
Instead, much writing is on questions of method or heuristic, advice which is intended to be
directly relevant to first personal epistemic appraisal or epistemic activity. This is the nature
of much writing in the skeptical tradition at the time (as in Montaigne, Gassendi, and per-
haps Bayle), but the first personal focus is also evident in the Cartesian tradition (well-known
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examples are Descartes’s Rules for the Direction of the Mind and Discourse on Method, and Arnauld
and Nicole’s advice on method in the fourth part of the Port Royal Logic, itself a hybrid work on
epistemology and logic), in the various fusions of moral and epistemological considerations in
early modern Catholic theology (such as Bartholomew Medina’s probabilism, which sets out an
epistemic framework for the following of authorities in acting on matters of conscience), and in
the early modern regeneration of the doctrine of fallacies as a psychological accompaniment to
logic and a precursor to the study of critical thinking (for instance, advisory passages by Francis
Bacon, Antoine Arnauld, and Locke himself).
These are all well-known examples for a philosophical audience, but our received ideas
about what constitutes our philosophical tradition also skew our attention to the purely the-
oretical, and so we naturally miss a third aspect of applied epistemology in the period. Just as
we are less attentive to developments in, say, psychology after the period in which it has clearly
evolved from a philosophical matrix, so too do we generally fail to attend to the ways in which
epistemological ideas have been put to work outside philosophy, in religion, science, politics,
medicine, and mathematics, among other fields. Consider again Locke, Berkeley, and Hume.
Locke’s doctrine of ideas is the intellectual ground of the freethinking case in John Toland’s
Christianity Not Mysterious (1696), for which Toland was prosecuted in London. Berkeley’s
account of perception and action is taken up in David Hartley’s Observations on Man (1749),
arguably the first work of associationist psychology. Berkeley’s case against Newtonian science
of course influences the physics of Ernst Mach, and through him, Einstein. Hume’s standard
of testimony is used as a test case of the congruence between probability theory and “simple
common sense” in Pierre Laplace’s Philosophical Essay on Probabilities (1814), and thereby feeds
into his analysis of jury reform in the subsequent chapter.
Many early modern philosophers also explicitly applied their own work within epistemology
to their work in other disciplines. For instance, the Portuguese philosopher Francisco Sanches is
best known within philosophy for his Quod nihil scitur of 1576 (published in 1581), a classic of
the early modern skeptical literature. Sanches argues there from general skeptical principles that
ideal (Aristotelian) knowledge is impossible and that a mitigated skepticism, based on experi-
ence and judgment, is the appropriate attitude to all matters of belief. (Rather unusually for the
time, Sanches does this without taking over the arguments of Sextus Empiricus.) This attitude
is then on show not only in his other philosophical works (for instance, attacking Aristotle’s
openness to the art of divination on the basis of our incapacity to know such matters), but also
in Sanches’s whole parallel career as a doctor and his many practical treatises in medicine. The
link between the two is in fact made clear in the reader’s greeting of the Quod nihil scitur itself,
where Sanches remarks that “the goal of my proposed journey [i.e., his skeptical epistemological
treatise] is the art of medicine, which I profess, and the first principles of which lie entirely
within the realm of philosophical contemplation” (Sanches 1988 [1581]: 171). The turn away
from pure philosophy is where we tend to drop our philosophical interest in Sanches –the
Quod nihil scitur is the only work of his with any kind of readership in contemporary phil-
osophy –but his career as a whole is that of an applied epistemologist. And Sanches is hardly
alone in this particular application; the close association between philosophy and medicine is
a basic assertion of the Galenic tradition, a common trope in Renaissance university curricula,
and a familiar feature of Descartes’s own account of his progress in his Discourse on Method.
A second (and better known) example is that of Spinoza’s analysis of the Bible in his Tractatus
Theologico-Politicus of 1670, a precursor to and defense of his Ethics. Spinoza’s form of ration-
alism is both optimistic and uniform: we can have adequate knowledge of all of Nature, and so
of God; however, the continuity of all aspects of nature entails an equally undivided treatment
of knowledge and the methods of inquiry. As a result, Spinoza denies that the interpretation of
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scripture is to be distinct in mode from the interpretation of anything else in Nature. An appro-
priate attitude to the Bible, then, will involve the methods of rational inquiry brought to histor-
ical texts in general, and Spinoza accordingly carries out one of the first exercises in historical
criticism, undermining the claims of Biblical scripture as a source of knowledge by exploring
internal inconsistencies in the Biblical texts and matters of historical context. As a consequence,
Spinoza argues for a complete overturning of the traditional devotional attitudes to accounts of
prophecies and miracles and presents a political/ethical case for toleration of thought, freedom
of religious expression, and a secular state.
The shape of theoretical epistemology

If we were telling this tale in the manner of Rorty, about now a change of emphasis would
be flagged. For, on his account in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, our contemporary
understanding of ‘philosophy’ (as something distinct from science and centered on epistem-
ology), ‘epistemology’ (as first philosophy), and the ‘theory of knowledge’ (as the foundation of
all sciences) all arise after Kant, with the growth of philosophy as a specific academic discipline,
autonomous and self-contained, constituting a tribunal of pure reason. And on that story, the
decline of applied epistemology is naturally to be dated to the same period, as the concerns of
philosophy become ever more etiolated and removed from a close relation with other discip-
lines. But we disagree with Rorty’s history, at least insofar as it concerns the kinds of activities
we marked off earlier as characteristic of applied epistemology. The nineteenth century may
have seen the professionalization of philosophy, but it also teems with projects in applied epis-
temology, many of them carried out by philosophers.
A notable example is that of the philosophy of science as it looked in the early nineteenth
century, which is, to a fair extent, work in applied epistemology: it is addressed to a non-
philosophical audience, concerned with first personal heuristic advice (in a way that becomes
less common in later philosophy of science), and it applies theoretical work within epistem-
ology to specific cases.William Whewell’s Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (first edition 1840) is
remarkably fertile in just this way, with his ‘discoverer’s induction’ involving a form of concep-
tual innovation (‘colligation’) and being constrained by considerations of coherence, prediction,
and a version of inference to the best explanation (‘consilience’). John Stuart Mill’s System of
Logic (first edition 1843), rather more famously, recommends a process of eliminative induction
and runs through a range of methods to be used in carrying it out. Moreover, the controversy
between these two, carried on in successive editions of their major books (along with Whewell’s
irritable Of Induction, with Especial Reference to Mr. J. Stuart Mill’s System of Logic (1849)), to some
extent revolves around the question of the worth of purely theoretical epistemological work in
application. Whewell, as a scientist, historian of science, and Kantian epistemologist (of sorts),
insists that Mill’s empiricist methodology is threadbare in application because it cannot explain
the way human knowledge has actually arisen in the natural sciences, a process that Whewell
sees as involving an interplay between the subjective colligation (bringing the phenomena
together in a unifying conception) and the confirmation of these colligations, generating fur-
ther, higher-order, phenomena. Science idealizes facts, Whewell argues, just because that’s how
knowledge in general operates. Just like Sanches, Whewell puts this epistemological account to
work in his own scientific activities and those of his acquaintances (for instance, in arriving at
his conceptual coinages for his friend Michael Faraday), and also in his work on science and its
history (as in his coinage of the very term ‘scientist’ itself).
A second, rather different, example is provided by the various fusions of the psychology of
perception and epistemology explored in German-language intellectual circles (in philosophy,
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but also psychology, physics, anthropology, and other fields) later in the nineteenth century. Here
epistemological theory, empirical work, and metaphysical worldviews are brought together in
a variety of ways, as philosophers sought to make use of psychology and physiology to make
progress on epistemological problems. Friedrich Lange’s “physiological neo-Kantianism,” for
instance, draws epistemic conclusions about the senses (as involving inferential processes) from
the study of the eye and other sensory modalities, and then applies these epistemic conclusions
in arriving at a species of idealism and a corresponding Kantian epistemology. His materialist
opponent Heinrich Czolbe presents an unusual interpretation of the empirical data designed
to complement a form of naïve realism, in which colors and sounds exist as sensible qualities
outside the mind and are transmitted through the nerves to the brain. Ernst Mach, by contrast,
tries to sort the whole mess out by going back to epistemological first principles, deriving
an empirically respectable account of knowledge, and then applying it to the sciences (for an
account of all this, see Edgar 2013).
These are not at all the only examples of applied work in the period; we could multiply
them easily. But to give Rorty his due, something very much like the target of his critique
also takes shape within this period alongside such activities: a concern for epistemology as
first philosophy and foundational to all inquiry, and a taste for the general and theoretical over
the locally relevant. This is the path generally taken in epistemological work by those figures
who made up (or were later identified as members of) the early analytic movement. The rela-
tionship between early analytic philosophy and applied ethics is complicated: Russell’s regular
activities on topics of ethical and political relevance, for instance, are generally divorced from
his work on metaphysics, logic, knowledge, and the philosophy of language, in much the way
that Michael Dummett later maintained separate identities as a logician/philosopher and as a
campaigner on matters of immigration and racism (and appeared to conceive of the latter as not
especially connected to his professional duties).4 But in the case of epistemology the interests of
the early analytics, at least up to roughly the First World War, can hardly be said to be applied
rather than theoretical in nature. Fregean concepts and Moorean propositions are entities of a
third realm, generating a broad range of epistemological problems; Russell’s incomplete draft
Theory of Knowledge and related writings are motivated by the need to secure the epistemo-
logical foundations of his reworking of logic.5 Even the early logical positivists, in reshaping
the philosophy of science,6 are primarily theoreticians, writing for a largely philosophical audi-
ence and with a conception of science in play far removed from local historical and social
complexities, as was emphasized by the post-Kuhnian revolution away from the high positivist
attitude. By the time the analytic movement becomes a self-conscious multi-generational trad-
ition in the decades after the Second World War, we are recognizably in the territory of the
critiques of Rorty and Quine: analytic epistemology in this period concerns above all the
ahistorical analysis of knowledge, its scope and limits, and related matters in the foundations
of knowledge (sense-data theories of perception, and so on). This focus is very evident when
one looks at the ways epistemology was taught in this period. For instance, Teaching Theory of
Knowledge, an advisory booklet put out by the Council for Philosophical Studies in 1986 as a
collaborative effort by many institutions and individual American epistemologists, lists fourteen
topics as “central to recent and contemporary epistemology” (Clay 1986: 1): They are the trad-
itional analysis of knowledge, skepticism, the Gettier problem, foundationalism, coherentism,
reliabilism, explanationism, memory, perception, a priori knowledge, naturalistic epistemology,
realism, rationality, and epistemic logic. On each topic, the emphasis is exclusively or over-
whelmingly on theoretical concerns.
Other philosophical traditions at the time show, by contrast, a very strong interest in applied
epistemology –notably the pragmatist tradition in American philosophy, which itself has
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recurrently influenced and grown with the analytic movement.7 Influenced by the physiologists
as much as by Hegel, John Dewey develops an account of knowledge and a conception of the
role of the philosopher that naturally tend to application –in educational theory, most obvi-
ously (see Chapter 16 by Kotzee), but more generally throughout our social and political life.
In Democracy and Education, Dewey sets out his conception of philosophy as the “general theory
of education,” as something to take effect in conduct, and so as something to be coordinated
with “public agitation, propaganda, legislative and administrative action” (Dewey 1916: 383).
By contrast, epistemology, as it has developed, and its research agenda, are, according to Dewey,
the products of a mistaken preoccupation with isolating mind from world and identifying self
and mind. The charge here is precisely that of irrelevance and theoretical sterility –the virtues
of philosophical clarity, rigor, and precision being wasted on reasonably unimportant or mis-
guided matters.This whole tradition constitutes something of a ready-made critique of analytic
epistemology, and it’s unsurprising that both Rorty and Quine had pragmatist training and were
themselves influential within the pragmatist tradition.8 More recent pragmatists develop very
similar critiques; for instance, consider Philip Kitcher’s call for us to reimagine contemporary
philosophy along Deweyan lines, as responsive to human social situations and the need of each
individual to make sense of the world and their own place within it (Kitcher 2011: 254). On
Kitcher’s view, there should be a kind of involution of the order of business of contemporary
philosophy: Kitcher calls us to attend to the valuable work on questions of contemporary sig-
nificance done by philosophers on the margins, and focus on work in the core areas of phil-
osophy (logic, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind) only
to the extent necessary to make progress on those questions (Kitcher 2011: 248).
The open future of applied epistemology

On our view, then, the ‘return’ of applied epistemology is a fairly local matter –a reaction to the
tendency of much twentieth-century analytic epistemology to a certain inwardness in audience
and topic. We’ve suggested a fairly broad conception of applied epistemology as a way to frame
this reaction, but others are on offer. We’ll close by considering the ways in which our concep-
tion of applied epistemology differs from another influential account, implicit in much social
epistemology and explicit in the following definition by Larry Laudan:
Applied epistemology in general is the study of whether systems of investigation that

purport to be seeking the truth are well engineered to lead to true beliefs about the
world.
Laudan 2006: 2
We think this is insufficiently general. It is certainly insufficiently general to represent the

contents of this book. There are at least two ways in which Laudan’s definition seems to us to
be too narrow.
First, it focuses exclusively on “systems of investigation,” such as science, mathematics,
or (Laudan’s particular concern in this passage) the Anglo- American legal system. Some
contributions to this book concern systems of investigation, in something like Laudan’s sense
(though we prefer the term “epistemic institutions”), for example, the chapters on Internet
platforms already mentioned, or John’s discussion of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change’s pronouncements about climate change (Chapter 10), or Brennan’s discussion of the
allegedly truth-promoting properties of democratic institutions (Chapter 7), or Gardiner’s dis-
cussion of legal burdens of proof (Chapter 14). Other chapters, for example Dentith and Keeley’s
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discussion of rational belief in conspiracy theories (Chapter 21), or Steve Fuller’s discussion of

the problems of forecasting (Chapter 18) do not fit this mold, because they are primarily about
individual investigators rather than epistemic institutions.
Second, Laudan’s approach is too narrow because it presupposes that the only fundamental or
intrinsic epistemic value is true belief.This veritistic approach to epistemology is in part inspired
by classical utilitarianism in ethics.9 Not surprisingly it has been criticized on grounds that echo
standard criticisms of classical utilitarian thought. These criticisms come in two forms: those
which object that there is more than one intrinsic value in the domain in question (in this
case epistemology), and those which object that there are constraints on how this value should
be pursued. Whatever you think of these objections, an approach to applied epistemology that
presupposed the truth of veritism, or any other controversial theoretical framework, would be
overly narrow, for just the same reason that an approach to applied ethics which presupposed
the truth of classical utilitarianism would be. Applied philosophy of any kind which is dog-
matic in its theoretical commitments will be of little interest to those who don’t share those
commitments.
Veritism is not the only example of an epistemic theory based on an ethical theory.Virtue
epistemology, for example, is explicitly modeled on virtue ethics. But while epistemology has
been willing to turn to ethics for guidance on theoretical matters, it has been much more
reluctant to follow it in applying its theorizing to issues of concern to non-philosophers. Part
of the problem is that in philosophy we are accustomed to thinking that the central problem
of epistemology is meeting “the skeptical challenge.” Epistemology over the last hundred
years has been dominated by attempts to demonstrate that, despite a plethora of arguments
to the contrary, we can have knowledge and justified belief (especially of the external world).
Applied epistemologists should feel free to ignore the skeptical challenge, for the same reason
applied ethicists typically ignore equally paradoxical views in meta-ethics. Applied ethics
begins with the assumption that there really is a distinction between morally correct and
morally incorrect actions as well as a distinction between morally virtuous and morally
vicious people. Likewise, applied epistemology can assume that we have knowledge (indeed
quite a lot of it), and that we can acquire more. Furthermore, it can assume that we are some-
times (indeed often) justified in believing the things we believe. It is only when we make
these assumptions that we are in a position to address the really interesting and important
epistemic questions that are challenging everyone, and not just academic philosophers, in the
twenty-first century.
Notes
1 See Battersby (1989), Shera (1970), and Sosa (2007) for examples.
2 See, for instance, Kim (1988).That this was Quine’s own conception of his famous paper is doubtful; see
for instance Quine (1986: 664–65), Quine (1990: 229), and Putnam (1982: 19).
3 A list heavily influenced by Lippert-Rasmussen’s conceptions, but with some additions.
4 See Dummett (1981: x–xi) for a well-known instance of his distinction between work for anti-racist
organizations and his philosophical work (“more abstract matters of much less importance to anyone’s
happiness or future”); Dummett makes a comparison with Russell’s situation himself.
5 Russell’s later interest in education is a curious case: As Monk notes (2001: 57–58), his 1926 bestseller
On Education is a work of behaviorist child psychology, betraying the enormous influence of Watson’s
work on him at the time, and the school opened by Bertrand and Dora Russell in 1927 was run
on the lines of Margaret McMillan’s play-centered nursery schools. Neither has much connection to
Russell’s work in analytic philosophy or his general epistemological work. On the other hand, much of
Russell’s popular writing in the 1920s, collected in Sceptical Essays, is arguably straightforwardly applied
epistemology.
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6 It’s undeniable that much work in the philosophy of science instances applied epistemology; see, for
instance, the well-known discussion of the role of ‘impure’ motives in furthering knowledge acquisition
in science in Kitcher (1993), but see also Hansson (2003) and Klausen (2009) for a more general discus-
sion of philosophy of science in relation to applied epistemology.
7 There are other examples. For instance, Jean Piaget’s “genetic epistemology,” largely treated as a pro-
ject in developmental psychology, was always intended by him to have epistemological consequences
(including normative consequences), settling various philosophical debates not only about knowledge
but about, for instance, the nature of numbers. Philosophers themselves have generally been uncon-
vinced by the way Piaget develops the connection (see Siegel 1978 for a critique).
8 Rorty locates himself in the American pragmatist tradition; see, for instance, Rorty (1982).
Notwithstanding his occasional talk of ‘pragmatism’ and his training by C. I. Lewis, Quine’s own rela-
tionship to American pragmatism is a little more remote; see Godfrey-Smith (2014) for discussion of
this.
9 See Goldman (1999: 87).
References
Battersby, M. (1989). “Critical Thinking as Applied Epistemology: Relocating critical thinking in the
philosophical landscape.” Informal Logic, 11(2).
Clay, M. A. (1986). Teaching Theory of Knowledge. Tallahassee, FL: Council for Philosophical Studies.
Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the philosophy of education. New York: Macmillan.
Dummett, M. (1981). Frege: Philosophy of language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Edgar, S. (2013). “The Limits of Experience and Explanation: F. A. Lange and Ernst Mach on things in
themselves.” British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 21(1): 100–21.
Godfrey-Smith, P. (2014). “Quine and Pragmatism,” in G. Harman and E. Lepore (eds.), A Companion to
W. V. O Quine. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Goldman, A. I. (1999). Knowledge in a Social World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hansson, S. O. (2003). “Applying Philosophy.” Theoria, 69(1–2): 1–3.
Kim, J. (1988). “What is ‘Naturalized Epistemology?’” Philosophical Perspectives, 2: 381–405.
Kitcher, P. (1993). The Advancement of Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kitcher, P. (2011). “Philosophy Inside Out.” Metaphilosophy, 42(3): 248–60.
Klausen, S. H. (2009). “Applied Epistemology: Prospects and problems.” Res Cogitans, 6(1): 220–58.
Laudan, L. (2006). Truth, Error, and Criminal Law: An essay in legal epistemology. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Lippert-Rasmussen, K. (2016).“The Nature of Applied Philosophy,” in K. Lippert-Rasmussen, K. Brownlee,
and D. Coady (eds.), A Companion to Applied Philosophy. Chichester: Wiley.
Monk, R. (2001). Bertrand Russell: The ghost of madness 1921–1970. London: Vintage.
Putnam, H. (1982). “Why Reason Can’t be Naturalized.” Synthese, 52(1): 3–23.
Quine, W. V. (1986). “Reply to Morton White,” in L. Hahn (ed.), The Philosophy of W. V. Quine. La Salle,
IL: Open Court Publishing.
Quine, W. V. (1990). “Comment on Lauener,” in R. Barrett and R. B. Gibson (eds.), Perspectives on Quine.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Rorty, R. (1982). Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays, 1972– 1980. Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press.
Sanches, F. (1988 [1581]). That Nothing Is Known (Quod Nihil Scitur). Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Shera, J. (1970). “Library and Knowledge,” in J. H. Shera (ed.), Sociological Foundations of Librarianship.
New York: Asia Publishing House.
Siegel, H. (1978). “Piaget’s Conception of Epistemology.” Educational Theory, 28(1): 16–22.
Sosa, E. (2007).“Experimental Philosophy and Philosophical Intuition.” Philosophical Studies, 132(1): 99–107.
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PART II
The Internet
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2
THE WORLD WIDE WEB
Introduction
The World Wide Web (henceforth the “Web”) is a large-scale digital compendium of infor-
mation that covers practically every sphere of human interest and endeavor. For this reason, it
should come as no surprise to learn that the Web is a prominent target for epistemological ana-
lysis. To date, search engines (Heintz 2006; Miller and Record 2013; Simpson 2012), Wikipedia
(Coady 2012; Fallis 2008, 2011) and the blogosphere (Coady 2012; Goldman 2008) have all
been the focus of epistemological attention. Other systems, while relevant to epistemology,
have attracted somewhat less scrutiny. These include microblogging platforms (e.g., Twitter),
social networking sites (e.g., Facebook), citizen science projects (e.g., Galaxy Zoo), and human
computation systems (e.g., Foldit). One of the aims of this chapter is to introduce the reader to
these systems and highlight their relevance to applied epistemology. A second aim is to review
existing epistemological analyses of the Web and, where necessary, point out problems with the
philosophical narrative. A third and final objective is to highlight areas where the interests of
epistemologists (both theoretical and applied) overlap with the interests of those who seek to
understand and engineer the Web. One of the outcomes of this analysis is a better understanding
of the ways in which contemporary epistemology can contribute to the nascent discipline of
Web science (see Smart et al. 2017).
Personalized search: epistemic boon or burden

One of the major areas of epistemological enquiry into the Web concerns the epistemic
impact of search engines, such as Google Search (Miller and Record 2013; Simpson 2012).
A particular focus of attention relates to the effect of personalized search mechanisms, which
filter search results based on a user’s prior search activity. Such mechanisms, it is claimed, can
result in so-called “filter bubbles” (see Pariser 2011), which have the effect of limiting a user’s
awareness of important bodies of epistemically relevant information. Epistemologists are largely
in agreement regarding the negative effects of personalized search. Simpson (2012), for example,
argues that filter bubbles accentuate the problem of confirmation bias and undermine users’
access to objective information. Similar views are expressed by Miller and Record (2013). They
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claim that the justificatory status of an agent’s beliefs is undermined as a result of exposure to
personalized search results.
Concerns about the epistemic sequelae of personalized search have led epistemologists to
make a number of practical suggestions as to how to avoid filter bubbles, or at least how to
minimize their epistemic effects. Simpson (2012) thus suggests that users should turn off per-
sonalization or resort to search engines that do not use personalization mechanisms (he cites
DuckDuckGo1 as a prime example). Simpson also suggests that there is a prima facie case for gov-
ernment regulation of search engine providers. Echoing the views of Introna and Nissenbaum
(2000), he argues that search engines are in the business of providing an important public service
and that regulation is required to ensure they operate in an objective and impartial manner.
Other proposals to address the problem of personalized search center on the epistemic
responsibilities of Web users. Miller and Record thus suggest that search engine users “can use
existing competencies for gaining information from traditional media such as newspapers to
supplement internet-filtered information and therefore at least partly satisfy the responsibility
to determine whether it is biased or incomplete” (2013: 130).
Finally, Knight (2014) draws attention to the efforts of computer scientists in developing
“diversity-aware search” techniques. These are deemed to enable users to break out of their
filter bubbles via the active inclusion of ‘diverse’ information in search results.
We thus have a range of proposals concerning the practical steps that could be (and perhaps
should be) taken by users to obviate the negative effects of personalized search. But before we
accept such proposals, we should at least question the (largely implicit) assumption upon which
all these proposals are based. Do personalized search engines really undermine the epistemic
status of their users? And, if so, are we justified in condemning personalized search engines on
account of their poor veritistic value? In responding to these questions, we suggest it helps to
be aware of a range of issues that, to our knowledge, have not been the focus of previous epis-
temological attention. While these issues do not exclude the possibility that personalized search
may, on occasion, harm the epistemic standing of individual Web users, they do at least provide
reasons to question the epistemological consensus that has emerged in this area.
The first issue to consider relates to the way in which search engines are actually used.Waller
(2011), for example, discovered that almost half (i.e., 48%) of the queries entered by search
engine users appeared to be directed toward the retrieval of information about a specific web-
site. In other words, it seemed that users were relying on a search engine, at least in part, as a
means of providing quick and easy access to familiar sources of information. These findings are
important, for they suggest that the discovery of new information is not the sole purpose of
search engines; instead, it seems that search engines may also be used to quickly access sources of
information that a Web user is already aware of. When seen in this light, it is far from clear that
personalized search mechanisms should always be seen to work against the epistemic interests of
the individual Web user. In fact, there is perhaps a risk that by interfering with personalization
mechanisms, we will disrupt a set of well-honed techniques for quickly and efficiently accessing
familiar bodies of task-relevant information.
This is not to say that Waller’s (2011) findings eliminate concerns about the epistemic
implications of personalized search.The use of search engines as a convenient shortcut to familiar
sources of information may, from an epistemic perspective, be more or less hazardous depending
on the kind of information that is being accessed, and clearly nothing about this particular
way of using search engines guarantees the objectivity or impartiality of the actual informa-
tion source.2 In spite of these caveats, Waller’s (2011) findings are important because they draw
attention to the different ways in which Web users may exploit the functionality of personalized
search engines. One question for future research is to ascertain whether all these modes of use
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The World Wide Web
are equally injurious to an individual’s epistemic health and standing, and whether some modes
may actually be of productive value in enhancing an individual’s epistemic functioning.
A second issue to consider relates to the broader ecological setting in which search engines
are used. Here we suggest that epistemological analyses can benefit from the sort of perspectives
that have long been embraced by the cognitive science community, especially those that empha-
size the situated and environmentally embedded nature of cognitive processing (Robbins and
Aydede 2009). In particular, we suggest that it is helpful to think of Web users as embedded in
multiple networks of information flow and influence, each of which presents the user with a
diverse (even if filtered) stream of facts, ideas, and opinions. This broader informational ecology,
we suggest, might work to mitigate the negative epistemic effects of personalized search (if
indeed there are any). The sociological concept of network individualism (Rainie and Wellman
2012) may be of potential value here. Networked individualism refers to the way in which
society is changing as a result of the introduction of new media technology. In particular,
it emphasizes the manner in which people connect, communicate, and exchange informa-
tion following the advent of the Web and the growth of mobile communications technology.
According to Rainie and Wellman (2012), society is increasingly organized along the lines of
multiple, overlapping social networks, each of which is characterized by fluid and dynamic
forms of membership. As a result of these shifts in social structure, individuals are likely to be
exposed to multiple sources of heterogeneous information, and this may help to allay concerns
about the selective exposure effects that filter bubbles are deemed to produce. A consideration
of network individualism thus reminds us that a user’s informational ecology is not necessarily
exhausted by the nature of their interaction with a particular search engine. Once this broader
informational ecology is taken into consideration, concerns about the epistemological impact
of personalized search may start to look a little overblown.
Finally, a more positive perspective on personalized search is provided by the notion of
mandevillian intelligence (see Smart forthcoming-b, forthcoming-c). Mandevillian intelligence is a
specific form of collective intelligence in which the cognitive shortcomings and epistemic vices
of the individual agent are seen to yield cognitive benefits and epistemic virtues at the collective
or social level of analysis, for example, at the level of collective doxastic agents (see Palermos
2015) or socio-epistemic systems (see Goldman 2011). According to this idea, personalized
search systems may play a productive role in serving the collective cognitive good, providing a
means by which individual vices (e.g., a tendency for confirmation bias) are translated into
something that more closely resembles an epistemic virtue (e.g., greater cognitive coverage of a
complex space of thoughts, ideas, opinions, and so on). Consider, for example, the way in which
personalized search may help to focus individual attention on particular bodies of information,
thereby restricting access to a larger space of ideas, opinions, and other information. While such
forms of ‘restricted access’ or ‘selective information exposure’ are unlikely to yield much in the
way of an epistemic benefit for the individual agent, it is possible that by exploiting (and, indeed,
accentuating!) an existing cognitive bias (e.g., confirmation bias), personalized search technolo-
gies may work to promote cognitive diversity, helping to prevent precipitant forms of cognitive
convergence (see Zollman 2010) and supporting an effective division of cognitive labor (see
Muldoon 2013). This possibility reveals something of a tension in how we interpret or evaluate
the veritistic value of a particular technology or epistemic practice. In particular, it seems that
assessments of veritistic value may vary depending on whether it is individual epistemic agents
or the collective ensembles in which those individuals are situated that is the specific focus of
epistemological attention.
Needless to say, much more work needs to be done to evaluate these claims about the
potential epistemic benefits of personalized search (as well as perhaps other forms of online
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information filtering). Note, however, that in the absence of the notion of mandevillian intelli-
gence, the epistemic consequences of personalized search might have seemed self-evident and
thus unworthy of further scientific and philosophical scrutiny.This helps to highlight one of the
ways in which the notion of mandevillian intelligence is relevant to applied epistemology: it
helps to provide the conceptual basis for novel investigative efforts that seek to explore the
epistemic consequences of, for example, technological interventions at both the individual and
collective (social) levels.
Web-extended knowledge
One of the ways in which epistemologists have sought to understand the epistemic effects
of the Web is by drawing on externalist approaches to mind and cognition (see Clark 2008).
According to the notion of active externalism, for example, the causally active physical vehicles
that realize mental states and processes can sometimes extend beyond the traditional biological
borders of the brain (and body) to include a variety of non-biological (i.e., extra-organismic)
resources (Clark and Chalmers 1998). This idea is sometimes presented as a thesis about the
explanatory kinds of interest to cognitive science (in which case it is commonly referred to as
the Hypothesis of Extended Cognition or HEC), and sometimes it is presented as a thesis about
mentalistic folk categories, such as states of belief (in which case it is commonly referred to as
the Extended Mind Thesis or EMT).
With respect to the EMT, it has been suggested that the nature of our interaction with the
Web supports the emergence of Web-extended minds; that is, forms of bio-technological merger
in which the Web serves as part of the realization base for some of our folk psychological mental
states, most notably states of dispositional belief (Smart 2012).This possibility has been discussed
in relation to criteria that are used to discriminate genuine forms of cognitive extension from
those of a more ersatz variety (see Clark and Chalmers 1998). Smart (2012) thus talks about
the Web in terms of the opportunities it provides for quick and easy access to online informa-
tion and the way in which these opportunities speak to at least one of the criteria for cognitive
extension discussed by Clark and Chalmers (1998), namely the accessibility criterion.
Recently, the notion of Web-extended minds has led epistemologists to make a number of
claims about the impact of the Web on our epistemic profiles. One implication of the Web-
extended mind concept, Ludwig (2015) argues, is that we are able to envisage a profound
transformation of our doxastic potential. In particular, Ludwig anticipates “an explosion of
dispositional beliefs and knowledge that is caused by digital information resources such as
Wikipedia or Google” (2015: 355). Similar views are expressed by Bjerring and Pedersen. They
argue that the Web enables us to enjoy various forms of “restricted omniscience,” wherein
we have more or less “complete knowledge about a particular, fairly specific subject matter”
(2014: 25). We thus arrive at a claim that seems to follow quite naturally from the possibility
of Web-extended minds –a claim that is nicely captured by the Web-extended knowledge
hypothesis:
Cognitively potent forms of bio-technological merger between human agents and

the Web serve as the basis for Web-extended knowledge, i.e., epistemically relevant dox-
astic states that supervene on material elements forming part of the technological and
informational fabric of the World Wide Web.
Unfortunately, there are a number of problems confronting this hypothesis. One of the most
pressing problems relates to the way in which the criteria for cognitive extension (e.g., those
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The World Wide Web
proposed by Clark and Chalmers) work against the epistemic interests of the technologically
extended agent (see Smart forthcoming-a). In order to help us understand this, consider the
accessibility criterion, as discussed by Clark and Chalmers (1998). The general idea behind the
accessibility criterion is that external information should be quickly and easily accessible –it
should be possible for agents to draw on external information whenever it is required and easily
incorporate this information into their cognitive processing routines. Accessibility thus seems to
demand a degree of fluency with respect to the interactions that occur between a human agent
and a bio-external resource –where the notion of fluency can be understood (at least in part) as
the “subjective experience of ease or difficulty with which we are able to process information”
(Oppenheimer 2008: 237).
Now, the problem with claims regarding easy access and fluent interaction is that these prop-
erties seem to be in some tension with the possibility of Web-extended forms of knowledge.
One of the key insights to emerge from research on fluency, for example, is that fluent processing
is often associated with a “truth bias,” in which the ‘truth’ of some body of external informa-
tion is judged relative to the subjective ease with which it is processed (Alter and Oppenheimer
2009). In the context of the Web, where information is of variable reliability, this particular
kind of cognitive bias looks set to undermine the epistemic integrity of the Web-extended
cognizer. Indeed, it seems reasonable to think that, in the interests of preserving positive epi-
stemic standing, Web users should be somewhat circumspect about online information. At the
very least, it seems important for the epistemically responsible agent to subject online infor-
mation to critical evaluation and scrutiny (Heersmink 2018; Record and Miller forthcoming).
But now note how this seemingly sensible demand for critical evaluation conflicts with the
putative role that fluency plays in extending the epistemic reach of the Web-extended cognizer.
Fluency thus seems to speak in favor of the possibility of Web-extended minds, but it seems to
work against the interests of Web-extended knowers (i.e., agents whose epistemic credentials are
enhanced as a result of Web-based forms of cognitive extension).We thus encounter the extended
cognizer vs. extended knower problem:
The properties that work to ensure that an external resource can be treated as a
candidate for cognitive incorporation are also, at least in some cases, the very same
properties that work to undermine or endanger the positive epistemic standing of the
technologically extended agent.
see Smart forthcoming-a
Somewhat surprisingly, this problem highlights a potential tension between our notions of
extended cognition and extended knowledge. Contrary to the idea that Web-extended minds
are the natural harbingers of Web-extended knowledge, cognitive extension may lead to a form
of epistemic diminishment, undermining the extent to which extended cognizers are the proper
targets of knowledge attribution.
Epistemic feelings
In addition to ideas concerning Web-extended knowledge and Web-extended knowers, there
is an additional way in which active externalism is relevant to epistemological analyses of the
Web. This is revealed by the results of recent empirical studies investigating the effect of Web
access on subjective, epistemically relevant experiences, such as the feeling of knowing (Fisher
et al. 2015; Ward 2013). The feeling of knowing is one of a range of epistemic feelings that
have been studied by epistemologists (Michaelian and Arango-Muñoz 2014). It refers to the
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experience of being able to retrieve or access some piece of information (e.g., the answer to a
specific question), typically from bio-memory. In situations where people use the Web to search
for online information, however, it seems that this feeling of knowing ‘extends’ to include the
informational contents of the online realm. Searching for information, Fisher et al. suggest,
“leads people to conflate information that can be found online with knowledge in the head”
(2015: 675). Similarly, Ward notes that as people turn to the “cloud mind of the internet, they
seem to lose sight of where their own minds end and the mind of the internet begins. They
become one with the cloud, believing that they themselves are spectacularly adept at thinking
about, remembering, and locating information” (2013: 88).
These findings are of interest, because they have long been anticipated by those working in
the active externalist camp. In 2007, for example, Clark proposed that our subjective sense of
what we know is informed by the kind of access we have to bio-external information:
Easy access to specific bodies of information, as and when such access is normally
required, is all it takes for us to factor such knowledge in as part of the bundle of skills
and abilities that we take for granted in our day to day life. And it is this bundle of
taken-for-granted skills, knowledge, and abilities that … quite properly structures and
informs our sense of who we are, what we know, and what we can do.
Clark 2007: 106
Such comments seem particularly prescient in view of the findings by Ward (2013) and Fisher
et al. (2015). Indeed, from the standpoint of active externalism, it might be thought that the
results of Ward (2013) and Fisher et al. (2015) are largely consistent with the idea of online
information being incorporated into an individual’s body of personal beliefs and (perhaps)
knowledge. Inasmuch as we accept this to be the case, then it potentially alters our views about
the significance of Web-induced changes in the feeling of knowing.The aforementioned quotes
from Ward (2013) and Fisher et al. (2015) both sound something of a cautionary note regarding
the extent to which changes in the feeling of knowing should be seen as marking a genuine
shift in an individual’s epistemic and cognitive capabilities –at the very least, such comments
appeal to a distinction between what might be called ‘knowledge-in-the-head’ and ‘knowledge-
on-the-Web’. Extended approaches to cognition and knowledge encourage us to question this
distinction. From an active externalist perspective, it is entirely possible that changes in epi-
stemic feelings are merely the subjective corollary of a particular form of cognitive extension,
one that emerges as a result of our ever more intimate cognitive and epistemic contact with the
informational contents of the online realm.
It goes without saying, of course, that feelings of knowing are not sufficient for genuine
knowledge attribution –we may feel we know lots of things without actually knowing any-
thing! It is thus important to note that while the work of Ward (2013) and Fisher et al. (2015)
might be seen to support claims about the Web-extended mind, this does not necessarily tell
us anything about Web-based forms of extended knowledge. From the perspective of applied
epistemology, it will be important, in future work, to consider the extent to which Web-based
shifts in epistemic feelings provide a reliable indication of what we do (and do not) know. It
will also be important to consider the extent to which changes in subjective experience alter
our tendency to engage in epistemically relevant processes and practices (e.g., those that help to
ensure the modal stability of our beliefs across close possible worlds). Interestingly, research in
social psychology suggests that changes in self-related perceptions of expertise contribute to a
more closed-minded or dogmatic cognitive style (Ottati et al. 2015). In view of such results, it
is natural to wonder whether changes in feelings of knowing (such as those accompanying the
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The World Wide Web
use of Web technologies) might lead individuals to become more dogmatic and thus diminish
their epistemic standing under a virtue-theoretic (especially, a virtue responsibilist) conception
of knowledge (see Baehr 2012).
Social machines
Despite the fact that the Web is a relatively recent phenomenon, it plays a crucial role in an
ever-expanding array of social processes. Indeed, the sudden disappearance of the Web would, in
all likelihood, result in a severe disruption of society, on a par perhaps with that resulting from a
coordinated nuclear strike. (This is somewhat ironic given that the Web emerged on the back of
research efforts to support the continued functioning of society in the face of a nuclear attack!)
For this reason, it is appropriate to think of the Web as a form of critical infrastructure for
society, resembling, perhaps, the more traditional elements of national infrastructure, such as the
road, rail, and electricity distribution networks. Arguably, the reason why the Web has emerged
to occupy this role is because of its ever more intimate integration into practically every aspect
of social life. For better or worse, the Web has now become an integral part of the structures and
processes that make our contemporary society what it is –part of the integrated physical fabric
that makes society materially possible.
This vision of socio-technical integration lies at the heart of an important concept that
has emerged in the context of the Web science literature. This is the concept of social machines
(Palermos 2017; Smart and Shadbolt 2014). Social machines are systems in which human and
(Web-based) machine elements are jointly involved in the mechanistic realization of phe-
nomena that subtend the computational, cognitive, and social domains (Smart and Shadbolt
2014). From an epistemological perspective, a particular category of social machines is of par-
ticular interest.These are known as knowledge machines (Smart et al. 2017). A knowledge machine
is a social machine that participates in some form of knowledge-relevant process, such as the
acquisition, discovery, and representation of knowledge. Citizen science systems, such as Galaxy
Zoo (Lintott et al. 2008), are one kind of knowledge machine that has been the focus of consid-
erable research attention.These have grown in prominence over recent years, to the point where
they play an important role in many forms of scientific practice (see Meyer and Schroeder
2015). Such characterizations are sufficient to make citizen science systems worthy of applied
epistemological analysis, and this is especially so given the interest in applying epistemological
theory to the understanding and analysis of scientific processes (e.g., Palermos 2015).
Another important class of knowledge machines are human computation systems (Law and von
Ahn 2011), which seek to incorporate human agents into some form of computational pro-
cessing. One example of such a system is the online protein folding game, Foldit (Cooper et al.
2010). This system incorporates the pattern matching and spatial reasoning abilities of human
participants into a hybrid computational process that aims to predict the structural proper-
ties of protein molecules. The role of the human participants in these sorts of systems should
not be underestimated. In many cases, the task being performed by the larger socio-technical
ensemble –the one involving both human and machine elements –is not one that could be
(easily) performed in the absence of the (often large-scale) socio-technical infrastructure that
social machines make available. This is something that is often explicitly recognized by those
who seek to harness the epistemic potential of social machines. In one of the papers describing
the Foldit system, for example, the authors explicitly acknowledge the contributions made by
more than 57,000 users of the Foldit system (Cooper et al. 2010).
One of the things that is revealed by a consideration of citizen science and human computa-
tion systems is the extent to which social machines draw on the complementary contributions
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of both human and machine elements. Human agents are thus the locus of particular kinds of
capability that subtend the epistemic, cognitive, perceptual, behavioral, social, moral, emotional,
affective, and aesthetic domains; computing technologies, in contrast, are renowned for their
speed of processing, their ability to engage in repetitive symbolic manipulation, their capacity
for digital data storage, and so on. By bringing these diverse capabilities together in the con-
text of a complex task, social machines are potentially poised to tackle problems that currently
lie beyond the cognitive and epistemic reach of the bare biological brain (see Hendler and
Berners-Lee 2010).
Network epistemology
One of the goals of the social machine research effort is to gain a better understanding of the
forces and factors that influence the performance profile of social machines relative to the kinds
of tasks in which they are involved. In the case of knowledge machines, for example, scientists
are interested in understanding how different organizational schemes (characterized as the
pattern of information flow and influence between human and technological elements) affects
the quality of specific epistemic products, such as the reliability of propositional statements.
It is here that we encounter a potentially productive point of contact between the scien-
tific goals of social machine researchers and the philosophical concerns of the epistemological
community. Goldman (2011), for example, identifies a specific form of social epistemology,
called systems-oriented social epistemology, whose primary objective is to understand the veritistic
value of different kinds of socially distributed epistemic practice and social organization. This,
it should be clear, is very much in accord with the goals of social machine researchers. It is also
something that is well-aligned with a body of work in network science that seeks to illuminate
the ways in which the topological structure of social networks influences the dynamics of belief
formation and collective cognitive processing within a community of interacting cognitive
agents (Glinton et al. 2010; Kearns 2012). Such forms of network epistemology (see Zollman 2013)
(or, more generically, computational social epistemology) promise to inform our understanding of
the complex interactions that occur between forces and factors at a variety of levels (e.g., the
cognitive, the social, and the technological), as well as the ways in which these interactions
influence the epistemic properties (e.g., truth-tracking capabilities) of individual agents and
socio-epistemic systems.
An epistemically safe environment?

One issue that typically arises in debates about the epistemic impact of the Web concerns the
extent to which the Web can serve as a source of reliable information. At first sight, it would
seem that the open and democratic nature of the Web (i.e., the fact that pretty much anyone can
participate in the creation of online content) poses a problem for claims about the reliability of
online content. The problem, of course, is that by enabling every Tom, Dick, or Harry to add
or edit content, we run the risk of contaminating the online environment with misleading and
inaccurate information. In the face of such epistemic risks and hazards, is there any reason to
think that the Web is apt to serve the epistemic interests of our doxastic systems?
One response to this question involves an appeal to the sorts of social participation that are
enabled by the Web. Of particular interest is the scale of Web-based social participation –the
fact that many hundreds or thousands (and sometimes millions) of individuals are involved in
the creation and curation of specific bodies of online information (consider, for example, the
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The World Wide Web
number of people who have contributed to the Wikipedia system). Interestingly, large-scale
social participation may be relevant to some of the concerns that have arisen in respect of the
dubious reliability of online content.To help us see this, consider Google’s PageRank algorithm
(Brin and Page 1998), which is used to support the ranking of Web search results. Part of the
reason the PageRank algorithm works is because it exploits the linking behavior of human
users on a global scale, and this helps to ensure that the efforts of a ‘few’ malign individuals will
be swamped by the efforts of the more virtuously minded masses. Similar kinds of approach
are used by a variety of Web-based systems. When it comes to human computation or citizen
science systems, for example, contributions are typically solicited from multiple independent
users as a means of improving the reliability of specific epistemic outputs.
One thing that is worth noting here is that these kinds of reliability mechanism are, in many
cases, very difficult to sabotage. When it comes to Google Search, for example, any attempt to
‘artificially’ elevate the ranking assigned to specific contributions (e.g., a user’s website) is offset
by the globally distributed nature of the linking effort, coupled with the fact that links to a
specific resource are themselves weighted by the ranking of the resource from which the link
originates. In view of such safeguards, it is difficult for individual agents to ‘artificially’ recreate
the sort of endorsement that is reflected in the results of the PageRank algorithm. At the very
least, it is difficult to see how such endorsement could be manufactured in the absence of a
large-scale, socially coordinated effort.
Reliability indicators and trust

Trust is a topic that lies at the intersection of both Web science (Golbeck 2006) and con-
temporary epistemology. From an epistemological perspective, issues of trust are typically
discussed in relation to what is dubbed testimonial knowledge (Lackey 2011), that is, the know-
ledge communicated by other individuals. The fact that so much of our knowledge is based on
the testimony of others raises questions about the extent to which we are justified in believing
what others tell us. In the context of face-to-face encounters, of course, there are a variety of
cues –or, in the terminology of Craig (1990), “indicator properties” –that are apt to influ-
ence our judgments as to who is a trustworthy informant (see Sperber et al. 2010). Such cues
are likely to play an important role in influencing decisions as to who we select as a source of
information, as well as the extent to which we endorse the information provided by a particular
source (e.g., information may be rejected if an informant shows signs of dishonesty or incom-
petence while communicating information). By being responsive to such cues, it seems that we
are able to exercise considerable ability with respect to the epistemically virtuous selection and
endorsement of sources of testimonial information, a claim that is broadly consistent with the
tenets of virtue reliabilistic approaches to knowledge (Greco 2007).3
It is easy to see how the judicious exploitation of reliability-relevant cues could serve as the
foundation for testimonial knowledge in face-to-face encounters. But are such strategies rele-
vant to the processing of information originating from the online realm? Do we, in other words,
encounter cues on the Web that could be used to assess the reliability of information? And are
these cues, if they exist, actually used to judge the trustworthiness or credibility of particular
information sources?
There are a number of strands of Web science research that speak to these issues. In terms of
the information that is presented on a typical website, studies have revealed that user credibility
judgments tend to be influenced by relatively superficial features, such as a website’s appearance,
structure, and navigability (Fogg et al. 2003; Metzger 2007; Wathen and Burkell 2002). Other
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studies have explored the relevance of social cues to credibility assessments. Westerman et al.
(2012), for example, investigated the relationship between perceptions of source credibility in
the context of the Twitter microblogging system. Their results revealed the presence of a curvi-
linear relationship, with too many or too few Twitter followers having a negative impact on
perceptions of expertise and trustworthiness.
The problem with the sorts of cues investigated by these studies (e.g., site design features,
number of Twitter followers, etc.) is that they are relatively easy to ‘fake’. Site designs are easily
modified, and fake Twitter accounts (and thus non-existent followers) are relatively easy to
manufacture. Ideally, what is required is a set of cues that provide something akin to an honest
signal in evolutionary theory (see Pentland 2008). In other words, an important property of an
online reliability indicator is that it reliably indicates the reliability of online content. A crucial
question, therefore, is whether the Web provides access to these particular kinds of (‘honest’)
reliability indicators.
In fact, such indicators are available, and as with almost everything on the Web, they rely
heavily on the fact that the Web is as much a social environment as it is a technological one.
Some examples of such indicators, as identified by Taraborelli (2008), include the following:
1. implicit indicators of individual endorsement (such as indicators that a specific user selected/
visited/purchased an item);
2. explicit indicators of individual endorsement (such as explicit ratings produced by specific
users);
3. implicit indicators of socially aggregated endorsement (such as density of bookmarks or
comments per item in social bookmarking systems);
4. explicit indicators of socially aggregated endorsement (such as average ratings extracted from
a user community);
5. algorithmic endorsement indicators (such as PageRank and similar usage-
independent
ranking algorithms);
6. hybrid endorsement indicators (such as interestingness indicators in Flickr, which take into
account both explicit user endorsement and usage-independent metrics).
All of these indicators, it should be clear, are ones that rely, to a greater or lesser extent, on the
behavior of other users. They are, as such, reminiscent of work that seeks to investigate the phe-
nomenon of social proof (Cialdini 2007). As work in this area suggests, a tendency to rely on the
actions of others does not always yield positive results; sometimes it can lead to herd behavior,
and in an epistemic context, there is a risk that users will erroneously equate popularity with
reliability. Nevertheless, there are, it seems, a rich variety of cues that users can exploit as part
of the epistemically virtuous selection and endorsement of online content, and these cues do
seem to play an important role in guiding users’ actual judgments as to the credibility of online
content (see Metzger et al. 2010). It thus seems that rather than being an environment that is
deficient or impoverished with respect to the availability of reliability-indicating cues, the Web
may, in fact, afford access to cues that are both more varied and perhaps more reliable than
those encountered in face-to-face testimonial exchanges. Key issues for future research in this
area concern the extent to which features of the online socio-technical environment can be
used to support the construction, evaluation, and validation of epistemically relevant indicator
properties. It will also be important to assess the extent to which socially constructed indicator
properties are immune to the various forms of epistemic injustice that have been discussed in
the epistemological literature (see Fricker 2003).
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The World Wide Web
Conclusion
The Web provides access to a digital compendium of information that is unprecedented in
terms of its scale, scope, and accessibility. It is, in addition, a resource that plays an ever-g reater
role in shaping our epistemic capabilities at both an individual and collective level. The Web
is, as such, a valuable form of epistemic infrastructure for our species, influencing the kinds
of beliefs we form and providing a platform for us to discover, manage, and exploit epistemic
resources. As a discipline whose primary focus is to understand the factors that influence our
epistemic capabilities, applied epistemology establishes a natural point of contact with contem-
porary Web science, helping to reveal the Web’s epistemic properties and informing the search
for interventions that maximize its epistemic power and potential.
Notes
1 See https://duckduckgo.com/ (accessed January 25, 2018).
2 We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer for highlighting this particular point.
3 By being the reliable receivers of testimony, for example, our cognitive abilities play an important role
in explaining why it is that we believe the truth in testimonial exchanges.
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3
WIKIPEDIA
Karen Frost-Arnold
Introduction
As a free encyclopedia produced mostly by volunteer contributors, Wikipedia is an ambitious
experiment in online collaborative knowledge dissemination. It is one of the most visited sites
on the Internet. It receives 374 million unique visitors every month, and regularly appears as
the top Google result to factual queries (“Wikipedia:About”). There are 280 active Wikipedias
in different languages (“List of Wikipedias”). The English language Wikipedia is the largest
and is the focus of this chapter. English Wikipedia (hereafter ‘Wikipedia’) has over 5 million
articles (“Wikipedia:About”) and over 30,000 active Wikipedians editing content (“Active
Wikipedians”). As one of the most commonly used reference sites, Wikipedia certainly merits
applied epistemologists’ attention.
Wikipedia has lofty epistemic goals and is designed and constantly updated with epistemic
considerations in mind. The Wikipedian dream is an army of volunteers drawing on reliable,
independent sources to provide free access to an accurate, neutral source of encyclopedic know-
ledge. Anyone can edit most pages and help shape the policies and organizations that maintain
Wikipedia’s community. This openness aims at adding content rapidly. Additionally, in place of
slower editorial oversight or expert peer review procedures,Wikipedia relies on its contributors
to check that articles meet its standards of a neutral point of view, verifiability, and no original
research (“Wikipedia:Core content policies”).
But does the reality live up to Wikipedians’ dreams? As a normative enterprise, applied epis-
temology is uniquely positioned to evaluate to what extent Wikipedia actually improves or
damages the landscape of human knowledge. This chapter summarizes the Wikipedia debates
within applied epistemology and argues that the social organization of the Wikipedia commu-
nity shapes its epistemic merits and limitations. A useful framework for the epistemology of
Wikipedia is veritistic systems-oriented social epistemology (see Fallis 2011). Systems-oriented
social epistemology evaluates epistemic systems according to their epistemic outcomes for
community members (Goldman 2011). A veritistic social epistemology takes true belief as the
fundamental epistemic good (Goldman 1992, 1999). Thus, a veritistic systems-oriented social
epistemology of Wikipedia evaluates Wikipedia’s impact on the formation and dissemination
of true beliefs within its community of users. Alvin Goldman (1992) lays out five veritistic
standards, summarized by Paul Thagard as follows:
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1. the reliability of a practice is measured by the ratio of truths to total number of beliefs fostered
by the practice;
2. the power of a practice is measured by its ability to help cognizers find true answers to the
questions that interest them;
3. the fecundity of a practice is its ability to lead to large numbers of true beliefs for many
practitioners;
4. the speed of a practice is how quickly it leads to true answers;
5. the efficiency of a practice is how well it limits the cost of getting true answers (Thagard
1997: 247).
Section 1 evaluates Wikipedia according to standard 1, while section 2 focuses on standards

2–5. Section 3 draws on the social epistemology of trust to argue that Wikipedia’s epistemic
status depends on its complex and shifting relations of trust and distrust between community
members. Finally, section 4 applies feminist epistemology to show that lack of diversity in
Wikipedia’s community is a pressing epistemic threat, especially to standards 1 and 2.
1. Is Wikipedia reliable? Should we trust it?

Much epistemic analysis of Wikipedia focuses on the question of Wikipedia’s reliability: is most
of the information in Wikipedia accurate (see Fallis 2011: 299)? Work on the price system, pre-
diction markets, and the Condorcet jury theorem suggests that aggregating the viewpoints of
many people can produce reliable knowledge, under certain conditions (Estlund 1994; Hayek
1945; Sunstein 2006; Surowiecki 2004). However, Don Fallis (2008) argues that this does not
adequately explain Wikipedia’s reliability.Wikipedians do not simply aggregate their views (e.g.,
they often reach consensus through deliberation rather than voting); any current article on
Wikipedia reflects the viewpoint of the most recent editor (rather than an aggregated judgment),
and often articles are created by a small group instead of a large crowd (Fallis 2008: 1670).
Whether or not Wikipedia illustrates the wisdom of crowds, studies show that it is relatively
reliable (Fallis 2008; “Reliability of Wikipedia”). For example, a widely read Nature study found
that Wikipedia’s reliability compares well with Encyclopedia Britannica’s (Giles 2005).1 Heilman
et al. (2011) review several studies showing that Wikipedia’s medical information is generally
reliable, and more recent studies concur (Kräenbring et al. 2014; Kupferberg and Protus 2011;
Temple and Fraser 2014). Despite these encouraging results, applied epistemologists’ concerns
about reliability center around three features of the encyclopedia: non-expert authorship,
anonymous editing, and incentives to damage Wikipedia.
Anyone can edit most pages in Wikipedia, which means that editors (i.e., those who write,
edit, remove, and categorize information on Wikipedia) are often not experts on the topic.
Wikipedia is not a source of new knowledge production that requires content expertise. Instead,
Wikipedia aims to be an army of people collecting and disseminating information based on reli-
able independent sources. Experienced Wikipedians may be “informational experts” who possess
procedural skill in managing information (such as finding and inserting citations in Wikipedia
articles) (Hartelius 2011; Pfister 2011). Nonetheless, one might worry that Wikipedians who
lack content expertise will not know which topics are notable and important, which sources
are reliable, which claims have been refuted, etc. (Fallis 2011: 300). Additionally, many con-
tent experts have been alarmed at non-experts editing or deleting their work on Wikipedia
(Healy 2007). When this happens, the reliability of Wikipedia can suffer, particularly if accurate
claims by content experts are removed or replaced with inaccurate ones by non-experts. While
Wikipedia does not grant content experts additional authority (in part, because it has no
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mechanism for verifying the expertise of editors (“Wikipedia:Expert editors”)), Wikipedians

have made attempts to reach out to experts by soliciting their input in ways that do not require
experts to learn how to navigate the wiki infrastructure (Lih 2015; Lih et al. 2015). Such efforts,
if successful, could improve the reliability of the encyclopedia.
Wikipedia allows editors to be anonymous. Anonymity is a second source of concern for
epistemologists who believe that holding people’s offline identities accountable for errors will
increase the accuracy of their contributions (Sanger 2009; Wray 2009). Wikipedians can create
accounts with a pseudonym, or they can edit with only their IP address being logged. Thus, an
editor can add inaccurate information, and their offline identity will not be tarnished. Since
editors’ offline identities cannot be punished, some worry that editors lack incentive for living
up to expectations of accuracy. Larry Sanger, a co-founder of Wikipedia, left the project, in
part, because of such concerns: “anonymity allows those with an anti-intellectual or just crot-
chety bent to attack experts without a restraint that many would no doubt feel if their real
names were known” (Sanger 2009: 66). And K. Brad Wray argues that the epistemic culture of
Wikipedia is inferior to that of science precisely because scientists have a reputation to protect,
while anonymous Wikipedians do not (Wray 2009: 39–40). While these arguments have merit,
they ignore two points. First, there are punishments for untrustworthy behavior on Wikipedia.
Although there is rarely punishment for users’ offline identities, there is a system for sanctioning
users’ online identities by, for example, banning an account from the site. Thus, there is some
accountability for inaccuracy.2 I discuss these sanctions in section 3. Wikipedians, though, are
generally very sensitive to privacy issues and rarely publicly release the offline identity of bad
actors (Owens 2013). Second, demands for increased accountability ignore the epistemic value
of online anonymity. Members of vulnerable populations who have legitimate fears of reprisal
and harassment might only contribute their expertise to Wikipedia under the protection of
anonymity (Fallis 2008: 1668; Frost-Arnold 2014a). In terms of reliability, Wikipedia’s ano-
nymity may allow some vulnerable Wikipedians to engage in talk and discussions that help
weed out errors, thereby improving the accuracy of the encyclopedia.
A third epistemic concern is that Wikipedia’s openness attracts editors with incentives to
harm the epistemic project (Fallis 2011: 300). Trolls, vandals, public relations firms, politicians,
and harassers are all potential threats to reliability, since it may be in their interest to add false
content to articles. For example, editing while under a conflict of interest, especially undis-
closed paid editing, is frowned upon in Wikipedia (“Wikipedia:Conflict of interest”). In August
2015, administrators blocked 381 user accounts for charging money to post articles (Erhart and
Barbara 2015). In this scam, small businesses and artists were contacted by someone posing as
an experienced Wikipedian or administrator. The scammers used records of previously rejected
articles. They contacted the subjects of those articles to offer to add the content once payment
had been received (“Wikipedia:Long-term abuse/Orangemoody”).This and other cases of paid
editing give critics cause to worry about its reliability. However, one might be comforted by
the fact that Wikipedia’s volunteer army did uncover the scam and take corrective measures
(Erhart and Barbara 2015). Additionally, Wikipedia has worked with major PR firms to create a
professional ethics culture in which PR firms do not violate Wikipedia policies, including those
related to conflict of interest (Lih 2015; “Wikipedia:Statement on Wikipedia from participating
communications firms”).
Wikipedia’s openness also attracts trolls and vandals who introduce inaccurate content for
their own amusement. In the widely reported Seigenthaler incident, a prankster edited the
biography of journalist John Seigenthaler to speculate that Seigenthaler had been involved in
the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy. Seigenthaler publicly attacked Wikipedia for
failing to detect the error quickly and for not identifying the vandal (Seigenthaler 2005). In
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response, Wikipedia instituted new measures to protect the encyclopedia against vandalism: (1)
anonymous users were prevented from creating new articles, (2) a Biography of Living Persons
policy was created to provide guidelines for removing questionable material in biographies, and
(3) a semi-protection tool was introduced, which prevents unregistered or newly registered
users from editing articles that may be targets of vandalism (Lih 2009: 191–94). While these
measures cannot make Wikipedia vandal-free, they can increase its reliability. In sum, there is
some empirical support for Wikipedia’s reliability, and it may be reliable enough to meet our
epistemic goals, especially when the stakes for error are not high (Fallis 2008: 8). While applied
epistemologists have raised concerns about its lack of experts, anonymity, and openness to
those with harmful goals, Wikipedia has policies in place to address these issues and continually
improve its reliability.
Leaving aside whether Wikipedia is in fact reliable, a further question of epistemological
importance is whether we can be justified in believing it reliable, or as P. D. Magnus asks: “Can
we trust it?” (Fallis 2008, 2011; Magnus 2009). If we can justifiably trust Wikipedia, our jus-
tification will have to be different than justification for trusting traditional testimony, since
Wikipedia has no single, identifiable author (Magnus 2009; Simon 2010; Tollefsen 2009; Wray
2009).3 Judith Simon (2010) argues that trust in Wikipedia is best viewed as an instance of pro-
cedural trust –trust in the process which generates Wikipedia content. One might take a user’s
knowledge about Wikipedia’s safeguards for reliability as good justification for their trust in the
process. However, a problem with procedural trust in Wikipedia is that Wikipedia is dynamic –
anyone can change the content at any moment.Thus, while we may have good reason to believe
that Wikipedia as a system is reliable on average, “this overall trustworthiness does not help us to
assess the trustworthiness of a specific claim in Wikipedia” (Simon 2010: 349).
So, are there any tools to assess the trustworthiness of specific claims? Magnus argues that
Wikipedia frustrates our usual methods of evaluating the trustworthiness of online claims. For
example, one might use the method of sampling by checking a claim on a website against other
sources for corroboration. However, many other sites copy material from Wikipedia, so one
may inadvertently use Wikipedia as a self-confirming source (Magnus 2009: 87). Relatedly,
Wikipedia has been a locus of ‘citogenesis’: “the creation of ‘reliable’ sources through circular
reporting” (“Wikipedia:List of citogenesis incidents”). In citogenesis, information is added to
Wikipedia, which is then picked up in media reports, which are in turn used as ‘independent’
sources to support the original information in Wikipedia. Another way Wikipedia frustrates our
usual tools of verification is through multi-authored content. I might evaluate the reliability of a
blog post about physics by a self-professed physicist using standards of plausibility of style (Does
the author write like a physicist?) or calibration (Suppose I know something about physics. Is
the author correct about the physics claims that I know? If so, then the author is likely to be
accurate about physics outside my area of knowledge). But a Wikipedia article is potentially
written by hundreds of people who do as little as add one claim or tidy up the spelling and style.
Thus, the fact that the article is written in the style of a physicist is no guarantee that any one
claim was written by an expert in physics; and since each claim could be written by a different
author, accuracy in one claim is no guarantee that other claims were written by the same know-
ledgeable author (Magnus 2009: 85–87). So, Wikipedia may be challenging to verify, and trust
in its claims may be hard to justify.
However, Fallis (2011) and Simon (2010) argue that there may be other ways to verify
Wikipedia’s content. Wikipedia grants access to every article’s editing history (showing readers
whether the article has been the subject of a recent edit war –a red flag for bias), and it provides
editing history for every editor (letting readers verify whether a claim was made by an editor
with a history of vandalism).4 The ‘talk’ pages allow readers to see critical discussion about the
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reliability of content. And dispute templates are posted in many Wikipedia articles warning
readers that, for example, “The truthfulness of this article has been questioned.” Thus, readers
who take the time to use these tools can put themselves in a position to gain defeaters that
would undermine trust in Wikipedia content. In sum, determining whether to trust Wikipedia’s
claims may be difficult using traditional methods of verification, but other methods are available.
2. A broader epistemology of Wikipedia

Reliability is not the only epistemic virtue, and applied epistemologists have analyzed Wikipedia’s
success according to Goldman’s other standards of power, speed, fecundity, and efficiency.While
error-avoiding epistemologists take reliability as the primary epistemic virtue, truth-seeking
veritists take power to sometimes trump reliability (Coady 2012: 5–7; Fallis 2006: 182–83;
Frost-Arnold 2014a: 66–68). An encyclopedia with only one entry consisting of all true claims
(e.g., about Harriet Tubman) would be a maximally reliable source, but it would not be very
powerful or encyclopedic (Coady 2012: 170). We want an encyclopedia to help its users to
know many truths, as well as avoid errors. And an encyclopedia that helps users attain more
true beliefs than its competitor would have an epistemic advantage, along one dimension. On
this score, Wikipedia is incredibly epistemically successful. Encyclopedia Britannica announced
it was ending print production in 2012; at the time, Britannica had 65,000 articles compared
to Wikipedia’s 3,890,000, almost sixty times as many (Silverman 2012). While Wikipedia’s
openness appeared to be a concern for its reliability, it is a boon to its power –thousands of
volunteer non-experts can create and expand more entries than an encyclopedia written by a
smaller number of experts (Fallis 2011: 305).
Wikipedia also measures well against Goldman’s standards of speed, fecundity and efficiency
(Fallis 2011: 305). In the era of smartphones, Wikipedia provides instant, convenient answers
to questions for many people. Additionally, Wikipedia’s openness is explicitly designed to allow
for fast content creation (Fallis 2008: 1669; Sunstein 2006: 150). An initial attempt at an online
encyclopedia by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, Nupedia, had such a demanding peer review
process that it only produced about two dozen articles in its first year (Lih 2009: 40–41). In
comparison, Wikipedia produced 20,000 in its opening year (Lih 2009: 77). Many Wikipedians
are open access advocates, and the project’s emphasis on free online content increases its
fecundity –it allows true beliefs to be acquired by many people. Similarly, Wikipedia is efficient
as a free source of knowledge for users, and its online platform and use of volunteer editors has
cost-saving benefits in production.
3. Wikipedia and trust

The epistemic culture of Wikipedia is central to its epistemic successes and failings (cf. Coady
2012: 171).While most readers perceive Wikipedia as a static piece of text,Wikipedia is actually
a dynamic community. Wikipedians interact on talk pages, meet in person, collaborate on Wiki
Projects, organize edit-a-thons, and hold conferences. This section analyzes one key feature of
Wikipedia’s culture: its complex and shifting relations of trust and distrust.
Wikipedia started with a small community, and personal relations of trust between people
who knew each other were central in founding the community (Lih 2009). Paul de Laat (2010)
shows that as new members were recruited, Wikipedia used hopeful trust, a form of trust with
interesting epistemic significance, to motivate trustworthiness in newbies. On Victoria McGeer’s
(2008) account of hopeful trust, the trustor makes herself vulnerable by putting herself in the
hands of the trustee, but her hope that the trustee will not take advantage of that vulnerability
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encourages the trustee to live up to the trust. Thus, hopeful trust can inspire people to be more
trustworthy. It does this because the trustor’s hopeful vision can be motivating –it prompts the
trustee to think: “I want to be as she sees me to be” (McGeer 2008: 249). In this way, a hopeful
vision can make the trustee a kind of role model to herself. Hopeful trust is epistemically
interesting because one’s own trust in someone can count, under the right conditions, as evi-
dence that they will be trustworthy.
In their relations with one another, Wikipedians often endorse a powerful form of hopeful
trust (de Laat 2010). First, members of the Wikipedia community make themselves vulner-
able –they put themselves in each other’s hands.Wikipedia maintains an openness that makes it
vulnerable to those with harmful motives. In the face of this threat, Wikipedians could adopt a
default attitude of distrust to new members, forcing them to get permission to edit after success-
fully completing screening procedures. But Wikipedians instead adopt an attitude of qualified
trust toward newcomers. One reason Wikipedians often give for this approach is that it inspires
people to do better. As founder Jimmy Wales puts it,
[B]‌y having complex permission models, you make it very hard for people to spon-
taneously do good … There are so many hostile communities on the Internet. One
of the reasons is because this philosophy of trying to make sure that no one can hurt
anyone else actually eliminates all the opportunities for trust … [Wikipedia is] about
leaving things open-ended, it’s about trusting people, it’s about encouraging people
to do good.
Wales 2009: xvii–xviii
A second sign of Wikipedia’s attitude of hopeful trust is its commitment to the principles of
“Assume good faith,”“Don’t bite the newbies,” and “Be bold” (“Wikipedia:Assume good faith”;
“Wikipedia:Be bold”; “Wikipedia:Please do not bite the newcomers”). With these principles,
Wikipedians encourage new editors to make edits without fear of breaking the encyclopedia.
In other words, Wikipedians make themselves vulnerable to damage, and they do so with hope
by assuming good faith (de Laat 2010: 332). Of course, Wikipedians are a diverse commu-
nity, and disputes about whether members are actually following these practices abound, but
the community consensus guidelines espouse this attitude of hopeful trust. Third, Wikipedia’s
most public ambassador, Jimmy Wales, presents a hopeful vision of the community in his public
discussions. For example, in a CNN discussion with Seigenthaler,Wales said, “Generally we find
most people out there on the Internet are good. … It’s one of the wonderful humanitarian
discoveries in Wikipedia, that most people only want to help us and build this free nonprofit,
charitable resource” (Wales 2005).5 In sum, Wikipedians make themselves vulnerable to harm,
but they often do so with an attitude of hopeful trust in fellow members and newcomers.
Wikipedia communications about community norms hold out a vision to its members of
trustworthy commitment to the production of a free, reliable encyclopedia produced by good
faith volunteers. If McGeer is right that hopeful trust can inspire trustworthiness, this may help
explain some of Wikipedia’s epistemic success –its attitude of hopeful trust and vision of epi-
stemic trustworthiness motivates users to work for the epistemic good of the community.
On the other hand, Wikipedia’s attitude of hopeful trust is also qualified and balanced with
a distrustful attitude and rational choice approach to trust.6 Wikipedia started as a small com-
munity where common forms of interpersonal trust could have force. If I know some other
Wikipedians, and I care what they think of me, then it is more likely that I can find their
vision of me as a fellow Wikipedian motivating. But as Wikipedia grew, it was bound to attract
large numbers of users who had only fleeting interactions with the community. Therefore, it
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is not surprising that Wikipedia was rocked by scandals of bad actors and consequently grew
an attitude of distrust to qualify the attitude of hopeful trust (see de Laat 2010). As discussed
earlier, in response to the Seigenthaler incident, Wikipedia instituted methods to improve its
reliability: (1) no article creation for anonymous users, (2) a Biography of Living Persons policy,
and (3) semi-protection. Moreover, software tools and autonomous bots have proliferated to
help Wikipedians detect and revert vandalism (de Laat 2015). Many of these mechanisms stem
from a mistrust of certain types of editors, for example, anonymous, new editors.
Additionally, as Wikipedia grew, it was no longer feasible for Jimmy Wales to act as a mediator
and judge in disputes. So, in 2004, Wales recruited volunteers to set up a mediation committee
and an arbitration committee (ArbCom) (Lih 2009: 180). While the mediation committee
has been used less, ArbCom is busy –it is the main sanctions arm of Wikipedia, delivering
punishments such as probation, restrictions on topics a Wikipedian can edit, and bans from the
community (“Wikipedia:Editing restrictions”). Systems of punishment are signs of a rational
choice approach to trust. This approach models individuals as self-interested rational actors
and maintains that people act in a trustworthy manner when there are sufficient external
constraints, most notably punishment for untrustworthiness, to make it in their self-interest to
act as expected.Wikipedia has guidelines for conduct and a system of punishment for those who
violate the rules. The goal of such systems is to allow members to cooperate with each other
without needing to assume that their community members share altruistic or pro-social motiv-
ations. Following Hobbes, the rational choice approach thus takes a bleaker view of human
nature than the hopeful trust approach. Internet historian Jason Scott summarizes the contrast
as follows: “Wikipedia holds up the dark mirror of what humanity is, to itself ” (quoted in Lih
2009: 131). Because of all the vandalism, trolls, and harassment on Wikipedia, one might be
persuaded to adopt this pessimistic view. Whether Wikipedia’s system of punishment is suffi-
cient to keep bad actors at bay is an open question, constantly debated within the community.7
It may be that Wikipedia’s success lies in its ability to blend both of these approaches to
trust. It may be descriptively accurate that Wikipedia’s early epistemic successes depended on
an attitude of hopeful trust and interpersonal connections. But the pressures of growth turned
the community more to threat of punishment. However, as I have argued above, there are still
remnants of hopeful trust’s openness to newcomers and articulation of a vision of trustworthi-
ness aimed at inspiring new members.8 For the applied epistemologist, the interesting question
is whether these changing relations of trust support or undermine Wikipedia’s epistemic goals.
4. Wikipedia’s gaps and biases

Lack of diversity is an epistemic problem for Wikipedia. Estimates of gender diversity of
Wikipedians range from 9% to 16% women (Hill and Shaw 2013; Wikimedia Foundation
2011). The Wikimedia Foundation does not collect data on the race or ethnicity of editors
in its surveys, and there is a lack of other data, but anecdotal evidence suggests that Wikipedia
lacks multicultural diversity (Backer 2015; Murphy 2015; Reynosa 2015). Wikipedia also has a
Western bias (Hern 2015).There is no consensus on the causes of Wikipedia’s diversity problem.
Determining the true causes of the diversity gap requires careful empirical study and falls out-
side the purview of the applied epistemologist. Applied epistemology can contribute (1) an
analysis of the epistemic significance of the imbalance and (2) an evaluation of the epistemic
consequences of proposed solutions to the gap. I address both.
The demographics of Wikipedia editors have several epistemic implications. First, concerns
about diversity on Wikipedia are most commonly framed as concerns about gaps in coverage of
topics related to women, people of color, and non-Western subjects, which is largely a concern
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about the power (in Goldman’s sense) of Wikipedia. For instance, Lam et al. (2011) found
that topics of interest to women have shorter articles in Wikipedia than do topics of interest
to men. And women’s biographies only account for 15.5% of all biographies in Wikipedia
(Graells-Garrido et al. 2015). If women editors are more likely than men to create biographies
of women, then attracting more women editors may increase the number of biographies of
women, thereby increasing the number of truths available on Wikipedia, since more biographies
will be added.9 Thus, lack of diversity means that fewer truths are available to cognizers.
Second, lack of diversity undermines the reliability of Wikipedia. In discussions of
Wikipedia’s reliability, it is often argued that errors are weeded out by communal scrutiny. But
as feminist epistemologists have long argued, communities that lack diversity can perpetuate
bias. Background assumptions shaped by individuals’ social locations can shape the claims they
consider supported by evidence. Errors can be detected when putative knowledge claims are
subjected to critical scrutiny by people from different backgrounds who can recognize and
often detect unconscious biases with the background assumptions and purported evidential
support for false claims (Frost-Arnold 2014a: 71; Goldman 1999: 78; Intemann 2010; Longino
1990). One of the main projects of feminist science studies has been to provide case studies
of knowledge communities that detected errors and bias when women or people of color
entered scientific disciplines in greater numbers. Returning to Wikipedia, this means that with
fewer women, people of color, and members of other underrepresented groups making edits or
taking part in the discussions on article talk pages, fewer errors are detected and the reliability
of Wikipedia suffers.
Third, lack of diversity facilitates the proliferation of misleading truths.Women’s biographies
on Wikipedia contain more marriage-related events than do biographies of men (Graells-
Garrido et al. 2015). There is an epistemic problem here, but what is it? Consider the statement
in a particular woman’s biography that she was married to so-and-so. Assuming the spouse was
correctly identified, this statement might not seem epistemically problematic, because it is true.
Perhaps the problem is a failure of power because Wikipedia is missing some truths (namely,
the marital status of many men), but this fails to fully capture the problem. It is not just that
some truths are missing; it is that the truths which do appear, in conjunction with the absence
of others, can be misleading and harmful. A reader of Wikipedia biographies is exposed to
misleading evidence –based on what they read, they have reason to believe the following false
claim (among others) ‘A woman’s spouse is more relevant to her accomplishments than a man’s
spouse is.’10 This is epistemically problematic, as a false claim, but it is also ethically harmful as it
contributes to the devaluation of women’s accomplishments and promotes the stereotype that
women’s identities are more tied to their families than to their professional accomplishments.
While women are also vulnerable to unconscious bias and can also perpetuate stereotypes, it is
likely that women have more at stake in correcting such misleading information in Wikipedia.
Therefore, more diversity in editorship seems likely to diminish Wikipedia’s problem with
misleading truths.
The Wikimedia Foundation set the goal of increasing women Wikipedians to 25% by 2015
(Cohen 2011).Although this initiative has failed, many other projects aim to improve Wikipedia’s
gender and multicultural diversity (“AfroCROWD:About”; “Wikipedia:WikiProject
Countering systemic bias”; “Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red”). Applied epistemology
can be useful in assessing the epistemic merits of these proposed solutions. To illustrate, I show
how one solution falls afoul of “the problem of speaking for others” (Alcoff 1991).
One of the suspected causes of Wikipedia’s diversity problem is its reliance on the notability
guideline and verifiability policy. The notability guideline ensures that the truths in Wikipedia
be non-trivial and interesting,11 and the verifiability policy obviously makes Wikipedia more
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Karen Frost-Arnold
verifiable and trust in it more rationally justifiable. While epistemically helpful in these ways,
notability and verifiability can perpetuate bias within a community lacking diversity (Backer
2015; Stephenson-Goodknight 2015). Assessments of an article’s notability and a source’s legit-
imacy are made in light of background assumptions, which can be biased by one’s social loca-
tion. To a white, Western editor, an article on an artwork of cultural importance to an Asian
subpopulation may not seem notable. The nutshell description of the notability guideline reads,
Wikipedia articles cover notable topics—those that have gained sufficiently significant
attention by the world at large and over a period of time, and are not outside the scope
of Wikipedia. We consider evidence from reliable independent sources to gauge this
attention.
“Wikipedia:Notability”
Following this guideline requires assessing whether a topic has gained “sufficiently significant
attention by the world at large,” which is a judgment made in light of assumptions about what
makes attention significant, who or what counts as good indicators of the world’s attention, etc.
Similarly, one must make judgments about whether there exist reliable independent sources to
document this attention, and this will be done in light of background assumptions about which
sources are reliable. The problem is that these background assumptions can be biased. Alice
Backer, founder of Afro Free Culture Crowdsourcing Wikimedia (AfroCROWD), an initiative to
increase the participation of people of African descent in Wikimedia (“AfroCROWD:About”),
gives the example of the proposed article on “Garifuna in Peril,” a film about the Garifuna
community (an Afro-Honduran community) (Backer 2015).The creator of the article, Garifuna
blogger Teofilo Colon, tried multiple times to add the article to Wikipedia, but each time it
was rejected by a user as non-notable and lacking independent verifiable sources to support
notability, despite the fact that Colon continued to add dozens of sources, including well-
established Central American newspapers. Now we cannot know with certainty the reasons
why the Wikipedian who rejected the article found it to be non-notable and poorly sourced,
but it is not hard to imagine that the typical white, Western Wikipedian is ignorant about
Garifuna culture, unaware of the films that have meaning in Garifuna communities, and unin-
formed about Central American news sources. Our social location shapes our background
knowledge, which biases our assessment of what is notable and which sources are reliable.
Hence, not surprisingly, the contributions of women, people of color, and other marginalized
communities are often rejected.
Now one proposed solution to this problem is for an experienced editor, who is a trusted
Wikipedian, to post the new article on behalf of less experienced editors who belong to
minority groups. Thus, when Wikipedians look at the new article and see that it was created by
the trusted Wikipedian, they will be less likely to recommend it for deletion as non-notable.This
solution was repeatedly proposed at WikiConference USA 2015, and examples were offered of
instances in which this strategy had effectively added new articles, which had previously been
deleted when submitted by people of color. Notice that this solution leverages Wikipedia’s
relations of trust –it recognizes that a large number of previous edits and known history of
valuable contributions to the community make one a trustworthy editor, and trust in the editor
behind an article can override concerns about the notability or verifiability of the content.
However, applied epistemology reveals a problem with this solution. It runs afoul of what
Linda Alcoff calls “The problem of speaking for others” (Alcoff 1991) and other problems with
advocating on behalf of marginalized others (Code 2006; Frost-Arnold 2014b; Ortega 2006).
Advocacy can be epistemically beneficial; it can allow the claims of marginalized speakers to be
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heard, when they might otherwise be ignored or rejected. However, advocacy also perpetuates a
system in which the speech of marginalized people is not heard or accepted in their own voice.
When people of color need to give their Wikipedia articles to established white Wikipedians
to prevent their article from being deleted, we still have a system in which people of color are
not trusted editors. Additionally, when an advocate speaks “in place of ” a marginalized subject,
the advocate buttresses their social status and epistemic credibility on the back of the epi-
stemic labor of the marginalized. While the intentions of the advocate may be noble, this still
perpetuates unjust privilege. White, established Wikipedians will ultimately receive the credit
for the addition of the new articles in their editing history, and Wikipedians of color will
still find that their content is rejected when added under their own identities. This solution
does not push established Wikipedians to address their own biases or learn to trust new com-
munity members who belong to more diverse populations. While no strategies are without
problems, other solutions may be more epistemically fruitful. Collaborations between applied
epistemologists and Wikipedians could be a source of new ideas for addressing the diversity gap.
In conclusion, Wikipedia is fertile ground for applied epistemology. As a dynamic and trans-
parent community with explicitly epistemic goals, Wikipedia provides opportunities to study
the production and dissemination of knowledge through online collaboration. While debates
persist about the reliability and verifiability of Wikipedia’s content, Wikipedia is constantly
adjusting to protect its epistemic standing.Wikipedia’s shifting relations of trust and distrust raise
important normative questions about which modes of social organization are best suited for
epistemic communities at various stages of development. And, while the epistemic damage due
to a lack of diversity is well-traveled terrain for the applied epistemology of science,Wikipedia’s
diversity gaps both display similar problems and raise new challenges for a digital age.
Acknowledgments
I thank Teofilo Colon, Michael Hunter, Alla Ivanchikova, Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight,
K. Brad Wray, and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments.
Notes
1 Encyclopedia Britannica critiqued the Nature study (Encyclopedia Britannica 2006). See Nature (2006), for
Nature’s rebuttal.
2 Sanger recognizes that there is some accountability but thinks accountability that does not target one’s
offline identity is insufficient to prevent some of the poor behavior on Wikipedia.
3 In fact, some question whether Wikipedia provides testimony at all (Tollefsen 2009; Wray 2009).
4 Editing history is a mark of trustworthiness in Wikipedia. Wikipedians often introduce themselves by
listing their number of edits, and many post summaries of their editing history on their user pages.
5 For quotes from other Wikipedians espousing Wales’s hopeful vision, see de Laat (2010).
6 De Laat (2010) analyzes Wikipedia’s balance between trust and distrust in terms of the discretion
offered to editors as a result of hopeful trust tempered with a decrease in discretion due to increasing
rules and governance tools.
7 Tollefsen (2009) argues that Wikipedia’s accountability mechanisms make it compatible with the
assurance theory of testimony, according to which hearers are entitled to accept testimony because the
speaker offers their assurance of the truth of the testimony and accepts responsibility for it. However,
de Laat (2010) responds that accountability should not be confused with offering assurances, which
anonymous editing precludes.
8 For a useful discussion of the design challenges of balancing openness to newcomers with vigilance
against vandals, see Halfaker et al. (2014).
9 Of course, more women editors adding more articles on women will only add more truths to Wikipedia
if women are as equally reliable as men, which there is no reason to doubt. Also, it is hard to obtain data
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about whether higher percentages of women Wikipedians will lead to more truths being added to the
encyclopedia (rather than the removal of false claims or a change in presentation of existing claims).
That said, the goal of many projects aimed at decreasing the diversity gap is to increase the number of
women writing articles (“Wikipedia:WikiProject Countering systemic bias”).
10 Additionally, readers are misled about which topics (such as women’s marital status) are important.
I thank an anonymous reviewer for this point.
11 See Fallis (2006) and Goldman (1999: 94–96) on the epistemic value of interesting truths.
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4
GOOGLING
Introduction
In a recent New Yorker cartoon, a man is fixing a sink. His partner, standing nearby skeptically
asks, “Do you really know what you are doing, or do you only google-know?”
This cartoon perfectly captures the mixed relationship we have with googling, or knowing
via digital interface, particularly via search engines. On the one hand, googling is now the dom-
inant source of socially useful knowledge. The use of search engines for this purpose is almost
completely integrated into many of our lives. On the other, the point the cartoon is making
resonates with nearly all of us: users often recognize that there are risks and trade-offs associated
with gaining certain kinds of information via online search.
These facts about googling make it particularly interesting to the applied epistemologist.
Our practices involving search engines not only have a distinctive character, that character puts
some traditional epistemic questions in a new light. This chapter will examine two of those
questions. The first concerns the extent to which googling raises problems similar to familiar
quandaries surrounding testimonial knowledge. The second –and more radical –concerns
whether googling is a type of distributed or extended knowledge.
Googling as a mode of inquiry

Finding information via a search engine is a ubiquitous feature of modern life. Google, as a
company, is now so dominant that the near-universal term for such activity is “googling.” For
most people, googling is just how you acquire socially useful knowledge.
In this chapter, we’ll use “googling” to cover a particular method or mode of inquiry. By
a “mode of inquiry” we mean a process whose point is to answer a particular question or
questions. Such questions needn’t be, and often aren’t, explicitly stated, but are implicit in the
inquiry itself. Importantly, following common usage, we take “googling” to name the process
of finding information online. As such, we take it to include not just the act of using a search
engine, but the whole process of acquiring information over the Internet, including the search, the
sites reached by that search, and the answer to the question(s) which is/are the target of the
inquiry. Thus, to say you “googled it” is to say that you acquired the relevant answer online via
a search.
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The sheer ubiquity of googling hints at one of its more epistemically interesting features.
Googling is deeply integrated into our epistemic life in at least three respects.
First, for many questions, googling is our primary or “go-to” way of finding answers. A quick
way of illustrating this fact is to simply reflect how you might go about finding answers to any
of the following questions, assuming you have normal, working Internet access:
• What are the possible causes for your car not starting?
• Where is the closest auto-parts store?
• How late is that store open?
• What opinions do people have about local auto mechanics?
Whether or not these particular questions matter to you, it is clear to most Internet users that
the first thing one would do if one wanted to know the answer to such questions is to engage
in an Internet search. Indeed, for most people, searching online happens without much fore-
thought. It is just the obvious, immediate first step in answering almost any question about the
social world; for those questions, it has a kind of priority for many people.
Modes of inquiry have causal priority over one another when you can’t engage in one
mode without engaging in another. Thus, one can’t read without using vision. Modes have
epistemic priority over one another when you are justified in using the second only if you
are justified in using the first. But modes can also enjoy what we can call a priority of use rela-
tive to certain classes of questions. Priority of use is a kind of statistical priority. A mode has
priority of use over another, relative to a given class of questions, just when it is, other things being equal,
the first mode or method used in order to answer questions of that class. Consider, for example, per-
ception with regard to questions about our immediate physical environment. If we wish to
know whether it is safe to cross the road, we first try to look and see; failing that, we might ask
someone nearby. If we want to know whether the phone is ringing, we first try listening for it,
etc. Perception often has causal, epistemic, and use priority over other modes of knowing. But,
as the above experiment indicates, googling has priority of use for many ordinary questions.
We can use other modes of inquiry to answer these sorts of questions, but we typically try
googling first.
Second, googling is cognitively seamless –that is, we look through the interface, or don’t
treat it as cognitively salient. This itself is a consequence of ubiquity and epistemic priority of
use together with the sheer speed of Internet searches. In this way too, googling is like certain
other modes of inquiry, like reading street signs or even perceiving the world around you. It is
a process that happens so easily that we “see” the information we are seeking without always
noticing how we are going about it.
Third, and perhaps most strikingly, most people treat googling with default, prima facie trust.
How many times has someone you know announced on some point of fact and everyone else
in the room races to their phones to verify or falsify it? We routinely use googling to trump
other forms of inquiry, even to question experts. Of course, almost no one will admit to trusting
everything on the Internet; we all know that googling can lead us astray. But that doesn’t stop
us from using it routinely, nor regarding it as essentially reliable on a broad range of topics. Here
again, googling is akin to perception.We know that perception can mislead us, but we nonethe-
less treat it with prima facie trust. So too with how we acquire information online; we used to
say that seeing is believing. Now googling is believing.
The above three points suggest that googling, like perception, is a mode of inquiry that is
deeply integrated into our epistemic life. Of course, googling is unlike perception in numerous
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Googling
ways, two of which will form the basis for the rest of the discussion of this paper. First, and per-
haps most obviously, when googling, we are not interacting with physical objects but consulting
a source for sources that are distributed across a virtual space. And second, googling, unlike per-
ception, is radically dependent on other people and processes that are not our “own.” Consulting
Google (the actual web-browser) is like asking someone about whom to ask for an answer. And
any act of googling (finding information online) by its very nature is dependent upon the beliefs
and actions of other people. In that way, googling is more like testimony.
Taken together, the above points indicate what we believe is distinctive about googling from
an epistemological point of view. It is a mode of inquiry that is at once closely integrated (like
perception) and yet distributed and reliant on others (like testimony). It is this combination of
features that makes googling of particular interest to the social epistemologist.
We should note at the outset that there is one further feature of googling that makes it par-
ticularly distinctive: it is a preference-dependent mode of inquiry. From a certain level of abstrac-
tion, Facebook, Google, and most of our apps, search engines, and social platforms all work in
the same basic way, different algorithms aside. They attempt to track people’s preferences by
way of tracking their likes, their clicks, their searches, or their friends. That data is then analyzed
and used to predict what a given person’s current and future preferences will be. But it is also
used to predict what sort of information you –and crucially, those similar to you –will find
interesting, what posts you will like, and what links you will most click. The results of this pref-
erence-aggregation are then served up on websites you visit.That’s how the magic happens. It is
why those shoes you were thinking of buying are being advertised on your Facebook feed. And
that’s also what makes googling both one of the most efficient modes of inquiry humans have
ever produced and one of the riskiest, from the epistemic point of view.1,2
In the next section, we discuss how those risks bear on the question of whether it is rational
for us to trust what we learn by googling.
In Googling we trust
Trust in the testimony of others plays an important role in our epistemic lives, since the amount
of knowledge we need to rely on in daily life far exceeds what we can acquire personally. With
the Internet serving as a major source of testimonial knowledge (and seemingly equally for low-
risk queries like “how to fold a fitted sheet” to high-r isk queries like “can I feed my newborn
peanuts?”), it is important to explore the epistemic vulnerabilities googling presents.Trusting, in
general, is an activity that makes us vulnerable to other people, and trusting in googling, as many
of us do on a daily basis, brings many of the same problems. That being said, there are several
features of googling that should make us wonder if it poses unique epistemic vulnerabilities that
testimony from other sources does not.
For one, the Internet makes it very easy for many sources to remain anonymous and so
removes the risks to reputation that face-to-face testimony may bring (and the security that
it can provide for the inquirer). Another related problem is the credibility of the sources that
Google directs us toward, and in particular our ability to verify the credibility of those sources. In
an ideal world, we would be able to rely on genuine experts for the information that we need.
But googling doesn’t necessarily take us to experts for answers to our questions.When we google
we are directed to forums, Internet encyclopedias, social media, news websites, online stores,
blogs, and videos, to name a few possible sources googling may point us to for answers. We can
immediately see two potentially unique problems with googling: we regularly don’t know who
we are talking to, and we typically don’t have access to information about their trustworthiness.
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In the discussion that follows, we explore a number of similarities between googling and
verbal testimony, and we point out where we think there may be unique issues raised by taking
googling as a mode of inquiry. We consider in more depth the nature of the sources of testi-
mony that googling directs us toward, and how these various sources present us with different
epistemic problems. We also consider the issue of credibility markers available to us when we
google and how this may be different from existing discussions in the literature on related
discussions about recognizing experts.
Googling and prima facie trust

Placing trust in others’ testimony is unavoidable. But it isn’t always warranted. So that raises a
natural theoretical question: under what circumstances is such trusting rational?
We mentioned earlier that googling is arguably treated by us with a default, prima facie
trust –much like the testimony of others. Put more carefully, absent obvious defeaters for what
someone says, we tend to take someone’s testimony that p as prima facie evidence for the truth of
p. And, we contend, we typically do the same thing when we google answers to our questions.
If so, then we can extend the natural question above and ask: are we rational in putting prima
facie trust into googled results?
There are two dominant positions in the existing literature on testimony that bear on this
question: reductionism and anti-reductionism. According to reductionists, the epistemic merit
of testimony is reduced to the epistemic merit of sources such as perception, memory, and
inductive inference. Our trust in testimony is rational when it is based on these other sources.
According to one such view, therefore, we are rational in trusting testimony by virtue of our
past experiences of the general reliability of testimony –reliability that we’ve presumably tracked
via other evidential sources (“global reductionism”) (van Cleve 2006; Hume 2010 [1740]: T
1.3.4). Alternatively, it may be because we are justified in accepting the testimony of particular
individuals on particular topics due to beliefs about their reliability on those topics (“local reduc-
tionism”) (Fricker 1994). Note, however, that in contrast to the common-sense understanding
of trust as prima facie trust sketched above, reductionist positions require positive evidence for
trustworthiness; that is, trust is earned, not assumed.
Anti-reductionists, by contrast, argue that testimony itself is a basic form of evidence that
provides universal, prima facie justification for accepting the testimony of speakers. What enables
us to trust testimony –understood typically as factual assertions –is an epistemic principle. One
such principle draws a connection between our self-trust in our own opinions and faculties and
the similar faculties and beliefs of others (Reid 1975; Foley 2001; Zagzebski 2015). We don’t
typically require independent justification of the reliability of our faculties in order to form
beliefs, we by-and-large trust them as reliable (putting aside cases where we have medical or
other reasons to distrust them). So, when faced with others whose beliefs have a similar etiology
and who also have similar (reliable) faculties, we should, in order to avoid inconsistency, treat
their testimony (the outcomes of their exercise of these faculties and opinions) with a similar
level of default trust. Other anti-reductionists argue that we can afford prima facie trust to the
testimony of others because, they argue, there is a special kind of epistemic warrant that comes
with something being presented as true (Burge 1993).3
To extend either reductionist or anti-reductionist positions to cases of googling will depend
on the degree to which googling and verbal testimony are similar. And in order to evaluate that,
we need to look more closely both at the nature of sources we find when we google (i.e., our
candidate testifiers) and the testimonial contexts we come across.
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Googling
Testifiers and trolls

With these positions in mind, we can return to the question with which we began –namely,
are we rational in giving prima facie trust to googled results? What we find is that differences
between traditional examples of testimony and googling do matter. In most discussions of
testimony, philosophers explore cases of (a) one-on-one verbal testimonial exchanges, where
(b) “testimony” is typically understood as the speech act of asserting. Both points are relevant
when considering googling because neither are guaranteed (or, indeed, the norm) for many
sources we find, and then form beliefs from, on the Internet.
Two common sorts of cases we find in the existing testimony literature involve novices
looking for expert testimony in areas they know little about (e.g., anthropogenic climate change),
and individuals needing to ask a stranger for advice (e.g., as a tourist asking for directions).While
we may be engaged in the same sorts of inquiry on the Internet (i.e., for expert’s opinions or
for directions) we are often not interacting with one other individual.4 In many cases it may be
community forums or community compiled encyclopedias (e.g.,Wikipedia or Stack Exchange).
In still more cases, we are not using a human source at all. Instead, search results are delivered
automatically by Google. Alternatively, answers to natural language questions are provided by
computational knowledge engines like Wolfram|Alpha. We take it that these features have sig-
nificance for thinking about reductionist and anti-reductionist positions that would aim to
show how we are justified in trusting our Google searches.5
On a reductionist reading, we might say that we are warranted in trusting our Google results
because of the general or local reliability of googling in the past.This would seem to square well
with one feature of preference ranking in search engine results –the most popular results are
the ones that our search engines direct us toward. That being said, and given the varied types of
sources we come across when we google, a local reductionist position may be more appropriate.
It seems plausible that one should not treat community-maintained wikis in the same way as
one treats a medical blog or a post on social media. In order to afford prima facie trust, then, it
might be epistemically preferable to localize either to a particular type of source (e.g., wikis,
scientific blogs, news websites) or to a particular testifier (e.g., Wikipedia, Phil Plait’s astronomy
blog, or The Guardian).
Whether we find reductionist positions plausible when applied to googling will hinge in
part on whether we think that they are too demanding –that is, whether they presume too high
an evidential standard for determining reliability. How much experience do we need to have
with googling to give us rational trust, either locally or globally? If you think that we can, at
least sometimes, be rational in trusting some online searches even when we lack broad personal
experience, you might find the reductionist account too conservative. On the other hand, per-
haps we should demand or desire that googling, even to a local level, have a potentially high
evidential demand like this to justify affording prima facie trust to their results. The nature (i.e.,
individuals or collectives/groups) and variety of sources that we come across when we google is
one reason we might desire these high evidential demands. Reductionist accounts of testimony
are open to the critique that they presume too great an evidential standard for trust: global
reductionism would seem to require a great deal of leg-work in establishing the reliability of
past-testimony given the ratio of the number of claims we are exposed to via testimony to the
number of claims to check; similarly, the narrower evidential demand of the local reductionist
is more demanding that it first appears.
Likewise, the anti-reductionist position seems to face some serious challenges in the case
of googling. Appealing to general wisdom for a moment, we might wonder how we should
square the common refrain of “You can’t trust what you read on the Internet” with the
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anti-reductionist view about googling that would give the verdict that we can because we found
it googling. A self-trust view like that mentioned above does not appear to port over to the
case of googling very easily. Recall that testimony has a prima facie level of trust on a view like
Foley’s because of a presumption of trust in our own opinions and faculties. If we know enough
about the author of the results we find when we google, then we may be warranted in trusting
those results. The issue is that we often do not know much about the authors of such results
(e.g., forum contributions or blogs) or the author may not be an individual (e.g., a community
wiki). More problematically for self-trust views, the author may not be a person at all (e.g.,
Google’s automated responses to many questions including currency conversions and mathem-
atical questions).
For similar reasons, appealing to a Burge-or Gricean- style anti-
reductionist position
for googling is not straightforward either. The general idea of these positions is that we are
warranted in trusting because of norms that apply to verbal testimonial settings, namely ones
that are tied to truthfulness and speech acts of asserting. Unlike verbal testimony, where we
typically take testimony to be a voiced assertion, googling arguably directs us toward a much
larger range of speech acts and speakers than just individuals offering up explicit opinions. We
might find an answer to our query in a picture, a forum, a video, or by reading news websites,
reading a blog, or from an automated system. In some such cases, the information we draw on
is not be being presented as true and thus it doesn’t seem we would be entitled in the way that
Burge, for example, argues.
But even in cases where the results of googling can be taken as claims that would be verbally
asserted by someone, it is not clear that the same conversational norms that guide these anti-
reductionist accounts necessarily apply on the Internet.
Consider the phenomenon of Internet “trolls.” Trolls are individuals who partake in forums
or comment sections (or anywhere where individuals can post messages to others) with the
intention of angering, fooling, or otherwise making insincere contributions to the discussion.
Trolling contributions vary in their obviousness, but in many cases, they are intentionally decep-
tive in order to get the desired rise out of other participants in the discussion. Consequently, it
can be difficult to detect trolls. If it is highly likely that trolls are contributing to the source our
googling directs us toward, then we would be wise not to treat the information in the source
with a default level of trust. In response to this concern, we might take trolls to be merely a
new instantiation of liars or deceivers (or even bald-faced liars), in which case we can look to
philosophers of language for their existing analyses (Bok 1978; Carson 2010; Saul 2012). This
would make Internet trolls not a new problem, but still one that poses as epistemic threat to us
when we google.
In sum, there is some intuitive appeal for a reductionist account of prima facie trust in our
googling results, even with the potentially high evidential demand that these accounts bring. In
cases of verbal testimony, there are factors that can bias us against (or in favor of) certain poten-
tial testifiers (Mills 2007; Fricker 2007; Medina 2013). Consequently, our ability as individuals
to perform the relevant tasks for assessing the reliability of potential testifiers can be biased in
unreliable ways. These are serious issues for social epistemologists concerned about testimonial
knowledge and trust. Likewise, the Internet brings with it a range of biasing factors that can
thwart our ability to place trust appropriately.
Selecting our Google sources

A number of different factors determine the search results that we see when we look for
information through a search engine, but it often includes our personal search history and the
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Googling
searches of others, that is, facts about the preference-dependence that we introduced earlier. It
is plausible that the ranking of search results brings with it a degree of reliability: information
that is accurate, true, or otherwise reliable will be more likely to be shared or cross-linked and
thus will rise in the rankings. There are other factors, though, that can lead to a result being
higher in the rankings, including “viral” information, memes, or simply being the product of a
celebrity or “influencer” (of film, music, television,YouTube, etc.) that can cause some pages to
rank highly on Google. In these cases, we have popularity-because-popular, rather than popu-
larity-because-reliable, as in the former cases. These facts select for certain testifiers over others,
and in ways that may not be tied to truth or reliability.6
As Miller and Record (2013) argue, these various methods of personalization –despite often
being touted as features –may undermine our ability to justify our beliefs. Miller and Record
take three properties of googling as central to their analysis: (i) our ability to discern between
different kinds of sources and why they have been so aggregated, (ii) the transparency (or lack
thereof) of generating results, and (iii) the representativeness of the information available to the
user. They argue that when these personalization technologies are secretive or non-transparent,
we are likely to form beliefs that are less justified. As a result, they argue that users can and
should do what they can to better inform themselves about googling and the ways our sources
are selected.
Of course, we may not be googling for information via a search engine, but instead by
posting on forums or through social media and these sources run the risk of being undermined
by other biasing factors. To take social media as an example: Our friend circles mean that we
are likely to find testifiers for opinions and beliefs that support what we already believe, given
that we tend to form friendships with others who have similar worldviews as ours.This can bias
the testimony that we find, but it can also lead to a biasing of the primary sources that we are
advised to look at when we ask on social media. For example, those on one side of the alter-
native medicine debate are likely to send recommendations and links to outside sources that
support their own beliefs. So, the advice we get about what to look at to answer our queries
on social media (and potentially forums) can be highly selective in ways that might bias us in
one direction.7
Thus, googling poses a selection problem for testifiers because of the way in which searches
are biased, and another problem regarding the way that we gather information from those we
already trust.
Are these new problems with googling? We would say, yes and no. Obviously, prior to being
able to google, the results of our inquiry could not be subject to the preference-dependence
biasing effects that search engines cause. That said, other social factors likely bias the popularity
of the information we hear about through other traditional media forms and these are also not
necessarily because of any epistemically virtuous qualities on behalf of the media in question.
The social media discussion is also not all that new. Friend circles (or family as the case may be)
are naturally selective, and the biasing effects from social media are probably best understood
because of pre-existing facts about non-social-media friendships and associations. In both cases,
however, the near ever-present ability to google, the massive body of information that makes up
the Internet, and the speed of results present us with a medium that has the potential to greatly
exaggerate these problems.
Credibility markers
The risk of false information, liars, or bullshit (à la Frankfurt 2005) is always present when
dealing with testimony. As we have just discussed, it’s not necessarily that the Internet and
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googling create new epistemic problems for us, but rather that they run the risk of exagger-
ating or making us open to existing threats more often.This is because of the easy availability of
googling and the huge amount of information on the Internet to support nearly any position
one favors. For instance, it is just as easy to find complicated explanations of why the moon
landings were a hoax as it is to find complicated explanations of how they couldn’t have been a
hoax. The consequence is that our need to assess the credibility of our sources when googling
is especially important.
The relevant existing problem in social epistemology explores when we –as novices –are
rationally justified in trusting experts. By definition, as novices we are not in a position to judge
the truth of what a purported expert tells us. Plato’s Charmides provides us with a particularly
early discussion of this problem. Sources on both sides of the moon landing debate (if we can
call it such) will claim expertise, and there may even be internal debates on each side about the
details and evidence that best supports their side’s position. Insofar as there are debates between
two experts (regardless of their stance on the moon landing), we as novices can be faced not
only with novice/expert situations but novice/2-expert situations (Goldman 2001). In the
former, we find ourselves trying to evaluate the credibility of one purported expert. In the
latter, we are faced with trying to adjudicate between conflicting experts on the topic at hand.
One solution to this problem is to use institutional markers of expertise. These are such
things as earned degrees, support from other experts on the same side of the debate in question
(best when this support is from the majority), performance in presenting their testimony, evi-
dence pertaining to the purported expert’s past credibility, or evidence of questionable biasing
factors (e.g., funding from groups or individuals with a vested interest in the results).
Let us limit ourselves to cases where we feel confident saying that the Google results are
presented as true and where we are not experts on the issue at hand.8 With the cases leftover,
we will still be able to find ourselves in many novice/expert situations and novice/2-expert (or
more) situations when we google. The question now is whether we can appeal to any institu-
tional markers of expertise that might assist us in such a situation, or whether there are non-
institutional but reliable markers of expertise available to us when we google. We take it that a
key consideration here, once again, is the nature of the source one has found on the Internet.
The trustworthiness of someone who writes their own blog will need to be assessed differently
from that of someone who has answered a question on a forum post.
Facts about the website itself can often aid us in assessing credibility, but this requires that
we have sufficient knowledge about different types of websites, the role of advertising, and the
nature of the testifiers to assess credibility. We discuss three examples here to demonstrate what
types of credibility markers we can have when we google: publicly accessible feedback for indi-
viduals, advertising, and community-enforced standards (for a related discussion, see Mößner
and Kitcher 2016: 10).
One source of questionable help in these cases is biographical information provided by the
author themselves, which in some cases may be easily verified (e.g., by checking their alleged
institutional affiliations or other affiliations). On many sites, for example, there are internal
systems that report on users in ways that can indicate their credibility. For many forums,
participants are ranked with titles that indicate their expertise (i.e., ‘moderator’, ‘administrator’,
etc.), and they receive publicly accessible feedback either for themselves as posters of informa-
tion (e.g., systems that award visual tokens for the number of contributions made), or for the
particular piece of information posted (e.g., “upvoting”9). Examples of these forums include
Stack Exchange (user titles, visual tokens (bronze/silver/gold medals), and upvoting), Reddit
(visual tokens (karma), upvoting), and the Ubuntu Forums (titles, visual tokens (coffee beans)).
Making effective use of these credibility markers though, requires that the user who has been
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Googling
directed to the website through googling knows both what credibility markers are in place, and
what such markers, like visual tokens or upvotes, indicate on that website. In some cases, it is
also useful to have an understanding of the risk of trolling behaviors on particular forums (e.g.,
Reddit), and how these can influence the upvoting of results.
A second potential credibility marker is the role of advertising on the websites that we find
when googling. A healthy skepticism toward advertising is generally warranted in our epi-
stemic practices, as companies typically have monetary gain in mind rather than our epistemic
interests. On the Internet such general skepticism is similarly warranted, particularly when
the articles we are directed toward are “sponsored content.” Sponsored content, in contrast
to traditional editorial content, consists of paid-for articles that are used as advertisements or
promotions, but the articles are presented as though they are actual editorial content (usu-
ally with “sponsored content” written somewhere on the page). This is a way for advertisers
to take advantage of the credibility we typically afford to editorial articles and instead direct
it toward their product. We take it that the general rules we apply in being skeptical of
advertised claims should apply when looking at sponsored content, but epistemic problems
arise from our ignorance of what sponsored content is and our ability to spot that a source
is actually sponsored content. There is a growing body of literature looking at our ability to
detect sponsored content and our general ability to assess the credibility of Internet sources
(Abdulla et al. 2007).
The third credibility marker is less a set of markers or signals but rather the commitment of
some Internet sources to a set of epistemic norms upheld by the source itself. One major source
of information that googling directs us toward is Wikipedia, and understanding how Wikipedia
functions is an important part of understanding the credibility of it as a source. Entries on this
Internet encyclopedia are created, edited, and managed by a community of users. Importantly,
the majority of these users are novices and not experts on the topics they contribute to (or at
least, they are not required to have qualifications to contribute or be a community moderator).
The community has rules for contributing to entries (the “five pillars”) that are enforced by
the community. Consequently,Wikipedia is “self-consciously” not a normative epistemic source
(i.e., one that tells us what we ought to believe about a topic) but rather a descriptive one (i.e.,
one that describes what the present consensus or majority view is on a topic).10 All entries are
required to meet the Wikipedia standard of verifiability (“Wikipedia:Verifiability”), and a main
task of community users who edit and maintain entries is to check up on edits made by others
(in part facilitated with discussion boards for each entry).
Given that those who edit Wikipedia pages are typically novices this seems the rational
move –publish what is already accepted in the literature.11 Entries are required to come
supplied with citations and other credibility markers (e.g., “citation needed,” or comments at
the top of the entry indicating that the page needs work to meet the community standards).
What this does mean, though, is that experts may not be able to update entries with our best
information until sufficient time has passed for new information to be widely accepted by the
relevant community of experts. This can mean that when our googling directs us to Wikipedia,
our information can be out of date or false (until such a time as accepted by the majority of the
relevant expert community).12
All of these measures for assessing the credibility of sources are taxing – they require having
a reasonably comprehensive knowledge both of different platforms one comes across when one
googles, and of the particular sources that one finds (i.e., to know which credibility markers
to look out for). While googling provides us with easy and immediate access to answers to any
question we could think to ask, our ability to rationally evaluate the quality of the answers we
find is a hard ask –even for those who have grown up in the Internet age.13
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What this suggests is a distinction between comfort and competence when googling. While
many of us are perfectly comfortable asking our preferred search engine for the answers to our
problems, it is apparent that many of us are far less competent at evaluating the credibility of
what we find. The ease with which we google and readily accept answers despite this distinc-
tion raises interesting questions about our relationship with the information we come across
when we google.
Googling as extended knowledge

Imagine “neuromedia,” technology that allows the capabilities of your smartphone to be
encoded on technology directly linked to your neural network: a brain-chip, if you will (Lynch
2014). Suppose everyone in a particular community had access to this technology. They can
query Google and its riches “internally”; they can comment on one another’s blog posts using
“internal” commands. In short, they can share knowledge –they can review one another’s testi-
mony –in a purely internal fashion.This would have, to put it lightly, an explosive effect on each
individual’s “body of knowledge.” That’s because whatever I “post” mentally would then be
almost instantly accessible by you mentally (in a way that would be, we might imagine, similar
to accessing memory). We’d share a body of knowledge by virtue of being part of a network.
But neuromedia also raises a further, more radical possibility: it is possible that neuromedians’
knowledge would be “extended,” in that individual neuromedians would be sharing not just the
content of what is known, but the actual process or act of knowing itself.
While neuromedia makes this point vivid, current technology arguably already extends our
knowledge. In this last section, we’ll briefly examine this possibility.
Traditionally, humans have known about the world via processes such as vision, hearing,
memory, and so on. These modes of inquiry are internal; they are in the head, so to speak. But
if you had neuromedia, the division between ways of forming beliefs that are internal and ways
that are not would no longer be clear. The process by which you access posts on a webpage
would be as internal as access to your own memory. So, plausibly, if you come to know, or
even justifiably believe, something based on information you’ve downloaded via neuromedia,
that’s not just a matter of what is happening in your own head. It will depend on whether the
source you are downloading from is reliable –and that source will include the neural networks
and cognitive processes of other people. In short, were we to have neuromedia, the difference
between relying on yourself for knowledge and relying on others for knowledge would be a
difference that would make less of a difference.
David Chalmers and Andy Clark’s (1998) “extended mind” hypothesis suggests that, in fact,
many of our intentional mental states are already extended past the boundaries of our skin.
When we remember what we are looking for in a store by consulting a shopping list on our
phone, they argue, our mental state of remembering to buy bread is spread out; part of that state
is neural, and part of it is digital.The phone’s Notes app is part of my remembering. If Chalmers
and Clark are right, then neuromedia doesn’t extend the mind any more than it already is
extended. We already share minds when I consult your memory and you consult mine.
The extended mind hypothesis is undoubtedly interesting, and it may just be true. But we
don’t actually have to go so far to think that when employing googling as a mode of inquiry, our
knowledge is extended. That is because even if we don’t literally share mental states, according
to other philosophers, it is possible that we share the processes that ground or justify what our
individual minds believe and think.
Sandy Goldberg (2010) has argued, for example, that when I come to believe something
based on information you’ve given me, whether or not I’m justified in that belief doesn’t
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depend just on what is going on in my brain. Part of what justifies my belief is whether you, the
teacher, are a reliable source. What justifies my receptive beliefs on the relevant topic –what
grounds them –is the reliability of a process that includes the teacher’s expertise. So, whether
I know something, according to Goldberg, depends as much on what is going on with the
teacher as it does the student.
Goldberg’s hypothesis seems plausible when applied to googling if you accept two conditions.
The first condition is that when we form beliefs via googling by relying on TripAdvisor or
Google Maps, for example –we form beliefs by a process that is essentially socially embedded –
a process the elements of which include not just chips and bits but aspects of other people’s
minds, social norms, and my own cognition and visual cortex. The second condition is that a
broadly reliabilist view of knowledge is correct. According to this position, you know that, for
example, Denver is in Colorado, just when that belief is the result of a reliable belief-forming
process. Importantly, you don’t have to know that the process in question is reliable –it just has
to be reliable. If that is how knowledge, or at least knowledge via googling works, then if these
processes are themselves extended, then the grounds for belief are extended, and arguably our
Google knowledge is as well.
Conclusion
Googling is a mode of inquiry that is not going away; it is, for many people, the most common
way to form beliefs about the social world. The epistemological questions it raises are old
questions,but these questions are given a new and pressing form. In a similar fashion, applied
epistemologists (and ethicists) are beginning to look in more detail at issues of privacy and sur-
veillance on the Internet, topics which dovetail with the phenomenon of preference-depend-
ence discussed here. As googling continues to occupy such a central role in our lives, new
concerns over epistemic responsibility and epistemic agency on the Internet are also rising
topics of concern.We expect that applied epistemologists (including ourselves) will continue to
explore these topics as our lives become ever more integrated with the digital world.14
Notes
1 Preference-tracking can be manipulated while manipulating at the same time (Lynch 2016). That’s
important because search prompts and the ranking of results affects what people know as much what
turns up in the encyclopedia (back when there were such things). Here’s a quick example: type, “is
climate change…” into Google and you are likely to have Google’s Complete program helpfully finish
your thought with “…a hoax?” (That answer often comes up before “…a fact?”). Hit that, and you
might get, for example, “Top Ten Reasons Climate Change is a Hoax” from a nice little outfit calling
itself “globalclimatescam.” (One can learn so much on the Internet!)
2 See Miller and Record (forthcoming) for a discussion of the epistemic risks posed by search engine
autocomplete features, and a proposal for the epistemic responsibilities of information providers.
3 Similar arguments are made by appeal to a pragmatic principle like Grice’s “Cooperative Principle”
(1989); the general idea behind these views being that the testimonial setting itself entitles the listener
to believe what is said.
4 We leave aside here examples of trusting online stores about their own products. For one, the cred-
ibility of businesses touting their own wares is not new with the Internet and so doesn’t present new
issues. On the other hand, concerns about the credibility of reviews are captured in the other cases we
discuss here and in the next section on credibility markers.
5 As stated above, typically philosophers take assertions to be the speech act in testimony cases that lead
to testimonial knowledge. While we may want to say that our non-human sources and community
complied encyclopedias, for example, are presenting information to us as true, it’s not immediately
clear that they (qua non-human or non-individual sources) are performing assertions. In addition,
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in many cases where the source may be both human and individual, there are a great many types of
media on the Internet we may be directed toward from our googling and these need not involve any
assertions.
6 Indeed, research into the clicking behavior of individuals using search engines supports the conclusion
that individuals are likely to click the top search result even when the next result may be (quite plainly)
the more relevant option. One hypothesis offered is that individuals have a “trust bias” for top results
because of an assumption that search engines are presenting the most relevant results (Joachims et al.
2005).
7 One medium we do not discuss here in detail are Internet blogs. Given the sheer number of blogs
created by a vast range of individuals (and thus, representing a potentially equally large number of
perspectives and opinions), blogs are an important area for epistemic work on googling. For a discus-
sion of the interplay between and epistemic comparison of blogs and professional (particularly, polit-
ical) journalism, see Coady (2012: Chap. 6).
8 We put aside cases where people are using non-assertions to base their beliefs on, and cases where the
searcher has enough knowledge to adjudicate between competing purported experts.
9 Upvoting is a way for users to indicate support for the information in a post or contributed to an
Internet forum. We use “support” here because upvoting is used across a wide variety of websites and
may be an indication of truth, reliability, aesthetic value, etc. Typically, upvoting systems will rank the
contributions to the forum so that those with the highest votes are at the top.
10 As the website itself states, “We strive for articles that document and explain major points of view,
giving due weight with respect to their prominence in an impartial tone. We avoid advocacy and we
characterize information and issues rather than debate them. In some areas there may be just one well-
recognized point of view; in others, we describe multiple points of view, presenting each accurately and
in context, rather than as “the truth” or “the best view.” All articles must strive for verifiable accuracy,
citing reliable, authoritative sources, especially when the topic is controversial or is on living persons.
Editors’ personal experiences, interpretations, or opinions do not belong” (“Wikipedia:Five pillars”).
11 For a defense of the position that novices ought to believe in accordance with the larger group of
experts, see Coady (2012: Chap. 2).
12 For an interesting case of an expert finding themselves unable to edit a Wikipedia page on their own
area of expertise, see Messer-Kruse (2012).
13 See Hargittai et al. (2010) and Wineburg and McGrew (2016) for two examples of studies specifically
addressing young people’s ability to conduct reliable credibility judgments on the Internet (and what
inhibits them). Studies of this sort also raise important questions about epistemic responsibility on the
Internet and whose job it is to make us safe when we google.
14 Thanks to Casey Rebecca Johnson, Nate Sheff, Teresa Allen and audiences at the Social Epistemology
Working Group (SEW) for comments and discussion.
References
Abdulla, R. A., Aiken, K. D., Anderson, C. C., Boush, D. M., Casey, D., Eysenbach, G., … Rainey, J. G. (2007).
“Bibliography on Web | Internet Credibility.” Retrieved February 9, 2014, from www.semanticscholar.
org/paper/Bibliography-on-Web-Internet-Credibility-Flanagin-Metzger/042d8e5813f3d70ffbc7b0d
9e99e4b4b99842372.
Bok, S. (1978). Lying: Moral choice in public and private life. New York: Pantheon Books.
Burge, T. (1993). “Content Preservation.” Philosophical Issues, 102: 457–88.
Carson, T. L. (2010). Lying and Deception: Theory and practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Clark, A., and Chalmers, D. (1998). “The Extended Mind.” Analysis, 58: 7–19.
Cleve, J. van (2006). “Reid on the Credit of Human Testimony,” in J. Lackey and E. Sosa (eds.), The
Epistemology of Testimony. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Coady, D. (2012). What to Believe Now: Applying epistemology to contemporary issues. Chichester: Wiley-
Blackwell.
Foley, R. (2001). Intellectual Trust in Oneself and Others. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Frankfurt, H. G. (2005). On Bullshit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Fricker, E. (1994).“Against Gullibility,” in B. K. Matilal and A. Chakrabarti (eds.), Knowing from Words: Western
and Indian philosophical analysis of understanding and testimony. Dordrecht: Springer.
Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic Injustice: Power and the ethics of knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Goldberg, S. (2010). Relying on Others: An essay in epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Goldman, A. I. (2001). “Experts: Which ones should you trust?” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research,
63: 85–110.
Grice, H. P. (1989). Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hargittai, E., Fullerton, L., Menchen-Trevino, E., and Yates Thomas, K. (2010). “Trust Online: Young
adults’ evaluation of web content.” International Journal of Communication, 4: 468–94.
Hume, D., Norton, D. F., and Norton, M. J. (2010). A Treatise of Human Nature. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Joachims,T., Granka, L., Pan, B., Hembrooke, H., and Gay, G. (2005).“Accurately Interpreting Clickthrough
Data as Implicit Feedback.” Proceedings of the 28th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research
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299–313.
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Liveright Publishing Corporation.
Messer-Kruse, T. (2012). “The ‘Undue Weight’ of Truth on Wikipedia.” The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Retrieved February 8, 2017, from www.chronicle.com/article/The-Undue-Weight-of-Truth-on/
130704/.
Medina, J. (2013). The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and racial oppression, epistemic injustice, and resistant
imaginations. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Miller, B., and Record, I. (2013). “Justified Belief in a Digital Age: On the epistemic implications of secret
Internet technologies.” Episteme, 10(2): 117–34.
Miller, B., and Record, I. (forthcoming). “Responsible Epistemic Technologies: A social-epistemological
analysis of autocompleted web search.” New Media and Society.
Mills, C. (2007). “White Ignorance,” in S. Sullivan and N. Tuana (eds.), Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance.
Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Mößner, N., and Kitcher, P. (2016). “Knowledge, Democracy, and the Internet.” Minerva, 55(1): 1–24.
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Saul, J. M. (2012). Lying, Misleading, and What Is Said: An exploration in philosophy of language and in ethics.
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wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars.
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wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability.
Wineburg, S., and McGrew, S. (2016). “Why Students Can’t Google Their Way to the Truth.” Education
Week, 36(11): 22–28.
Zagzebski, L.T. (2015). Epistemic Authority: A theory of trust, authority, and autonomy in belief. New York: Oxford
University Press.
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5
ADVERSARIAL EPISTEMOLOGY
ON THE INTERNET
Don Fallis
Over the past twenty years, the Internet has become an increasingly important source of infor-
mation for almost everyone. But can we trust this information? Since anyone at all can send
an email or put up a website, we have to wonder whether these people really know what they
are talking about. However, the Internet poses an even more insidious threat to our ability to
acquire knowledge. Many people online intentionally try to mislead us. For instance, fraudulent
websites have been created in order to manipulate stock prices. Also, Wikipedia entries have
been altered in order to manipulate public perceptions. Is it possible to acquire knowledge from
the Internet when there are so many epistemic adversaries out there?
In this chapter, I suggest how work by René Descartes and David Hume points the way
to one possible solution to the problem of epistemic adversaries on the Internet. In his dis-
cussion of malicious demons, Descartes emphasizes the importance of identifying the source of
the information that we receive. In his discussion of reports of miracles, Hume emphasizes the
importance of finding evidence that is difficult to fake. By combining their insights in what I will
call adversarial epistemology, and by appealing to work in modern cryptography, I argue that it is
possible for us to assure ourselves that we are dealing with a trustworthy source and, thus, to
acquire knowledge from the Internet.
Epistemic adversaries on the Internet

It is a sad truth that we face all sorts of adversaries in life who intentionally try to thwart our
goals. For instance, competitors in sports, in business, and in politics attempt to beat us out for
the victory. Criminals and terrorists even try to take our money or take our lives. Sometimes
these adversaries use force to get their way. But frequently, as when a running back fakes to the
left and runs to the right in order to fool a potential tackler, adversaries simply use guile.That is,
they interfere with what we know about the world so that we will make choices that redound
to their benefit, choices that we would not make if we had all the facts.1
Such epistemic adversaries show up in all sorts of contexts. Politicians lie to us on television,
scammers lie to us over the phone, and all sorts of people lie to our faces. In this chapter, I focus
on one specific area where we frequently face adversarial threats to our knowledge, the Internet.
The Internet has greatly expanded the amount of information that we have access to and has
significantly reduced the time that it takes us to access information (see Thagard 2001).Thus, we
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Adversarial epistemology on the Internet
increasingly use the Internet to learn about all sorts of important topics, such as health infor-
mation (see Fallis and Frické 2002: 73) and financial information (see Fowler et al. 2001). But
there are definitely adversaries on the Internet trying to interfere with our knowledge acqui-
sition. Fraudulent websites, phishing scams, and online hoaxes are commonplace (see Schneier
2000: 23–28; Hancock 2007).
Moreover, the Internet has many features that facilitate deceptive activities. For instance, it
is easier to make emails and websites look authentic as compared with physical documents (see
Schneier 2000: 74–77). Also, emails and websites provide people with fewer potential clues to
the deceptive intent of the authors as compared with face-to-face communication. As Ralph
Keyes (2004: 198) puts it, “with email we needn’t worry about so much as a quiver in our voice
or a tremor in our pinkie when telling a lie. Email is a first rate deception-enabler.”
As a result, it can be difficult to determine the answers to the following sorts of questions:
• Does my organization’s IT department really need me to send them my password in order to

carry out a new software update as this email claims (see Schneier 2000: 267–68)?
• Is this tech startup going to be purchased by a multinational corporation as this business
news website claims (see Schneier 2000: 74; Fowler et al. 2001)?
• Is this email a legitimate request from a Nigerian prince for assistance in transferring funds
out of the country (see Hancock 2007: 290)?
• Was this famous journalist involved in the Kennedy assassinations as his Wikipedia page
maintains (see Fallis 2008: 1665)?
• Is my nephew really stranded in Romania as this email claims?
• Is this a valid credit card transaction (see Schneier 2000: 78–79)?
• Is the person that I am chatting with online an attractive young woman who sympathizes
with the Syrian rebels as “she” claims (see Gallagher 2015)?
• Did Brad Pitt shock liberals by endorsing Donald Trump in the United States Presidential
Election as this news website claims (see Ohlheiser 2016)?
In many cases, such as with fake Nigerian princes and fake IT departments, it is pretty easy to
identify epistemic adversaries. Since so many potential victims can be reached so easily on the
Internet, a successful adversary’s online presence does not have to be all that convincing (see
Schneier 2000: 18). She can make money even if only a few of the people who receive the email
or visit the website are taken in.
But epistemic adversaries on the Internet are often much more subtle. Since a huge amount
of personal information about each of us is available on the Internet, it is fairly easy for an
epistemic adversary to target people that she is likely to convince (see Schneier 2000: 18–19).
Alternatively, as in spear phishing, she can tailor her attack to the specific person that she needs
to fool.
We could avoid being misled by epistemic adversaries online by believing nothing that we
read on the Internet. But we probably do not want to take such extreme measures. As William
James (1979 [1896]: 31–32) famously put it, “a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent
me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there, would
be an irrational rule.” There is a lot of valuable information on the Internet that we would miss
out on. Also, what if my nephew really is stranded in Romania?
Many information scientists (e.g., Alexander and Tate 1999) have published checklists of
features that are supposed to be indicators of accuracy (such as whether a website is up to date or
whether the author is listed). However, in empirical studies (e.g., Fallis and Frické 2002; Kunst
et al. 2002; Khazaal et al. 2012), few of the proposed indicators have been found to be correlated
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Don Fallis
with websites actually containing accurate information, and those indicators are not very highly
correlated.2 Moreover, the proposed indicators are not specifically targeted at identifying epi-
stemic adversaries. This is a serious problem since the clues that suggest that someone is lying
are unlikely to be the same clues that suggest that a person just does not know what she/he is
talking about.3
In order to acquire knowledge from the Internet despite the fact that there are epistemic
adversaries out there, we really need a theory about how to identify epistemic adversaries. Such
a theory falls within the domain of epistemology, the branch of philosophy that studies what
knowledge is and how people can acquire knowledge. In particular, we need to do some work
in what might be called adversarial epistemology.
The Cartesian lesson in adversarial epistemology

In recent years, several epistemologists (e.g., Goldman 1999: 165–73;Thagard 2001; Keen 2007;
Brennan and Pettit 2008; Fallis 2008; Pettit 2008; Magnus 2009; Simon 2010; Coady 2012:
138–71; Simpson 2012; Frost-Arnold 2014b) have looked at knowledge acquisition in the con-
text of the Internet. In particular, they have investigated the reliability of the Internet as a
source of information. However, this work in Internet epistemology has focused primarily on
worries about the competence rather than about the sincerity of Internet sources. For instance,
should we trust what we read in Wikipedia, the “free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit”
(emphasis added), in the way that we trust traditional encyclopedias? Also, given that bloggers
often lack the training and the resources of traditional journalists, should we trust what we read
in the blogosphere to the same degree that we trust traditional news media? The issue of epi-
stemic adversaries on the Internet is typically only mentioned in passing, if at all.4
Indeed, epistemologists in general rarely worry about the possibility of epistemic adversaries.
Whether we try to acquire knowledge through reason or through perception, it is certainly
possible to end up with false beliefs instead of knowledge. But epistemologists typically focus
on cases where it is accidental, rather than intentional, that we are misled.5 For instance, humans
make errors in reasoning (see Feldman 2003: 157–66). Also, we can be fooled by optical illusions
(simply because nature is indifferent to our epistemic outcomes). Nevertheless, there are a few
notable examples of adversarial epistemology in the history of philosophy.6
In his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes (1996 [1641]) wanted to see if there was
anything that he could know for certain. He concluded that, unfortunately, most of his beliefs
were open to doubt. For instance, Descartes (1996 [1641]: 13) realized that he might only be
dreaming “that I am here in my dressing-gown, sitting by the fire –when in fact I am lying
undressed in bed!” But in addition, it might be that “some malicious demon of the utmost power
and cunning has employed all his energies in order to deceive me” (Descartes 1996 [1641]: 15).
It is conceivable that “the sky, the air, the earth, colours, shapes, sounds and all external things
are merely the delusions of dreams which he has devised to ensnare my judgment.”
At first glance, the problem of the malicious demon might not seem particularly relevant
to our problem of epistemic adversaries online. What Descartes envisions is completely crazy.
Indeed, it makes the idea that you might be a brain in a vat hooked up to a powerful computer
providing you with simulated experiences (e.g., as depicted in The Matrix) seem quite reason-
able. No one (not even Descartes) thinks that these sorts of science fiction scenarios are really
the case. By contrast, we are concerned here with much more mundane adversaries. The idea
that this email that I just received came from someone who is only pretending to be a Nigerian
prince (or my nephew) is certainly a live possibility.
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But that being said, Descartes is addressing exactly the right sort of problem. Real-life adver-
saries do precisely what the malicious demon does. They make the world appear to be a way
that it is not. And they often go to great lengths to do this. Thus, much like Descartes, it is not
clear that we can know that the world really is as it appears to be.
So, how does Descartes address the problem of the malicious demon? Descartes famously
identified one fact (viz., he himself exists) that not even the demon could deceive him about.
(He cannot doubt his own existence because he must exist in order to do all of this doubting.)
But in order to secure his knowledge of any other facts, Descartes had to argue that there is an
all-powerful being who is benevolent and is concerned that we have good epistemic outcomes.
As Descartes (1996 [1641]: 37–38) put it, “since God does not wish to deceive me, he surely
did not give me the kind of faculty which would ever enable me to go wrong while using it
correctly.”
At first glance, this strategy might not seem to be particularly helpful for our purposes. First,
it is not clear that we should be convinced by Descartes’s arguments for the existence of a ben-
evolent (rather than a deceitful) God. Many objections to them have been raised (see Descartes
1996 [1641]: 81–83, 95–99). Second, even if his arguments are correct, they only rule out the
possibility of an all-powerful malicious demon. They do not rule out the possibility of more
mundane adversaries on the Internet.
Even so, Descartes is asking exactly the right question. In order to acquire knowledge despite
the fact that there may be epistemic adversaries out there, we have to determine who we are
dealing with. In particular, are we dealing with someone who is trying to inform us about the
world, or are we dealing with an adversary who is trying to mislead us? Call this the Cartesian
lesson in adversarial epistemology.7
Admittedly, there are several potential concerns about following Descartes’s advice. First,
identifying the source of a piece of information on the Internet is notoriously difficult (see
Brennan and Pettit 2008: 191; Pettit 2008: 170–74). In addition to misleading us about other
aspects of the world, epistemic adversaries often mislead us about who they are (see Hancock
2007: 291–93). Thus, as Janet Alexander and Marsha Tate (1999: 11) point out, “if an author’s
name is given on a page, it should not be automatically assumed that this person is the actual
author. In addition, it is often difficult to verify who, if anyone, has ultimate responsibility
for publishing the material.” Or as the New Yorker cartoon famously puts it, “on the Internet,
nobody knows you’re a dog.”
However, as I discuss below, it is possible for people to establish their identity online. And
people who are not epistemic adversaries often want to have their identity known when they
disseminate information. For instance, if my nephew really is stranded in Romania, he will def-
initely want me to know that his email came from him.
A second potential concern is that identifying the source of a piece of information does
not by itself tell us whether or not that source is an adversary. For instance, even if I am sure of
the identity of a politician who is giving a speech on television, it still may be unclear to me
whether he is lying.
We often have independent reasons to believe that what a particular individual says is true,
however. For instance, she may have a good track record of providing accurate information (see
Fallis 2004: 469–70; Magnus 2009: 79–80). Thus, if we also have good reason to believe that a
particular individual is the source of a particular piece of information, we have good reason to
believe that the information is true.8 For instance, since I know that my nephew is an honest
person, it is fairly safe for me to conclude that he really is stranded in Romania if I can assure
myself that this email really came from him.
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Don Fallis
A third potential concern is that being able to identify the source of a piece of informa-
tion can have epistemic costs as well as epistemic benefits. Some accurate information will
only be disseminated if it can be done anonymously (see Brennan and Pettit 2008: 185; Coady
2012: 154–55; Frost-Arnold 2014b). For instance, it might be too dangerous for a whistleblower
to come forward if her true identity might be discovered.
But following Descartes’s advice need not involve any epistemic costs in terms of lost
communications. First, not all accurate information that someone might want to disseminate
is so controversial that it will only be disseminated anonymously. As noted above, people who
are not epistemic adversaries are often happy to have their identity known when they dissem-
inate information. Second, when some accurate information is sufficiently controversial, there
is no reason why it should not be disseminated anonymously. The cryptographic techniques for
establishing identity online that I discuss below can be used on a voluntary basis. Having the
ability to establish your identity online does not preclude refraining from using this ability in
some circumstances. Indeed, people who do wish to communicate anonymously will probably
want to use other cryptographic techniques in order to ensure that their communications are
not connected to their identity (see, e.g., Chaum 1988).9
The Humean lesson in adversarial epistemology

In his work on miracles, Hume (1977 [1748]: 77) also did some adversarial epistemology.
According to Hume, “when any one tells me, that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immedi-
ately consider with myself, whether it be more probable, that this person should either deceive
or be deceived, or that the fact, which he relates, should really have happened.”With this, Hume
certainly leads us to ask the right sort of question for our purposes here. For instance, if an
email says that the IT department needs me to send them my password, I should “consider with
myself, whether it be more probable, that this person should either deceive or be deceived” or
that the IT department really needs me to send them my password.
Unfortunately, just as with Descartes’s solution to the problem of the malicious demon, it is
not immediately clear how Hume’s suggestions for dealing with reports of miracles can help us
with real-life epistemic adversaries. Hume quite reasonably recommends that we ignore (i.e., do
not believe) such extremely implausible claims because deception is more likely than a viola-
tion of well-established laws of nature. But this advice does not help with the claims that we are
concerned with here, which are not completely implausible. For instance, that the source of this
email is a Nigerian prince who needs to get his money out of the country might be unlikely,
but it would not violate any physical laws.
Hume (1977 [1748]: 75), however, also gave some suggestions that can be applied to
evaluating testimony in general and not just reports of miracles. He proposed that “we enter-
tain a suspicion concerning any matter of fact, when the witnesses contradict each other;
when they are but few, or of a doubtful character; when they have an interest in what they
affirm; when they deliver their testimony with hesitation, or on the contrary, with too violent
asseverations.”
These suggestions are very similar to standard lie detection techniques. Unlike the checklists,
they are specifically designed for detecting epistemic adversaries.10 Since epistemic adversaries
have a motivation to appear to be sincere, Hume wanted to find clues that it would be diffi-
cult for an adversary to cover up. For instance, an adversary would typically have to go to great
lengths to ensure that no one else contradicted her false claim. In order to acquire knowledge
despite the fact that there may be epistemic adversaries out there, we need to find things that are
robust indicators of insincerity.11 Call this the Humean lesson in adversarial epistemology.
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At first glance, though, there appear to be several shortcomings with Hume’s suggestions for
our purposes. First, these indicators of insincerity can only help us to determine who we should
not trust online. For instance, if other websites contradict what a particular website says, that
gives us a reason not to trust it. But we are not just interested in identifying epistemic adversaries
so that we can avoid being misled by them. We also want to be able to determine that we are
not dealing with an epistemic adversary so that we can acquire knowledge despite the fact that
epistemic adversaries are out there. And it is not clear that the indicators that Hume suggests
help us to determine who we should trust online. The fact that some feature is an indicator of
insincerity does not mean that the lack of that feature is an indicator of sincerity (see Fallis and
Frické 2002: 78). For instance, even if people who speak with hesitation are more likely to be
insincere than sincere, it does not mean that people who speak without hesitation are more
likely to be sincere than insincere.
Even so, there are indicators of sincerity in the vicinity. In his work on social epistemology,
Alvin Goldman (1999: 108–9) made some suggestions for assessing a “speaker’s honesty” that
are very similar to Hume’s. He claims that “in face-to-face communication, the speaker’s style of
delivery can powerfully influence credibility: her tone of voice, her facial aspect, and her body
language. Another element is the speaker’s prior pattern of (verifiable) truth-telling. By telling
truths in the past, a speaker establishes a reputation for honesty that can promote credibility on
each new occasion. Another strategy is to inform hearers of how to authenticate one’s report
if they question it. Other witnesses of the reported event might be identified who could be
consulted for confirmation.” So, for instance, whereas the fact that other websites contradict
what a particular website says gives us a reason not to trust it, the fact that other websites corrob-
orate what the website says arguably gives us a reason to trust it.
A second potential shortcoming is that most of these indicators are limited to face-to-face
communication. Evaluating a “speaker’s style of delivery,” as both Hume and Goldman suggest
that we do, requires close physical proximity (or at least a high quality synchronous video
connection). However, most online communications are asynchronous and at a distance. Online
epistemic adversaries might be anywhere in the world (see Schneier 2000: 20).
Even so, there are techniques for detecting insincerity that just utilize text (see Newman et al.
2003) and images (see Farid 2009). For instance, empirical studies have found that “compared
to truth-tellers, liars used more words, were more expressive, non-immediate and informal and
made more typographical errors” (Hancock 2007: 296). Such indicators could potentially be
used to detect, or rule out, epistemic adversaries on the Internet.
A third potential shortcoming is that it is not clear how difficult it is for an adversary to
fake these indicators. Just as with the checklists, standard lie detection techniques are notori-
ously unreliable (see Hancock 2007: 296). Some “face-to-face” indicators are fairly robust. For
instance, the psychologist Paul Ekman (2001: 132–33) claims that there are certain “micro-
expressions” which appear briefly on a person’s face even if she is trying to conceal her deceptive
intent. These indicators tend to be difficult to cover up because people do not have voluntary
control of the muscles that lead to micro-expressions. However, it is not clear that the same
can be said for indicators that might be used to detect, or rule out, epistemic adversaries on the
Internet.
As the biologist Jim Perry (1986: 177) points out, “when an evaluation technique has been
developed and tested, it will become familiar to the evaluatees as well as the evaluators.” So, for
instance, if an adversary reads in the research literature that liars are somewhat less likely to use
first-person pronouns, she can easily take steps to use first-person pronouns more often in her
writing. Thus, even if they start out correlated with insincerity, textual indicators will probably
not remain correlated with insincerity for very long.
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Even corroboration can potentially be faked online. If an adversary can create one fraudulent
website (or email) that is convincing, it is probably feasible to create several other fraudulent
websites (or emails) that appear to provide corroboration for it. For instance, in the “catfishing”
attack against the Syrian rebels, hackers working for the Syrian government created fake pro-
opposition websites to corroborate their claims (see Gallagher 2015). Also, as Peter Ludlow
(2013) points out, private intelligence agencies have developed systems for the government
“that allowed one user to control multiple online identities (‘sock puppets’) for commenting in
social media spaces, thus giving the appearance of grass roots support.”
Even so, we can potentially address this problem by combining the Humean lesson with the
Cartesian lesson. While robust indicators of sincerity for online communications are hard to
come by, we may have better luck finding robust indicators of identity. In the remainder of this
chapter, I argue that such indicators are available and I show how they can allow us to know
that what an email or a website says is true.
Trustworthy sources
There is no guarantee that a website that looks like it was created by a certain person was really
created by that person. But there are some sources on the Internet, such as the New York Times
and WebMD, whose identity can be established with a high degree of confidence. The reason is
that these institutions have the resources and motivation to police their online identities. When
someone makes unauthorized use of their online identity, they are likely to find out about it
and they can do something about it.
Anyone’s online identity can be taken over by an adversary. For instance, hackers have posted
false stories on the New York Times website and on the Associated Press’s Twitter account (see
Fiore and Francois 2002; Shapiro 2013). Also, hackers have created fake websites that “imper-
sonate” the websites of reputable sources of information, such as Bloomberg News (see Fowler
et al. 2001).12 However, since these institutions very much want to protect their brand, they
institute security that makes it difficult for an adversary to fake their identity.
Moreover, if such an adversary nevertheless succeeds in doing so, she is unlikely to succeed
for very long as these institutions are highly motivated to correct the situation quickly. A short
while ago, Taylor Swift’s Twitter account was hacked by a group known as the Lizard Squad
(see Kastrenakes 2015). Within a few hours, however, Taylor was back in control of her Twitter
account. If Taylor Swift can police her online identity in this way, then presumably an organiza-
tion like the New York Times also has the resources to do so. Thus, the fact that a website looks
like it is the New York Times website, or the WebMD website, is a fairly robust indicator that it
really is.
As noted above, establishing the identity of a source is not sufficient by itself to establish the
accuracy of what it says. But if we also have reason to trust a source, we can know that what it
says is true. Since many institutions, such as the New York Times and WebMD, have a motivation
to get their facts straight (as well as to police their online identity), we probably do have reason
to trust them.13
However, it would be unfortunate if the New York Times and similar large institutions were
our only real sources of knowledge on the Internet. For instance, we may be interested in topics
that do not have sufficiently broad appeal to be reported on in the New York Times. Also, we may
want to have access to multiple points of view from diverse sources (see Hume 1977 [1748]: 75;
Coady 2012: 151). Thus, we would often like to get information from private individuals, such
as my nephew, who are not as able to police their online identity. Can we ever trust online
information that seems to be coming from such individuals? For instance, if my nephew really
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were stranded in Romania in need of money, could I come to know this on the basis of an
email message?
In fact, we often get online information that we can trust from private individuals. For
instance, suppose that my wife sends me an email saying that she will bring KFC home for
dinner. Admittedly, it would not be very difficult for an adversary to impersonate my wife. As
the security expert Bruce Schneier (2000: 200) reminds us, “you do know that the ‘From’ field
in your mail header can easily be forged?” But even so, I can be reasonably sure that the email
is from my wife and that she actually is bringing KFC. No one has any serious motivation to
mislead me into believing that my wife is bringing home KFC when she is not.
But we would not want to be limited to getting online information on fairly trivial matters
where there is no motivation to deceive. What happens when the stakes are higher? In other
words, what happens when an adversary does have a motivation to impersonate someone?
Establishing identity online with secret information

Even when there is enough incentive to impersonate someone, it is still possible for private
individuals to establish their identity online. We actually do this on a regular basis. For instance,
you can prove to your bank’s website that you are who you say that you are. And you can do
this despite the fact that criminals certainly have an incentive to get unauthorized access to your
bank account.
You typically establish your identity to the bank by entering a password and possibly by
answering some security questions (such as “What is the name of your junior high school?” or
“What is your mother’s maiden name?”). The basic idea here is that you produce some secret
information that only you know. Thus, your bank’s website is able to conclude that you are who
you say that you are. It is unlikely that an epistemic adversary would have this knowledge and,
thus, could convincingly pretend to be you.
Unfortunately, there are several issues with this strategy as it stands. First, it is difficult to
come up with secret information that it is not possible for an adversary to guess (and if an adver-
sary can guess what the secret information is, then she can pretend to be you). Passwords, for
instance, do not provide much security from motivated adversaries (see Schneier 2000: 136–37).
In fact, they are sort of necessarily insecure. If passwords are going to be easy enough for people
to remember, they are going to be fairly easy for adversaries to guess. And security questions are
not much better. A lot of personal information about each of us is available online (see Schneier
2000: 33). So, it is often possible for an adversary to learn the answers to our security questions
just by searching the Internet.
Second, in order to establish your identity, you have to transmit the secret information to
the bank. As a result, even if she cannot guess the secret information, an adversary might learn
the secret information by eavesdropping on your communications with the bank. And it is par-
ticularly easy for an adversary to intercept messages that are sent over the Internet (see Schneier
2000: 178–79).
Third, instead of passively eavesdropping, an adversary might take active steps to steal the
secret information. For instance, she might break into your house and/or your computer.
Alternatively, she might pretend to be your bank in order to trick you into simply revealing the
secret information (see Schneier 2000: 114–15). And regardless of how an adversary learns the
secret information, she can use it to pretend to be you.
Finally, in order for the secret information to convince the bank that you are who you say
you are, the bank must already know the secret information about you. In other words, you
have to have previously shared the secret information with the bank and only with the bank.With
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many people, such as our friends and family, we are able to share secret information at a secure
location or via a secure communication channel. But we would like to be able to learn things
online from all sorts of people whom we have never met and with whom we have not had the
opportunity to share secrets.
Establishing identity online with cryptography

Cryptography has not been discussed much in the Internet epistemology literature.
However, my contention is that it can address all of the aforementioned issues with using
secret information to establish identity online. Cryptography is traditionally associated with
the sending of secret messages. But it can also be used to establish the identity of the source
of a message (see Schneier 2000: 96–98). In fact, this is how establishing your identity to
the bank actually works. But before I can show this, I need to explain some of the basics
of cryptography.
Cryptography is intended to deal with the problem of trying to communicate over insecure
communication channels. For instance, suppose that Alice wants to send a message to Bob and
to be sure that only Bob can read it. But she is worried that someone, Eve, might get ahold of
the message while it is in transit. For instance, if Alice speaks to Bob, Eve might overhear. Also,
if Alice sends an email to Bob, Eve might intercept it. What can Alice do about this?
Cryptography solves this problem by using sophisticated mathematics to convert the message
into something that looks like gibberish, something that only the intended recipient can
decipher. As a result, even if someone intercepts the encrypted message (or ciphertext), she will not
be able to tell what the original message was.
Modern cryptographic algorithms use a long string of random digits, known as a cryptographic
key, to encrypt and decrypt messages. Most of these algorithms have been vetted over many
years by experts looking for some way to break the encryption without knowing the key (see
Schneier 2000: 118). Indeed, for many algorithms, it has been proven that there is no way to
read the original message without knowing the key.14 Thus, using cryptography is like locking
a message in a box that can only be opened by someone who has the key. So, if Alice wants to
send a secret message to Bob, it is as if she locks it in a box using a key that only she and Bob
have copies of.
So, how might cryptography help you to establish your identity online? One possibility
would be to send your password or the answers to your security questions to the bank in an
encrypted form. In that case, an adversary will not be able to learn this secret information by
eavesdropping on your communications with the bank. But this strategy does not address the
other issues that I have discussed. For instance, this strategy does not make it any harder for an
adversary to guess your password.
It turns out though that you do not need to actually send any secret information in order
establish your identity. Simply sending an encrypted message is enough to convince someone
that a message came from you since it shows that you know the cryptographic key. For instance,
Alice might write a message that says, “This is Alice. I am stranded in Romania and I need
money.” Then she locks it in the box using the key that only Alice and Bob share and has the
box delivered to Bob. Since Alice and Bob are the only people who have copies of the key,
when Bob receives the box and unlocks the message, he can be sure that it came from Alice.
Only Alice could have put this message in the locked box.
This procedure fully addresses the first two issues with using secret information to establish
identity online. First, unlike passwords and answers to security questions, a cryptographic key –
a long string of random digits –is extremely difficult for an adversary to guess. Second, since
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the cryptographic key itself is not sent over an insecure channel, this procedure is invulnerable
to eavesdroppers. An adversary cannot learn the cryptographic key just by getting ahold of an
encrypted message.
In addition, this procedure partially addresses the third issue. Since the cryptographic key
itself is not sent to the person that you want to convince of your identity, there is no risk of
revealing the cryptographic key to an imposter. Admittedly though, this procedure does not
help with the problem of outright theft of secret information. But this problem can presumably
be dealt with in the traditional ways that we insure the security of ourselves and our property
(intellectual and otherwise). And just as we can have reason to trust someone to tell the truth, we
can have reason to trust her to keep her cryptographic key secure. Moreover, this task is much
easier for a private individual than is policing one’s online identity (e.g., making sure that no
one hacks into your Twitter account or creates a fake website for you).
However, as it stands, this procedure does not address the final issue with using secret infor-
mation to establish identity online. In order for someone to convince me of her identity in this
way, the two of us must have already securely shared the cryptographic key. But as suggested
above, this requirement severely limits the number of people that we can identify and learn
things from online. Fortunately, though, even more sophisticated cryptography is available that
allows us to solve what is known as the “key distribution problem” (see Schneier 2000: 89–90).
Indeed, it turns out that we can be convinced of someone’s identity online even if we have
never shared any secret information with her.
So far, I have been discussing symmetric cryptography.This is where there is one key that both
encrypts and decrypts messages. In order to use asymmetric or public key cryptography, Alice
creates two distinct keys. When one key is used to encrypt a message, the other key can be used
to decrypt it (see Schneier 2000: 94–96). Alice makes one of the two keys public (say, by posting
it on her website) and she keeps the other key private. Then if Bob or anyone else wants to
send her a secret message, they encrypt it with her public key. Since the value of the private key
cannot be deduced from the value of the public key, Alice is the only person who knows what
her private key is.Thus, she is the only person who can decrypt the message from Bob and read
it. Alice and Bob never have to get together to share any secret information.
This procedure ensures that Bob’s message will remain secret, that it cannot be read by
eavesdroppers. But unlike with symmetric cryptography, Bob cannot establish his identity to
Alice just by sending an encrypted message. Alice cannot be sure who the message came from
since everyone has access to her public key.
However, public key cryptography can be used to convince someone that a message came
from you. Doing so simply requires reversing the aforementioned procedure for sending secret
messages. Alice can digitally sign a message by encrypting it with her private key (see Schneier
2000: 96–98). When Bob is able to decrypt it with her public key, he can be sure that the
message came from Alice since she is the only person who knows what her private key is.15 In
other words, Alice has succeeded in establishing her identity to Bob online. So, if Bob also has
reason to think that Alice is trustworthy, then he has reason to think that the information that
he has just received is accurate. Thus, this procedure addresses the remaining issue with using
secret information to establish identity online.16
Unfortunately, though, checking a digital signature is not always enough by itself for us to be
confident of who a message is coming from.We check a digital signature by trying to decrypt it
with the putative source’s public key. But this just tells us that the message was encrypted with
the associated private key.17 If Alice’s website claims that K is her public key, how do we know
that K is really Alice’s public key? Maybe an adversary just created a fake website made to look
like it belongs to Alice and put his own public key on it.
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If we want to use digital signatures to establish identity online, they typically have to be
supplemented with something else. A digital certificate is an electronic document signed by a
trusted entity known as a certificate authority. (Symantec and Comodo are examples of certificate
authorities.) This electronic document says that a particular public key belongs to a particular
person.18 Basically, on the say-so of the certificate authority we can be confident that a par-
ticular public key really does belong to Alice.
At first glance, it may not look like digital certificates represent much progress toward
establishing the identity of the source of an email or a website. In order to assure ourselves
that a particular public key belongs to a particular identity, we have to assure ourselves that a
different public key belongs to a particular certificate authority. In addition, we have to assure
ourselves that this certificate authority is a reliable source of information about people’s iden-
tities. In other words, it looks like we have traded one epistemological problem for two new
epistemological problems.
However, the idea behind digital certificates is that the certificate authority is a “trusted
third party” (see Schneier 2000: 226–27). That is, while you may not know the Nigerian
prince or what his public key is, you do know this certificate authority and what its public
key is. Moreover, you trust this certificate authority to reliably check the identities of other
people.
Unfortunately, certificate authorities have not always lived up to the ideal of being a “trusted
third party” (see Leavitt 2011: 17–18). They have not always been sufficiently diligent about
maintaining the security of their computer systems. This has allowed hackers to break in and
issue fake certificates. Also, certificate authorities have not always been careful enough when
checking people’s identities. As a result, on several occasions, adversaries have been able to get
ahold of digital certificates that falsely claim that a particular public key belongs to a particular
person.
Nevertheless, the idea of using digital certificates to establish identity online can potentially
work. Basically, it just requires that certificate authorities come to have the same sort of prop-
erties that the New York Times has. As noted above, we can trust what we read on the New York
Times website because the New York Times has two important properties. First, the New York
Times is able to police its online identity and it works hard to do so. Second, the New York Times
is motivated to get its facts straight and it works hard to do so. In a similar vein, we can trust
what a digital certificate says if the certificate authority that signed it has two analogous prop-
erties. First, the certificate authority would need to work hard to police its online identity. That
is, we need to be sure that a digital certificate really has been issued by the certificate authority
itself. Second, the certificate authority would need to work hard to get its facts straight. That is,
we need to be sure that the certificate authority will only tie a public key to a real-life identity
when it is sure that that public key really belongs to that person.
Conclusion
The Internet is full of epistemic adversaries. As a result, it is not immediately clear how we
can know that what an email or a website says is true. Although there may be other strat-
egies for addressing this problem, work by Descartes and Hume in adversarial epistemology
suggests one possible solution –namely, we can often eliminate the worry that we are dealing
with an epistemic adversary online by finding robust indicators of exactly who we are dealing
with. Moreover, as I have argued, modern cryptography can provide us with such indicators.19
It is important to note, though, that identifying the source of a piece of information is
not always sufficient to secure knowledge on the Internet. In many cases, we might not trust
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a particular source even if we are quite sure who it is. But often (as with the New York Times
and my nephew), if we can identify who we are dealing with, we can trust what she says to be
accurate because we already know her to be trustworthy. Moreover, once we are able to deter-
mine who we are dealing with, we are in a much better position to determine whether or not
she is trustworthy. For instance, since we can tell that different messages came from the same
source, we can check a source’s past track record. Also, we can assure ourselves that corrobor-
ating sources are not sock puppets.20
Notes
1 Strictly speaking, an epistemic adversary might use force rather than guile to interfere with what we
know about the world. For instance, a repressive government might be quite open about the fact that
it is censoring books or blocking access to the Internet (see Richtel 2011). However, the focus of this
chapter will be on those epistemic adversaries that do engage in deceit.
2 For a recent literature review, see Fahy et al. (2014). Khazaal et al. (2012) did find that a high score on
the DISCERN instrument (www.discern.org.uk/discern_instrument.php) is correlated with accuracy.
However, this instrument only works for the evaluation of a specific type of websites (health). Also, it
requires checking for a large number of website features (16 to be precise).
3 P. D. Magnus (2009: 79–83) discusses several general criteria for evaluating “claims from single-author
websites, personal blogs, and Internet forum posts.” These include considering “authority, plausible
style, plausible content, calibration, and sampling.” But as with the checklists themselves, it is not clear
how effective these considerations are unless we already know that we are not dealing with a highly
motivated epistemic adversary (see the section on Descartes below).
4 For instance, cases of people intentionally removing accurate information from, and intentionally
adding inaccurate information to,Wikipedia have been discussed very briefly (see Keen 2007: 18; Fallis
2008: 1665; Simon 2010: 349).
5 Liars sometimes do show up as characters in the epistemological literature. For instance, Nogot
fakes having a Ford (see Feldman 2003: 26). But deception is typically not essential to these thought
experiments.
6 More recently, epistemologists of testimony (e.g., Faulkner 2007; Lackey 2008: 53–56) have had to take
account of the possibility of liars. Also, Karen Frost-Arnold (2014a) has offered an epistemic evaluation
of “imposters” and “tricksters.”
7 Descartes wanted certainty. But even if we only seek strong, but not indefeasible, justification for
believing what an email or a website says (which is probably the best we can hope for), the Cartesian
lesson is still important. The importance of determining identity has also been emphasized in recent
research on online deception (see Hancock 2007: 290).
8 Moreover, if a source knows that you know who she is, that by itself can give you further reason to
trust her (see, e.g., Brennan and Pettit 2008: 177). Many sources have “such credit and reputation in the
eyes of mankind, as to have a great deal to lose in case of their being detected in any falsehood” (Hume
1977 [1748]: 78).
9 In addition, even if she does not want her online communications connected to her offline identity,
someone writing under a pseudonym may want to use the cryptographic techniques that I discuss
below in order to ensure that her communications are connected to her pseudonymous online identity.
10 Some of these indicators do work for identifying incompetence as well as insincerity.
11 Indicators that are not robust may initially be correlated with insincerity, but they are easy for an
adversary to cover up. Indicators (aka signals) that are difficult to fake have been studied extensively by
economists (e.g., Spence 1973) and biologists (e.g., Zahavi 1975). For a discussion of how these the-
ories apply to verifying the accuracy of information on the Internet, see Fallis (2004: 474–76).
12 In other cases, in order to disseminate “fake news” or fake investment advice, epistemic adversaries have
created websites that are intended to look like a reputable source, but not like any particular reputable
source, such as the New York Times or Bloomberg News (see Fowler et al. 2001; Ohlheiser 2016). The
problem here is not (or not only) that we cannot tell who the source of this information is. The main
problem is that we do not have good reason to believe that this source is trustworthy (see the section
on Descartes above).
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13 The online institution that has been most discussed in the Internet epistemology literature is Wikipedia
(see, e.g., Fallis 2008; Magnus 2009; Simon 2010: 348–52; Coady 2012: 169–71). And despite Magnus’s
(2009: 84) suggestion that claims made in a Wikipedia entry are “more like ‘claims made in New York’
than ‘claims made in the New York Times,’ ” Wikipedia probably does share these two critical properties
with the New York Times and WebMD. First, we have reason to think that Wikipedia is fairly reliable as
compared with other sources of encyclopedic information (see Fallis 2008: 1666–67). Second, we can
be pretty sure that we are reading an entry from the real Wikipedia without any sophisticated identifi-
cation procedures. Admittedly, we do not know the identities of the individual people who contributed
to a Wikipedia entry. But as with encyclopedia entries in general, the identities of individual authors
are not particularly relevant to assessing the quality of the information (see Fallis 2008: 1667; Simon
2010: 348; Coady 2012: 171). Of course, Wikipedia itself does have to worry about the identities of
contributors in order to ensure that people are not editing their own entries (see Fallis 2008: 1668;
Simon 2010: 349).
14 These proofs often make a few mathematical assumptions that have not themselves been proven. But
mathematicians and cryptographers would be very surprised if these assumptions turned out to be false.
15 Of course, anyone else who gets ahold of the message will also be able to determine that it came from
Alice. If the message is private or controversial, Alice may want to make sure that only Bob will know
that the message came from her. In that case, she will have to digitally sign it with her private key and
then encrypt the result with Bob’s public key.
16 This procedure still addresses the first three issues as well. In fact, since only one person (rather than
two) ever needs to know the private key, public key cryptography does even better than symmetric
cryptography with respect to the security issue. Remember Ben Franklin’s saying that “three may keep
a secret, if two of them are dead.”
17 Admittedly, in some exceptional cases, this could be enough to ensure that we are not dealing with an
epistemic adversary. Even if we do not know for sure what her offline identity is, we might know that
whoever controls the associated private key has a reputation for accuracy. In a similar vein, we do not
have to verify someone’s offline identity in order to decide whether or not to accept a Bitcoin trans-
action. We just need to verify that sufficient funds are associated with the public key that was used to
digitally sign the transaction.
18 Digital certificates are most commonly used by big companies, such as Amazon or Google. But digital
certificates can also potentially be used by private individuals. For instance, my nephew could con-
ceivably go to a certificate authority and get a digital certificate that shows that a particular public key
really does belong to him.
19 Modern cryptography does not guarantee that someone is who she says that she is. But unlike Descartes,
we are not seeking certain knowledge about who sent a message.
20 For extremely helpful feedback, I would like to thank James Chase, David Coady, Andrew Dillon,Tony
Doyle, Melanie Fagan, Bob Goldberg, Kay Mathiesen, Sille Obelitz Søe, Jacob Stegenga, Dustin Stokes,
Dan Zelinski, the fellows of the Tanner Humanities Center, an anonymous referee, and audiences at
the University of Copenhagen and at the University of Utah.
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Simon, J. (2010).“The Entanglement of Trust and Knowledge on the Web.” Ethics and Information Technology,
12: 343–55.
Simpson, T. W. (2012). “Evaluating Google as an Epistemic Tool.” Metaphilosophy, 43: 426–45.
Spence, A. M. (1973). “Job Market Signaling.” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 87: 355–74.
Thagard, P. (2001). “Internet Epistemology: Contributions of new information technologies to scientific
research,” in K. Crowley, C. D. Schunn, and T. Okada (eds.), Designing for Science. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Zahavi, A. (1975). “Mate Selection: A selection for a handicap.” Journal of Theoretical Biology, 53: 205–14.
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PART III
Politics
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6
JOHN STUART MILL ON
FREE SPEECH
1. Introduction
John Stuart Mill’s work on freedom of expression has had enormous influence on philosophical
research and has long been a pillar of the undergraduate curriculum. But though the attention
paid to Mill on this topic is large, its focus (at least when Mill is taught to students) tends to be
restricted to the text of On Liberty. Our aim in this chapter is to provide a sense of how Mill’s
wider body of writings contributes to the strength and ongoing relevance of his defense of free
speech. While On Liberty will always be the central text, Mill’s other writings deserve not to
be overlooked. They provide much that both clarifies and supports the agenda in On Liberty,
particularly with regard to the epistemic elements of Mill’s project. Important here is Mill’s pre-
occupation with the role of freedom, and freedom of expression in particular, as facilitating the
growth and diffusion of knowledge within a community, and in turn facilitating greater human
development. In short, Mill’s defense of free speech is very much about how knowledge spreads
and why it is valuable. We hope that this chapter will be useful to students wishing to grapple
with Mill’s arguments but who have not had an opportunity to read beyond On Liberty, and to
those professional scholars not already entrenched in Mill’s thinking.
We begin by noting that Mill’s approach to applied philosophy shifted between an emphasis
on breadth and depth. Compared to Mill’s longer works, On Liberty very much prioritizes
breadth. Mill’s overall goal is to understand “the nature and limits of the power which can
be legitimately exercised by society over the individual” (1977a: 217). The book is famous
for, among other things, Mill’s promotion of the value of individuality, his worries about
the “despotism of custom” (1977a: 272), and his skepticism about the assumption of infal-
libility among legislators. These contribute to Mill’s defense of his well-known harm prin-
ciple. Clearly such topics continue to have significance across a wide range of rather different
contexts. Nevertheless, the style of argument in On Liberty is rather schematic: The book’s main
arguments are expressed with the help of generalities and abstractions, with cases and examples
described only quite fleetingly. This is no scholarly oversight –schematic arguments are simply
necessary if one wants to fit an ambitious project into a short book. In light of these facts, it’s
fair to say that On Liberty is applied philosophy constrained by the fact that it is, first and fore-
most, a piece of popular philosophy: It needed to be short and readable, and this is reflected in
the sort of text that it is.1
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None of this is to degrade the status given to On Liberty, only to suggest that Mill’s style of
argument depended on how much space he had at his disposal. In several of his other works,
far more sustained attention is paid to specific aspects of the socioeconomic and political status
quo.These arguments lack the schematic minimalism of On Liberty: They seek to diagnose more
specific injustices or shortcomings, based on fairly extensive descriptions of the relevant cases,
while recommending tailored reforms. Overall, attention to Mill’s other works leads to three
ways in which his project can be better appraised. In particular, we will find in Mill’s other texts:
( 1) strengthening of the arguments found in On Liberty;

(2) some novel arguments that cannot be found in On Liberty;
(3) observations that prompt some further questions about the importance of free speech that
are not encouraged by the text of On Liberty.
As a guide, here’s how this entry is structured: Section 2 provides a brief recap of the ground
covered in On Liberty. Section 3 draws on various other writings to give a sense of how On
Liberty’s defense is augmented, particularly with reference to Mill’s emphasis on the concept
of the free exchange of ideas (as we propose to call it) as opposed to mere expression. Mill saw
freedom of speech as valuable in epistemic, discursive terms. Much of this will involve attention
to Mill’s complementary views on education. Section 4 provides an assessment of this defense
in light of prevailing criticisms aimed mainly at On Liberty, and new criticisms that emerge in
light of the position we reconstruct. These new criticisms are inspired by some contemporary
examples whose significance we think Mill would have appreciated. Section 5 concludes.
We would like to make one brief qualification before continuing. Like many influential fig-
ures in the history of political philosophy, Mill is subject to a certain amount of controversy as
to which contemporary school of thought gets to ‘claim’ him. Thus, there is disagreement over
whether Mill was a classical liberal, and thus saw economic liberty as having importance on a
par with other personal freedoms, or a progressive who might thereby have assigned secondary
or defeasible status to economic freedoms, or something else. Such questions have substance,
and we accept that the claims we defend here may implicitly take a position on such debates.2
But we want to remain largely neutral as to which (if any) position in contemporary philosophy
gets to confer prototype status on Mill’s project. As co-authors, we do not necessarily agree with
each other when it comes to such questions.The fact that this entry has still been written is evi-
dence that there is more to studying Mill than the rather tribal question of whose side he would
pick if faced with twenty-first century disagreements. Much of this has to do with working out
where his views have twenty-first century relevance, regardless of how they are best labeled.
2. On Liberty’s schematic agenda

On Liberty’s defense of free speech centers on how it aids humanity’s search for the truth
and, hence, greater realization of human potential. This commences with Chapter 1’s negative
account of the dangers of censorship. This is followed by Chapter 2’s positive account of how
free expression aids the identification of true opinions while protecting accepted truths against
becoming “dead dogmas.” Chapter 3 focuses on the value of individuality and “the permanent
interests of man as a progressive being” as the basis for a justification of freedom of action
regulated only by the harm principle (1977a: 224). Chapter 4 draws some general conclusions,
and Chapter 5 deals (briefly) with some “Applications,” though its claims are still couched in
quite general language. Overall, free expression allows everyone in society to develop authentic
opinions which really do affect and guide their actions as “living truths” (1977a: 243).
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John Stuart Mill on free speech
As we have said, Mill uses few examples in On Liberty. Best known may be his ‘corn-dealer’
case in Chapter 3 (1977a: 260), the man crossing the dangerous bridge (1977a: 294), and a
variety of possible harmful actions in Chapter 5 (e.g., trade; government activity; drunkenness;
giving advice; and gambling) (1977a: 292–310). Each of these cases is a realistic hypothetical
meant to represent a broad category of actual cases. Mill himself speaks of his examples in
Chapter 5 as a “few observations … on questions of detail,” which “are designed to illustrate
the principles, rather than to follow them out to their consequences” (1977a: 292). In this sense
Chapter 5’s “Applications” remain quite abstract and generalized, as applications go.
One important idea, made clearer in other writings, is implicit in On Liberty. This has to
do with the way in which freedom of expression becomes easier to defend when construed
in a relatively narrow way.3 On a broad conception, often presupposed by everyday appeals to
‘free speech’, freedom of expression covers anything at all that might be called an ‘expression’.
A narrower conception is restricted to the expression of claims that may be true or false, and
which therefore might feature in some sort of constructive exchange or disagreement in ways
that other expressions typically cannot. As Richard Vernon has pointed out (1996: 622–23),
Mill’s language in his famous defense errs strongly toward the expression of linguistic con-
tent aimed at discursive participation. Mill does not use the word ‘expression’ much at all, and
Chapter 2’s title invokes the liberty “of discussion.” It is the successful exchange of ideas that
allows free speech to fulfill an epistemic function from which it gains much of its value. In
a similar way, Mill’s remarks about the importance of rigor and a culture of mutual criticism
suggest that free speech is (most) valuable when it works in ways that stimulate genuine con-
structive exchanges. The point about rigor is a good one –we are all irritated by people who
take criticism as an affront and simply assert that they are ‘entitled to their opinion’, as if mere
criticism were full-blown censorship. It is here, too, that Mill explains that it is “not on the
impassioned partisan,” but “on the calmer and more disinterested bystander, that this collision
of opinions works its salutary effect” (1977a: 257). But although the text strongly suggests the
importance of free expression construed in this relatively narrow way, On Liberty contains no
extended account of the mechanisms by which free expression actually brings about a dis-
cursive society, and exactly where in society the improvements might be most felt or most
urgently needed.
The sort of free expression worth defending is that which lends itself to the free exchange
of ideas. The philosophical distinctiveness of this position is worth making explicit. Broadly
speaking, defense of free expression on epistemic grounds contrasts with arguments for free
speech that, though liberal or even Millian in some important respects, rely on premises that
are not explicitly epistemic, having to do with the value of autonomy, tolerance, or some
related interest in being able to express one’s position.4 It is also worth emphasizing that the
free exchange of ideas can encompass different sorts of content. It includes explicitly prop-
ositional content, of which even the false (or almost entirely false) variety might “supply the
remainder of the truth” or serve to preserve the truth from becoming “dogma” (1977a: 258).
It also includes apparently non-propositional content, as in music and pictorial form, which
is sometimes subject to censorship but can be part of an ‘idea’ about the pursuit of a certain
conception of the good life. Granted, there may prove to be some forms of expression that
can make little contribution of any sort. We are not suggesting that Mill would conclude that
such content is for that reason generally fair game for censors. Apart from anything else, it
would be very hard to design legislation that could separate the two types of expression with
any sort of reliability, and here one should keep in mind Mill’s counsel against the assumption
of infallibility. And even if the most hostile forms of expression contain no truth, they might
help stimulate a culture in which decent people take on the responsibility for calling out those
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who cause offence, rather than relying on the state to do it for them.5 We will come back to
this problem in section 4.
On Liberty’s defense of free speech, then, has a negative and a positive aspect. The negative
aspect has to do with the ills of censorship, which should be used sparingly (guided, perhaps,
by the harm principle). The positive aspect emphasizes the role played by the free expression of
ideas (in the ‘narrow’ sense) in facilitating the growth of knowledge in a community, “quite the
chief ingredient of individual and social progress,” and the vital part played by free expression
(in the broader sense) in developing individuality, “one of the principal ingredients of human
happiness” (1977a: 261). But in On Liberty, the negative defense is more emphatic, and it’s easy
to gain the impression that it’s the more important. While there are elements of the positive
defense in On Liberty, it is expanded upon in Mill’s other works (whereas the negative defense is
not). Accordingly, it is through examining these other texts that the epistemic elements in Mill’s
project are become more appreciable.
3. Expression versus exchange: Mill’s defense of the

discursive value of free speech
With the possible exception of Utilitarianism, which is not much concerned with free speech,
Mill’s other works besides On Liberty are either narrower in scope or greater in length. Several
of them include substantive discussion of free speech and closely related topics.
One such related topic is the problem of freedom in general and when it may be permissibly
restricted by some interference by government. In short, Mill was a liberal but not a libertarian.6
Mill was always cautious of too much power being given to the government, in part because
there was always a risk of this power being abused, particularly of it being wielded in the interests
of established minorities; and in part because he thought ‘active’ citizens (who were much better
than ‘passive’ ones) were more likely to be created by a culture of self-help than reliance on
government. Mill’s worries about the perils of a passive citizenry is perhaps most evident in the
rejection of benevolent despotism that is laid out in Considerations on Representative Government
(1977b: 399–412), as well as in various other writings (1977a: 262–63; 1965: 938). But this is
not to say that Mill was opposed to all state interference. The final chapter of the Principles of
Political Economy is an extended account of why the importance of individual freedom does not
ultimately favor an entirely ‘hands-off ’ approach by government. It is fair to say that, for Mill,
though non-interference was the default position, departure from this default could occur quite
readily and for a wide range of reasons. Thus, though Mill speaks of “laissez-faire [as] the general
rule” (1965: 944–47), he immediately follows this with twenty-five pages of “large exceptions
to laissez-faire” (1965: 947–71). Indeed, he attacks the traditional case for laissez-faire as nonsens-
ical, and inconsistent with the ideals it purports to protect and preserve (1965: 800, 936–44).7
Mill also had a nuanced view on the nature of government interference. He believed it
could come by way of restrictive legislation, but also by state provision of goods and services
(1965: 937, 947–50, 954–71). In other words, the state ‘interferes’ when it prohibits some sort of
activity or exchange, but also when it provides opportunities for such activities or exchange. Mill
also drew a parallel distinction between ‘authoritative’ interferences, which cannot be avoided or
opted out of, and ‘non-authoritative’ interferences, particularly regarding the provision of goods,
where participation is optional (1965: 936–37). A good example of both comes from his views
on education: parents ought to be legally obligated to educate their children –an unavoidable
‘authoritative’ interference by government (legitimized by the harm principle). But though the
state ought to provide schools for them to send their children to, such interferences count as
non-authoritative: The state ought neither to hold a monopoly on provision of schools, nor on
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accreditation/licensing of educators and thus no one is forced to use state-provided education

services (1965: 948–50).
All of this is rather more elaborate than the bald claim at the start of On Liberty that freedom
should be constrained only when there is a risk of harm to others. Free speech, like other
freedoms, should be understood with reference to this rather sophisticated way of understanding
what freedom is and how its exercise might be regulated.8 Mill’s views on freedom and interfer-
ence support the view that, in general, state interference is often a matter of helping along some
sort of voluntary activity by individual citizens. Interference might be needed as an enabling
condition for an eventual (and more desirable) state of affairs in which citizens are doing things
for themselves.9 This needs to be kept in mind when reconstructing Mill’s positive defense of
free speech, particularly regarding its emphasis on how the free exchange of ideas can help
humans advance as “progressive beings.”
Drawing further on what Mill says in the Principles, we will now focus on two more specific
ways in which free speech was supposed to improve society:
1. the role played by free expression and individuality in the development of effective formal
education;
2. the role played by free expression, particularly of the press, in improving the intellectual cap-
acities and political power of the working poor.
Both of these themes have a clear epistemic significance: Each concerns the growth and use of
knowledge within a population, and the role that free speech can play in facilitating that growth.
There is also a degree of political significance attached to the second theme.
Mill evidently believed that education could help advance the economy.10 He claimed
that “a thing not yet so well understood and recognized, is the economical value of the gen-
eral diffusion of intelligence among the people” (1965: 107). He also believed that education
equipped people with greater ability to gain pleasure (and better kinds of pleasure) outside of
work hours. The uneducated worker had a strong tendency to concentrate on alcohol con-
sumption (1965: 108–9) or procreation (1965: 159). In Mill’s day, these were considered two
important causes of the abject poverty endured by large swathes of the population. Though
it might do so very indirectly, a right to free expression was an important aid (according to
Mill) in fighting this. In Mill’s day, many of the Victorian social elite believed the poor to be
incorrigible and that poverty would never be erased. Mill’s view shows a more intelligent
optimism.11
Mill thought it vital that everyone receive at the very least a basic schooling, or formal
education. In On Liberty, Mill rejected a state monopoly on provision of education or licensing
of teachers; he was also anxious about a state-prescribed curriculum, something he regarded
as a “mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another” (1977a: 302). Mill
believed that formal education must internalize freedom of expression –both in the sense of
curriculum planning and the character of the experience gained by students (1977a: 302–4).
His aversion to monopoly was an affirmation of competition –a view expressed more generally
in Principles (1965: 794). The provision of education should have no great barriers to entry, so
as to ensure a wide variety of experiments in curriculum design and the style of its delivery.12
This is not to say, however, that the state can’t perform well when it is required to join in with
the competition. Mill supported the provision of state-funded schools and even thought they
might be exemplars of best practice for other education providers (1965: 947–50; 1977a: 302–
3). Favoring competition does not mean favoring privatization, nor of allowing consumer
preferences to be the final arbiter of which products win or lose. Indeed, Principles makes clear
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that elementary education may be one of those goods not best left to the market, due to the
incompetency of consumers when it comes to identifying the best product (1965: 947–50).
All of these claims are up for debate. Questions about the public and private side of edu-
cational provision, for example, remain contentious. Such controversies aside, Mill made his
contribution largely by emphasizing a basically liberal view about the point of education. What
was more important to Mill than who provided the education was how students learned.When
done properly, education can facilitate the free development of individuality, a good in itself
(or as an integral part of utility) (1977a: 260–75), rather than a mere instrument for securing
greater economic output.13 It bears emphasizing that individuality is something people ultim-
ately must cultivate for themselves. The state might help by providing an environment condu-
cive to this. Dale Miller, however, represents Mill’s view well when stressing that “individuality
could never be distributed by society.”14 Mill believed an education could only really equip its
beneficiary with the ability to make a contribution if it had stimulated the capacity for inde-
pendent thought. He scorned education that promoted rote learning, and thereby ‘dead dogma,’
homogeneity, and mediocrity. Some emphatic remarks occur in his Autobiography:
Most boys or youths who have had much knowledge drilled into them, have their
mental capacities not strengthened, but overlaid by it. They are crammed with mere
facts, and with the opinions or phrases of other people, and these are accepted as a
substitute for the power to form opinions of their own. And thus, the sons of eminent
fathers, who have spared no pains in their education, so often grow up mere parroters
of what they have learnt, incapable of using their minds except in the furrows traced
for them.
Mill 1981: 33–35
We suspect that readers who have taught in universities will appreciate these sentiments. We
hope that students who’ve suffered under such conditions can take Mill’s words as an encour-
agement to pursue higher education partly for the sake of the emancipatory experience it can
provide after a childhood spent undergoing much learning by rote. Certainly, Mill makes a
sound point about the problems that result from schooling designed to get students over the
next hurdle at the expense of preparing them for the territory waiting on the other side. Private
education is often priced on the basis that some school or tuition service is especially good
at delivering good exam results or test scores. The tendency of markets to select such services
may represent one of Mill’s counterexamples to the principle of laissez-faire, namely, that where
a consumer is not the best judge of what the market supplies (1965: 947–50). The point is
that while parents may prioritize their child’s academic success, and purchase services accord-
ingly, this may result in educational outcomes that are far from optimal.15 Such sentiments are
revisited in Principles. Mill says, with subtler tone but similar substance, that “if there is a first
principle in intellectual education, it is this –that the discipline which does good to the mind
is that in which the mind is active, not that in which it is passive” (1965: 281), again echoing
claims made in On Liberty (1977a: 262–63).
Let us now examine the second theme –the relation between free speech and the advance-
ment of the laboring poor. Principles retains On Liberty’s schematic affirmation of individuality’s
normative value (1965: 209). But there is a new emphasis on the increasing independence of
the poor. Mill writes of how they are “coming out of their leading-strings” and becoming
dissatisfied with paternalistic or arbitrary rule (1965: 763). This gives some content to the
schematic emphasis, in On Liberty, on independence and personal sovereignty, and his strong
anti-paternalism.
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Not all education is of the formal sort that occurs within schools. Mill associated informal
education with the more free-wheeling production of pamphlets, newspapers, and other
vehicles for the dispersal of ideas and information. In Mill’s day, formal education of any
advanced sort was a luxury reserved for those from families who could afford it. Though Mill
did call for policies that would realize “an effective national education for the children of the
laboring class” (1965: 374), a realistic view at the time was that much of the population would
not get educated far beyond basic literacy and numeracy. Mill thus spoke of those “who have
been taught to read, but have received little other intellectual education” (1965: 861). Free
expression of ideas was vital for the dissemination of information to those who had no other
access to these sorts of educational goods. Here are three representative passages from the
Principles:
There is a spontaneous education going on in the minds of the multitude, which may
be greatly accelerated and improved by artificial aids. The instruction obtained from
newspapers and political tracts may not be the most solid kind of instruction, but it is
an immense improvement upon none at all.
Mill 1965: 763
Ideas of equality are daily spreading more widely among the poorer classes, and can
no longer be checked by anything short of the entire suppression of printed discussion
and even of freedom of speech.
Mill 1965: 767
Newspapers are the source of nearly all the general information which they [the
uneducated poor] possess, and of nearly all their acquaintance with the ideas and
topics current among mankind; and an interest is more easily excited in newspapers,
than in books or other more recondite sources of instructions.
Mill 1965: 861
The basic point is that any society without freedom of the press denies the underprivileged a
means of learning about the realities of their social context, and from communicating with each
other in ways that may help them mobilize so as to change it. An economy without freedom
of expression is not just one that will suffer from a less productive workforce, but also one that
will retain oppressive hierarchies akin to feudalism, particularly through lack of political partici-
pation among the masses. Such optimism about the intellectual emancipation of the working
poor gives greater content to On Liberty’s various claims about humans as “progressive beings,”
in large part because this optimism is articulated with reference to the empirical status quo and
how it might develop. Indeed, Mill probably held the view that human development is only
possible within communities not riven by an arbitrarily hierarchical internal structure.16 In add-
ition, the argument of Principles suggests that a further evil of censorship is its role in promoting
the oppression of the poor by keeping them ignorant and divided. Again, this goes beyond On
Liberty’s more abstract worries about fallibility and dogma, which do not make any reference
to social hierarchy and inequality. But it does more than merely strengthen the schematic argu-
ment in On Liberty: The Mill of Principles was also making what might now be identified as an
egalitarian argument, one that defends free speech on grounds that it may help make society a
fairer place. (Though, we should note, the emphasis is on pursuing equality through removing
unjustly hierarchical differences in status, rather than simply relying on the redistribution of
wealth and property.)
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In short, freedom of expression leads to many positive social benefits when and because it
plays an integral role in the emergence and survival of a discursive society. It necessitates at least
universal mandatory basic education, and also encourages, and makes possible, informal edu-
cation throughout our lives. Mill’s examples are of the contemporary benefits of a free press in
educating the working poor, but this does not mean it would be permissible to silence the press
once everyone had a basic education. What’s significant about writings other than On Liberty is
how revealing they are as to the depth of Mill’s thinking on why freedom of speech could be
defended along such lines.
4. A contemporary assessment of Mill’s Applications

We will not offer an historical assessment of whether Mill was right about the trends of his day.
Suffice it to say that the lot of the working poor had begun to improve by the end of Mill’s life
and continued to do so thereafter. Much of this had to do with improvements in education,
as well as increased political participation and representation of the working classes, at least in
Britain. How much of this can be attributed to the rise of individual freedoms and how much
to other factors is another question.
We are most interested in examining how Mill’s ideas might fare in the contemporary cli-
mate.We will do this, first, by seeing how the arguments from Principles and elsewhere help Mill
handle some influential criticisms aimed at the schematic argument of On Liberty. His positive
account faces two problems relating to its reliance on ideas about the power of free exchange in
maintaining an epistemically well-functioning community. These are a ‘naiveté’ objection that
Mill does not properly anticipate the ‘invasion’ of communities by extremism; and an objection
about the problem of fragmentation within the community. Both problems draw force from
recent real-world trends. A third problem is more external. It grants that Mill was right about
the case for protecting the free expression of claims whose content helps provide inputs into
useful debates, but it asks what we are to make of other ‘expressions’ whose discursive credentials
are weaker, and where there might appear to be good reasons to censor.
It has been said that Mill’s position is unduly optimistic as to how things will actually play
out when people are free to say what they like. Free expression has led, it seems, to some
dreadful political outcomes that might have been prevented had powers of censorship been
available beforehand. Roger Crisp (1997: 194–95) objects that “Mill’s faith in human rationality
is excessive. He underrates the human capacity to believe and act on the patently absurd” and
cites the example of Nazi propaganda in support of this claim.
We think that the force of this objection may weaken in light of the sort of defense given in
the Principles. That is, Crisp’s criticism may presuppose that Mill regarded rationality as already in
situ, ready to be set free by the absence of censorship. Aimed only at the argument made in On
Liberty, whose text may encourage this interpretation, we might agree with Crisp. But what’s
made clearer in the Principles is that rationality might increase gradually, over time, as conditions
of free exchange improve the quality of debate and stimulate the mental powers of citizens.
A properly discursive society might be protected against ‘invasion’ in two ways. Firstly, it is pos-
sible that ‘irrational’ political views gain currency partly because of enduring conformism and
intolerance of individuality and difference.17 Secondly, the proponents of extremist views would,
in a Millian discursive society, need to air these views in a context in which they can be properly,
and easily, criticized. Citizens of this discursive society thus would not only be able to hear both
sides of a debate, but hear extremist views tackled in debate. They would also have the requisite
capacities of judgment which might make them less susceptible to such views (when based
on misinformation and untruth) in the first place, or certainly more able to choose between
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opposing views. This, too, might involve easily accessible objective information regarding the
topic under debate. As Mill says in his Inaugural Address to the University of St. Andrews:
Unless an elementary knowledge of scientific truths is diffused among the public,

they never know what is certain and what is not, or who are entitled to speak with
authority and who are not: and they either have no faith at all in the testimony of
science, or are the ready dupes of charlatans and imposters … we all require the ability
to judge between the conflicting opinions that are offered to us as vital truths.
Mill 1984: 233
By “scientific truths,” Mill meant “laws of the world.” This may plausibly include much more
than the natural sciences but also (at least) the social sciences. Mill’s claim could be directed,
today, at climate change deniers, Islamophobes, and anyone else who takes advantage of an audi-
ence uninformed about the subject matter and unable to distinguish argument from rhetoric.
The rise of the Nazis may not be a counterexample to Mill’s defense, but rather an illustration
of what can happen to a society that has not been able to develop in line with Mill’s idea of
humanity as a progressive species.
In venturing this defense, we are not wholly confident as to its total success against Crisp’s
sort of criticism.We do find it plausible that the discursive strength of a society evolves over time,
and Mill’s views on the laboring classes suggest that he saw things this way. It is also plausible that
demagoguery struggles to take hold when its audience is well informed about relevant facts. In
addition, totalitarian regimes routinely seek to purge society of disinterested intellectuals who
might publicly question what the regime is doing. However, the worry may remain that the
quality of debate evolves sufficiently slowly that ‘immunity’ to rabble-rousing politics takes some
time to secure and may never be fully obtained. After all, scientific knowledge may diffuse rela-
tively slowly compared to the spread of fascist ideology. Generally, human evolution (genetic or
cultural) tends to lag environmental change and cannot react easily to sudden shocks.
This may prove to be a significant concession for a Millian outlook to make. This is because
environment change has apparently accelerated greatly where human communication (and
hence expression) is concerned. It is hard to deny the assessment recently offered by the historian
Timothy Garton-Ash (2017: 137–38), who claims that “all forms of expression can potentially
reach farther and last longer than they did even 20 years ago, let alone in the era of John Stuart
Mill.” This summary reflects a variety of plausible generalizations: Cartoons that get published
in a French magazine may lead to people killing each other in Pakistan. A misguided post or
non-consensual photograph posted on social media may be literally impossible to purge from
the Internet. The fact that someone can say something online without revealing their identity
or location probably accounts for the tendency of very nasty and threatening content. All of this
is cause for concern and suggests that Mill’s optimism must now be qualified. But Garton-Ash,
who documents these examples alongside a great many others, still identifies as a Millian. He
concludes that the answer to such trends cannot be a resort to censorship.The state enforcement
of legislation cannot hope to cope with such an internationally diffuse and intangible web of
communication. Our best hope, he says, is to rely on humans finding ways to become more self-
regulating in their communications. Given the way in which the solution is sought in individual
freedom, and the potential for humans to adapt, and not in the powers of state coercion, it is still
very much a Millian view. And Mill’s optimism does not fly wholly in the face of the evidence.
Whatever the hazards of twenty-first century communication, there are the benefits. Growth in
access to online content is making it difficult for authoritarian states to prevent free expression
from circulating among their people. Again, the value is largely epistemic: State propaganda is
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being undermined as people ‘wise up’, and social media has played a role in facilitating civil
disobedience and forms of protest. More generally, the removal of media censorship is seen by
some social scientists as an important element of a “virtuous circle” of economic and political
institutions, whose mutual reinforcement maintains prosperity.18
And again, censorship is not the only sort of state intervention that might be used to solve
problems associated with free speech. This goes for the twenty-first century as well as the nine-
teenth. The danger Crisp points to comes from public pronouncements, and particularly public
pronouncements which are liable to reach previously unpersuaded audiences and encourage
them to adopt fascist views, particularly if this is because they are allowed to go unchallenged.
But as Mill’s ‘corn-dealer’ example shows, his defense of free speech takes into account the
changing dangers of context, and his underlying principle of exchange also means his defense of
free speech is not necessarily applicable to, for instance, demagogic speeches, spread of misinfor-
mation through one-sided advertising, and the like. Mill’s arguments might suggest the letters
of fascists ought to be allowed to appear in newspapers but would not support a fascist rally
through a predominantly Jewish or black neighborhood, nor prohibition of non-fascist media
outlets.This may be best thought of in terms of restrictions on where and when certain content
can be expressed, rather than as any restriction on content per se.
Similarly, Mill’s position allows for serious consideration of the potential harm of legit-
imizing extremist views if they are invited to participate in debates funded by public-service
broadcasters, though he would want that harm to be weighed against the potential value of such
ideas being debated and challenged in a public arena and thus either being roundly defeated, or
re-affirming other people’s anti-fascism as a “living truth.”What is more, even if Mill did support
such public engagement with extremism, it would have to be engagement. That is, he provides us
with good grounds for ‘coercing’ demagogues into answering their opponents properly, rather
than being able to simply choose who interviews them and what they are allowed to ask about,
or making speeches which no one can challenge, let alone forcibly removing from the arena
those who might potentially protest. Mill would probably be appalled about the ease with which
politicians (extremist or otherwise) are able to avoid answering difficult questions in televised
interviews or ‘debates’.19
In a similar vein, David Brink suggests that Mill’s arguments support what he calls
“deliberation-enhancing forms of censorship” (2014: 166) such as campaign-finance restrictions
(2014: 169–70). Of course, such examples of ‘censorship’ only really qualify as such if one adopts
the view of free speech currently maintained by the U.S. Supreme Court, to which Mill’s view
is much superior.20 On Mill’s account, such regulation would form part of the maintenance of a
system of genuine free exchange, as opposed to one in which the wealthiest can buy up all the
air time. Other sorts of regulation might be justified on Millian grounds: They might involve
publicly funded ‘fact-checking’ organizations (with the requisite funding for publishing and
disseminating their results); better dissemination of impartial information; and a general atti-
tude on the part of the public regarding what they are willing to believe, and the grounds on
which they are willing to vote for legislators and changes in statutes or public policy. There is
no principled reason why such measures cannot be part of what enables the culture of commu-
nication to become increasingly ‘self-regulating’ over time. It bears emphasizing that these are
delicate points. To the extent that private wealth has come to exert disproportionate influence
over political campaigning, there are genuine worries about restrictions on speech handing
similarly disproportionate influence to the state. Much depends on the possibility of setting up
institutions that can remain independent when politicians might wish to bend them to some
chosen agenda.
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The emergence of a genuinely discursive society is bound to be a slow process, and prob-
ably it will not occur wholly spontaneously. Thus, it needs the design and implementation of
institutions and systems of exchange. It might also be true that even more censorship than Mill
appears to desire might be justifiable on the route to such a society, though we should note
both Mill’s arguments for the way this almost paternalist censorship helps create passive citizens
who would themselves undermine the sustainability of such a system of exchange, and the pre-
viously mentioned types of “censorship” Mill’s arguments do support. Certainly, On Liberty does
not provide us with a detailed scheme for creating or implanting such a society, only a set of
arguments as to why it would be a good thing, and a few examples of what actions might, or
might not, be restricted in such a society, but it does provide us with principles upon which to
ground such a framework.
The problem of fragmentation is somewhat different. Mill wrote in the nineteenth cen-
tury, when, as he noted, newspapers were a relatively new thing. In the twenty-first century,
newspapers are not exactly the egalitarian forum for disseminating ideas that Mill saw as the
savior of the working classes. The general worry here is that the effective exchange of ideas can
be stymied when different perspectives are not brought into the same arena of debate. ‘Echo
chambers’21 arise because the very bulk of free expression leads people only to listen to or read
opinions which reaffirm their own view of the world –a view which may not be grounded in
reality, understanding or reflection. What is more, it prevents people from understanding their
opponents’ position, not only making it harder to enter into meaningful conversation, persua-
sion, and debate, but leading to disparagement, disdain, and distrust, even where the opinions of
experts are concerned. This in turn may lead us to be more willing to consider forcing the right
opinion (as we see it) on those who disagree with us, undermining the very foundations of
democracy, liberal rights and, in the end, these ‘forced’ opinions themselves.
If such fragmentation takes hold within a political community, the problem is that there is
little or no exchange of ideas going on, just reiteration of the same ideas within circles in which
they are accepted: an endless preaching to the converted members of one’s own fragment.To be
fair, Mill did appreciate this sort of possibility, as suggested by some remarks from the Inaugural
Address:
Look at a youth who has never been out of his family circle; he never dreams of any
other opinions or ways of thinking than those he has been bred up in; or, if he has
heard of any such, attributes them to some moral defect, or inferiority of nature or
education.
Mill 1984: 226
The observation is astute but is not accompanied by any suggestion as to what a solution might
be. Mill did not anticipate how the massive proliferation of different media outlets would make
fragmentation extremely difficult to prevent. Censorship per se would not be the answer. The
idea of ‘forcing’ adults to listen to alternative views sits very uneasily with Mill’s anti-paternalism.
Indeed, one of the more venerable insights of the liberal tradition is that while coercion might
make a person change their behavior, it is much less equipped to make them change (much less
improve) their mind.22 Suffice it to say that any solution to these problems requires more than
laissez-faire but less than censorship, though it is not clear precisely what.
One solution might involve breaking up the concentration of ownership and control.This is
not, of course, to obstruct the content of views, but rather to oppose the disproportionate power
with which some parties can broadcast them. In this way, the solution to fragmentation might
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overlap with attempts to suppress domination. Public-service broadcasting is another potential

aid, though not a complete solution (for, again, the problem of echo chambers is not that other
views are not being expressed, but that individuals refuse to listen to them). Another idea would
be to implement more of Mill’s ideas about education and how it ought to prepare children for
adult life and responsibilities as citizens in a discursive society. This has interesting implications
for just how hands-off the state could be, on Mill’s view, regarding how and what children were
taught outside of state schools. Perhaps Mill’s thought always was that parents could pick and
choose (much of) the content and context of their child’s education but could not allow the
child’s “permanent interests as a progressive being” to be retarded or damaged, and it certainly
seems plausible to think we have an interest in, and in being able to properly participate in, a
discursive society.
Overall, then, with regards to his ‘positive’ defense of free speech, Mill was perhaps optimistic.
But his view has the resources to defend intervention of the sorts needed to make his positive
defense not only more plausible, but more practicable.
Let us turn to the criticism leveled against Mill’s ‘negative’ arguments against censorship in
On Liberty, one which was raised by Mill’s contemporary (James Fitz-James Stephen) but which
also has contemporary relevance. This is the idea that when governments censor opinions,
it is not because they are sure they are false (as Mill seems to assume) but –at least in some
instances –because they know them to be true, and also know them to be harmful. Consider,
for example, publications of fairly technical information that instructs readers about the con-
struction of homemade weapons. Many jurisdictions continue to ban or heavily restrict such
publications, on the grounds that the information can be put to dangerous use. Another sort
of case is represented by things like violent pornography and video games. Here, the case for
censorship is founded on a somewhat different concern about what sort of attitude might be
conveyed by such ‘expressions’.
These cases are not really threatening to Mill’s project. Again, we should see an important
difference between free expression per se, and the free exchange of ideas. Mill is assumed to
argue against censoring such expression, and then the debate rages over whether or not he is
right to do so in any given example. But we are not sure this is the right reading of Mill in
these cases: recipes for chemical weapons, violent video games, and pornography are typically
not contributions (apart from, perhaps, in some extremely rare cases) to public discourse or an
exchange of ideas. The Anarchists’ Cookbook may have truth-apt content but such content does
not serve as stimulus for any important debate. One of the arguments against pornography is
that it precludes debate over what is a ‘good’ or ‘normal’ sexual relationship. Mill makes plain
that one of the most important reasons we should allow for free speech is to permit the free
exchange of ideas (and hence the improvement of opinions): but he also says that both speech
and actions are to be constrained by the harm principle, and both elements are, we think, of
importance in this case.
Proponents of (or apologists for) freedom to acquire such material often couch their defense
in terms of free expression. Such claims are often left unpacked, but one thought might be, of
course, that experimenting with chemicals and publishing one’s findings, or consuming video
games and pornography are “experiments in living.” This suggestion strikes us as less plausible
when applied only to forms depicting violence (and it might also be problematic if it is solely
about consumption and not ‘active participation’, which Mill wants to promote). In particular,
it is hard to see how such material, produced merely to be consumed, is articulating the sort
of content that might feature in a discursive exchange with its audience. To put the point
crudely, one may object to depictions of sex and violence but it is not clear that this involves
disagreeing with (rather than disapproving of) any content thereby expressed. More crudely still,
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it’s not immediately clear what anyone ever learned from violent pornography or video games,
at least nothing comparable to the valuable lesson that might be learned by working through
the flawed reasoning or misleading rhetoric of a fascist pamphlet. At the same time there is a
lingering sense that depictions of sex and violence often express some evaluative or normative
content. On the other hand, the free expression of content that many find offensive may help
a small, widely dispersed set of individuals share a lifestyle that they have in common.23 The
fact that others find this alien or repulsive may not count for anything, at least in the absence
of proper evidence that the content in question leads to some kind of harm, for example that
it genuinely reinforces the oppression of some group. Our remarks here are just meant to be
suggestive: This is, admittedly, a complex issue, partly because good evidence for the allegedly
grievous effects of such speech is hard to come by.24 But some have suggested that censorship
may be compatible with Mill’s overall position, particularly if Mill’s views link expression to
discursive improvement in ways similar to what we’ve suggested here, which involves consid-
erations of ‘harm’ to others, as well as of the ‘free development of [one’s own] individuality’.25
But as Joshua Cohen has pointed out, it might generally be better to seek ways of combatting
the oppressive background conditions that some published content reinforces, rather than just
restrict the content itself (1993: 249).
While there is wide debate on what constitutes ‘harm’ on Mill’s view, one basic thought is
that harm occurs whenever there is some negative impact on our interests as a progressive being,
or violation of any rights plausibly founded on those interests. Speech that violates, undermines,
or damages these interests can be legitimately censored on Mill’s account –and this might include
publishing on the Internet the recipe for poisonous gases (security being one of our interests).
This is a different rationale than that the free exchange of ideas ought to be protected (even
promoted), and thus there are two ways (at least) in which Mill might have the materials to
mount a defense against such objections to his negative arguments against censorship.
5. Conclusions
Mill’s defense of freedom of expression in On Liberty is rightly famous, and has generated a good
deal of debate, from his own day to ours. Our understanding of it is deepened when we see it in
the context of his other works. Our understanding is also deepened when we understand Mill
as supporting not a simple ‘free expression’ of opinions, nor a ‘marketplace of ideas’ regulated by
a laissez-faire, hands-off kind of tolerance, but the ‘free exchange’ of ideas. This in itself requires
more non-authoritative and also authoritative interferences or actions by the government than
is usually supposed. These include not only mandating that every child receive a sufficient edu-
cation, but also providing schools and paying for the education of at least some. It may also have
implications for campaign finance, public-service broadcasting, media ownership, and censor-
ship of extremist or offensive views, as well as throwing some light on why ‘echo chambers’ are
problematical and, perhaps, even dangerous.
We have emphasized what we describe as the ‘epistemic’ elements of Mill’s defense of free
speech. Broadly speaking, these seek to highlight the ways in which free expression allows
knowledge to both grow and disperse and include Mill’s claims about how knowledge and edu-
cation are important elements of human development. We do not claim that this exhausts any
plausible, or indeed any Millian, case for free speech. But we think that the epistemic character
of Mill’s defense is what is most readily appreciated by looking beyond the text of On Liberty. As
we have said, On Liberty will remain the central text, and there will always be ways of defending
free speech that do not have such epistemic preoccupations. Our goal here has been mainly to
show how much mileage Mill saw in such an epistemic strategy.
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Acknowledgments
The authors thank John Thrasher for very helpful comments on an earlier draft. Daniel
Halliday’s work on this chapter was supported by a research grant from the Center for Ethics
and Education (grant #G40371/553300). He gratefully acknowledges the Center’s support.
Notes
1 We follow Daniel Jacobson (2000: fn 26) in treating On Liberty as a popular work, in ways that might
help explain otherwise puzzling aspects of the text, such as occasional lack of analytic rigor. Similar
remarks could be made about the text of Utilitarianism, which first appeared as a series of magazine
articles, and is another very short text. We also note David Brink’s suggestion (2014: ix, 285) that On
Liberty can be distinguished from Mill’s “more applied” works.
2 For interpretations of Mill as a classical liberal, which emphasize his intellectual debts to the likes
of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, see Gaus (2017) and Riley (1998). For an interpretation that
distinguishes Mill from his classical liberal predecessors, see Freeman (2001), Baum (2007), Claeys
(1987, 2013), Sarvasy (1984, 1985), and McCabe (2015). For accounts that are less explicit about iden-
tifying a box in which Mill ought to be put, see Hollander (1985), Ten (1998), Kurer (1992), Stafford
(1998), Miller (2010: Chap. 8), and Rosen (2013, 210–11). There are also contemporary authors who
are skeptical about Mill’s defense of free speech on either interpretation (see, for example, van Mill
2017: Chap. 2).
3 The remarks in this paragraph are indebted to a similar distinction that David Brink (2014: 152–56)
draws between Mill’s “truth-tracking” and “deliberative” rationales, and which is worked out in more
detail than anything we say here.
4 An influential version of what we call the non-epistemic (though not necessarily anti-Millian) defense is
Scanlon (1972). A contemporary defense of free speech that identifies as Millian in a more explicitly epi-
stemic sense, and which distinguishes itself from such an approach is Braddon-Mitchell and West (2004).
Something of a hybrid is Cohen (1993), in which the case for free speech rests on a variety of interests,
including but not limited to our “deliberative” interest in inhabiting a culture that has ways of “finding out
which ways of life are supported by the strongest reasons” (1993: 228).This draws on what Cohen describes
as “the Millian thesis that favorable deliberative conditions require a diversity of messages” (1993: 247), but
Cohen’s case also draws on interests that are not ultimately deliberative in his Millian sense.
5 This view is sometimes given qualified defense by commentators who identify as broadly Millian when
it comes to free speech. Timothy Garton-Ash believes that part of the response to hate speech is to
become more thick-skinned and to deal with hate speech ourselves rather than through legislation: “An
essential and defining feature of a mature, liberal, democracy is that, so far as humanly possible, it replaces
external constraint with self-restraint” (2017: 229). The point is delicate and Garton-Ash is at pains not
to exaggerate it, but it has some substance. And its Millian credentials are real –see the remarks below
on state protection as a source of passivity among the citizenry and in On Liberty where Mill says that
“[i]‌t is obvious … that law and authority have no business with restraining” “the employment of vitu-
perative language” either by the powerful or the powerless (though the injustice of using it is worse on
the side of powerful). Rather, individual opinion “ought in every instance, to determine its verdict by
the circumstances of the individual case: condemning everyone, on whichever side of the argument he
places himself, in whose modes of advocacy either want of candour, or malignity, or bigotry, or intoler-
ance … manifest themselves … This is the real morality of public discussion” (1977a: 259).
6 For a useful disambiguation of these terms, see Freeman (2001).
7 A similar perspective is found in the Chapters on Socialism, particularly the closing remarks on why the
idea of private property is “not fixed but variable” (1967: 749–53).
8 Here we follow Jill Gordon (1997), who has more to say on this point.
9 This permits a somewhat charitable interpretation of On Liberty’s claim that “despotism is a legitimate
mode of government in dealing with barbarians” (1977a: 224). While it is easy to see this remark
as betraying a racist or imperialist attitude, it is worth attending to the more expansive remarks in
Representative Government. Here, Mill makes the point that societies first need to evolve a respect for
rule of law before democratic freedoms can flourish. This is now a respectable position about social
evolution (see Fukuyama 2011: 14–19). On Mill’s view of social progress, and what he means by
‘savage’ and ‘barbarian’ stages, see also Habibi (2017: 521).
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10 We are setting aside lots of detail about Mill’s overall position on the value of education in a liberal
society. For good general appraisals, see Donner (2007) and Gutmann (1982).
11 See especially the discussion of the Malthusian outlook (Mill 1965: 154–59).
12 Mill did not think that good curriculum design could draw on no generalizations at all, only that experi-
mentation is required to help identify superior curricula and to help them adapt over time.This position
was defended in his Inaugural Address to the University of St. Andrews, from which we quote below.
13 Eventually, the free development of individuality might lead people away from the pursuit of profit
(for instance, in alternative ‘hippy’ lifestyles) and, potentially more dangerously for the sustainability of
capitalism, might well lead to workers demanding fair sharing of profits or even revolutionary change.
Mill had nuanced views about the case for socialism (see Dale Miller 2003, 2010: Chap. 8; Jonathan
Riley 1996; and Helen McCabe 2015).
14 Miller (2010: 134).
15 For a more contemporary discussion of this aspect of markets in education, see Halliday (2016).
16 Though we think this is the thought that guides Mill in the chapter on the futurity of the laboring
classes in Principles, Mill develops this view more fully in On the Subjection of Women. This may be the
text in which Mill’s condemnation of social hierarchy is most emphatic, but little is made in Subjection
of any connection to freedom of expression. Here we have been helped by the very comprehensive
discussion and exegesis of Subjection in Morales (1996).
17 Ryan Muldoon (2015) argues that Mill’s comparison defense of individuality against the “despotism
of custom” turns out to be well-supported by contemporary work on norms and social inertia. This
goes some way toward vindicating Mill’s convictions about the role of custom in maintaining stasis
and mediocrity. For more general discussions of Mill on individuality, see Anderson (1991) and Miller
(2010: Chap. 7).
18 We borrow this term from Acemoglu and Robinson (2012: esp. Chap. 11). As these authors explain,
countries with repressive governments and high levels of poverty tend to lack virtuous circles.
19 Mill himself did not shy away from openly answering difficult questions put to him by the crowd when
standing for election in Westminster.
20 We are suppressing a thorny issue here that depends on careful attention to the political significance of
corporate speech. For more discussion, see Mahoney (2013).
21 We borrow this term from Cass Sunstein (2001: 74, 205), who raises precisely the sort of fragmentation
worry that we describe here.
22 Here we have in mind the views put forward by John Locke in his Letter Concerning Toleration, particularly
the remark that “It is only light and evidence that can work a change in men’s opinions; which light can in
no manner proceed from corporal sufferings, or any other outward penalties” (2003: 395). Mill makes little
reference to Locke in his political writings. But there is a clear continuity of thought regarding the way in
which mental improvement requires some degree of free thinking. Indeed, Mill was also concerned about
the ‘outward penalties’ of shame, loss of ‘face’ and offended amour propre which might prevent the ‘light’ of
evidence from working on men’s minds if rational arguments were presented to them in an antagonistic,
patronizing, or flat-footedly corrective way (see McCabe 2014).
23 Joseph Raz has claimed that free expression can “reassure those whose ways of life are being portrayed
that they are not alone” (1991: 311). Raz does not mention Mill anywhere in this defense but speaks of
the “validating function” of free expression. We take his point to be Millian insofar as it acknowledges
the role of free expression in allowing certain minority lifestyles to flourish.The point is also epistemic
insofar as validation of one’s way of life can be aided by knowing that like-minded people exist.
24 These cases are often associated with harms that obtain in some structural fashion: any single piece
of pornography, for instance, might not do any specific harm to any specific woman (presuming, of
course, that anyone participating in making it has freely consented and was not harmed in the pro-
cess). But this does not undermine the hypothesis that pornography in general (or, at least, the kind of
pornography most-usually produced, which objectifies women, treating them as mere objects for the
sexual gratification of men, and even when not specifically portraying the violence, humiliation, or
degradation of women in order to engender male sexual pleasure, still considers only the male perspec-
tive, treating the male orgasm as the supreme purpose of sexual activity) helps perpetuate a patriarchal
culture which harms women, not only through obvious repercussions of sexual violence, rape, and
objectification, but in more insidious ways regarding men’s treatment, assessment, and view of women.
25 According to Vernon (1996), Mill’s position might allow him to support the censorship of violent
pornography, which may have little discursive input and, at least in some forms, reinforce gender hier-
archies that Mill saw as unjust.
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7
EPISTEMIC DEMOCRACY
Jason Brennan
What, if anything, justifies democracy?

One basic question in political philosophy is who should hold power. Just as there are com-
peting answers to that question, so there are competing views about which criteria we should
use to answer the question. Proceduralism holds that some ways of distributing political power
are intrinsically just, or, alternatively, that some ways are intrinsically unjust.1 In contrast, instru-
mentalist or epistemic theories hold that (1) there are procedure-independent right answers to at
least some political questions, and (2) what justifies a distribution of power or decision-making
method is, at least in part, that this distribution or method tends to select the right answer (see
Estlund 2007; Brennan 2016a).
To hold an “epistemic conception of democracy,” is to hold that democracies tend to, in
one way or another, track some normative standards about what governments ought to do,
or that democracies tend to produce certain good/just/right outcomes (e.g., Cohen 2006;
List and Goodin 2001; Estlund 2007). Advocates of epistemic democracy hold that there are
some procedure-independent standards for assessing the quality of political decisions, and at
least part of what justifies democracy is that it tends to produce higher quality decisions than
other forms of government. To illustrate, a liberal might hold that democracy is good at least
in part because democracies tend to recognize and protect rights. Or an egalitarian might hold
that democracy is good because democracies tend to have more equal distributions of income.
Epistemic democrats believe that for at least some normative questions, democracies tend to
track the right answer; they deny that democratic decisions are good simply because they are
made democratically.
There are at least two major conceptions of epistemic democracy. The first view –which
we might call the “wisdom of the crowd” view –holds that in certain conditions, the demo-
cratic electorate as a whole makes wise decisions at the voting booth, or, more narrowly, that
deliberative bodies composed of randomly selected voters tend to make good decisions. As
Melissa Schwartzberg (herself somewhat skeptical of epistemic democracy) summarizes the
wisdom of the crowd view, “[e]‌pistemic democracy defends the capacity of ‘the many’ to make
correct decisions and seeks to justify democracy by reference to this ability” (2015: 187). The
wisdom of the crowd view holds that two heads are better than one, and many heads are better
than fewer.
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The second view –which we might dub the “wisdom of the process” view –holds that
the democratic governments as a whole tend to implement relatively good policies and laws.
A person holding this view claims that certain features of modern democratic governments –
such as the separation of powers, checks and balances, the party system, contestatory elections,
technocratic bureaucracies, special interest politics, or a combination of such factors –tend to
result in good outcomes.
Some epistemic democrats advocate both views –they believe that both the crowd and the
process are wise –while others might advocate the latter but not the former. For instance, an
epistemic democrat might hold that the electorate is not wise, but then maintain that demo-
cratic checks and balances tend to produce good outcomes, in part because party systems,
entrenched bureaucracies, and other factors allow democratic governments to “get away” with
passing rules and laws that the electorate opposes (see Achen and Bartels 2016; Shapiro 2003;
Brennan 2016a).
A classic illustration of the wisdom of the crowd view is the jelly bean experiment. A pro-
fessor asks students to guess how many jelly beans are in a jar. Individual student guesses are
distributed all over, but the class’s mean guess is very close to correct. The larger the number
of guesses, the more accurate the mean guess becomes. Only a small minority of individuals
are more accurate than the class’s mean guess (Suroweicki 2005: 5). In this case, the crowd as a
whole is wiser than nearly all of the individuals within it.
As an example of the wisdom of the process view, consider how markets work according to
standard neoclassical economics. Market prices emerge from individual actions and preferences.
In general, if not always, market prices quickly and efficiently coordinate the activities of
billions of people, even though individual agents in the market know hardly anything about the
economy, and even though no individual or group of experts could themselves plan a large-
scale economy. More specifically, no single human being has the knowledge or ability to make
a number 2 pencil from scratch (including growing the tree, making the saw that cuts it down,
the truck that takes it to the sawmill, making the paint, etc.), and yet the market produces pencils
cheaply and efficiently (Read 1958). As individuals, people are too dumb to make pencils by
themselves, but in a market economy, as a collective, they are excellent at it. In standard neo-
classical economics, we cannot say that all consumers and producers as a collective whole know
how to run the economy efficiently, yet the market process works. The process is smart though
the individuals participating within it, as individuals or as a collective, are not.
In this essay, I will argue that the most defensible version of epistemic democracy is the
wisdom of the process view. The evidence for the wisdom of the process view is stronger than
the evidence for the wisdom of the crowd view. In fact, there is good evidence that in democratic
decision-making, the “crowd” is not wise, but systematically in error. Nevertheless, though the
crowd is not wise, the democratic political process as a whole has a tendency to produce good
outcomes. To put this thesis in a more exciting and radical way: perhaps the reason democracy
tends to work so well is that, in a sense, it does not work. Democracies tend to produce good
outcomes because they respond to citizens’ interests, but downstream, post-election decision-
makers retain significant freedom to implement policies that the crowd opposes.
Pure proceduralist skepticism about epistemic democracy

By definition, epistemic democrats are committed to the view that there are procedure-
independent right, correct, or true answers to at least some political questions. They hold that
for many political decisions, if not all, there is some truth of the matter about what ought
to be done. (An epistemic democrat might agree that there is no independent truth of the
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matter about what color flag a country ought to have, but there is an independent truth about
which rights it ought to protect.) There are better and worse decisions, as judged by some true,
procedure-independent standard. The reason to advocate democracy over other forms of gov-
ernment is that it tends to track the truth.
Note that while epistemic democracy is an instrumentalist view of government, as it holds
that part of what justifies democracy is how well it performs, epistemic democrats need not
be thoroughgoing consequentialists. In general, consequentialist moral theories hold that what
makes an action right is that the action can be expected to lead to the best overall consequences.
Some epistemic democrats are consequentialists (e.g., Arneson 2003, 2004), but an epistemic
democrat could instead subscribe to a deontological view. For instance, an epistemic democrat
could hold that democracies are superior to other forms of government because they are the
most likely to recognize, respect, and protect people’s natural rights. In that case, the epistemic
democrat advocates democracy because it best tracks a deontological theory of justice.
Some democratic theorists are skeptical of epistemic democracy because they are skeptical
of the claim that there are procedure-independent standards by which to judge democratic
outcomes. Many democratic theorists are pure proceduralists (e.g., Arendt 1967: 114). Pure
proceduralism is the thesis (a) that there are no independent moral standards for evaluating the
outcome of the decision-making institutions, and (b) that some political decision-making
procedures are either intrinsically just or unjust. For instance, Jürgen Habermas says, “The
notion of a higher law belongs to the premodern world. There are no standards that loom over
the political process, policing its decisions, not even the standard of reason itself ” (1996: 106).
Habermas believes there are moral standards governing how democracies ought to make
decisions but denies there are any standards for judging what democracies decide. As another
illustration, consider this quotation from political theorist Iñigo González-Ricoy:
In a democratic society no process-independent moral criteria can be referred to in

order to settle what counts as a harmful, unjust or morally unjustified exercise of the
right to vote, for voting is a device that is only called for precisely when citizens dis-
agree on what counts as harmful, unjust and morally unjustified.
González-Ricoy 2012: 50
González-Ricoy claims that because people disagree about what counts as harmful or unjust,
it is illegitimate to refer to any independent standards of justice to judge what democracies do.
Pure proceduralists are not moral nihilists –they do not claim there is no moral truth at all.
Rather, they believe that there are truths about what decision-making procedures we ought
to use, but no truths about what we ought to decide. This puts them in an odd position: why
would principles of justice or political legitimacy be limited only to how we decide rather than
what we decide? Some political theorists answer this question by saying that since people dis-
agree about what government ought to do, justice requires that we use a fair procedure for
resolving our disagreements. However, as David Estlund points out, a concern for fairness does
not get us to democracy. We could instead “flip a coin,” that is, we could randomly select some
citizens’ preferred policies or candidates over others (Estlund 2007).
Further, pure proceduralism has some deeply implausible implications. For instance, suppose
we disagreed about whether we should do something horrific, such as nuke a neighboring state
for fun, or allow parents to kill their children for fun. Suppose, after following an idealized delib-
erative procedure, the majority of citizens (or, if you like, every citizen) agreed that we should
nuke the neighbor or allow filicide. A pure proceduralist would have to say that in such a case,
it would, as a result, become permissible to nuke the neighbor or to commit filicide. But that
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seems absurd –it seems absurd to claim that evils could become permissible by democratic fiat.
If so, then pure proceduralism must be false. There must be at least some independent standards
by which to judge democratic decisions, and the main question is what those standards are.
Another way of putting this is that pure proceduralists are committed to skepticism about
almost every theory and view within political philosophy. What personal and economic rights
do people have? Pure proceduralists have to say: whatever rights a democracy decides.What are
the standards for social justice? Whatever a democracy decides. What is the correct theory of
criminal justice? Whatever a democracy decides. Is capitalism or socialism more just? Whatever
a democracy decides. What democracies do is just simply because democracies do it.
Epistemic democrats can and do accept that people are fallible and that there is reasonable
disagreement about right and wrong. An epistemic democrat need not believe that she herself
knows what the independent standards or right answers to political questions are. Instead, epi-
stemic democrats try to appeal to features of democratic decision-making that, they believe,
make it likely that democracies will better tend to track the truth or produce better outcomes
than other forms of government, whatever that truth may be.
Political ignorance, misinformation, and irrationality

Before asking what amount of wisdom the crowd or the democratic process has, we might ask
how much wisdom the individuals within the crowd have. The answer, for most of them, is not
much.
Beginning in the 1950s, researchers at the University of Michigan and elsewhere began
examining how much political knowledge the average and typical voters had.2 The results were
disheartening. As Philip Converse summarizes, “The two simplest truths I know about the dis-
tribution of political information in modern electorates are that the mean is low and the vari-
ance is high” (1990: 372). Ilya Somin says,“The sheer depth of most individual voters’ ignorance
is shocking to many observers not familiar with the research” (2013: 17). In his extensive review
of the empirical literature on voter knowledge, Somin concludes that at least 35% of voters are
“know-nothings” (2013: 17–37, emphasis mine). I emphasize “voters” because not everyone
votes, and people who choose not to vote tend to know less than people who choose to vote.
Political Scientist Larry Bartels says, “The political ignorance of the American voter is one the
best-documented features of contemporary politics” (1996: 194).
For instance, during election years, most citizens cannot identify any congressional candidates
in their district (see Hardin 2009: 60). Citizens generally don’t know which party controls
Congress (Somin 2013: 17–21). Most Americans do not know even roughly how much is spent
on social security or how much of the federal budget it takes up (Somin 2013: 29). During the
2000 U.S. presidential election, while slightly more than half of all Americans knew Gore was
more liberal than Bush, they did not understand what the term “liberal” meant. In fact, 57% of
them knew Gore favored a higher level of spending than Bush did, but significantly less than
half knew that Gore was more supportive of abortion rights, more supportive of welfare-state
programs, favored a higher degree of aid to black people, or was more supportive of envir-
onmental regulation (Somin 2013: 31). Only 37% knew that federal spending on the poor
had increased or that crime had decreased in the 1990s (Somin 2013: 32). On many of these
questions, Americans did worse than a coin flip –they were systematically mistaken. Similar
results hold for other election years (see, e.g., Althaus 2003: 11).
Voters do poorly on tests of basic political knowledge. But such tests overestimate what voters
know for at least two reasons. First, most surveys give voters a multiple-choice test. They mark
lucky guesses as correct answers. Second, most surveys, such as the American National Election
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Studies or the Pew Research Center Polls, only test easily verifiable basic knowledge (such as
who the president is or which party controls Congress), rather than advanced social scientific
knowledge, such as voters’ understanding of economics or sociology. Not surprisingly, attempts
to measure such knowledge also produce disheartening results. Americans have systematically
different beliefs from economists about how the economy functions, and systematically different
beliefs from political scientists regarding how government functions (Caplan 2007; Caplan et al.
2013). These differences in belief are not explained by demographic differences between aca-
demic social scientists and the lay public.
Every four years, the American National Election Studies ask voters who they are, what
they know, and what policies they prefer. With this massive amount of data, it is possible
to determine, through statistical analysis, how demographic factors affect policy preferences
(holding knowledge constant), and how knowledge affects policy preferences (holding demo-
graphics constant). It is thus possible to estimate what policies the voting public would support
if it had full knowledge, and also what it would support it were completely ignorant or system-
atically in error. In one such study, Scott Althaus finds that, holding demographics constant, a
poorly informed voting public has systematically different preferences from a well-informed
voting public (see Althaus 2003: 129; Caplan 2007).3 Worse, the actual median voter’s policy
preferences are closer to those of the badly informed voter than of a well-informed voter.
Other studies using similar methods find similar results (Caplan 2007; Caplan et al. 2013;
Gilens 2012).
Voters do not just appear to be ignorant and misinformed, but also irrational. The
overwhelming consensus in political psychology, based on a huge and diverse range of studies, is
that most citizens process political information in deeply biased, partisan-motivated ways, rather
than in dispassionate, rational ways. Political psychologists Milton Lodge and Charles Taber
summarize the body of extant work: “The evidence is reliable [and] strong … in showing that
people find it very difficult to escape the pull of their prior attitudes and beliefs, which guide the
processing of new information in predictable and sometimes insidious ways” (2013: 169). Here
Lodge and Taber mean both (a) that voters suffer in particular from confirmation/disconfirm-
ation bias, that is, that they ignore and evade evidence contrary to their previous views, while
overrating evidence that validates their existing views, and (b) that random emotions greatly
influence how voters process information. (For instance, if you happen to be sad or happy right
before you encounter a new piece of evidence, that changes whether and how you take it in.)
Political psychologists Leonie Huddy, David Sears, and Jack Levy say, “Political decision-making
is often beset with biases that privilege habitual thought and consistency over careful consid-
eration of new information” (2013: 11). Voters suffer from a wide range of biases, including
confirmation bias, disconfirmation bias, motivated reasoning, intergroup bias, availability bias,
and prior attitude effects.
The dominant explanation for why voters are so ignorant or misinformed is the rational
ignorance theory.This view starts by noting that the probability that an individual vote will break
a tie in an election is vanishingly small (see Brennan and Lomasky 2003: 56–57, 119; Gelman
et al. 2012). Individual voters seem to be aware that their chances of making a difference are
low. Acquiring political information is costly, taking time and effort.When the expected costs of
acquiring information of a particular sort exceed the expected benefits of possessing that sort of
information, people will usually not bother to acquire the information. Thus, voters are ration-
ally ignorant –most do not invest in political information because it does not pay. Furthermore,
voters may be “rationally irrational”: they do not expend the effort to correct their cognitive
biases when reasoning about politics, because the costs of doing so exceed the expected benefits
(Caplan 2007; Brennan 2016a). Since individual votes make no difference, individual voters are
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incentivized to remain ignorant, or to indulge irrational thought processes or mistaken political

ideologies.
Now, some democrats dispute whether voters are quite as ignorant as the studies say. They
agree that voters lack the information the studies test. However, they claim, voters have other
forms of information which are relevant for politics. As one public debate partner of mine put
it, colorfully: “Knowing the price of a bus ticket is as important as knowing the unemployment
rate.” But while voters surely know a great deal about their personal experiences, it’s unclear
how this helps them as individuals (or in aggregate) when it comes to choosing parties or
policies.
A priori arguments for the “wisdom of the crowd” view

The wisdom of the crowd view holds that wisdom or knowledge is an emergent property
of the group. Though individuals within the group have inaccurate beliefs, having them vote
together might cause the group as a whole to make accurate or good decisions. There are a few
cases –such as guessing the number of jelly beans or the weight of farm animals –where large
crowds’ mean guesses tend to be accurate. There are others cases where the mean guesses are far
off. Defenders of the wisdom of the crowd view need a general theory to explain when the
crowd is wise and when it is not.
To show that competence is an emergent feature of democratic decision-making, polit-
ical theorists frequently cite three mathematical theorems, (1) The Miracle of Aggregation
Theorem, (2) Condorcet’s Jury Theorem, and (3) The Hong-Page Theorem.
The Miracle of Aggregation Theorem holds that a large democracy with a minority of well-
informed voters can perform as well as a small democracy made up entirely of well-informed
voters (Converse 1990: 381–82). The argument for this theorem is simple. Suppose a voter is
entirely ignorant. She is asked to choose between two candidates, A and B. Being ignorant, she
has no reason to pick either candidate, and so will just choose at random. If there are a large
number of random voters, then voters will be randomly distributed, and cancel each other out.
The small minority of informed voters will have systematic preferences for one candidate, and
so that candidate will end up with a majority and win.
In the abstract, this theorem seems plausible, but it might not describe what happens in
real-life democracies. The theorem assumes voters are so ignorant that they vote randomly.
But empirical work reveals that the real-life voters we call “ignorant” do not vote randomly.
For example, they are strongly biased to select the incumbent over the challenger (Somin
1998: 431).4 They are biased to “follow the leader,” that is, to settle on the same candidate that
other ignorant voters have picked, rather than to vote at random (Jakee and Sun 2006). As we
discussed above, their preferences do not track the preferences of a simulated fully informed
electorate.
Condorcet’s Jury Theorem holds that if voters are independent, and if the average voter is suffi-
ciently well-motivated and is more likely than not to be correct, then, as a democracy becomes
larger and larger, the probability that the voting public will get the right answer approaches 1
(de Condorcet 1976: 48–49). Thus, even if individual voters are on average just slightly more
likely than chance to make the right choice, Condorcet’s Jury Theorem says that an electorate
of only 10,000 voters is close to certain to make the correct choice.
Whether Condorcet’s Jury Theorem tells us anything at all about real-life democracy depends
on whether democratic voting meets a number of conditions. For instance, voters have to be
sufficiently independent of one another –they cannot just be copying each other’s votes.5 But
empirical work provides strong evidence that voters are conformists and do in fact follow each
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other (Jakee and Sun 2006). However, as I will discuss below, the main worry is that voters in
fact make systematic mistakes.
The Hong-Page Theorem holds that under the right conditions, cognitive diversity among the
participants in a collective decision-making process better contributes to that process producing
right outcomes than increasing the participants’ individual reliability or ability (Hong and Page
2001). These conditions are as follows:
( 1) the participants must have genuinely diverse models of the world;

(2) the participants must have sufficiently complex models of the world;
(3) the participants must agree on what the problem is and what would count as a solution;
(4) the participants must all be trying to solve the problem together;
(5) the participants must be willing to learn from others and take advantage of other participants’
knowledge.6
The conditions for the Hong- Page Theorem are highly demanding. It requires that
participants have complex models of the worlds, but, as Scott Page writes: “For democracy to
work, people need good predictive models. And often, the problems may be too difficult or too
complex for that to be the case” (2007: 345). It may be that most voters have overly simple
models of the world.
The Hong-Page Theorem also assumes individual decision-makers have identified a problem
and are each trying to solve that problem. It assumes individual decision-makers agree on what
the problem is, that they are each dedicated to solving that problem, and that they are willing to
listen to each other in an open-minded and rational way. It assumes that when the problem has
been solved, the participants will agree that it has in fact been sold.
But it’s far from obvious that actual democratic deliberation is anything like that. In real-
world deliberation, deliberators frequently fail to listen to one another and instead dig in their
heels. In a comprehensive survey of the empirical research on democratic deliberation, political
scientist Tali Mendelberg says that the “empirical evidence for the benefits that deliberative
theorists expect” is “thin or non-existent” (2002: 154), adding that “in most deliberations about
public matters,” group discussion tends to “amplify” intellectual biases rather than “neutralize”
them (2002: 176). In the real-world, voters do not agree on just what the “problem” is that pol-
itics is trying to solve, nor do they always agree that problems have been solved. For example,
Americans in the early 1990s wanted crime rates to go down. In the next twenty years, crime
rates went down dramatically, but few Americans knew this (see Somin 2013: 18–21). In fact,
Americans mistakenly think gun crimes are up.7
All this aside, there is a common worry about these three theorems. Each of the three
theorems claims that if certain conditions obtain, then a democratic voting body as a whole
will make reliable decisions, even though individuals within that body are not particularly reli-
able. The essential problem with all three theorems, though, is that empirical work seems to
show that the voting public makes systematic errors. “Ignorant” voters do not have random
preferences. For instance, in economics, the median voter advocates significant protectionism,
while economists both Left and Right advocate free trade (Caplan 2007). Numerous studies
find that the mean, median, and modal voters have different policy preferences than they
would have were they better informed (see Althaus 2003; Gilens 2012; Achen and Bartels 2016;
Brennan 2016a).
It is hard to overstate the importance of critiques based on systematic error. If citizens are
systematically mistaken, then by definition their errors are not randomly distributed, and the
miracle of aggregation does not occur. And if they are systematically mistaken, then Condorcet’s
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Jury Theorem implies not that democracies always pick the right answer, but that they always
pick the wrong answer. If they are systematically mistaken, then citizens lack the cognitive
diversity the Hong-Page Theorem needs to generate the right results.
The wisdom of the process

A priori “proofs” of the wisdom of the crowd view are problematic for many reasons. Real-life
democracies, such as Canada, France, Sweden, Germany, the United States, and so on, do not
quite seem to fit the models, in part because multiple empirical studies find that real-life voting
publics make systematic mistakes on both basic political knowledge and advanced social scien-
tific knowledge.
Nevertheless, this by itself does not show that epistemic democracy is mistaken. After all,
epistemic democrats in general take a comparative approach. They need not claim that democra-
cies always or even usually get the right answer. Instead, they need only argue that democracies
tend to do better than the feasible or extant alternatives, such as one-party systems, dictatorships,
absolute monarchies, oligarchies, and the like.
As an illustration, suppose democracies tend to make correct decisions only 1/10th of the
time, but the second-best alternative regime-type tended to make correct decisions only 1/
11th of the time. Suppose also that when democracies make wrong decisions, they tend to be
only 1 to 2 standard deviations in error, while the next best system tends to be 2 to 3 standard
deviations in error. In such a case, democracy as a whole would be an unreliable and, indeed, an
incompetent political decision-making method. Nevertheless, epistemic considerations would
still favor democracy over any other system.Thus, an epistemic democrat might say, “democracy
is the worst form of government except for all those that have been tried from time to time…”
(Winston Churchill, quoted in Langworth 2008: 574).
An epistemic democrat could thus admit that voters tend to be ignorant, misinformed, and
irrational, but then argue, quite plausibly, that nevertheless, democracies tend to do a better job than
the alternatives at respecting and promoting a wide range of citizens’ interests. For instance, empir-
ical work shows that there are strong positive correlations between (a) how democratic a country is
and (b) how strongly a country respects non-political civil and personal liberties, and also between
(c) how strongly a country respects economic liberties and (d) the wealth and income enjoyed by
both the average citizen of a country and the citizen at the 10th percentile of income.8
Though these strong correlations exist, correlation is, of course, not sufficient for causation.
Perhaps democratic politics tends to lead to liberal results and to prosperity. Perhaps liberal and
prosperous countries tend to become more democratic. Perhaps some third factor tends to
produce both. Perhaps democracy and liberalism tend to be mutually reinforcing.
Leading institutional economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson argue that dem-
ocracies do not just happen be liberal and prosperous, but democratic politics tends to lead
to liberalism and prosperity. They claim political and economic regimes fall into two broad
types: extractive and inclusive (Acemoglu and Robinson 2012). In extractive regimes, power is
concentrated into the hands of the few, and these few in turn use their power to expropriate
wealth and dominate the majority. In inclusive regimes, power is widely dispersed. Institutions
and laws in inclusive regimes tend to be designed to benefit the majority of citizens. Inclusive
regimes tend to enjoy the rule of law, respect for private property, and reduced economic rent
seeking. In turn, this leads to greater economic prosperity and respect for civil rights.
While Acemoglu and Robinson might be right, we should be careful not to presume that
the reasons democracies are so liberal is that most democratic citizens strongly advocate civil
or economic liberalism. As Scott Althaus (2003: 11), Bryan Caplan (2007: 51), Martin Gilens
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(2012: 106–11) each conclude (using different surveys and data sets), the modal and median
citizens in the United States are much less supportive of economic or civil liberties than more
elite, educated, and higher-income citizens. Many modern democracies appear to be significantly
more liberal than we might expect, given what the modal and median voter tends to support.
For many years, and perhaps still, the dominant model in political science of how politicians
respond to voter preferences was the Median Voter Theorem.9 According to the Median Voter
Theorem, politicians in any given district will tend to advocate and attempt to implement the
policy preferences of the median voter from that district. The basic argument is that politicians
on either extreme, left or right, can usually win more votes by moving toward the political
center, where the center is defined by the median voter that that district advocates. Some evi-
dence for this model can be seen in the U.S. presidential elections. After the primaries, the
Democratic and Republican nominees tend to move toward the center; they advocate more
moderate policies than they did during the primaries.
One recent challenge to the Median Voter Theorem may help to explain why democracies
perform better than we might expect, in light of widespread voter ignorance and misinfor-
mation. Recently, Martin Gilens measured how responsive different presidents have been to
different groups of voters. Gilens finds that when voters at the 90th, 50th, and 10th percentiles
of income disagree about policy, presidents are about six times more responsive to the policy
preferences of the rich than the poor (2012: 80).
If Gilens is right, epistemic democrats should take heart. Democracy performs well in part
because it does not automatically give the median voter what he or she wants. Study after
study finds that political knowledge is strongly, positively correlated with income; voters at
the 90th percentile of income will generally be much better informed than voters at the 50th
or especially 10th percentile (see, e.g., Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996). Furthermore, voters
tend to vote and form their policy preferences sociotropically (for what they perceive to be
the national interest).10 (Thus, siding with what higher-income voters want does not neces-
sarily mean advancing their interests over others.) Gilens finds that, for example, high-income
and high-information Democratic voters have systematically different policy preferences from
low-income, low-information Democrats. High-income Democrats tend to have high degrees
of political knowledge, while poor Democrats tend to be ignorant or misinformed. Poor
Democrats approved more strongly of invading Iraq in 2003. They were more strongly in favor
of the Patriot Act, of invasions of civil liberty, of torture, of protectionism, and of restricting
abortion rights and access to birth control. They were less tolerant of homosexuals and more
opposed to gay rights (Gilens 2012: 106–11).
In general, democratic voters elect politicians with certain ideological or policy bents. In
doing so, they make it more likely that laws, regulations, and policies fitting those bents will be
implemented. But it is not as though whatever policies most voters happen to support during
an election are immediately implemented. Instead, there is a wide range of political bodies and
administrative procedures that mediate between what the majority of the moment appears to
want during the election and what laws and rules actually get passed. Many empirically minded
democratic theorists argue that these intermediary bodies and processes help explain why dem-
ocracies make good decisions. Consider that:
• Large government bureaucracies have significant independence. They do not simply follow
presidential or congressional orders, but instead set their own agendas and act without, or
even in defiance of, oversight from elected officials.
• The judiciary similarly has significant power to change or to veto democratic legislation, or
to create laws itself.
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• The political process –with checks and balances, frequent elections, and so on –tends to
prevent political instability (see, e.g., Oppenheimer and Edwards 2012: 119–222).
• While voters are badly informed, politicians are much better informed, and many are rea-
sonably well-motivated. Politicians and political parties make deals with one another and
compromise, or they hold fast and prevent the other side from unilaterally imposing its will.
As a result, political outcomes tend to be relatively moderate and conservative, in the sense
that changes from the status quo come gradually.
• Political parties have significant power to shape the political agenda and make decisions
independently of voters’ desires, opinions, and wishes. Since most voters are ignorant, they
are unlikely to know what the parties have done and are thus unlikely to punish them for
imposing laws the voters wouldn’t like if only they knew about them.11
Each of these mediating factors reduces the power of the majority of the moment during the
election, and instead places greater power in the hands of more informed citizens. In that sense,
they are epistemic checks within a democratic system. But, at the same time, these bodies and
processes are not dictatorial.They can be checked by the electorate, and an unusually dissatisfied
electorate can vote to create change.
To summarize, the arguments and positions we have reviewed in this section do not purport
to show that, somehow, when we get lots of relatively ignorant people together, they will end up
voting in a way that closely approximates the truth. Rather, the arguments are that, as a whole,
the various inclusive systems of checks and balances in modern democracies tend to perform
well, compared to the alternatives. Most governing is done by politicians and bureaucrats who
to a significant degree act against citizens’ policy preferences. Yet politicians and bureaucrats are
disciplined to a significant degree to serve the public interest, rather than simply serving their
own personal interests, because inclusive voting allows citizens to punish bad behavior and reward
good behavior, at least to a significant degree more than we see in extant non-democratic systems.
The epistocratic challenge

Political scientists generally defend democracy on epistemic grounds. They’ve produced
an impressive body of work explaining why democratic procedures tend to produce good
outcomes (even if the “wisdom of the crowd” view is mistaken). I have reviewed only a small
sample of that work here.
However, while there is strong evidence that democracies tend to outperform other extant
forms of government, there might be new forms of government that outperform democracy.
In particular, perhaps some form of epistocracy might be preferable to democracy, at least on epi-
stemic grounds. A political regime is said to be epistocratic to the extent that political power is, by
law, distributed according to competence, skill, and the good faith to act upon that skill.12 There
are many possible forms of epistocracy, including:
1. Restricted Suffrage: Citizens may acquire the legal right to vote and run for office only if they
are deemed (through some sort of process) competent and/or sufficiently well-informed
(Brennan 2011).
2. Plural Voting: As in a democracy, every citizen has a vote. However, some citizens, those who
are deemed (through some legal process) to be more competent or better informed, have
additional votes (Mill 1975; Mulligan forthcoming).
3. The Enfranchisement Lottery: Electoral cycles proceed as normal, except that by default no
citizen has any right to vote. Immediately before the election, thousands of citizens are
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selected, via a random lottery, to become pre-voters. These pre-voters may then earn the
right to vote, but only if they participate in certain competence-building exercises, such as
deliberative forums with their fellow citizens (López-Guerra 2014).
4 . Epistocratic Veto: All laws must be passed through democratic procedures via a democratic
body. However, an epistocratic body with restricted membership retains the right to veto
rules passed by the democratic body (Brennan 2016a).
5. Weighted Voting/Government by Simulated Oracle: Every citizen may vote, but each must take a
quiz concerning basic political knowledge at the same time. Their votes are weighted based
on their objective political knowledge, perhaps while statistically controlling for the influ-
ence of race, income, sex, and/or other demographic factors (Brennan 2016a).
Epistocracy should not be conflated with technocracy. For many, the term “technocracy” connotes
a government with extensive power over its citizenry, which imbues bands of experts with
significant power, and which attempts to engage in various forms of social engineering. An
epistocrat need not accept technocracy so defined; a fortiori, some democrats do accept technoc-
racy so defined (see, e.g.,Thaler and Sunstein 2008). Nor should epistocracy be described as the
“rule of the few” (pace Landemore 2012). Suppose an epistocrat favored excluding the bottom
50% of voters. In the United States, that would still be the rule of 100 million voters –the rule
of the many, if not quite everybody.
Epistocrats might favor using the same checks and balances within current democratic
systems. Epistocracies might have parliaments, contested elections, free political speech open
to all, contestatory and deliberative forums, and so on.13 These epistocracies might retain many
of the institutions, decision-making methods, procedures, and rules that we find in the best-
functioning versions of democracy.The major difference between epistocracy and democracy is
that people do not, by default, have an equal right to vote or run for office.
There are a number of arguments for epistocracy, and not surprisingly, in general,
epistocrats defend epistocracy on epistemic grounds. Epistocrats make note of the widespread
voter ignorance and misinformation we discussed above, and then argue that distributing
basic political power in unequal ways could lead to better outcomes. In general, though, their
arguments are somewhat speculative, because at present we have few or no viable examples
of epistocracy.14
Conclusion
In general, the best places to live are democracies, not one-party states, absolute monarchies, or
oligarchies. Epistemic democrats of all stripes think this is not merely a coincidence, and that
part of what justifies democracy is that it tends to produce good and just outcomes. In this
chapter, we have examined two forms of epistemic democracy, the wisdom of the crowd view
and the wisdom of the process view. We saw that the main arguments for the wisdom of the
crowd view seem weak, but there are stronger arguments for the wisdom of the process view.
At present, though, the main challenge for epistemic democrats is to explain why some form
of epistocracy does not produce an even wiser process, or, if it does, why this is not sufficient
grounds to prefer epistocracy to democracy.
Notes
1 For instance,Thomas Christiano (1996, 2008) thinks democracy is intrinsically just because it expresses
that all citizens have equally valuable lives.
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2 Of course, one issue is just what counts as political knowledge. Even “ignorant” voters presumably have
some knowledge about their own lives and local conditions, which in principle could be important for
making good political decisions.
3 Both Althaus and Caplan correct for the influence of demographic factors.
4 For an empirical confirmation of these claims, see Bartels (1996) and Alvarez (1997).
5 So, for instance, David Estlund (2007: 136–58) doesn’t dispute the mathematics of Condorcet’s Jury
Theorem (CJT) but denies that it tells us anything about real-life democracies. Similarly, even though
it would be ideologically convenient for me if the CJT applied to actual democracies (because I think
democracies are largely incompetent and because I think I can prove that average and median levels of
competence among voters is <0.5), I also think it is just a mathematical curiosity.
6 See Somin (2013: 114) and Hong and Page (2001).
7 http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/nation/la-na-nn-gun-crimes-pew-report-20130507.
8 For a review of this literature, see Brennan (2016b).
9 Achen and Bartels (2016) are deeply skeptical of even the most sophisticated versions of this theorem.
10 There are dozens of studies testing this thesis. See Brennan (2016a: 51–52) for a review.
11 See Achen and Bartels (1996: 90–176) for overwhelming evidence that voters are terrible at retro-
spective voting as well as incredibly myopic.
12 David Estlund coined this term in Estlund (2003).
13 Epistocrats might favor most of the improvements that Robert Goodin (2008) suggests.
14 Though see Bell (2015) for a defense based upon the merits of existing epistocratic institutions in
China.
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8
EPISTEMIC INJUSTICE AND
FEMINIST EPISTEMOLOGY
Andrea Pitts
Due to the explicitly normative focus within feminist epistemology, applied approaches have
tended to be quite common in the sub-field. Although the literature on epistemic injustice
is more recent than that of feminist epistemology, this area of analysis has also largely applied
its methods and questions to concrete contexts. To enrich our understanding of these areas of
philosophy, this chapter examines three widespread methods found among applied approaches
to feminist epistemology and the study of epistemic injustice. These methods each provide dis-
tinct means through which epistemologists have been able to develop novel demonstrations and
examples that contribute to the study of how knowledge acquisition, truth, authority, belief,
justification, credibility, and meaning are impacted by axes of gender, racial, socioeconomic, and
sexual forms of experience and oppression.
The three methods are: (1) first-person narratives, (2) historical case studies, and (3) fic-
tional/allegorical examples. Methods (1) and (2) could be said to characterize a large portion of
feminist philosophy more generally, and are often thought to be among the principal features
of prominent theoretical veins of feminist epistemology and philosophy of science, such as
standpoint theory and contextual empiricism. The third method sheds light on the rhetorical
nature of the study of knowledge, and it may be said to stem from intra-disciplinary distinctions
between differing readings of figures in the history of classic Western epistemology such as G. W.
F. Hegel, Karl Marx,Wilfrid Sellars,W. V. O Quine, and Thomas Kuhn. In this vein, while many
feminist philosophers and critical philosophers of race have challenged ideal and abstract forms
of philosophical argumentation, the normative force of epistemic features such as objectivity
and agent-neutrality has also been studied by a number of theorists in these fields (e.g., Alcoff
2006; Code 1991, 1995; Harding 1991; Haslanger 1993, 2000; Keller 2003; Longino 1990;
Medina 2013; Mills 1998, 2005). Interestingly, alongside these critical discussions of abstract
and idealized forms of philosophical argumentation, contemporary theorists in the study of
epistemic injustice have utilized fictional/allegorical narratives to defend claims regarding the
nature of epistemic violence, silencing, and oppression. Two recent examples can be found in
the respective works of Kristie Dotson (2014) and Miranda Fricker (2007).
This chapter analyzes these distinct methods to demarcate differing forms of applied epis-
temology within the literature on feminist epistemology and epistemic injustice. First, I will
offer a brief introduction to the emergence of these fields within Anglophone epistemology,
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then I examine each method of applied epistemology in turn. The chapter then concludes
with a brief example of contemporary applied feminist epistemology by turning to my current
research on the epistemic implications of prison abolition. This final example aims thereby to
demonstrate how applied feminist epistemology can attend to each of these differing methods
of application via the study of the carceral system in the United States.
1. Situating women’s experiences within theories of knowledge

Feminist philosophers, at a very general level, have long attempted to give authorial primacy to
the experiences of women. Historically, however, theorists of white feminist philosophy have
often been neglectful of the range of social and experiential positionalities that women, as a
group, occupy. For example, Simone de Beauvoir’s groundbreaking work in feminist philosophy,
The Second Sex (1949), has been studied and cited widely for its critical engagement with
questions regarding women’s oppression and the relationship between masculinity and univer-
salism.Yet, this same influential work by Beauvoir has also been heavily criticized for its inatten-
tion to the manner in which women’s experiences are impacted by multiple axes of oppression,
and specifically, the harms of structural racism (e.g., Spelman 1988; Gines 2014; Rivera 2016). In
opposition to this tendency within white feminist theorizing, many women of color feminists
have been carefully attuned to the multi-dimensionality of experience and the various social
and epistemic matrices in which women are located. Consider in this vein, for example, Anna
Julia Cooper’s (1892) A Voice from the South in which the author locates her authorial agency
among representational histories of black women, and against totalizing narratives about black
women within late nineteenth-century literature, political/legal discourses, and science. As
Vivian May writes of Cooper’s work, “Given the racist and sexist biases at the foundations of
scientific and legal rules of evidence, Cooper would like readers to realize that ‘one important
witness has not yet been heard from. The summing up of the evidence deposed, and the charge
to the jury have been made –but no word from the Black Woman’ ” (May 2004: 79). Cooper’s
writings, as a response to this neglect, thus address varied and distinct audiences, including
among others, white feminists, Comtean positivists, and other black writers and orators. While
white feminist philosophical discourses have often struggled to theorize the multivalent nature
of women’s experiences and, at times, neglected the experiences of women of color, women
of color feminisms have long been attuned to the varied and distinct experiences of ‘women’
as a group.
Anglophone feminist epistemology as an academic sub-discipline developed in large part
distinctly from the early iterations of women of color feminisms. However, since its beginnings
in the 1970s and 1980s, the field of feminist epistemology has been a leading theoretical vein of
philosophy that has examined the importance of the varied experiences among women. In this
vein, the field developed largely in conversation with debates within philosophy of science and
Anglophone epistemology about the role of values and subjectivity within knowledge produc-
tion. For example, Dorothy E. Smith argues in “Women’s Perspective as a Radical Critique of
Sociology” (1974) that the study of sociology –which responded to the ongoing debates about
the sociology of scientific knowledge at the time –requires attentiveness to the experiences
of women as knowers. Sociology, she proposes, cannot merely supplement the main thematic
trends within the discipline by simply adding attention to women’s experiences. Instead Smith
argues that developing methods within sociology that are derived from women’s experiences
and from their socially situated locations will “restore to [women] a centre” within their discip-
line which is wholly theirs (Smith 1974: 12). Feminist philosophers in the 1980s also began to
focus on features of women’s experiences and their importance for the study and theorization
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of questions of knowledge, justification, and the nature of objectivity. In this vein, an early work
by Lorraine Code, “Is the Sex of the Knower Epistemologically Significant?” (1981), examines
the manner in which distinct forms of knowledge have been attributed to women throughout
the history of philosophy. Code’s piece affirms that the study of knowledge in Western epistem-
ology has tended to attribute specific ways of knowing to women, for example, excessive emo-
tionalism, subjectivity, and irrationality, and has granted more highly valued features of knowers
such as rationality, objectivity, justification to men. Also, in the 1980s, the influential work of
Carol Gilligan challenged the work of mainstream moral psychology to argue that women
may reason differently than men with respect to moral orientation and moral development.
Gilligan’s In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (1982) was thus piv-
otal in the study of gender in philosophy due to its demonstration of empirically demonstrated
forms of gender-distinct patterns of reasoning.
While not formally acknowledged in many academic discourses of epistemology at the
time, also in the 1970s and 1980s many women of color activists, artists, and authors were
emphasizing the unique epistemic contributions to feminist theorizing from the positionalities
of women. The work of the Combahee River Collective (1974–1980) and the collection of
writings, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981) shed light on
the importance of distributing stories, artwork, and history by and among women of color.
These theorists and organizers, along with authors such as Paula Gunn Allen (1986), Gloria
E. Anzaldúa (1987), Angela Y. Davis (1981), bell hooks (1981, 1984), Audre Lorde (1984), María
Lugones (1987), and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988) were engaged in projects that sought to
create methodologies and historiographical and literary archives that grappled with the difficult
question of how to situate experience within the complicated socioeconomic, intellectual, and
aesthetic fields of cultural production in which women live. Given these immense efforts by
prior theorists, contemporary feminist epistemologists have taken up the task of revisiting these
authors’ respective works in efforts to address their philosophical contributions to the study of
knowledge production (e.g., Dotson 2011; Ortega 2006; Pitts 2016, Santa Cruz Feminists of
Color Collective 2014).
Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, several strands of feminist epistemology were consolidated
within Anglophone academic philosophy, including approaches such as feminist standpoint
theory, feminist contextual empiricism, and postmodern and postcolonial approaches. Such
approaches, as I discuss in the following section, foreground the use of concrete social issues and
demonstrate a rich set of resources within applied epistemology.
2. Applied approaches to feminist epistemology

Examining the various methodological approaches within feminist epistemology illustrates a
wide range of forms of application. As I expand on below, each approach takes up a variety of
means to elaborate how the experiences of women are complex epistemic phenomena that
impact how theorists can interpret the agential possibilities and nature of epistemic inquiry.
a. First-person perspectives

As I note above, feminist philosophers have long attempted to give primacy to the agency of
women. However, within the discipline of academic epistemology, various approaches have
attempted to demonstrate why such authorial primacy bears relevance within studies of know-
ledge. One applied method whereby feminist epistemologists have elaborated these concerns is
through the study of first-person perspectives. For example, within feminist standpoint theory,
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Sandra Harding’s pivotal work has argued that mainstream notions of scientific knowledge
production have neglected the situatedness of knowledge producers, and such views have
developed a “weak” conception of objectivity. This weak conception of objectivity, she argues,
ignores “broad, historical social desires, interest, and values that have shaped the agendas, con-
tent, and results of the sciences” (Harding 1991: 143).1 In this sense, Harding’s critical lens offers
a justification for considerations of the epistemic agent’s perspective. Namely, she proposed
that “ ‘starting thought from women’s lives’ increases the objectivity of the results of research
by bringing scientific observation and the perception of the need for explanation to bear on
assumptions and practices that appear natural or unremarkable from the perspective of the
lives of men in the dominant groups” (1991: 150). Her claim is that the presumption of value-
neutrality and impartiality leads to more errors in epistemic judgment and, in effect, inhibits
scientific knowledge production. Scientists who assume such attitudes toward their areas of
study will likely neglect important causal, social, and historical factors. Thus, to attend to the
researcher’s values, interests, desires, and socio-historical situatedness provides a more robust
account of scientific inquiry, according to Harding.
Another influential feminist standpoint theorist is Patricia Hill Collins. Collins’s 1990 book,
Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, draws from the
writings of other prominent black feminists such as Angela Y. Davis, bell hooks, Zora Neale
Hurston, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Maria W. Stewart, and Alice Walker to defend a dis-
tinct tradition of epistemology found in the writings of black women. Collins outlines sev-
eral distinguishing features of black feminist thought and each feature outlines the shape and
contours of black feminist epistemic practices. Among these Collins cites a dialectical relation-
ship between activism and oppression, whereby black women who have sought to resist racism,
sexism, and other forms of oppression in their everyday lives are able to collectively develop a
multiplicitous group consciousness that gives rise to common epistemic standpoints (Collins
1990: 22–25). Collins also argues that another distinguishing feature of black feminism is the
very tension that exists between experiences and ideas (1990: 25). Namely, she states that due
to differences of class, age, sexuality, culture, and so on, “no homogeneous black woman’s stand-
point exists” (1990: 28). In this sense, black feminist epistemology can also be characterized
by the need to theoretically grapple with the existence of shared structures of oppression
that black women face and the multidimensional and heterogeneous standpoints that black
women occupy. Lastly, of particular significance for the epistemological emphasis on women’s
standpoints, Collins defends the claim that self-definition is a crucial component of black fem-
inist theorizing. This recognition for the need for black women’s self-definition thereby opens
up the field of feminist epistemology to the study of poetry, fiction, music, autobiography, and
other forms of individual and collective expression. In this vein, Collins cites analytic work on
musicians such as Bessie Smith, Sara Martin, and Gertrude ‘Ma’ Rainey who challenged the
objectifying and constraining images of black women in early twentieth-century United States.
Within this vein of feminist theorizing about first-person perspectives, Latina feminists as
well as postmodern and postcolonial feminist theorists are also critical voices within debates
about the representability of women’s experiences. For such theorists, understanding the neo-
colonial structures of intellectual production that affect the task of theorizing about women,
and women in the Third World specifically, remains an important point of contact for debate
within feminist theories of knowledge.The work of Chela Sandoval (2000), for example, critic-
ally attends to the way in which differing linguistic, semiotic, and sensory modes of orientation
have impacted conceptions of human consciousness in the era of advanced capitalism and neo-
colonial globalization. Rather than attempting to restore or authentically enact the perspectives
of women and other oppressed peoples, Sandoval develops what she describes as “differential
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consciousness” that attempts to “develop and mobilize identity as [a]‌political tactic in order to
negotiate power” (Sandoval 2000: 144). In a similar vein, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak proposes
a view described as “strategic essentialism,” whereby feminist theorists and postcolonial theorists
deconstruct the audience’s and author’s accounts of oppressed women’s agency in their writings.
Thus, to respond to the very call to represent women, Spivak states that we must set ourselves
to the task of “measuring the silences” of oppressed subjects (Spivak 1988: 286).
b. Historical case studies

The deployment of historicization within feminist epistemology has also been quite common,
and many feminist theorists have sought to reread the history of philosophy or a given philo-
sophical debate in order to ground their critical engagement with gender or other axes of
women’s identities. For example, in their 1993 essay, “Are ‘Old Wives’ Tales’ Justified?” Vrinda
Dalmiya and Linda Alcoff examine the history of midwifery to demonstrate the relationship
between mainstream theories of justification in Western epistemology and the denigration of
women’s traditional ways of knowing.They argue: “The point of [a]‌brief history [of midwifery]
is to suggest that an advantage in instrumental success cannot account for the rise of the male
obstetrician and the demise of the midwife” (Dalmiya and Alcoff 1993: 223). They challenge
the long-held view that the acceptance of a given scientific practice or theory depends on its
conditions of success. Rather, through their analysis of the discrediting of midwifery by modern
obstetrics, forms of experiential knowledge held by midwives became gradually replaced by
propositional knowledge within modern biomedicine (1993: 229–31). In this sense, given the
high rates of instrumental success among midwifery practices, modern obstetrics was not justi-
fied in rejecting the knowledge claims of midwifery.
Alcoff ’s other writings similarly place an emphasis on history and the value of interpreting
metaphysical questions via an appeal to historical conditions. A vivid example of this approach
can be found in Alcoff ’s Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (2006). In that text, Alcoff
articulates the specific forms of epistemic oppression faced by persons from mixed racial ancestry.
To diagnose these harms, she turns to a historical account provided by twentieth-century
Mexican philosopher Leopoldo Zea. Zea’s analysis compares differing forms of imperial con-
quest in the Americas, and, in particular, he offers several differences between Roman-Catholic
Iberian assimilation in Latin America, and Germano-Protestant English patterns of assimilation
in North America (Alcoff 2006: 271–73). Alcoff, citing Zea, argues that colonial conquest in
Latin America was prefaced on a kind of expansionist legacy of cultural absorption and blending
that was distinct from conquest in the North. In North America, Nordic cultural expansionist
practices preceded the Germano-Protestant iterations of colonialism in the Americas, which
led to a form of assimilation that subsumed all differences of culture under a dominant norm.
In Latin America, Iberian cultural expansion did not seek homogeneity in this same manner,
according to this historical set of claims (2006: 273). The relevance for Alcoff ’s epistemological
analysis is that these differing forms of assimilation and conquest impact the structuring of epi-
stemic values and concepts. These include a preference for universalist and secular humanist
discourses in the United States that tacitly operate by making whiteness the dominant culture
and universal norm. Although forms of conquest in both North America and Latin America
gave political and cultural primacy to whiteness, a requirement of homogeneity in the North
and a tolerance for heterogeneity in Latin America, Alcoff claims, marked significant variations
between the cultural practices of these geopolitical contexts.
In other contemporary discourses of feminist epistemology, specifically the literature on
epistemic injustice, theorists also place heavy emphasis on the importance of history. In this
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vein, José Medina’s recent work in The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression,
Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations (2013) utilizes historical case studies to defend
what he describes as “chained agency” (Medina 2013: 234). A chained action, he states, “is an
action with individual elements, the significance of which can only be properly understood
within a chain of actions, being thus crucially dependent on the actions of others, indefinitely
many others, but always particular others and not (at least not necessarily) entire collectives
or social groups” (2013: 226). This conception of action thereby reconfigures the notion of
agency by requiring social epistemologists to interpret the meaning of actions as dependent
upon the connected actions in which that act is situated. This conception resists individualistic
conceptions of agency and the decontextual manner in which epistemologists have attempted
to study action.
One of Medina’s primary examples of chained agency is the Montgomery Bus Boycott of
1955–1956. While most invocations of the bus boycott begin with Rosa Parks’s act of civil dis-
obedience, Medina draws from historical research on precursors to Parks’s action, including the
arrest of fellow activist, Claudette Colvin. He claims that to make sense of the social uptake of
Parks’s resistant act, we must consider not only the many other black civil rights activists who
were staging similar forms of civil disobedience, but also the white and black audiences that
gave uptake to Parks’s action. Such variegated forms of uptake, Medina claims, are constituted
by both intentional and non-intentional chained actions. For some audiences, Parks’s action
may have gained more sympathy due to her appearance and demeanor. Medina citing the work
of Terry Lovell states, “Parks’s background and profile exhibited the markers of working-class
status, which made her a likely regular bus commuter; she spoke quietly and displayed a peaceful
and apparently docile demeanor, lacking any sign of aggressiveness or irrationality; and most
important of all, Parks’s appearance provided a compelling image of a middle-age respectability
with her rimless spectacles, her neatly kept graying hair, her clean and tidy clothes, and so on”
(2013: 245). Medina continues that Colvin’s younger, dark-skinned, and seemingly rebellious
appearance and demeanor made her less of a figure of respectability for white audiences. Thus,
he claims Colvin’s prior act of civil disobedience did not elicit sympathy from many audiences
for meaningful uptake. However, Medina also adds importantly, “But this sympathy, which was
exploited by local activists and emerging groups of resistance, clearly shows that Parks’s act of
insurrection contained a lot of concessions to the normalizing expectations and racist stereo-
types of the white mainstream culture of the time” (2013: 246).
c. Fictional/allegorical examples

The third form of applied philosophy found within feminist epistemology and the literature on
epistemic injustice is fictional or allegorical forms of thought experiment or narration. Such
applications, in many cases, seek justification through the elaboration of counterfactual cases and
stories. More generally, this method of justification has been prominent throughout a great deal
of Western philosophy. For example, Wilfrid Sellars’s “myth of Jones” (1956), Hilary Putnam’s
“twin earth” thought experiment (1975), and Judith Jarvis Thomson’s violinist example (1971)
are three well-known instances of philosophers’ relying on thought experiments or brief
narratives to challenge a reader’s intuitions/implicit beliefs about a given philosophical debate.
In the case of Sellars, he states in his now-famous text “Empiricism and the Philosophy of
Mind” that he has “used a myth to kill a myth” (1956: §63). Rebecca Kukla, in an analysis of this
argumentative strategy in Sellars, thus asks: “how can fiction be used to establish a non-fictional
result such as an account of epistemic authority?” (Kukla 2000: 163). Her response is as follows:
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Now making sense of something’s authoritative status is not the same kind of project
as making sense of, for example, its empirical properties. Something is authoritative
only if it is binding, and makes a claim on the subject of its authority. Furthermore,
for it to genuinely bind or make a claim, its authority must be legitimate. There can
be no such thing as real yet illegitimate authority, since such “authority” would not in
fact bind us; the closest there could be to such a thing would be coercive force which
makes no normative claims upon us. Thus, recognizing authority is inseparable from
at least implicitly recognizing that this authority is already legitimate –to recognize
authority is to recognize the claim it makes upon us. In fact, it seems that making
sense of something’s authoritative status can mean nothing other than providing the
legitimization which grounds it and makes it binding. Thus myths of the origin of
authority are legitimization myths, and they succeed exactly to the extent that, in their
telling, they do legitimize authority and bring us to recognize the claims we can make
and that can be made upon us.
Kukla 2000: 165–66
Kukla’s main claim here with respect to the use of myth is that the task of understanding the
foundations of epistemic justifications for belief is a normative matter. Thus, the only means
whereby we can seek justification for the foundations for belief will be further normative argu-
mentation, and not via reference to empirical claims. Kukla also reads such forms of argumenta-
tion and myth-making into the writings of classic figures in Western epistemology and political
philosophy, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant (Kukla 2005).
Such patterns of argumentation can also be found in the contemporary feminist epistem-
ology and the literature on epistemic injustice. However, rather than specifically looking at
the normative features of epistemology in a general sense, feminist epistemology and the lit-
erature on epistemic injustices bear normative aims that seek to address forms of oppression
that impact women and other marginalized groups both internal to and outside of the con-
text of philosophical analysis.2 Consider, in this vein, Miranda Fricker’s pivotal work, Epistemic
Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. In that work, she states: “The method [used in her
work] is to construct a fictional State of Nature scenario as the basis from which to draw
philosophical conclusions about a given concept or institution” (Fricker 2007: 109). She
continues that such State of Nature stories are meant to characterize “our most basic epi-
stemic needs with a view to illuminating the concepts of truth and truthfulness” (2007: 109).
Similar to Kukla’s account of the normative sources for epistemic justification, Fricker too
relies on a strategy of fictional storytelling to justify, in her case, the “virtue of truth” as a nor-
mative principle. Within Fricker’s work on epistemic injustice, the philosophical demand to
explain the concept of epistemic harm hinges upon the moral wrongs inherent in deficits in
credibility assessments or excessive attributions of credibility. In this sense, socially privileged
subjects wrongly receive higher attributions of credibility for their claims, and likely receive
a large amount of conceptually detailed hermeneutical resources for making sense of their
experiences. For socially oppressed epistemic subjects, in her view, the opposite is usually the
case. Namely, many persons are wrongly denied credibility when it is due and are given fewer
and more simplistic hermeneutical resources for making sense of their experiences. The alle-
gorical accounts analyzed in Fricker thereby attend to the moral and self-interested reasons
for intellectual virtues, such as accuracy and sincerity. However, her account also proposes
that some “identity prejudicial stereotypes” (e.g., “outsider,” “insider,” “allies,” “enemies,” and
“competitors” (2007: 115)) will likely also be part of any State of Nature story. Thus, she
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argues that the call for epistemic justice requires developing “anti-prejudicial virtues such
that the hearer reliably corrects for any counter-rational influence that identity power would
otherwise have on his (sic) credibility judgments” (2007: 116). In this sense, a State of Nature
story justifies the normative demand for critical attention to how epistemic agents attribute
credibility.
Another vivid illustration of the use of fictional/ allegorical examples within feminist
epistemology can be found in recent work by Kristie Dotson (2014). In “Conceptualizing
Epistemic Oppression,” Dotson examines the relationship between the general nature of
social/political oppression and specifically epistemic forms of oppression. She argues that
while some epistemic oppressions can be alleviated via the dissolution of more general social/
political oppressions, there are some forms of epistemic oppression that are distinctly irre-
ducible. Namely, irreducible epistemic oppressions arise not from within a given epistemo-
logical system, but due to features of epistemological systems themselves that are not merely
comprised of “socially and historically contingent power relations” (Dotson 2014: 116–17).
To defend these claims Dotson looks to differing orders of change that might affect various
forms of oppression, and she outlines differing levels of change accordingly. To illustrate these
distinctions, she invokes Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. She states in a footnote about this use of
allegory: “It is important to note, again, that I am not borrowing the insight Plato draws from
his Allegory. Rather I am appropriating the imagery for the sake of my attempt to concep-
tualize epistemic oppression. Hence, my use of the Allegory may diverge starkly from Plato’s
positions” (2014: 135). Here, although she does not explicitly propose this reading, we could
argue that her use of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave relies on the normative force of a well-
known philosophical story. However, Dotson’s own appropriation of the story points to an
undertheorized aspect of the Allegory, that is, in her case, the positions of the persons fettered
in the cave. Namely, the manner in which each fettered person is located with respect to the
appearance of shadows on the cave wall will impact their perceptual, experiential, and accord-
ingly, epistemic horizon. For example, she states that while the persons in the cave may speak
to one another, the person at the end of the line of prisoners will likely have experiences that
differ from the other prisoners. This person will never have heard a voice arising from one
side of their perceptual field. The importance for this, in Dotson’s account, is that because all
persons in the cave will develop a language to describe their “Shadowland” within the cave,
only specifically situated persons will be able to account for their experiences. The person
fettered to one end of a line of prisoners may have experiences that differ from the other per-
sons, but that agent both lacks the language to describe this unique perspective and lacks the
appropriate uptake from the rest of the persons in the cave to change the relevant beliefs of
the group (2014: 130–31). Moreover, the maintenance and effectiveness of a shared epistemo-
logical system (including the shared imaginative resources that system holds) can be under-
stood, as Dotson’s defends, to lead to an intractable form of epistemic oppression. Thus, in this
example, Dotson uses the normative force of the well-known epistemological problems of the
relationship between shared epistemic resources and intelligibility in Plato’s Allegory to defend
the claim that there are recalcitrant epistemic harms that persist as products of the proper
functioning of epistemological systems.
Through these three forms of application, we can see that feminist epistemologists and
theorists of epistemic injustice have utilized a variety of means to connect epistemological
concerns such as the conditions of belief, truth, justification, and knowledge acquisition to the
normative concerns of the experiences of women and oppressed groups. In the concluding
section, I demonstrate how contemporary epistemological facets of prison abolition utilize
these three forms of application.
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3. Prison abolition and applied feminist epistemology

First, it is important to note that this analysis of prison abolition will not attempt to subsume
the entire political, historical, and philosophical project entailed within the scope of prison abo-
lition to its specifically epistemological dimensions. Rather, we can consider the epistemological
functions of prison abolition to be a subset of the category of sustained efforts to dismantle
the modern carceral system in the United States. Accordingly, feminist approaches within the
study of prison abolition similarly are a subset of larger efforts, that is, efforts that may share the
goals of feminism but that need not specifically name themselves as such. For example, Thomas
Mathieson, whose work was influential in early theorizations of prison abolition, writes in a
2015 second edition of his foundational text The Politics of Abolition that gender was not an
explicit focus of his original 1974 conceptualization (Mathieson 2015: 2). Rather, he states
that his newest edition of the work attends to problems to which, early on, he was not expli-
citly attuned. As such, to interpret prison abolition through the lens of feminist epistemology
is already to consider a portion of a larger series of questions regarding theories of punish-
ment, the function of the state, moral harms and goods, socioeconomic systems, discourses
of power, and so on. In what follows, then, I elaborate a few ways in which we can see the
applied methods of feminist epistemology and epistemic injustice literature within the debates
regarding prison abolition.
The term “prison abolition” has recently come into feminist and philosophical discourses
largely through the work of Angela Y. Davis. Davis writes of the origin of the term:
[W. E. B.] Du Bois argued that the abolition of slavery was accomplished only in
the negative sense. In order to achieve the comprehensive abolition of slavery–after the
institution was rendered illegal and black people were released from their chains–
new institutions should have been created to incorporate black people in the social
order. … the continued demand for land and the animals needed to work it reflected
an understanding among former slaves that slavery could not be truly abolished until
people were provided with the economic means for their subsistence. They also
needed access to educational institutions and needed to claim voting and other polit-
ical rights … Du Bois thus argues that a host of democratic institutions are needed to
fully achieve abolition–thus abolition democracy.
Davis 2005: 92
Following Du Bois’s articulation, Davis and other current prison abolitionists call for compre-
hensive prison abolition. In this sense, the call to abolish the carceral system in the United States
is also a call to build new institutions, including educational, healthcare, familial, legal, govern-
mental, and religious institutions. Such new institutions would also bear as their aim the end of
the carceral state and thereby advance alternatives to state policing and punishment.
In academic philosophy, scholars have been developing political, epistemological, moral,
and phenomenological analyses to address this comprehensive conception of abolition. With
respect to the emphasis on first-person perspectives and narratives, prison abolition literature
has foregrounded the experiences of incarcerated persons. Drawing from the rhetorical and pol-
itical strategies of the abolitionist movement against slavery of the nineteenth-century United
States, many recent philosophical studies have attended to the experiences of people that have
been directly impacted by state violence. Notably, within the abolitionist movement against
slavery, the writings and speeches of former slaves were crucial (although not unproblematic-
ally so) in garnering support from white audiences. In particular, historians and philosophers
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of abolitionism note the function of moral suasion as a key methodological strategy for affected
audiences. Neil Roberts cites in Freedom as Marronage (2015) that key abolitionists such as
Frederick Douglass were well aware of the rhetorical demands placed on black writers. Following
the work of Frank Kirkland, Roberts describes moral suasion as “prima facie the use of rhetoric
to persuade others about the moral wrongness of slavery and the moral rightness of abolition”
(Kirkland 1999: 244).3 Roberts also states that the “core prophetic principle of moral suasion
denounced racially charged language, abhorred any calls to violent, revolutionary slave resist-
ance, and privileged rhetorical morality over physical struggle” (Roberts 2015: 59). Douglass
responds to these strictures in his autobiographical writings, noting, among other slights, that
white abolitionist John A. Collins once told him prior to delivering a speech, “Give us the facts;
we will take care of the philosophy” (Douglass 1855: 361; Douglass 1892: 269). Roberts then
outlines the means whereby Douglass responds to these forms of constrained agency.
Given this history, the rhetorical strategies of contemporary prison abolitionists are seeking
to respond to this overdetermined character of the testimonies provided by persons who are vul-
nerable to state violence. For example, in the recent volume Active Intolerance: Michel Foucault, the
Prisons Information Group, and the Future of Abolition, editors Perry Zurn and Andrew Dilts intro-
duce the contents of the volume by stating that the intolerable conditions of incarceration are
best articulated by those who have experienced those conditions, and their voices are included
as theoretical contributions to the study of prison abolition. Included in the volume is a series of
pieces written by persons currently incarcerated on death row at Riverbend Maximum Security
Institution in Nashville, TN. The editors write in their introduction:
At the heart of our analysis and that of the GIP is the identification of things that
are intolerable, which form the basis of cultivating active intolerance. To that end,
statements by Abu Ali Abdur’Rahman, Derrick Quintero, and Donald Middlebrooks
(all currently incarcerated on death row at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution
outside of Nashville, Tennessee) identify what are, for them, intolerable prison real-
ities. From bad breath and too many beans (or not enough), to corporate monopoly,
administrative violence, and rape—not to mention “the lack of honor and respect
amongst those of our incarcerated community”— Abdur’Rahman, Quintero, and
Middlebrooks canvass the sublime and mundane elements of what is, ultimately, an
indiscriminate system of oppression. In doing so, their voices break against the prison
as much as against our own easy categories of significance.
Zurn and Dilts 2016: 14, my emphasis
To prevent casting incarcerated persons as overdetermined victims within this discourse, the
attempt to critically collaborate with incarcerated persons remains a central feature. Importantly
Zurn and Dilts understand the authorial agency of the incarcerated authors included in their
volume as critical challenges to the text as well. Also, in this vein, many recent works by
philosophers working in the area of prison abolition are seeking ways to undermine the sim-
plistic narratives circumscribed for incarcerated persons. These methods include developing
coalitional projects with persons who are incarcerated, including art exhibits, edited volumes of
essays, poetry, and self-writings, and coordinated strikes, divestment efforts, and other forms of
resistance to the carceral system.
Within feminist analyses of prison abolition, recent theorists have marked the seemingly tense
relationship between state-based forms of redress for violence against women and the abolition
of the prison industrial complex. For example, scholars such as Alisa Bierria and Communities
Against Rape and Abuse (2007), Natalie Cisneros (2014), Marie Gottschalk (2006), Beth Richie
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(2012), Dean Spade (2011), Chloe Taylor (2009), and Sarah Tyson (2015) argue that women’s
advocacy groups, anti-rape movements, and anti-violence campaigns too often become com-
plicit with punitive state measures to address forms of harm facing women in the United States.
Thus, within feminist epistemology, the work for philosophers addressing prison abolition will
be to interpret both how to avoid the circumscription of agency of incarcerated persons, and,
at the same time, in Richie’s words, “to yield expertise” to those women –and predomin-
antly women of color –who are most subject to the harms of punitive state violence (Richie
2012: 129). Richie thus proposes interpreting everyday knowledge as authoritatively relevant for
policymakers, scholars, and educators. In addition, Richie argues that images of black women –
and we could add other persons impacted by mass incarceration –must be read dialectically
and not as static representations. Finally, Richie claims in concert with other black feminist
activists such as Patricia Hill Collins, Barbara Ransby, Julia Sudbury, and Joy James that “schol-
arly work should be in service to activism and that the beneficiaries of research findings, policy
recommendations, or theoretical insights should be those most affected” (Richie 2012: 131).
Secondly, regarding historical case studies, numerous scholars have linked the present impact
of mass incarceration to prior forms of disenfranchisement and state violence in the United
States. Notably, influential works by Angela Y. Davis (1998) and Michelle Alexander (2012)
have brought public attention to the historical continuities between the convict lease system
and Jim Crow laws of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and contemporary
patterns of mass incarceration affecting black communities in the United States. Further
feminist epistemological work here might thus be to continue to seek genealogies of state
violence, disenfranchisement, and resistance to respond to current iterations of the carceral
system. For example, Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex (2011)
and Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada (2014),
two recent volumes examining patterns of state violence affecting disabled, queer, and trans-
gender persons in the United States and Canada, each offer substantive collections of essays
dedicated to the study of historical precursors to the era of mass incarceration. As such, fem-
inist epistemologists, equipped with theories of epistemic oppression and injustice are also
well situated to offer critical genealogies of patterns of state violence and patterns of resistance
against carceral systems in the United States. For example, my own research focuses on the rela-
tionship between patients of color and clinicians, and the difficulties of truth-telling and trust
within the provider–patient relationship. My efforts to examine the carceral state point to the
epistemological impasses that exist between patients who face structural patterns of racism and
a system of healthcare that has naturalized their criminality and social death (Pitts 2014, 2015).
I thus call for a more comprehensive analysis of healthcare in bioethics and philosophy of medi-
cine that I describe as carceral medicine. Carceral medicine is the name for historically sedimented
healthcare institutions, patterns of clinical research, and medical writings that function in col-
laboration with the punitive and exploitative measures of the state. I propose that philosophers
of medicine and bioethicists must thereby attend to patterns of resistance to carceral medicine
to seek to build the kinds of healthcare systems that would effectively support comprehensive
prison abolition. These might include, for example, further study of the Survival Programs of
the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (Hilliard 2008) and the Ten Point Health Program of
the Young Lords (Enck-Wanzer 2010).
Lastly, with respect to fictional and allegorical means of applied feminist epistemology,
we can attend to the dimensions of the aesthetic, imaginative, and hermeneutic implications
of prison abolition. Given the enormous task of comprehensive abolition, Davis and other
theorists recognize the limited epistemic and historical resources that impact the political
and pragmatic obstacles to prison abolition. In the introduction to Are Prisons Obsolete? Davis
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writes, “The prison is considered an inevitable and permanent feature of our social lives …
Prison abolitionists are dismissed as utopians and idealists whose ideas are at best unrealistic
and impracticable, and, at worst, mystifying and foolish… . The prison is considered so ‘nat-
ural’ that it is extremely hard to imagine life without it” (Davis 2003: 9–10). However, the
rejoinder Davis offers is the seeming incomprehensibility that the abolition of slavery was
in previous centuries, or, in her words, “how strange and discomforting the debates about
the obsolescence of slavery must have been to those who took the ‘peculiar institution’ for
granted –and especially to those who reaped direct benefit from this dreadful system of
racist exploitation” (2003: 24–25). Davis thus calls for an analysis of racist institutions in the
United States, like slavery, and their linkages to the current carceral system. In addition, she
attempts to denaturalize the existence of the prison system by narrating its contingent his-
torical roots. However, other strategies prison abolitionists employ include championing the
ideas of authors of fiction, poets, artists, and storytellers who seek other methods to challenge
sedimented forms of ignorance that impact resistance to prison abolition. For example, adri-
enne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha, editors of the volume Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction
Stories from Social Justice Movements (2015), attempt through their work to enact specula-
tive worlds whereby audiences can come to explore the social injustices in which they live.
Describing the volume, Imarisha writes: “The first and fundamental lesson is that all organ-
izing is science fiction… . This principle is the foundation we started the anthology from;
that when we talk about a world without prisons, a world without police violence, a world
where everyone has food, clothing, shelter, quality education, a world free of white supremacy,
patriarchy, capitalism, heterosexism –we are talking about a world that doesn’t currently exist.
But being able to envision these worlds equips us with tools to begin making these dreams
reality” (Imarisha 2013: 4). Accordingly, the characters, settings, futures, and fictional pasts
of the collection seek social justice aims. Thus, following this call, the remaining work by
feminist epistemologists committed to prison abolition may therefore be to aid in creating,
critiquing, and sustaining these forms of imaginative and epistemic resources to enact what
Davis describes as abolition democracy.
Notes
1 An important theoretical influence on the discourse of feminist standpoint theory is Marxist analyses
of knowledge and ideology. Marxism, as a precursor to analytic feminist epistemology, thus also offers
an explicitly materialist analysis of knowledge production that could be characterized as an applied
approach to epistemology.
2 It is important to note, however, that Kukla’s other epistemological writings do include the normative
aims of feminist epistemology.
3 Cited in Roberts (2015: 59).
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9
PROPAGANDA AND IDEOLOGY
Randal Marlin
1. Introduction
The future of epistemology as a source of enlightenment concerning propaganda and ideology
seems promising indeed, particularly in the light of recent developments in the field. The rele-
vant feature of these developments is a greater emphasis on knowledge acquisition as a col-
lective enterprise. When knowledge is thought of in that way, the importance of the norms and
presuppositions of what are collectively taken for granted in any given society is more likely
to come into view. Feminist epistemology in particular has been influential in exposing how
commonly held stereotypes about women have disadvantaged them regarding their perceived
competence as witnesses, as well as in other areas.
The terms “propaganda” and “ideology” are both subject to variable and sometimes conten-
tious definitions. The word “propaganda” can be understood in a neutral way, meaning dissem-
ination of facts and ideas for purposes of persuasion, but also in a negative or pejorative way.
In the second, negative conception, propaganda consists of communications designed to affect
people’s beliefs and attitudes in a way favoring the communicator, or a surrogate, or a cause,
without a special concern for truth.Truth is relevant, but only to the extent that departure from
it might be detrimental to the objective. Lying communication for purposes of manipulating a
crowd is an obvious case of propaganda, but the forms of deception are so varied and variable
that it can be useful to define propaganda as “use of epistemically defective communication for
purposes of persuasion.”1 The Greek word “episteme” pertains to knowledge. Communication
that is epistemically defective lacks one or more of those features we count on when we assume
people to at least be trying to tell us something true, in other words, to convey accurately what
they know or believe. Stating something emphatically, as if one were convinced of its truth,
while actually being doubtful about it would normally count as an example of epistemically
defective communication. Choosing to report certain facts or statements out of context and
thereby deliberately creating false impressions is another example. George Orwell conveyed,
paradoxically but pithily, the idea of propaganda as deception when he wrote (in the context
of his own propaganda activities for the BBC in 1942): “All propaganda is lies, even when one
is telling the truth” (Orwell 1970: 465). A communication is “epistemically defective” when
it misrepresents or obscures evidence for or against the truth of what is being communicated.
Frequent repetition of some contention, for example, may encourage belief while adding
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nothing in the way of evidence for its truth. Our main concern will be with propaganda so
defined. Part of our task here will be to illustrate different kinds of such defectiveness. Of course,
people can be mistaken about their facts, and when they make false claims by mistake their
claims are epistemically defective, but not necessarily propaganda. The special situation where
it might be termed propaganda is where a person is duped by a propagandist into unwittingly
furthering the latter’s aims.
The term “ideology” once had a very broad scope, meaning simply the study of ideas. It has
come to mean a system of shared ideas linked to social action. So, capitalism, socialism, fascism,
nationalism, and communism are all examples of ideology. The major religions of the world
would qualify as ideologies in this sense. Their religious ideas are certainly shared by many and
have an impact on collective behavior with their rituals and ethical codes.
There is a narrower sense of “ideology” that carries a pejorative sense. It is the sense in which
one person will accuse another of being “blinded by ideology.” In this narrower sense there is
the additional feature that the person under the sway of an ideology is impervious to arguments
or reasons that appear to threaten that system of beliefs by contesting its veracity.This could take
the form of questioning basic facts assumed by the ideology, or the logic linking facts and beliefs
in the system of ideas, thereby questioning the justification for those beliefs. Here ideology
and propaganda in their narrower senses share the feature of epistemic defectiveness, on the
assumption that protecting beliefs from all challenges undermines the warrant for those beliefs.
I will focus here on ideology in the narrow sense. The reason has to do not only with space
limitations, but also because the combination of propaganda and ideology has been at the root
of the largest and bloodiest conflicts in human history. Ideology supports propaganda, and
propaganda supports and disseminates ideology in a mutually reinforcing synergy.
Reaction against Fascist and Nazi ideologies in the twentieth century produced a strong
current of logical positivistic thinking that contested the cognitive content of ethical claims.
The laudable aim was to discredit the belief-worthiness of those ideologies by attacking their
epistemic foundations. But, first, Mussolini seemed to have no problem with an ethics devoid
of sound epistemic foundations. Just because ethics is relative, he maintained, it was necessary
for the state to become the fixed point to guide behavior (Ginsberg 1956: 14–15). Secondly,
reflection on knowledge as a social enterprise produced doubts about the rigid separation of
science from ethics. When we move from knowledge in the basic physical sciences to thinking
about knowledge about humans many different ethical concerns intrude, for example in the
obtaining of the knowledge, the application of it, and the choice of subject matter to investigate.
Knowledge, at least in everyday life, is situated and can have a big effect on our own and others’
interests. Clinging to prejudices that view certain identifiable groups of people as inferior can
deprive them of their rights in subtle ways. A common result of such prejudices is that members
of the disfavored group are not regarded as reliable sources of knowledge. This can have life and
death consequences when someone from the disfavored group gives testimony that is true but
is not believed. When such information would save an accused from a murder conviction, the
result can be that an innocent person goes to the gallows (Fricker 2007: 16–23).
The unwillingness of prejudiced people to give equal credence to others simply on the basis
that they are members of some identifiable group, identified by race, gender, ethnicity, etc.,
creates considerable harm among those groups. As Heidi Grasswick has noted, there is fallout
of further harm when co-workers in a team of knowledge-seekers in some scientific study
exclude from their team members of groups against whom there is a prejudice. Knowledge is
often linked to good jobs and salaries and exclusion from such jobs impoverishes members of
disfavored classes. Epistemology as the study of knowledge and belief-worthiness has in this
way ethical implications, but the connection to ethics may be even more direct when we ask
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questions such as “What kind of knowledge is the most deserving of public expenditure?” and
“Does the pursuit of knowledge make deception (say of subjects in a psychological experiment)
justifiable?”
It is hardly deniable that knowledge is of great value, even if some truths, such as that of
Oedipus’s parentage, might be better left unknown to Oedipus. For some epistemologists, and
philosophers generally, knowledge has a value of its own, just as happiness, health, harmony,
freedom, have their own special values. The word “veritistic” and cognates has been used by
Alvin Goldman to designate an orientation toward truth determination (Goldman 1999: 5)
or the property of being conducive to truth, as something to aim for in social policy consid-
erations, along with others such as happiness. A fabricated report may have good social effects
such as drawing attention to a drug problem in society, so that something is done about it,
but the fact that it was fabricated makes the report at least veritistically unacceptable, and in
Goldman’s words, a policy designed to prevent a recurrence of such fabrications “could well be
veritistically beneficial” (Goldman 1999: 190).
One problem in referring to the application of epistemology to propaganda and ideology
is what to include under “epistemology.” Insights relevant to detecting propaganda have come
from linguistics, discourse analysis, phenomenology (in the sense given to it by Edmund
Husserl), literature, mathematics (particularly statistical analysis), accounting, and much else.
Even conjurors have useful things to say about the practice of political persuasion and the role of
distraction. In some ways many truth-seeking people may be epistemologists without knowing
it, rather like Molière’s newly rich man, surprised to find he had been speaking prose all his life.
The requirement may only be a strong desire to know truth in a particular area, together with
aptitude to discern truth and the ability to attend to norms that conduce to truth, such as wari-
ness against wishful thinking.
In what follows I begin with cases where the discipline of epistemology is clearly exempli-
fied. This will be followed by propaganda analysis less connected to the specific field of epis-
temology but being highly relevant to that field nevertheless.This is the point where we look at
rules and practices designed to maximize truth and protect against bias, but as developed within
specific other disciplines such as law, journalism, history, linguistics, social sciences, etc.
I will also take note of some observations made by epistemologists examining the credibility
of rumors and conspiracies, surely all the more important today in the context of instant Internet
communications. Rumors and conspiracies are often employed to suggest or imply matters that
support some propaganda campaign. It is also a common propaganda tactic to denounce factual
claims and testimony as “mere” rumor or conspiracy. That makes it highly relevant to scrutinize
carefully the science supporting one side or another of politically or ideologically opposed
claims. Currently the term “fake news” has been widely used to discredit alleged facts by per-
sons who use those putative facts to support some political or ideological goal. Syrian President
Bashar al-Assad has been accused, for example, of using poison gas against rebels on April 4,
2017. A credible MIT scientist,Theodore Postol, has written a damning critique of the evidence
the U.S. administration used to support that claim. U.S. President Donald Trump responded to
the gas attack allegation by bombing a Syrian airfield with fifty-nine Tomahawk missiles. Such
actions could lead to escalations resulting in full-scale war. It’s important to know the truth
about allegations that can serve as the basis for convincing a nation to go to war or to resist such
action in the light of counter-evidence. Knowledge of epistemological principles can help us
sift the relative strengths of evidence for and against such claims.
In the final section, I return to the connection between epistemology and ethics to see how
epistemology can best assist the ordinary person today to resist the deceptions and misdirections
created by propaganda in today’s world.
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2. Propaganda, ideology and epistemology

Jason Stanley’s book How Propaganda Works (Stanley 2015) is a path-breaking study devoted to
the understanding of propaganda and its synergistic relation to ideology. His motivation for the
study was in part to understand how people could be so duped by propaganda, believing in
racial theories so strongly that the Holocaust became possible under the Nazis. Other motiv-
ating reasons were his observation that detrimental discrimination against women, blacks, the
poor and underprivileged, etc., has been assisted by propaganda that has made use of what he
calls flawed ideology. He uses this term to refer to the rationalizations used by oppressors to justify
their oppression of others. The rationalizations “become ossified into rigid and unchangeable
belief ” (Stanley 2015: 3).
The same rationalizations come to be believed by members of the disfavored group them-
selves. The beliefs become barriers to rational thought and empathy, barriers that propaganda
exploits. He calls group identities the “coral reefs of cognition” (Stanley 2015: 3). The identities
become carefully constructed by existing political powers to maintain an exploitative situ-
ation where the oppressed think they are rightly treated as underdogs because they share the
identity of a group that deserves to be so treated. Stanley suggests that identity construction is
not an overnight process but takes decades. But existing powers can appeal to already existing
prejudices to disseminate successful, harmful propaganda, of the kind that produces unjust priv-
ilege and unjust exploitation.
Flawed ideologies, in Stanley’s view, “rob groups of knowledge of their own mental states by
systematically concealing their interests from them” (Stanley 2015: 5). Stanley does not believe
that all propaganda is necessarily bad. He allows that “a different kind of propaganda, civic rhet-
oric, can repair flawed ideologies, potentially restoring the possibility of self-knowledge and
democratic deliberation.” His use of the term “propaganda” in this favorable sense bears com-
parison with Cicero’s use of the term. Cicero wrote of the duty to propagate (using the word
“propaganda”) religion that is joined with knowledge of nature, and to root out all superstition
(Cicero De Divinatione 2, LXXII: 149).2 In this chapter, I have adopted a negative definition
of “propaganda” but here and elsewhere have recognized the existence of a neutral and even
favorable definition of the term (Marlin 2013 [2002]: 10–11).
Stanley is sensitive to the relatively nuanced way in which propaganda operates in Western
liberal democracies as opposed to the brazen tactics of totalitarian regimes. In support of his
idea, one may note that Goebbels’s early World War II propaganda has been compared to a
trombone against the flute sounds of French propaganda organized under Jean Giraudoux.
Stanley brings psychological evidence to bear on the phenomenon of motivated reasoning that
stands in the way of a correct assessment of facts about the world. Perception tends to accord
with what people wish to believe. Desire colors the perceptions of those in power in a way
that tends to justify their privileges. It also means that exploited persons don’t see themselves as
exploited because they identify themselves with a group whose underprivileged status has come
to be accepted as a fact of nature rather than a mutable social construction. The same flawed
ideology stands in the way of the privileged seeing that they are exploiters and the have-nots
seeing that they are exploited (Stanley 2015: 231ff.).
One reason people come to believe flawed ideologies relates to the phenomenon of spon-
taneous belief that we don’t control. It is normal to believe authoritative sources, because they
are a primary source of evidence. Stanley writes: “This is why the school system of a state is
the paradigm example of an ideological state apparatus, in Althusser’s sense.” It is in schools that
the indoctrination of children takes place, such as the development of reverence for symbols of
national cohesion. This can be the flag, the monarchy, the church, or some cultural icon, or any
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combination of these. Of many examples supporting Stanley’s claim one can note how, under
Napoleon Bonaparte, school catechisms proclaimed that serving the Emperor was like serving
God (Marlin 2013 [2002]: 50–52).
Stanley observes that under British rule people often had to renounce their faith to advance
economically. “History testifies to the difficulty of rejecting a broad and consistent tapestry of
testimonial evidence from apparently authoritative information providers, especially when it
begins at an early age” (Stanley 2015: 236).
To Stanley’s own examples of spontaneous belief might be added the observation of a French
writer who described a form of propaganda against which in his view the French were power-
less to resist under the Nazi occupation. It consisted of the constant publication of factual
nuggets, used as fillers in the press at the time. These factoids carried implicit messages, such
as that U.S. soldiers were unfit to fight due to alcoholism, illness, criminal tendencies, etc.
Implicitly they reinforced the Nazi message of racial superiority (Marlin 2013 [2002]: 82–83).
Each factoid by itself carried little weight, but constant repetition made belief in the underlying
message unstoppable.
The effect of ideology in the form of sanitized history taught in schools can be seen in recent
U.S. history. This kind of history cultivates a sense of patriotism, which bolsters respect for
the country’s leaders. Following the 9/11 attacks, the administration of U.S. President George
W. Bush was able to convince the public, on the basis of flimsy evidence, that somehow Iraq
was connected with al-Qaida, had weapons of mass destruction, and was close to obtaining
nuclear weapons. As portrayed in Bill Moyers’s documentary, Buying the War,3 journalists lost the
incentive to get at the truth of the administration’s case for war because the constant repetition
of these putative facts by authorities both in government and the media made the allegations
against Saddam Hussein seem true. Stanley quotes a clip from Oprah Winfrey responding to a
questioner skeptical about the case for war: “We’re not trying to propagandize, show you propa-
ganda. We’re just showing you what is.” Moyers’s documentary shows how, in the feverishly
emotional post-9/11 patriotism, a journalist who questioned government officials was likely
to be ignored or treated as some kind of irrelevant outcast (Stanley 2015: 244). TV Network
officials found that viewers would write irate letters when the official views were challenged.
Meanwhile journalists encountered problems with checking sources, because government
officials would leak supposedly secret intelligence to the New York Times and then quote the
New York Times as a source.Wittgenstein once mentioned the absurdity of checking a newspaper
fact by looking at another copy of the same newspaper (Wittgenstein 1958: para. 265). But
looking at news sources under the same ownership or checking a newspaper account by calling
the same officials who leaked the story to the press often has hardly more epistemic value.
Though Stanley’s book is titled “How Propaganda Works” he states that he restricts his
attention to political propaganda.The title might therefore be misleading, because not all propa-
ganda works in the way described, though arguably the most important forms do. Political
propaganda in his approach involves “a kind of speech that fundamentally involves political,
economic, aesthetic, or rational ideals, mobilized for a political purpose” (Stanley 2015: 52). It is
possible to see this as a neutral definition, but in light of common practices, including the one
he describes, it tends to be weighted toward the negative. Particularly interesting is his focus on
what he considers the most damaging kind of propaganda in liberal democracies. Such propa-
ganda appears to support the values of a liberal democracy, for example, by using words such as
freedom, rights, equality, etc., in its messages. But, in fact, its messages, taken in context, under-
mine those very values. Or an institution may disseminate the favorable imagery of democratic
values but violate them in its own practices, thereby signaling that such violations aren’t really
in genuine conflict.
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The primary message Stanley communicates is that few people in liberal society are likely
to recognize propaganda when it occurs in the form of flawed ideology. What’s meant here is
the use of words that signify some value or disvalue connected to a given ideology, but in a
context where the practical effect of those words is to negate in practice that value or disvalue.
Words and habits can preserve illiberal values despite our proclaiming their opposite. The lack
of perception sometimes happens because freedom of one sort conceals lack of freedom of
another sort. For example, economic freedom often clashes with political freedom. People may
have equal voting rights, but the super-wealthy few can make sure that candidates favoring their
interests get the kind of news coverage that gives those candidates voter appeal. Candidates
opposing the interests of the wealthy have a hard time raising funds for their election, and
news media controlled by the wealthy can give maximum attention to their faults. Over time
stereotypes become ingrained in people’s minds, making it easier for the powerless to accept
prejudicial conceptions of their group identities, even when these conceptions adversely affect
their own interests.
Miranda Fricker has given a good example of unconscious freedom-denying habits when
she writes about what she calls “epistemic injustice.” In one of her examples, taken from fiction,
a woman’s testimony is discounted because an otherwise reasonable man thinks of her as emo-
tional and not paying enough attention to “facts.” A stereotype works to deprive her of the
credibility owed to her by virtue of special knowledge that she has (explained in her book)
about the unlikelihood of her fiancé breaking a special promise to her (Fricker 2007: Chap. IV).
The point here is that embedded stereotypes operate unconsciously. Propaganda can operate
as a kind of societal residue affecting how we think and evaluate. The way of combatting it in
Fricker’s view is by developing the virtue of seeking out ways to offset our possible epistemic
biases, being careful not to discount the testimony of the economically or otherwise underpriv-
ileged who may be less articulate but who have special knowledge to communicate.
These observations help us to understand the enormous power of propaganda. It is especially
difficult to resist a set of ideas that are promulgated by state-controlled media through all the
different forms of mass communication, and where opposing ideas are censored. When Adolf
Hitler came to full power in March 1933, he very quickly made sure that Nazi party members
were in control of all the major forms of mass communication –books, film, radio, newspapers,
journals, magazines, posters, educational institutions, speeches, demonstrations, etc.
The skillful propagandist imprints pictures in people’s minds, images that stimulate strong
emotive responses. A simple narrative is made to accompany the images, so that when the
powers creating the propaganda choose they can easily galvanize people into action based on
new alleged facts (real or simulated).
It is vital for the propagandist to make sure that a targeted audience is not exposed to
opposing viewpoints. Jacques Ellul makes the point in his classic work Propaganda (Ellul 1973
[1965]) that effective propaganda must be total.That is why the Nazi tyranny required thorough
censorship as well as control over all the mass media.
3. Propaganda in general

I have been focusing on propaganda as it is linked to ideology, but it is at least questionable
whether propaganda as commonly conceived is always linked to ideology. There is more to be
said about the potential for applying sound epistemological principles to recognize and combat
propaganda in a more general form than one necessarily linked to ideology.
Here some caution is needed. It should be fairly obvious that expertise in epistemology by
itself does not qualify one to claim to be an expert within a given field of knowledge, such as
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law, journalism, or medicine. But that should not stop a good epistemologist from recognizing
instances where evidential deficiencies exist in claims made within a given field, especially when
these, as in advertising, are directed at consumers. Epistemologists tend to be alive, for example,
to the need for knowing the source of scientific claims, the nature of scientific studies done to
support, for example, various pharmaceutical claims, and in general the reliability of testimony
used to boost some product. An especially interesting case of epistemic deficiency was recently
brought to light by a music professor at Carleton University. He studied drug commercials and
found that when it came to listing adverse side effects, including possible death (as required by
law), the commercial would play upbeat, loud, or stylistically divergent music thereby distracting
the listener’s attention from the message and giving the feeling that there was “nothing to worry
about” (Deaville 2014).
The epistemologist can learn things about evidence by looking at principles and practices
within individual professions. For example, millennia of legal practice have left us with rules
and principles relating to the sound assessment of evidence. Maxims such as “Always hear the
other side”; “No one should be judge in his own cause”; “Do not rely on what a witness says
about what someone else says, when that other person can be heard directly,” have long given
sound guidance.
Similarly, journalistic practice has its own rules for maximizing truthfulness and avoiding
errors stemming from bias. On controversial matters, the journalist should avoid giving only one
person’s interpretation of alleged facts that support one side of the matter, particularly when the
person is strongly committed to one side of the controversy. It is bad practice, for example, in
the case of opinion polls, to report only the interpretations given by the person or organization
that commissioned the poll, without going to more objective sources, or those with an opposing
bias, for interpretation and evaluation of the poll results.
Another rule is that the source for a news item should always be indicated, with rare
exceptions where there is justifiable reason to protect the source.The reason is that the message
recipient should have a right to judge the credibility of that source, whether for example the
source has an interest that would be likely to encourage false reports.
One very common device used by propagandists is the faking of credentials, which can take
many forms. When we decide whether to take another person’s word for something, we first
want to know whether the person is honest and will want to communicate truthfully. Then
we want to know whether the person has the relevant competence and expertise to give an
opinion, say, on whether a certain structure will bear a certain load. We also want to know
whether a person has experiences relevant to certain claims to knowledge –witnessing an acci-
dent, for example. Above all, we want to know whether there is a possible self-interested motive
for a person to misrepresent states of affairs. The propagandist finds it convenient to suppress
information that would count against believing the messages to be imparted, and to represent
or misrepresent credentials that would favor belief in those messages.
In the United States the term “fake news” has been officially applied to the broadcast of what
appear to be interviews of officials in a genuine news setting by genuine reporters.The reporters
may be genuine, but they are acting in a different capacity in these cases. The whole interview
is an exercise in pretense. It is funded and scripted by a government department or corporation
seeking to burnish its public image. Legislation exists against government departments paying
for this activity, which is monitored by the Government Accountability Office, but enforcement
requires cooperation of the Executive branch of government.4
Two forms of deception were successfully used to support the first U.S. Iraq War in 1991.
The dream of a public relations consultant is to find a highly credible source to propound a
message helpful to a client. In the case of getting people to accept the United States going to
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war against Iraq, it was very helpful to have duped Amnesty into endorsing the allegation that
Iraqi soldiers had emptied 312 incubators of premature babies in Kuwaiti hospitals. Previously
a young Kuwaiti woman had given impassionate, widely publicized testimony as to having
witnessed the soldiers leaving the babies to die “on the cold floor.” What viewers of her testi-
mony were not told was that the witness was actually the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador.
When Amnesty, having been misled, gave further credence to the story it clinched the swing in
U.S. and world opinion toward accepting that war. Had the public known about the identity of
the young informant they might have been more skeptical about accepting it as true.5
There are at least three reasons for regarding the application of epistemology to social activity
as a useful endeavor. First, there may be biases within each profession so that criteria for truth-
fulness may be skewed toward the interests of the profession rather than the public it serves.
As an outsider, the epistemologist does not have the same biases (though she may have others).
Secondly, having an interest in knowledge as such, the epistemologist can compare the success
and pitfalls of principles and methods of truth determination in different professions or walks
of life. The comparisons may sometimes provide insights that can be carried over to other areas.
There are also particular issues concerning reliability of testimony that are not tied to a single
profession. Thirdly, we have already seen how recent developments in epistemology, particu-
larly feminist epistemology, have proven their relevance and importance in exposing “epistemic
injustice.” This would be a “proof of the pudding” argument. The following will elaborate on
the above points.
1. Every profession has its own special interests to protect. Bernard Shaw has one of his fictional
characters describe all professions as “conspiracies against the laity” (Shaw 1906). Rules of
evidence in law, for example, are designed to facilitate truth determination, but they can
sometimes disadvantage the poor, the uneducated, or those against whom prejudice exists in
their social milieu.
Truth in medicine may be jeopardized by reception of favors from the drug industry. Truth
in journalism may be skewed by the interests of media owners or by powerful advertisers, or by
freebies provided by corporations or individuals seeking favorable coverage. The potential for
bias is sufficiently appreciated today that the value of independent scrutiny of epistemic norms
governing practices in the different professions, judged from the perspective of fairness and the
general interest, can hardly be denied; in the case of journalism press councils and “Ombuds”
have been instituted, with varying degrees of success.
Two journalistic studies are of particular interest for the way in which they reveal epistemic
injustice in reporting practices. Theodore Glasser has argued that so-called “objectivity” works
out in practice to giving credence in an imbalanced way to more highly placed members of the
social power structure (Glasser 1992). Likewise, Herbert J. Gans has called for greater efforts to
be made to report on perspectives from economically or otherwise disfavored groups in society,
to help remedy injustices stemming from societal ignorance (Gans 1992). This would appear
to fit well with Fricker’s suggestion for remedying epistemic injustice through the practice of
virtue ethics, for example by giving special attention to witnesses who have knowledge but may
have difficulty expressing it (Fricker 2007).
2. When we look at the rules for ensuring veracity in the field of law and compare these with
what should be ideal journalistic practice, we find that the former have something to con-
tribute to the latter, though perhaps with modification. “Always hear the other side,” might
become “Always contact sources that might give a different and possibly conflicting account
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of some matter to be reported.” “No one should be judge in his own cause” could become
“Distrust sources that have an interest in getting their version of the truth reported,” or
“Always reveal the interests a source might have in getting their story published,” or “Never
write stories quoting anonymous officials,” or if anonymity is required, “Reveal as much
information as possible that would enlighten the reader as to possible self-serving motives of
the anonymous source.”6
The rule to not rely on hearsay, but to go straight to the source of some alleged fact may
be more possible in law than in journalism (unless the source is deceased). The law court has
powers of subpoena not available to journalists in their ordinary reporting work. Nevertheless,
a journalist can be faulted for not trying to make contact with more authoritative sources,
assuming they exist, if publicizing an inadequately verified report could damage someone’s
reputation. Canadian jurisprudence has recently admitted a journalistic defense of “responsible
communication” in libel suits. The new legal interpretation recognizes the public interest in
having some facts reported in a timely way while recognizing also the rights of people not to
have their name tarnished by false reports. The fact of having to meet a deadline will not be a
defense against every error in a story, but if it can be shown that every effort (due diligence) was
made to correct the possible error, and that the publication of the story involved a matter of
urgency for the public interest, and the error was prominently corrected at the earliest occasion,
the defense may succeed.
It should not be difficult to find further examples in which carryovers of rules for truth-
maximization are possible, at least in some modified form, from one profession or occupation
to another.
3. The discussion so far has been from the standpoint of people working within various
professions. In that context, the receiver of propagandistic messages is portrayed as passive.
The focus will now be on the recipients of epistemically flawed messages. Jacques Ellul
argues that modern receivers of mass media messages feel a need for propaganda, without
their being conscious of this. In modern democracies people are supposed to be responsible
citizens, thinking about the major problems of their time and voting responsibly. But the
world is too complex for most people to be genuinely knowledgeable, and so it is convenient
to latch onto narratives that are widely reproduced in the mass media. These may be over-
simplified narratives, but since others absorb the same narratives, a person will appear to be
well informed in most circles when he repeats them (Ellul 1973 [1965]: 102–5 and passim).
What this suggests is that there is strong pressure on contrarian media outlets not to challenge
too strongly the narratives presented by the large corporate media, even when evidence supports
the contrarians. Even if the independent media are right, they still reach only a small audience
and don’t have a big impact. If they are wrong, however, the more powerful media can use their
mistakes to discredit them. There is also the constant danger of a libel suit, where the smaller
media outlets might simply not have the resources to defend themselves in costly suits. Forced
to make retractions, they lose credibility. The result is that the conscientious reader or viewer of
today’s media, both mass and alternate, is likely to need supplementary sources of information.
This is particularly true in the case of foreign reporting, where the mass media are frequently
shown to be unreliable. One solution might be to seek out independent sources in the form
of close friends or family members in foreign countries, where these are available. There are
also wide-ranging news and opinion sources on the Internet, providing a counter-weight to
prevailing media narratives.
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The problem then becomes what sources to consult and whom to trust. The Internet is
one obvious place to go for alternate news sources, but there are formidable difficulties in
knowing whom to believe. Goldman thinks it arguable that conventional news systems are
in one respect more likely to give reports conducive to true belief. They have a professional
interest in maintaining a reputation for accurate and impartial reporting, whereas bloggers
(at least in contemporary USA) appear to be more polarized, with axes to grind (Goldman
2008: 121). David Coady, on the other hand, thinks that the fear of the blogosphere contrib-
uting to epistemic impoverishment is overblown (Coady 2012). He has no difficulty showing
examples of supposed professionals giving more attention to pleasing powerful sources than to
carrying out obligations to inform readers and viewers adequately. There are also highly quali-
fied professional journalists in the blogosphere. Among these I would name Robert Parry, of
Consortium News, who consistently reminds readers of recent historical facts that are ignored
by mainstream media pursuing a simplified narrative that supports war or war-r isking actions.
Noam Chomsky may not be a professional journalist, but he regularly calls attention to media
oversights that skew the public perception of reality. His views are readily obtainable from
various Internet sites. It is true that there is much misinformation on the Internet, some of
it deliberately planted to discredit other voices, but Coady sees the regular clash of beliefs as
conducive to the development of people’s critical faculties, an epistemically desirable state of
affairs (Coady 2012: 164).
Coady’s treatment of rumor and conspiracy theory shows a similar distrust of official sources,
and the mainstream media that uncritically accept them. He argues that many rumors are cred-
ible and the fact that something is rumored to be true is evidence in favor of it being true,
though of course antecedent probability and circumstances need to be weighed in.
Many of us are familiar with the parlor game wherein a story is told to one end of a chain of
persons, each one passing the story to the last, whose final account is often hilariously garbled
compared with the first. Some more elaborate experiments show much the same thing. By
contrast, Coady notes C. A. J. Coady’s observation that reliability of testimony can be preserved
and even enhanced as it passes from person to person. In the ordinary world, as distinct from
some experimental settings, people can ask questions of informants and check up on key facts
pertaining to the rumor. People also often know their informants and can assess the probability
of truth on the basis of the general reliability of the informant, the informant’s informant, and
so on. Furthermore, the informant often indicates how reliable she thinks the rumor is, some-
times adding disclaimers.
Another argument David Coady makes is that in the case of real rumors, many people will
simply not pass them on if they are implausible, so a rumor’s survival through a long chain
becomes evidence of its plausibility. People may also hear different versions of the same rumor
and make their own assessment that, in the light of other knowledge they have, becomes more
credible and accurate than previous versions they have heard. All in all, Coady thinks that there
is a realistic possibility that rumors can become more accurate as they spread. Even the fact
that a rumor spreads may be evidence of its accuracy, though Coady recognizes that this is less
likely when interests of the rumor-purveyors lie behind the dissemination. Interestingly, he also
cites evidence that the United States military was once concerned about rumors among its
troops not because they might be false but because they tended to be true and might reach the
enemy, giving them vital information. The response of the military was to break up the normal
channels of rumor dissemination and engage in anti-rumor activity. Although successful, the
activity spawned new but less credible rumors, showing that the original chains of dissemination
were indeed fairly reliable (Coady 2012: 87–96).
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The upshot of these observations is that the conscientious truth-seeker should not auto-
matically dismiss putative evidence merely because it has been labeled “rumor” or “conspiracy
theory.” For example, when a very credible witness makes claims or reveals documents that
convincingly upset a narrative needed to maintain very powerful interests, and that witness
is subsequently killed under suspicious circumstances, a public outcry demanding competent
impartial investigation into the causes of the death should not be dampened by media-assisted
preoccupation with those labels. Use of those labels to intimidate or discourage those seeking
the truth is a familiar propaganda technique.
Of the greatest importance for the detection and resistance to propaganda is the observa-
tion concerning the use of anonymous sources in the media. When government officials speak
to the media “not for attribution,” there is an appearance of veridicality without the reality,
Coady says, referring to David Dadge’s 2006 study of the 2003 Iraq War (Dadge 2006: 131–35).
Coady notes that many of those who uncritically accepted false official statements at that time
“have seen their careers go from strength to strength, while some of those who raised legitimate
doubts about those statements have been punished for doing so” (Coady 2012: 98–99). In this
context the sad saga of investigative reporter Gary Webb for the San José Mercury News warrants
examination. His early revelations about connections between the CIA and drug-dealing, lost
him his institutional and professional support in the late 1990s.7
On conspiracy theories Coady argues strongly against the practice of using the expression
“conspiracy theory” as a way of discrediting the theory. There are numerous real conspiracies just
as there are fictitious conspiracies, and there is no good reason, he argues, to accept use of the word
as shorthand for an imaginary or false conspiracy. There is ample evidence, for example that the
CIA has been involved in numerous conspiracies to overthrow governments deemed unfavorable
to U.S. interests and to engage in assassinations. As to 9/11 events, he notes there is no question
there was a real conspiracy, if only of the immediate perpetrators aboard the three planes used for
attack. Of course, people speak of this as a conspiracy, and not “conspiracy theory,” because of the
plain facts that cannot be denied. But there has to be more than one detailed account consistent
with the plain undeniable known facts, and it remains true that the question is about which more
detailed conspiracy theory is the right one, not whether there was a conspiracy.
That the U.S. government may engage in false flag attacks and may not always be trusted to
tell the truth is evidenced by the documentation of various conspiracy scenarios proposed by
the U.S. Joint Chiefs of State, headed by Admiral Lyman Lemnitzer. Code-named Operation
Northwoods, the document, drafted March 13, 1962, was top secret until obtained under
freedom of information in the late 1990s. Submitted in March 13, 1962, to Secretary of Defense
Robert McNamara, it proposed various false flag attack scenarios, including the sinking of an
American ship and blaming the attack on Cubans, as a way to initiate war against Cuba. The
document is especially valuable for interpreting events in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964,
where two supposedly unprovoked attacks on two U.S. warships were alleged, with doubtful
evidence. These allegations were the publicly asserted rationale for the United States going to
war in Vietnam.8
Coady has a useful rhetorical counter to the term “conspiracy theory” used as a general
put-down. His suggestion to the “Oh, so you are a conspiracy theorist” jibe is to reply, “Oh, so
you are a coincidence theorist, are you?” as if the perpetrators of 9/11 just happened to have
box-cutters, pilot training, etc., and coincidentally embarked on three different passenger planes,
etc. The response usefully opens the door to rational discussion. As he concludes, the only way
to find out which of two contradictory conspiracy theories is the right one is “by listening to
arguments and examining evidence” (Coady 2012: 135).
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4. Propaganda and ethics

It stands to reason that our obligation to pursue evidence in support of our beliefs will depend
on the impact those beliefs will have on the well-being of others and oneself. If the belief is
inconsequential, the obligation is minimal. If lives and safety depend on them, the obligation
is strong (Wolfram 1993: 131). Without some ethical concern to be a good citizen regarding
one’s own belief formation, it becomes that much easier for propaganda to succeed. A genuine
democracy can easily be turned into a dictatorship where there is a media oligopoly.This makes
it all the more important that the public develops the interest and skills necessary to separate
reliable reporting from that which is biased and unreliable. In this context, I credit the makers
of the documentary Outfoxed with showing how Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News fails to live up
to its claim to be “fair and balanced.”9
One formula that seems plausible relates to the numerous news and opinion sources available
online for free or very low cost. A consistent follower of such news reports can develop over
time a sense of which reporters are trustworthy and which ones are not. It would also help to
be in regular communication with a circle of friends who share the work of verification and
compare notes.
We should be careful to recognize our potential for adversely judging another’s credibility
based on biases and prejudice. We can discount someone’s credibility in advance, but this has
to be on solid grounds –perhaps the person or website is shown to regularly exaggerate some
things and illegitimately discount others.
This brief overview of propaganda and ideology will end with a particular example to show
how those engaged in public relations can skew news we get about world affairs. In a surpris-
ingly candid interview with French television station executive and author Jacques Merlino,
James Harff, director of Ruder Finn Global Public Affairs, a public relations firm in Washington,
explained his company’s role in serving Bosnian, Croatian, and other clients’ interests regarding
Serbian death camps such as in August, 1992: “Our job is not to verify information. We are not
equipped for that. Our job as I’ve said, is to speed up the spreading of news favorable to us, to
aim at judiciously chosen targets. That’s what we did. We did not say there were death camps in
Bosnia. We let people know that Newsday said it” (Merlino 1993: 129, my translation).10
The question was not whether Serbs engaged in war crimes and systematic killings, which
they did. The question was whether the implied comparison with Nazi concentration camps
and killings based solely on ethnicity was justified. Serbs allege that there were many similar war
crime killings among their opponents in the Yugoslavian civil war. James Harff made it clear that
he was not interested in ascertaining the larger truth involved, but rather of spreading believable
news that would serve his clients’ interests.
From this it becomes apparent that those looking for truth about world events need to be
exceptionally wary before jumping to conclusions even after reading what seem to be reliable
reports. The additional question to ask is whether a stream of incriminating reports may fail to
place the blame within a framework that distributes blame fairly and within proper dimensions.
One way of disciplining the media would be to hold proper judicial inquiries after the fact. It
has been done in Canada, with an inquiry into events surrounding the scandalous official hand-
ling of Maher Arar, who was suspected of terrorist links with no good evidential foundation and
sent to Syria for torture. The record of the events, including media cooperation in government
manipulation of information is there for all to see.11
There may be many reasons for not wanting to revisit government and/or journalistic mal-
feasance with a public inquiry, cost among them, but epistemic concerns and their impact on
public behavior might well be enough in some cases to outweigh them. There is, however, the
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opposing risk that a corrupt government could threaten the media with inquiries in order to
discourage them from exposing wrongdoing on the government’s part.
We have looked at some of the many manifestations of propaganda in the world today. We
have noted many epistemically negative practices. It must be borne in mind that the power and
ingenuity of lobbyists and public relations practitioners to shape mass beliefs to the advantage
of privileged sectors is very great. They have the resources to keep a constant watch on what a
given population at a given time takes as believable sources of information and to exploit that
credibility by co-opting, duping, or masquerading as those sources. Exposing the many different
kinds of deceptions and distractions used to support wars and maintain power over the less eco-
nomically privileged is a never-ending task to which epistemologists have much to contribute.
It’s also a task sorely needed in our time.12
Notes
1 For an extended discussion of the definition of “propaganda,” see Marlin (2013 [2002]: Chap. 1).
2 For the translation of this passage see The Obstinate Classicist:
Then Cicero gives the reason for this work:
quam ob rem ut religio propaganda etiam est quae est iuncta cum cognitione naturae sic
superstitionis stirpes omnes ejiciendae.
For this reason, just as religion must be promoted, religion which has been joined with contem-
plation of nature, so every root of superstition must be ejected.
http://obstinateclassicist.blogspot.ca/2013/12/de-divinatione-by-cicero-summary.html.
3 www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/btw/watch.html.
4 See the letter from the United States Government Accountability Office to Honorable Henry
A. Waxman and Honorable John W. Olver, January 4, 2005, relating to a video news release by the
Office of National Drug Control Policy. Accessed January 11, 2016, through www.gao.gov/products/
A15416.
5 See (Marlin 2013 [2002]: 205–13), and the excellent Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s the fifth
estate documentary “To Sell a War,” January 7, 1992.
6 I would like to acknowledge the late Canadian Ambassador Sidney Freifeld as my source for this idea.
7 See http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318–66/26093-documents-show-how-the-cia-
and-us-press-destroyed-gary-webb. See also Valentine (2017: passim).
8 For the documentation on Operation Northwoods and the Cuban scenarios, see http://nsarchive.
gwu.edu/news/20010430/. I have an email dated July 8, 2010, from Mary Curry, PhD, Public Service
Coordinator and Research Associate, National Security Archive, verifying the authenticity of the
Operation Northwoods document.
9 On this matter see the video “Outfoxed.” The treatment of Jeremy Glick by Fox News TV host Bill
O’Reilly is especially revealing: www.youtube.com/watch?v=P74oHhU5MDk.
10 I wish to thank Aleksandar Jokic for this valuable reference.
11 See the Commission of Inquiry into the Actions of Canadian Officials in Relation to Maher Arar. The
Honorable Dennis O’Connor Commissioner, September 2006: www.sirc-csars.gc.ca/pdfs/cm_arar_
bgv1-eng.pdf.
12 I would like to thank the editors for their many helpful observations and suggestions for improving this
text.
References
Coady, C. A. J. (1992). Testimony: A philosophical study. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Coady, D. (2012). What to Believe Now: Applying epistemology to contemporary issues. Malden, MA, and
Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.
Cohen, E. D. (ed.). (1992). Philosophical Issues in Journalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dadge, D. (2006). The War in Iraq and Why the Media Failed Us. Westport, CT: Praeger.
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Deaville, J., and Malkinson, A. (2014). “Doctoring Music in Medication Commercials.” Paper presented
at Communicating Humanly in an Age of Technology and Spin: Jacques Ellul in the Twenty-First
Century, Carleton University and Dominican University College, Ottawa, July 13–14, 2014.
Ellul, J. (1973 [1965]). Propaganda: The formation of men’s attitudes. New York: Vintage Books.
Gans, H. J. (1992). “Multiperspectival News,” in E. D. Cohen (ed.), Philosophical Issues in Journalism.
Ginsberg, M. (1961 [1956]). On the Diversity of Morals. London: William Heinemann.
Glasser, T. L. (1992). “Objectivity and News Bias,” in E. D. Cohen (ed.), Philosophical Issues in Journalism.
Goldman, A. I. (2008). “The Social Epistemology of Blogging,” in J. van den Hoven and J. Weckert (eds.),
Information Technology and Moral Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Goldman, A. I., and Blanchard, B. (2015). “Social Epistemology,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Retrieved April 28, 2015, from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology-social/.
Grasswick, H. (2017). “Epistemic Injustice in Science,” in I. J. Kidd, J. Medina, and G. Pohlhaus Jr. (eds.),
The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice. Abingdon: Routledge.
Marlin, R. (2013 [2002]). Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion, 2nd ed. Peterborough, ON: Broadview
Press.
Merlino, J. (1993). Les verités yougoslaves ne sont pas toutes bonnes à dire. Paris: Albin Michel.
Orwell, G. (1970). The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Volume II, My Country Right
or Left (1940–1943). Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Shaw, G. B. (1906). The Doctor’s Dilemma. New York: Brentano’s.
Stanley, J. (2015). How Propaganda Works. New York: Princeton University Press.
Valentine, D. (2017). The CIA as Organized Crime: How illegal operations corrupt America and the world. Atlanta,
GA: Clarity Press.
Wittgenstein, L. (1958). Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Wolfram, S. (1993).“Ethics and Belief,” in R. Marlin (ed.), Propaganda and the Ethics of Rhetoric, The Canadian
Journal of Rhetorical Studies,Vol. 3. Ottawa, ON: Carleton Centre for Rhetorical Studies.
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PART IV
Science
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10
EXPERTISE IN CLIMATE
SCIENCE
Stephen John
National and international policies aimed at mitigating and adapting to anthropogenic climate
change are highly controversial. This is unsurprising, given that climate change raises a “perfect
moral storm” of ethical and political issues (Gardiner 2012). However, public climate debates
involve disagreements over basic factual questions as well as normative issues. For example, in
a 2012 UK poll only 26% of respondents agreed that it had been shown that climate change is
anthropogenic (BBC 2012). A summary of research in the USA, the world’s largest producer of
greenhouse gases, suggests that even those who believe that climate change is occurring, typic-
ally believe “that climate change poses no significant threat within one’s own lifetime and that
the causes of climate change remain scientifically controversial” (Torcello 2016: 25).
There are two notable features of this phenomenon. First, there is broad consensus in the
climate-science community that anthropogenic climate change is occurring, that it is (largely)
anthropogenic, and that it is likely to have significant effects. In 2014, the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published a synthesis of its “Fifth Assessment Report,” based
on the existing scientific literature. Its claims were stark: “human influence on the climate system
is clear, and recent anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are the highest in history” and
“continued emission of greenhouse gases will cause further warming and long-lasting changes
in all components of the climate system, increasing the likelihood of severe, pervasive and irre-
versible impacts for people and ecosystems” (IPCC 2014). The factual disagreements in public
debate do not mirror a “perfect scientific storm.” Second, factual disagreement among non-
expert audiences is “politically patterned” in the sense that non-experts’ political commitments
are highly correlated with their beliefs about climate change. In many countries, skepticism
about climate science is a badge of honor for right-wing politicians. In a 2013 U.S. poll, 44%
of self-identified Republicans believed global warming was happening, compared to 87% of
Democrats (Pew Research 2013).
A venerable philosophical tradition distinguishes between factual and evaluative inputs
into policy-making (Betz 2013). In the case of climate change, however, non-experts’ political
commitments seem to shape not only their evaluative, but their factual commitments. Either
something is wrong with our system of public knowledge –with the experts or with the trans-
mission of their knowledge –or the distinction between facts and values is more porous than
we hoped. Of course, climate change research and resultant public debates raise other issues in
social epistemology: for example, about how climate scientists rely on each other in building
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models (Biddle and Winsberg 2011), and how bodies such as the IPCC reach consensus (Miller
2013). In this paper, however, I focus on how non-experts learn from experts.
To address this topic, I make three assumptions. First, that climate scientists are “true experts”;
that is, with regard to the domain of the global climate they “possesses an extensive fund of
knowledge (true belief) and a set of skills or methods for apt and successful deployment of this
knowledge to new questions in the domain” (Goldman 2001: 92).1 Second, that if they have an
interest in knowing about some topic, then non-experts should learn from the relevant experts
(i.e., if some cognitive expert reports some claim, then, all else being equal, interested non-
experts should believe it). Third, regardless of their political commitments, non-experts have an
interest in knowing about climate change.
Why do some fail to believe what the experts say, and why is this phenomenon politically
patterned? In section 1 of this chapter, I outline some general difficulties around learning from
climate experts, before turning to explanations for the political patterning of non-belief: in
terms of “manufactured dissent” in non-experts’ socio-epistemic environments (section 2), and
by appeal to a value-influenced interpretation of evidence (section 3). In section 4, I return to
the broader topic of how non-experts learn from experts, arguing that the tactics used in polit-
ically motivated climate change denialism imply that “folk philosophy of science” creates a more
general problem for understanding the proper relationship between experts and non-experts.
Before going further, note that even choosing a vocabulary for talking about climate change
debates is controversial. Should we call those whose beliefs do not match mainstream scientific
consensus, “dissidents” or “skeptics” or “denialists”? Each of these terms has complex evalu-
ative connotations (Coady and Corry 2013: Chap. 2), and, furthermore, each risks overlooking
important differences between different responses to mainstream climate science. In this chapter,
I will call any non-expert who (for whatever reason) does not believe the same claims as (most)
climate experts, a “climate non-believer”; I will use the term “climate dissident” or “climate
skeptic” to describe those who actively argue against belief in mainstream climate scientists’
claims.
1. Learning from climate scientists: some complications

In the background of any discussion of why so many non-experts are “non-believers” are
assumptions about how non-experts do and should learn from experts. Most discussions of
expertise consider cases where non-experts learn some factual claim by relying on some expert’s
testimony.There is a wealth of literature –well-represented in the rest of this volume –on when
non-experts should treat a putative expert as a true expert, and which of two competing experts
to trust. Some writers have used such models as a starting point for thinking about climate
change debates. For example, applying Goldman’s influential account of expertise, Anderson
argues that it should be easy for non-experts to distinguish who counts as a true expert in
climate-science debates, such that we cannot explain expert non-belief by saying that they
face a difficult cognitive task (Anderson 2011; see also Almassi 2012). However, non-experts’
learning about climate change differs from standard cases of testimony in two important ways.
First, many claims about climate change are made by groups of experts, rather than human
individuals. For example, the debate over climate change is dominated by the IPCC, a cor-
porate body whose reports are “authored” by very many contributors (John 2017). Bracketing
the theoretical issue of whether corporate bodies can testify at all, standard ways of assessing a
human speaker’s trustworthiness may not apply well to assessing corporate speech. One defeas-
ible reason to trust a putative expert’s claims is that she has social credentials such as an advanced
degree. It is unclear, however, what it means for a corporate body to have such credentials.
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Expertise in climate science
Second, many claims about climate change –whether made by human individuals or by

groups –are not, strictly, claims about climate change, but, rather, claims about the consensus
among climate scientists about climate change. As Boaz Miller (2013) has argued, the relevant
concept of consensus at stake here is more than a mere convergence of independently derived
beliefs but refers to a widespread willingness within a community to jointly accept some theory
as (at least) partially true. There are two ways in which learning about the world from testi-
mony about consensus is complicated. First, one need not be an expert about the climate to
be an expert about the consensus view on climate change. A sociologist can accurately report
what climate scientists believe even if she cannot contribute to climate science herself.2 Second,
believing a report about the consensus in some community does not necessitate believing the
claims on which there is a reported consensus. I may believe that most astrologers believe there
will be a catastrophe next month without myself believing that claim.
Even if we accept testimony that there is a consensus that p, we need to make a further
inferential step to believe p ourselves, by assuming that the best explanation of that consensus
is the (partial) truth of p. We often simply assume that a scientific consensus is best explained
by truth. However, this assumption is complex and may involve further assumptions, both
broadly epistemic –for example, about the reliability of the methods used –and broadly socio-
logical –for example, about the mechanisms whereby consensus is reached and maintained.
Such assumptions are necessary to rule out alternative explanations for consensus: for example,
that it is the result of what Miller (2013) calls “epistemic misfortune,” such as widespread epi-
stemic bias, or articulated for non-epistemic reasons, such as paternalistic concern (Beatty 2006).
One obvious explanation for why some non-experts do not believe that climate change is
happening is that they suffer from an information deficit: one can only learn from the experts
if one “hears” what they say in the first place. However, such claims, disguise the difficul-
ties of learning about climate change. Assessing corporate testimony is complex, and so, too,
is the inferential move from testimony of consensus on some claim to accepting that claim.
Non-belief may often seem an epistemologically safer option. Furthermore, even within the
climate change community, most “experts” will have to learn from others through indirect
means, because understanding and predicting changes to the climate involves inputs from many
different disciplines and types of experts. There is no easy way of cutting through these com-
plexities. In the next two sections, I explore how these issues inter-relate with the charged
politics of climate change.
2. Manufactured dissent

Despite widespread scientific consensus that climate change is occurring, that it is anthropo-
genic, and that it is likely to have significant, largely negative consequences, there is a mini-
industry of “climate dissidents” or “skeptics” who dispute these claims. Pollock famously
differentiated two types of “defeaters”: one may undermine the apparent evidential relation
between some evidence E and some hypothesis H either by “undermining” that link (showing
that E is not, in fact, strong evidence for H), or by “rebutting” it (by providing evidence in favor
of some alternative H) (Pollock 1986). A striking feature of climate skepticism is how many
arguments aim at “undermining,” rather than rebutting, climate scientists’ claims. For example,
in the 2007 “Fourth Assessment Report” of the IPCC, there was an incorrect prediction that
the Himalayan ice cap would melt by 2035. Many climate skeptics used this error as evidence
of a more systematic problem with the IPCC’s procedures.3 Similarly, as I discuss in more detail
in §4, skeptics have argued that emails released from the Climate Change Research Unit at the
University of East Anglia (UEA) show that consensus was maintained artificially. Of course,
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attempts at “undermining” are common in scientific controversy. They are normally, however,
subsidiary to “rebuttals”: that is, arguments for alternative claims. Interestingly, however, the
authors who list “revelations of unethical behavior, errors, and serial exaggeration in climate
science” (Hayward 2010) rarely offer any positive claims about the environment. Undermining
mainstream scientists often seems to be the end of climate skepticism, rather than a means to
the further end of convincing audiences of an alternative. In this sense, “dissidence” may more
properly be called “skepticism”: it aims at aporia, rather than alternative belief.
These comments provide further reasons for not modeling climate debates as straightforward
instances of choosing whose testimony to accept. Not only do such models risk overlooking
the complexity of learning from climate experts –which rarely involves testimony in the strict
sense –but they typically assume that we must choose between two (or more) experts, each
of whom are making positive claims about the same domain. However, mainstream climate
scientists and climate skeptics often make claims in different domains: the environment, and the
sociology of climate science. Torcello’s characterization of climate skeptics as “non-experts who
naively consider themselves more scientifically astute than the collective scientific community”
(Torcello 2016: 21) is misguided; skeptics do not need to claim to be scientifically astute to
claim, for example, that scientific institutions are unduly influenced by political concerns.
Placing climate skepticism within its broader political and economic contexts explains why
so much skepticism aims at “undermining,” rather than “rebutting.” One could rationally both
believe that climate change is happening and that nothing should be done about it. In practice,
however, most of us hold ethical positions according to which, if climate change is occurring,
we should reform economic and political structures. Therefore, those with vested interests in
the current economic and political order have incentives to prevent widespread adoption of the
claims of mainstream climate scientists. In turn, there is excellent evidence that, even if some
climate skeptics are sincere, their work is directly or indirectly supported by such vested interests
(Orsekes and Conway 2010). In the words of Biddle and Leuschner (2015), much climate
dissent is “manufactured.” Of course, dissent in science can often be explained, at least partially,
by the non-epistemic interests of involved parties; an expert may keep a theory alive because his
reputation depends on that theory. However, climate science seems distinctive in terms of the
degree to which non-epistemic interests, as opposed to genuine epistemic uncertainty, explain
ongoing controversy.
In circumstances where policy is felt to require certainty, non-belief in the claims of climate
science is a tool on the side of vested interests, regardless of whether this non-belief takes the
form of uncertainty or belief in some alternative claim (Almassi 2012). In this regard, debates
over climate science are an example of the more general phenomenon, discussed in the history
and sociology of science, of “agnotology”: the deliberate creation of ignorance, motivated by
political or economic ends (Proctor and Schiebinger 2008). As a tobacco executive wrote about
his industry’s response to the research linking smoking and lung cancer: “doubt is our product.”
Building on Mill, Feyerabend argued that “unanimity of opinion may be fitting for a church
… variety of opinion is a feature necessary for objective knowledge” (1975: 46). However,
some argue that “manufactured dissent” may have negative epistemic consequences for science
(Biddle and Leuschner 2015; Intemann and de Melo-Martín 2014). Regardless of how we think
about manufactured dissent’s intra-scientific effects, it is clear that it might have –indeed, is
aimed at having –a significant negative effect on non-experts’ beliefs about true experts’ beliefs.
I argued above that learning about climate science from the experts is an epistemologically
complex task. As such, it may be easy for those with an interest in disrupting such learning to
do so.Why, though, is non-belief politically patterned? Most non-experts are exposed to experts
via mass media, in which different channels may choose to represent certain views over others.
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Therefore, there might be an indirect path between political commitments and belief in climate
change via differential exposure to skeptical voices.4 Before discussing the tactics used in attacks
on climate science in section 4, it is useful to consider some alternative accounts of politically
patterned climate non-belief.
3. Socio-cognitive explanations

Rather than think that non-experts’ political convictions play an indirect role in non-belief,
we might instead think that politically patterned non-belief reflects an influence of our values
on how we assess and understand experts’ claims. (Of course, the social and the cognitive
explanations may be complementary. For purposes of exposition, however, it is useful to keep
them separate.) In this section, I discuss two such arguments: one drawing on the concept of
“cultural cognition,” the other on debates over “inductive risk.”
Work by Dan Kahan and colleagues suggests that the relationship between political
commitments and belief in climate science may be more complex than differential exposure
(Kahan et al. 2011, 2012; Kahan 2014). For example, in one study, participants were provided
with an identical biography of an expert (fictional) and one of two articles allegedly written
by that expert, one of which argued that climate change is occurring, and the other that it is
not (Kahan et al. 2012). Participants who self-identified as Republican voters and received
the “anti-” climate-science article were more likely to describe the author as a reliable expert
than Republicans who received the “pro-” climate-science article, while Democrats’ responses
followed an inverse pattern. Other experiments reveal similar results: for example, non-experts’
beliefs about the degree of consensus within scientific communities are heavily influenced by
the content of the claims. Republicans believe –correctly –that there is a high degree of con-
sensus on the safety of nuclear waste disposal, whereas Democrats believe there is not (Kahan
et al. 2011).
Jointly with various collaborators, Kahan has combined strands from anthropology and
psychology to explain such phenomena in terms of “cultural cognition.” Very roughly, this
model proposes that individuals’ sense of self-identity is bound up with their cultural values,
which can be mapped along two axes: hierarchical/egalitarian, and communitarian/individu-
alistic. In turn, accepting certain sorts of factual claims may challenge or affirm those values,
because accepting those claims are commonly seen to lead to further normative conclusions.
For example, the claim that global temperatures are rising is commonly seen as implying the
normative claim that “commerce must be constrained”; for an individualist, strongly committed
to the free market, accepting this factual claim may threaten her cultural identity, whereas the
opposite is true for a communitarian. Kahan’s key claim is not, however, that we simply accept
or reject factual testimony on the basis of our self-identity. Rather, more subtly, our cultural
values guide our assessment of the experts themselves: when someone’s factual claims chime
with our commitments, we are more likely to think she is a true expert; when they do not, we
are more likely to look for reasons to distrust her.
On Kahan’s model, the relationship between our (broadly) “political” commitments and
our learning from experts is complex. We do not simply appeal to our values as straightforward
reasons to accept or reject experts’ claims, but we justify our acceptance or rejection in epis-
temological terms. However, the reasons we give are shaped by our value-saturated assessment of
the testimony’s normative implications, as a way of reducing potential dissonance between our
commitments.5 Therefore, simply making the public more aware of what experts say is unlikely
to be an effective way to communicate scientific claims in contested areas. Rather, we need to
present information in ways which do not threaten cultural values. For example, coupling a
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report about climate change with a policy recommendation in favor of nuclear power may lead
hierarchical-individualists to take the factual claims more seriously (Kahan 2014). I return to
some of these proposals below. First, however, it is useful to consider how recent arguments in
philosophy of science may seem to imply an even stronger claim: that our political beliefs may
not merely influence but justify climate non-belief.
Building on work by Richard Rudner, Heather Douglas has argued that scientific justifi-
cation must be guided by non-epistemic values (Rudner 1953; Douglas 2009). According to
this argument, scientists face problems of “inductive risk”: because no scientific claim is ever
conclusively proven by available evidence, they must decide how much evidence suffices to
accept or assert some claim. The more evidence they demand, the lower the risk that they will
accept a false claim, but the higher the risk they will fail to accept a true claim. Purely epistemic
values cannot determine how to trade-off these risks. Therefore, scientific research is “value
laden,” in the sense that the degree of evidence which scientists demand before accepting some
claim should be sensitive to the non-epistemic costs of different kinds of error. To provide an
extremely simplified example: “climate change is anthropogenic” will never be conclusively
proven; as such, we must decide how much evidence suffices for accepting that claim; our
choice of such a threshold should be guided by the relative non-epistemic costs of believing that
climate change is anthropogenic when, in fact, it is not, and failing to believe it is anthropogenic
when, in fact, it is.
These arguments have an important implication for the epistemology of learning from
experts. Imagine that a policy-maker believes that acting as if climate change is anthropogenic
when it is not would be disastrous. As such, she refuses to accept that claim unless it is highly
certain. A scientist tells her that climate change is anthropogenic. However, the policy-maker
knows that the scientist’s own valuation of the non-epistemic consequences of different kinds
of error is such that she is willing to accept such claims when they are merely likely. Therefore,
the policy-maker refuses to defer to the scientist, because there is a chance that her claims,
although well-established, are not well-established enough to be properly accepted according to
the policy-maker’s valuation of different kinds of error. We might object to the policy-maker’s
values, but, given those commitments, her refusal to defer seems justifiable (John 2017).
This abstract model seems relevant to some real-life cases of climate non-belief. For example,
Paul Edwards has documented how U.S. political debate over climate change in the 1990s
turned on distinguishing between “frontier” scientists, who were willing to rely on theoretical
claims in making climate predictions, and “high-proof ” scientists, who rested their predictions
on known to be accurate data (Edwards 1999). Many influential Republican senators claimed
that only high-proof claims, which tended to be more conservative than those of frontier
scientists, should guide policy. On the model above, the Republicans’ failure to defer might be
viewed as justifiable: they could reasonably both have conceded that “frontier” scientists were
more likely to be right than they were themselves, but still refused to defer because, given the
political stakes involved, they were not “likely enough.”
One might object to this on the grounds that scientists do not accept or reject claims out-
right, but, rather, assign epistemic probabilities to hypotheses. Indeed, Gregor Betz has argued
that climate science seems to provide a neat example of this phenomenon; climate scientists, and
bodies such as the IPCC, routinely “hedge” their claims or predictions with epistemic qualifiers
(Betz 2013). However, close studies of climate science reveal a problem with this response. The
complexities of climate modeling are such that even our “second-order uncertainty” –that is,
our uncertainty about model-derived probabilities of future events –is better represented as
a range of values, rather than as a single value (Parker 2014). In Wendy Parker’s terms, precise
estimates of uncertainty can, at best, be “offered,” rather than “owned.” Thus, we face a version
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of an inductive risk problem –which “point” estimate of uncertainty to offer –even when cli-

mate claims are hedged.6
Concerns about inductive risk raise important questions about how scientists should reason
and communicate in contexts where their epistemically underdetermined decisions may
have important non-epistemic consequences. However, while climate scientists’ resolution of
inductive risk problems might lead to (justifiable) politically patterned non-belief, it is unlikely
that much actual climate change non-belief can be explained (let alone justified) in these terms.
First, actual climate non-belief is rarely justified by appeal to inductive risk concerns, and even
in cases where such reasoning is invoked, it may function more as an ex-post rationalization.
Second, the evidential requirements for asserting scientific claims are typically very demanding
and there is very much evidence in favor of claims such as “climate change is anthropogenic”;
as such rejecting the core claims of climate science would be to hold an absurdly high standard
of evidence.7
This section has canvassed two ways in which our political commitments might affect our
learning from experts: in terms of “cultural cognition,” and through concerns about “inductive
risk.” Although the second model points to an intriguing sense in which climate science may be
unavoidably “value laden,” the former is most useful for understanding actual failures to learn
from experts. Still, this model leaves open an issue: to say that our cultural values play a biasing
role in our assessment of experts is to imply that there is some assessment which we should
make independent of our values. Broadly, we can identify two ways of understanding the rele-
vant “should”: the assessment we “should” make given the rest of our beliefs; and the assessment
we “should” make given the actual expertise in our community. In the next section, I argue that
these two kinds of “should” can come apart.
4. Folk philosophy of science

As Kahan acknowledges, we rationalize our failure to learn from experts, even if those
rationalizations are, often, post hoc. In contemporary societies, the resources for such
rationalizations are provided by the purveyors of manufactured dissent. In turn, it is plausible
that these agnotologists are true experts on the topic of how non-experts think about learning
from experts; after all, they have huge financial stakes in disrupting such learning. My question
in this section, then, is what can social epistemologists learn from the agnotologists’ attempts to
undermine non-experts’ learning from experts? This moves us away from the topic of politically
patterned climate change non-belief, but it raises a no less politically important topic about how
non-experts themselves decide which experts to trust.
Above I distinguished three ways in which non-experts learn about climate change: from
the testimony of individual experts; from the testimony of corporate experts; and from claims
that there is consensus in the scientific community. Climate skeptics aim to undermine all
three of these forms of learning. First, they seek to show that individual climate scientists are
not trustworthy experts. For example, they argue that high-profile climate scientists cannot be
trusted because their political views color their scientific work. Second, they seek to show that
corporate testifiers –such as the IPCC –are “politicized” such that we should not defer to these
bodies’ claims. Finally, they seek to block an inference from consensus in a community that cli-
mate science is occurring to acceptance of that claim through two routes: first, by suggesting
that there is no consensus; second, by suggesting alternative explanations of consensus –as the
result of group-think.8
The final strategy relates to a familiar trope in climate skeptic arguments: accusations that
scientific norms are not honored in climate science.9 Many commentators claim that dissenters
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are somehow anti-scientific. However, such charges should be treated carefully. There are at
least two kinds of assumptions we must make before treating communal consensus on “p” as
evidence for the truth of “p”: that the epistemic tools used within that community are good
tools at getting to the truth; and that the consensus has arisen through proper use of those
tools. In arguing that consensus has arisen from “social pressures,” climate skeptics challenge the
second assumption, rather than the first. They argue that a specific community fails to be truly
“scientific,” rather than that the tools of science are inherently epistemically faulty. (Note that
this is not an idle possibility. Some forms of radical environmentalism might be understood as
articulating concerns about the scope of scientific knowledge (Yearley 2005).) Rather, they
claim that they are willing to respect well-done science, but that actual climate research has not
been done properly because of systematic failures in the institutions governing climate science.
Philip Nickel has distinguished between “assurance-based” and “norm-based” entitlements to
rely on others’ testimony, where the latter involves an assumption that institutions are such that
testifiers satisfy certain epistemic and communicative norms (Nickel 2013). Climate skepticism
often attempts to undermine a putative norm-based entitlement to defer to those credentialed
as experts, by objecting that the institutions of climate science do not incentivize individuals to
meet epistemic and/or communicative obligations. What skeptics do not deny is that following
those norms would be good grounds for deference.
For example, consider the furor caused by leaked emails from the University of East Anglia’s
Centre for Climate Change Research (McAllister 2012). Climate skeptics claimed that these
emails showed that the climate scientists at UEA were engaged in “non-” or “anti-” scientific
practices, by refusing to include certain data sets in their analyses, by refusing to publish papers
by certain other scientists, and so on (Delingpole 2012: Chap. 2). “Political concerns” –both
in the sense of the politics of the climate-science community and the sense of policy debates –
took precedence over proper scientific practice. Similarly, a key theme in the ongoing con-
troversy over the “hockey stick graph” (a graph showing a huge upward trend in temperature
over the last 150 years), is not simply that climate scientists made a mistake, but, rather, that
they published known-to-be-flawed data, and that systems of peer review facilitated this deceit.
Interestingly, even when dissidents make “positive” claims, for example concerning possible
effects on solar activity on the earth’s temperature, these are often accompanied by a further
rhetorical point: that if mainstream climate scientists fail to take these claims seriously, then
they are failing to be open-minded, and, hence, failing as scientists. (The final strategy poses a
particularly tricky problem for mainstream climate scientists. On the one hand, if they ignore
the claims of climate dissidents, this provides further ammunition for the charge that they are
“unscientific.” On the other hand, engaging with these claims may grant them a spurious
legitimacy.)
Assuming that agnotologists are experts in non-experts’ views on expertise, their strategies
suggest that non-experts are willing to defer to scientists, but that this willingness is –perhaps
implicitly –based on a “folk” philosophy and sociology of science, a set of assumptions about
what is involved in doing good science. (This hypothesis is compatible with political patterning
of non-belief: maybe the public in general hold this philosophy of science but conservatives are
more often exposed to agnotological arguments; or, as with Kahan, that political commitments
structure hearers’ receptiveness to arguments based on such assumptions.) Climate skeptics are
sometimes accused of peddling misinformation. What they say is, however, often true: emails
from the UEA servers, for example, do show an unwillingness to engage with skeptics, or a
“tidying up” of data. What is problematic about climate skepticism is that, even if such activities
are improper according to folk philosophy of science, they may be proper parts of normal scien-
tific practice, which allow scientists to function as true experts. For example, refusals or failures
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to engage with dissident viewpoints may be a justifiable aspect of scientific practice (Biddle and
Leuschner 2015), refusing to publish some kinds of work is part of the “dogmatism” necessary to
promote “progressive research projects” (Lakatos 1978), and ignoring recalcitrant or strange data
sets is a normal, and justifiable, way of reflecting the uncertainties of data collection (McAllister
2012). Climate skepticism rarely deals in outright falsehoods. Nor does it necessarily provide
information which is irrelevant, given its audience’s views on good practice. What it does is to
point to information which is irrelevant given how audiences ought to assess expertise.
These possibilities have important practical and theoretical implications. Many writers believe
that non-experts should defer to the expert consensus. One popular proposal for achieving this
end is that the processes of science should be made more transparent to the public. For example,
Philip Kitcher claims that “informed citizen involvement” in science will generate trust in cli-
mate science (Kitcher 2011: Chap. 6). Kahan’s arguments suggest that such opening up may be
ineffective. The arguments above suggest an even worse outcome: making science more open
may be as likely to decrease as to increase trust, at least where vested interests can appeal to false
philosophies of science (John 2018). (Interestingly, there is good evidence that “the most scien-
tifically ‘literate’ sections of society and the most scientifically ‘literate’ nations are not the most
deferential to science” (Yearley 2004: 118).)
The more theoretical implication relates back to the problems with which we started: of
politically patterned climate change non-belief. The strategies of manufactured dissent suggest
that there may be a systematic gap between those whom non-experts “should” believe in an
objective sense and those they “should” believe relative to their beliefs about true expertise. On
a popular account of practical reasoning, decision-making requires two kinds of inputs: evalu-
ative judgments about which kinds of ends are valuable; and factual judgments about which
courses of action are most likely to promote these ends. In turn, it seems plausible that a similar
structure should guide policy-making: specifically, democrats hold that the people should
(ultimately) decide on evaluative judgments, and cognitive experts should (ultimately) provide
factual judgments. One worry about politically patterned climate non-belief is that it blurs the
lines between the evaluative and the factual. Therefore, it is tempting to think, with Kahan,
that we should overcome any political bias in how non-experts assess experts. However, for the
democratic division of labor to function properly requires that the public are able and willing
to trust the cognitive experts. In particular, they must be able to trust that experts will not
smuggle controversial values into policy through the provision of factual information. (These
concerns are central to thinking through the proper response to concerns about inductive risk.)
In a thoughtful paper, Richardson argues that concerns about the dangers of relying on experts
imply the importance of the “public recoverability of the grounds for the experts’ conclusion,”
through the means of “publicity preserving institutions” (Richardson 2012: 104).What, though,
should we say in cases where “recoverability” might undermine trust in true experts?
Notes
1 There are well-motivated concerns about some practices of climate science, and especially the reliability
of some climate model outputs (Werndl et al. 2015). However, such concerns do not apply to the very
general claims –such as that climate change is happening at all –which I mostly discuss.
2 In Collins and Evans’s terms, all that is required may be “interactive expertise” (2007: Chap. 5).
3 For a nuanced discussion of this case, see Hulme (2010).
4 For the media’s reporting of climate change, including differential reporting, see Boyce and Lewis
(2009).
5 Gelfert (2013) proposes a related account of climate change denialism as resulting from the resolution
of cognitive dissonance.
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6 For a related claim about the IPCC, see Steele (2012). For yet another response to Betz, focused not on
what to communicate, but which evidence to use, see John (2015).
7 I am grateful to Erin Nash for forcefully arguing this point.
8 A useful compendium of these techniques can be found in Delingpole (2012)
9 Of course, there are other important features of their strategies, most notably their appeal to conspira-
torial reasoning. For some more general work on the relationship between climate non-belief and con-
spiratorial ideation, see Lewandowsky et al. (2013).
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11
EVIDENCE-BASED MEDICINE
The term “evidence-based medicine” (EBM) was introduced to the broader medical commu-
nity in a 1992 paper published in JAMA by the Evidence-Based Medicine Working Group.The
article was intended as a manifesto, describing a revolutionary new way of practicing medicine.
While a reasonable reaction to the introduction of evidence-based medicine might be to wonder
what medicine had been based on before, the proponents of EBM have a very specific view on
what counts as (good) evidence in medicine. In this chapter, we describe the history and the key
epistemological claims of EBM, and identify the major epistemic criticisms levied against EBM
by both clinicians and philosophers. We then outline the most recent developments in both
philosophical work on EBM and EBM itself, and offer some suggestions about what might be
next on the horizon. Applied epistemology matters, and matters deeply, in the medical context,
and we hope that will become clear as the chapter proceeds.
1. Evidence-based medicine

Although the roots of EBM date back to the 1960s, and although similar developments were
occurring in other areas of the world, the EBM Working Group can be viewed as both leaders
in the development of EBM and representative of major ideas developed throughout the world.
Their 1992 “manifesto” aimed to revolutionize clinical practice by teaching clinicians to find
and assess the published clinical literature, and to use the results of this exercise in their clinical
practice. The article distinguishes between “The Way of the Past,” illustrated by a case in which
a resident consults with both her senior resident and the attending physician to learn what to
tell a patient about his likely prognosis. In the evidence-based “Way of the Future,” by contrast,
she searches the medical literature for relevant research, critically appraises the quality of the
studies located, and discusses them with her patient, who then “leaves with a clear sense of his
likely prognosis” (EBM Working Group 1992: 2420).
More generally, the article claims that medicine was all-too-often based upon clinicians’
own experience, or on the pronouncements of authority figures, together with the knowledge
of pathophysiology acquired in medical school. This provided an insufficient basis on which
to evaluate new treatments and diagnostic tests. While both clinical experience and know-
ledge of disease mechanisms were necessary for good clinical practice, clinicians also needed a
set of skills that would allow them to make proper use of the research literature. These skills
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Evidence-based medicine
included: the ability to precisely define a clinical problem; knowledge of how to critically

assess the quality of the available studies, summarize them, and present their strengths and
weaknesses; and the ability to extract the “clinical message” from the literature and apply it
in the clinic (EBM Working Group 1992: 2421). Much of the contribution of EBM to med-
ical practice1 has been in providing resources for acquiring these critical appraisal skills, for
example in the Users’ Guides to the Medical Literature (Guyatt and Rennie 2001; Guyatt et al.
2015). The principles of critical appraisal have been increasingly incorporated into medical
education.
Despite the importance of critical appraisal, in practice, EBM has also provided a number of
“shortcuts” that help clinicians to minimize their need to engage with the research literature.
The major shortcut to assessing the quality of the available literature is actually the key fea-
ture of EBM, the “hierarchy of evidence.” This hierarchy ranks study methods (with the best
methods at the top of the hierarchy), so that clinicians can quickly triage the results of their
literature search. According to the Users’ Guides, the hierarchy “implies a clear course of action
for physicians addressing patient problems: they should look at the highest available evidence
from the hierarchy” (Guyatt and Rennie 2001: 8).
The Users’ Guides provides this hierarchy:2
• N-of-1 randomized controlled trial

• Systematic reviews of randomized trials
• Single randomized trial
• Systematic review of observational studies addressing patient-important outcomes
• Single observational study addressing patient-important outcomes
• Physiologic studies
• Unsystematic clinical observations
The basic idea here is that studies ranking higher on the hierarchy are more likely to provide an
accurate assessment of the clinical value of a therapy and, relatedly, are less likely to be biased.3
As Sackett et al. explain, “the randomised trial, and especially the systematic review of several
randomised trials, is so much more likely to inform us and so much less likely to mislead us”
(1996: 72).
Note that the top five levels of the hierarchy are occupied by study designs that use epidemio-
logical methods, comparing outcomes associated with two (or more) distinct interventions.The
top level, the N-of-1 clinical trial, involves testing a treatment of interest against a comparator
in a single patient.This study design is unique in the hierarchy in that it aims to identify the best
treatment for that individual patient; the results of the trial are not intended to generalize to
other patients.4 The next four levels all involve large numbers of patients and aim to determine
whether, on average, a treatment of interest provides better outcomes than a control interven-
tion (whether another active therapy or a placebo). One of the most controversial aspects of
the hierarchy is its categorical ranking of randomized trials above non-randomized (“obser-
vational”) studies; we will return to this point below. For both the randomized and the non-
randomized trials, a single study ranks below a systematic review or meta-analysis that combines
the results of multiple studies on the same intervention.
The lowest level of the hierarchy is occupied by individual physicians’ unsystematic clin-
ical observations; sometimes case reports and case series are included near the bottom of the
hierarchy. The idea here is that, while physicians who treat a relatively large number of patients
with a particular condition may develop strong opinions about the utility of the treatment, their
experience provides much weaker evidence than a large-scale randomized study, and therefore
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generalizing these results to other patients is not epistemically as secure as generalizing from a
large-scale randomized controlled trial (RCT).
Finally, coming between the epidemiological methods and clinical experience are studies
that examine physiological variables. The rationale for placing physiological studies lower on
the hierarchy than epidemiological methods is two-fold. First, knowledge of pathophysiology
and of the mechanism of action of a treatment do not provide a good basis from which to
predict clinical outcomes; we will return to this point below. EBM textbooks often present
examples of therapies predicted to be beneficial on the basis of knowledge of physiology and
of the mechanism of action of the drug, but that proved to be ineffective or even dangerous.
For example, flecainide and encainide were used as preventive therapy for myocardial infarc-
tion. Because these drugs were known to reduce cardiac arrhythmias, and arrhythmia was
associated with myocardial infarction, the rationale for their use was that they would reduce
the incidence of myocardial infarction. When the drugs were tested in a clinical trial, how-
ever, it was found that they were actually associated with an increase in rates of myocardial
infarction.
The second reason EBM gives for placing physiological studies close to the bottom of the
hierarchy involves the use of so-called “surrogate endpoints,” which are measures of physio-
logical variables (such as blood pressure or cardiac output), rather than clinically important
outcomes (such as death or heart attack). Although surrogate outcomes are often supposed to
be predictors of clinical outcomes, in many cases they prove to be only weakly related to the
clinically important events.
Another aspect of EBM that allows clinicians to avoid doing their own critical appraisal is
the use of sources of evidence that have already been assessed for quality and, where applicable,
that combine the results of a number of studies. One, entirely legitimate, reason for doing so is
the sheer amount of clinical research being published. Sackett et al. calculated that, in general
medicine, the number of articles to be read would equal nineteen per day, and they compare this
with the estimated time that British medical consultants have each week for reading –only one
hour (1996: 71).The proponents of EBM therefore suggest that while some clinicians may wish
to hone their skills and appraise the available evidence for themselves, many people may decide
that their needs are best met by using predigested evidence (Guyatt et al. 2000).
The top of the hierarchy of evidence is occupied by systematic reviews and meta-analyses
of RCTs, which summarize the results of a number of studies. (A meta-analysis is a kind of
systematic review that includes a statistical analysis combining these results.) These studies are
themselves empirical studies, taking other studies as their data. The authors of these meta-level
studies can, and should, report their methods, including the criteria they use for combining or
including studies, and a justification for their decisions.5
With other kinds of evidence summary, however, this information is lacking. Proponents
of EBM have, increasingly, endorsed further systematizations and condensed summaries of the
evidence.The “6S” approach is a good example (DiCenso et al. 2009).This approach builds new
levels onto the top of the existing hierarchy of evidence as follows:
• Systems
• Summaries
• Synopses of Syntheses
• Syntheses
• Synopses of Studies
• Studies
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As always, clinicians are advised to begin their search of the literature at the highest possible level.
In this hierarchy, that’s the “systems” level, which refers to computer systems which integrate
all “relevant and important” research evidence, provide concise summaries of that evidence, are
regularly updated to include new evidence, and are linked directly to electronic patient records
(DiCenso et al. 2009: 2). The system might even recommend a treatment tailored to the par-
ticular patient profile. Such systems are not widely instituted, nor is there much evidence of
their success at this point, but nonetheless the systems are regarded as a worthy ideal.
If they aren’t available (as is likely), clinicians are advised to turn to summaries of the evi-
dence provided through sources like Clinical Evidence (www.clinicalevidence.com), UpToDate
(www.uptodate.com), and the Physicians’ Information and Education Resource (PIER) (http://
pier.acponline.org), even though they note that not all of these sources are transparent about
their methods or sources. Clinical practice guidelines might also count as summaries if they
meet certain evidence-based criteria, such as providing a GRADE ranking for any evidence
presented. A synopsis is next down the hierarchy and can be found in sources like the ACP
Journal Club (www.acpjc.org). A synopsis summarizes the findings of a systematic review and
sometimes includes editorial-style comments on the quality of the synthesis.
If no synopsis is available, the synthesis itself can be useful. Such reviews of the literature are
often associated with the work of one of the other groups identified with an evidence-based
approach to medicine, the Cochrane Collaboration. It is here that the 6S framework intersects
with the original hierarchy, as the Cochrane Collaboration produces systematic reviews and
meta-analyses.
If even syntheses are unavailable, clinicians are directed to synopses of single studies. Reading
these synopses is thought to be better than looking at the original study because someone else
has already determined that the study is of high quality and relevant to clinical practice, or they
wouldn’t have bothered attending to it. Furthermore, such synopses might contain useful crit-
ical commentary on the original study, and of course, they’re a lot shorter for busy clinicians to
read (DiCenso et al. 2009). Finally, we arrive at the studies themselves –the literature seems to
exclusively refer to RCTs here rather than “lower” forms of studies from the original hierarchy,
but presumably one could stoop to examine non-randomized studies if all else failed.
2. Criticisms of EBM

From the beginning, EBM has been the target of criticism by both physicians and philosophers.
In this section, we address the features of EBM that have drawn extensive epistemological
criticism.
Randomization and the hierarchy of evidence

As noted above, the placement of RCTs at the top of the evidence hierarchy has been hotly
debated. Proponents of randomization argue that it is the best way to reduce bias in the results
of clinical trials (where “bias” is understood as any deviation from the truth), whether this bias is
due to deliberate or subconscious actions on the part of clinical researchers or to chance. There
are two main arguments for randomly assigning study participants to the treatment or the con-
trol group in a study.
First, it is said to be the best way to guarantee the similarity of the two groups with regard
to clinically important factors, such as age, sex, and severity of illness. These factors should be
balanced: that is, they should be roughly equally distributed across groups (or on average similar
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in the two groups), because they may affect the way that the treatment works and thus con-
found the results of the study. Moreover, while researchers can check to see whether (on average)
the study groups are similar with regard to known (potential) confounders, there is always the
possibility that there are unknown confounders, perhaps a genetic or physiological characteristic
that influences the effects of the treatment being tested. Although it is possible to ensure that
the study groups include (for example) the same proportion of women and men by deliberately
assigning the same number of each sex to the treatment and the control groups, this is of course
not possible in the case of confounders that are not known to the researchers. Randomization,
then, is an efficient and effective way of dealing with known (or potential) confounders and the
only way to deal with unknown confounding factors.
The second major argument for random allocation is that it facilitates allocation conceal-
ment (“blinding”). Because the packets of drugs (whether the experimental or the control
intervention) are put together by someone who is not involved in assigning patients to study
groups or in assessing outcomes, neither the clinicians involved in the trial nor the study
participants themselves know what group each participant is in. This prevents cases in which
study personnel (either deliberately or subconsciously) assign patients to the treatment or the
control group in a biased manner, perhaps by assigning sicker patients to receive an active drug
rather than placebo. It also prevents biased assessment of outcomes by both clinicians and study
participants. For example, knowing that a particular individual is receiving a placebo may cause
both clinical assessors and the patient herself to underestimate the effects of the treatment.
John Worrall has published an extended analysis of the claims that EBM makes about ran-
domization. He acknowledges that its ability to facilitate allocation concealment is a “cast iron”
argument in favor of randomization, but points out that, in this case, randomization is a means
to the end, rather than the end itself (see also Senn 1994). “It is blinding (of the clinician) that
does the real methodological work –randomization is simply a means of achieving this end”
(Worrall 2002: S325). Thus, it is also possible that deliberately balancing potential confounders
across groups, and separating this job from the job of outcome assessment, could be just as
effective as randomization.6
This alternative is especially worth noting given that the claims made on behalf of random-
ization may be overblown. Worrall notes that some of those who argue for the use of random-
ization claim that it guarantees the balancing of confounders (known or unknown). He points
out, however, that only the weaker claim that randomization balances confounders “in some
probabilistic sense” is defensible (2002: S322).
Population evidence/individual care

Another central epistemological question related to EBM is how to use the results of RCTs and
other epidemiological studies in the care of individual patients. Clinical trials report the average
results of a therapy in a large number of people, but within that group, outcomes may be highly
variable. Some participants may respond well to the study drug, while others’ health stays the
same or worsens. Some experience one or more of a variety of side effects, and in each of these
cases, the harms may or may not outweigh the benefits of taking the drug. It is not clear how to
know, for any individual patient, what to predict on the basis of the results of a study.
EBM still does not have a good solution to this problem, and in fact initially underplayed
its importance. The first edition of a key EBM textbook began with a brief overview of the
steps involved in practicing EBM. The last of these steps, following the different aspects of
critical appraisal, is “using the evidence in clinical practice” (Sackett et al. 1996). This phrasing
implies that the research evidence can be straightforwardly extrapolated to an individual clinical
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encounter, and there is a lack of discussion of how to “use” the evidence (relative to the extended
explanations of the various steps of critical appraisal).
In the second edition of the textbook, published three years later, this final step is described
more thoroughly: clinicians are told that they must “integrat[e]‌the critical appraisal with our
clinical expertise and with our patient’s unique biology, values, and circumstances” (Sackett et al.
2000: 4). Yet even here, EBM has relatively little to say about how to do this and its strengths
remain in teaching the skills of critical appraisal. One prominent critic of EBM, Mark Tonelli,
has been developing an alternative approach to understanding how to use the results of clinical
research in clinical practice. Rather than making research evidence, especially clinical trials, the
basis of clinical decision-making, he begins from the idea that information relevant to making
treatment decisions can come from a number of different sources, including both clinical and
physiological studies, patient values, and clinical experience (Tonelli 2009).
External validity
Yet another concern raised with EBM is that when evidence hierarchies pick out the “best”
evidence, they often do so by highlighting aspects of study design that track internal validity or
methodological rigor, narrowly defined.These trials are referred to as efficacy trials or “explana-
tory” trials (Schwartz and Lelouch 1967). The cost of this focus is loss of external validity, or
applicability in real clinical contexts, so this concern is often raised in tandem with the individu-
ality problem above. Trials that are designed to increase applicability are called pragmatic trials.
Though the evidence hierarchy is a device intended for primary use by clinicians, it is
also used by researchers when deciding how best to design their studies. After all, they want
to produce top quality evidence so it will receive maximum uptake by clinicians. In order to
produce evidence of highest quality, researchers might decide to minimize the heterogeneity
of the subjects in the trial by excluding patients with comorbidities, or elderly people, or preg-
nant women. They might choose to test the treatment against a placebo, rather than the best
available treatment. They might choose to include only clinicians who are experts in the field
(especially for trials assessing surgical interventions), and so on through a long list of idealizing
decisions. Each of these decisions makes the study “cleaner” and more internally valid, but at
the cost of relevance to the community of interest (Borgerson 2013; see also Cartwright 2007).
The vast majority of trials today are explanatory trials; that is, they aim for maximal internal
validity. This is a problem because the lack of fit between the research produced and the needs
of clinicians provides additional reasons to resist incorporating evidence into clinical practice,
and likely contributes to the long time delay between evidence production and evidence uptake
in medicine.
Criticisms from within

In addition to the criticisms from relative “outsiders,” EBM has received some of its harshest
critiques from within clinical medicine. And some of the interesting perspectives today are
from the movement’s pioneers, who have come to appreciate the ways in which EBM can be
manipulated to work against the interests of patients.
John Ioannidis
John Ioannidis, a professor at Stanford University, has written a number of articles exposing the
weaknesses and shortcomings of modern medicine, including the most downloaded paper on
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PLoS Med on why most published research results are false (2005). Most recently, he has written
a paper entitled “Evidence-based medicine has been hijacked: A report to David Sackett”
in which he argues that the original goals of EBM have been undermined and hijacked at
every step. Who is doing the hijacking? That is revealed in his portrayal of what has replaced
EBM: finance-based medicine, on which clinical trials are done by, and benefit, the pharma-
ceutical industry, and influential academic researchers “excel primarily as managers absorbing
more money” (2016). He concludes by saying, “Twenty-five years after its launch, EBM should
still be possible to practice anywhere, somewhere –this remains a worthwhile goal” (2016: 5).
The core of his concern may not seem epistemological at first glance –perhaps it seems pol-
itical or ethical (and it is also these things). But what has happened is that advocates of EBM laid
out the rules (‘here is what constitutes best evidence’) and vested interested played the game.
They followed the rules while subverting their true spirit. There may be lessons here worth
exploring, about the dangers of proposing conditions of knowledge without thinking through
how these conditions are instantiated and where and how they may be open to abuse.
Ben Goldacre
Ben Goldacre, a physician and former science writer for The Guardian newspaper, has been a
long-standing advocate of scientific rigor and critic of “bad science” (particularly the bad science
touted by practitioners of alternative medicine). This positioned him well to be a spokesperson
for EBM, but in recent years his frustrations with the machinations of “finance-based medicine”
(to use Ioannidis’s language) have led him to become one of its most vocal internal critics. He
is known especially for his work in exposing the problem of publication bias (in all its forms) in
medicine and has been an active crusader for transparency and data sharing in medicine. One of
the strengths of his critique of EBM is that it appeals to a common image of good science, and
highlights ways in which modern medical research fails to live up to our ideals. So, most scientists
believe themselves to be aiming at knowledge, but too often the social systems in which they are
embedded make this impossible. Goldacre, in collaboration with various partners, including the
Cochrane Collaboration, has launched an initiative known as AllTrials (www.alltrials.net/). The
aim of this initiative is to find ways to encourage practices of transparency in clinical research,
often referred to as “open science.” Specifically, the AllTrials group calls for “all past and present
clinical trials to be registered and their full methods and summary results reported” (AllTrials
2013). Goldacre’s suggestions often overlap with those made by other internal critics, and in
addition to increased transparency include recommendations on how to get better evidence by
improving Phase IV research and shared decision-making/informed consent (Goldacre 2015).
The EBM insiders

In a paper reflecting on the developments within EBM since 1992,Victor Montori and Gordon
Guyatt celebrated the rapid uptake of EBM worldwide. They also acknowledged the main
developments in EBM since 1992, including an increased access to research through the expan-
sion of the Internet, the extensions of the original hierarchy of evidence (discussed above)
and an “increasing emphasis on patients’ values and preferences in clinical decision making”
(2008: 1814). However, they don’t paint an entirely rosy picture. In a section on the “Misuses of
EBM,” they voice concerns over the branding of EBM at the cost of genuine transparency and
critical thinking, and the range of problems raised by the financial manipulation of the evidence
base. They hold that while the promise of EBM remains strong, efforts will have to be made to
address the manipulations of evidence within medicine, and something will have to be done
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to distinguish genuinely evidence-based recommendations and guidelines from imposters. No

specific guidance is offered, though there is some suggestion that technological evolution will
help.
The EBM renaissance group

Trisha Greenhalgh has written a number of articles criticizing –and suggesting helpful
improvements to –EBM over the years. A recent article written with colleagues calls for a
“renaissance” in EBM in response to some of the movement’s “unintended consequences” over
the years (Greenhalgh et al. 2014: 1). While the authors take time to point to the successes of
EBM, including the production of guidelines that have been shown to have decreased mor-
bidity and mortality in various domains of medicine, they also acknowledge a growing body
of literature on the shortcomings of the approach. These concerns aren’t the traditional ones
about hierarchies, individualized care, or cookbook medicine, but are new concerns arising after
twenty years of EBM in practice.
First among these is a worry about the ‘branding’ of evidence-based medicine, and the
misappropriation of that brand by companies looking to make a profit. Some of this mis-
appropriation happens when studies are rigged to produce desired results, and then presented
to physicians –and evidence appraisers –as unbiased. Another concern they raise –really a
problem arising as a result of the successful and widespread uptake of EBM in research –is an
“unmanageable and unfathomable” volume of evidence. This pushes EBM toward the sorts
of “6S” synthesis solutions outlined above, with all the concerns that come with that move
(including a shift to new forms of authority). Related to this is an increase in the production
of overpowered studies designed to find statistically significant results even when no clinical
significance follows. They also raise concerns about the “creeping managerialism” that accom-
panies EBM in practice; this echoes worries about ‘cookbook medicine’ and the overuse of
guidelines to the exclusion of clinical judgment raised by the earliest critics of EBM. Finally,
they point out that the single-focus explanatory RCT is notoriously bad at getting at infor-
mation about comorbid conditions and at interactions between and among treatments used by
patients with multiple conditions, a point also emphasized by Ross Upshur, a long-time con-
structive critic of EBM (e.g., Upshur 2005). This can cause real harm to patients with multiple
chronic conditions –in particular, elderly patients.
In their “campaign for real evidence- based medicine,” the authors make several
recommendations. One such suggestion is returning to a focus on individual patients. This
is achieved by individualizing evidence, communicating that evidence in accessible ways, and
having conversations about what really matters to particular patients. The authors also rec-
ommend that physicians adhere less strictly to guidelines, develop better listening skills, and
build relationships with patients. Researchers are advised to work harder to develop research
questions of relevance to practice, and publishers are advised to demand more accessibility and
transparency in the presentation of research results. If these changes, and others, are made in
good faith, a renaissance in EBM just might save it from itself.
3. Emerging issues

Many of the problems and solutions just considered are under active debate. In addition to
those raised thus far by critics, there are related movements and suggestions coming from new
domains of inquiry. In this section we consider some of these progressive movements and their
relation to EBM.
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Integrated health care systems

In an editorial in the BMJ in which the authors summarize the problems with contemporary
clinical research, Goldacre and Heneghan refer to the need for integrated health care systems
as part of the solution: “The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence’s guidance
on cholesterol argues for head-to-head trials in low-r isk populations; this would require over
100,000 participants, followed up for a decade. Such trials can practically be delivered only by
reducing the expensive and disproportionate regulatory burden, embedding them in everyday
clinical care and gathering follow-up data from existing electronic health records” (2015: 1). In
other words, to get the high quality, clinically relevant research results we want, we are going to
have to think differently about research. One way forward would be to embed research into the
daily practice of all physicians and gather evidence across the wide range of real patients treated
by physicians.This would help to “pragmatize” research by ensuring patients are realistic, clinical
treatments are appropriate to real practice (not, for instance, requiring specialized equipment),
and follow-up is done on a long-term basis.
As it turns out, this move toward integrated health care systems (sometimes called “learning
health care systems”) is a popular one. The Institute of Medicine in the United States proposed
a shift to integrated systems in 2007, describing a hypothetical ideal system “in which know-
ledge generation is so embedded into the core of the practice of medicine that it is a natural
outgrowth and product of the health care delivery process” (2015: 6).
Proponents often invoke EBM in their explanation or justification for moving toward
an integrated system. But all too often these proponents mean to improve one-way inte-
gration: the integration of research into clinical practice (a traditional goal of EBM). Other
indications of one-way integration include an exclusive focus on RCTs within the so-called
integrated systems and limited discussion of the various problems with research and the ways
in which practice might better inform, and even improve, research. Better approaches, such as
those outlined in an ethics-focused framework paper by Ruth Faden and colleagues, highlight
genuine two-way integration, “Practice cannot be what it is, and cannot be of the highest
quality that morally it must be, independent of its intimate connection to ongoing, systematic
learning” (Faden et al. 2013: S6). Given the challenges to EBM outlined above, a move in the
direction of integrated systems seems wise, provided it is executed with due attention to the
range of problems encountered by EBM and doesn’t blindly replicate those problems.
Mechanisms/physiological research
As noted above, evidence from research on physiological mechanisms is placed near the bottom
of the hierarchy of evidence. To some extent, this is justified, as knowledge of the physio-
logical mechanism of action of a drug is not sufficient to predict its clinical effects; these can
only be evaluated using epidemiological studies. Yet there is reason to think that knowledge
of mechanisms is important and should play a role in the evidence base. Recent philosophical
work has aimed to provide a more nuanced view of the relationship between epidemiological
and physiological research.
One topic of debate is whether knowledge of mechanisms can ever be a substitute for
epidemiological studies. The hierarchy of evidence itself suggests that it can: if there are no
studies available from higher on the hierarchy, clinicians should base their treatment decisions
on the evidence provided by studies of physiology. Jeremy Howick (2011) has offered a more
detailed set of guidelines for the use of mechanistic reasoning in clinical decision-making: the
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knowledge should be complete (i.e., should provide a continuous causal explanation linking
the intervention with the outcome(s) of interest), and should take into account both the prob-
abilistic nature of the operation of mechanisms and their complexity, including the ways in
which a mechanism of interest might interact with other mechanisms to produce “undesir-
able side effects or even paradoxical effects” (2011: 144). Howick acknowledges that we will
only rarely have this knowledge (see also Howick et al. 2013), but wants to ensure that it is
recognized, when it does occur, as legitimate evidence (see Andersen 2012 and Bluhm 2013
for criticisms of Howick’s account).
Another situation in which EBM allows mechanisms to guide clinical decision-making is in
bridging the gap between evidence from RCTs and the specific circumstances of an individual
patient. As described above, many RCTs are “explanatory,” so that large numbers of patients
whom a clinician will treat in clinical practice may not have qualified to participate in the trial. In
such cases, “[u]‌nderstanding the underlying pathophysiology allows the clinician to better judge
whether the results are applicable to the patient at hand” (EBM Working Group 1992: 2423).
Among philosophers writing on EBM, Andersen (2012) has defended this approach, at least as
the best option often available to clinicians, while Bluhm (2013) and Howick (2011; Howick
et al. 2013) have argued that this kind of extrapolation is unlikely to be justified.
At a more theoretical level, Frederica Russo and Jon Williamson have argued that causal
claims about the effects of an intervention require both statistical information from epidemio-
logical studies and knowledge of physiological mechanisms (Russo and Williamson 2007).Their
approach also has practical implications; they emphasize the role of knowledge of mechanisms
in the design of clinical trials, their interpretation, and (echoing Andersen), the extrapolation of
the results of clinical trials in the care of individual patients (Clarke et al. 2014).
Ethics and EBM

Another domain of developing interest is the intersection of ethics and epistemology in the
EBM debates. Some authors investigate particular cases, like philosopher John Worrall did with
ECMO (extracorporeal membrane oxygenation). He showed that decisions about whether
trials on ECMO were ethically justified depended on one’s theory of evidence, and he
suggested that this offers a “vivid and precise confirmation of the thesis that ethics is import-
antly dependent on epistemology” (2008: 419). Moreover, he concluded that “no informed
ethical judgment can be made without an earlier informed epistemological judgment about
evidence” (2008: 430).
Other scholars, such as bioethicist Kenneth Goodman (2003) and psychiatrist Mona Gupta,
have asked whether there is an ethical imperative built into EBM itself. Gupta digs deep into
the history of EBM to answer the question “Is EBM committed to certain ethical values?”
(2014: 118). She identifies some such values, for instance EBM seems to assume that health
is good and that physicians ought to pursue the most effective means to health. If EBM is
thought to provide a method for pursuing the most effective means of achieving health, it seems
physicians are also bound to practice EBM.
This analysis makes sense of much of the literature on EBM, which often seems to be
offering more than suggestions about what others ought to be doing: it seems to be saying
that physicians ought to be evidence-based or they will fail to be good doctors. This is some-
times tied to informed consent: if the physician (or health provider more generally) is morally
obligated to ensure that they disclose information relevant to a patient’s decision, then being on
top of the research literature is a requirement of the job.
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Causation
The literature on EBM skirts around issues of causation, rarely addressing them head-on
(though see the discussion of Russo and Williamson, above).Yet causal claims are central to the
position of those who wish to elevate the RCT above other research studies (as noted above)
and are also drawn upon by those who wish to downplay or disregard mechanistic reasoning
and basic science. CauseHealth is a four-year research project, which started in Norway in 2015.
Researchers with the group reject simplistic accounts of causation. They are developing and
contributing to an understanding of causal dispositionalism that is less reductive and more com-
plex. And they are doing so with an awareness of the debates over EBM that have persisted for
over twenty years and which might benefit from a fresh perspective. It is the early days of this
project, but it is likely to be of interest to epistemologists and metaphysicians with an interest
in causation in medicine.
Conclusion
Epistemology matters, and it matters in ways that affect the health and well-being of billions of
people. This is nowhere more evident than in the debates over what constitutes good evidence
in medicine. Epistemologists have an opportunity to contribute to a serious and important
ongoing debate in this applied domain if they’ll take up the charge.
Notes
1 It is worth noting that, from its origins in internal medicine, EBM has spread to all areas of medical
practice, as well as to other clinical professions such as nursing, physiotherapy, and social work.
2 There are actually different hierarchies for evidence related to different kinds of clinical decision-making,
including one for diagnostic tests and one for prognosis.We have presented the hierarchy of evidence for
treatment decisions, because EBM has been most concerned with decision-making related to treatment.
It is also worth noting that in a more recent version, the hierarchy also incorporates different levels of
study quality (e.g., www.gradeworkinggroup.org).
3 “Bias” here means that the results of a study are influenced by systematic error, due, for example, to
differences between the treatment and the control groups.
4 Note, too, that the N-of-1 trial is of limited use even for individual patients; it uses a crossover design in
which the patient alternates between the treatments being tested and is therefore of use only in relatively
stable chronic conditions.
5 Because of this, systematic reviews have largely replaced older “narrative” reviews, which do not lay out
the author’s methods for searching and assessing the literature and which often tended to be influenced
by the author’s idiosyncratic biases.
6 See La Caze (2013) for a critical assessment of Worrall’s arguments and a defense of the use of
randomization.
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12
THE PRECAUTIONARY
PRINCIPLE IN MEDICAL
RESEARCH AND POLICY
The case of sponsorship bias
Daniel Steel
1. Introduction
Sponsorship bias refers to the tendency of research funded by a financially interested sponsor to
draw conclusions that align with the sponsor’s interests. For example, it is by now well established
that the tobacco industry purposefully funded studies in an effort counteract evidence of the
harmful effects of second-hand smoke (Barnes and Bero 1996; Ong and Glanz 2000). Literature
reviews and meta-analyses from various areas of biomedical science, especially clinical research
on pharmaceuticals, suggest that sponsorship bias is widespread (Bero 2013; Lundh et al. 2013;
Perlis et al. 2005). Moreover, there are reasons to think that these findings do not have benign
explanations, such as industry-funded clinical trials using larger sample sizes or focusing on drugs
that proprietary knowledge indicates are more promising. For example, such explanations cannot
account for the correlation between industry sponsorship and research outcome in head-to-head
trials, in which one drug is compared to another for efficacy or safety (Flacco et al. 2015; Lexchin
2012: 250). In addition, other studies examine the processes through which favorable results
are achieved, in some cases with the aid of documents obtained through litigation, and reveal
such patterns as administering inappropriate dosages of the comparison drug, omitting data, and
conclusions that are incongruent with reported results (Lexchin 2012: 250–54;Vedula et al. 2013).
The most common response to sponsorship bias consists of a suite of measures some-
times collectively labeled “the reformist package” (Schafer 2004: 21; Lexchin 2012: 255). The
reformist package includes disclosure requirements, clinical trial reporting guidelines, clinical
trial registries, and regulations of contracts between university scientists and industry. However,
many critics charge that these measures are inadequate and call for more forceful solutions to
sponsorship bias (Biddle 2013; Doucet and Sismondo 2007; Lexchin 2012; Reiss 2010; Reiss
and Kitcher 2009; Schafer 2004; Sismondo 2008). This article examines three such proposals:
1. Adversarial proceedings that pit pharmaceutical industry advocates against independent

scientists in a “science court” setting as part of the evaluation process of drugs by the U.S.
Food and Drug Administration (FDA) (Biddle 2007, 2013).
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The precautionary principle
2. Sequestration of health researchers from sponsors with a financial stake in research outcomes
by means of a newly created independent testing agency that recruits and funds scientists to
carry out clinical trials for drugs being reviewed by health agencies (Angell 2004; Krimsky
2003; Reiss 2010; Reiss and Kitcher 2009; Schafer 2004;Volz and Elliott 2012).
3. Elimination of intellectual property rights for biomedical innovations, possibly in com-
bination with a reward mechanism to encourage health research and development (R&D)
with significant health impacts (Hubbard and Love 2004; Pogge 2005; Reiss 2017; Brown
2008, 2017).
These proposals are ordered in terms of the extent to which they would change current funding
structures in biomedical science. The proposals are not mutually exclusive, and their elem-
ents could be recombined to generate hybrid approaches. For instance, sequestration is some-
times proposed in tandem with patent reform (Angell 2004; Reiss and Kitcher 2009; Schafer
2004: 23).
This chapter examines these proposals from the perspective of the precautionary principle
(PP). I suggest that sponsorship bias has the features of classic cases to which the PP applies: it
concerns a scientifically uncertain and difficult to contain risk to a public good important for
human health or the environment. Trustworthy scientific knowledge on health issues –effect-
iveness of treatments, causes of disease, social and environmental determinants of health, etc. –is
a public good, and sponsorship bias poses risks to it just as motor vehicle emissions threaten
air quality. Sponsorship bias can result in decisions that have harmful impacts on health or that
impose unnecessary costs on health care systems. Moreover, sponsorship bias can lead to indirect
harms by eroding trust in health research, which can create long-lasting and difficult to con-
tain risks to public health even when science is trustworthy, as the anti-vaccination movement
illustrates.
The organization of this chapter is as follows. Section 2 provides background about the
PP and suggests how to apply it to the proposals for addressing sponsorship bias considered
here. The subsequent sections, then, consider the three proposals –adversarial proceedings (§3),
sequestration (§4), and elimination/restriction of intellectual property rights (§5) –in turn. The
concluding section (§6) briefly discusses potential ways forward and limitations of PP.
2. Precaution and sponsorship bias

This section reviews some recent developments in the literature on the PP and extracts some
general themes relevant to addressing sponsorship bias. A good place to start is by noting that the
label “the precautionary principle” is somewhat misleading because the PP is often associated
with a number of distinct claims (Hartzell-Nichols 2017).
To illustrate the variety of propositions associated with PP, let’s begin with what is perhaps
the most commonly cited formulation of it, the 1992 Rio Declaration on Environment and
Development: “Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific
certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent envir-
onmental degradation.” This is an example of what is sometimes called an “argumentative”
(Sandin et al. 2002), “procedural” (Ahteensu and Sandin 2012), or “meta” (Steel 2015) formu-
lation of PP. That is, in this formulation, the PP places limits on what sorts of reasons can be
given for not taking precautions against serious or irreversible harms. However, such “meta”
formulations of the PP do not specify when to take precautions in specific cases. In contrast,
“decision-rule” formulations of the PP aim to provide guidance on when precautions should
be taken. The Wingspread Statement of the Precautionary Principle is an oft-cited example of
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Daniel Steel
such a formulation: “When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the envir-
onment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause-and-effect relationships
are not fully established scientifically.” Unlike the Rio formulation, the Wingspread Statement
provides a sufficient condition for taking precautions, although those conditions are stated rather
vaguely and no indication is provided for how one should decide which precaution is appro-
priate. Regarding this last point, it is often suggested that precautions should be “proportional”
(Kramer et al. 2017; Steel 2015), a concept that I return to below. Moreover, varying the degree
of uncertainty, the severity of the threatened harm, and the recommended action can generate
numerous distinct decision-rule formulations of the PP (Manson 2002; Sandin 1999; Steel
2015). Thus, not only can procedural and decision-rule formulations of PP be distinguished
from one another –many decision-rule versions of the PP can also be articulated.
Epistemic formulations constitute a third category of PP. While not associated with a
well-known statement, the central idea here is that precaution can be reflected in epistemic
practices relating to false negatives and false positives. For the present, let a false negative con-
sist of accepting that a risk to health or the environment is absent when it in fact exists. Thus,
accepting that a new pharmaceutical is safe when it in fact increases the risk of fatal heart attack
by a factor of twenty would be an example of a false negative. Conversely, false positives consist
of accepting that a risk is present when it is in fact non-existent. Epistemic approaches to pre-
caution tend to focus on contexts in which false negatives are judged to be significantly worse
than false positives, and suggest in such cases that inferential thresholds should be adjusted to
reflect this. For example, if the harms resulting from mistakenly accepting the safety of a new
pharmaceutical far outweigh the harms of the opposite mistake, then a very high evidential
threshold should be demanded for establishing safety.
Rather than treating the several types of the PP as mutually exclusive, meta, decision-rule,
and epistemic variants of the PP can be viewed as working in tandem (Steel 2015). According
to this approach, meta formulations place constraints on what sorts of decision rules should
be adopted (i.e., avoid ones that are inclined to make uncertainty a reason for inaction in the
face of threats to the environment or human health), so the two must be considered jointly.
Furthermore, applications of the PP to concrete decisions often require scientific procedures for
assigning entities into categories (e.g., possibly carcinogenic, bio-accumulative, etc.) that trigger
a precautionary response. Yet designing such procedures in a manner that would persistently
frustrate precautions (e.g., by making it nearly impossible to classify a chemical as possibly car-
cinogenic) would be contrary to meta formulations of the PP. An integrated approach to the
PP is also promising for the case of sponsorship bias, which involves epistemic considerations in
connection with decisions about how to reform institutions.
The concept of proportionality plays a major role in the discussion below. Proportionality is,
very roughly, the idea that the stringency of a precaution should correspond to the seriousness
of the risk. To make this idea more precise, it is helpful to distinguish two sub-components of
proportionality: efficiency and consistency (Steel 2015). Efficiency entails avoiding unnecessary
costs. Thus, a precaution is inefficient if an alternative would achieve a similar or greater reduc-
tion in the target risk at lower financial cost or with less in the way of harmful side effects.
Consistency is the idea that the version of the PP used to recommend a precaution should
not also recommend against that very same precaution. To illustrate, consider the following
version of the PP:
1. If it is possible that an activity may result in serious harm, then that activity should be
prohibited.
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Note that this is an example of the PP as a decision rule, like the Wingspread Statement
quoted above. Suppose that this version of the PP were invoked to justify socializing all health
research, on the grounds that it is possible that the current arrangement may lead to serious
harm. However, such an application is obviously problematic from the perspective of con-
sistency, because it is also possible that socializing all health research would result in serious
harms, for instance, by suppressing biomedical innovations. This example illustrates that some
versions of the PP are paralyzing insofar as being inclined to recommend against nearly any
action (Munthe 2008). Paralyzing versions of the PP typically combine a very sensitive know-
ledge condition (e.g., mere possibility) or harm condition (e.g., someone is harmed) with a
very strict recommendation (e.g., ban it!). Thus, consistency normally will require applying a
version of the PP with a less sensitive knowledge or harm condition, or with a less stringent
recommendation.
Moreover, just as some versions of the PP are problematic, so too are some precautions.
Some versions of the PP cannot consistently recommend any precaution, and some precautions
cannot be consistently recommended by any version of the PP. For example, consider pre-
emptive war as a precaution against a threat to national security. Given the high probability of
extremely harmful and far reaching consequences of war, it will often be very difficult to find a
version of the PP that would advise against the status quo national security policy without also
recommending against pre-emptive war (Steel 2015). Consider three types of precautions that
would be difficult to justify by any version of PP.
The first of these are ineffectual precautions –that is, precautions that do little or nothing to
reduce the target risk. Ineffectual precautions will tend to run into problems with consist-
ency. That is, to motivate taking precautions in the first place, one would invoke a version of
the PP that recommends against the status quo.Yet an ineffectual precaution does not differ
significantly from the status quo as far as mitigating the target risk is concerned. Thus, the
version of the PP called upon to justify departing from the status quo will also recommend
against the ineffectual precaution. The second case consists of harmful precautions. These are
precautions, such as pre-emptive war, that are very likely to generate severely harmful and
difficult to contain effects. Banning the measles-mumps-and-rubella (MMR) vaccine due
to concerns about autism is another example of a harmful precaution. In such cases, it will
be very difficult to find an informative version of the PP (i.e., a version that recommends
against something) that does not also recommend against the harmful precaution. Finally,
inefficient precautions generate unnecessary costs or harms (i.e., costs or harms that could be
avoided by equally or more effective alternatives). Note that these three types of problem-
atic precaution are not mutually exclusive. A single precaution might be ineffectual, harmful,
and inefficient. Banning the MMR vaccine due to concerns about the risk of autism is
plausibly an example of this sort. It would likely be ineffectual (given that current research
suggests that there is no link between the MMR vaccine and autism), harmful (because it
would increase rates of infectious disease), and inefficient (since risks from vaccines could
be reduced in less harmful ways, for instance, by substituting certain preservatives with safer
alternatives).
Proportionality, then, places constraints both on which versions of the PP one might apply
in a given context and on which sorts of precautions are worthy of consideration. This point
is important for the present discussion, because the choice of a version of the PP is highly
dependent on the specific details of the case (Hartzell-Nichols 2017; Steel 2015). Sponsorship
bias can arise in a broad range of fields such as health, environmental protection, occupational
safety, and consumer protection, and can involve a variety of private and public actors. As a
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result, attempting to fashion a version of the PP suitable for all of these cases might not be the
best approach. One might attempt to apply a general version of the PP such as:
2. If a system for funding scientific research is likely to result in compromised scientific integ-
rity and/or loss of public trust in science, then it should be reformed.
While this provides a flavor of an appropriate version of the PP for sponsorship bias, it is also
quite vague and would need to be adjusted and operationalized to suit specific cases.
The approach adopted here, then, is to begin with the three proposals for addressing spon-
sorship bias listed in the introduction and then to evaluate each on the basis of whether it avoids
the precautionary foibles noted above: ineffectiveness, harmfulness, and inefficiency. Of these,
effectiveness will be considered first, since an ineffectual precaution is not worth pursuing, and
hence there is little reason to devote effort to assessing whether it would also be harmful or
inefficient.
A natural assumption is that effectiveness depends on counteracting the mechanisms by
which sponsorship bias operates. Dissatisfaction with components of the reformist package,
such as conflict of interest disclosure, is often driven by the sense that they fail to do this. Thus,
Doucet and Sismondo write, “Disclosure does not directly address any of the … mechanisms
by which sponsorship has its effects, because it merely points to the open barn door after the
horses have gone” (Doucet and Sismondo 2008). Mechanisms through which sponsorship bias
operates could be obstructed through prevention or containment, or some combination of the two.
Prevention aims to block the production of research tainted by sponsorship bias, for instance,
by severing links between financially interested funders and scientific researchers. Containment,
on the other hand, seeks to limit the influence of biased research on the decision-making of
the general public, physicians, or government agencies charged with protecting public health.
Proposals fail to be effective when they are unlikely to either prevent or contain sponsorship
bias. This might be because the proposed measures are unlikely to have much impact at all, are
very limited in scope, or could be easily captured or marginalized by industry.
3. Adversarial proceedings

In a pair of essays, Biddle defends a proposal he calls “Adversarial Proceedings for the Evaluation
of Pharmaceuticals,” abbreviated by the acronym APEP (Biddle 2007, 2013). This proposal is
inspired by the concept of a “science court” (Kantrowitz 1967, 1976 ), in which advocates of
opposed hypotheses (e.g., about the safety or effectiveness of a pharmaceutical) would debate
before a judge, or panel of judges, in a setting modeled after an adversarial court proceeding.
In an APEP, advocates of a pharmaceutical company seeking approval of a drug by the FDA
would spar with independent scientists on what the data show about the safety and efficacy
of the drug. Biddle’s proposal is inspired by the notorious case of Vioxx, in which Merck &
Co. downplayed and concealed evidence of harmful cardiovascular effects (Biddle 2007). The
thought is that an APEP would have revealed Merck’s questionable data analysis and would
have thereby avoided the ensuing debacle. More generally, Biddle expresses the rationale for his
proposal in these terms:
the privatization of health research is consolidating the pharmaceutical industry’s

power over the entirety of the research and development process, which it can then
use to marginalize perspectives that are different from its own. Pharmaceutical com-
panies are increasingly organized so as to allow financial considerations to influence
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scientific decision-making, and the agencies that are supposed to be regulating the
pharmaceutical industry are, in a variety of ways, so dependent upon that industry that
they cannot effectively regulate it. … The appropriate response to this, in my view, is
to design systems that institutionalize certain types of criticism and that, more gener-
ally, counteract the power of entities that have large financial stakes in the outcomes
of research.
Biddle 2013: 334
Biddle suggests that the questions addressed by the APEP would primarily be “(1) whether a
new drug should be placed on the market, (2) whether a drug that is already on the market
should remain on the market, and (3) the conditions under which a drug should be placed, or
remain, on the market” (2013: 339). An APEP would not be initiated in all cases, but only for
those deemed sufficiently controversial by an independent panel (Biddle 2013: 340). APEPs
would be housed within the FDA and funded by taxes “collected from a conglomeration of
for-profit companies, especially pharmaceutical companies, HMOs, and insurance companies”
(Biddle 2013: 341–42). Panel judges and scientists who take the side opposing industry would
be chosen through a process designed to ensure that they had no financial ties to the regulated
industry (Biddle 2013: 343). Finally, the assessment of the panel of judges regarding the drug
would be a recommendation to the FDA rather than a decision that the FDA would be legally
bound to follow (Biddle 2013: 343).
Biddle’s proposal has several appealing features, such as providing a mechanism for par-
ticipation by health advocates and members of the general public in FDA evaluations of
pharmaceuticals (see Biddle 2013: 343). However, there are a number of reasons to think the
proposal would be limited in its effectiveness. The first is that it does not reduce the produc-
tion of clinical trials skewed by sponsorship bias but only seeks to limit their influence upon
decisions regarding pharmaceuticals made by the FDA. While this is certainly important, it is
only one aspect of the problem. Thus, Biddle’s proposal would not address sponsorship bias in
clinical trials designed to promote “off-label” uses of drugs already approved by the FDA. Nor
would it mitigate sponsorship bias in science on topics relevant to public health, such as the
effects of taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages (Mandrioli et al. 2016).
Concerns about effectiveness in regard to Biddle’s proposal become even more acute when
one considers potential for regulatory capture. Recall that Biddle, following other critics (e.g.,
Angell 2004), claims that the FDA has become less independent of industry due to funding
changes enacted by Congress that make it dependent on user fees paid by pharmaceutical
corporations (Biddle 2013: 332–33). But if the independence of the FDA has been compromised,
then prospects for APEPs to mitigate the problem of sponsorship bias appear rather dim. Since
APEPs would be housed within the FDA, pharmaceutical corporations would have every
incentive to use their influence on the FDA to marginalize APEPs or bias them in their favor.
For example, in Biddle’s proposal an APEP is not automatically triggered, but occurs only if the
case is judged to be controversial by a panel convened within the FDA. Thus, pharmaceutical
companies would have a strong incentive to influence the membership and behavior of this
panel in order to make it extremely reluctant to call for an APEP. In addition, pharmaceutical
companies might attempt to delegitimize the APEP process in the eyes of the public and elected
officials by arguing that it unnecessarily delays the approval of life-saving medicines.
Adversarial proceedings can also be criticized for being inefficient because of their potential
to create a system of dueling, parallel scientific studies (Reiss 2010: 443). To fairly compete in
the adversarial process, the independent scientists would need funds to carry out research of
their own. At the very least, this would include literature reviews and analyses of data provided
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by the company that holds the patent for the drug in question. In some cases, the independent
scientists might even wish to carry out clinical trials of their own.Yet a system of dueling, par-
allel lines of research is financially inefficient and likely to result in politically polarized science.
Thus, if research relatively untainted by sponsorship bias is possible, then it would be better to
simply base regulatory decisions on that.
4. Sequestration
The term “sequestration” will be used here as an umbrella for proposed mechanisms, typic-
ally involving the creation of new agencies or institutes, to function as a “firewall” or “buffer”
between financially interested sponsors and scientific researchers. Sequestration is motivated by
the idea that trustworthy health research is a public good, that public goods are undersupplied
in a free market, and consequently that government intervention is appropriate in this case.
Consider a version of sequestration proposed by Krimsky:
One approach, say for drug testing, would be to establish an independent national
institute of drug testing (NIDT). Any company wishing to generate data for submis-
sion to the FDA would have to submit the drug to the NIDT. The drug-testing insti-
tute, in collaboration with the private sponsor, would issue a drug-testing protocol.
The NIDT would put out a notice to research centers, called a request for proposal
(RFP). Qualified drug assessment centers would submit their proposals, and the NIDT
would select a testing group. Protocols, data utilization, and publications would be
negotiated between the institute and the contractee.The institute would have quality-
control requirements that would be applied uniformly. Proprietary information would
be protected. Once the test is completed, the results would be sent to the company. As
certified data, it can thus be submitted to the relevant agency.
Krimsky 2003: 229
Contracting researchers, whether from private research firms or universities, would be

prohibited from having any financial stake in the product being tested (Krimsky 2003: 229–30).
Moreover, the pharmaceutical company whose drug is being tested would be prohibited from
contacting the scientists carrying out the research. Companies would be free to carry out their
own research, but only research carried out under the aegis of the NIDT would inform regula-
tory decisions, for instance, at the FDA about whether to approve a new drug. While sequestra-
tion proposals are most commonly made in connection with pharmaceuticals, the concept can
also be extended to other arenas, such as chemicals regulation and occupational safety (Krimsky
2003: 228–29;Volz and Elliott 2012).
Sequestration adopts both a preventative and containment approach to the problem of
sponsorship bias in a certain class of clinical trials. That is, sequestration aims to sever contacts
between interested sponsors and scientific researchers in clinical trials that will influence
decisions about pharmaceuticals made by government agencies, such as the FDA. The creation
of research produced at arm’s length from sponsors with a financial stake in the outcome is a
preventative measure, and it requires that certain regulatory decisions be based only on research
generated by such means. Unlike adversarial proceedings, then, sequestration does not incen-
tivize the creation of parallel, opposed streams of health research designed to sway regulatory
agencies. If regulatory decisions will be based only upon research certified by the independent
testing agency (the NIDT in Krimsky’s proposal), then research funded by pharmaceutical
companies would have to be geared toward other purposes.
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Nevertheless, sequestration faces several limitations. Sequestration is limited in its scope

insofar as it would only be relevant to a subset of research, namely, research whose results would
inform regulatory decisions of specific agencies, such as the FDA. Thus, sequestration proposals
would permit industry-sponsored research aimed at influencing physicians’ prescribing behavior
and promoting “off-label” uses to continue as they do at present. In addition, regulatory capture
is also a major concern for sequestration proposals. How is one to prevent industry capture of
the “buffer” agency? Without some solution to this problem it is questionable whether seques-
tration would be effective in the long term.
In light of the appealing features of sequestration proposals, it is worthwhile to consider what
measures might mitigate these difficulties. Begin with concerns about scope. Given sequestra-
tion, it would be easy for publications to indicate that they derive from research overseen by
an independent testing agency. Unlike disclosing conflicts of interest, which involves revealing
credibility diminishing information, it would obviously be in scientists’ professional interests to
state that their research was carried out under the auspices of an agency that rigorously ensured
its independence and vetted is methodology. Moreover, knowing whether or not a published
study was overseen by an independent testing agency would be very useful for consumers of
medical information, even outside of regulatory decision-making. In such a context, research
sponsored directly by financially interested parties might be judged less credible, which could
reduce its ability to influence the prescribing behavior of physicians (see Holman and Bruner
2015).
Turn, then, to the question of regulatory capture, which is perhaps the gravest challenge
for sequestration proposals. To some extent, careful design of the funding mechanism and
functioning of independent testing agencies can reduce risks of regulatory capture.With regard
to funding, an independent testing agency should not be reliant on user fees paid by regulated
industries, since this creates a situation in which it is financially beholden to the industries
it is supposed to keep at arm’s length from researchers. While increased taxes on pharma-
ceutical companies to fund an independent drug-testing agency might be reasonable, these
funds should be paid to a governmental tax collecting authority (e.g., the Internal Revenue
Service in the United States), not directly to the drug-testing agency itself. In general, it is a
mistake to conceive of an independent drug-testing agency as something paid for exclusively
by the pharmaceutical industry. Trustworthy, independent health research is a public good, so
it is reasonable that the public and not just the regulated industries should share the costs of
maintaining it.
In addition, it is important to avoid built-in avenues for regulatory capture when creating
rules for how the independent testing agency would function. For instance, in the quotation
above Krimsky states that the NIDT would collaborate with the private sponsor to create a
protocol for testing the drug.Yet, this appears problematic, as it would enable the private sponsor
to influence how the test was designed, which could potentially bias the results. An alternative
would be for the NIDT to devise a protocol in collaboration with the agency to which the test
results would be submitted (e.g., the FDA). This opens up fewer avenues for regulatory capture,
while also ensuring that the results satisfy the decision-making requirements of the pertinent
regulatory agency.
Nevertheless, careful design of a sequestration proposal is unlikely to be sufficient in
preventing regulatory capture for at least two reasons. First, regulatory capture is an evolving and
dynamic challenge in which reforms generate new tactics on the part of the regulated industry.
Thus, it would be naïve to expect that the difficulty could be addressed once and for all by a
single policy proposal, no matter how well thought through. Second, it is questionable to what
extent any reform could be effective in an environment wherein industry has the financial and
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Daniel Steel
political means to corrupt the regulatory system. This thought is the motivation for the next
proposal to be considered.
5. Restriction/elimination of intellectual property in biomedicine

An important feature of sequestration proposals is that they are compatible with retaining the
current system of intellectual property rights in biomedicine. The proposals considered in this
section, by contrast, see the prevailing regime of intellectual property as the root cause of
sponsorship bias in biomedical research. These proposals recommend the restriction or elimin-
ation of intellectual property rights for biomedical innovations, possibly in combination with
a reward mechanism to encourage biomedical research and development (Hubbard and Love
2004; Pogge 2005; Reiss 2010; Reiss and Kitcher 2009) or socialization of biomedical research
(Brown 2008, 2017). Such proposals are motivated by the idea that the existing intellectual
property regime creates monopolies for industry, leading to incentives to protect and extend
those monopolies and massive profits to fund such efforts. From this perspective, then, sponsor-
ship bias is just one symptom of a deeper malaise.
The proposals considered in this section often vary significantly according to whether they
seek to eliminate intellectual property for biomedical innovations altogether or only to incre-
mentally restrict it, and in what they see as the appropriate replacement for the status quo.
Some of these differences are discussed below. Before proceeding to those details, however, it
will be useful to critically examine an assumption that all of these approaches share, namely, that
sponsorship bias is fundamentally the result of the current system of intellectual property. This
system gives patent holders of pharmaceuticals the exclusive right to market their product for a
fixed period of time, usually twenty years. The rationale for this system is that it is necessary to
enable pharmaceutical companies to recoup the substantial cost of researching and developing
new drugs. Without such intellectual property protection, the argument goes, there would be
insufficient economic incentive to create biomedical innovations and bring them to the market.
However, critics of the current system argue that the patent protections it provides far exceed
what is needed to secure profitability, and that they furthermore create incentives for rent-
seeking behaviors, such as strategies for extending patent life, efforts to delay the introduction
of generic versions of a drug when its patent life is set to expire, and corruption of the political
system in order to facilitate such activities (Angell 2004; Reiss and Kitcher 2009).
While debates about intellectual property in biomedicine are interesting from both a philo-
sophical and economic perspective, the connection between this issue and sponsorship bias is
nevertheless rather unclear. From an economic standpoint, it is uncertain whether the pharma-
ceutical industry would remain profitable in the absence of intellectual property protections
(Reiss 2017). So, consider two possibilities in turn. First, suppose that the pharmaceutical
industry would remain profitable without intellectual property protections, albeit less so than
at present. Then eliminating intellectual property in biomedicine would do little to prevent
sponsorship bias. In this scenario, pharmaceutical firms would still have an incentive to gen-
erate biased research for the purpose of securing regulatory approval, getting their products on
formularies (i.e., lists of medications that health insurance plans will cover), and for directly
influencing the decisions of physicians and consumers.1 Indeed, the claim that sponsorship
bias is not inherently linked to intellectual property protection is supported by research on the
health impacts of profitable but not patented products, such as sugar and tobacco (Barnes and
Bero 1996; Bes-Rastrollo et al. 2013). In such cases, sponsorship bias tends to be driven by trade
associations that promote the interests of a group of corporations that produce similar products,
rather than by individual corporations seeking to gain market share against rivals. However,
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the tendency for the financial interests of sponsors to influence the research (i.e., sponsorship
bias) is present either way. In general, motive for sponsorship bias exists when a product is both
highly profitable yet harmful or ineffective, regardless of whether it is protected by intellectual
property rights or not.
On the other hand, suppose that the pharmaceutical industry would not remain profitable if
intellectual property for biomedical innovations were abolished. In this case, eliminating intellec-
tual property in biomedicine would be a harmful precaution unless some alternative mechanisms
were devised to incentivize the research and development of biomedical innovations. Two pri-
mary options have been proposed to address this in the literature: reward mechanisms linked to
health impacts of new pharmaceuticals or biomedical devices (Hubbard and Love 2004; Pogge
2005) and a socialized central planning approach (Brown 2008, 2017). Let us consider whether
either of these approaches would be effective in eliminating sponsorship bias. Let’s begin with
reward mechanisms. To cover the substantial costs of research and development in biomedicine,
these rewards would have to consist of very large sums of money. But this would create massive
incentives for firms to corrupt the award process to advance their interests, for instance, through
influencing organizations or agencies that administer the prizes. Moreover, biased biomedical
research that exaggerates the positive health impacts of one’s product while minimizing its
negative side effects would be very useful for achieving such ends.
Let’s now turn to the proposal to socialize biomedical research and development (Brown
2008, 2017). According to this proposal, all biomedical research and development would be
funded through government agencies, which would disperse grants to university researchers or
institutes for this purpose. In the case of pharmaceuticals, generic drug manufacturers would
be able to produce and market any drugs that had been developed and approved by regulatory
agencies. There are obvious questions about whether such a scheme would provide adequate
incentives for moving innovations from the lab to the market (Reiss and Kitcher 2009). But let
us put aside such concerns for the moment and focus on sponsorship bias. The difficulty here is
that sponsorship bias can exist within government, too. Government agencies sometimes have a
financial interest in research turning out a particular way –for instance, research which suggests
that the government agency is responsible for remediating an environmental or public health
problem. Moreover, the potential for such conflicts of interest would be vastly expanded if
governments were the sole source of financial support for biomedical research and development
(Reiss 2017). For example, suppose that government health agencies have devoted substantial
financial resources toward the development of a new drug, and that after regulatory approval,
concerns arise that this drug has severely harmful side effects that were previously downplayed.
In such circumstances, it is obviously in the interest of lead officials in government agencies
that promoted the development of this drug that these concerns turn out to be spurious. Such
a situation, then, is rife with potential for sponsorship bias.
In sum, there may be good reasons for restricting intellectual property rights in biomedi-
cine, such as reducing inequities in access to needed medications (Reiss and Kitcher 2009).
However, such a move is unlikely to be effective for mitigating sponsorship bias. At best,
intellectual property reform might provide more favorable background conditions for other
approaches, such as sequestration. For example, restrictions of intellectual property in bio-
medicine might reduce the profits of pharmaceutical firms, thereby leaving them with fewer
resources to corrupt the political system and capture regulatory agencies. However, intellectual
property is only one background factor that may be relevant to the risk of regulatory capture.
Others include how political campaigns are financed and the extent of public commitment
to supporting important public goods, including independent scientific research on important
topics such as health.
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Daniel Steel
6. Conclusions
This chapter considered three proposals for addressing sponsorship bias –adversarial proceedings,
sequestration, and restriction/elimination of intellectual property –from the perspective of PP.
A consideration of the PP in this context suggests three criteria for evaluating proposals: they
should be effective, not harmful, and efficient. It was suggested that sequestration fares best of
the three as considered by these criteria. Only sequestration provides a clear mechanism for
preventing sponsorship bias, and it avoids the inefficiencies of parallel opposing lines of research
as well as the potential harms of eliminating intellectual property for biomedical innovations.
Nevertheless, sequestration is not without difficulties. Its scope is limited to decisions made by
regulatory agencies, and hence it does not address sponsorship bias in other contexts, such as
promoting “off-label” prescriptions of pharmaceuticals. Moreover, it is vulnerable to regulatory
capture.While some suggestions were made about how these concerns might be addressed, fur-
ther work on this topic would be valuable.
Finally, I wish to conclude with some limitations of the PP itself as a basis for analysis of
these issues. Perhaps the most significant of these is the lack of clarity about the PP itself. For
example, avoiding ineffectual, harmful, and inefficient precautions may require some means of
quantifying effectiveness, harm, and efficiency, yet the PP does not specify methods for doing
this. Relatedly, it is unclear to what extent the PP is separate from other decision-making
approaches, such as expected utility maximization or cost-benefit analysis, or simply a variant of
them that involves, say, an emphasis on risk aversion and minimal future discount rates. This is
also an arena in which further work would be welcome.
Note
1 Reiss (2017) proposes to eliminate both intellectual property and regulatory approval for biomedical
innovations. Even putting aside the potential harmfulness of such a proposal, it would do nothing to
mitigate sponsorship bias in research used to influence physicians, formularies, and consumers.
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13
PSYCHOLOGY AND
CONSPIRACY THEORIES 1
David Coady
I have argued elsewhere that although the terms “conspiracy theory” and “conspiracy theorist”
have no fixed meaning, they do serve a fixed function (Coady 2012: Chap. 5).They function in
much the same way that the terms “heresy” and “heretic” respectively did in medieval Europe.
The former terms, like the latter, serve to narrow the range of acceptable opinion and restrict
the terms of acceptable debate. They are, in effect, policing devices, for the enforcement of
orthodoxy. People aren’t often denounced or punished for being heretics anymore.2 On the
contrary, the label “heretic,” to the extent that it is used at all, is more likely to be worn with
pride than shame. However people are routinely denounced (or ignored, condescended to,
sneered at, etc.) for being “conspiracy theorists.” Furthermore, they are punished in the court of
public opinion for believing, wanting to investigate, or giving any credence at all, to anything
that can effectively be labeled “a conspiracy theory.”
If the persecution of those labeled as “conspiracy theorists” in our culture is analogous to the
medieval persecution of those labeled as “heretics,” then the role of psychologists in our culture is
analogous to that of the Inquisition. Outside of the psychology literature, some authors will some-
times offer some, usually heavily qualified, defense of conspiracy theories (in some sense of the
term); they admit that they are not all false, or that it is not necessarily irrational to believe some-
thing just because it is a conspiracy theory, or that believing a conspiracy theory (whether it be
true, false, rational, or irrational) need not cause the believer, or anyone else, any harm. But within
the psychology literature, the assumption that conspiracy theories are objectionable in all three of
these ways (i.e., that they are false, irrational, and positively harmful) appears to be universal.
This is a very troubling situation, especially since the beliefs that attract the pejorative label
“conspiracy theory” tend to be marginalized political beliefs. There is a disturbing history of
psychologists and psychiatrists pathologizing marginalized political views. We are not yet for-
cibly institutionalizing people whose political beliefs are deemed unacceptable by the state or
other powerful institutions in psychiatric hospitals, as happened in the Soviet Union (see Bloch
and Reddaway 1985),3 but we have got to the point that a group of prominent psychologists
have written to a leading French newspaper, Le Monde, calling on the French government to
more effectively “fight” the “disease” of conspiracy theories.4 The authors of this letter do not
say what they mean by “conspiracy theories,” nor do they define related terms, such as “con-
spiracy thinking” or “conspiracism” which they use in the letter. It is simply assumed that we all
know what these terms refer to and that the things that they refer to are very bad things indeed.
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Psychology and conspiracy theories
One of the most striking things about the conspiracy theory literature, including the literature
from within psychology, is that authors almost invariably assume that they are all talking about
the same things, when closer examination reveals that they are not. I hope to make it clear that
when Michael J. Wood claims in an article in Political Psychology that “since the mid-1990s, a
growing psychological research tradition has generated a great deal of knowledge about the
antecedents and consequences of beliefs in conspiracy theories” (Wood 2016: 695), he is mis-
taken. Equivocations over the use of these terms has created an illusion of progress.
Another two assumptions the authors of the letter to Le Monde make, which are widely shared
in the psychology literature and beyond (e.g., Keeley 1999: 45–46; Wilson 1998: 1–2), are that
conspiracy theories are a distinctively contemporary phenomenon, and that they are becoming
increasingly widespread. However we decide to understand the concept of a conspiracy theory,
these assumptions appear to be unfounded. What is distinctively contemporary and becoming
increasingly widespread is the use of the terms “conspiracy theory” and “conspiracy theorist.”
These terms were not widely used before Sir Karl Popper’s discussions of the “Conspiracy
Theory of Society,” and only appear to have gained popular currency after the assassination of
John F. Kennedy (or more particularly the Warren Commission’s report on the assassination).5
Since then the terms have been employed more and more often by more and more people.They
have also given birth to a host of new terms (“conspiracism,” “conspiracist,” etc.) and a thriving
academic industry, as people have become increasingly concerned about this allegedly new phe-
nomenon (or cluster of phenomena).This situation bears all the marks of an epistemic panic, like
the contemporary panic about Fake News (as if false and deceitful news stories haven’t always
been with us), which the conspiracy theory panic often merges with. It seems clear that those
who think conspiracy theories are proliferating are confusing the proliferation of references to
conspiracy theories with a proliferation of the (alleged) phenomenon referred to.6
I will not be introducing my own definitions of “conspiracy theory” or “conspiracy the-
orist,” etc., here. That is because I don’t believe there are any correct (or even good) definitions
of these terms. My position is that ideally7 we should avoid using (as opposed to mentioning)
these terms altogether. The fact that these terms are multiply ambiguous is not, on its own, a
reason for not using them. The words “conspiracy” and “theory” are arguably both ambiguous,
but I certainly wouldn’t suggest that they should not be used. In most contexts it is clear enough
what they mean. By contrast, the terms “conspiracy theory” and “conspiracy theorist” are rou-
tinely used as if they always meant the same thing, despite the wide variety of incompatible
definitions (and quite often the absence of definition) and arguments that they are a problem
are routinely guilty of the fallacy of equivocation. Of course, I can’t hope to make a particularly
convincing general case for this in this chapter; I will be content to alert the reader to some of
the fallacious equivocations in the psychology literature.
Neutral definitions of conspiracy theory

Most definitions in the psychology literature (and elsewhere) are neutral, in the sense that they
don’t explicitly say what it is that is supposed to be objectionable about conspiracy theories.
They don’t say, for example, that they are false, or that belief in them is irrational, or harmful, or
whatever. Here are some representative examples of such “neutral” definitions.
Conspiracy Theories are lay beliefs that attribute the ultimate cause of an event, or the
concealment of an event from public knowledge, to a secret, unlawful, and malevolent
plot by multiple actors working together.
Swami et al. 2010: 749
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David Coady
Conspiracy theories can be defined as explanatory believe[sic], involving multiple

actors who join together in secret agreement and try to achieve a hidden goal that is
perceived as unlawful or malevolent.
van Prooijen and Acker 2015: 753
Conspiracy theories are attempts to explain events as the secret acts of powerful mal-
evolent forces.
Jolly and Douglas 2014
These definitions vary in some significant ways, and arguably pick out quite different phe-
nomena. However, they have one thing in common; on each of these definitions, some, indeed
many, conspiracy theories are true. Precisely how many are true will depend on how we under-
stand the word “malevolent” which occurs in each of them. Nonetheless, it’s perfectly clear that
there are and always have been people, many of them powerful, who do join forces secretly, and
that many of them are reasonably understood to be malevolent. At any rate it’s not an essential
feature of most definitions of “conspiracy theory” outside the psychological literature that the
alleged conspirators be malevolent or even that they are perceived to be malevolent or other-
wise immoral (see Coady 2012: 114). Furthermore, at least one neutral definition exists in the
psychology literature, according to which a conspiracy theory can simply be defined as “a set
of beliefs that are used to explain how a group of individuals is covertly seeking to influence or
cause certain events” (Leman and Cinnirella 2013). This definition leaves open the possibility
that the alleged conspirators of a conspiracy theory are not malevolent or perceived to be mal-
evolent or in any other way morally objectionable.8
Although many conspiracy theories, on all these definitions, are true, the examples of
conspiracy theories cited in the four articles in which these definitions occur are clearly all
believed to be false by the authors. What’s more, they clearly expect their readers to agree. As
it happens, most of the conspiracy theories they mention do appear to be false. It is not my
place to adjudicate which if any may be true since philosophers in general are not much better
equipped than psychologists at determining matters of historical fact. However, one example
mentioned in all four articles, the theory according to which some form of conspiracy was
responsible for President John F. Kennedy’s death, is worth some consideration. Reasonable
opinion seems to be divided over whether this theory is true. One thing is clear, however; the
fact that it is, according to these definitions, a conspiracy theory, is no reason at all for thinking
that it is not true, or for thinking that those who believe it do so as a result of some irrational
(or non-rational) process. Many conspiracy theories, on the above definitions, are both true
and well-known to be true. It may or may not be true that there was a conspiracy behind
John F. Kennedy’s assassination, but it is certainly true that there were conspiracies behind the
assassinations of Julius Caesar, Abraham Lincoln, Tsar Alexander II, Archduke Franz Ferdinand,
and Anwar Sadat. Charles Pigden (2006: 161) has reviewed high-profile assassinations of late
sixteenth-and early seventeenth-century Europe and found that about half of them were the
products of conspiracy. There seems to be no reason to think that conspiracies in general, and
conspiratorial assassinations in particular, are less common now than they were then.
The causes and effects of conspiracy theories

Does this matter? Couldn’t these psychologists say that they are not concerned with normative
issues concerning whether particular conspiracy theories are true (or rationally believed); rather,
they are concerned with empirical questions about the causes and effects of belief in them. As
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Wood puts it, they are trying to find “the antecedents and consequences of beliefs in conspiracy
theories” (Wood 2016: 695), without specifying whether they are true or whether they are
held on rational grounds. In fact, this attitude seems to be widespread among psychologists.The
authors of the Le Monde letter I mentioned earlier explicitly say that they “focus on the psych-
ology and sociology of conspiracy theories, conceived as the outcome of situational factors,
personality, and cognitive traits largely unrelated to the truth or falsity of said “conspiracies.”9
The idea that we can address substantive psychological or sociological questions10 about
the causes of any category of belief in a way that is largely unrelated to the truth or falsity of
the beliefs in question is deeply misguided. If you want to explain why I believe that I own a
Ford Focus, the first thing you have to do is find out whether I do in fact own a Ford Focus.
No attempt to explain my belief that doesn’t first settle the issue of whether the belief is true
will be credible. This is because, putting aside extremely rare or far-fetched cases of the kind
philosophers love to consider when analyzing knowledge, when a person’s beliefs are true, that
fact is central to any adequate explanation of why he or she holds them.
This point may perhaps be made clearer if we consider a different category of theory, one
which doesn’t have the bad reputation conspiracy theories suffer from, namely scientific the-
ories. Suppose psychologists decided to investigate why people believe scientific theories,
without regard to whether the theories in question were true.The proposal would of course be
treated by serious scholars as a piece of relativistic confusion. There may, though I doubt it, be
some interesting generalizations to be made about why people believe false scientific theories,
but there can be no prospect at all of a general truth-independent and informative account of
why they believe scientific theories. For the same reason, there can be no prospect of a general
truth-independent and informative account of why people believe conspiracy theories. The
explicit claim of some psychologists that they are offering such an account is disingenuous.
They are inevitably implicitly assuming that when they talk about conspiracy theories they are
talking about a category of false belief.
A truth-independent and informative inquiry into the effects of belief, on the other hand,
might be a worthwhile project, in a way that, as we have seen, a truth-independent inquiry
into the causes of belief could not. You could, for example, make some progress investigating
the effects of my belief that I own a Ford Focus without taking a stance on whether that belief
is true.You could find, for example, that my belief causes me pride, without concerning your-
self with whether it’s true. You might think, therefore, that the prospects for a general enquiry
into the effects of belief in conspiracy theories is more hopeful. That would, however, be a
mistake. It presupposes that the population can be divided into two groups of people: those
who believe conspiracy theories (the test group) and those who don’t (the control group).
But, at least on the definitions we have considered so far, and on most definitions both inside
and outside of the psychology literature, everyone (or, at any rate anyone who is moderately
well informed about history and current affairs, not to mention their own immediate environ-
ment) believes numerous conspiracy theories. Anyone who is aware of the historical conspir-
acies I have mentioned so far believes in the conspiracy theories to the effect that they occurred,
and if you don’t believe in those, or any of the other well-documented conspiracy theories
with which history books and newspapers are filled, then you must believe that there is a very
large-scale (and presumably malevolent) plot to deceive us about history and current affairs, in
which case you still believe at least one conspiracy theory (though in that case of a paranoid
and irrational kind).11
In a widely cited article called “Belief in Conspiracy Theories,” published in Political
Psychology, Ted Goertzel found that “people who believed in one conspiracy theory were more
likely to believe in others” (Goertzel 1994). What does Goertzel mean by the term “conspiracy
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theory”? Unlike the other psychologists we have considered, he doesn’t say. But he can’t have
anything like their definitions in mind, since his “finding” presupposes that some people do not
believe any conspiracy theories at all. In particular, of course, he is presupposing that neither
he nor his readers believe any conspiracy theories. Instead of giving us a definition, he surveys
people’s attitudes to ten things which he calls “conspiracy theories,” which, beyond positing a
conspiracy, appear to have nothing in common except that (a) they are widely believed to be
true, especially by young, black, and hispanic people,12 and (b) not believed to be true by the
author. Whether any of them are in fact true isn’t really relevant to my main point, but it is
worth noting that at least one of them, the theory according to which American government
agencies conspired to bring drugs into American inner-city communities, does appear to be
true (Shou 2014). Two of his other examples, that there was a conspiracy behind the assassin-
ation of Martin Luther King and that Ronald Reagan conspired with the Iranians to ensure that
American hostages would not be released until after the 1980 elections, are still highly contro-
versial. It seems likely that no one who hasn’t spent a significant portion of their life researching
these topics is particularly worth listening to on them. Certainly, there is no evidence that
Goertzel has done any research on these matters. He cites no evidence that these, or any of his
ten conspiracy theories, are false. It is simply assumed that although many people, especially
young people and members of minority communities, believe them, his readers will share his
assumption that they are all so obviously false that no evidence or arguments to that effect are
necessary. Some of them, I hasten to add, are obviously false, but they are not obviously false
because they are conspiracy theories. They are obviously false because of the outlandish nature
of the specific conspiracies that they posit.
Some psychologists have made more modest claims, not about the effects of believing in
conspiracy theories simpliciter, but about the effects of believing in certain kinds of conspiracy
theories. Jolly and Douglas, for example, the authors responsible for the third neutral definition
we have considered found “that beliefs in anti-vaccine conspiracy theories –such as the belief
that research on vaccine efficacy is manipulated to make profits for pharmaceutical companies –
are associated with reduced vaccination intentions.” This finding is not surprising. If we assume
that people with “reduced vaccination intentions” (i.e., people who are reluctant to vaccinate
themselves or their children) are aware that there is a medical consensus that vaccination is
beneficial both to those who undergo it and to the wider society and that it involves no sig-
nificant side effects, and we assume that they have a normal concern for their own well-being
and/or that of their children and/or that of the wider society, then we may reasonably con-
clude that they have significant doubts about the reliability of the medical consensus, and it is
very difficult to see how one could explain the existence of such a large-scale expert consensus
over a matter of this kind without supposing it to be the product of a wide-ranging conspiracy
involving the medical profession, pharmaceutical companies, and perhaps others. It is clear that
anti-vaccination conspiracy theories are false. But we mustn’t, as Jolly and Douglas do, jump
from this to the further conclusion that these beliefs are false because they postulate conspiracy.
As we have seen, there are plenty of circumstances in which we are right to postulate conspiracy.
Jolly and Douglas move from the unsurprising finding that unwillingness to vaccinate is
often caused by a false belief in certain conspiracies to the conclusion that it is caused by some-
thing they call “conspiracism”:
Ongoing investigations are needed to further identify the social consequences of

conspiracism, and to identify potential ways to combat the effects of an ever-g rowing
culture of conspiracism.
Jolly and Douglas 2014
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Jolly and Douglas offer no definition of “conspiracism,” nor do they offer any argument for
their claim that it is playing a role in vaccine refusal or that it is having an ever-g rowing influ-
ence in our culture. I will address each of these issues in turn.
Sometimes the word “conspiracism” seems to refer to the state of believing one or more
conspiracy theories. This is not a useful concept, since, as we have seen, at least on definitions
considered so far, including Jolly and Douglas’s, everyone, or at least everyone with a reasonable
knowledge of history or politics, believes many conspiracy theories.
There is perhaps a more charitable interpretation of Jolly and Douglas’s position avail-
able. Conspiracism could be understood to refer to a certain intellectual vice: roughly the
vice of being excessively willing to believe conspiratorial explanations. Now it may be that
the participants in Jolly and Douglas’s study who believe one or more anti-vaccination con-
spiracy theory suffer from this vice, but their study provides us with no reason to believe
this. The participants may believe an anti-vaccination conspiracy theory, not because they are
excessively willing to believe conspiracy theories, but for some other reason. It’s hard to see
how psychologists could design a study to test whether people believe anti-vaccine conspiracy
theories because they suffer from the vice of conspiracism. Indeed, it is hard to see how they
could devise a test for how widespread the vice of conspiracism is or whether it even exists.
Jolly and Douglas’s claim that conspiracism is having an ever-g rowing influence in our culture
is a commonplace assertion of the psychology literature and beyond (e.g., Keeley 1999; Wilson
1998: 1–2; Sunstein and Vermeule 2009: 203). However, others have argued that people are
becoming less willing to posit conspiratorial explanations than they were in the past (partly
because of the pejorative connotations of the terms “conspiracy theory” and “conspiracy the-
orist”) and that most people are, if anything, too reluctant to do so (e.g., Coady 2012: 110–37).
If psychologists are to test whether readiness to believe anti-vaccine conspiracy theories is the
result of conspiracism (i.e., an excessive willingness to believe conspiracy theories), they need
to have an idea of how willing one should be to believe conspiracy theories and that requires
us to have an idea of how widespread conspiracy is. Unfortunately, this is not a question that
psychologists are particularly well-qualified to answer. It is primarily a question for historians,
sociologists, and political scientists.
Loaded definitions
Other psychologists make conspiracy theories objectionable by definitional fiat. Here is an
example:
A conspiracy theory can be defined as an unverified and relatively implausible allega-

tion of conspiracy, claiming that significant events are the result of a secret plot carried
out by a preternaturally sinister and powerful group of individuals.
Brotherton and French 2014
In a similar spirit, Brotherton et al. (2013) define a “conspiracist belief ” as “the unnecessary
assumption of conspiracy when other explanations are more probable.”13
These definitions are, of course, quite different from the neutral ones we have considered so
far. Although, as we saw, many conspiracy theories, understood in accordance with any of the
neutral definitions, are true, very few conspiracy theories, understood in accordance with either
of these loaded definitions, are true. That has nothing to do with how widespread or important
conspiracies (or malevolent conspiracies) are, and everything to do with the trivial fact that very
few implausible or improbable theories of any kind are true.
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These definitions are extremely unnatural and misleading. First, unlike any other cat-
egory of theory (scientific theory, number theory, film theory, etc.) conspiracy theories, on
this understanding, are supposed to be implausible or improbable by definition. Second, these
definitions don’t accord with their authors’ practice, since both articles cite findings about con-
spiracy theories from other psychologists who are using neutral definitions of the kind we have
already considered, as if they all are talking about the same thing. Brotherton et al. (2013), for
example, describe Goertzel’s (1994) “finding” that people who “endorse one conspiracy theory
tend to endorse others” as “robust.” As we saw, this finding, on the neutral definitions of con-
spiracy theory, wrongly presupposes that there are people who don’t endorse any conspiracy
theories at all. If we make conspiracy theories implausible or unlikely by definition we reduce
the number of conspiracy theories that people believe, but it seems unlikely that we are reducing
them to such a degree that there are people who don’t endorse any at all. Most of us are modest
and realistic enough to recognize that many of our beliefs are implausible (from an objective
standpoint) and unlikely to be true, even though of course we can’t identify which beliefs they
are (or presumably we would stop believing them). Since many of the beliefs of any reasonably
well-educated person involve the postulation of conspiracy, it’s reasonable to conclude that we all
have some beliefs that are, in one or both of these loaded senses, conspiracy theories.
The most fundamental problem with these loaded definitions is, of course, that they reduce
the objectionable feature of conspiracy theories to a trivial matter of definition. Of course, we
shouldn’t believe conspiracy theories so understood because we shouldn’t believe any theories
that are implausible or unlikely to be true. We have been given no reason to believe that the
fact that some people (and almost certainly all people) believe some conspiracy theories that
are implausible or unlikely to be true is something that stands in need of explanation. It is a
familiar fact about human beings that each of us believes things that are implausible and unlikely
to be true, and if you take a broad enough subject matter (science, history, conspiracy, etc.) on
which everyone has opinions, we probably all believe things on that topic that are implausible
and unlikely to be true. It’s likely that we’ve all been guilty of assuming conspiracy when other
explanations are more probable, but that doesn’t mean we were (even temporarily) suffering
from the vice of conspiracism (or “conspiracist ideation,” as Brotherton et al. (2013) call it)).
After all, we’ve probably all been guilty of assuming non-conspiratorial explanations when con-
spiratorial explanations are more likely as well. Elsewhere I have argued (Coady 2012: Chap. 5)
that the latter mistake is probably more common and certainly more pernicious than the former.
The absurdity of these loaded definitions is particularly clear when we consider the fact
that one of Brotherton et al.’s (2013) examples of “conspiracist ideation,” is the belief held by
some people that the U.S. government orchestrated the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Brotherton et al.
fail to notice that this belief does not fit their own definition of a conspiracy theory (i.e., “the
unnecessary assumption of conspiracy when other explanations are more probable”), because
this is an event for which any conceivable explanation involves the assumption of conspiracy.
Charles Pigden has noted the absurdity of trying to explain the 9/11 terrorist attacks without
supposing there to have been a conspiracy in the following passage:
Nobody half-way sane supposes that the events of 9/11 were not due to some con-
spiracy or other. (To think that you would have to suppose that the perpetrators
assembled in the planes quite by chance and that on a sudden, by coincidence, it struck
them all as a neat idea to hijack the planes and ram them into the Twin Towers, the
Whitehouse and the Pentagon, with the aid of other perpetrators who, presumably,
they had never met before.)
Pigden 2006: 158
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People who believe that the U.S. government orchestrated the 9/11 attacks are certainly wrong,
but they are not wrong because they suffer from conspiracism or conspiracist ideation. They
don’t go wrong because they assume conspiracy.They are absolutely right to assume conspiracy.
They go wrong because they have misidentified the conspirators.
Conclusion
I said at the beginning that we should not use the terms “conspiracy theory,” “conspiracy the-
orist” or any of the language associated with these terms. Each time we do so, we are implying,
even if we don’t mean to, that there is something wrong with believing, wanting to investigate,
or giving any credence at all, to the possibility that powerful people (and especially governments
or government agencies of Western countries) are engaged in secretive or deceptive behavior.
The net effect of the use of these terms is to silence people who are suspicious of, or would like
to investigate, the behavior of powerful people. These terms serve to herd respectable opinion
in ways that suit the interests of the powerful and make it more likely that they will be able to
get away with conspiracies.
So one bad effect of these terms is that they contribute to a political environment in which
it is easier for conspiracy to thrive at the expense of openness. Another bad effect of them is
that their use is an injustice to the individuals who are characterized as conspiracy theorists or
whose beliefs are characterized as conspiracy theories. Following Miranda Fricker, we may call
this a form of “testimonial injustice.”14 When someone asserts that a conspiracy has taken place
(especially when it is a conspiracy by powerful people or institutions) that person’s word is
automatically given less credence than it should because of an irrational prejudice associated
with the pejorative connotations of these terms. When these terms are employed by profes-
sional psychologists it can constitute a form of gaslighting; that is, a manipulation of people
into doubting their own sanity. I hope and believe that in the future these terms will be
widely recognized for what they are: the products of an irrational and authoritarian outlook.
When that happens, we will look back on the pseudo-scientific study of conspiracy theories
by many professional psychologists with the same bemused wonder that we now look back
on phrenology.
Notes
1 I thank James Chase for his useful advice on an earlier draft of this chapter.
2 Some conservative religious people still denounce heresy and heretics. A group of conservative
theologians and priests, for example, recently accused Pope Francis of “spreading heresy.” This way of
speaking is likely to strike most readers as archaic. Conspiracy theorists are the heretics of our secular
age. See http://edition.cnn.com/2017/09/25/world/pope-heresy/index.html. Retrieved November
28, 2017.
3 At least we are not yet doing so systematically and en masse as happened in the Soviet Union. There
are some well-known cases of political dissidents in the West being targeted by the state for believing
true conspiracy theories. The “Martha Mitchell Effect” is a name given to the process by which a
psychiatrist or psychologist labels a patient’s accurate beliefs as delusional and misdiagnoses accordingly.
Martha Mitchell, after whom the phenomenon is named, was the former wife of Richard Nixon’s
Attorney-General, John Mitchell. When she accused her former husband and other White House
officials of engaging in illegal conspiracies, the White House responded with a coordinated cam-
paign to portray her claims as the product of mental illness. Ultimately, of course, she was vindicated.
Her former husband was convicted of several crimes, including conspiracy. I thank James Chase for
pointing out the relevance of this case to my current point.
4 “Luttons efficacement contre les théories du complot” [Let’s fight conspiracy theories effectively],
written and signed by Gérald Bronner, Véronique Campion-Vincent, Sylvain Delouvée, Sebastian
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Dieguez, Karen Douglas, Nicolas Gauvrit, Anthony Lantian, and Pascal Wagner-Egger, published on
June 5, 2016, in the print edition of Le Monde.
5 John Ayto (1999: 15) cites a use of the term “conspiracy theory” from 1909. Apparently, it did not then
have negative connotations.
6 I say “alleged” because, as I hope to make clear, there is no single thing which people are talking about
when they talk about conspiracy theories.
7 Of course we don’t live in an ideal world, and there are circumstances in which I would countenance
their use (see Coady 2012: 125–30), and I will occasionally use them in this chapter.
8 Most definitions of conspiracy allow conspirators to be harmless and even well-intentioned. David
Hume speaks of “a conspiracy for the public interest” (Hume 1985: 587).
9 https://social-epistemology.com/2016/12/28/they-respond-comments-on-basham-et-al-s-social-
sciences-conspiracy-theory-panic-now-they-want-to-cure-everyone-sebastian-dieguez-et-al/#_ftn2.
Retrieved November 28, 2017. Presumably they mean the truth or falsity of said “conspiracy theories.”
Theories are true or false. Conspiracies occur or don’t occur.
10 There might be trivial questions about the causes of beliefs that can be addressed independently of
their truth-value. One might say, for example, that someone believes that p, because p appears to him
or her to be true, without concerning oneself with whether p is true or false.
11 Charles Pigden (2006: 158) presents a slightly different version of this argument.
12 Goertzel claims that his study found that minorities and young people are particularly prone to
believing conspiracy theories.This “finding” is often cited in the psychology literature. In fact, Goertzel
seems to have simply chosen examples of conspiracy theories which minorities and young people are
particularly likely to believe. In at least one case, they are particularly likely to believe them because
they are particularly likely to be aware that they are true.
13 They take this definition from Aaronovitch (2011), though they change the definiendum from “con-
spiracy theory” to “conspiracist belief.” They are clearly treating these as synonyms.
14 See Fricker (2007).
References
Aaronovitch, D. (2011). Voodoo Histories: The role of conspiracy theory in shaping modern history. New York:
Riverhead Books.
Ayto, J. (1999). Twentieth Century Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bloch, S., and Reddaway, P. (1985). Soviet Psychiatric Abuse: The shadow over world psychiatry. Boulder,
CO: Westview Press.
Brotherton, R., and French, C. C. (2014). “Belief in Conspiracy Theories and Susceptibility to the
Conjunction Fallacy.” Applied Cognitive Psychology, 28(2): 238–48.
Brotherton, R., French, C. C., and Pickering, A. D. (2013). “Measuring Belief in Conspiracy Theories: The
generic conspiracist beliefs scale.” Frontiers in Personality Science and Individual Differences, 4: 279.
Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00279.
Coady, D. (2012). What to Believe Now: Applying epistemology to contemporary issues. Malden, MA:
Wiley-Blackwell.
Goertzel, T. (1994). “Belief in Conspiracy Theories.” Political Psychology, 15(4): 731–42.
Hume, D. (1985). “Of Suicide,” in E. F. Miller (ed.), Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary. Indianapolis,
IN: Liberty Fund.
Jolly, D., and Douglas, K. M. (2014). “The Effects of Anti-Vaccination Conspiracy Theories on Vaccination
Intentions.” PLoS ONE, 9(2): e89177. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.
pone.0089177.
Keeley, B. L. (1999). “Of Conspiracy Theories.” The Journal of Philosophy, 32(2): 109–26.
Leman, P. J., and Cinnirella, M. (2013). “Beliefs in Conspiracy Theories and the Need for Cognitive
Closure.” Frontiers in Psychology, 4: 378. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00378.
Orosz, G., Kreko, P., Paskuj, B., Toth- Kiraly, I., Botha, B., and Roland- Levy, C. (2016). “Changing
Conspiracy Beliefs through Rationality and Ridiculing.” Frontiers in Psychology, 7: 1525. Retrieved
from http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01525.
Pigden, C. (2006). “Complots of Mischief,” in D. Coady (ed.), Conspiracy Theories: The philosophical debate.
London: Ashgate.
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Shou, N. (2014). Kill the Messenger: How the CIA’s crack-cocaine controversy destroyed journalist Gary Webb.
New York: Nation Books.
Sunstein, C. R., and Vermeule, A. (2009). “Conspiracy Theories: Causes and cures.” The Journal of Political
Philosophy, 17(2): 202–27.
Swami, V., Chamorro-Premuzic, T., and Furnham, A. (2010). “Unanswered Questions: A preliminary
investigation of personality and individual difference predictors of 9/11 conspiracist beliefs.” Applied
Cognitive Psychology, 24: 749–61.
van Prooijen, J.-W., and Acker, M. (2015). “The Influence of Control on Belief in Conspiracy
Theories: Conceptual and applied extensions.” Applied Cognitive Psychology, 29(5): 753–61.
Wilson, R. A. (1998). Everything Is Under Control: Conspiracies, cults and cover-ups. New York: William
Morrow Paperbacks.
Wood, M. J. (2016). “Some Dare Call It Conspiracy: Labeling something a conspiracy theory does not
reduce belief in it.” Political Psychology, 37(5): 695–705.
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PART V
Epistemic institutions
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14
LEGAL BURDENS OF PROOF
AND STATISTICAL EVIDENCE
Georgi Gardiner
1. The golden thread

The presumption of innocence is a keystone of many criminal justice systems. In criminal trials,
the defendant is formally considered “innocent until proven guilty.” The burden of proof is on
the state to prove the defendant committed all elements of the crime; the defendant, by con-
trast, need not prove his innocence. This asymmetry was famously dubbed “the golden thread”
of criminal law.1 Correspondingly in many legal systems, such as Anglo-American common
law, the defendant in civil cases enjoys a presumption of non-culpability; the burden falls to the
plaintiff to establish the facts of the case.
A legal burden of proof generates a formal standard of proof. This is the standard to which
the facts must be established to satisfy the burden. Formal standards include the “reasonable
suspicion” standard in the US, which is required for a brief stop and search.2 A slightly higher
standard, “probable cause,” is required for detentions, arrests and indictments, and for more
substantial searches of persons and property. When quantified, the thresholds for satisfying the
standards are typically glossed as around 10–50% and 30–60% confidence, respectively, that
the person is participating in criminal activity (McCauliff 1982; Lerner 2003; Bacigal 2004;
Goldberg 2013).
The “preponderance of evidence” standard, usually understood as requiring that a claim is
more likely true than not, operates in civil and family courts. The standard is typically quan-
tified as exceeding 50% likelihood that the litigated facts obtain.3 The “clear and convincing
evidence” standard, frequently quantified as around 65–75% confidence, is more demanding.
This standard is employed in equity cases such as right-to-die hearings, wills, libel, child custody,
paternity disputes, and commitment to mental institutions.4
The proof “beyond reasonable doubt” standard, which is required for criminal conviction in
many jurisdictions, is more demanding still. It is one of the most familiar aspects of criminal law
and is commonly understood to be around 90–95% confidence in the guilt of the defendant
(Tribe 1971; Laudan 2011; Walen 2015; Mulrine 1997; Lippke 2010).
Burdens of proof and their associated standards raise many epistemological questions. Questions
concern whether the presumption of innocence is a propositional attitude, the nature of this atti-
tude or stance, and whether it is appropriate.There are questions about how to interpret, and what
legitimates, the various standards of proof.5 In this chapter, I examine whether these standards can
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be properly understood in quantitative terms and how this affects the kinds of evidence that can
satisfy the standard. In section 2, I introduce examples that suggest legal standards of proof cannot
be properly interpreted in quantitative terms. In sections 3, 4, and 5, I evaluate three competing
proposals for a non-quantitative epistemic condition on satisfying legal burdens of proof.
2. Statistical evidence

Consider the following cases:6
Underage Alcohol. Reliable studies establish that at most undergraduate house parties,
underage drinking is ubiquitous. The local police force decides this base rate evidence
satisfies the reasonable suspicion standard. On this basis they search underage individ-
uals arriving at undergraduate parties.7
Gatecrasher. A music venue sells seats at its event but does not issue, or record who
purchases, tickets. One day the gate is left open and, taking advantage of the lack of
ticketing system, many people gatecrash. The managers realize only 10 seats were
sold, but 80 people attended. They call the police, who arrest some attendees for
gatecrashing.The police reason that there is probable cause to arrest any attendee, since
it is overwhelmingly likely they committed a crime.8
Cohen 1977
Red Taxi. A vehicle hit Jeanette late one night. She could determine it was a taxi, but
could not discern the color. The Red Taxi company operates 75% of taxis in town.
The remaining 25% are operated by the Green Taxi company. Jeanette sues the Red
Taxi company. Using only the evidence described here, Jeanette reasons, she will win
the case, because it is more likely than not that Red Taxi is liable.9
Uncertain Paternity. Magda does not know who fathered her child. She knows it is one
of two lovers, and asks them to undergo DNA testing. Owing to disorganization at the
laboratory, both samples become adulterated. Statistical analysis cannot generate the high
certainty characteristic of flawless DNA testing but reports a 90% likelihood that Tom
is the father. Since paternity tests are expensive, Magda reasons this evidence ought to
suffice for her paternity suit, which only requires “clear and convincing evidence.”
Prison Yard. One hundred prisoners exercise in the prison yard. Ninety-nine prisoners
together initiate a premeditated attack on a guard. Security footage reveals one pris-
oner standing against the wall refusing to participate. There is no evidence indicating
who refused to participate. The prison officials decide that since for each prisoner it is
99% likely they are guilty, they have adequate evidence to successfully prosecute indi-
vidual prisoners for assault.
Nesson 1979
In each case brute statistical evidence plausibly licenses a relatively high credence in the target
claim. If the burden of proof can be satisfied by statistical evidence alone, these vignettes exem-
plify satisfying the relevant burdens. But there is something dubious about these cases. Law
courts would not adjudicate in favor of the claimants and the police would likely violate their
code of conduct were they to act on this basis (Koehler 2001).
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Legal burdens of proof
For each vignette, furthermore, we can construct a comparison case in which non-statistical,
“individualized” evidence is employed instead. The overall likelihood of the disputed fact given
the evidence might be lower, yet the burden seems satisfied. Consider the following case:
Red Taxi Testimony. A vehicle hit Jeanette late one night. The Red Taxi company
operates 50% of taxis in town. The Green Taxi company operates the remaining 50%.
Jeanette claims she saw the taxi was red. Eyewitness reports are notoriously unreli-
able, and so tests are performed to determine Jeanette’s reliability under the relevant
conditions. She discerns the correct color 70% of the time. Her eyewitness testimony
thus suggests a red taxi caused the accident. With this evidence Jeanette sues the Red
Taxi company.
Thomson 1986
In some sense, this eyewitness evidence is less determinative: plausibly a red taxi is more likely at
fault given the evidence in the original example. But finding liability in the second case seems
more legitimate and courts are significantly more likely to find in the plaintiff ’s favor. Similar
counterparts can be constructed for each of the five vignettes above.
These cases suggest the standard of proof is not a quantitative measure, such as a credence
or statistical likelihood. If “preponderance of evidence” could be captured numerically, for
example, it would be lower than 75%. And this would mean, implausibly, the fact finder should
find liability in the Red Taxi case. Similarly, if “beyond reasonable doubt” can be understood
quantitatively, it must be lower than 99% confidence. This would entail, implausibly, statistical
evidence in the prison yard case suffices for conviction. Questions about whether merely stat-
istical evidence can satisfy a burden of proof are increasingly pressing, as cold hit DNA or fin-
gerprint matches and other statistical approaches to evidence are becoming more prevalent.10
(“Cold hits” are when a database search connects a hitherto unconnected perpetrator to a
crime.) This raises the question: if the standard of proof is not simply a numerical likelihood, and
if merely statistical evidence does not satisfy that standard, what other conditions are required
to satisfy the burden of proof?
3. Causal relations and guarantees

Legal theorists note that vignettes like the first five above lack “individualized” evidence against
the defendant. But this notion is itself opaque. Judith Jarvis Thomson (1986) aims to illuminate
the nature and value of individualized evidence. She argues individualized evidence is that
which is appropriately causally connected to the target claim. This causal relation might be
that the evidence caused the crime. Gambling debt, for example, might be individualized evi-
dence of guilt if debt motivated the theft. Thomson calls this “forward-looking” individualized
evidence. Alternatively, crime can cause evidence. The crime’s occurring, for example, causes
incriminating fingerprints. Thomson calls this “backward-looking” individualized evidence.
Finally, evidence and crime might have a common cause. Suppose the defendant verbally abused
an officer one evening.This might be evidence the defendant later attacked a pedestrian because
it indicates a common cause –the defendant was enraged that evening –for both incidents.
Evidence with an appropriate causal relation, Thomson argues, supplies epistemic import
distinct from merely raising the likelihood of the disputed claim. Individualized evidence, in her
view,“guarantees” the claim is true (Thomson 1986: 206, 208–9, 214). In the Red Taxi Testimony
case, the taxi’s being red causally explains the eyewitness evidence. Eyewitness evidence can
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therefore guarantee, argues Thomson, the litigated taxi-color claim.Thomson writes, “to require
individualized evidence of guilt just is to be requiring a guarantee” (Thomson 1986: 214).
Thomson notes the similarity to lottery cases in epistemology (Thomson 1986: 207–8).11
Statistical evidence about lotteries can make the claim that a specific ticket lost more probable,
but cannot guarantee it. Lottery results printed in the newspaper, by contrast, can guarantee
the ticket lost. As with individualized evidence of a litigated fact, newspaper evidence can, in
Thomson’s view, guarantee the ticket lost even if the likelihood of false belief from newspaper
evidence is higher than the likelihood of false belief via merely statistical evidence. (This can
happen if, for example, the newspaper-reported lottery is significantly smaller and there is some
chance the newspaper misprinted the numbers.)
Thomson’s suggestion has virtues. Statistical evidence, at least in the above kinds of cases,
characteristically lacks a causal relation to the disputed claim. And statistical evidence plausibly
fails to provide a guarantee: even excellent statistical evidence is straightforwardly consistent
with the target claim’s falsity. Individualized evidence, by contrast, typically has a causal relation
and can characteristically –in some sense –generate a guarantee. If a person is convicted even
though no evidence is causally related to the putative crime, furthermore, this seems incon-
sistent with justice; the defendant’s crime has no bearing on whether he is convicted.12
But there are weaknesses in Thomson’s account. Firstly, absent a more precise conception
of causation, the account remains schematic. Causation is a notoriously “murky,” elastic notion,
and Thomson does not specify the causal relation her account employs.13
Some base rates are plausibly causally related to some litigated claims, furthermore, which
suggests that the lack of causal relation fails to capture the inadequacy of merely statistical evidence.
If local gang membership rates are sufficiently high, for example, this base rate can causally con-
tribute to an individual participating in an illegal gang initiation rite. Since it is causal, the base rate
is a candidate for forward-looking evidence, but nonetheless is statistical.The statistical evidence in
the uncertain paternity case above is plausibly caused by paternity; if so, this is backward-looking
causal evidence that is nonetheless statistical.14 Base rates can be causally related to a common cause.
Perhaps in some cases religious tenets causally contribute both to rates of domestic violence within
that religion and a particular instance of domestic violence. Despite these causal relations, base rate
evidence seems illegitimate for satisfying the burden of proof and is (arguably) unindividualized.
Realistic social base rate evidence does not typically generate high statistical likelihood (and
tends to be complex). In the following fictional examples base rate statistics are high and so are
a potential candidate for sufficient evidence.15
First Gatecrasher. A music venue sells seats at its event, but does not issue, or record
who purchases, tickets. Fern notices the gate is open, and decides to gatecrash. Other
people see her gatecrashing and decide to follow. The managers realize only 10 seats
were sold but 80 people attended, and summon the police. Fern happens to be one of
the people apprehended. The statistical evidence against Fern is deemed sufficient to
satisfy the burden of proof, since it is overwhelmingly likely she gatecrashed.
Opportunistic Gatecrasher. A music venue sells seats at its event, but does not issue, or
record who purchases tickets. One day the gate is left open and, taking advantage of
the lack of ticketing system, many people gatecrash. Oppy walks past the venue and
realizes many people are gatecrashing. Oppy sees this as opportunity to gatecrash, and
so joins in.The managers realize only 10 seats were sold, but 80 people attended. Oppy
is one of those arrested. The statistical evidence against Oppy is deemed sufficient to
satisfy the burden of proof, since it is overwhelmingly likely he gatecrashed.
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In these cases, arguably, the statistical evidence is causally related to the person’s guilt, yet is
not individualized, does not generate a guarantee, and should not satisfy a burden of proof.
But according to the letter of Thomson’s account, the statistical evidence, by being causally
related, qualifies as individualized. Since the statistics render guilt likely, Thomson’s account
cannot explain why they do not suffice for conviction. This objection is pressed in Blome-
Tillmann (2015).
Responses are available. By refining the account of causation, one might deny that Fern
caused the statistic. There were, after all, many intervening causes. It is implausible, however,
that an account of causation is available where gambling debt causes the theft but the high pro-
portion of gatecrashers does not cause Oppy’s opportunistic gatecrashing. A second response
posits that the way the statistic causes Oppy’s crime – by providing motivation or cover – is
importantly disconnected from how it epistemically supports guilt, namely by establishing a
base rate likelihood. Perhaps, then, the case does not undermine the spirit of Thomson’s pro-
posal. Thirdly, advocates of a causal account of the epistemic difference between statistical and
individualized evidence might argue that the statistical evidence against Oppy is not itself causal,
perhaps because it is abstract. For the evidence to be causal one must incorporate that Oppy
notices the high proportion of gatecrashers, which motivates him. But then, the response con-
tinues, the evidence qualifies as causal precisely because one includes an individualized, not
purely statistical, aspect.
An alternative line of response argues that the existence of cases illustrating that sometimes
brute statistical evidence is causally related to the target fact does not undermine Thomson’s
account;Thomson identifies why brute statistical evidence is characteristically inadequate for con-
viction. Thomson’s account explains that merely statistical evidence characteristically cannot
guarantee the disputed fact, but individualized evidence –evidence with appropriate causal
relations to the fact –characteristically can.Thus, a refined version of Thomson’s causal account
may avoid these criticisms.
This response raises a second set of concerns about Thomson’s account. It is unclear how
causal relations generate a guarantee, or indeed what Thomson means by “guarantee.” A witness
might testify that although she thinks the perpetrator wore sandals, she cannot recall the inci-
dent well. A causal relationship obtains –the witness believes this because the perpetrator wore
sandals –but the evidence cannot provide a guarantee. We might speculate that if Jones stole,
his debt was a cause. But we are unsure whether he stole and, if so, whether debt was a motive.
These pieces of evidence offer no guarantee. It is unclear from Thomson’s account why com-
bining evidence of this kind is epistemically or legally superior to statistical evidence. Perhaps
lottery-style, statistical evidence provides a greater guarantee than combining many unreliable,
but individualized, considerations.
To further cleave guarantees from causally connected evidence, note there can be non-
causal facts that generate guarantees. These might include facts of legal definition, such as if the
accused performed certain actions he thereby committed an offence, or facts concerning a med-
ical diagnosis, such as if the witness has specific traits then he has a particular disorder. A lawyer
might articulate entailment relations such as if three people conspired as alleged, then at least
three people knew the plan in advance. Evidence can include mathematical testimony from
expert witnesses. Cold hit DNA evidence is typically characterized as statistical and, if the DNA
is unmixed and non-degraded, produces a virtual certainty (Devik 2006; Schneps and Colmez
2013: 69).16 These examples of non-causal evidence do not, by themselves, satisfy a burden of
proof. The prosecutor must determine, for example, that the DNA would not have been at the
crime scene were the defendant innocent. But although DNA evidence has a causal element,
the statistical reasoning guarantees some facts of the case, such as whether the accused’s DNA
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was found at the scene. These examples illustrate that non-causal evidence can provide guar-
antees during a trial, which raises the question of whether and how causal relations generate a
distinctive guarantee.
Perhaps the guarantee arises because causal relations can only obtain if the crime
occurred. Jones’s committing the crime did not cause eyewitness beliefs, for example, unless
he committed the crime. But this is a trivial sense of guarantee and cannot be what Thomson
intended. It is divorced from our epistemic state; fact finders do not know whether the causal
relation between the evidence and the litigated fact holds unless they know whether the
litigated fact obtains. So, the logic of causation does not provide reasoners with a guarantee.
The relation holds objectively and is not one to which we have independent epistemic
access.
To develop Thomson’s account, more must be said about the relation between individualized
evidence and guarantees. In section 5, I articulate one way we might understand this connection.
As noted above, a causal relation does not obtain unless the relata exist. This generates a
further problem for Thomson’s account.17 If individualized evidence requires a causal relation,
how is individualized evidence possible when the putative fact does not obtain or where the
evidence misleads? If the defendant is innocent, his (putative) guilt cannot stand in any causal
relationship to evidence. But then, according to Thomson’s account, there is no individualized
evidence. This is problematic for at least two reasons. Firstly, evidence can be individualized, as
opposed to merely statistical, regardless of whether it misleads and whether the accused is inno-
cent. Secondly, it is a desideratum of an account of legal evidence that –if evidence is compel-
ling but misleading –the burden can be satisfied even if the judgment is false. A police officer
can have legitimate reasonable suspicion, for example, when no crime is afoot and an innocent
defendant can appear guilty beyond reasonable doubt. The causal account owes an explanation
of how misleading evidence can be individualized.
To conclude this section, I articulate two further worries concerning Thomson’s account
of the connections among individualized, causally related, and guarantee-providing evidence.
Thomson holds evidence is individualized only when uniquely identifying. She writes,
Mrs. Smith believes she saw a one-legged, left-handed, entirely bald, and extremely tall
man kill Bloggs. That is individualized evidence that a man with those four features
killed Bloggs, for the (putative) fact that a man with those four features killed Bloggs
would causally explain Mrs. Smith’s believing she saw a man with those four features
kill Bloggs… There are [99 other men in the world in addition to Mullins] who have
all four features, so getting individualized evidence against Mullins requires getting some fact
in respect of which an appropriate causal role is played by a feature which distinguishes Mullins
from [all other men in the world].
In the revised version of the case, Mrs. Smith believes she saw a one-legged, left-
handed, entirely bald, extremely tall, and one-eyed man kill Bloggs… [O]‌ur further
evidence suggests that only Mullins has all five features… To the extent to which we
believe that further evidence, then, we shall take ourselves to have individualized evi-
dence, not merely that a man with those five features killed Bloggs, but that Mullins
did –he being the only available candidate with the five features.
Thomson 1986: 217, emphasis mine
The italicized condition would help underwrite a guarantee of guilt. But as a condition on
individualized evidence, it is too strong. Evidence can be individualized and against the defendant
without being uniquely identifying or conclusive. This point echoes Donnellan’s and Kripke’s
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objection to descriptivism as a semantics for proper names: we can have a de re, individualizing
thought about something without being able to uniquely discriminate it (Donnellan 1972;
Kripke 1972). This underscores that individualized evidence is far from a guarantee of guilt, at
least in the strong, ordinary sense of “guarantee.”
Secondly, the notion of “guarantee” arguably sits uncomfortably with lower standards.
Thomson extends her account from criminal to civil burdens. According to Thomson, different
standards of proof correspond to how sure fact finders are of having a guarantee of culpability.
She writes,
Our law requires the jury in a criminal case to be sure beyond a reasonable doubt that
the defendant is guilty before imposing liability on him; the friend of individualized
evidence may be taken to say that the jury must be sure beyond a reasonable doubt
that the defendant is guilty because of being sure beyond a reasonable doubt that there
are facts available to it which guarantee that the defendant is guilty. Our law requires
the jury in a case in tort to believe no more than that it is more probable than not
that the defendant is guilty; the friend of individualized evidence may be taken to say
that the jury must believe it is more probable than not that the defendant is guilty
because of believing it more probable than not that there are facts available to it which
guarantee that the defendant is guilty.
Thomson 1986: 215, emphasis in original
We might further extend this treatment: to satisfy a “clear and compelling evidence” standard,
fact finders must believe they have clear and compelling evidence that there are facts available
to them which guarantee the defendant is liable; to satisfy a “reasonable suspicion” standard,
the officer must believe she has reasonable suspicion that there are facts available to her which
guarantee that crime is afoot.
But our ordinary notion of “guarantee” seems inappropriate for understanding standards
lower than beyond reasonable doubt. Plausibly finding fault in civil cases does not require any
evidence or chance of a guarantee of liability, for example; instead, it simply requires a certain
level of epistemic support. Perhaps a court can appropriately find in favor of the plaintiff, in
other words, even if no evidence purports to guarantee liability, but the preponderance of avail-
able evidence indicates liability.
Thomson’s account of the inadequacy of statistical evidence appears unsuccessful as it stands.
To render the view more compelling, we need a better understanding of the relevant notion of
guarantee, the causal relation, and how causal relations underwrite guarantees.
4. Sensitivity and incentives

An alternative view holds that merely statistical evidence cannot satisfy a legal burden because
legal standards of proof require one’s judgment to be sensitive to the truth of the litigated facts.18
Enoch et al. (2012) and Enoch and Fisher (2015) argue that the deficiency of merely statistical
evidence is that it obtains regardless of the particular crime, and so a belief based on statistical
evidence would be held even were the accused innocent. Individualized evidence, by contrast,
characteristically engenders sensitive beliefs; if the defendant did not commit the crime, the
individualized evidence would not obtain.19
Sensitivity of Beliefs. S’s belief that p is sensitive iff had it not been the case that p, S
(likely) would not have believed p.
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Extending the notion of sensitivity of beliefs suggests a corresponding “sensitivity of evi-

dence”: Evidence is sensitive to a claim iff (roughly speaking) were the claim false, the evidence
would likely not obtain.20
Enoch et al.’s suggestion enjoys a great deal of plausibility. It is plausibly a principle of justice
and good reasoning that a person should not be found culpable unless the evidence used to
secure a conviction is counterfactually dependent on the crime. The conviction should be
sensitive to the transgression. The court should be able to assert that if the accused did not the
commit the crime, he would not have been convicted.Thomson’s suggestion employs the caus-
ation relation to unpack this idea; the sensitivity approach employs modal conditions.
Enoch et al. argue, however, that sensitivity as an epistemic value does not have legal value
and courts should not care about the sensitivity of their judgments (Enoch et al. 2012: 211–15;
Enoch and Fisher 2015: 577–81). Instead, they advance a non-epistemic vindication of the legal
value of sensitivity, and thus a practical vindication of the distinction between individualized
and statistical evidence. They argue that relying on statistical evidence undermines incentives
to obey the law. If evidence sufficient for finding culpable obtains regardless of whether the
person transgresses, Enoch et al. reason, the person might as well transgress because “whatever
he decides will have negligible influence on the likelihood of his being punished” (Enoch
and Fisher 2015: 583). If purely statistical evidence suffices to satisfy the burden of proof, then
a person deciding whether to purchase a ticket or gatecrash, for example, has no incentive
(stemming from evidence law) to purchase the ticket. Similarly, taxi drivers lose their incentive
to drive cautiously.
I think this incentive-based explanation of the need for individualized evidence is mis-
taken. Firstly, consider the gatecrasher case, which is the example they select to illustrate
their claims about incentive structures. In this case, there remains an incentive to obey the
law by not entering the venue; by not entering, the person avoids arrest. A more significant
objection is that cases with the appropriate incentive structure are rare. Enoch at al.’s explan-
ation only applies when the crime occurs regardless of whether the person participates;
the person is already in the class of suspects to be investigated and will remain so regard-
less of whether he participates; the person must decide whether to participate in the law-
breaking; and an investigation or other legal action will occur regardless of whether the
person participates. Cases with this structure might include activities such as small-fry tax
fraud, littering, and television license evasion. If defendants for these infractions were identi-
fied and prosecuted with purely statistical evidence, the incentive from legal evidence would
arguably be diminished.21 But typically decisions about whether to transgress concern cases
where the crime or harm to be investigated would not otherwise occur, and so no investi-
gation would occur but for the person’s transgressing. This includes almost all thefts, assaults,
harassment, negligent accidents, embezzlement, etc. So even with merely statistical evidence,
incentive is provided: if the person had not transgressed, there would be no investigation or
risk of punishment.
Enoch et al. acknowledge this concern. They write,
The incentive story thus has different implications across the two categories of
cases: those in which the act would likely be performed by others regardless of
whether the would-be perpetrator decides not to engage in it, and personal-context
cases [such as spousal abuse], in which the act will not likely be carried out by anyone
else. In the latter type of case, the statistical evidence against the defendant ought to
be admissible at trial.
Enoch and Fisher 2015: 608
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What Enoch et al. fail to appreciate, I think, is that “the latter type of case” includes most
crimes and liabilities. If Jones does not coldcock Williams on his way home, probably no one
else will. Their incentive-based account, rather than vindicating the legal distinction between
individualized and merely statistical evidence, instead vindicates the adequacy of statistical evi-
dence in almost every instance.
Allowing purely statistical evidence to satisfy the burden, furthermore, might well
disincentivize crime: It lifts a restriction on admissible evidence, and thereby renders conviction
more likely.
Arguably the strongest case for Enoch et al.’s incentive-based account concerns drivers
employed by the smaller taxi service. Drivers of green taxis will not be found liable in any case
adjudicated solely by market share evidence. So perhaps they lose incentive (from legal evi-
dence) if purely statistical evidence can satisfy a burden. But even in this instance the incentive-
based account is uncompelling. To see why, note the difference between statistical evidence
sufficing for a finding and statistical evidence being the only admissible evidence. If it were the
only admissible evidence, green taxi drivers would have no incentive (from legal evidence) to
drive cautiously: they would never be found liable. But since –regardless of whether statistical
evidence suffices –other kinds of evidence are admissible, drivers retain incentives from legal
evidence: for any particular accident, there is likely to be individualized incriminating evi-
dence. Only in unusual cases would the court rely wholly on market share evidence.
A further weakness of the incentive-based account is that even if merely statistical evidence
is employed persons retain incentives from other sources, such as the motivation to not steal, feel
guilty, be injured, or injure others. Enoch et al. do not mention these other incentives, but they
dilute the importance of incentives stemming from legal evidence.
Finally, Enoch et al.’s proposal, which concerns influencing one aspect of citizens’ incen-
tive structures in some kinds of cases, does not provide adequate warrant for our response to
the prospect of satisfying the burden of proof with purely statistical evidence. When we con-
sider the cases described in section 2, there seems something unjust about convicting, finding
liable, arresting, searching, or detaining on purely statistical evidence. Plausibly those people are
wronged. But Enoch at al.’s incentive-based account, which is rooted in practical policy consid-
erations, is not the right kind of explanation to vindicate those moral reactions.
We can set aside Enoch et al.’s incentive-based explication of the distinction between
individualized and statistical evidence. The question remains whether a sensitivity- based
account explains the inadequacy of bare statistical evidence. As noted above, it seems remiss for
a court to convict unless they would have acquitted were the defendant innocent. Plausibly this
sensitivity-based epistemic condition itself has legal value. The idea merits investigation.
The sensitivity account raises some similar concerns as the causal account. Some statistical
evidence –or beliefs based on statistical evidence –is sensitive to the crime’s occurring, for
example. Recall Fern the first gatecrasher and Oppy the opportunistic gatecrasher. In these
cases, statistical evidence generates the relevant sensitivity counterfactuals. If Fern did not gate-
crash, the statistical evidence would likely not have obtained. If Oppy had not gatecrashed, the
courts would not have found him liable. Blome-Tillmann holds that the latter counterfactual is
true since had Oppy not gatecrashed he would not have entered the venue (Blome-Tillmann
2015: 106–7).
Some of the same responses are available: Like advocates of the causal account, advocates
of the sensitivity account might argue the account identifies what is characteristically inad-
equate about employing statistical evidence to satisfy a burden, and the account is thereby con-
sistent with some marginal instances in which statistical evidence generates sensitive beliefs. In
response note that, assuming Tom is the father, statistical evidence in the uncertainty paternity
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case generates sensitive beliefs, and underwrites a sufficiently high likelihood, yet is inadequate
for finding liability. This suggests that mundane, central kinds of statistical evidence engender
sensitive beliefs.22
A further problem for the proposal is that much individualized evidence is insensitive: regard-
less of whether the accused is culpable, there is incriminating individualized evidence against
him.This can occur with misleading or inconclusive evidence. Perhaps, for example, the accused’s
fingerprints are at the scene because he is an acquaintance of the victim. The fingerprints can
feature in the prosecution’s narrative as individualized evidence but may not be sensitive to the
crime.
Note too that sensitivity is factive; a belief cannot be sensitive unless true. This creates a
challenge for a sensitivity account of the legal value of individualized evidence.To see why, con-
sider a case in which the accused is innocent but there is compelling, misleading, incriminating,
individualized evidence. To determine whether the fact finder’s belief is sensitive we must ask,
“Were the accused innocent, would the fact finder believe he is innocent?” Since the defendant
is actually innocent, the answer is no. No false conviction is sensitive. If the burden of proof
requires that the judgment is sensitive, as the sensitivity account suggests, no false conviction
satisfies the burden. But, as noted above, it is a desideratum of legal epistemology that some false
convictions satisfy the burden.23
Enoch et al. respond to these kinds of objections by arguing that sensitivity is a hallmark of
good individualized evidence, not just any individualized evidence; statistical evidence, by con-
trast, is insensitive even when it is good statistical evidence (Enoch et al. 2012: 209). But it bears
noting that as an account of the characteristic virtue of individualized evidence over statistical
evidence, it is a weakness of the sensitivity account that much individualized evidence is insensi-
tive. In section 5, I explore whether a relation known as “normic support,” or a kindred relation,
is a better hallmark of individualized evidence and can better explain its legal and epistemic value.
5. Normic support

Many epistemologists hold that epistemic support concerns probabilification.24 They hold that
a body of evidence E epistemically supports proposition p iff p is likely, given E, to be true; a
body of evidence E1 epistemically supports proposition p more than E2 does iff p is more likely
given E1 than given E2.
Martin Smith (2010) challenges this orthodoxy. He notes that in the lottery case, purely stat-
istical evidence can establish that it is extremely likely a particular ticket lost but cannot justify
outright belief that the ticket lost. Reading lottery results in a newspaper, on the other hand, can
justify outright belief. Individualized evidence can justify belief even if the claim is more likely
to be false than if it were based on purely statistical evidence.
Smith argues that individualized evidence, but not statistical evidence, “normically supports”
the target claim. Evidence normically supports a conclusion when, roughly speaking, given that
evidence, p would normally be true. This notion of normalcy does not reduce to statistical fre-
quency (Smith 2010: 16). If the evidence obtains yet p is false, some abnormality or malfunction
has occurred. The error demands explanation. When evidence statistically indicates p but p is
false, by contrast, it is not really an error; it is simply a case of “you win some you lose some”
(Enoch et al. 2012: 208).
Smith employs a possible worlds framework for understanding normic support. He writes,25
A body of evidence E normically supports a proposition p just in case p is true in all

the most normal worlds in which E is true. Alternately, E normically supports p just in
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case the most normal worlds in which E is true and p is true are more normal than any
world in which E is true and p is false… A body of evidence E normically supports a
proposition p more strongly than it normically supports a proposition q just in case the
most normal worlds in which E is true and q is false are more normal than any world
in which E is true and p is false.
Smith ms: 20–21, emphasis in original
There are concerns with this account of normic support and, in particular, the possible world
framework proposed. One concern is that more normal claims receive more normically sup-
portive evidence just in virtue of being normal. If p is adequately normal an intuitively irrelevant
fact F will qualify as normically supporting p. Suppose p obtains in almost all normal words (p
is “grass is green,” for example). Now consider an intuitively irrelevant fact F, such as “polar bear
hind paws are elongated.” The normal F-worlds are p-worlds; the worlds where F is true and
p is true are more normal than any world where F is true and p is false. This is because not-p
worlds are almost all abnormal. And so, the seemingly irrelevant fact F normically supports p.
A related worry –one common to possible world analyses –concerns logical truths. Logical
truth T, which obtains in all worlds and so obtains in all normal worlds, is normically supported
by an irrelevant fact F, because normal F-worlds are T-worlds.
Even if Smith’s understanding of the normic support relation is not correct, perhaps an epi-
stemic support relation similar to Smith’s normic support can vindicate the distinction between
individualized and merely statistical evidence.26 In what follows, I use “normic support” to
denote epistemic support relations that share key features with Smith’s proposal but may vary
in the details. (In particular, one might reject analyzing normic support in terms of possible
worlds.27) Consider the first five vignettes in section 2. Reflecting on what normally follows
from the evidence plausibly illuminates various judgments about the cases. Insofar as it might
seem permissible to search partying underage undergraduates, for example, this is because,
given the evidence, they would normally have alcohol and their not having alcohol would be
an abnormal, surprising fact. This might obtain, for instance, if underage partygoers exhibit
hallmarks of drinking, such as vomiting in bushes. If a police search is conducted purely on
statistical grounds, by contrast, it seems illegitimate. The uncertain paternity vignette stipulates
the samples were mixed. Given this laboratory error, it is normal and does not demand further
explanation if the results are misleading. And so we cannot rely on those results in court. If the
tests were conducted with non-mixed DNA, by contrast, the match would normically support
the paternity claim since error would demand explanation. Perhaps a normic support relation,
then, can vindicate the epistemic and legal distinction between individualized and statistical
evidence.
If Smith’s normic support, or a kindred relation, is a condition on satisfying burdens of proof,
this may illuminate some ethical concerns about “stop and frisk” tactics. Suppose for illustration that
many members of a demographic commit a particular crime. And suppose that for any individual,
given only demographic evidence, it is statistically relatively likely they commit the crime. And
now suppose the police frisk an individual based solely on demographic evidence. If burdens of
proof require only statistical likelihoods, the officer’s frisk would convey, “I judge (with reasonable
suspicion, given only demographic evidence) it is statistically relatively likely the person committed
the crime.” Given the stipulation, the judgment could be true and well-grounded;28 arguably, the
judgment does not capture what is wrong with frisking. If instead the burden of proof concerns
normalcy, the officer’s frisk conveys, “I judge (with reasonable suspicion, given the evidence) it
is normal that the person committed the crime; if the person has not committed the crime it is
a departure from normalcy.” Plausibly this judgment, unlike the first, is a condemnation of the
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individual or their group. It is wrong to judge with only demographic evidence that someone
would normally transgress. Thus, part of the moral seriousness of “stop and frisk” may stem from
the nature of the burden of proof.
Appealing to the idea of normalcy may illuminate promising aspects of the causal and
sensitivity accounts. Causal relations often generate normic support relations. If an accident
causes eyewitness evidence indicating the taxi was red, for example, normally the taxi is red. If
the liable taxi is not red, this is abnormal and demands explanation. Evidence that normically
supports a conclusion typically underwrites the belief ’s sensitivity. Enoch et al. note that sen-
sitivity and normic support often correlate but remain agnostic about which is explanatorily
more basic. They suggest normic support is less basic because the notion of “which errors call
for explanation” seems unilluminating and opaque (Enoch et al. 2012: 210). Enoch et al. are
correct that “what calls for explanation” is a poor candidate for an explanatory foundation. But
this is not the heart of normic support; it is simply a characteristic feature. Normic support
is a relation of epistemic support; plausibly it generates facts about which beliefs are sensitive
and about which errors demand explanation. If a belief is insensitive, in other words, plausibly
this is because the evidence fails to normically support the belief. Normic support seems the
more basic notion.29
Thomson argues that an epistemically valuable feature of individualized evidence is that
it –unlike statistical evidence –can provide a guarantee. I noted above that this notion was
underdescribed in Thomson’s account. Perhaps a normic support relation can illuminate this
“guarantee.” If evidence normically supports p, and yet not p, something is amiss and is not as it
seems. The error demands explanation because something abnormal has occurred. Perhaps this
is the kind of guarantee demanded by the burden of proof.
Enoch et al. demur. They write,
Why should the law especially care about avoiding mistakes that call for explanation?
Mistakes that do not call for explanation seem –absent some storytelling otherwise,
at least –just as harmful to the relevant party, just as detrimental to the relevant social
interests, and so on, as mistakes that do call for explanation.
Enoch et al. 2012: 214
But this point seems mistaken. If a court convicts a defendant erroneously, and the only response
available is “you win some you lose some” because the court relied on statistical evidence to
satisfy the burden, the court has wronged the defendant. If a person is convicted, found liable,
searched, or arrested without participating in the alleged activity, this error ought to arise from
some abnormal feature. Plausibly justice –also public trust in the legal system –demands this.
Smith’s account of the relationship between error and normic support, if correct, can further
illuminate Thomson’s guarantee. He writes,
If one believes that a proposition p is true, based upon evidence that normically
supports it then, while one’s belief is not assured to be true, this much is assured: If
one’s belief turns out to be false, then the error has to be explicable in terms of dis-
obliging environmental conditions, deceit, cognitive or perceptual malfunction or
some other interfering factor. In short, the error must be attributable to mitigating
circumstances and thus excusable, after a fashion. Errors that do not fall into this category
are naturally regarded as errors for which one must bear full responsibility –errors for
which there is no excuse.
Smith ms: 18, emphasis in original
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According to Smith, if one’s evidence normically supports p, and one believes p based on that
evidence, the person is not responsible for the error if p is false. I am doubtful of Smith’s claim
concerning epistemic responsibility, since it seems evidence could normically support p, p not
obtain, yet the error accrue to the person’s reasoning and be something the reasoner is respon-
sible for. Suppose, for example, Oliver believes p, where p is “Jones murdered Jill.” He believes
this because Jones’s clothes are bloodstained. Oliver’s belief is thus based upon evidence that
normically supports p. But Jones believes p because he is confident that only butchers wear
bloody clothes and butchers are angry and murderous. In this case, the evidence normically
supports p, and Oliver believes p because of that evidence, but the error nonetheless accrues
to Oliver’s poor reasoning. If Oliver had reasoned better, he may well have realized Jones’s
innocence.
Even if Smith’s claim about the relationship between normic support and epistemic respon-
sibility is incorrect, a normalcy-based epistemic support relation might plausibly illuminate
the sense of “guarantee” generated by individualized evidence: When a conclusion normally
follows from the evidence, perhaps the evidence does not merely make the conclusion more
probable, it also entails that if the evidence is true, and yet the conclusion false, something is
amiss and abnormal. Perhaps this approaches the kind of guarantee demanded by legal burdens
of proof.30
Notes
1 Lord Sankey in Woolmington v DPP (1935) AC 462. The burden of proof for some claims –such as
affirmative defenses or immunities from prosecution –falls to the defendant.
2 See Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1 (1968).
3 This standard is also known as the “balance of probabilities” standard (In re Winship, 397 U.S. at 371–
72; House of Lords in Re B (A Child) (2008) UKHL 35). For discussion of quantifying the standard, see
McCauliff (1982) and Simon (1969).
4 See McCauliff (1982); Simon and Mahan (1971); United States v. Fatico, 458 F Supp. 388 (E.D.N.Y.
1978); Sand and Rose (2003).
5 See, for example, Laudan (2011, 2012) and rebuttals by Risinger (2010) and Gardiner (2017a). See also
Lerner (2003); Walen (2015); Mulrine (1997); Nesson (1979); Pardo and Allen (2008); and Sand and
Rose (2003).
6 I include five kinds of example partly because readers unconvinced by one might find a different
example compelling, and partly to provide an example for each standard of proof outlined above. For
related examples and discussion, see Tribe (1971); Redmayne (2008); Koehler (2001); Schneps and
Colmez (2013);Thomson (1986); Buchak (2014); Moss (2018: Chap. 10); and People v. Collins 68 Cal.
2d 319, 66 Cal. Rptr. 497 (1968).
7 This case is inspired by Kerr (2012).
8 Note the example is usually employed to illuminate the preponderance of evidence standard rather
than probable cause.
9 Tribe refers to the case as a “famous chestnut” (1971: 1341). See also Morgan (1946);Thomson (1986);
Nesson (1985); Smith v. Rapid Transit 317 Mass. 469, 58 N.E. 2d 754 (1945); Kaminsky v. Hertz
Corp. 288 N.W. 2d 426 (Mich. Ct. App., 1980).
10 For recent advances in statistical approaches to legal evidence, see Pardo (2013); Schneps and Colmez
(2013); Koehler (2001); Kaye (2009); Roth (2010); Song et al. (2009); Goldberg (2013).
11 Discussion of lottery cases in epistemology stems from Kyburg (1961). See also Harman (1968),
Nelkin (2000) and Hawthorne (2004).
12 I sometimes, for concision, use terminology specific to one kind of legal burden, such as criminal trials,
even though the ideas apply equally to other burdens of proof.
13 Enoch et al. (2012); Enoch and Fisher (2015); Redmayne (2008); and Blome-Tillmann (2015) raise
similar concerns. The term “murky” appears in Redmayne (2008: 300).
14 For more on DNA evidence and the distinction between statistical and individualized evidence, see Di
Bello (2013); Pritchard (2018); Stein (2005); Kaye and Sensabaugh (2011).
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15 The first gatecrasher and opportunistic gatecrasher cases are from Blome-Tillmann (2015). Blome-
Tillmann mistakenly claims Thomson’s account is not vulnerable to the opportunistic gatecrasher case
(Blome-Tillmann 2015: 110).This is because Blome-Tillmann overlooks forward-looking evidence in
Thomson’s account, such as evidence of motive.
16 If the DNA test is performed correctly and if –as geneticists contend –the locations of the thirteen
peaks in genetic code are mutually independent, the probability that two people share a DNA match
is 1/400 trillion.
17 Blome-Tillmann (2015) raises a version of this worry.
18 For information on sensitivity see Nozick (1981) and DeRose (1996). For a sensitivity-based approach
to lottery cases in epistemology see Dretske (1971) and DeRose (forthcoming: Chap. 5).
19 At least, those beliefs are sensitive in the good case; see discussion below.
20 Here the evidence must be understood with some imprecision. It is not that seventy people gatecrashed,
for example; it is that many people gatecrashed. See also Blome-Tillmann (2015).
21 Although I do not have space to develop this claim here, I believe Enoch et al. elide the distinction
between the statistical evidence being used to identify and to convict the accused. If statistical evidence
were used to identify suspects from the general population to prosecute, this might reduce incentives
(from some aspects of evidence law) to not transgress. (Although, even here, for reasons articulated below,
I think the incentive-based account cannot capture the nature of the wrong.) But the use of the statistics
proposed is to convict the suspect once identified. Given this, the incentive-based account is less successful.
22 We must assume Tom is the father because sensitivity is factive: no false belief is sensitive. Thanks to an
anonymous reviewer and Laura Callahan for helpful comments on these issues.
23 This point is also made in Blome-Tillmann (2015) and Smith (2010).
24 See, for example, citations in section one of Smith (2010).
25 See also Smith (2010: 16–17).The actual world may not be maximally normal; misleading individualized
evidence is possible.
26 Smith (ms: 41ff.); Smith (2017) applies normic support to legal epistemology.
27 For discussions of normalcy, see Pettit (1999); Millikan (1984); Nickel (2008); Schurz (2001); Haslanger
(2014); Morreau (1997); Spohn (2014); and Hauska (2008). Gardiner (2015) discusses the relationship
between possible worlds and normalcy. Normalcy is not usually discussed by philosophers as a sub-
ject matter, but instead the notion of normalcy is used to illuminate other areas, such as character in
ethical theory, populations in philosophy of biology, illness in philosophy of disability, conditionals in
metaphysics, ceteris paribus laws in philosophy of science, generics in philosophy of language, and in
the semantics for nonmonotonic logic. I am very grateful to Bernhard Nickel, Liz Camp, and Martin
Smith for helpful insights on these topics.
28 Although see Gardiner (forthcoming), which argues that such judgments are typically not supported
by the evidence. Note also that real world “stop and frisks” may exhibit myriad moral errors.
29 Gardiner (2017b) develops the claim that epistemic modal conditions supervene on other epistemic
facts and are explanatorily less basic than those facts.
30 Many thanks to Boris Babic, Austin Baker, Laura Callahan, Liz Camp, Marcello Di Bello, David Black,
Branden Fitelson, Will Fleisher, Doug Husak, Jon Garthoff, Bernhard Nickel, Ernest Sosa, Alec Walen,
and an anonymous reviewer for very helpful comments on this paper. I am particularly indebted to
Martin Smith for his generous and insightful comments.Thanks also to James Chase and David Coady
for their excellent editorial work.
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Further reading
Redmayne, M. (2008). “Exploring the Proof Paradoxes.” Legal Theory, 14: 281–309. This article first
explains the proof paradox using both real-life and hypothetical examples, and then surveys several
responses to the paradox.
Tribe, L. (1971). “Trial by Mathematics: Precision and ritual in the legal process.” Harvard Law Review,
84(6): 1329–93. This article influentially resists mathematical decision-theoretic techniques in legal
fact-finding.
Thomson, J. J. (1986). “Liability and Individualized Evidence.” Law and Contemporary Problems, 49(3): 199–
219. This article is a classic philosophical discussion of proof paradoxes in the law.
Enoch, D., Spectre, L., and Fisher T. (2012). “Statistical Evidence, Sensitivity, and the Legal Value of
Knowledge.” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 40(3): 197–224. This article argues that the insensitivity of
resultant beliefs explains the legal inadequacy of bare statistical evidence.
Smith, M. (2017). “When Does Evidence Suffice for Conviction?” Mind, https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/
fzx026. This article attempts to resolve the proof paradox by appeal to a relation called normic support.
Pritchard, D. (2018). “Legal Risk, Legal Evidence and the Arithmetic of Criminal Justice.” Jurisprudence,
9(1): 108–119. This article argues that the easy possibility of error explains the legal inadequacy of bare
statistical evidence.
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15
BANKING AND FINANCE
Disentangling the epistemic failings
of the 2008 financial crisis
Lisa Warenski
1. Introduction
If asked what caused the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, the first response of a man or woman
on the street might be “Greed on the part of bankers.”The financial crisis is often seen as having
been caused by a complex of moral failings and structural problems within the financial services
industry. However, investigations into the circumstances and actions that led to the financial
crisis reveal significant epistemic failures. These also played a crucial role. While these epistemic
failings have been documented individually, a comprehensive analysis of them from a philo-
sophical perspective has been broached by few.1 I think an account of the epistemic failings
implicated in the financial crisis and their means of redress is best developed by identifying
those policies and procedures that are likely to facilitate good judgment. I call these policies
and procedures “best epistemic practices.” Some of these practices will be general in that they
facilitate good judgment in many domains, but others will be specific to particular components
of the financial services industry.2
In saying that epistemic failings contributed to the financial crisis, I am not denying that
moral failings played a significant role. Nor am I denying that there was a lack of regulative
oversight on the part of regulatory agencies and government authorities. These failings –epi-
stemic, moral, and regulatory –are distinct, but there are relations between them. Moral actions
have epistemic components: a person must first recognize a given problem as having a moral
dimension, and she or he must form a judgment about what ought to be done before taking
action.3 Likewise, deliberate belief formation and the regulation of belief for evidence have eth-
ical dimensions. The extent to which non-epistemic norms legitimately govern belief forma-
tion and revision is a subject of philosophical debate; however, at the very least, practitioners in
the financial services industry have moral obligations to their clients, employers, and colleagues
to form judgments that are based on evidence and which reflect their expertise. Finally, regu-
lation may have ethical or epistemic aims (or both). For example, The Director’s Book, published
by the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), advises the boards of large
banks to adopt a written code of ethics, and it specifies that bank managers are responsible for
establishing a risk management system that identifies, measures, monitors, and controls risk
(U.S. OCC 2016: 20–21, 50).
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Epistemic failings of the financial crisis
Epistemic failings may have non-epistemic causes. An epistemic failing, broadly under-
stood, is a failure to form a well-founded belief or accurate judgment, or a failure, in a
particular instance, to employ appropriate methodologies of belief or judgment formation.
An epistemic failing may be the result of insufficient inquiry, inability to recognize the
consequences of a proposed action, or lack of imagination with respect to considering
alternative explanations. But it may also be the result of willful disregard or prevailing
circumstances that interfere with the free exercise of reason. A full causal explanation of the
epistemic failings of the 2008 financial crisis in the United States would require an investi-
gation into the moral, structural, and regulatory features that may have been implicated in
the crisis, and the extent to which particular features are implicated will depend on the case
in question.
In what follows, I will examine some of the epistemic features that were implicated in the
financial crisis and discuss the steps that either have been or could be taken to correct them.
In considering how best epistemic practices could foster a strong and healthy risk culture,
my emphasis will be on financial institutions, although I will say something about regulation.
However, a healthy and strong risk culture must originate with the financial institutions. In
his 2014 address to the Annual Conference of the Clearing House, U.S. Comptroller of the
Currency, Thomas J. Curry, said
In fact, we [regulators] do have a crucial role to play, assuring that banks have appro-
priate internal controls, a strong risk management framework, and compensation
programs that incent employees to abide by the bank’s rules and culture… But for
all this, we cannot lose sight of the fact that the full responsibility for building and
maintaining a strong risk culture belongs, first and foremost, with the bank and its
management and board of directors. They clearly need to set the tone at the top.
Curry 2014: 2
The best- epistemic- practices approach that I outline below provides a framework for
thinking about corporate self- governance and supervisory regulation. In what follows,
I explain how promoting and adhering to best epistemic practices supports good reasoning
in the financial services industry, thereby facilitating accurate judgments about relative risk
and reward. I explain what best epistemic practices are in a general sense, and I discuss an
example by way of illustrating their applicability to financial institutions. I then identify
some epistemic failings on the part of financial institutions that were implicated in the
financial crisis. These include failings in the securities rating process, institutional investing,
and institutional risk management. My focus is on the financial crisis in the United States
and financial institutions that were operating in the United States at the time. I discuss some
of the ways that best epistemic practices have been implemented in the United States to
correct faulty methodologies and to prepare for possible catastrophic economic scenarios
in the future. I conclude with some preliminary observations about the merits of the best-
epistemic-practices approach.
2. Best epistemic practices

I understand an epistemic practice as a policy, method, or procedure that furthers an epistemic
aim or realizes an epistemic value, where epistemic aims and values are truth-oriented aims
and values.4 In accepting truth as the primary epistemic value, one is neither committed to an
instrumental analysis of rationality nor a reliabilist account of justified belief. Truth is often said
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Lisa Warenski
to be the goal of inquiry, but knowledge, understanding, and explanation are among its valued
ends. In addition to these desiderata, we value properties such as coherence in our systems of
beliefs and tractability in our belief-forming methodologies. For present purposes, we need not
enter into a philosophical analysis of these concepts and their relations; what matters is that
epistemic aims and values can be understood pluralistically and in a way that does not require
a reductive analysis of them.
While inquiry and deliberation are appropriately understood as goal-oriented activities,
belief formation is often not goal directed. Beliefs are often formed in response to incoming
evidence or inferred from other beliefs regardless of our aims; however, such non-deliberative
beliefs are epistemically assessable. We appraise our beliefs as being justified (or not) depending
upon whether they are based on appropriate grounds such as evidence or a reliable method,
and when we do, we evaluate them from an epistemic standpoint, namely a perspective within
which we have adopted epistemic values.
It will sometimes be more natural to talk about epistemic values rather than aims, depending
on whether an activity is or is not goal directed. For example, I will be talking about the value
of transparency with respect to methods by which corporate bonds are assigned a credit rating.
Transparency allows for the verification of the accuracy of a credit rating by other parties; trans-
parency is an epistemic value, the realization of which may be instrumental to an investment
decision. But transparency is not a direct aim of an analyst when she rates a corporate bond. It
could, however, be a direct aim of a credit rating agency that discloses its methodology in order
to engender public trust or the confidence of its subscribers.5 And transparency is certainly a
recognized value in financial markets.
A best epistemic practice is one that serves an epistemic aim or realizes an epistemic value at
least as well as any available competitor. (We need not make an assumption that there is a unique
best practice for a given epistemic aim.) In order to be reason guiding, a best epistemic practice
must be one that we can non-accidentally identify as being as good as any available competitor.
Although ‘best epistemic practice’ could be given an externalist reading, whereby a best epi-
stemic practice would be one that is best from a God’s-eye point of view,6 I will understand
best epistemic practices to be practices that reflect our best collective judgment and that are, in
principle, subject to further improvements.
In the financial services industry, epistemic inquiry is often made in the service of making
practical decisions and, especially, informed judgments about relative risks and rewards. In non-
technical terms, a judgment about risk is a judgment about the likelihood of a possible negative
outcome.7 Particular courses of action, for example, making loans, underwriting and selling
securities, or contracting to make future purchases of the currency of a country that is in pol-
itical turmoil, are evaluated for the risks that they entail. These risks are of various and possibly
overlapping types, for example credit, market, and sovereign. Whether a particular action is
worth taking, given the perceived risks, will depend upon the expected rewards.
3. Best epistemic practices in the financial services industry

A practice within a corporation is a policy, procedure, or norm of conduct (loosely speaking, a
way of doing things) that typically furthers an aim or set of interests. A corporation typically has
multiple aims: to manufacture and sell its products at a profit, target specific markets, attain com-
petitive advantages, attract and build a talented workforce, and so on. The constituent members
of the corporation who are in the role of agents with respect to the corporation’s various aims
must have good information about matters that serve these aims in order to effectively achieve
them. Hence, the aims of a corporation –whatever they are –presuppose an interest in truth.
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The members of a corporation engage in the exchange of information, offering reasons and
explanations for their individual judgments. The epistemic interests of a corporation will thus
include knowledge, justification, and explanation. Best epistemic practices that are specific to a
corporation are practices which serve these epistemic interests in relation to the corporation’s
aims.
Many judgments that professionals in the financial services industry make are about relative
risk and reward, where it is understood that decision-making in this context is decision-making
under uncertainty. Judgments made by financial professionals about risk are a form of expert
judgment. Making them requires special expertise, not only with respect to technical know-
ledge of a product or service but also with respect to knowledge of markets, industries, and
economic factors that may bear on a decision. Such expertise is acquired through ongoing effort
and experience. A good judgment on the part of a professional with the relevant expertise is
arrived at through the free exercise of reason, in accordance with his or her background know-
ledge. Whether a particular judgment or action is warranted may also depend upon the opera-
tive preferences of the corporation; the person making the judgment, presumably, is aware of
these preferences and is acting in the best interests of the corporation.
We can understand the notion of best epistemic practices to encompass practices that facili-
tate good judgments in a corporate setting, especially judgments about relative risk and reward.
Best epistemic practices will promote actions that facilitate good judgment, and they will
minimize interference with the free exercise of reason. Practices that generally promote good
judgment include making thorough investigations of matters that are materially significant to a
decision, seeking the advice of experts when appropriate, and engaging in dialogue with peers.
Practices that minimize interference with the free exercise of reason include checking one’s
work for computational errors, eliminating conflicts of interest, and ensuring that one is suf-
ficiently rested to complete the task at hand. In the event that bias, implicit or otherwise, may
enter into judgment, best practices would include the implementation of processes designed to
counteract bias, such as gathering pertinent data and performing analytics to identify patterns of
discrimination.8 Many other “best practices” will be specific to a particular activity or industry.
4. An example of best epistemic practices: the credit approval process

It will be helpful to consider an example in order to illustrate the best-epistemic-practices
approach and to provide some background for the discussion to follow.9 The approval pro-
cess for corporate loans at a major money center bank will serve as a suitable example. When
functioning properly, the loan approval process is an example of best epistemic practices at
work in the social enterprise of corporate lending. The approval process is typically a collab-
orative effort during which the collective expertise of the participants is brought to bear on
the decision. It constitutes a system of checks and balances which is designed to ensure that
no information that is material to the decision is overlooked and that judgments regarding
the creditworthiness of the borrower and the appropriateness of the structure of the proposed
financing are sound.
The corporate lending unit of a major money center bank is typically organized into teams,
where the different teams may specialize in different industries. A financing request will be
analyzed and presented for approval by a particular team. The initial evaluation is often done by
a credit analyst who, in conjunction with an account officer who is responsible for the client
relationship, performs a credit analysis. A credit analysis is an evaluation of a potential borrower’s
creditworthiness in relation to a specific request for financing.The credit analysis encompasses an
evaluation of the company’s financial statements, and it typically includes the construction of a
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cash flow statement that shows the company’s annual sources and uses of cash over the duration
of the loan. The analysis will also include an assessment of the business climate and industry in
which the company operates. A key component of the analysis is the “risks and mitigants” section
in which the analyst identifies and evaluates the risks of the proposed transaction.
During the course of the evaluation, the analyst and members of the deal team may ask
questions of the company’s management and consult with persons who have special expertise,
for example attorneys, accountants, or colleagues, in other areas of the bank. After the analysis
is complete, the request is reviewed by a credit committee, and if approved, it may be further
evaluated by persons with increasing seniority and authority. If the loan is approved, it will
be monitored on an ongoing basis by the account officer and embedded risk managers. The
decision arrived at via this process will represent the best considered judgment of all of the
participants; however, there is still a chance that unforeseen events and their consequences may
prevent the borrower from meeting its debt service obligations.
Several features of this process are worth noting:
1. Credit analysis is governed by institutional norms, namely policies and procedures, some of
which will have been codified. The policies and procedures for conducting a credit analysis
are designed to encourage thorough and informed inquiry. They promote the epistemic
virtues of inquisitiveness and critical reflection.
2. An analyst must rely heavily on testimonial sources to arrive at a credit judgment.A company’s
financial statements, industry reports, and any verbal exchanges with issuers or principals are
all forms of testimony. These testimonial sources may sometimes be vetted by experts, for
example, accountants or attorneys, or they may otherwise be subjected to scrutiny.
3. The process of arriving at a credit judgment is conducted in a social context, and an analyst
arrives at a judgment through dialogue with other experts. Participants to the review process
will likely raise questions that the analyst may not have considered and to which the analyst
must respond.
4. Both the credit review process and the internal system of risk management are systems of
checks and balances. The credit review process guards against oversights of judgment and
gaps in information. The monitoring of the loan asset by risks managers is designed to iden-
tify and address any problems that might interfere with the borrower’s ongoing ability to
service the debt.
The norms that govern the credit analysis process are informed by the collective experience of
a community of experts, and they are subject to ongoing critical modification in light of new
experiences. The picture of knowledge acquisition and practical judgment that emerges is a
pragmatic one: knowledge is acquired by empirical investigation and reflection, and judgments
about what actions to take are informed by past experiences, projected future events and their
anticipated consequences, and corporate aims.10 These features of inquiry and judgment are pre-
sent in various ways and to different degrees throughout the financial services industry.
The credit approval process may be subverted in cases where the interests of a person who is
party to the decision are not aligned with those of the bank, and the participant prioritizes his
or her own interests at the expense of the bank. If someone stands to gain a raise or large bonus
by approving a transaction that is recognizably less than creditworthy, he may allow his personal
interests to override his best judgment. If the person in question is fairly senior, it will likely be
difficult for other, more junior people who are involved in the decision to oppose him. One pos-
sible remedy for this kind of situation, which would be consistent with guidelines proposed by
the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency,11 would be to delay the bonus or raise until
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the loan has been on the books for an extended period of time, thus tying the banker’s compensa-
tion to the actual performance of the loan.The problem is more challenging when the conflicts of
interest are manifested at very senior levels of management.A solution to this latter problem would
require tying executive compensation to the long-term performance of the corporation, coupled
with effective internal and external regulation to ensure that lending decisions are sound.12
The best-epistemic-practices approach acknowledges epistemic virtue, and it encourages the
cultivation of responsibilist epistemic virtues. A responsibilist epistemic virtue is an intellectual
character trait that can be cultivated and that is thought to contribute to epistemic goods such as
knowledge and understanding.13 Responsibilist epistemic virtues include inquisitiveness, open-
mindedness, conscientiousness, and perseverance. Moreover, the responsibilist understanding of
an individual epistemic agent as a member of a community with certain moral and epistemic
obligations to that community is an appropriate characterization of an agent in the domains of
business and finance.
However, a virtues approach to understanding the epistemology of banking and finance does
not go far enough. We need an account of what facilitates good judgments in these domains,
and that will require the identification of domain-specific epistemic practices and procedures.
For one thing, an individual develops domain-specific virtues, in part, by following domain-
specific best epistemic practices. (On the other hand, best epistemic practices may not be suf-
ficient: one must also have the requisite talents.) Secondly, best epistemic practices are needed
to guide inquiry and guard against computational errors, even for those persons who exemplify
epistemic virtues. And finally, the implementation of best epistemic practices enables less-than-
virtuous epistemic agents to serve the epistemic aims of a corporation: a person who lacks the
social epistemic virtue of sharing information with his community will come to share that
information if he is required to fill out a form that asks for it, and a person who sometimes
makes hasty decisions will be corrected if there are procedures in place whereby her decisions
are reviewed by others.
5. An overview of the financial crisis of 2008

Although the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 was triggered by the onset in 2007 of the subprime
mortgage meltdown in the United States, its full causal explanation is the subject of ongoing
debate.14 A complex of factors, some global and some local, are thought to have contributed
to the financial and economic crisis in the United States, and there is disagreement about
which factors played essential causal roles and whether there was a single precipitating cause.15
Inadequate risk management, poor documentation, and faulty systems of internal control –all
on the part of financial institutions –are among the factors that have been cited as contributing
to the crisis. These constitute violations of best epistemic practices, even if some of their causes
were non-epistemic.
In claiming that system-wide violations of best epistemic practices contributed to the crisis,
again, I do not mean to suggest that the only failings were epistemic ones. Ill-conceived mort-
gage origination practices and global imbalances of capital were arguably root causes without
which the course of events would have been different. Furthermore, acknowledging that there
were violations of epistemic practices does not necessarily demonstrate incompetence on the
part of those persons who transgressed (although some violations would be indicators of incom-
petence): a given individual who is an agent in a corporation may not be in a position to rectify
the suboptimal practices of the corporation.
In what follows, I will focus on the subprime mortgage crisis in the United States, and in
particular, the roles of the credit rating agencies and banks. Three financial instruments figure
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prominently in the events that ensued: residential mortgage-backed securities, collateralized

debt obligations (“CDOs”), and synthetic CDOs.
An asset-backed mortgage security is a security that is collateralized by a pool of receivables
of some kind, for example leases, credit card receivables, car loans, or mortgage loans. A residen-
tial mortgage-backed security is a particular kind of asset-backed security, namely one that is
collateralized by a pool of residential mortgage loans. To create a mortgage-backed security, an
arranger packages a large group (usually thousands) of mortgage loans into a pool and transfers
them to a trust that will issue securities which are collateralized by the pool. Investors in the
mortgage-backed security receive monthly interest and principal payments that come from the
mortgage loans in the pool. A residential mortgage-backed security is divided into different
classes called “tranches.” A tranche is a division of a security that has a particular structure and a
coupon rate which reflects its structure. (I explain these structural differences below.)16
A CDO is created in a similar fashion to a residential mortgage-backed security. A CDO
is made up of debt securities that may include residential mortgage-backed securities. A CDO
thus may be a securitization of securitizations. The purported function of CDOs is to diversify
risk for institutional investors and create liquidity in the residential mortgage markets.
Finally, a synthetic CDO is a CDO that has entered into a credit default swap that
references subprime residential mortgage-backed securities or CDOs. A swap is a contract
through which two parties exchange future streams of cash flow payments. In a credit default
swap, the buyer of the swap makes periodic payments to the seller through the maturity date
of the underlying fixed income security. The seller of the swap will pay the buyer in the event
of a default by the debt issuer. If no default occurs, the seller of the swap will continue to
collect a premium from the buyer. Credit default swaps are designed to shift credit risk from
one party to another, and they function as insurance for a buyer of the swap. Credit default
swaps can also be used by an institution to hedge components of its portfolio position or
make speculative bets in the financial markets.
So what went wrong? In broad outline, the now oft-told story is as follows: There was
a housing bubble in the United States that began in the late 1990s and accelerated in the
2000s, fueled by low interest rates. During this time, there was a proliferation of non-
traditional mortgage products, coupled with a deterioration in mortgage underwriting
standards, which led to the origination of a large number of subprime loans. Securitizers
of mortgage loans such as Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Countrywide, lowered the credit
quality standards of the mortgage loans that they securitized. Credit rating agencies inaccur-
ately rated the residential mortgage-backed securities and CDOs that were collateralized by
these lower-quality mortgages, effectively giving investment-g rade ratings to junk bonds.
Banks, insurance companies, and other large financial institutions invested heavily in these
purportedly investment-g rade securities, and when the housing bubble burst, the value of
the securities collapsed.17
In the course of events leading to the financial crisis, failures to observe best epistemic practices
were implicated in (at least) the following three areas: (1) the assignment of radically inaccurate
risk ratings to real estate mortgage-backed securities and CDOs on the part of the credit rating
agencies, (2) a lack of due diligence on the part of institutional investors, and (3) poor risk man-
agement on the part of some of the large financial institutions. I discuss these in turn.
6. The role of the “big three” credit rating agencies

Concerns about the accuracy of credit ratings and the recognition of the importance of the credit
ratings to the financial markets prompted the Credit Rating Agency Reform Act of 2006. The
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Reform Act amends the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, and it aimed to “improve ratings quality
for the protection of investors and in the public interest by fostering accountability, transparency,
and competition in the credit rating agency industry” (120 Stat. 1327).The Reform Act provided
for the registration of Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organizations (“NRSROs”)
and their subsequent examination by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)
with respect to their ratings activities. At present, there are ten NRSROs: the “big three” rating
agencies, namely S&P, Moody’s, and Fitch, and seven smaller rating agencies.
The Reform Act expressly prohibits the SEC from regulating the substance of either the credit
ratings themselves or the methodologies by which any NRSRO determines credit ratings. The
Reform Act thus endeavors to preserve the autonomy of the rating agencies with respect to
their judgments about credit ratings.
For ease of exposition, in what follows, I will simply refer to the agencies that are registered
as NRSROs and subject to examination by the SEC as the “credit rating agencies” or just the
“rating agencies.” But these terms should be understood to refer to the NRSROs, or in dis-
cussion of the agencies that were implicated in the financial crisis, the big three credit rating
agencies.
An account of the general credit rating process for residential mortgage-backed securities
and CDOs is given in the SEC Commission Staff ’s 2008 Summary Report of its investigations
of the big three credit rating agencies that was initiated in August of 2007.18 My description of
the general ratings process and the particular methodologies of the agencies is drawn from this
report, which I will refer to as the “2008 SEC Staff Report.”
The ratings process for a residential mortgage-backed security is initiated by the arranger,
who sends the credit rating agency data on each of the subprime loans that are to be held in the
trust, along with the proposed capital structure for the trust and the proposed levels of credit
enhancement for each tranche. The data on the subprime loans includes information such as
the type of mortgage loan, principal amount, geographic location of the property, credit history
and FICO score of the borrower, and ratio of the loan amount to the value of the property.19
The loan pool in each tranche is evaluated for projected losses and recoveries, under various
scenarios, on a quantitative expected loss model. A rating is assigned based on both the projected
future performance of the loan portfolio and qualitative factors (pp. 7–9). The process for a
CDO is similar; however, the loss models that were used by the rating agencies for CDOs during
the period before the subprime crisis required only five inputs: current credit rating of indi-
vidual residential mortgage-backed securities included in the pool, maturity, asset type, country,
and industry (p. 36).
When a credit rating agency rates a residential mortgage-backed security or CDO, it issues
a rating for each tranche, with the exception of the junior-most “equity” tranche. The rating
represents the agency’s opinion with respect to the creditworthiness of the tranche as a measure
of the likelihood that the issuer would default on its obligations to make interest and principal
payments on the debt instrument.
A securitization of subprime mortgages can, in theory, be a low-risk investment if it is
structured in a way that lowers or enhances the credit risk. The primary source of credit
enhancement for residential mortgage-backed securities is the creation of the hierarchy of
tranches, whereby tranches are successively subordinated. Any losses of principal or interest are
first allocated to the lowest-ranking tranche in the pool and then applied successively up the
ladder. The senior-most tranche will not suffer any losses until the lower-ranking tranches have
lost all of their principal amounts.
From 2001 to mid-year 2006, there was a steady deterioration in the performance of
subprime mortgages, and the rating agencies relied on historical performance data in order to
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predict future performance. During this period, there was an increase in mortgages with zero
down payments, delayed amortization, second liens, and a lowering by mortgage originators
of credit quality standards.20 It has been widely observed that the rating agencies were slow
to downgrade the mortgage-backed securities in accordance with the changed profiles of the
underlying mortgages.
The findings of the Commission Staff revealed a number of practices that were suboptimal
from an epistemic point of view. These included the following:
1. Lack of due diligence

The rating agencies did not seek to verify the integrity or accuracy of the loan data in the mort-
gage pools. They relied on the information provided to them by the sponsors of the residential
mortgage-backed securities. The agencies did not perform this due diligence, nor did they seek
representation from the sponsors of the securities that due diligence had been performed (p. 18).
At the time, the rating agencies were under no obligation either to perform the due diligence
or to require that due diligence be performed.21 However, it is common practice to require
verification of key features of an underlying asset if it is critical to a credit assessment or invest-
ment decision, and the agencies’ failure to do so was a failure to adhere to an industry-wide
best epistemic practice.
2. Lack of transparency

The examiners noted that certain significant aspects of the ratings process and methodologies
were not disclosed. Specifically, the rating agencies did not always disclose relevant ratings criteria,
and two of the rating agencies regularly made “out of model” adjustments to loss expectations, the
rationale for which was not documented or disclosed (p. 13). Prior to the Credit Rating Agency
Reform Act of 2006, rating agencies were not required to disclose their methodologies, but rating
agencies who are registered as NRSROs are now required by the Reform Act of 2006 and the
Dodd–Frank Act to disclose information that could be beneficial to investors and others.22
Transparency of the ratings methodologies enables investors and other parties to evaluate
the adequacy of the methods and the reliability of the ratings that have been arrived at through
their deployment. Transparency is an epistemic good in two ways: it conveys information that
is important to decisions that investors and regulators need to make, and it enables the methods
to be scrutinized and potentially improved through the collaborative efforts of an epistemic
community.
3. The “issuer pays” conflict

At the big three rating agencies, the investment bank (or other arranger) who creates the trust
that issues a security also pays for the rating. This business model creates an inherent conflict
of interest because (1) the banks want to obtain the highest possible rating for a given security
and (2) the rating agencies have an interest in generating business with the banks. If a rating
agency does not give a rating that a bank finds satisfactory, the bank can seek a better rating
from another rating agency. The conflicts of interest inherent in this business model potentially
undermine autonomy of judgment in the ratings process.
Direct conflicts of interest are a pernicious form of interference with the free exercise of
reason, and the “issuer pays” model has been roundly criticized as a threat to the integrity of
credit ratings. The Reform Act of 2006 requires NRSROs to establish, maintain, and enforce
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written policies and procedures that are reasonably designed to address and manage conflicts
of interest, and additional rules to address conflicts of interest were implemented by Dodd–
Frank.23 The latter includes a rule that prohibits an agency from issuing a rating for which per-
sons who determine or monitor the rating also participate in sales or marketing activities, or are
influenced by sales or marketing considerations.24
Although many of the agencies have put the required policies and procedures in place, there
is a serious question as to whether any internal policies could satisfactorily block a conflict of
interest that is inherent in the business model, and the debate continues about how to address
conflicts of interest generated by those who pay for the ratings.
The above findings by the SEC Staff are instances of epistemic failings, and the subsequent
reforms are implementations of best epistemic practices. With the exception of the solution to
the conflicts of interest problem, which would appear to require more dramatic measures, the
recommended solutions address the aforementioned problems. These components of the regu-
lation are examples of proactive and forward-looking regulation, although the regulation was
implemented retroactively in response to the perceived failures of the rating agencies.
7. The role of large financial institutions

The U.S. Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) was formed to examine the causes of
the current financial and economic crisis in the United States, and in 2011, the Commission
reported its findings in a comprehensive report (hereafter, the “FCIC report”). Six of the ten
Commissioners voted to adopt the report. Three dissenting Commissioners co-authored a
dissenting statement, and a fourth Commissioner single-authored a dissenting statement. The
votes were split along party lines, and the opinions expressed in the report reveal the complex-
ities of the events of the crisis and the range of disagreements with respect to its essential causes.
Of the many topics covered in the report, I will mention just two that illustrate epistemic
failures on the part of large U.S. financial institutions.
1. Lack of due diligence on the part of investors

The buyers of mortgage- backed securities and CDOs were institutional investors, staffed
by sophisticated financial professionals. The novelty and complexity of the securities should
have prompted the purchasers of the securities to do their own due diligence, despite the
fact that they were rated by the major credit rating agencies. At the very least, purchasers of
the securities should have made an effort to understand the methodology behind the ratings
and to consider whether the projected performance of the mortgage loans based on historical
data was reasonable. The failure to exercise prudence and perform due diligence is cited by
Commissioners Hennessey, Holtz-Eakin, and Thomas as one of the essential causes of the crisis
(FCIC 2011: 426).
From an epistemological standpoint, to have accepted a rating without performing due
diligence in this context was a form of unwarranted acceptance of testimony. Due diligence
would be required for an understanding of a rating in cases where a security is novel and
presents special challenges for evaluating its probability of default. One reason that investors,
regulators, and other participants in the market rely on ratings for ordinary corporate bonds is
that their rating methodology is fairly standardized and well understood. However, mortgage-
backed CDOs were new and complex securities, and their evaluation required security-
specific modeling techniques. Institutional investors should have taken steps to ensure, to
their satisfaction, that they understood the modeling techniques in virtue of which the
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agencies arrived at ratings for mortgage-backed CDOs and that both the methodology and
assumptions of the models were sound. Best epistemic practices for institutional investors
thus require that due diligence be performed on securities whose ratings employ unfamiliar
or novel methodologies.
2. Poor risk management on the part of financial institutions

As part of their investigation, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission conducted case studies
of some of the large financial firms that failed during the 2008 financial crisis. Commissioners
Hennessey, Holtz-Eakin, and Thomas identified and summarized some of these findings in their
dissenting statement. The Commissioners note that the large financial institutions which failed
or nearly failed in the crisis had substantial and highly concentrated exposure to the housing
market through mortgage-backed securities and CDOs.To the extent this was done knowingly,
it was an ill-placed bet. But, according to the FCIC report, some firms were unable to aggregate
their housing risks across various lines of business, with the result that they were not fully aware
of their total residential real estate exposure. Those firms who understood their total position
were able to move to sell or hedge their risk before the market collapsed, but those who did not
were stuck with toxic assets (FCIC 2011: 428–29).
Lack of awareness of one’s total exposure to a given segment of a market can lead to
asset allocations that violate a coherency norm which requires total asset allocation to represent
one’s preferences for risk vis-à-vis the totality. A perspicuous characterization of coherency and
its normative role in a system of beliefs is not a simple task; philosophers have offered different
accounts of the concept of coherence and the reasons for which we ought to rely on coherence
as a reason-guiding principle.25 However, consistency is arguably an essential component of the
notion of coherency (Ewing 1934; Bonjour 1985), and if our beliefs are manifestly inconsistent,
we have good epistemic reason to revise them (except, perhaps, with respect to special para-
doxical cases). In the realm of practical reasoning, if our actions are manifestly inconsistent with
our preferences, we have reason to modify our actions so that they align with our preferences.
If components of a financial institution’s assets are overweighted or its liability exposure to
a particular segment of the market otherwise exceeds desired levels, then there is a mismatch
between actual and preferred risk allocation. Best epistemic practices require that risk be looked
at in the aggregate, as well as more locally in relation to specific commitments, and that there
be procedures in place to collect and aggregate the relevant data.
8. Regulatory changes in the aftermath of the crisis

Some of the regulatory changes that have been implemented in response to the financial crisis
are, in effect, codified rules of best epistemic practices. Although the Credit Agency Reform Act
of 2006 was in place at the onset of the crisis, the Dodd–Frank Act implemented further regula-
tion that was, in effect, designed to (1) promote good judgment by requiring due diligence and
the elimination of conflicts of interest and (2) improve methodologies by making them trans-
parent to the investing public. In 2012, the Office of Credit Ratings was established to oversee
the practices of registered NRSROs and to ensure compliance with the new regulations in
accordance with Dodd–Frank. These rules and the procedures for enforcing them are examples
of regulation for best epistemic practices.
In addition to regulations governing credit rating agencies, the Dodd–Frank Act provides
for annual reviews of selected banks by the Federal Reserve for capital adequacy. The Federal
Reserve’s annual Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review program for banks includes a
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stress test whereby a bank is tested to see how well it could withstand an economic down-
turn of a severity similar to the financial crisis of 2008. Stress testing aims to ensure that the
U.S. banking system can withstand extreme adverse economic scenarios, should they occur in
the future. This regulatory tool helps the Federal Reserve determine whether any given bank
needs to strengthen its capital reserves.
The general concept of stress testing is not new. Banks regularly model projected aggre-
gate losses under different scenarios as a standard component of aggregate risk management.26
What is new is the annual testing by the Federal Reserve for a set of factors that constitutes a
worst-case scenario that is more apocalyptic than what had previously been entertained. From
a modeling standpoint, a scenario that once might have been regarded as a bare logical possi-
bility has come to be viewed as having a non-zero chance of occurring. Stress testing is thus
a precautionary response to a newly recognized risk. Stress testing asks and aims to answer the
question, Could the banking system in the United States and each of its significant individual
components withstand a severe global economic downturn?
9. Conclusion
Suboptimal epistemic practices in the financial services industry arguably played a significant
role in the 2008 financial crisis. The rating agencies failed to follow procedures that would pro-
mote accurate assessments of risk. Large financial institutions failed to act in ways that would
have enabled them to understand and manage the risks of residential mortgage-backed secur-
ities and related derivatives. Had better policies and procedures been in place, the collapse of the
housing market in the United States would have had less of an impact.
The fact that epistemic failings were implicated in the financial crisis suggests that thinking
about best epistemic practices might be a fruitful way to approach corporate management
and regulation. Such an approach would involve identifying both general and industry-specific
epistemic practices that promote good judgment. Ideally, regulators would be able to identify
components of the financial services industry that are critical to its functioning and ensure that
best epistemic practices are being followed before potential problems develop.The employment
of methodologies that are epistemically praiseworthy is no guarantee that we will make good
judgments or be able to foresee the consequences of our actions and policies, but in the absence
of foreknowledge, it is arguably our best strategy.
Acknowledgments
I thank the participants in the May 24, 2016, “Finance –Knowledge –Justice” Workshop at the
Goethe University of Frankfurt, especially Boudewijn de Bruin, Lisa Herzog, and Marco Meyer, for
helpful comments and stimulating conversation; the participants in the Finance and Social Justice
Conference at the University of Bayreuth, November 3–5, 2016; and an anonymous referee for the
Handbook. I am also grateful to David M. Katz (DMK Publications), Thomas Hickey (National
Association of Insurance Commissioners), Donald Paynter (Commodore Funding Corporation),
Michael Stoynov (MIMCO Global), and Shelley Yu (Société Générale) for helpful conversation.
Notes
1 A notable exception is Boudewijn de Bruin (2015), who offers an analysis of corporate epistemic virtue.
2 The best-epistemic-practices approach is aligned with a metaepistemological conception of a justified
belief as one that is licensed or mandated by good epistemic norms, where the goodness of the norms
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is not understood to be reducible to natural properties or processes. This basic metaepistemological

approach has been developed in a variety of ways (e.g., Pollock 1987; Field 2000, 2009, 2018; Skorupski
2000; Chrisman 2007; and Warenski (in progress)). The best-epistemic-practices approach also overlaps
with the philosophical tradition of classical pragmatism (Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and
John Dewey). Classical pragmatism is understood to encompass a focus on learning through problem
solving and a conception of inquiry as a cooperative and social endeavor.
3 These components of ethical decision-making are the first two of four stages of ethical decision-
making (and action) distinguished by James Rest (1986). (The subsequent two are forming a moral
intention to behave in a certain way and then engaging in that behavior.) Rest’s stages are discussed in
the introductory chapter of de Bruin (2015), who notes that (epistemic) competence is related to the
first two stages.
4 My use of ‘practice’ here is strictly pragmatic. It is distinct from MacIntyre’s notion of a practice
as a complex, socially established and cooperative human activity that is governed by standards of
excellence (MacIntyre 1984). Some components of the financial services industry are practices in
MacIntyre’s sense, and it may be appropriate to foster practices, as MacIntyre understood them, by way
of improving both the ethical and epistemic culture of certain components of the financial services
industry.
5 Both the Credit Rating Agency Reform Act of 2006 and the Dodd–Frank Act impose disclosure
requirements on NRSROs that are designed to increase transparency with respect to the methods used
in assigning credit ratings.
6 This is how Alvin Goldman (1980, 1993) draws the distinction.
7 More technical notions of risk that either differentiate it from decision-making under uncertainty
or define it in terms of expectation value are utilized in theoretical discourse. These more technical
notions need not concern us here.
8 The extent to which implicit bias factors into judgments will likely vary according to the financial
product and the customer base. The more abstract the corporate person, the less likely decisions about
how to treat the corporate person will be influenced by implicit bias. On the other hand, retail banking,
residential mortgage lending, and small business lending will be more vulnerable to implicit bias.
9 My description of the lending process is based on my personal experience as a corporate credit analyst
and loan officer in major money center banks.
10 In these respects, the best-epistemic-practices approach is similar to what has been characterized as a
classical pragmatic approach to management (see Kelemen and Rumens 2013).
11 See the OCC Bulletin 2010–24, which is summarized in The Director’s Book (U.S. OCC 2016: 25–28).
12 In his remarks before the Annual Conference of The Clearing House Association (November 2014),
Thomas J. Curry, U.S. Comptroller of the Currency, noted that the European Union, as part of a
package of rules implementing Basel III in the EU, adopted strict limits on bonuses for executive
officers and material risk takers at covered firms. Curry went on to suggest that international regulations
may influence incentive-based compensation practices at some U.S.-regulated entities (Curry 2014).
13 Responsibilist accounts of virtue have been put forth by Code (1987), Montmarquet (1987), and
Zagzebski (1996), among others. De Bruin (2013, 2015) utilizes a responsibilist notion of epistemic
virtue in his virtue account of business ethics.
14 See Davies (2010) for a comprehensive and accessible discussion.
15 The U.S. Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission’s (2011) report on the causes of the financial and
economic crisis in the United States (hereafter, the “FCIC report”) discusses a range of contributing
factors and their putative causal roles in the crisis.
16 Details concerning the composition of residential mortgage-backed securities are drawn from the
description given in the 2008 U.S. SEC Commission Staff Summary Report, p. 6.
17 The impact of the housing bubble on the mortgage market and the subsequent implosion of residential
mortgage-backed securities and CDOs is chronicled in the FCIC report. See, especially, the dissenting
statement authored by Commissioners Hennessey, Holtz-Eakin, and Thomas (2011: 413–30).
18 See 2008 SEC Staff Report (2008: 6–10).
19 The 2008 SEC Staff Report (p. 7) does not list a loan delinquency report as among the information
that was sent, but this information would be essential to an assessment of the creditworthiness of a
tranche.
20 2008 SEC Staff Report (2008: 33–35). The Commission Staff cite a study in Demyanyk and Van
Hemert (2011 [2008]).
208
209
21 New rules implemented by the Dodd–Frank Act require the rating agencies to disclose information
on the reliability, accuracy, and quality of the data relied on in determining the credit rating. See The
Securities Exchange Act of 1934, 15E(s)(3)(A)(iv–vii).
22 See the Securities Exchange Act of 1984, Section 15E(q).
23 See, respectively, section 15E of The Securities Exchange Act of 1934, and the Code of Federal
Regulations, Conflicts of Interest, sec. 240.17g-5.
24 See the Code of Federal Regulations, Conflicts of Interest, sec. 240.17g-5(c)(8).
25 One central contemporary debate concerns whether coherence is or is not truth conducive. See Erik
Olsson (2014), especially Section 7, for an overview of this debate.
26 For an overview of risk management models and techniques in banking, see Saunders and Allen (2010).
References
BonJour, L. (1985). The Structure of Empirical Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
de Bruin, B. (2013). “Epistemic Virtues in Business.” Journal of Business Ethics, 113: 583–95.
de Bruin, B. (2015). Ethics and the Global Crisis: Why incompetence is worse than greed. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Chrisman, M. (2007). “From Epistemic Contextualism to Epistemic Expressivism.” Philosophical Studies,
135(2): 225–54.
Code, L. (1987). Epistemic Responsibility. Hanover: University Press of New England and Brown University
Press.
Credit Agency Credit Reform Act of 2006, Public Law 109–291, U.S. Statutes at Large 120 (2006):
1327–39.
Curry,T. (2014). “Remarks before the Annual Conference of The Clearing House Association.” New York,
November 21, 2014. Washington, DC: U.S. Office of the Comptroller.
Davies, H. (2010). The Financial Crisis: Who is to blame? Cambridge: Polity Press.
Demyanyk,Y., and Van Hemert, O. (2011 [2008]). “Understanding the Subprime Mortgage Crisis.” Federal
Reserve Bank of St. Louis and New York University Working Paper (2008). Review of Financial Studies,
24: 1848–80.
Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, Public Law 111–203, U.S. Statutes at
Large 124 (2010): 1376–2223.
Ewing, A. C. (1934). Idealism: A critical survey. London: Methuen.
Field, H. (2000). “A Priority as an Evaluative Notion,” in Truth and the Absence of Fact. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Field, H. (2009). “Epistemology without Metaphysics.” Philosophical Studies, 143(2): 249–90.
Field, H. (forthcoming). “Epistemology from an Evaluativist Perspective.” Philosophers’ Imprint.
Goldman, A. I. (1980). “The Internalist Conception of Justification,” in H. Kornblith (ed.), Epistemology:
Internalism and externalism. Oxford; Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Goldman, A. I. (1993). “Epistemic Folkways and Scientific Epistemology.” Philosophical Issues, 3: 271–85.
Kelemen, M., and Rumens, N. (eds.). (2013). American Pragmatism and Organization: Issues and controversies.
Farnham: Gower.
MacIntyre, A. (1984). After Virtue. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.
Montmarquet, J. (1987). “Epistemic Virtue.” Mind, 96: 482–97.
Olsson, E. (2014). “Coherentist Theories of Epistemic Justification,” in E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014 Edition). Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/
spr2014/entries/justep-coherence/.
Pollock, J. (1987). “Epistemic Norms.” Synthese, 71(1): 61–95.
Rest, J. (1986). Moral Development: Advances in research and theory. New York: Praeger.
Saunders, A., and Allen, L. (2010). Credit Risk Measurement In and Out of the Financial Crisis: New approaches
to value at risk and other paradigms, 3rd ed. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons.
Skorupski, J. (2000). “Irrealist Cognitivism,” in J. Dancy (ed.), Normativity. Oxford: Blackwell.
U.S. Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC). (2011). The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report. Washington,
DC: Government Publishing Office.
U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. Code of Federal Regulations. Conflict of Interests.
240.17g-5. 2014.
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Lisa Warenski
U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). (2016). The Director’s Book. Washington, DC.
Retrieved from www.occ.gov/publications/publications-by-type/other-publications-reports/the-
directors-book.pdf.
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Staff of the Office of Compliance Inspections and Examination,
Division of Trading and Markets and Office of Economic Analysis. (2008). “Summary Report of Issues
Identified in the Commission Staff ’s Examinations of Select Credit Rating Agencies.” Retrieved from
www.sec.gov/news/studies/2008/craexamination070808.pdf.
Zagzebski, L. (1996). Virtues of the Mind: An inquiry into the nature of virtue and the ethical foundations of know-
ledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Further reading
Davies, H. (2010). The Financial Crisis:Who Is to Blame? Cambridge: Polity Press.
De Bruin, B. (2013). “Epistemic Virtues in Business.” Journal of Business Ethics, 113: 583–95.
De Bruin, B. (2015). Ethics and the Global Crisis: Why incompetence is worse than greed. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Dimon, J. (2016). Letter to Shareholders, April 6, 2016. JPMorgan Chase & Company Annual Report 2015.
Lewis, M. (2011). The Big Short. New York: Norton.
U.S. Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC). (2011). The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report. Washington,
DC: Government Printing Office.
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16
OF EDUCATION
Ben Kotzee
Introduction
Alongside institutions like science, the media, libraries, museums, etc., the education system
fulfills a largely epistemic purpose in society. The institutions that comprise the education
system, like schools, universities and colleges, are there to provide children and young people
with the knowledge and skills needed to play their role as adults in society. Often, educational
tasks are also carried on in institutions that we do not see as educational institutions first and
foremost, such as workplaces, hospitals, the courts, and our political institutions. The reason
epistemologists should take education seriously is that in fulfilling their educational role, these
institutions have a profound impact (mostly for good, but sometimes for ill) on what people
know. Next to influencing what people know or do not know directly –by teaching about
certain facts but not others, or teaching certain canons, traditions, or methods of study (but
not others) –educational institutions also shape the character of people’s thinking indirectly.
By teaching in a certain way, educators in and outside schools have an effect on whether their
students become inquisitive, independent-minded, accurate, and creative; or whether they
become uncurious, hide-bound, sloppy, and dull in their thinking. Educational institutions
shape both the content and the character of people’s thinking.
In this chapter, I provide a state-of-the-art overview of applied epistemological issues in
education for analytic philosophers. I also attempt to map out the main features of a program
of “applied epistemology of education.” In section 1 of the chapter, I consider how we should
understand some central concepts that are of importance to education, but also to epistemology.
I hold that, while it is important to applied epistemology to understand these concepts, analysis
of concepts is not enough to provide normative guidance regarding how education should be
organized or conducted. In the remainder of the chapter, I consider two more plausible sources
where we may find real applied philosophical guidance regarding how to educate children: the
social epistemology of epistemic institutions (section 2) and the individual realm of epistemic
virtue (section 3).
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1. Epistemic concepts in education

Some of the most important concepts in education are epistemic concepts. Among these are the
concepts of “learning” and “teaching” and the concept of “education” itself. In what sense are
“learning,” “teaching,” and “education” epistemic concepts?
Learning
The most general concept in the area is that of “learning.” One tempting definition of “learning”
is that it is the acquisition of knowledge. As David Hamlyn holds:
At all events, on our ordinary conception of learning it would … be impossible to

suppose that someone could have learned something if he had not in some sense
acquired new knowledge…
Hamlyn 1973: 180
Hamlyn holds that truly to learn something, one must not only come to know the truth about
it, but also see why or understand why it is so. On Hamlyn’s way of thinking, only what we
would call genuine or deep learning that goes beyond recall of facts and also includes justifica-
tion is real learning.
Israel Scheffler disagrees.Take the example of a child growing up during the time before the
germ theory of disease was accepted and who is taught that disease is caused by evil spirits. In
such a case, it is perfectly natural to say that the child “learned that disease is caused by wicked-
ness” (Scheffler 1965: 7). The issue is whether “learning” is a factive concept and if Scheffler is
right, it is not.1 There is also reason to doubt that learning requires coming to have justifica-
tion for what one believes. Rote learning is entirely possible (and widespread). In fact, in some
domains, for example learning to count, learning the letters of the alphabet, etc., some form of
rote learning is probably essential. Moreover, one can think of many things that are learned that
are not even beliefs: learning skills can perhaps be finessed as acquiring a form of know-how,
but one can also learn attitudes, habits, responses or feelings, or, even, meaningless ticks. We can
conclude that none of belief, truth, or justification is necessary to learning and that Hamlyn
packs too much into the concept of learning. More realistically, we can call any capacity that an
individual (animal or human) develops in response to its environment (but that doesn’t merely
come down to growth or development it would have experienced whatever the environment)
“learning.”2
Even though learning is a very basic concept and does not necessarily seem to involve truth,
justification, or knowledge, it is still important to think about it in epistemology. The reason (as
we shall see below) is how the concept of “learning” features in the explanation of other epi-
stemic concepts, such as the concept of “teaching.”
Teaching
Learning can come about in a number of different ways. Any person constantly learns by
experience and self-discovery; learning can even happen by accident. However, some learning
is achieved by teaching. One may teach propositional knowledge by telling someone some-
thing –in this mode, teaching is analogous to testifying. However, one may also teach another
know-how or practical skill –in this mode, teaching is showing (Kotzee 2016). Whereas the
concept of “learning” is basic and does not in itself imply much regarding how education should
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Applied epistemology of education
be conducted, things are completely different for the concept of “teaching.” There is much
lively debate in the philosophy of education over how teaching should be conducted. Some
have held that the very concept of what it is to “teach” someone already provides us with nor-
mative guidance regarding how (or even what) to teach. Gilbert Ryle (1949), for instance, spent
much time distinguishing what sets teaching apart from other legitimate modes of instruction
such as drill, practice, or training (and hints at the superiority of “teaching,” because it involves
understanding). Others have spent much time distinguishing proper “teaching” from illegit-
imate modes of instruction such as indoctrination (Snook 1972) and make prescriptions for
how we should teach if we are to avoid indoctrinating children. The normative guidance that
many derive from study of the very concept of “teaching” makes attention to this concept and
the literature surrounding it directly relevant to applied epistemology.
Against this backdrop, debates about the concept of “teaching” trace again the outlines of
the debate about the nature of learning. Firstly, one must notice that “teaching” has an obvious
success condition –learning on the part of the learner (Passmore 1980). However, because it is
possible to learn something that is not true, so it is clearly possible to teach something that is
not true. There was a time, for instance, when children were taught that the earth is flat. One
may even, purposefully, decide to teach something that one knows is false. In introductory
classes in nuclear physics, for instance, we teach children that the structure of the atom is like
the structure of the solar system (with electrons orbiting the nucleus in fixed circular orbits)
even though we know that this is not literally true (Elgin 2004). Because learning is not factive,
teaching is not either.
What of the relation between justification and teaching? This relationship is a little more
complex. It is clearly possible to teach what one does not have justification for. Teaching the
tenets of some faith is an example. It is also possible to present poor justifications for belief as
part of one’s teaching; take teaching that the fossil record is fake because the Bible does not
mention the dinosaurs, for example. Having good justification for what one teaches is not
necessary to teaching something (but that it were so!)
Scheffler holds that there is a different relationship between justification and teaching and
that is that teaching must work by presenting justification to the learner (whether that justifica-
tion is good or not). Scheffler writes:
Teaching involves … that, if we try to get the student to believe that such and such is
the case, we try also to get him to believe it for reasons that, within the limits of his
capacity to grasp, are our reasons.Teaching, in this way, requires us to reveal our reasons
to the student and, by so doing, to submit them to his evaluation and criticism.
Scheffler 1960: 57
Rather than as a conceptual point, we can see the relationship between teaching and justifica-
tion as a normative one; providing justification or evidence sets evaluative standards for what
is good teaching (or may set ideals or goals for teaching). Ideally, we should only teach what we
have (good) justification for and, in this way, standards of goodness for justification may inform
what to teach. Drawing on the link between evidence and teaching, Jonathan Adler (2003), for
instance, holds that we should apply evidentialist standards in curriculum planning (see below).
Michael Hand takes the matter further and proposes an epistemic test (the “epistemic criterion”)
for the curriculum. According to Hand (2008) we should settle questions about the inclusion
of controversial topics on the curriculum epistemically and should not teach material for which
there exists no scientific evidence. Hand’s epistemic criterion has been applied to a number of
disputes about the curriculum, from teaching religion to teaching about the environment and
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Ben Kotzee
about sexuality (Hand 2007; Hand 2011; Reiss 2011). Where our evidence does not settle what
should be accepted straightforwardly, Hand holds, we should teach that the matter at issue is
open; for instance, about a scientific question like “is there biological life elsewhere in the uni-
verse?” we should teach children that it is an open question.
Important to notice is that, for Hand, epistemic justifiability forms only a necessary condi-
tion for teaching some piece of curricular content; it is not a sufficient condition, for, other-
wise, we would have to teach everything that we have evidence for. The same holds for what
we should teach as open; clearly there is no obligation on teachers to teach of every open sci-
entific question that it is an open question. Presumably, we will only be obliged to teach that
something is an open question if it is important enough or interesting enough to teach about
at all. In brief, while the evidence available may provide some negative or cautionary guidance
in curriculum design –we should not teach what we do not have evidence for –it does not
provide much positive guidance and we will have to get positive curriculum guidance from
elsewhere.This point is crucially important below. Be that as it may, debates from epistemology
(and from the philosophy of science) over what exactly constitutes good enough evidence in
the field of human knowledge will feed through to discussions about the curriculum too (into
discussions about what children should be taught). In this area, epistemology has clear applied
import.
Education
The concept of “education” draws on and incorporates the concepts of “teaching” and
“learning.” We have seen that, in educating, someone teaches someone something. However,
what we call an “education” goes beyond mere teaching. For Richard Peters, an education
always involves a specific kind of teaching: it is the teaching of knowledge and understanding
(and not of mere skill, attitude, or behavior). As Peters writes:
For a man to be educated it is insufficient that he should possess a mere know-how

or knack. He must have also some body of knowledge and some kind of conceptual
scheme to raise this above the level of a collection of disjointed facts. This implies
some understanding of principles for the organisation of facts.
Peters 1966: 30
According to Peters, receiving an education is being brought to learn not any old thing, but a
specific class of things –theoretical knowledge and understanding –that is uniquely improving.
In fact, for Peters it is part of the concept of “education” that an “education” is an improving
experience. As he writes:
It would be a logical contradiction to say that a man had been educated but that he
had in no way changed for the better…
Peters 1966: 25
From the concept of “education,” Peters not only deduces that it is theoretical, but also that
an education that results in theoretical understanding is uniquely desirable and that we should,
therefore, promote it among children (for more on this, see Hand 2009). By contrast, John
Wilson holds that “education” is not a normative or evaluative concept. Wilson points out
that it is perfectly possible to “disapprove of, or criticise, or even express horror and disgust
at” instances of teaching that we call “education” (Wilson 1979: 27). Take the education that
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Fagin provided to the urchins in Oliver Twist. While a thoroughly corrupting experience for the
urchins, it would not be wrong to say that the only or most important education the urchins
had was Fagin’s. This shows that not all of what is called “education” is necessarily desirable.
Next to whether “education” is necessarily improving, a further important debate about the
concept of “education” is what it aims at. If, as we have seen above, “teaching” and “education”
aim at learning on the part of the student, the question still remains what particular learning a
good or proper education should aim to foster.
Alvin Goldman summarizes the aim of education like this:
The fundamental aim of education, like that of science, is the promotion of know-
ledge. Whereas science seeks knowledge that is new for human kind, education seeks
knowledge that is new for individual learners.
Goldman 1999: 349
Goldman holds that a good or successful education results in learners coming to possess a
greater stock of true belief. Harvey Siegel objects that rational processes of belief formation are
educationally valuable independent of whether they lead to true beliefs or not. He points out
that mere true belief, held without rational justification, cannot be the aim of education. If it
were, that would imply that educational methods such as brainwashing or indoctrination would
be acceptable, as long as they ended up in students believing truths (Siegel 2005: 350). Imagine,
for instance, that we could get our students to believe a large number of truths by giving them
a pill (or by subjecting them to some kind of brain manipulation process); Goldman would have
to applaud such a method as having a high veritistic value, but we would not ordinarily say
that brainwashing is “education” (even if it results in the learner believing something true). We
would say that the point of education is not just that students end up believing truths, but that
they begin to believe them because they understand them or can begin to see that they are true.
Like Goldman, Adler (2003) holds that we should understand the knowledge aim of edu-
cation in terms of the acquisition of justified true belief. Adler observes that if the aim of edu-
cation is knowledge, then education must also aim at (a) true belief and (b) justified belief,
because both of these are components of knowledge. However, to rule out Gettier cases, the
basis upon which one believes must establish the belief as true. From this, it follows that, if the
point of education is to turn students into knowers, then (part) of the task of education must be
to make it salient for students how the justification for what they are taught establishes the truth of what
they believe. According to Adler’s elegant formulation, education, in effect, is there to ensure that
students are real knowers, not Gettier knowers. This explains one of our most basic educational
insights: that, rather than merely getting children to believe truths, a good education consists in
students beginning to see the connection between the evidence they have and the truth. Adler
holds that if one accepts the account of knowledge as justified true belief plus something else,
then two educational applications follow directly:
1. Because education consists in forging a connection between justification and truth for the
student, “you cannot get anyone to believe (hence, learn) something directly by threat or
offer…” (Adler 2003: 288). This condition rules out indoctrination or brainwashing as
proper education –education must proceed by attempting to convince.
2. The view leads us to adopt an evidentialist approach to the ethics of belief (to the question
“what ought one to believe?”) (Adler 2003: 288). If people should, in general, believe what
they have evidence for, this provides the reason why teachers should teach what we have
evidence for, rather than what is true simpliciter.
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Ben Kotzee
Adler thinks that these two points provide support for a traditional liberal education comprising
familiar school subjects (like mathematics, science, history, literature, etc.) as the best curriculum
(Adler 2003: 293). On Adler’s view, the liberal curriculum is a collection of “significant truths plus
those truths requisite for comprehension of the significant ones” (2003: 288). For Adler, the fact
that we have evidence for the truth of the various scientific claims made in the liberal curriculum
is why we teach those subjects.
Famously, in the philosophy of education, Paul Hirst and Richard Peters made the same
point.Writing separately and jointly, Hirst and Peters argued for the superiority of a liberal cur-
riculum (that is a broad and theoretical introduction to the most important subject disciplines)
and sought to justify the superiority of this curriculum in terms of how it follows from the very
definition or idea of knowledge. As Hirst puts it:
Liberal education … is the appropriate label for … an education based fairly and
squarely on the nature of knowledge itself.
Hirst 1965: 30
In support of this idea, Peters gave a transcendental argument. Peters (1966: 164) argued that any
person who even asks the question what they should learn are thereby committed to finding
out the truth about matters like: (i) what there is to learn in broad terms (i.e., what subjects
there are that one could possibly learn), (ii) what there is to learn about what there is to learn
(i.e., the content of these subjects), and (iii) how the content of the different subjects compare
against each other for importance. Peters held that even asking the question of what one should
learn commits one to acquiring broad acquaintance with human knowledge in the round.
The problem lies in how Peters (and Hirst) turned this idea into support for the liberal
curriculum that we find in most school systems today. John White (2005, 2009), for instance,
holds that Hirst and Peters start from the existing school curriculum in England at the time
of their work and merely rationalize the superiority of this curriculum in terms of epistemic
considerations. This is true of Adler (2003) too, who starts by accepting the current curriculum and
then asks how epistemological considerations help explain or justify why we have this curric-
ulum. However, starting with the current curriculum and asking how it makes sense in terms
of epistemological considerations, is to assume that the current standard school curriculum gets
the specifics of what children should learn more or less right. Whether it does so is a matter for
debate. The question that we need to answer in rational curriculum planning is not “how can
we justify or explain the fact that we teach what we teach?” but, “why teach this rather than
that?”
The reason why this discussion of the concept of “education” and debates about the curric-
ulum is so important is that it is one of the major ways that study of epistemology has influenced
thinking about how we organize the school curriculum. How we organize the school curric-
ulum must be a matter of interest to applied epistemologists, because of how profoundly this
experience influences children’s knowledge of the world and their outlook on it. Because chil-
dren turn into adults, the content of the education children receive (and, equally, what is left
out!) will influence, one generation later, the whole state of knowledge in society. The problem
is that mere analysis of concepts like “knowledge” or “education” does not provide an answer
to the question “what should people come to know?” or “what kind of knowledge should we
educate for?” While conceptual analysis helps us to map the terrain, applied epistemology will
have to go beyond conceptual analysis if it is to answer normative educational questions like
“what should be taught in school?” (the question of the school curriculum) and “how should it
be taught?” (the question of pedagogy).
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2. Social applied epistemology of education

To provide an answer, let us begin instead where much applied epistemology begins and look
at the functioning of epistemic institutions in society.3 Take the major epistemic institutions in
society, for instance science, the media, the courts, and democratic government. In this hand-
book, a number of these institutions are discussed from an epistemic point of view. (See, for
instance, the chapters on “Expertise in climate change,” “Epistemic democracy,” “Legal burdens
of proof and statistical evidence,” and “Evidence-based medicine.”) From the perspective of epi-
stemic institutions like these, we can look at “education” in two ways. In one way, formal educa-
tional institutions, like schools and universities, are themselves examples of epistemic institutions
in society. However, in another way, the other epistemic institutions themselves have educational
functions. I shall discuss these two points in turn.
As epistemic institutions in their own right, schools and other formal educational institutions4
train (mainly) the young for participation in other epistemic institutions in society. When they
grow up to be adults, children will be users of society’s epistemic institutions (like the courts,
the media, science, democracy, health systems, etc.). They will depend on science and the media
for keeping them informed, they will arrange their lives in accordance with laws interpreted by
the courts, they will participate in collective decision-making through democratic systems, and
so on. Using and taking part in all of these epistemic systems depends on the public having a
degree of knowledge about these institutions and the principles by which they operate. A first
epistemic task of the school, then, is to provide children –who are to become adult users
of society’s other epistemic institutions –with the necessary knowledge of how best to use
these institutions. Moreover, many of our young people will go on to work in these epistemic
institutions themselves, by becoming journalists, scientists, politicians, civil servants, doctors,
etc. (they will become “knowledge workers”). A second important epistemic function of the
school is to prepare young people for working in not any, but at least in some of these epistemic
institutions, should they wish.5
As an epistemic institution, the school has a unique function: it prepares people for participa-
tion in other epistemic institutions.While the school is in this sense “in the service of other epi-
stemic institutions,” it does not make it less important or interesting to applied epistemologists.
We can see this by paying attention to a second, more subtle, way to think about education
in the context of epistemic institutions and this is that, quite apart from the institution of the
school, all other epistemic institutions in society also have (i) educational interests and (ii) an
educational function.
To see this, consider again Goldman’s remark (above) that science discovers new know-
ledge and education communicates existing knowledge to new learners. Goldman makes
the task of the educator seem rather humdrum –as merely re-packaging what scientists have
already discovered and communicating it to a new generation. Rather than humdrum, this
task –of continuously re-packaging and re-communicating things that humankind has already
discovered –is crucially important to our whole “epistemic economy.” Literally all of our epi-
stemic institutions (the courts, the media, science, democracy, etc.) depend on the education
system for its maintenance in the two ways that I outlined above. Without schools in which
young people become an “educated public” and learn to read, write, investigate, argue, experi-
ment, etc., those institutions will not be able to serve the public as well as they could. Moreover,
without schools, these educational institutions will not have anyone to recruit as new know-
ledge workers. Quite simply, in the absence of some form of education system, all of our epi-
stemic institutions will die out in a few generations; for, as the old knowledge workers die, with
no new recruits to replace them, their knowledge will die with them.6
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Seeing the education system’s role as one of “the transmission of culture” in this way is
a well-known picture. Many educational thinkers thought like this. Bruner (1977) sketched
a general account of how human culture can only come into being and endure across the
generations if adults take the trouble to educate children. Oakeshott (1989) held that what we
call academic subject disciplines depend on scholars initiating students into those fields through
a process of cognitive apprenticeship. Jaspers (1959) held that, as a social institution, the univer-
sity only survives because academics educate students to become their colleagues, and one day
their replacements. Dewey (1916) pointed out that democratic government depends on educa-
tion quite generally, because in a democracy any adult citizen must be in a position to take part
in democratic debates about public affairs. Dewey points out, astutely, that the educative task
of the school in a democracy is not only to transmit a fixed set of ideas in the same way across
the generations, but to induct children into democratic thinking in such a way that they can
also improve and change the democratic system themselves when they are adults (1916: 44–45).
More recently, Gutmann has updated this idea; she holds that education is a form of “conscious
social reproduction” (1987: 14–15) of our democratic political system. Educating children in
the procedures and values of democracy is necessary to ensure that our democracy survives
from generation to generation, but also to ensure that democracy constantly improves. Because
democratic decisions are made by all citizens equally, it is important for Gutmann that every
child must receive an equal education.
While there is a long pedigree to the idea that epistemic institutions ensure their own
survival through education, this is not to say that we must always have the exact educational
institutions that we call schools. It is possible to teach the young much knowledge in different
kinds of settings –through home education, through informal education, through on-the-job
education, etc. However, any such setting is an education setting and you need an education
system of some sort to maintain the knowledge that we have already developed in human
society and transmit it from generation to generation.This brings us to the second way to think
about education in the context of social applied epistemology. In the epistemic economy of
the developed world, we have developed an educational institution –the school –that provides
the young with the preparation to become users of and workers in other epistemic institutions.
However, society’s other epistemic institutions cannot leave the matter of education to schools.
Simply to survive across the generations, any epistemic institution must take an interest in
how the young is educated in schools. For this reason, all of the major epistemic institutions,
like science, the media, the courts, democracy, etc., seek to work with schools in various ways
to shape the curriculum. They also carry out certain educational functions themselves. For
instance, all of the major epistemic institutions have functions pertaining to educating the public
and they also conduct much “in-house” education of their own workforce.
In sum, there is a particular epistemic institution that is devoted to education, but all epi-
stemic institutions have another task in addition to advancing knowledge in their own fields
and that is educating the public sufficiently that they may stay alive as epistemic institutions
across the generations. We may say that next to discovery, education is a distinct epistemic task of
epistemic institutions.
We are now in a position to fill out the details of what a program of applied social epistem-
ology of education would look like. Such a program would start with epistemic institutions
like the media, science, democracy, etc. It would establish that each of these institutions has
a different epistemic function, but each of these will have an interest in another system –the
education system –that trains its users and that also provides the new generation of workers
that each of these systems will depend on for their own survival across generations. It will also
carry on its own educational function. In this context, applied epistemology of education would
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essentially concern the matter of how each epistemic institution in society must carry out its
own educational functions and how it should coordinate with the epistemic institution that is
devoted to education –the school system –to further that educational function.
In this regard, a number of interesting questions arise, for instance:
1. How much of its educational function should any epistemic institution carry out itself and
how much should it leave to the school system?
2. In the case of educational work left to the school system, how should the other epistemic
institutions in society shape and control that work? (Concretely, who should shape cur-
ricula: the epistemic institutions or teachers themselves?)
3. What is the best basic education that the school system can provide to the young to prepare
them as users of and potential recruits to the other epistemic institutions in society? (In par-
ticular, what does a good basic education look like in a world of epistemic institutions?)
4. What should be the relationship between a basic, common education provided to all young
people mainly in the service of making them competent users of epistemic institutions
and the more specialist education that they will need to become workers in a particular
epistemic institution? (For instance, in science education, how should we divide our educa-
tional resources between teaching all children some basic science and training a select few as
science specialists?)
5. How should epistemic institutions select young people to become knowledge workers in
that institution? (For instance, how should we select particular young people to become
workers in high status epistemic institutions like the law and the courts, science, the media,
and politics?)
All of these are practical questions concerning how epistemic institutions should conduct a
unique and important epistemic function –education. They are applied epistemological
questions par excellence.
To give an example of how we can answer some of these questions, I will focus on one of
these questions –question 4. Looking at this question returns us to one of the classic questions
in the philosophy of education –the nature and value of a liberal education –and helps us pro-
vide a partial answer to the question opened by Peters and Hirst: what is valuable about a broad
and general theoretical education?
In one sense, the question of the liberal curriculum is how much specialization we should
encourage in education and how broadly we aim to educate young people. In epistemic terms,
this is an interesting question. Do we want to live in a world populated by epistemic agents
who are all-rounders –who all know a little bit about many different things? Or do we want
a society composed of epistemic agents who each specializes deeply in one field of knowledge
(at the cost of all-round knowledge)? The answer will settle how we should arrange our school
system: to give children a broad introduction to the standard fields of study or to specialize at
an early age. Kitcher (1990) points out that just as we have a division of (economic or pro-
ductive) labor in society, so we have a “division of cognitive labor” in any society, according
to which different people direct their epistemic energies toward different projects. In science,
specialization is efficient because it allows particular scientists to focus more deeply on specific
areas and, by each taking one small area of a terrain to explore, it becomes possible for a group
of specialists to cover more terrain in more depth than a group of non-specialists all trying to
explore the same (shallow) area (Weisberg 2009; Muldoon 2013). Kitcher writes about science
(and especially about how scientists divide their effort between different research projects), but
there is clearly a division of cognitive labor across society too –lawyers specialize in the law,
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accountants specialize in accountancy, doctors specialize in medicine –and, when there is epi-

stemic work to be done, we ask the right specialist to do that work for us. Given the epistemic
efficiency of specialization, should we not encourage it as early and as deeply as possible through
our schooling system?
There are limits to how deeply and how early specialization can be achieved at school and,
surprisingly, specialization in adult life depends on broad coverage of fields of human know-
ledge at school. Firstly, it would only be possible to have a cognitive division of labor –or, at
least, a sophisticated one –if generations are, one after the other, taught how to take part in the
division of cognitive labor. To keep our division of cognitive labor functioning smoothly across the
generations, it is necessary to teach children things like: (i) what the boundaries of the different
specialisms are, (ii) which experts to defer to regarding what matters (e.g., trust biologists about
living cells, trust chemists about the make-up of molecules, trust plumbers about domestic water
and sewage supply, etc.), (iii) which specialisms would suit them best to work in themselves, etc.
The point is that the cognitive division of labor itself requires that children learn about the very
specialisms that scientists and other experts divide themselves into in breadth before they become
specialists in one of these areas themselves.
Secondly, even among specialist scientists, there is a limit to how far their specialization can
go. Writing about the division of epistemic labor in very large and complex scientific projects
(like the Large Hadron Collider, or the space shuttle program), Collins and Sanders (2007) report
that among the thousands of scientists, engineers, mathematicians, computer programmers, etc.,
working on such large projects, there is often a sense of mutual incomprehension. Very deep
and very specific specialization makes coordinating the efforts of specialists into one research
program difficult. According to Collins and Evans (2002, 2007), the solution is to foster a par-
ticular kind of expertise, “interactive expertise,” which is the ability to translate findings from
one specialist field to another, in addition to specialist expertise. Collins and Evans think that
interactive expertise is a qualitatively different kind of expertise from subject matter expertise,
but one does not have to follow them that far to see the point. Any cognitive division of labor
in which different people investigate different things will only be worth it for the collective if
people are still able to communicate and share results with one another and to coordinate with
one another which specialist questions will be investigated by whom and how. Specialization
is both a boon and a threat in the cognitive division of labor. On the one hand, specialization
allows specialists to discover more about their field of specialism more efficiently; on the other,
it can lead to incomprehension between different specialists resulting in the loss of coordinating
focus. These opportunities and threats need to be balanced. It is clear that an education system
that encourages specialization while still promoting comprehension between different subject
disciplines is part of the answer.
Thirdly, not all human epistemic endeavors are of the scientific kind; there are some matters
(for instance politics) in which we think it is important that all epistemic agents have a say and
in which we do not expect everyone to defer to experts. From the standpoint of the cognitive
division of labor, Goldberg explains how a degree of broad, general knowledge helps improve
the quality of epistemic exchange. Goldberg (2011) notes that, in testimony quite generally,
the speaker and the hearer are not necessarily the only parties to the testimonial exchange –
there is often also an audience (this is certainly so in discussions of politics and public affairs).
Goldberg notes that the audience is not passive, but also plays an epistemic role –monitoring
the exchange for credibility. When an audience overhears a testimonial exchange in which one
person misleads another, the audience can (given the right opportunities) step in and correct
the misleading testimony. Moreover, when there is an audience present, a testifier usually takes
more care in expressing her testimony correctly and precisely. The audience, then, plays the
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epistemic role of keeping testifiers’ testimony accurate, precise, and relevant. Goldberg calls
this the “remote monitoring and policing” function of the audience in testimonial exchange
(2011: 112–25).
The point is that, in a community of thinkers and speakers, we all sometimes take the task
of monitoring testimonial exchanges for accuracy, relevance, and precision. While Goldberg
does not make the point exactly like this, it is clear that people can only play a constant role
in monitoring and policing exchanges if they know enough about a wide variety of topics or if
a reasonable knowledge of a wide variety of fields is well distributed through society. Put very
simply, broad general knowledge of human affairs creates an “educated public” and an educated
public is epistemically valuable in keeping experts to account.
This is a new argument, different from that offered by Hirst and Peters, as to why it is valuable
to divide a school curriculum into subjects and why it is important to require children to study
a wide range of these subjects at school. The ideal is that such an education helps maintain our
epistemic division of labor in society and helps improve its efficiency. Whether current school
curricula actually live up to this ideal is, of course, an open question. It may be that current school
curricula are, for instance, too broad or too specialized, that they do not give enough weight to
the right subjects, that school subjects do not adequately match broad fields of epistemic spe-
cialization in society, or that a school education does not in fact enable children to see the rela-
tionship between different specialisms. The task of criticizing and suggesting improvements for
school curricula in this light is exactly one for social applied epistemology of education.
In this section, I have only been able to give a broad sketch of what kinds of argument
applied epistemology of education can make about how schooling is organized and conducted
in order to promote efficient cooperative epistemic endeavor in society. I focused on whether
the school curriculum should be broad or specialized because this is such a classic question in
the philosophy of education; however, applied epistemology of education can take a similar
look across the broad range of questions I have identified regarding how best we should arrange
the epistemic task that is called “education” in society and how that task should be shared and
coordinated between epistemic institutions in society and the particular epistemic institution
that is the school.
3. Individual applied epistemology of education

In section 2, I located the work of applied epistemology of education in the realm of epistemic
institutions as studied in social epistemology. In the context of social epistemology, the function
of “education” is carried on by schools, but also by the epistemic institutions themselves in order
to maintain and improve the functioning of those same epistemic institutions. From the discus-
sion so far, it may appear that the reason why we educate, or the particular value of education, lies
in the social function it plays in keeping our epistemic institutions alive through the generations
and helping them to develop over time. However, one may ask whether this social function of
education adequately captures the value of education: is education not also of value to the indi-
vidual herself who undergoes that education quite apart from its social value? To understand the
epistemology of education fully, we must see education as a process that aims (or more precisely,
should aim) at “edification” or improvement of individuals in addition to a process that is of
value to society (Kidd 2016). Here, too, existing work in epistemology can be brought to bear
to offer normative advice about how we should conduct education. In particular, epistemology
already studies two matters of great relevance: (1) the nature of good thinking and reasoning
(what we call “critical thinking”) and how to foster it, and (2) the nature of the intellectual
virtues and how to foster them.
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Promoting critical thinking

Ask an analytic philosopher why young people should study philosophy and chances are that
they will answer that the study of philosophy improves one’s thinking. Analytic philosophy
is not short of advice on thinking7 and it contains a whole sub-discipline –informal logic –
devoted to the study of ordinary reasoning and how to improve it. One can argue over whether
informal logic properly belongs to the field of logic or of epistemology, but there is little doubt
that applied epistemology must take seriously how people use (and should use) evidence to
reason things out. If epistemology has an inherent interest in how people should use evidence
to reason things out, applied epistemology must have an interest in how to promote better
thinking in the population at large –that is, in how individuals should conduct their thinking.
According to Siegel (2005, 1988), the most fundamental aim of education should be exactly
this: the fostering of rational or critical thinking. Siegel offers three reasons as to why the basic
purpose of education is promoting good thinking. Firstly, on a broadly Kantian view, the fun-
damental principle of ethics is that all individuals should be treated with respect as persons.This
general ethical demand binds teachers with respect to their classroom conduct too: teachers
must treat students with due respect in their teaching. According to Siegel, treating a student
with respect as a person demands that teachers must teach by explaining things to students
rationally –deception, indoctrination, or bullying does not amount to teaching that respects
the student as a person.8 Secondly, the aim of education should be –quite generally –to
prepare students for their life as adults in which they play an autonomous and equal role in
society. In order to play this equal and autonomous role, students need to learn skills of rational
investigation, discourse, debate, and decision –in short, they need rational thinking skills. This
justification is essentially the liberal one that to be independent and to make rational choices
requires that one can think for oneself. This second argument connects with the first argument
in a special way: in order to engage with and grasp the rational kind of teaching that is crucial
to being treated with respect as persons, teachers need to work on developing their students’
rational thinking processes.The first and second arguments work together to show that teachers
must both appeal to students’ independent and rational thinking in their teaching and must also
continuously work to develop that very ability. Thirdly, Siegel holds that, in order to play an
autonomous and equal role in thinking in society, children need to be initiated into reasoning
in and communicating within our central cultural traditions (such as science, literature, history,
art, mathematics, etc.). Because these traditions are not static, but constantly grow and evolve,
the only way to take part in them is by acquiring the skills of rational thinking that enable one
to evaluate and propose claims in these areas. This point connects the development of good
thinking on the level of the individual with the social aims we considered above: in order to
take part in thinking socially (in order to cooperate intellectually with other people), individuals
need to learn the principles of that cooperation; for Siegel, these principles are exactly captured
in the principles of logic, broadly and informally construed.
What is the kind of rational thinking that Siegel holds is the aim of education to develop?
Building on Dewey’s work on reflective thinking, authors such as Glaser (1941), Paul (1990), and
Ennis (1996) have identified basic thinking abilities (such as recognizing arguments, analyzing
them, finding and criticizing unstated assumptions, etc.) and proposed methods for measuring
and improving students’ thinking. Over time, this has become known as “critical thinking”
(Facione 1990: 2). There exists considerable disagreement in the literature regarding the exact
nature of critical thinking. Bailin (1998) identifies three prominent perspectives.
On one conception of critical thinking, critical thinking is simply facility with logic (formal
and informal). Ennis (1962) is the clearest proponent of this view. In his work on critical
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thinking, Ennis identifies what are some of the most important thinking skills, such as iden-
tifying arguments, identifying premises and conclusions, establishing the relationship between
premises and conclusions, evaluating the strength of these relationships, finding and criticizing
common fallacies, etc. One can say that Ennis’s perspective is reflected in some of the most
widespread and well-known attempts that philosophers make to promote critical thinking to
(university) students: at many analytic philosophy departments across the world, the first intro-
ductory course that (university) students take in logic covers exactly this ground.
On another conception of critical thinking, however, facility with the basic principles of
logic is not enough. In fact, Paul (1984, 1990) questions whether teaching critical thinking
by focusing on the teaching of logic is helpful at all. According to Paul, too great an emphasis
on the mechanics of argumentation and too heavy an emphasis on argumentation as a quasi-
competitive activity (in which one makes specific moves in order to win an argument and
in which one practices argumentation in order to win arguments) merely produces young
“sophists.” Paul holds that the kind of critical thinking that Ennis advocates is mere “weak”
critical thinking. For Paul, what we should teach students is to be better thinkers in the round;
for Paul “strong” critical thinking involves not only winning arguments, but thinking broadly
and responsibly, knowing when to apply particular standards of evaluation to an argument, and
truly being original and independent in one’s thinking. Importantly, for Paul, this will include
teaching students self-knowledge and teaching students to be critical of their own (or their
culture’s) worldview. In the end, Paul sees the word “critical” in “critical thinking” to mean
more than facility with logic. For Paul, critical thinking is the inclination and ability to cri-
tique common modes of thinking in the sense of questioning and challenging accepted ideas,
exposing their false allure and improving them (in the tradition of social critique).
According to a third perspective, critical thinking is neither the teaching of logic, nor the
teaching of social criticism. McPeck (1981, 1990), for instance, holds that critical thinking is
not the domain of philosophy to teach at all; he holds that each subject discipline taught in
schools and universities (like science, history, literature, etc.) has its own form of critical thinking.
Rather than a generalized form of instruction in thinking that is not about any particular sub-
ject matter, McPeck holds that a true education in critical thinking is one that requires deep
immersion in the study of a particular topic. For McPeck, this kind of education requires deep
study of the subject disciplines and not merely instruction in a few moves or procedures for
good thinking that is content and context-less. McPeck holds that education can best improve
people’s thinking not by trying to teach thinking directly, but by simply providing a deep edu-
cation of whatever kind.9
It is only possible here to give a very brief introduction to the nature of critical thinking;
however, the issue is of acute importance to applied epistemology. For reasons like those outlined
by Siegel, it is uncontentious to say that it is important to young people to learn to think “crit-
ically.” But what is critical thinking and how should we instruct children in critical thinking?
Should we teach them mainly logic to do this (Ennis 1996)? Should we teach social critique
(Paul 1984, 1990)? Or should we simply teach the standard liberal curriculum in depth and well
(McPeck 1981, 1990)? Applied epistemology must take an interest in what good thinking is on
the individual level and how to promote it.
Other important questions are whether the task of the teacher of critical thinking is to
teach students how to think and then to leave it to the students themselves whether they take
on good thinking as a commitment in their lives or whether teaching critical thinking also
includes motivating students to think, or even motivating them to think in a certain way?
Whatever exactly “critical” means, a number of scholars draw a distinction between the skill to
think critically and the disposition to think critically and hold that the skill to think critically
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is of little use if students are not disposed to use those skills well in their actual thinking.10
Ennis (1996) and Facione et al. (1995), for instance, recognize this and have begun to outline
what the dispositional “habits of mind” are that drive effective thinking. They propose thinking
dispositions such as open-mindedness, reasonableness, curiosity, and metacognitive reflection as
being of particular importance. Thinking of it this way raises the question of whether the task
of the teacher is not greater or higher than envisaged in the standard critical thinking literature.
Rather than the aim of fostering mere critical thinking skill, the aim of education may be the
higher one of inculcating intellectual virtue among students.
Fostering intellectual virtues

Above, we noted the importance of the disposition to think well in addition to the skill to think
well. Some have held that, rather than mere critical thinking skills, the education system should
focus on fostering the intellectual virtues in the round (see, e.g., the papers collected in Baehr
2016). The effort to form students’ intellectual character in positive ways has long been seen as
one of the central aims of education. Plato, for instance, proposes that there is but one intellec-
tual virtue –wisdom –and that all the other virtues are subordinate to it (Republic, 428a–444e).
For Plato, the task of education is to cultivate the wisdom that is needed to understand the true
nature of the physical, moral, and political world. Aristotle distinguished the intellectual from
the moral virtues and held that one can teach the intellectual, but not the moral virtues. For
Aristotle, it follows that the main formative work of education is to shape children’s intellectual
faculties. Locke’s work on education (in Some Thoughts Concerning Education) and his work on
epistemology (e.g., his Essay Concerning Human Understanding) contains much reference to the
character traits needed for good thinking. Forming good habits of thinking was then also the
task that Locke saw for education, writing that the teacher’s task is:
to fashion the Carriage, and form the Mind; to settle in his Pupil good Habits, and the
Principles of Vertue and Wisdom.
Locke 1712: 128
Today, contemporary virtue epistemology has a lively interest in the inculcation of intellectual
virtue or how the education system should promote intellectual virtue. Indeed, Roberts and
Wood (2007: 20–22) hold that epistemology should be a regulatory enterprise –epistemology’s
task is to help form people’s intellectual lives in accord with reason. The task of virtue epistem-
ology is not only to study what the intellectual virtues are or whether some kind of intellectual
conduct is virtuous or not, but it is also to promote intellectual virtue. In particular, a number of
virtue epistemologists are interested in how we can use the education system to promote intel-
lectual virtues like “open-mindedness” (Adler 2004), intellectual humility (Hazlett 2012; Kidd
2016), inquisitiveness (Watson 2015, 2016), etc.
Other virtue epistemologists focus more on how we can inculcate virtue through education.
Battaly, for instance, provides an account of the acquisition of the intellectual virtues. For her the
process of becoming intellectually virtuous unfolds in stages. Acquiring the virtues
[begins] with the imitation of virtuous persons, [requires] practice which develops
certain habits of feeling and acting, and usually include[s]‌an in-between stage of intel-
lectual self-control.
Zagzebski 1996: 150, quoted in Battaly 2016: 172
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Battaly identifies the main methods by which one can seek to inculcate intellectual virtue
as formal instruction about the virtues, the use of exemplars of intellectual virtue, and role-
modeling. Other authors broadly agree with Battaly in how they see the teaching of intellectual
virtue proceeding in the classroom. Robert C. Roberts holds that classroom teaching for one
intellectual virtue (the virtue of intellectual humility) should proceed by modeling, practice,
critical thinking, and identifying virtues and vices (2016: 196–201) And Steven Porter identifies
four dimensions to the formation of virtue: “(1) Direct instruction on the nature and import-
ance of virtues; (2) exposure to exemplars of the virtues; (3) practice of virtuous behaviours and
the resultant habituation of virtuous dispositions; and (4) crafting environments that inculcate
virtue” (Porter 2016: 222). (He also calls these four the “standard approach” to teaching virtue.)
It is clear that teaching intellectual virtue goes far beyond the teaching of logic in terms of what
this requires in the classroom.
Virtue or thinking skills?

What should the education system aim to promote as far as people’s epistemic development
goes? Should it seek to promote mainly thinking skills or should it seek to shape someone’s
whole character as a thinker?
In his work on critical thinking, Siegel draws a sharp distinction between the skills involved
in critical thinking (what Siegel calls the “reasons assessment” component of critical thinking)
and the motivational or dispositional component of critical thinking (what he calls the “critical
spirit” component of critical thinking). Siegel (2016: 96–97) notes that it is possible to be very
good at reasons assessment but not to possess much critical spirit and vice versa. One can easily
imagine students who are, for instance, well-educated in the principles of logic, but who have
little inclination toward critical thinking, or students who possess a deeply critical attitude, but
who have no grounding in logic. Because the two components come apart so easily, Siegel holds
that reasons assessment and critical spirit are two completely different things. He writes:
It is because one can have the critical spirit but be terrible at reason assessment that
the latter component is required. It is because one can be good at reason assessment
but too often fail to engage in it that the former component is required. That is why
the two components are individually necessary but only jointly sufficient for being a
critical thinker.
Siegel 2016: 97
Starting from the distinction between reasons assessment and critical spirit, Siegel goes on
to present three arguments as to why the former and not the latter is the proper business of
education. Firstly, Siegel holds that conceiving critical thinking (or even just the critical spirit
component of critical thinking) as a “virtue” will embroil one unnecessarily in debates in the
Aristotelian virtue tradition. Siegel (2016: 98) holds that it is far easier to justify why we should
teach critical thinking by staying out of these debates and providing a Kantian justification for
the desirability of critical thinking. The Kantian justification (that I also sketch above) is rea-
sonably simple: in order to treat students with respect as persons, teachers must both develop
students’ rational thinking ability and appeal to that ability in their teaching. While Siegel does
not elaborate on what is so specifically superior about this explanation than any Aristotelian
explanation one can give, it is a matter of considerable debate in Aristotelian scholarship as to
what is so particularly valuable about the virtues or why we should promote virtue through
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education. In particular, there is considerable debate between those who take a eudaimonistic
and a perfectionistic approach to Aristotle’s work. According to the first perspective, virtue,
including intellectual virtue, should be promoted because it is the only way for children to lead
flourishing and satisfying lives; according to the second perspective, virtue, especially intellec-
tual virtue, should be promoted because it is conducive to excellence (whether that excellence
enhances one’s life satisfaction or not).
Next to the complexity involved in justifying teaching the intellectual virtues from an
Aristotelian perspective, Siegel has doubts about the eudaimonistic justification for teaching intel-
lectual virtue. In liberal approaches to politics, the state should be neutral between different
conceptions of the good life; because the school is (mostly) a state institution, liberals hold that
schools should not attempt to bring children to adopt any particular stance regarding what is
good: the school’s task, rather, is to educate children so that they can make choices about what
they value themselves. While this is most often said of, for instance, moral, religious, or political
values, is the same not true of epistemic values? Does the principle of liberal neutrality not also
demand that students be given the freedom to choose whether to love knowledge or not? If we
answer “yes” (and Siegel does), then trying to bring students to be intellectually virtuous violates
this principle of neutrality. He writes:
Our educational obligation is not to deliver our students to flourishing lives (or happy
ones), but rather to prepare them to consider for themselves … the virtuousness of the
virtues and their place in their own lives.
Siegel 2016: 108
Baehr (forthcoming) accepts the distinction that Siegel draws between the reasons assessment
and the critical spirit components of critical thinking but criticizes Siegel for confusing “intel-
lectual virtue” with only the critical spirit component. Baehr holds that the best way to describe
the combination of maximally good performance at reasons assessment and maximally good
critical spirit is as “intellectual virtue.” He holds that the possibility that someone can be very
skilled at reasons assessment while possessing little critical spirit (or vice versa) simply shows
that there are different ways to be intellectually vicious. It does not show that what Siegel calls
“critical thinking” and what Baehr calls “intellectual virtue” are all that different.
Baehr (forthcoming: 13–14) holds that Siegel’s first objection against intellectual virtue as an
aim of education –that the Aristotelian justification of intellectual virtue as an educational ideal
is too complicated –does not go through. Baehr holds that it is entirely possible to see intellec-
tual virtue as an educational ideal despite the fact that there is considerable debate about how
to interpret Aristotle’s work; moreover, he argues that the Kantian alternative is not without
its difficulties (especially when it comes to providing a theory of the “critical spirit”). As Baehr
puts it “[t]‌reating something as an educational ideal does not require working out a systematic
philosophical theory of it” (forthcoming: 14). He also does not find the second objection –that
schools in a liberal democracy should not prescribe to students whether they should be intellec-
tually virtuous and that students should properly decide this for themselves –convincing. Firstly,
Baehr points out that, on one description, the intellectual autonomy that Siegel advocates and
defends on Kantian grounds can itself be seen as an intellectual virtue (forthcoming: 13). While
Baehr does not put it exactly like this, he implies that if Siegel has no qualms defending the
importance of this intellectual virtue, he should have no qualms making similar arguments about
other intellectual virtues. Furthermore, Baehr holds that Siegel breaks his own principle of lib-
eral neutrality in how he thinks about the reasons assessment component of critical thinking.
Siegel does not think that it is up to students themselves to choose what principles of reasons
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assessment they support and, likewise, Baehr holds, it is an objective matter what intellectual
virtues a person should possess in order to be a good thinker (forthcoming: 13). Baehr holds that
while there is a time and place for arguing about what the most important intellectual virtues
are, in the long run, it is probable that students thinking about this seriously will come to realize
the objective importance of being intellectually virtuous.
Be that as it may, whether we should educate individual epistemic agents to be critical
thinkers or to be intellectually virtuous raises a host of problems for applied epistemology. This
is because the educational prescriptions demanded by the two programs are so very different.
If the aim of education is teaching critical thinking, one can approach this reasonably dir-
ectly through the teaching of logic and all the associated skills of using evidence to support
conclusions found in disciplines like statistics. However, if the aim is to promote intellectual
virtue, chances are that this ideal can only be approached more orthogonally by setting a good
intellectual example, by role-modeling, and by providing students opportunities to practice
being intellectually virtuous. Furthermore, while the critical thinking approach can describe
with some exactness what exactly is involved in being good at reasons assessment, the kind of
education demanded by the aim of creating intellectually virtuous students is not only some-
what vague but considerably more demanding. What the ideal thinker looks like on the indi-
vidual level and what education’s task and approach should be in fostering good thinking on the
individual level are clearly important questions for applied epistemology.
4. Conclusion
In this chapter, I have attempted to set out a state-of-the-art overview of applied epistemo-
logical issues in education. I have also mapped out what are the most important questions to
answer in a systematic program of applied epistemology of education. I have held that such a
program will have two foci: a social focus to do with education not only as a formal institution,
but also as an epistemic function that will have to exist in any world of epistemic institutions, and
an individual focus to do with improving young people’s thinking and intellectual conduct in
the round to help them become autonomous thinkers as adults.
Notes
1 See also Alan Hazlett (2010).
2 An extensive account of the philosophy of learning can be found in Winch (1998).
3 In this, I take the lead from Goldman (1999).
4 From here on in, I write simply “schools.” There are other kinds of formal educational institutions
like universities and technical or vocational schools or colleges. How university and vocational educa-
tion should best be arranged is itself a big question, but, for the purposes of this chapter I focus on the
schooling that all young people between the ages of about 5 and 16 are typically required to undergo in
the developed world.
5 Next to their epistemic function, schools of course have other functions: the political function of cre-
ating citizens or the ethical function of promoting moral behavior in society. Depending on how we
arrange the school system, these functions may cohere with one another (or come into conflict).
6 It is no good saying the older generation of knowledge workers can write their knowledge down for
posterity; it requires education to be able to read and to interpret what someone else has written.
7 See, for instance, Dewey (1916), Russell (1926, 1942), and Dennett (2013).
8 In making this argument, Siegel is influenced by Scheffler’s work on teaching, discussed above.
9 Next to these three perspectives, there exist yet other views on the nature of true “critical thinking.”
For Hare, critical thinking is essentially thinking that is open-minded (1979); DeBono (1972) sees crit-
ical thinking as thinking that is flexible and creative (lateral thinking); Lipman (1991) identifies critical
thinking with good contextual judgment.
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10 The issue is related to the so-called “transfer” (and sometimes lack thereof) of critical thinking. As any
teacher of logic knows, taking and passing an introductory course in logic on occasion makes depress-
ingly little difference to the quality of students’ thinking outside of logic class. One might diagnose the
problem as one of students acquiring critical thinking skills without acquiring the disposition to think
critically.
References
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Education. Oxford: Blackwell.
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Baehr, J. (forthcoming). “Intellectual Virtues, Critical Thinking and the Aims of Education,” in M. Fricker,
P. Graham, D. Henderson, N. Pedersen, and J.Wyatt (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Social Epistemology.
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Education: Essays in applied virtue epistemology. London: Routledge.
Bruner, J. (1977). The Process of Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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ence.” Social Studies of Science, 32(2): 235–96.
Collins, H., and Evans, R. (2007). Rethinking Expertise. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Collins, H., and Sanders, G. (2007). “They Give You the Keys and Say ‘Drive It!’ Managers, referred
expertise, and other expertises.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 38: 621–41.
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Dennett, D. (2013). Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking. New York: W. W. Norton.
Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and Education. New York: Macmillan.
Elgin, C. (2004). “True Enough.” Philosophical Issues, 14(1): 113–31.
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Facione, P. (1990). Critical Thinking: A statement of expert consensus for the purposes of educational assessment and
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Glaser, E. (1941). An Experiment in the Development of Critical Thinking. New York: Bureau of Publications,
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Goldberg, S. (2011). “The Division of Epistemic Labor.” Episteme, 8(1): 112–25.
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ledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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PART VI
Individual investigators
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DISAGREEMENT
Tim Kenyon
1. Introduction
Some years ago, I had a disagreement with an acquaintance while we golfed together. It was
a summer day, but slightly on the cool side. One member of our group remarked on the low
temperature, leading another one to respond,
“There’s your global warming for you. Complete scientific hoax.”

“That’s a heck of a hoax,” I replied. “You really think those climate scientists are all in
a massive conspiracy? My department can’t even agree on what calendar software
to use. Come on. The planet’s getting hotter.”
“No, the ones who don’t go along with it get purged. Even the IPCC says that over
five hundred of the world’s largest glaciers are actually growing.”
And there our disagreement ended. At least, the communicative exchange ended there. This
final claim shut me up –not because I thought that it was true, but because I had no idea of its
provenance or significance; and I could tell from its specificity, and the confidence with which
this educated professional recited it to me, that any unspecific reply from me (“Hmm, I hadn’t
heard that; it sounds really wrong to me”) would accomplish nothing.
But it certainly left me wondering, as an alternative to thinking about golf, just what back-
story could explain his having made that specific claim. It seemed really unlikely that he could
have just made it up, or even that he could have reached this belief through a misunderstanding
of some true claim. So, what information was circulating out there? How had my disagreer
come to believe that over five hundred glaciers were growing, not shrinking?
This disagreement was an invitation to my epistemic improvement –and, strictly speaking,
to change my mind –not because it required me to make my view more congruent with my
disagreer’s, but because the way he disagreed gave me some provocative evidence about our
shared informational environment, evidence that invited (and possibly even obliged) further
inquiry. It told me something potentially important about false claims circulating in contexts
relevant to me, claims that were shaping the opinions of people with whom I occupy a neigh-
borhood, a polity, and a planet. As a result of the investigation, I learned an illustrative and
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entertaining background story about my golf partner’s claim, which turned out to be in wide
circulation on politically conservative websites.
Without going into details, I learned how extraordinarily low the bar could be set, in the
climate change denial community, for someone to be depicted as a scientist offering a scientif-
ically informed rejection of global warming. This knowledge conditioned my understanding
of appeals to individual expert skeptics regarding climate change, in my subsequent encounters
with them. It improved my capacity to manage such contexts of disagreement, because it added
perspective and detail to my understanding of appeals to dissident experts. And it served as a
higher-order caution to me, inspiring me to attend to signs indicating that I too might stand to
some proposition as my golf partner stood to the expanding glaciers claim: confidently gulled
by the ideological concordance of claims divorced from evidence and expertise. Some of this
valuable understanding was presaged in the character of the disagreement itself; the rest came
out of the investigation toward which the disagreement guided me.
In this concrete case of disagreement, epistemological significance resides in such factors
as the spread of information online, the cognitive interplay between ideology and scientific
understanding, and the politicized public uptake of science. Of course, in some other case, it
might be the effects of testimonial repetition on memory that matters most, or information
about possible content-related biases in my own reasoning that encodes some epistemically
significant property. All of these things and more are relevant in principle; what is relevant in
practice gets settled situationally.
Applied epistemology of disagreement, I am suggesting, begins with the disagreement scen-
ario itself, viewed without preconceptions about which of its features might be epistemically
significant, nor about what analytical perspective best brings those features into focus. The full
range of sociological, psychological, linguistic, historical, political, and for that matter geological
and meteorological factors could be relevant to the full range of epistemologically significant
factors: truth, reliability, justification, safety, sensitivity, or other elements represented in the dis-
agreement, its context, and its provenance.
2. Application denied

The Golfer’s Glaciers example might not even count as a case of the core phenomenon of
philosophical interest, as represented in most of the recent and rapidly expanding literature on
the epistemology of disagreement (EoD).1 That literature largely takes as its jumping-off point
a question along the lines of: Under what circumstances does someone’s disagreeing with you rationally
require you to change your belief?2 On the face of it, this question is itself a practical or applied one.
But it’s also quite a narrowly focused question, pushing aside cases in which one is not a dispu-
tant, or in which one is not rationally required to change one’s belief.
Why does EoD have this character? Partly it’s because philosophers love a good puzzle
or conundrum. Maybe we love puzzles a little too much, to be honest; I’ll suggest the cau-
tionary term grifomania to denote the tendency of a philosophical literature to quickly blow
up around a proposed conundrum, perhaps without much methodological reflection on its
coherence, its applicability to the phenomenon initially of interest, or the wisdom of making it
the focus of discussion.3 Anyhow, I love a good self-contained puzzle or paradox –and strictly
speaking there is nothing very paradoxical about what to believe in a disagreement scenario
marked by great asymmetries of evidence and epistemic capacity. At least from the perspec-
tive of the first-person normative question, Must I change my mind? such cases are boring,
because the answer will be utterly obvious. From this perspective, the juicy philosophical
puzzle and thus the phenomenon of philosophical interest seems to be the relatively slender
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Disagreement
class of cases in which there is disagreement without any obvious asymmetry: cases in which
the disagreers either believe themselves to be, or are known to be, epistemic peers with respect
to the topic, field, or belief at issue. The chief aim of EoD, so conceived, is to correctly and
generally theorize an individual’s rational obligations when confronted with the notional
core phenomenon of revealed peer disagreement.4 With appropriate allowances for oversimpli-
fication regarding a large and varied literature, this approach is largely the direction that the
EoD has actually gone.5
There may be considerable virtues to the resulting focus on first-person normative questions
in a context of persistent revealed peer disagreement. Anyhow, I will not argue that there aren’t
virtues to it. But I contend that for a fruitful applied epistemology of disagreement, we need a
somewhat different approach. We need to focus more on the particularities of specific contexts,
and especially on asymmetries between agents regarding the evidence they possess and their
situation-specific capacities to use that evidence to settle on true or reasonable views. Our
approach should regard these asymmetries not as complications that distract us from the core
phenomenon, but rather as among the core phenomena themselves. For applied purposes, the
many kinds and degrees of asymmetries (and believed asymmetries) of evidence or information,
and of cognitive or epistemic abilities, and how to discover and manage those asymmetries to
good epistemic effect, are what largely comprise the epistemological significance and interest of
particular cases of disagreement.
This puts me in the somewhat surprising position of holding that we don’t get an applied
epistemology of disagreement by applying the EoD. There is a nearly tautologous ring to the
proposal that to get Applied X you (1) take X and (2) apply it. In this case, we would take
the positions, concepts, and principles that epistemologists have widely used to characterize
disagreement as a kind, such as epistemic peerhood, steadfastness, conciliation, revealed peer disagree-
ment, independence, uniqueness, and so forth, and use these to identify, diagnose, and intervene in
particular cases. But these notions have been developed to investigate and to theorize mostly
frictionless scenarios of disagreement between peers of identical or very similar knowledge and
abilities.They are not especially oriented toward, and provide little purchase on, the illumination
or diagnosis of the full sweep of disagreement cases.
One manifestation of EoD’s orientation toward puzzling peer cases is its focus on general the-
ories of disagreement’s epistemic significance, described by Jennifer Lackey as the assumption of
“Uniformity” (2010a: 302).6 As David Christensen observes, this emphasis on general principles
is intertwined with EoD’s tendency to rely on simplified examples, and its resulting uncertain
relationship with applied cases:
The literature on disagreement has concentrated on artificially simple cases designed

to support or refute general principles governing the correct response to disagree-
ment; the hope is that this abstract understanding will throw light on how we should
react to controversial matters in philosophy and elsewhere. But it may be more diffi-
cult than it would seem to take this next step.
Christensen 2009: 765
An influential example of such an artificially simple case is Christensen’s own “Mental Math”
scenario: Suppose you and I agree to split a restaurant bill after adding an agreed percentage tip
to the bill amount, and then I find that we’ve come up with different answers to the question of
how much we each owe (Christensen 2007: 193). Suppose also that I think you’re both arith-
metically competent and in possession of the relevant information about the bill amount. Now
what should I do, what should I believe, in light of your disagreement?
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Tim Kenyon
We can answer in terms of two positions that have defined the most heavily discussed debate
in this literature. The conciliatory reply is that I should change my view, at least to some extent,
in light of your disagreement. The steadfast reply is that I should (or at least may) continue to
believe as I do, notwithstanding your disagreement.7 Christensen offers Mental Math as an illus-
tration of the virtues of conciliationism, since it seems that, at a minimum, your disagreement
should substantially weaken my confidence in my answer. This conclusion, he suggests, should
“generalize widely” to other cases and scenarios (2009: 757). But other examples, simplified in
different respects, make steadfastness seem compelling, especially scenarios that emphasize the
known reasonableness of my own belief-forming process, or higher-order evidence to the effect
that my interlocutor holds an outlier perspective.8
No steadfast theorist thinks that you should never change your mind in the face of disagree-
ment; and no conciliationist thinks that you should always change your mind.9 Epistemologists
have advocated versions of these positions in various strengths, and in quite different ways,
often noting that the context of disagreement and details of the cases are important factors.
Nevertheless, conciliationism in the first instance is a principle regarding the epistemological
significance of disagreement quite broadly; and steadfast theory, by dint of its opposition to
conciliationism, tends to a similarly general focus.
One consequence of this debate between two general approaches to the highly constrained
case of revealed peer disagreement is the outsized importance that a very few principles like
Uniqueness and Independence have assumed.
Uniqueness: For any given proposition and total body of evidence, the evidence fully
justifies exactly one level of confidence in the proposition.
Kelly 2010; Feldman 2007
Independence: In evaluating the epistemic credentials of another person’s belief about

P, to determine how (if at all) to modify one’s own belief about P, one should do so
in a way that is independent of the reasoning behind one’s own initial belief about P.
Christensen 2011
A simplified narrative is that conciliationists incline to conciliate because they hold both
Independence and Uniqueness, while steadfast theorists incline to stand pat because they deny
both. Certainly these proposed principles, correct or not, are relevant to the interpretation
of disagreements. But they have become relatively central to the literature, I suggest, because
they apply even to disagreements as imagined under conditions of strict epistemic peerhood.
Uniqueness, for example, bears on whether you are obliged to change your mind in the face
of disagreement even when you and your disagreer have exactly the same evidence. Because
conditions of significant epistemic asymmetry are factored out of the peer disagreement scen-
ario, the thin set of principles that do not directly implicate such asymmetries are promoted
from principles of some relevance to principles of central concern.
Even some work that is pessimistic about the promise of the Uniformity thesis still accepts
that a general theory of disagreement at least ought to be the aim of EoD. For example, John
Hawthorne and Amia Srinivasan observe that “there seems to be no single privileged answer to
the question, ‘What ought we to do, epistemically speaking, when faced with a disagreement?’ ”
Yet they describe this conclusion and its various consequences for EoD, respectively, as bleak
and bleaker.
This doesn’t follow, though. That there is no single privileged answer to the question, “What
ought we to do, epistemically speaking, when faced with a disagreement?” is no more surprising,
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Disagreement
and certainly no bleaker, than the idea that there is no single privileged answer to the question,
“What ought I to do, possession-wise, when somebody hands me something?” or “What ought
I to do, navigationally, when faced with a fork in the road?” It depends on whether I’m being
handed a cake or a cobra, and it depends where I’m trying to go. It’s not just relevant whether I’ve
been handed a cake or a cobra; it’s not a background consideration whether the leftmost road
takes me to the wrong destination. I think that there is just no substantive general answer to any
such question independent of the particular cake-or-cobra, Moncton-or-Vancouver details of
the various scenarios.That could only be a bleak prospect if we were committed to finding some
general account in the first place. From an applied perspective, there is no reason to expect this.
My thinking here is of a piece with Lackey’s (2010a, 2010b) justificationist view of dis-
agreement.10 Lackey points out the contribution of contextual justifications in a range of cases,
arguing that neither steadfastness nor conciliation is plausible as a general view of how to
interpret peer disagreement. What is general, Lackey observes, is a kind of meta-principle of
justification: in each case the right thing to do, doxastically speaking, is to believe what is
most strongly justified, all things considered. Lackey argues that her view helps explain why
conciliationism and steadfastness each gets some cases right. But she also correctly notes that
this impugns the general steadfastness-conciliationist debate. Justificationism says, roughly, that
what you should believe upon encountering disagreement is more or less what you should
believe upon encountering anything at all: whatever is most justified by all the considerations
available to you. This verges on the view that the epistemological significance of disagreement
only emerges with the details of cases. Using revealed peer assumptions to abstract away from
those details creates a significant barrier to an applied epistemology.
From an applied perspective, peerhood is something of a garden path. In part this is because,
as we have seen, peerhood functions in EoD as a condition on disagreement’s counting as epis-
temologically interesting, limiting (perhaps to as few as zero) the class of disagreements to which
the resulting theory applies. As Feldman and Warfield note:
In the stipulative sense of “peer” introduced, peers literally share all evidence and
are equal with respect to their abilities and dispositions relevant to interpreting that
evidence. Of course, in actual cases there will rarely, if ever, be exactly equality of evi-
dence and abilities. This leaves open questions about exactly how conclusions drawn
about the idealized examples will extend to real-world cases of disagreement.11
Feldman and Warfield 2010: 2
In part, though, it’s because the question of whether disagreers are epistemic peers is entangled
with more fundamental questions about the explanation for, and the significance of, their dis-
agreement. In context, a reasonable judgment about whether disagreers are peers in a relevant
sense will require investigating just the sort of factors that make disagreement epistemically
significant, rather than being an empirical background condition against which our analysis of
the disagreement takes place.
Peerhood is sometimes cashed out in terms of agents’ equiprobability of making true assertions
regarding a given domain (Konigsberg 2013: 97). But it is more often augmented with some
more specific reference to the possession of the same evidence, or equally good and extensive
evidence, and of equivalent reasoning capacities relative to that evidence. On the “puzzle of the
peers” approach to EoD, the satisfaction of known (revealed or acknowledged) epistemic peerhood
functions as a defining feature of the core phenomenon of interest. But in applied contexts, it is
obscure how we could determine the peerhood status of disagreers without already determining
most of what is epistemically interesting about the disagreement. I suggest that this is due not so
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Tim Kenyon
much to the variations of definition of epistemic peerhood already noted, nor the difficulties of
making precise such notions as “all the same evidence,” and “equality of abilities,” though these
are genuine concerns.12 Instead, it is because it’s typically unclear within a situation whether the
difference between interlocutors that explains their disagreement is a difference that bears on
their potential peerhood –however loosely defined –until we consider the details of the dis-
agreement and bring our full range of explanatory resources to bear on the question of epistemic
asymmetries in context. We could think of this in terms of inferentially proximal and inferentially
remote explanations for someone’s holding a belief with which we disagree.
Suppose we allow, first, that disagreeing about a proposition p is likely to involve disagreeing
about some of p’s inferential neighbors –call this the proximal case –but, second, that beliefs and
attitudes can also influence other beliefs and attitudes that are, at first blush, surprisingly topic-
ally isolated from them –the remote case. In the inferentially proximal case, disagreement about
p implicates disagreement also about beliefs in the domain of p-related expertise. For example,
suppose we disagree about the use of vaccines because we disagree also about the health effects
of tiny doses of thiomersal, and, in turn, about the extent to which corporate influence has
corrupted the medical science bearing on thiomersal. Now, if we disagree about this much in the
domain of vaccines, are we peers with respect to the domain? Plausibly we are not.13
But now consider the remote case in which we disagree about p owing to a disagreement
about something well beyond the domain of expertise specific to p. For instance, suppose we
disagree about the use of vaccines because we disagree about the value and desirability of col-
lective action motivated by public concerns, including for public health ends. Here we might
well be epistemic peers with respect to the domain of vaccines or vaccine safety. But then, in
this case, our being epistemic peers is unrelated to the diagnosis and illumination of the dis-
agreement at hand.
In both sorts of cases, we learn things by investigating the disagreement, and by reflecting on
its significance. But in the first sort of case we are not peers, even though we might seem at first
to be; and in the second sort of case, even if we are peers, our peerhood doesn’t really illuminate
the disagreement. Even if there turns out to be in-between cases in which the proximal inferen-
tial spread of disagreed-upon beliefs is consistent with a rough epistemic symmetry, the practical
import of peerhood in the applied case remains the same: judgments regarding peerhood will
be subordinate to more fine-grained judgments regarding what really explains or illuminates
the disagreement. The judgment that we are (relevant) peers is a conclusion, not a premise, in
our reasoning about an applied case.Whatever peerhood is doing here, it isn’t serving as a back-
ground constraint on which disagreements are and which are not epistemically significant; the
significance of the disagreement is not hostage to whether we decide, upon reflection, that we
could characterize the disagreement as occurring between peers.
The emphasis on peer disagreement as the chief philosophically interesting form of disagree-
ment moreover discourages us from focusing on the breadth of commonplace factors that break
the symmetry between disagreers. Our assessments of the relative credibility of parties in a dis-
pute should be based on an empirically informed attitude about the topic, the situation, and the
people involved. In the EoD literature, though, factors such as political or religious affiliations
are rarely explicitly treated as likely disrupters of epistemic peerhood (for reasons that may be
pro-social and collegial, given the frequent use of examples internal to philosophy, as discussed
below).
Consider another climate change example. A 2015 study of American public attitudes
regarding climate change found that whether respondents disagreed with the scientific con-
sensus was subject to framing effects that arose from seemingly minor variations in wording
or question- order. These influences were negligible for subjects identifying themselves as
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Democratic Party voters but were large among those identifying themselves as Republican
Party voters. For Republican partisans, otherwise trivial wording or ordering variations that
activated partisan self-identification increased the likelihood of disagreement with statements
about the reality of climate change or the need to take action to address it (Schuldt et al. 2015).
Other studies indicate that, for partisan Republican respondents, increased education levels
do not correlate with increased credence assigned to the proposition that climate change is
occurring. Some research even suggests that for highly partisan Republicans, higher education
levels correlate with slightly lower credence (Hamilton et al. 2015).
Assume for the sake of argument that these studies are published in reputable journals and
are of appropriate statistical power and methods. Once you are aware of them, what practicably
discoverable evidence could make it reasonable for you to think, in a context of disagreement
about whether the earth’s climate is changing rapidly due to human actions, that a comparably
clever, sincere, and informed Republican partisan is your epistemic peer for the purposes at hand?
Note that this needn’t have much to do with your own political affiliations. These studies pro-
vide both a partisan Democrat and a partisan Republican who accepts the scientific consensus on
climate change with grounds to believe that a partisan Republican who rejects the consensus is
simply displaying an ideological insensitivity to evidence. Yet taking this worry seriously, even
regarding it as a standing defeater of the hypothesis of epistemic symmetry in practice, does
not reduce the epistemological significance of the case. If anything, it deepens that significance,
emphasizing the sensitivity of evidential assessment to social identities, and the contingency of
disagreements that can, in the event, take the appearance of disputes rooted in context-neutral
argumentation. When we take such symmetry-breakers seriously, the prospect of peerhood’s
holding and being practically knowable is obscure.
A final note about peerhood in EoD and its tendency to gloss non-rational explanations
for disagreements: it has not always been well served by the choices of concrete examples.
Specifically, even when EoD has focused on applied cases, it has surprisingly often resorted to
self-referential examples of disagreements about philosophical questions, between living, named
interlocutors. This feature of the literature steers EoD away from applicability to other cases
because it predictably favors silence about symmetry-breaking factors crucial to the practical
evaluation of disagreements.
Again, empirically open contextual and theory-based explanations of disagreement typ-
ically include epistemic asymmetries arising from ignorance, bias, ideological commitments,
incapacity of some type and degree, and self-deception –factors that can be highly spe-
cific to the case at hand. By contrast, the impetus to consider symmetrical scenarios as the
core cases of philosophical interest gets a boost from the suggestion that actual philosophical
disputes, between the author and some named interlocutor, count as instances of such sym-
metry. This suggestion is buoyed by professional courtesy, personal modesty, collegiality, and
friendship rather than by a pure diagnostic spirit and frank empirical imagination. These con-
siderations (rightly, from a collegiality perspective) limit the conjectures one may commit to
print regarding other living philosophers’ dispositions to believe claims that one rejects for
good and articulable reasons.
Empirical conjectures of asymmetries between agents being critical elements of fertile
thinking about the significance of disagreement, it is a methodological risk to use examples
with built-in incentives to limit such conjectures. Robert Aumann (1976: 1238) follows his
influential proof of the Agree to Disagree result by noting that “even people who respect each
other’s acumen may ascribe to each other errors in calculating posteriors”; but it’s one thing
to think it, and another thing to publish it as an example regarding a named colleague. When
our theorizing about the significance of disagreement is constrained by the treatment we can
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pro-socially give to our touchstone examples, we have chosen our examples uncarefully and are
drawing a distorted map of the applied project.
3. Elements of an applied epistemology

One thing to note straightaway about applied epistemology of disagreement is that there is
already lots of it around, even though it does not always travel under that flag. For example,
Sandra Harding (2006) proposes a range of reasons for the long absence of Freudian and
Marxian epistemologies of ignorance from Anglo-American analytic philosophy in the twen-
tieth century. Whatever one’s views of Freudian or Marxian thought in general, both theorists
offer inherently applied takes on social epistemology, postulating that specifics of (respectively)
individual psychology and socioeconomic position can play a major role in shaping someone’s
evidence and their interpretations of evidence. To the extent that this shaping is intensely
epistemically relevant in contexts of disagreement, these psychological and structural approaches
to ignorance reflect applied epistemologies of disagreement, both with deep intellectual roots.
Similar remarks apply to a good deal of applied social epistemology that is well-established in
its own right, but which is rarely recognized or individuated as epistemology of disagreement
in particular. Concepts and explanations typical of these lines of inquiry might be very useful
in revealing a disagreement’s epistemic significance, as the notions of “substantive practices
of ignorance” and “socially acceptable but faulty justificatory practices” lend epistemological
clarity to the Golfer’s Glaciers disagreement case that opened my discussion (Alcoff 2007: 40).14
What emerges from these reflections on EoD, in any case, is a sort of diagnostic particularism
regarding disagreement in practice: we should expect actual cases of disagreement to display
epistemic significance in fairly unconstrained and singular ways, or combinations of ways, not
usefully predicted or explained by a single general theory of disagreement. What counts as
most epistemically significant in a particular case might be characterizable in terms no more
epistemologically specific than those of truth-conducivity, reliability, or justification. There are
epistemically charged tropes that will be realized in many different cases –the viral falsehood
with expert-seeming support; the momentary confusion; the slow assimilation of evidence; the
confident ignoramus; the immersion in internally consistent propaganda; the unnoticed ambi-
guity –but individual cases are apt to display many tropes, realized in many ways. An applied
social epistemology is one that goes about examining actual social situations with an openness
to finding anything comprising or conditioning epistemic significance in context. One ground-
breaking treatment along these lines is provided by Miriam Solomon (2014), who outlines the
single case of Sara G. as she ponders whether to have a screening mammogram as part of her
preventative health care, and then analyzes the case for practical epistemic significance from
eleven different socio-epistemic perspectives.
Yet some tools in the applied epistemology toolkit can, after all, be drawn from the EoD lit-
erature. Two examples stand out here. First, the prospect of faultless disagreement is broached in
recent EoD in a few ways, including under the label of the Uniqueness Thesis, described earlier.This
view is associated with conciliationism in EoD, since it rules out one key rationale for holding
fast in one’s belief: that one’s disagreer’s being right doesn’t imply one’s being wrong.15 A lot of
fairly technical debate has focused on the implications of Uniqueness; but the basic point at least
draws our attention to the practical relevance of faultless disagreements.The significance of a dis-
agreement and the response it calls for are partial functions of whether at least one disagreer must
be mistaken. In practical terms, the question of which person is right in a dispute over whether
smashing a watermelon with a sledgehammer is inherently funny, or whether strawberries taste
better than blueberries, or which are the top ten philosophy departments, is subordinate to the
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question of whether there is something to be right about in each case. Such disagreements might
still be epistemically rich in their details, considering the reasons given, or reasons confabulated,
and why. But the prosecution of the discussion as if to settle on a right answer falls somewhere
between wasteful and sophomoric. Practical guidance linked to EoD: don’t attempt to settle a
disagreement without considering whether it is conceptually amenable to genuine settling.
Epistemic peerhood, I suggest, is another notion that could be repurposed for an applied
epistemology of disagreement. In particular, it can be used to sharpen our reasoning about
what, if anything, distinguishes the epistemic positions (capacities, biases, evidence) of various
interlocutors. Understood in this way, it is a default starting point from which to chart
epistemically interesting asymmetries between disagreers in encountering or just in analyzing
disagreements. It can be as highly idealized as one wishes, in this role, because it is treated expli-
citly as a heuristic, perhaps a Weberian ideal type, and not as an empirical background condition
of the core cases of disagreement. Practical guidance linked to EoD: we may hypothesize plaus-
ible sources of epistemic asymmetries by envisioning the idealized case of peer symmetry and
considering ways in which that symmetry is broken in the real case at hand.
In practice, disagreement carries epistemic weight not simply through the fact that parties
disagree, but through the way they do it. Suppose that Lee is a graduate student working on
issues of international politics, whom I’ve never met but have seen occasionally and heard a bit
about. One day I do meet Lee, though, and during this meeting I assert “Military drone attacks
on civilians violate international law.” Lee disagrees. What epistemic significance should our
disagreement hold for me?
The unsurprising answer: it all depends. Notice that the situation as I have described it is
consistent with either of the following scenarios (among many others):
A: Lee and I eventually get introduced in a reading group on international military law,
the politics of which Lee is studying for their PhD. In this group I assert, “Drone
attacks on civilians violate international law,” and Lee replies that this is an intuitively
plausible claim but ultimately incorrect.
B: Lee is at a rally in support of a political leader who frequently authorizes drone strikes
on civilians, while I am at that rally as a protester, holding a sign that reads, “Drone
attacks on civilians violate international law.” Lee and several friends notice my sign
when they look my direction, and Lee’s friends cheer as Lee shouts at me, “No way,
no way!”
In both cases, we could say that Lee disagrees with me, in the sense of having a relatively stable
psychological commitment to the legality of that leader’s drone strikes.We can moreover say that
in both cases Lee has disagreed with me, in the sense of having performed an act of disagreement.
But the epistemic significance I assign to these two performances may be very different in the
two cases, even if Lee’s general evidence and doxastic commitments are the same in both. The
context of the second makes it far more reasonable for me to see Lee’s denial as expressing a tribal
identity than to think that it reflects an informed insight. Even if I felt some confidence that Lee
possessed the raw materials of such an insight in the second case, the context undermines the
sense that they have brought their best critical judgment to bear at that moment.
To put it in a slogan: disagreement is informative partly because disagreements are performa-
tive. They are acts situated in contexts, performed for reasons that are typically path-dependent
or otherwise contingent on local circumstance. The significance of a dispute over how to split
a restaurant bill, for example, is shaped by the practical need for a quick resolution, since the
party can’t leave the restaurant until the bill is paid. More generally, too, the mere fact that an
assertion has been made typically carries with it some obligation to retract or defend the claim
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in the face of counterargument. (While some philosophers have argued that this is definitional
of the practice of assertion, one needn’t accept that view in order to think it’s characteristic of
assertions.) Contexts of disagreement in which this obligation is felt sufficiently strongly pro-
voke the giving of reasons; and the giving of reasons is a practice that can have unpredictably
informative effects on all parties.
Socio-epistemic due diligence in response to a disagreement might start off pro forma, with
little expectation of changing minds, and yet end up substantially shifting one or more of
the disagreers’ views –perhaps in ways that don’t easily answer to EoD terminology. If I’m
a committed Presbyterian having a doctrinal disagreement with a Baptist, the considerations
raised as I ponder the disagreement can move me instead to Anglicanism, or even to atheism;
my options go far beyond just standing pat on Presbyterianism or becoming a Baptist. In such
a case, I genuinely change my mind on the contested question, and I do it because of the dis-
agreement, but I do not conciliate or conform with my disagreer’s position.These terms provide an
awkwardly one-dimensional lexicon to describe sideways moves.
The uptake and assimilation of evidence through disagreement takes place over extended
time scales in actual cases, moreover. In practice, our understanding of a disagreement is con-
ditional on the time period or events that we want to explain in relation to the disagreement.
For example, here is a thing that has happened to me many times, on matters both normative
and empirical: I have a verbal disagreement with someone; they present arguments, or even just
a point of view, which I find unconvincing; I defend my current belief on the matter and leave
the discussion with my stated views unchanged. Steadfastness triumphant! Except that the next
time I discuss that issue with someone else, perhaps months or even years later, what I hear
coming out of my mouth are the arguments and viewpoints of the person with whom I’d ini-
tially disagreed. (A realization accompanied by a phenomenology best summarized as Huh! Well,
I’ll be.) Conciliation confirmed! I would be astonished if this sort of experience were unique to
me, or even particularly rare. I expect that belief revision arising from disagreement is typically
less Road to Damascus and more Train across Ontario: slow, halting, uneven, and best done in
an unconscious state.
Am I steadfast after all, in such a delayed revision case, or am I conciliationist? Plausibly I am
both, depending on what we are interested in explaining. If the conversation was about which
political party best represents my stated values, and it took place the day before an election in
which I voted Party A in spite of my disagreer’s Party B arguments, then for the purposes of
that election, I was steadfast. If I came around to accepting her arguments within a week, and
then voted Party B for the rest of my life, then for the purposes of explaining my general voting
dispositions relative to that disagreement, I was conciliatory. In application, our explanatory
interests on any given occasion co-determine the epistemic properties of a disagreement, by
determining how widely we carve up the context to capture doxastic changes related to the
communicative exchange itself.
4. Conclusion: epistemic conduct and epistemic design

The focus of EoD has largely been on the first-person normative question already noted, the
What should I do or believe? approach. Call this the question of epistemic conduct. It concerns the
identification and satisfaction of my personal rational obligations when encountering someone
who disagrees with me.Yet an applied epistemology of disagreement also implicates issues of epi-
stemic design: issues of theoretical analysis and practical intervention, such as how to epistemically
evaluate situations in which other people disagree; how to individuate contexts of disagree-
ment, how to prepare for disagreements; how to teach about them; how to structure situations
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in advance of them; and generally how to enable disagreement to be a truth-conducive or

reasonableness-preserving process for those involved in it, in contexts ranging from university
classrooms to locker rooms, from aircraft flight decks to kitchen tables at mealtime. In this sense,
experts on how to prepare and structure successful business negotiations, in light of known
barriers, have for many years been working in the applied epistemology of disagreement (e.g.,
Keltner and Robinson 1993), as have educators exploring the use of structured formal debating
as a tool for developing epistemic virtues or critical thinking skills (e.g., Goodwin 2003).
Following EoD, I have been focusing mainly on applied questions of epistemic conduct. Yet
both epistemic conduct and epistemic design in disagreement ought to draw on the widest range
of theoretical and empirical resources. In both domains, the idea is to focus first on the details of
disagreements themselves, considered in light of some fairly general epistemological concepts.We
should first attend to the relevant features of disagreements in context –cognitive, affective, social,
linguistic, institutional –and ask which factors promote and which impede the disputants’ settling
on knowledge or justified beliefs, or their developing epistemically virtuous habits or characters.
An applied epistemology of disagreement appeals to these high-level and general concepts of epi-
stemic felicity and infelicity to reveal how specific features of particular cases implement (or fail to
implement) the epistemic properties that interest us.The widest range of diagnostic resources may
be invoked to illuminate the contextual factors that promote accuracy or error, that guide belief
and action, and that enable interventions in the service of epistemic improvements.
With respect to epistemic design, these principles can play out in many ways. We might pay
special attention to the prospect that prejudices of race, gender, age, ability or class are distorting
or defeating influences on our credibility judgments in some contexts of disagreement; and we
could seek methods to neutralize such distortions (Fricker 2007: 122). We could attend to the
language pragmatics of disagreements to determine how conversational turn-taking or different
kinds of oppositional expressions help or hinder the flow of information that can improve
disputants’ epistemic states (Georgakopoulou 2001). And empirical work on social cognition
could reveal ways in which even resolvable or minor disputes can intensify into deeply polarized
affairs for reasons that do not track the truth or justification of either position, disrupting the
accurate attribution of beliefs and motives between disagreers (Kenyon 2014).
With commercial media and social media fostering increasingly tribalized and disjoint
understandings of even the most straightforward factual matters, polarized opinions and sys-
tematically skewed judgments are likely to become greater barriers to informative disagreement.
The scientific study and practical development of personal and situational interventions that
can mitigate distortive biases in disagreement fits squarely within the scope of applied epistemic
design for disagreement. Some such debiasing strategies might be pitched at the individual level,
through education for habits of thought and decision-making that make for truth-conducive
disagreements (Madva 2016). Others might be situational, shaping the contexts of reasoning
in ways that promote sound reasoning (Thaler and Sunstein 2007; Beaulac and Kenyon 2018).
Issues of epistemic design may well turn out to be the most practically important applications of
epistemology to contexts of disagreement. If they do, this will represent a significant departure
from much of the epistemology of disagreement as developed thus far.16
Notes
1 I use ‘EoD’ to denote the epistemology of disagreement, in the sense of the non-applied extant literature
on the topic. In the closing section of the paper, I note some extant applied epistemology of disagree-
ment as well.
2 I take this to be practically equivalent to formulations that emphasize belief retention, like Ernest Sosa’s
(2010: 278): “when and how can a belief be sustained reasonably in the face of known disagreement?”
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3 See David Lewis’s remark on (seeming) paradoxes of nuclear deterrence in highly idealized scenarios: “I
am afraid that because paradoxical deterrence is philosophically fascinating, it will be much discussed;
and because it is much discussed, it will be mistaken for reality” (1999: 211). James Chase kindly alerted
me to Lewis’s comments.
4 Cf. John Hawthorne and Amia Srinivasan (2013: 9), and Jennifer Lackey (2010a: 299).
5 In so doing, it has nevertheless become more applied and less idealized than some of the results in game
theory and probability that partially motivate it. For example, Robert Aumann’s Agree to Disagree
theorem precludes (stable) disagreement between agents with respect to some proposition P when
their posterior probabilities for P are common knowledge; but this rests on the assumption, extraor-
dinarily powerful by normal human standards, of identical priors between agents and perfect rationality
(Aumann 1976).
6 Recent dissenting views from this approach include Feldman (2009), Enoch (2010), and Worsnip
(2014).
7 Steadfastness is defended in various respects by writers including Kelly (2005), van Inwagen (2010),
Bergmann (2009), and Enoch (2010). Defenses of conciliationism are offered by Christensen (2007,
2011, 2013), Elga (2007, 2010), Pittard (2015), and Feldman (2007).
8 Conciliationism in particular is a heterogeneous family of positions, since there are many more ways
of changing one’s mind than there are ways of not changing it. Adopting your interlocutor’s position
outright; assigning your position and your interlocutor’s position equal weight; adopting a position
that is (in some appropriate sense) “halfway” between your initial view and your interlocutor’s view;
taking a strictly agnostic position; moving from belief in your position to some weaker pro-doxastic
attitude toward it; and continuing to believe your position but with less confidence: all of these (pos-
sibly overlapping) approaches may count as conciliationist views of the appropriate response to peer
disagreement. Conciliationism is sometimes depicted in stricter terms than these, however, including
by Lackey (2010a: 275) and Konigsberg (2013: 107).
9 See, for example, Christensen & Lackey (2013: 1); Feldman & Warfield (2010: 4).
10 Kelly’s Total Evidence View (2010) shares some of these features.
11 See also Nathan King (2012), who observes that true peerhood would be both very rare, and difficult
for disagreers to recognize. Others, like Lackey, hold that it suffices to talk about “ordinary disagree-
ment,” taking place between agents who are “roughly epistemic peers” (2010a: 304).
12 “Equality of abilities,” moreover, comes close to invoking an empirically dubious notion of general
intelligence; this is also the case with the idea of “equally philosophically talented” peers (Weatherson
2013).
13 I take this example to be similar to, though less extreme than, Elga’s case of Ann and Beth, who disagree
about a clutch of issues related to abortion (2007: 492–93).
14 A case of ignorance that might equally be understood as both reliable and pernicious, in Kristie Dotson’s
use of the terms (Dotson 2011).
15 The possibility of such disagreements has been taken to follow from a range of factors: for instance,
a domain of discussion (matters of taste, say) characterized by a relativist truth predicate that permits
them (Wright 1992; Kölbel 2003); or uttered claims that reflect attitudes less committal than belief
(Huvenes 2014); or the potential for complex evidential states to support a range of incompatible
propositions with equal non-demonstrative force; or an interval of equally justified confidence levels
toward a single proposition (Kelly ). See also Ballantyne’s discussion of verbal disagreements, in particular
the prospect that many philosophical disputes are not genuine (2016).
16 For helpful insights and corrections on earlier drafts and presentations, I am grateful to Nathan
Ballantyne, James Chase, Shannon Dea, David DeVidi, Catherine Elgin, Klaas Kraay, Kirk Lougheed,
Myron Penner, and the participants in my 2017 Applied Social Epistemology seminar at the University
of Waterloo.
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FORECASTING
Steve Fuller
1. Foundational epistemological issues in forecasting

Forecasting is a kind of applied epistemology oriented toward the future, whose core activity is
prediction. I shall take the significance of prediction and the future in turn.
Why is prediction an epistemically significant activity at all? No one doubts that it is fun,
and sometimes lucrative, to predict the winners of games and elections and to place bets at a
casino or invest in the stock market. But beyond the entertainment value –the long-term psy-
chological effects of which should never be underestimated –predictions serve three epistemic
functions.
The first is to enhance the brain’s normal operating procedure. Specifically, predictions force
us to simulate a state of the actual world, specifically a future that is sufficiently distant from the
present that it is, strictly speaking, unknowable. This provides a qualified challenge to how we
normally register the world, which is as a horizon of possibilities that are realized to varying
degrees as we move through space and time, always being updated in light of external cues.
This fluidity in the horizon of our prospects in turn helps to explain the ease with which our
memory and imagination change. Egon Brunswik, the Viennese (later Berkeley-based) psych-
ologist who was the closest fellow traveler of the logical positivists, took this fluidity as the
foundational insight of his discipline (Hammond and Stewart 2001). However, more recent
neural network-based models of the brain have conferred on Brunswik’s sense of fluidity a
more explicit sense of fallibility. Through a combination of genetic front-loading and prior
experience, the brain is now seen as programmed to presume that the world is more predictable
than it really is. As if in vindication of Karl Popper, what we normally call “learning” consists
mainly in error correction, a continuous process of compensating for our default sense of an
overdetermined world (Clark 2016). Put another way, the mistakes that we routinely make in
the sort of medium-to-long-term predictions involved in forecasting help to improve the brain
at the very thing that it appears designed to do.
The second epistemic function of predictions is to remind us that we are in the world that
we think about. Predictions are specific public events that do not enjoy the luxury of accom-
modating the full range of worldviews that people normally carry around in their heads. Those
worldviews, when treated as private entertainments, are easily adjusted in light of events in
which those entertaining them have no personal investment. But predictions demand just such
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investments. Hence, they potentially exact unwelcomed costs to one’s wealth, reputation, or
friends, regardless of the truth of the prediction itself. The figure of Cassandra in Greek myth-
ology springs to mind as someone who both won (accuracy) and lost (reputation) by making a
prediction. In other words, those who are inclined to issue predictions –even when they predict
an impending catastrophe which should be stopped from happening –are revealing their own
openness to personal risk. A culture that encourages people to make predictions is inherently
proactionary, which means that it subordinates the fate of the predictor herself to the potential
benefit to society that comes from her having made the prediction, regardless of its outcome.
Arguably it is just such a cultural sensibility that has enabled science to make as much progress
as it has, which many precautionary thinkers consider in retrospect to have been reckless (Fuller
and Lipinska 2014).
The third epistemic function of predictions also derives from their public character. Because
predictions are events experienced by predictors, their clients, and interested onlookers,
preparations of various sorts can be made in the run-up to a prediction’s outcome, aimed at
either facilitating or impeding prediction’s accuracy. Although professional forecasters may be
loath to admit it, predictions may even be said to license, if not authorize these activities. Here
we enter the realm of what Robert Merton (1968) originally called “self-fulfilling” and “self-
defeating” prophecies. Although Merton and others have cast these prophecies as “pathologies”
of prediction, the label fails to do justice to their rationality. After all, they involve exactly the
same recognition of the co-dependency of prediction and outcome that motivates scientists to
construct “crucial experiments” and other “test cases,” which serve to force the outcome of a
prediction to appear in a timely manner within certain preconceived constraints –something
that probably would not have happened had the scientists not been keen to obtain a decisive
result, one way or the other. Indeed, Francis Bacon may well have been correct to see in experi-
mental science a protocol for expediting the pace at which nature reveals its secrets to humans,
namely, by the systematic priming of both humans and nature to specifically crafted outcomes.
As for forecasting’s orientation to the future, my opening definition stressed that forecasting
is only one way to be oriented to the future, since there are other ways which would make
forecasting unadvisable, if not impossible. These other orientations would be guided by one or
more of the following propositions: (1) The future is in principle unknowable, perhaps because
it does not (yet) exist, and one can only know that which exists. (2) The future is already known
to be different in all respects from the past and present, perhaps due a fundamental indeter-
minacy in nature, to which human free will contributes significantly. (3) The interaction effects
between prediction and outcome are so entangled that every forecast generates unintended
consequences that are bound to do more harm than good.
The above three propositions are arguably mutually reinforcing –certainly (2) and (3) are.
What they share is a belief that our presence as an epistemic agent is of little help –if not down-
right counterproductive –to our “grasp” of the future, be it understood cognitively or practic-
ally. Much of “therapeutic” philosophy from the Hellenistic period onward (e.g., Epicureans,
Skeptics) has been an accommodation to the prospect that many –if not most –of our cherished
beliefs and desires will turn out to be false or not live up to expectations. In this sort of world,
forecasting is a futile activity that is bound to lead to just more personal misery. In that case, one
should learn to cope with whatever happens in the future, not to try to predict, prevent, or pro-
mote it in any way. Indeed, that would be the ultimate lesson that the therapeutic philosophers
draw from Cassandra’s fate.
So what sort of metaphysics is required for forecasting to be possible? Three basic conditions
need to be in place: (1) The future is sufficiently like the past and present that it makes sense
to speak of “learning” from the past and present in order to “inform” our understanding of the
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future. (2) The agents responsible for bringing about and inhabiting the future are sufficiently
like us that the terms of our forecast would be something recognizable (and perhaps even
welcomed) to them. (3) Reality is not so indeterminate that it would be impossible to tell after
the fact whether –or by how much –a forecast has turned out to be right or wrong.
Of course, even granting the above three conditions, it does not follow that forecasting is easy
or even likely to succeed. Arguably the success of chance-based wealth producing institutions –
from insurance companies to casinos and lotteries –is testimony to people being at once both
well-disposed and ill-equipped to make forecasts, not least when they implicate their own fate.
Much of this may be explained in terms of what social psychologists call the “fundamental attri-
bution error,” whereby people overestimate the significance of their intentions in explaining
their own success, while overestimating the significance of “chance” in explaining the success
of others (Nisbett and Ross 1980).
However, even if one takes into account the various cognitive liabilities that can affect
forecasting, there remain at least three fundamentally different approaches to the dynamics of
lived time that can affect the forecaster’s judgments of a plausible future. These are best under-
stood as alternative interpretations of the expression, “legacy of the past”:
(A) The past provides a cumulative load on the prospects for the future through the sheer repetition of
its presence over a long period. This is the idea behind “straight rule induction,” which says
we should expect the sun should rise tomorrow simply because it rose yesterday. A more
sophisticated, second-order version is “trend extrapolation,” whereby we assume that the
rate at which things have been changing for a long time will continue into the indefinite
future. But whether we imagine that the past’s “cumulative load” is borne by our genes, our
memory, our behavior, or even some invariance in nature beyond our direct control (e.g.,
the reliability of sunrise), the transmission process itself may allow for non-trivial changes
(“mutations”) over time which could decisively alter the projected outcomes.
(B) The hold of the past on our future prospects diminishes over time, unless the past is actively maintained.
Unlike (A), here the past is not conceptualized as the original and continuing agent of
history. Rather, it is treated as an increasingly distant if attractive place, any connection
to which requires “institutions” understood as indefinitely binding social arrangements
whereby successive generations of individuals occupy roles which together uphold the rele-
vant values that were established in an ever-receding past. Against this backdrop, charges of
corruption are significant because they call into question the integrity of the transmission
process. In late medieval law, the term universitas (“corporation”) was coined to capture
such institutions, which originally applied to churches, universities, and cities –and much
later to business firms. However, the key modern application has been to the state, under-
stood as that artificial person whom Hobbes dubbed “Leviathan.” This entity is explicitly
committed to a sense of constancy (and hence the common Greco-Latin root of “state”
and “static” in stasis) over time, a sense of perpetuity that simulates on Earth the sense of
eternity that only God possesses.
(C) The past is a repository of possible futures only some of which are realizable at any given time. This
suggests the idea of “paths not taken,” which may be revisited in a future that in relevant
respects resembles an earlier decision-making moment –yet where the circumstances are
now sufficiently different to militate a different path to be followed. Presupposed here is
that there are always many competing futures at any point in time, and the one which
prevails is contingent and hence potentially –if not easily –reversible.This is another angle
on the idea that the present needs to be actively maintained because it will not necessarily
persist into the future. But here the reason is the presence of other possibilities vying for
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realization. This in turn gives the status quo its authoritarian cast, and institutions appear
not only to promote the status quo against degeneracy but also to suppress any alternatives
from flourishing.
2. The tension between the art and science of forecasting:

the case of Philip Tetlock
US-based political psychologist Philip Tetlock is perhaps the leading contemporary student
of “expert political judgment,” by which he mainly means forecasting of the sort practiced
by pundits and pollsters as well as professional politicians and policymakers (esp. Tetlock
2005; Tetlock and Gardner 2015). The epistemological upshot of his work is to challenge the
time-honored distinction between political judgment and political science, or more generally, the
experienced practitioner and the theoretically informed scientist. To be sure, the distinction
between political judgment and political science has been drawn at different times, on different
grounds, and to different effect. For example, Plato’s “political science” might be read as aiming
to transcend the volatility of opinion in which Aristotle’s conception of “political judgment”
later swam (and arguably rendered a virtue, given the value Aristotle placed on rhetoric).
However, as an academic discipline called “political science” emerged in the twentieth century
that self-consciously modeled itself on the methods of the natural sciences, “political judgment”
became increasingly consigned to that amalgam of tradition-cum-personal experience that has
been often mystified as “tacit knowledge.” In terms of this divide, Tetlock operates on the
assumption that anything epistemologically worthy of the name “political judgment” is ultim-
ately a species of applied political science. In other words, politicians and political scientists are
engaged in the same sorts of fallible yet corrigible cognitive processes, albeit subject to rather
different time and resource constraints.
To appreciate this perspective, consider failed predictions that are “almost right” (but wrong)
versus “almost wrong” (but right). Tetlock (2005) treats the former as self-justifying defensive
responses to predictive failure and the latter as the presumptive epistemic state of most pre-
dictive successes. In effect, Tetlock holds all political predictors guilty of systemic error, until
proven otherwise, because by playing on the ambiguous epistemic space between “almost right”
and “almost wrong,” it is easy to leave the impression that one is exactly right. For example,
one of the best publicized “successful” social scientific predictions of recent times, namely, the
collapse of the Soviet Union, was made in 1978 by the U.S. sociologist Randall Collins (1995).
On closer inspection, the prediction turns out to be both “almost right” and “almost wrong”
but in any case, not exactly right. While Collins’s general theoretical model was vindicated in
that he predicted that the tipping point would come from social movements mobilizing around
dissenting elites, it failed to assign a specific role to the media in expediting this mobilization.
Thus, a process that Collins, on the basis of past revolutions, had predicted would take thirty to
fifty years ended up happening in a little more than a decade.
Chapter one of Tetlock (2005) provides a set of compelling reasons for not trusting correct
predictions of any sort. After all, anyone who predicts regularly is bound to hit a few targets –
and if you predict the same target long enough, you are bound to hit that one. In these cases,
one should be looking for the predictor’s success/failure ratio. There is also the methodo-
logical problem of deciding exactly what had been predicted and whether it actually occurred.
Unless one is predicting a specific outcome in an independently determined process, such as an
election result, one may be faced with a hopelessly moving target, as predictors rationally recon-
struct both their initial and final knowledge states. Finally, Tetlock interestingly suggests that
successful predictions may be based on normatively dubious forms of knowledge that involve
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insider information, torture, and coercion, or quite simply, models of the human condition that
capitalize on deep-seated “irrational” tendencies that we might otherwise wish to minimize or
eliminate in the future.
Tetlock’s gold standard of political judgment combines the two leading philosophical the-
ories of truth, correspondence and coherence. Thus, one predicts the right outcomes and for the
right reasons. On the one hand, the predictor must do better than being “right but almost
wrong,” in that she must have a coherent causal account of why an event should have occurred,
not just the simple claim that it would occur. On the other hand, the predictor must do better
than being “wrong but almost right,” in that her conceptually sound model must also capture
specific actual outcomes. This is the context for understanding Tetlock’s appropriation of the
contrast first popularized by Erasmus of the fox and the hedgehog, the former knowing many
little things and the latter one big one. Foxy predictors are always on the verge of incoherence,
while the hedgehogs fail on strict accuracy.
The value of crystallizing political judgment as the ability to predict the right thing for the
right reasons is that it forces you to confront the modal structure of your worldview, not least
the amount of control that you ascribe to the agents populating it. Instead of parsing the diffe-
rence between hedgehogs and foxes in terms of the number of things that they “know,” one
might say that foxes operate with what I have called an underdetermined worldview, one that
allows for many reversals of fate, whereas hedgehogs adopt an overdetermined worldview that
posits a dominant tendency onto which all paths ultimately converge (Fuller 2015: Chap. 6).
Foxes see hidden triggering conditions to a new order where hedgehogs detect only tem-
porary interference to the main narrative flow. Much of this boils down to historical stand-
point: Those for whom politics consists of lurching from one election to the next tend to
behave like foxes, whereas hedgehogs are more likely to see politics as long-term movements of
social transformation. Much of the authority that hedgehogs command in the media –some-
thing that Tetlock bemoans –may be attributed to their ability to speak as if their worldview is
destined to triumph and hence they focus mainly on explaining how exactly that is supposed
to happen. They make up for their predictive inaccuracy by personifying the future they would
see come about. In that case, as we shall see, it may be wiser to follow Machiavelli than Erasmus
and regard not the hedgehog but the lion as the species best placed to oppose the fox.
Improving political judgment in order to improve political forecasts and to improve the con-
duct of public life are two distinct goals. Each is difficult in its own way, the latter perhaps more
so.Tetlock wants to achieve both. On the one hand,Tetlock supports the cultivation of intellec-
tual virtue in the punditry, to improve the rigor in what he takes to be ultimately applied polit-
ical science. On the other hand, would the conduct of public life really be improved if pundits
were nudged to issue more accurate predictions, to own up to their failures, and to update their
beliefs in ways that conform to the probability axioms and Bayes’ theorem? The answer is not
clear, mainly due to lack of evidence about the consequences of such changes.
Consider a more modest policy to improve the conduct of public life that does not require
any instruction of the punditry: a careful media record of pundits’ success ratio. Even if this
policy would improve public life, would it be the result of people gravitating to the pundits
with better track records –or might they respond perversely? For example, a string of “near
miss” predictions by one of Tetlock’s dogmatic hedgehogs might spur those resonant to her
message to transform the political-economic order in ways that serve to increase the hedgehog’s
future predictive accuracy. In other words, false predictions can be interpreted as evidence for
a systematically suppressed reality that deserves full expression –perhaps in the spirit of (C)’s
account of a plausible future horizon in the first section. We normally think of self-fulfilling
and self-defeating prophecies as resulting from the prior announcement of a prediction that then
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triggers actions contributing to its fulfillment or defeat. But what about a self-avenging prophecy
inspired by the attractiveness of the alternative reality inferred from a string of false predictions?
At this point, we need to add to Tetlock’s political menagerie. The fox has had many foils –
not only Erasmus’s hedgehog but also Machiavelli’s lion: The lion rules by focused shows of
force, as opposed to the fox’s diverse displays of cunning. Whereas the fox cajoles and adapts,
often with the net effect of dissipating its energies, the lion is inclined simply to eliminate
opponents who stand in its way. In that respect, the lion extends the hedgehog’s explanatory
idée fixe into an explicit political strategy, as, say, when a Marxist academic crosses the line from
possessing a hegemonic theory to becoming a politician possessed by a hegemonic ideology.
Tetlock’s failure to take the full measure of leonine politics can be seen in his conclusion
that hedgehogs fare better in static environments and foxes in more dynamic ones (Tetlock
2005: 251). He presumes that both political animals simply adapt to the world –albeit each in its
own inimitable way –rather than create new opportunities, let alone recover lost ones intimated
in their failed predictions.This reflects Tetlock’s treatment of political judgments as, to recall the
old speech act jargon, “constatives” rather than “performatives” (Austin 1962). In other words,
his concern is exclusively with whether the judgments match up against their target referents
rather than with whatever consequences might flow from the very making of those judgments.
Thus, Tetlock may be guilty of misreading the mass media’s preference for pundits who are
hedgehogs rather than foxes. These hedgehogs may be lions in disguise, making predictions that
are meant to be interventions either to reinforce or subvert existing political tendencies. Here
the media may be less reporting politics than providing an alternative channel for its conduct.
From this standpoint,Tetlock’s own disruptive research constitutes a countermove, one designed
precisely to inhibit the hedgehog’s more leonine tendencies by luring pundits from their epi-
stemic comfort zones to reveal the limits of their expertise. Of the two species of pundit,Tetlock
clearly prefers the fox, not least because its more self-consciously limited horizons give it less
capacity for causing lasting damage.
Successful experts understand the conceptual limits within which they should operate. Like
Socrates, they know what they do not know. However, much of Tetlock’s work is designed to
nudge experts outside their epistemic comfort zone, effectively getting them to relax their self-
discipline. While Tetlock sees himself as probing the limits of expert knowledge, he is arguably
destroying expertise, or at least violating one of its essential preconditions by supposing that an
expert in a given field should display a uniform competence in judging all matters logically and
counterfactually related to that field –and not simply the range of matters on which the expert
would normally be expected to pass judgment.
Tetlock is most explicit on this point when he asks experts to unpack possible futures in
terms of finer-grained outcomes, only to discover (perhaps unsurprisingly) that they manage
to confer on these specific possibilities greater plausibility than their original judgments of the
more generally stated outcomes would logically permit (Tetlock 2005: 189–218). An experi-
ment of this sort reflects Tetlock’s implicit understanding of judgment as applied science –that
is, the translation of knowledge of potentially universal scope to specific cases. Thus, as Tetlock
admits, the hedgehogs are better prepared than the foxes to parry what he calls “close-call”
counterfactual scenarios, in which small perturbations in real conditions would have led to quite
different outcomes. Hedgehogs tend to stick to their original predictive frameworks and explain
away counterfactuals as “exceptions that prove the rule” or as products of overactive imagin-
ations or unlikely factors, whereas the foxes are more easily led to admit many more realistic
possible outcomes than their theories would seem to allow (2005: 212–13).
The difference seems to be that hedgehogs are firmly anchored in the paradigm cases of their
expertise, whereas foxes are always playing with the limiting cases, making them better able to
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capture the nuances in real-world situations but also more easily disoriented when the divide
separating the actual and possible worlds is blurred or erased, as when asked by the experi-
menter to consider close-call counterfactuals. In a sense, the foxes treat the extra imagination
required to specify possible outcomes as if it constituted additional evidence for the likelihood
of those outcomes.
Tetlock’s (2003) research into “thinking the unthinkable” provides a backdrop against which
to understand his approach to the limits of expertise. When experts are asked to make fine-
grained judgments about alternative pasts or futures, they are often forced to entertain, in his
jargon, taboo cognitions, which is to say, that they must trade off a “sacred” against a “secular”
value. In the case of experts, the sacred value violated in Tetlock’s (2005) scenarios amounts to
the boundary surrounding an expert’s sphere of discretion. The secular experimental setting
induces the expert to overstep that boundary, resulting in judgments that effectively humiliate
the expert, perhaps even if they turn out to be correct. In that case, some follow-up action –
what Tetlock calls “moral cleansing” –is needed to re-establish the expert’s authority, evidence
for which can be found among both foxes and especially hedgehogs, who are inclined to accuse
the experimenter of impertinence, if not outright deception, in having got them to relax their
normal standards of probative judgment, in particular what is either impossible or inevitable.
3. Superforecasting and the psychology of the resilient forecaster

Tetlock has recently introduced the concept of superforecasting for forecasters who seem to
have a better than average track record at predicting complex events. His key insight is derived
from Baron Helmuth von Moltke (1800–1891), the mastermind behind the newly unified
Germany’s victory over France in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 and popular icon of
Bismarck’s Realpolitik (Tetlock and Gardner 2015: Chap. 10). For Moltke, effective military
strategy operates from a position of neither strength nor weakness but of resilience. The strategist
must be capable of surviving and improving upon the false predictions that are inevitable in any
complex dynamic engagement. Indeed, Moltke famously said that no plan survives first contact
with the enemy. Thus, improvisation is necessary for the successful realization of any strategy.
In this context, a “strategy” should be understood as a set of prioritized objectives, the
achievement of which can take place by a variety of means, depending on the state of play. This
combination of clear overarching aims and discretionary action on the field characterized what
Moltke called Auftragstaktik, normally translated as “mission command.” It assumes a sense of
utmost trust in both the rightness of the ends set by the commander and the will of the ground
troops to achieve them by whatever means it takes. It is an approach that has been facilitated by
open (first telegraphic, later telephonic) lines of communication in the period of engagement,
conducted in a pyramid structure, whereby the field marshal would process all the different
inputs and offer appropriate specific feedback to the ground fighters. The overall process some-
what resembles the internal workings of the brain as proposed in Clark (2016), mentioned in
the first section.
Tetlock’s superforecasters embody Moltke’s modus operandi in their approach to the
future, which is conceptualized as an ontological battlefield open to multiple outcomes, as per
(C)’s account of a plausible future horizon. In terms of counterfactually based philosophical
approaches to causation, the successful superforecaster derives from Moltke a sense of the future
that is overdetermined in the forecaster’s favor yet underdetermined with regard to obstacles in the
way of realizing that future (see Fuller 2015: Chap. 6). In other words, one should not assume
that the opening state of play, including its dominant tendencies, will prevail throughout the
conflict. On the contrary, they may be easily reversed, permitting other latent tendencies to
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reveal themselves. This general frame of mind had led the Prussian Army to invent the modern
concept of “war game” (Kriegsspiel) with an in-built element of chance. They were basically
board game precursors of today’s virtual reality simulators which the military has been designing
since the 1960s and which are commercially redeployed in the programs of video games.
An important lesson taught by the gaming approach to warfare is that the superforecaster
must be always open to “unknown unknowns,” to use the decision-theoretic jargon popularized
by U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld during the Iraq War. The key point is that such
remote prospects may be unknown but they are not unknowable. They can be imagined,
anticipated and, if not outright defeated, capitalized on. Indeed, one might even lose the war yet
win the peace from the standpoint of overarching objectives. Such a relatively positive orienta-
tion to worst-case scenarios characterizes the resilient warrior, one always in search of “room to
maneuver” (Spielraum). Much depends here on how abstractly one’s military objectives are spe-
cified. For example, if the main aim is the long-term prosperity of one’s society, then accepting
a defeat that stops short of annihilation followed by a postwar reconstruction policy funded by
the victors may actually make the society economically stronger within, say, a generation than
it was prior to the war. Arguably that was exactly what happened to Germany and Japan after
the Second World War.
For a deeper understanding of resilience, imagine it as part of a logical square of oppos-
ition, whose founding contraries are the proactionary and the precautionary attitude toward risk,
a distinction introduced in the first section. The proactionary embraces risk, the precautionary
avoids it. The former is associated with the standpoint of the entrepreneur and adopts prima
facie optimistic perspective on scientific and technological innovation. The latter is associated
with the standpoint of the environmentalist and adopts a prima facie pessimistic attitude toward
such innovation. Both proactionaries and precautionaries admit the presence of considerable
uncertainty in the world, much –if not most –of it being of human origin, which in turn
implies some distribution of good and bad consequences. However, they differ in their attitudes
to those consequences: The former presumes our world is resilient and the latter fragile (cf. Taleb
2012). Thus, the proactionary attitude toward risk would be refuted by a world in which even a
slight change in current conditions would have catastrophic consequences, which in turn would
demonstrate our “fragility.” In contrast, the precautionary attitude would be refuted by a world
in which even a major change in current conditions would not only leave us intact but quite
possibly stronger, which would demonstrate our “resilience.”
What is the value of adopting the “resilience” perspective? It helps to explain how people
have adapted throughout history to complex transformations to their lifeworld. These have
been often accompanied by little fanfare, let alone understanding or regulation. A case in point
in our own time is the centrality of computer-mediated forms of production, consumption
and communication, all transpiring within a single generation and epitomized in the latest
smartphone. Nevertheless, specific problems arise as such developments interact with default
expectations of how the world should be. More to the point: New science and technology tend
to cast in a new –and not always flattering or even supporting –light old social, political, and
economic aspirations, which can force a major rethink of society’s value system. Indeed, we may
come to want different things as a result of realizing that we are coming to live in a new world
in which our old desires have become obsolete, or otherwise difficult to realize.
A useful concept for exploring people’s resilience is what social psychologists call adaptive
preferences, which is central to the reduction of “cognitive dissonance,” namely, how people main-
tain a coherent sense of what is meaningful in a world undergoing fundamentally unpredictable
changes. After all, even when people fail to predict the future, they still need to see themselves
in the future that they failed to predict. An adaptive preference results when aspiration is bent
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toward expectation in light of experience: We come to want what we think is within our grasp.
More than a simple “reality check,” adaptive preference formation involves disciplining one’s
motivational structure with the benefit of hindsight. Much of what passes for “wisdom” in life
is about the formation of adaptive preferences.
When the social psychologist Leon Festinger suggested the idea in the 1950s, it provided a
neat account of how people maintain a sense of autonomy while under attack by events beyond
their control (Festinger et al. 1956). He might have been talking about how the United States
and the USSR held their nerve in Cold War vicissitudes, but in fact he was talking about how a
millennial religious cult continued to flourish even after its key doomsday prediction had failed
to materialize. A quarter-century later, the social and political philosopher Jon Elster (1983)
brilliantly generalized the idea of adaptive preference in terms of the complementary phe-
nomena of “sour grapes” and “sweet lemons”: We tend to downgrade the value of previously
desired outcomes as their realization becomes less likely and upgrade the value of previously
undesired outcomes as their realization becomes more likely.
An interesting question is whether adaptive preference formation is rational. Festinger’s ori-
ginal case study seemed to imply an answer of no. After a few hours of doubt and despair, the
cult regrouped by interpreting the deity’s failure to end the world as a sign that the cult had
done sufficient good to reverse their fate. This emboldened them to proselytize still more vig-
orously. One might think that had the cult responded rationally to the failed prophecy, they
would have simply abandoned any belief that they were in a special relationship with a higher
deity. Instead the cult did something rather subtle. They did not make the obvious “irrational”
move of denying that the prophecy had failed nor did they try to postpone doomsday to a later
date. Rather, they altered their relationship to the deity, who previously appeared to claim that
there was nothing humans could do to reverse their fate. The terms of this renegotiated rela-
tionship then gave the cult members a sense of control over their lives which served to renew
their missionary zeal.
This is an instance of what Elster called “sweet lemons,” and it is not as obviously irrational
as its counterpart, “sour grapes.” In fact, a “sweet lemon detector,” so to speak, may be a key
element of the motivational structure of people who are capable of deep learning from the
negative experience of a falsified prediction. Such people come to acquire a clearer sense of
what they have truly valued all along so that they are reinvigorated by adversity. The phenom-
enon of sweet lemons is disorienting to the observer because it highlights just how much we
presume that others share our overarching values. We do not simply respect the autonomy of
others. We also expect, somewhat paradoxically, that by virtue of their autonomy they will
become more like us over time. Thus, the post-prophecy behavior of Festinger’s cult is con-
fusing because they carried on in a version of what they had previously done. In so doing, they
learned from experience. But what they learned was to become more like themselves.
Adaptive preferences are arguably scalable, perhaps to become the properties of entire
cultures and species. Indeed, humanity may be improving its capacity for adaptive preference
formation, a sign of our increasing resilience. It is striking that the disruption and destruction
resulting from faulty forecasts do little to prevent similar precipitating behaviors in the future.
However, we seem to be getting better at converting liabilities into virtues, making it easier “to
lose the war and win the peace.”
Here the sociologist Max Weber’s theodicy of suffering offers some insight (Joas
2000: Chap. 2). Weber distinguishes two ways in which the world religions sublimate the pain
suffered from thwarted expectations. One, rather like Elster’s sour grapes, is ressentiment, whereby
pain results in the devaluation of a prior aspiration; the other, rather like his sweet lemons, is
ecstasy, which operates in reverse, investing value in a state that one had previously tried to avoid.
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In the latter case, a glimpse of the truth is revealed in the moment of pain, a light at the end
of the tunnel, which offers an incentive to carry on with greater resolve. “Perseverance” was
the name given to this attitude in the early modern period, which applied to, say, the hardships
suffered by the Puritan founders of the United States. But since that time, it has been extended
to cover the entire scientific worldview, courtesy of Karl Popper (1963). This helps to explain
the curious Popperian logic whereby the relentless falsification of scientific hypotheses does not
serve to falsify scientific inquiry itself (i.e., skepticism) but, on the contrary, shows that science
is getting closer to the truth.
Both sides of Weber’s theodicy of suffering are at play in secular guise in the history of
technological innovation. Take the case of automotive transport. Within a half-century of
mass produced cars, the hazards that were forecast at the time of their invention had been
realized: Cars were a major –if not the major –source of air and noise pollution. The roads
required for cars ravaged the environment and alienated their drivers from nature. Yet none of
that seemed to matter –or at least not enough to lead people to abandon automobiles. Rather,
car production worldwide has continued apace while becoming a bit more environment-
friendly to avoid the worst envisaged outcomes. For better or worse, the value package that
Henry Ford and others were selling in the early twentieth century still holds: We value the car’s
freedom and speed not only over the connectedness to nature provided by the horse but also
the relatively low ecological impact offered by mechanized public transport today. Sour grapes
and sweet lemons combine to raise the car to a liberator of the human spirit from “nature,”
now seen as the imposer of constraints. Whether this turns out to be a good long-term survival
strategy remains an open question.
4. Conclusion: superforecasting as a mode of being in the world

We have seen that forecasting carries emotional investments in both the process and the out-
come. The appeal of Tetlock’s superforecasting is that one might improve predictive capacity
by adopting a productive attitude toward error, perhaps even welcoming it as an incentive to
raise one’s game and divest oneself of unnecessary commitments. The agents in both Moltke’s
military strategy and Festinger’s millenarian cult enact this policy on the field and in the mind
by a clear division between steadfast ends and fluid means, the “ends justify the means,” as the
Jesuits originally put it. Put another way, they self-instrumentalize, which is to say, they prioritize
the future they want to such an extent that along the way they are willing to trade off features
of their present selves that are not essential to this future’s realization. In metaphysical terms, the
trail left in the wake of this process identifies the past with the discarded “matter” and the future
with the emerging “mind.”
At a more psychological level, superforecasting may be understood as a form of cognitive
immunology. In other words, when one forecasts with an eye to one’s own fate over a range of
possible futures (not only the one predicted as most likely), then it becomes easier to change tack
as the future is unfolding so that one’s ultimate goal is realized. The rethink required involves a
reversal of what economists have recognized as the “hyperbolic” time-discounting tendencies of
consumers, whereby they fixate on short-term goals even when these goals compromise their
long-term ones (Ainslie 1992). One especially creative –albeit daunting –way of understanding
this psychological reversal was put forward by the Cold War RAND Corporation strategist
Herman Kahn, who coined the phrase “thinking the unthinkable” (Kahn 1962).
Kahn’s signature phrase built on his earlier work on scenarios involving the aftermath of a
thermonuclear war in which, say, 25–50% of the world’s population is wiped out over a relatively
short period of time (Kahn 1960). How do we rebuild humanity under those circumstances?
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This is not so different from “the worst-case scenarios” proposed nowadays under conditions of
severe global warming. Kahn’s point was that we need now to come up with the relevant new
technologies that would be necessary the day after doomsday. Moreover, he believed that such
a strategy was likely to be politically more tractable than trying actively to prevent doomsday
through, say, unilateral nuclear disarmament, which would simply make us more vulnerable to
attack from those who failed to disarm.
Kahn’s understanding of the politics of the situation proved to have predictive value. The
United States largely followed Kahn’s advice. And precisely because doomsday never happened,
we ended up in peacetime with the riches that we have come to associate with Silicon Valley, a
major beneficiary of the U.S. federal largesse during the Cold War. The Internet was developed
as a distributed communication network in case the more centralized telephone system were
taken down during a nuclear attack. This sort of “ahead of the curve” thinking is character-
istic of military-based innovation generally, in which DARPA (Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency) has served as both torch-bearer and flack catcher. As we have seen in the case
of Moltke, warfare focuses minds on what is dispensable and what is necessary to preserve –and
indeed, how to enhance that which is necessary to preserve. Here one can truly say that “neces-
sity is the mother of invention.” We win even –and especially –if doomsday never happens.
Doomsday scenarios invariably invite discussions of human resilience and adaptability.
A good starting point is a distinction drawn in cognitive archaeology between reliable and main-
tainable artefacts (Bleed 1986). Reliable artefacts tend to be “overdesigned,” which is to say, they
can handle all the anticipated forms of stress, but most of those never happen. Maintainable
artefacts tend to be “underdesigned,” which means that they make it easy for the user to make
replacements when disasters strike, which are assumed to be unpredictable. While in principle,
resilience and adaptability could be identified with either position, the Cold War’s proactionary
approach to doomsday implies that the latter (Fuller and Lipinska 2014: 35–36). In other words,
we want a society that is not so dependent on the most likely scenarios –including the most
likely negative ones –that we could not cope in the event of a very unlikely, very negative scen-
ario.The knowability of Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns” is clearly a guiding assumption here.
Tetlock’s taboo cognition research offers a good basis for thinking about such extreme
scenarios to make superforecasting a normal feature of our mode of being in the world.
Candidates for the relevant “unknown unknowns” in today’s world come from the interaction
effects of relatively independent scientific and societal trends, each individually benign yet cap-
able of producing malign emergent consequences.These would constitute the relevant “taboos.”
Let us say that techno-optimists are vindicated and global warming does not turn out to be as
disruptive to current socioeconomic trends as techno-pessimists think.Yet these same optimists
also tend to predict an increase in both the labor force’s technological redundancy and human
life extension. In that case, an extreme scenario might be to imagine both trends in tandem.
Social scientists following in Tetlock’s lead could then ask both expert and lay subjects to pin-
point the negativity in such a scenario, including trade-offs that might redeem the negative
aspects. In this way, the value of taboo topics ranging from “universal basic income” to more
liberal policies concerning suicide and euthanasia would be likely given voice –and we could
start to prepare to live in a world where worst-case scenarios are no longer seen as a threat to
our “normal” way of life.
References
Ainslie, G. (1992). Picoeconomics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Austin, J. L. (1962). How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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Bleed, P. (1986). “The Optimal Design of Hunting Weapons: Maintainability or reliability?” American
Antiquity, 51: 737–47.
Clark, A. (2016). Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, action and the embodied mind. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Collins, R. (1995). “Prediction in Macrosociology: The case of the Soviet collapse.” American Journal of
Sociology, 100(6): 1552–93.
Elster, J. (1983). Sour Grapes: Studies in the subversion of rationality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Festinger, L., Riecken, H., and Schachter, S. (1956). When Prophecy Fails. Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press.
Fuller, S. (2015). Knowledge: The philosophical quest in history. London: Routledge.
Fuller, S., and Lipinska,V. (2014). The Proactionary Imperative. London: Palgrave.
Hammond, K., and Stewart, T. (eds.). (2001). The Essential Brunswik. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Joas, H. (2000). The Genesis of Values. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Kahn, H. (1960). On Thermonuclear War. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Kahn, H. (1962). Thinking about the Unthinkable. New York: Horizon Press.
Merton, R. K. (1968 [1948]). “The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy,” in R. K. Merton (ed.), Social Theory and Social
Structure, 2nd ed. New York: Free Press, pp. 475–90.
Nisbett, R., and Ross, L. (1980). Human Inference: Strategies and shortcomings of human judgment. Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Popper, K. (1963). Conjectures and Refutations. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Taleb, N. N. (2012). Antifragile. London: Allen Lane.
Tetlock, P. (2003). “Thinking the Unthinkable: Sacred values and taboo cognitions.” Trends in Cognitive
Science, 7(7): 320–24.
Tetlock, P. (2005). Expert Political Judgment: How good is it? How can we know? Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Tetlock, P., and Gardner, D. (2015). Superforecasting: The art and science of prediction. New York: Crown
Publishers.
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1. What is a rumor?

Informal communication comes in many forms and varieties and we use a correspondingly
wide range of expressions to refer to different types of such interactions: what starts off as
innocent ‘small talk’ may sometimes turn into ‘gossip’ about others; beliefs acquired on the
basis of ‘hearsay’ may be passed on as ‘rumor’. Clearly, then, there is a great deal of continuity
between the various phenomena picked out by these labels, and it may not be possible, except
by stipulative definition, to draw a clear line between them. Some considerations are based on
content: small talk may be about virtually any number of ‘neutral’ issues –such as the weather –
whereas gossip is specifically about other people and their behavior. But it also matters who is
communicating with whom: while gossip typically circulates on a limited scale among groups
of friends, colleagues, or acquaintances, rumors sometimes spread quickly throughout vast
populations. While the various types of informal communication do exhibit a ‘family resem-
blance’ of sorts, it is still worthwhile attempting to establish insightful contrasts and to note
existing (dis)similarities between them. As a first step, then, it may be helpful to distinguish a
little more carefully between gossip and rumor, in the hope that drawing out some of the epi-
stemic characteristics of the former may, by way of contrast, also shed light on the latter.
The phenomenon of gossip, which is explored in detail by Bertolotti and Magnani,
Chapter 20, in this volume, has received considerably more philosophical attention than rumor
(e.g., Goodman and Ben-Ze’ev 1994; Code 1995; Adkins 2002), and so may provide a con-
ceptual template for the subsequent discussion of rumor. Social scientists have defined gossip
variously as “evaluative talk about a person who is not present” (Eder and Enke 1991: 494),
“the process of informally communicating value-laden information about members of a social
setting” (Noon and Delbridge 1993: 25), or (within the context of organizational studies) as
“informal and evaluative talk in an organization, usually among no more than a few individuals,
about another member of that organization who is not present” (Kurland and Pelled 2000: 429).
Interestingly, these definitions all include a component relating to the content involved (“evalu-
ative talk about others”) and make reference to structural features of the social setting in which
communication takes place (“target member of the community is not present”). This suggests
that, when it comes to characterizing the various types of informal communication, content
and context are deeply intertwined.
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Whereas gossip concerns individuals and their (often, though not always, private) conduct,
or “personalities and their involvement in events of the community” (Paine 1967: 283), and
excludes them from the group of interlocutors (except perhaps by accident), rumor is not
restricted to social information about others. Some of the earliest systematic empirical studies
concerning the psychology of rumor, conducted by Jamuna Prasad (1935) in the immediate
aftermath of the 1934 earthquake in Bihar, India, found that rumors in disaster situations often
concern natural phenomena, such as the extent of damage caused or the impending possibility
of aftershocks; even where rumors are about the social world and its institutions, as in the case of
stock market rumors, they often appear in the guise of purported factual information of broader
significance, rather than as evaluative talk about individuals and their behavior.
What has been said so far about the differences between gossip and rumor is entirely com-
patible with the former being a subspecies of the latter. Though usually confined to a narrower
social circle, gossip may spread more widely –for example, when gossip about celebrities
is picked up by sensationalist news outlets –in which case, as Ralph Rosnow puts it, “it is
impossible to separate rumor from gossip” (Rosnow 1988: 14). A number of authors, however,
have suggested that the contrast between rumor and gossip runs deeper than this. Whereas
gossip may be presented as ‘first-hand’, in that a gossiper may portray himself/herself as having
access to privileged information and evidence, rumors are necessarily ‘second-hand’ and some-
times –though not always –are reported in a non-committal way (“I have heard that…”).
Thus, Rosnow, in joint work with Gary Fine, claims that “the basis of gossip may or may not
be a known fact, but the basis of rumor is always unsubstantiated” (Rosnow and Fine 1976: 11).
What these authors seem to be suggesting is that certain instances of first-hand testimony may
well count as gossip, whereas rumor, by necessity, is based on hearsay, and thus cannot –at least
not here and now –be confirmed by independent evidence.
While the rumor-monger typically lacks first-hand evidence, instead passing on information
acquired on the basis of hearsay, there seems to be a general presumption that relevant evidence
could in principle be had, given the right resources and circumstances. Indeed, where it is widely
believed that such first-hand evidence is, in fact, enjoyed by a small group of epistemically
privileged outsiders, rumor-mongering may even feed off (and contribute to the development
of) conspiracy theories. (On the epistemology of conspiracy theories, see Dentith and Keeley,
Chapter 21, this volume; and Coady, Chapter 13, this volume.) Lack of actual availability of
first-hand evidence, however, is hardly unique to rumor: for testimonial knowledge in general,
neither would it be desirable to always have to ascertain the facts first-hand, nor should we
demand that all independent evidence must always be non-testimonial in character. Otherwise,
we would have to disavow much of what we ordinarily take ourselves to know –including, for
example, all of our historical knowledge. (For a survey of the epistemology of testimony, see
Gelfert 2014.)
Nevertheless, most definitions of rumor emphasize –more than anything, or so it seems –
the absence of independent verification and evidence. In a much-cited definition, which they
develop in their classic study The Psychology of Rumor (1947), Gordon Allport and Leo Postman
define rumor as
a specific (or topical) proposition for belief, passed along from person to person, usu-
ally by word of mouth, without secure standards of evidence being present.
Allport and Postman 1947: ix
Contemporary definitions in the sociology of rumor echo this: thus, Gary Fine holds that
“rumor’s foundation is a lack of evidence –without regard for topic” (Fine 1985: 223).Yet, for
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the reasons stated above, both formulations –in the absence of “secure standards of evidence”
and “lack of evidence” –are problematic, insofar as they both overstate the extent to which
rumors lack evidential support and underestimate the continuity that exists between ordinary
testimonial knowledge and information received via rumor. Instead of building lack of evidence
in general into the definition of rumor, for the purposes of this chapter let us characterize rumor
as the propagation of ostensibly informative hearsay, usually on a topic of broader interest, and typically
communicated via informal pathways in the absence of independent corroboration by either first-hand evi-
dence or official (authoritative) sources (see also Gelfert 2013: 771). Importantly, its status as hearsay
need not be advertised as such to the recipient of a rumor –what matters is that the informa-
tion provided cannot presently be verified, or corroborated on the basis of other sources, yet is
spreading across a population of interlocutors who accept it as, if not true, then at least in some
way informative about some matter of interest.
2. How rumors emerge

Rumor, like gossip, is primarily spread “though the grapevine” –that is, opportunistically,
through casual conversation, in happenstance encounters, via informal networks of commu-
nication. Whereas other forms of communication can typically be traced back to their ori-
ginal source (say, in the case of public communication, a press release) or can be assumed to be
grounded in our interlocutor’s vouching for the truth, the origin of a rumor may be shrouded
in mystery. This raises the question of how rumors originate –and, as will be discussed in section
5 of this chapter, who can be held epistemically responsible should one’s trust in the veracity of
claims received via rumor ultimately turn out to have been misplaced.
An important strand in early rumor research concerned the empirical study of rumors in
crisis situations brought about by war and disaster. Two classic examples, already mentioned in
sections 1 and 2, are Prasad’s study of rumor-mongering after an earthquake and Allport and
Postman’s study of the disruptive effects of rumors in wartime. In addition to analyzing how
rumors spread (more about which in section 3), Allport and Postman also set out the conditions
that are conducive to their emergence. In particular, they formulated a “basic law of rumors,”
according to which “first, the theme of the story must have some importance to speaker and lis-
tener; second, the true facts must be shrouded in some kind of ambiguity” (Allport and Postman
1947: 33). Both factors were thought, by Allport and Postman, to be “essential conditions” for
the emergence of rumors and to stand in a law-like, quasi-mathematical relationship to the
prevalence of rumors in a given situation.This proposal immediately raises questions: what kinds
of importance determine the emergence of a rumor? When do “ambiguous events create an
unsatisfied demand for answers” (Kapferer 1990: 115) that is met by rumors (rather than, say, by
a systematic inquiry into the situation at hand)?
‘Ambiguity’, in Allport and Postman’s framework, may not be a unitary notion at all, which is
why some have preferred to distinguish between a more general sense of uncertainty and a more
personal notion of anxiety. Whereas the former may be due to the unavailability of conclusive
evidence or other objective features of the situation (as would be the case in natural disasters,
which often unfold rapidly and unpredictably), the latter reflects “an affective state –acute or
chronic –that is produced by, or associated with, apprehension about an impending, potentially
disappointing outcome” (Rosnow 1991: 487). ‘Importance’, too, can be understood in different
ways, not least since the perspectives of the speaker and of the hearer can come apart on this
issue. Much also depends on features of the situation: when a situation is developing rapidly
and much is at stake, individuals may believe (and spread) any information that purports to shed
light on the situation. However, when there is no pressing need to make up one’s mind and act
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quickly, individuals may be more cautious when accepting information that has the potential
to affect them in significant ways. This is why Rosnow, drawing on work by Blair Johnson and
Alice Eagly (1989), proposes outcome-oriented involvement –which highlights “the relevance of
an issue to [the rumor-mongers’] currently important goals or outcomes” (Johnson and Eagly
1989: 292) –as a better predictor of the passing on of rumors than importance simpliciter. In
particular, this helps to make sense of experimental findings that show that –‘paradoxically’,
from the vantage point of Allport and Postman’s “basic law” –participants in rumor experiment
often report that they passed on a rumor when they deemed it less important, because nothing
much was at stake for them personally.
While this section focuses on the emergence of rumors, section 3 will look in more detail
at the processes and mechanisms of transmission, once a rumor has come into existence. Yet it
is clear that the two cannot entirely be separated: after all, part of what makes an act of telling a
case of rumor-mongering is the fact that it is an instance of a message that is already developing
and spreading through a population. Any successful theory should reflect “the distinctively
recirculatory character of rumor” (DiFonzo 2010: 1128). This is why an important criticism
of Allport and Postman’s account targets their narrow emphasis on serial transmission, which
tends to disregard “the social context within which rumors develop, spread, and gain meaning”
(Miller 2006: 507).The idea, then, is that rumors tend to emerge in specific social contexts and,
more controversially, serve specific social functions. Regarding the former, Jean-Noël Kapferer
has attempted the following taxonomy of rumor-conducive situations: rumors occur (1) when
“front-runners or insiders” who are at the forefront of uncovering information “hurriedly speak
about it in private” (thereby, for example, presenting information out of context, in a way that
may be prone to being misunderstood); (2) “when ambiguous events create an unsatisfied
demand for answers”; (3) “when a highly sensitive social body spontaneously speaks up to
express itself in isolation from any particular event” (similar to what, later in this section, will be
discussed under the heading of “informational cascades”) (see Kapferer 1990: 115).
Regarding the social function of rumor, Tamotsu Shibutani, in his influential 1966 mono-
graph Improvised News, characterized rumors as “a recurrent form of communication through
which men caught together in an ambiguous situation attempt to construct a meaningful interpretation
of it by pooling their intellectual resources” (Shibutani 1966: 17, italics original). Drawing on his
own experience as a Japanese-American who was interned in so-called ‘relocation centers’ in
1941, where he witnessed the role of rumors in resolving ambiguity and psychological tension,
Shibutani emphasized the idea of collective sense-making. Rumors evolve as ‘improvised news’
in order to fill a gap in a community’s collective understanding of problematic situations: when-
ever the collective need for understanding is not satisfied by readily available public informa-
tion, communal norms of accuracy, objectivity, and evidence will be suspended or relaxed. This
allows rumors to aggregate whatever understanding is distributed across individuals within the
community, rendering rumors collective attempts at addressing information deficits. Rumors,
on this account, are attempts at collective sense-making –that is, they arise for a social purpose.
Yet, as with all functional-teleological explanations, there remains a nagging worry, aptly voiced
by Gérald Bronner, that this “moves the enigma [of how rumors arise] on rather than proposing
to resolve it” (Bronner 2007: 84). Even if rumors do have social functions, this does not render
questions about the mechanisms of their emergence and propagation moot.
Perhaps, then, we need to look beyond individual factors or informational states of the com-
munity to the very structure of the network of communications. Social network theory has
demonstrated that the structure of a social network –that is, the distribution of links between
individual nodes, the degree of integration, etc. –strongly influences how quickly information
(and other social attitudes) can spread through a population. An individual’s belief, behavior, or
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attitudes will be influenced by those he is in contact with (i.e., in the language of network ana-
lysis, by his ‘neighbors’). This includes both the observable behavior and pronouncements of his
neighbors and his beliefs about what they privately think (which may come apart from how they
portray themselves in public). Depending on the structure of a social network, phenomena such
as informational cascades may occur whenever
people with incomplete personal information on a particular matter base their own
beliefs on the apparent beliefs of others. In response to their communications, other
individuals, who lack reliable information, may accept that belief simply by virtue of
its acceptance by others.
Kuran and Sunstein 1999: 685
As Cass Sunstein (2009) has recently argued, rumors emerge in social networks in just this way,
as a consequence of which “affective factors, and not mere information, play a large role in the
circulation of rumors of all kinds” (Sunstein and Vermeule 2009: 215).
By shifting the emphasis away from individual beliefs to the overall prevalence of a belief, or
cluster of beliefs (and associated attitudes), in a social network of a given structure, this perspec-
tive may account for why certain individuals may become ‘opinion-makers’ –or, in the termin-
ology of network theorists, ‘supernodes’ –and may end up having a disproportionate effect on
the spreading of (mis)information through a population.
3. Rumor transmission

By definition, a rumor propagates: once it stops being passed on within a population, it ceases
to exist qua rumor –even if the corresponding propositions are still widely believed. This raises
the question of how rumors are transmitted in a way that is compatible with their circulatory
character.
A simple model of how rumors propagate is already implicit in Allport and Postman’s earlier
definition of rumor as a “proposition for belief, passed along from person to person” (Allport
and Postman 1947: ix). The dominant mode of rumor transmission, on this model, is the serial
transmission of a message received by one interlocutor who then passes it on to another, in
a manner that reproduces, more or less faithfully, the original report. The situation, basically,
resembles the children’s game of ‘Telephone’ (also known as ‘Chinese whispers’), in which
a message is whispered by one person to another, who then repeats it to another, and so
forth, in a linear fashion –until the chain of interlocutors has been exhausted (by which time
the message has typically morphed in unrecognizable ways, to great hilarity). Unsurprisingly,
the experimental simulation of serial transmission bears close resemblance to this game: in a
series of lab experiments conducted by Allport and Postman, an ‘eyewitness’ (nominated by the
experimenters) recounted an event to an interlocutor, who in turn described what happened
to another, and so forth –until the report reached a research associate who carefully noted the
content and analyzed any deviations from the original account. Rumor propagation, in this
setting, was idealized as the result of a linear series of unidirectional acts of communication.
Unsurprisingly, given the experimental setup, Allport and Postman found that informa-
tion deteriorates as it is passed on serially from one interlocutor to another; messages also
tended to become more simplified over time and to be modified to cohere better with the
background beliefs of the rumor-mongers. Yet it is clear that, in real life, rumor-mongering
differs from Allport and Postman’s setup. For one, interlocutors usually have a choice whether
to pass on a rumor or not; if they think they might have misunderstood a message they
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might decide against passing it on to others. Furthermore, real-life recipients of testimony –

including rumor –may seek clarification from their interlocutor, request additional evidence,
solicit corroboration from other sources, and so forth. As sociologists of rumor were keen
to point out, by not allowing participants in their experiments “to repeat, seek clarification,
question, or interact with each other,” Allport and Postman created a situation “unlike what
occurs in everyday conversation”; this, it has been argued, reflected serious “inadequacies of
mundane realism of the experimental procedure” they employed (Bordia 1996: 149). Allport
and Postman dismiss such considerations, claiming instead that most people do not regularly
inquire into what they are told.While this may be true in crisis situations, where any additional
fact-checking and inquiry is costly, the fact remains that in most ordinary situations, individuals
have greater latitude in choosing to accept, or pass on, a rumor than is reflected by the serial
transmission model.
A further limitation of the serial transmission model is the implicit assumption that rumor
as a source of information can only be as good as its initial input. This assumption may be
challenged on several grounds. For one, rumors do not necessarily simplify information
(through what Allport and Postman called ‘leveling’); instead, “people notice, extract cues,
and embellish that which they extract” (Weick 1995: 49) from a situation. It is certainly con-
ceivable that such a collective reshaping of a rumor can increase its truth content, for example
when well-positioned interlocutors augment it on the basis of reliable evidence or background
knowledge. Second, as a species of testimony, rumor is subject to recent epistemological
arguments to the effect that testimony can sometimes generate knowledge, rather than merely
transmitting it. Jennifer Lackey (1999) has argued that, in a situation where a speaker lacks
knowledge that p because her belief that p is undermined by doxastic defeaters (even though,
in fact, p), a hearer can nonetheless acquire knowledge from her testimony that p: doxastic
defeaters are not automatically transmitted via testimony. This makes it entirely conceivable
that there could be a chain of testifiers, all of whom unanimously testify that p (where p is in
fact true), yet none of whom can be credited with knowledge, due to their having undefeated
doxastic defeaters of the claim in question. And yet, if such a chain were to reach its final link,
Sarah, who “has a defeater-defeater for believing that p,” it seems reasonable that Sarah could
nevertheless “come to know that p via the testimony of other members in the chain” (Lackey
1999: 487). Note that, in this case, it is not the reliability of the process of transmission that is
being called into question; rather, what undermines the speaker’s knowledge is the presence
of a doxastic defeater.
By contrast with the serial transmission model of how rumor propagates, Shibutani’s sense-
making model takes an altogether different approach. On this account, rumors are “some-
thing that is shaped, reshaped, and reinforced in a succession of communicative acts” (Shibutani
1966: 8), for example through embellishment. This rules out a conception of rumors as the
simple passing on of “stand-alone statements” (Miller 2006: 516) –except perhaps on occasion –
since rumor can no longer “be identified in terms of any particular set of words,” but only “by
abstracting from dozens of communicative acts” (Shibutani 1966: 16). In short, what makes
rumor distinctive is not “the dissemination of a designated message” per se, but “the process of
forming a definition of a situation” (Shibutani 1966: 8–9). While this adequately captures the
complexity and variety of real-life rumors, it raises the question of how we are to individuate
rumors: How much can a rumor change and still remain the same rumor? While there may be
pragmatic ways of answering this question in the context of rumor research, for example by
pointing to the causal continuity exhibited by a series of tellings among a chain of interlocutors,
it indicates a need to be more precise about the kinds of changes that are likely to occur over
the lifetime of a rumor.
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The changes one might expect in a rumor depend heavily on context and the mode of trans-
mission. When Allport and Postman speak of ‘leveling’ (loss of detail), ‘sharpening’ (making the
content more concrete by highlighting specific aspects while neglecting others), and ‘assimila-
tion’ (the tailoring of a rumor to its social context), they may be capturing something important
about oral transmission in crisis situations where resources are limited. Rumors in written form
may display other forms of change and distortion, such as embellishment. After all, some individ-
uals “may purposely exaggerate or invent for effectiveness,” others may add specific details, such
as “names and specific references to places,” in a cumulative fashion (Shibutani 1966: 84–85).
Perhaps the most that can be said in general about how rumors develop is to note that changes
must be compatible with the continued propagation of a rumor. As Klaus Merten puts it, in somewhat
stronger teleological terms, “the rumor tends to demand that interpretation of its disseminators
which most ensures its own survival” (Merten 2009: 34, translation).Whether or not a rumor is
passed on, and if so in which form, depends also on the motivations of the disseminator. These
may differ considerably, for example, if one compares wish rumors –that is, rumors expressing
hoped-for consequences –with dread rumors (i.e., those involving dreaded outcomes).Whereas
passing on the former may be “an attempt to validate one’s wishful thinking in order to savor
the anticipation of the desired outcome,” sharing the latter may be “a way of validating one’s
prejudices” (Rosnow 1991: 488). In turn, reasons for not passing on a rumor may differ in each
case: the disseminator of a wish rumor risks being resented for giving false hope if what he says
turns out to have no basis in truth, and so may decide not to pass on information he regards as
unreliable; by contrast, the recipient of a dread rumor (say, about a minority group) may choose
not to pass on information, for fear of facing a backlash from members of that minority, even
though she might consider the rumor to be true. Either way, only content that remains in cir-
culation by being propagated within a community can continue to exist qua rumor.
4. How reliable are rumors?

From the recipient’s perspective, a rumor does not look all that different from other types of
testimony. Explicit appeals to rumor are rare: few speakers preface their tellings with phrases
such as “Rumor has it that…”; at most, they might indicate that what they are about to state was
received second-hand (“I have heard that…”). Then again, most of what we take ourselves to
know we have received from others who themselves were not eyewitnesses: think of the many
testimonial beliefs we form about history, science, geography, world affairs, etc. Rumor-based
belief shares many of the characteristics of testimony-based belief in general, and its epistemic
status is thus subject to whatever constraints and conditions come with one’s preferred view on
testimonial justification in general.
Most contemporary accounts of testimonial justification acknowledge that whether or not
a testimonial belief is justified is at least in part a matter of external circumstances that may not
be immediately accessible to the recipient. This is especially pertinent in the case of rumor,
given that the circumstances of its emergence and the reliability of the beliefs associated with
the rumor in most real-life cases are not transparent to the recipient. Just how reliable a rumor
is as a source of information about the world depends crucially on both the conditions of its
emergence and its subsequent transmission. Perhaps what began as an accurate piece of infor-
mation gradually became corrupted through unfaithful reproduction by intermediaries. Or
perhaps, through a collective act of sense-making, a community succeeded in pooling reliable
information from different sources, resulting in a more accurate overall picture of the situation.
Both scenarios are not only conceivable but are likely to occur given the right circumstances.
Various factors determine the reliability of a rumor: thus, as Shibutani argues, in situations
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where “collective excitement is mild,” rumor construction “occurs through critical deliber-
ation,” on the basis of close examination of available information and the collective appraisal
of the plausibility of novel claims; in such a situation, the audience may collectively place “a
premium upon facts” (Shibutani 1966: 70–71). By contrast, when events are unfolding rapidly
and the audience demands news urgently, rumors may extrapolate from the facts, rather than con-
tribute to a reliable representation of reality; thus, “a total picture may be constructed that is quite
inaccurate, but highly plausible” (Shibutani 1966: 77).
Earlier, three factors were noted that have been found to correlate with the spreading of
rumors: general uncertainty, personal anxiety, and outcome-oriented involvement. A fourth factor is the
perceived credibility of a claim itself. (Rosnow 1991 prefers the term ‘credulity’, but this may be
misleading in that it lends itself to being misunderstood as referring to a character trait on the
part of the hearer or speaker.) This reflects the fact that “whether a rumor is transmitted will
often depend on whether the teller finds it trustworthy” (Rosnow 1991: 487). Acknowledging
the role that judgments of credibility –of the speaker as well as of the claim itself –play in
the transmission of a rumor shifts the focus away from worries about the possible (deliberate
or accidental) corruption of initially reliable information toward the potentially active role of
interlocutors as safeguards of reliability. After all, each interlocutor has a choice as to whether
or not to pass on a given rumor claim, and it seems plausible to assume that many interlocutors
will want to pass on only information they themselves regard as sufficiently trustworthy to merit
belief; others may even choose to speak up against claims they regard as erroneous or unreliable.
As mentioned in section 1, the mere fact that a claim was received via hearsay is insufficient to
merit rejecting it as unreliable –at least not if we want to hold on to the possibility of testimo-
nial knowledge in general.
Recognizing the importance of judgments of credibility also helps to make sense of another
explanandum that any successful theory of rumor must address: viz., why some rumors are rou-
tinely believed in the first place, even when their status as a rumor becomes apparent or is made explicit
(“I have heard a rumor that…”). There are, of course, some findings from social psychology
which purport to demonstrate that acceptance of information “may be a passive and inevitable
act, whereas rejection may be an active operation that undoes the initial passive acceptance”
(Gilbert et al. 1993: 222), and that even information one intends to reject may leave an impact
on one’s belief system. (On the latter point, see, e.g., O’Brien et al. 2010). But, apart from this
descriptive point, a further case can be made that, given the right circumstances, rumors –even
when we are aware of their status as such –are often rationally believed. Consider this argument
by David Coady:
[I]‌f you hear a rumour, it is not only prima facie evidence that it has been thought
plausible by a large number of people, it is also prima facie evidence that it has been
thought plausible by a large number of reliable people. And that really is prima facie
evidence that it is true.
Coady 2006: 47
The idea here is this: if one encounters a rumor, this suggests –defeasibly, no doubt, in such a way
that independent considerations and background knowledge can undermine the presumption –
that a large number of people have found the report in question credible. And not just any large
number of people, but a large number of people who are regarded by others as reliable sources.
Since reliable interlocutors will only pass on information they take to be credible, while refusing
to pass on information they disbelieve, they effectively act as ‘filters’ that remove unsubstantiated
rumors from circulation (see Coady 2006: 47). If one knows that this is how one’s community is
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operating, this should give one reason to accept what one hears (or at least consider it likely to
have a basis in fact). Let us call this line of reasoning the argument from filtering. According to the
argument from filtering, chances are that, by the time we encounter a rumor, it will have gone
through various stages of ‘filtering’, thereby making it more likely to be reliable.
This theoretical argument can be supported with historical examples. During World War II,
the U.S. Army was understandably concerned about the possible detrimental effects that rumors
might have on their troops.Theodore Caplow, who was one of five officers tasked with collecting
rumors in his platoon (and who, after the war, wrote up his observations for a sociology journal),
reports that “[t]‌he veracity of rumors was high”: virtually “every major operation, change of
station, and important administrative change was accurately reported by rumor before any offi-
cial announcement had been made.” While there was some inverse correlation between the
distance a rumor traveled from its original source and the degree of diffusion it reached within
its target audience, little decline in the veracity of the rumors was found: “Errors in transmission
were apparently well-compensated by selection” (Caplow 1947: 301). Interestingly, anti-rumor
campaigns did little to quell rumors: though they led to some decline in diffusion, they also
“invariably increased the number of rumors.” When stable networks of informal communica-
tion were broken up, either as the result of the turnover of troops or because networks were
deliberately broken up, rumors flared up: “During a two week period at a camp near port,
as many rumors were heard daily as had been heard in a typical month of the preceding two
years” (Caplow 1947: 300). Distortion in terms of wishes and avoidances was rife; only once
“channels solidified, this phenomenon became comparatively rare, because of the exclusion of
persons associated with previous invalidity” (Caplow 1947: 301). Occasional official anti-rumor
campaigns, by breaking up stable networks of transmission, did not lead to a reduction, but typ-
ically an increase in the number of rumors, though these tended to be more fragmented in their
diffusion and less reliable (and thereby, it stands to reason, less likely to communicate sensitive
information “through the grapevine”).
The argument from filtering adds yet another layer to the question of the reliability of
rumors. Whereas, on the serial transmission model, the reliability of a rumor as a potential
source of knowledge was solely a matter of the quality of the initial information and its subse-
quent preservation through reliable transmission, the present argument conceives of filtering as
a constructive process. Filtering might take the form of an interlocutor not passing on infor-
mation she perceives as unreliable, speaking up if she thinks that an interlocutor is presenting
a falsehood as truth, or modifying a rumor based on her background information so as to
increase its truth content and then passing it on. The reliability (or lack thereof) of rumors, on
this account, is partly constructed through a complex web of individual and social processes.
Importantly, the argument from filtering does not warrant the global claim that rumors are
always, or even typically, reliable. It is clear that much depends on the temporal and social
dynamics of the various interactions that reverberate across a social network in typical rumor
situations. For example, while it may be true that less reliable rumor-mongers are more likely to
be disbelieved, it may also be the case that they are more likely to spread rumors (even if, per-
haps, only in this particular type of situation). Such trade-offs are only to be expected and will
vary across social situations. This helps explain why empirical estimates of the general reliability
of rumors vary widely, from negligible (Weinberg and Eich 1978) to over 80% (Rudolph 1973),
with rumors in some organizational case studies reported to be “nearly 100% true” (DiFonzo
and Bordia 2006: 262). Even if the argument from filtering is unable to establish the reliability
of rumors in general –since, as I have argued, this is a contingent matter and depends crucially
on the social setting –it does show that, as a rumor gains wide circulation in a population, its
reliability need not diminish, but can in fact accrue.
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5. Rumor and epistemic dependence

Rumor has traditionally been thought of by philosophers in terms of falsehood and the
corruption of ‘proper’ knowledge: Michel de Montaigne, in his Essays, designated rumor a
kind of “public error,” and similar sentiments can be found throughout the (relatively few)
discussions of rumor in the history of Western philosophy. Contemporary epistemologists, for
the most part, echo this dismissal, characterizing rumor variously as “typically untrue informa-
tion” (Chakrabarti 1992: 424), a “pathology of testimony” (Coady 2006), or the way “falsehoods
spread” (Sunstein 2009). In light of what has been discussed in this chapter so far, such a whole-
sale dismissal of rumors seems unwarranted. For one, rumors are the result of complex social
interactions and, as such, should be expected not only to contain (perhaps dubious) information
about the alleged target event or state of affairs, but also to reflect broader patterns of commu-
nication and social dynamics within a community. To be sure, this will rarely be immediately
obvious to the recipient of a rumor, but it opens up the possibility, outlined in section 4, that
rumors may, on occasion, be reliable sources of true (and relevant!) information.
One way to highlight the potential contribution of rumors to our epistemic standing is
to shift attention away from the reliability of individual testimony-based beliefs toward the
more general fact of our epistemic dependence on others. ‘Epistemic dependence’ here is to
be understood as an umbrella term for cases in which an epistemic subject H depends on a
source S’s cognitive (or, if S is a community, social) processes for the formation, sustainment, or
reliability of her belief that p. Reliability is but one of several ways in which a belief we have
may depend on the social and cognitive activities of other people, and it seems plausible that, all
else being equal, it would be preferable to form beliefs on the basis of the most reliable process
available. Rumor, then, might seem an unattractive source of beliefs.What, however, if no way of
forming beliefs other than by relying on rumor is available for a given topic? The subject matter
in question might be so important that we might prefer ‘to take a chance’ by believing a rumor,
rather than not forming any belief at all. Or we might take ourselves to be sufficiently well
positioned within our extended social network to warrant the assumption that our interlocutors
have access to privileged information.
To see more clearly how rumors may enable us to extend the reach of our knowledge, it is
instructive to distinguish between direct and indirect epistemic dependence. When we accept
the testimony of others and form a corresponding belief on its basis, we directly depend on our
informant for the belief in question.Yet, we also depend, in a more indirect way, on our social
environment for keeping us up to date on relevant matters of interest. Indeed, even beliefs that
we already hold owe some of their justification to our social environment: as John McDowell
has noted, while many of the beliefs we take to be knowledge are “reasonably durable,” they
are also necessarily “impermanent states of affairs to whose continued obtaining we have only
intermittent epistemic access” (McDowell 1998: 422). For example, having attended one of his
press conferences a few days ago, I may take myself to know the identity of the current edu-
cation minister of Singapore. Let us assume that, at the time of its formation, my belief about
who is the education minister was correct and formed in such a way as to count as knowledge.
However, in order to be able to credit myself with this knowledge, I must also assume that,
had there been significant changes –for example, had the education minister resigned, or had
there been a cabinet reshuffle –I would have heard about it. Sandy Goldberg has coined the term
“coverage reliability” to refer to the degree to which sources in our social environment keep us
“reliably apprized of the relevant facts in a certain domain” (Goldberg 2010: 157).
It is now clearer what the epistemic significance of rumors is: when official channels of
communication cannot be relied upon for coverage –because they have been disrupted or are
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themselves perceived as unreliable (say, due to censorship) –rumors may well be the only source
of timely information (for a detailed argument to this effect, see Gelfert 2013). The degree of
coverage reliability afforded by rumors will, of course, depend strongly on the specifics of the
social networks in question; however, when one has reason to believe that one’s source is part of
a well-informed and trustworthy social network, the ‘filtering effect’ discussed in section 4 may
well lead one to regard the rumor as not just the only information available on a given topic, but
also as sufficiently reliable to merit belief.
6. The ethics and politics of rumor

Just as philosophers have traditionally been quick to dismiss rumor as epistemically defective
(see section 5), they have also been keen to reject it on moral grounds. A perhaps extreme
example of this is Immanuel Kant who held that, even if we stand to gain true information
from gossip and rumor, we must nonetheless categorically reject them. In his Metaphysics of
Morals, Kant argues that “the intentional spreading” of rumors that detract from another person’s
honor –“even if what is said is true –diminishes respect for humanity” (Kant 1996: 212) and,
thus, ought not to be believed.
As we have seen throughout the discussion of this chapter, rumor is continuous with testi-
mony in general, and so Kant’s recommendation to disbelieve rumor cannot easily be followed,
except in those cases where a rumor-monger is explicit about the status of his testimony. This
might explain why it is typically those who are responsible for spreading a rumor who come
in for criticism, not those who believe it (except perhaps when, as it is sometimes said, “they
should have known better”). Ward Jones (2005) has analyzed this asymmetry in our response to
rumor, libel, and slander, and he notes that, although the harm a rumor does (for example, to
someone’s reputation) is due to the fact that other people believe it, it is not the holding of rumor-
based beliefs which we regulate, and for which the target of the rumor can seek restitution (or
an apology), but rather the spreading of the rumor. As Jones argues, the reason “why we do not
reproach strangers for accepting libel, slander, and rumors” is, at least in part, that “they utilize
familiar sources of testimony” (Jones 2005: 203). Yet, in the case of rumor, this seems to give
rise to a paradox:
If … we do not reproach Hearer –who believes a rumor –because [he] is prima facie

epistemically justified in receiving testimony, then why do we reproach Speaker –who
hears, believes, and then simply spreads the very same rumor? … Why would we get
upset at Speaker for her telling but not Hearer for his believing given that Hearer and
Speaker are in exactly the same epistemic situation?
Jones 2005: 206
One possible answer to this puzzle is to simply accept that speakers and hearers are subject to
different epistemic norms. To be sure, insofar as “speakers and hearers are both in the game of
believing” (Jones 2005: 207), both are subject to the same doxastic norms: after all, the speaker,
as the quotation above makes vivid, is also a believer. Once she resolves to pass on her belief,
however, she incurs additional responsibilities: for example, the responsibility to avoid certain
types of wrongdoings –such as causing harm by spreading personal information about others
and failing to do her epistemic due diligence.
In addition to the ethical questions surrounding individual rumor behavior –ought we to
refrain from believing in rumors? Is it morally wrong to spread a rumor? –there is a further set
of questions relating to the impact of rumors on public life and society at large. Partly spurred
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by the high degree of visibility and the speed with which rumors circulate on the Internet,
some commentators, such as Sunstein, have focused on rumors as attempts “to derail political
candidates, injure companies and reputations, even damage democratic governance” (as the
cover on Sunstein’s 2009 book proclaims). A high prevalence of (political or racialized) rumors
may be indicative of, and may contribute to, political and racial polarization. This raises the
question of what, if anything, can be done to quell false or harmful rumors. Unsurprisingly,
an official denial of the rumor will rarely be an effective way of terminating it, because, by
repeating the rumor (if only to deny it), it risks exposure of a larger segment of the population,
who might not yet have come across it. Yet, much of the practical literature on rumor con-
trol claims that rumors should not be left unrebutted. Reviewing this literature, organizational
psychologists Nicholas DiFonzo and Prashant Bordia have argued that, while “belief in rumors
weakens when they are rebutted, some cherished beliefs endure and the negative impressions
created by the rumor persist”; this is why rebuttals that “convincingly deny the rumor and asso-
ciate the target with positive characteristics seem more likely to restore positive attitudes toward
the rumor target” (DiFonzo and Bordia 2007: 243).
Short of rebutting rumors over and over again (the repetitive nature of which has been
shown to have some effect in chipping away at their credibility; see Ecker et al. 2011), educating
audiences about the range of information sources in their social environment (and about their
varying degrees of reliability), and institutionalizing “preexposure warnings” wherever feasible
(e.g., in legal proceedings), perhaps the most basic principle is “to anticipate events in which
anxiety and uncertainty might be optimum for threatening rumors to take hold, and to defuse
the situation before damaging consequences develop” (Rosnow 1991: 493). Preventing rumors
from taking hold by reducing factors that are conducive to their formation and entrenchment,
though a formidable challenge in itself, may still be more manageable than the Sisyphean task
of rebutting individual instances of rumor-mongering once a rumor is in full swing. Yet, even
then, as recipients of rumors, we must each come to determine whether to trust the official
denials enough to dismiss a given rumor, or whether the rumor we encountered was, in fact,
our social environment’s way of alerting us to a piece of information that we could not have
easily obtained via official channels.
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20
GOSSIP
1. Defining gossip

The first epistemologically revealing fact about gossip is that the word “gossip” may stand for a
variety of interconnected but well-separated meanings. According to the New Oxford American
Dictionary, gossip refers to:
• casual or unconstrained conversation or reports about other people, typically involving

details that are not confirmed as being true: he became the subject of much local gossip;
• (chiefly derogatory) a person who likes talking about other people’s private lives;
• (verb) to engage in gossip: they would start gossiping about her as soon as she left.
It can be added as an appendix to the first definition, that “gossip” both denotes the general
activity and the single bit of social knowledge shared (I’ve been hearing a weird gossip about Peter
and Sandra).
The definition of gossip may also proceed negatively and add something about what gossip is
not: it is important to distinguish gossip from rumor (the topic covered in Chapter 19). Consider
this explanation by David Coady:
This is one difference between rumor and another form of communication with
which it is often confused, gossip. Gossip may well be first-hand. By contrast, no first-
hand account of an event can be a rumor, though it may later become one.
Coady 2012: 87
Slightly elaborating on Coady’s explanation about the difference between gossip and rumor, it
seems consistent with anyone’s experience of gossip to say that a peculiarity of gossip resides in
the abundance of first-hand testimony: even if different sources are selected and used in gossip,
usually the prop for the exchange itself is ideal when it refers to the first-hand testimony of one
of the participants, namely relating to what happened to them, or what they saw or heard (from
a determinate source), and so on.
In this chapter, by “gossip” we will chiefly refer to the general activity, and not to the person
who gossips. A basic definition of gossip could read as follows:
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Gossip is a kind of idle social discourse taking place between two or more speakers that
are at least comfortably acquainted, about some absent third party that the speakers
know, and which usually displays a broadly evaluative or moral dimension.
Axel Gelfert, in his A Critical Introduction to Testimony (Gelfert 2014: 201) reports a similar
definition itemized by German communication scholar Klaus Merten, per whom “gossip
(1) occurs only among acquaintances, (2) is always about a particular individual, who (3) is
known to –and, in turn, knows –everyone in the group, but (4) is not present at the time”
(Merten 2009: 16).
The latter definition, although mostly consistent with the one provided before, misses a
crucial point: the presence of an implicit or explicit evaluation. This emerged in the seminal
anthropological work on gossip by Gluckman (1963) and especially by Yerkovich (1977),
who contended that gossip was about the construction of shared moral characters. For instance,
one colleague talking about those who did not attend the company’s Christmas party may or
may not be engaging in gossip. It depends on whether the report has a merely informative
value or intends to present some absences as particularly noteworthy (which would make the
gossip “juicy”):
“I didn’t see Jones and … who else … Melissa wasn’t there either … oh, and you
know who was not there? Harriet, the blond one, the big boss’ new secretary!”
By reading the sentence above in your mind, you will have probably labeled as gossip only the
second half: the absence of Jones and Melissa is not gossip, it is just reporting of some social facts.
Any initial definition has to be taken as a rule of thumb because some exceptions may be
given: most notably, a scarce degree of acquaintance between the speakers may be increased
by the presence of a common acquaintance who can be gossiped about. Furthermore, it is
not unusual for people who do not know each other at all to explore the possibility of some
common friendship to establish a communication that is based on that person. As shown by
Yerkovich, if the evaluation (either positive or negative) is shared by the two speakers, then
gossip may be initiated. In more playful settings, and usually between close friends, the absence
of the person who is being gossiped about is not mandatory. Gossip in clear presence of the
target may also reach the status of mobbing, but then again, the playfulness of the situation should
be assessed.
In sum, everybody knows what gossip is. Definitions are good rules of thumb to direct
research, but they should not be used to brutally rule out communicative practices that are felt
to be gossip even if they do not fall clearly within a given definition.1
2. A brief history of applied gossip studies: anthropology,

cognitive science, and philosophy
The fact that a handbook of applied epistemology incorporates a whole chapter about gossip is
not a small feat considering the poor theoretical reputation gossip has enjoyed over the ages. It is
thus important to start by briefly reviewing the studies that led to the theoretical legitimization
of gossip as an object worthy of study. Quite interestingly, the history of gossip studies is quite
recent and it does not begin with philosophy.
The revaluation of gossip is indebted to two main disciplines: anthropology on the one
hand, and cognitive/evolutionary studies on the other. Both will be relevant in our epistemo-
logical analysis. Anthropology focused on gossip as a means of social regulation via the sharing
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of social information (Max Gluckman was the pioneer in this field), but during the 60s and
70s other anthropologists came to explore the topic of gossip, especially in reference to North
American native tribes (Gluckman 1963; Paine 1967; Cox 1970); however, the mechanism often
maintained a sense of otherness. Sally Yerkovich’s landmark fieldwork went beyond this view by
exploring gossip in a suburban New Jersey community (Yerkovich 1977).
Later, evolutionary psychology and sociobiology would immensely boost the theoretical
worth of gossip by showing its relevance to the origins of language and sociality (Dunbar
2004; Wilson et al. 2002): gossip was presented as a natural tool for the enforcement of a deter-
minate order within the group. Dunbar, specifically, maintains that gossip has evolved along
the lines of grooming to allow hominids the possibility to cope with life in large social groups.
This approach (together with the sociobiological perspective (Wilson et al. 2002)) stresses the
pragmatic-moral origin of gossip as a collective device that –by circulating social information –
monitors, reports, and punishes deviants and free riders.
It took philosophy quite a long time to take a (defensive) stance on the topic within the new
wave of gossip studies. The most remarkable output is an edited book eloquently entitled Good
Gossip that was published in 1994 (Goodman and Ben-Ze’ev 1994).We will later return to one
of its essays, “Knowledge through the Grapevine: Gossip as Inquiry” (Ayim 1994), that can be
held as the first socio-epistemological analysis of gossip. The rest of the book was essentially a
treaty of applied ethics.
3. Social epistemology and the gossip conundrum

In order to analyze gossip in an applied epistemological framework, it seems fairly obvious to
set it under the scope of social epistemology. As a matter of fact, gossip as an epistemic process
could not be more social, as it is social in its functioning and social in its content.
We can first of all try to fit gossip within the classification of social epistemology modes
offered by Alvin Goldman in his “Guide to Social Epistemology.”These are the four parameters
he uses to discriminate the different varieties of social epistemology:
(1) the options from which agents or systems make choices or selections; (2) the type
of agent or system that makes the choices or selections; (3) the sources of evidence used
in making doxastic choices; and (4) the kinds of epistemic outcomes, desiderata, or norms
used in the evaluations.
Goldman 2011: 12
Let us briefly see how these parameters concern gossip, deferring for the moment reflection on
the second parameter, the type of agent or system.
• Options: epistemology applied to gossip analyzes the doxastic attitudes adopted by gossipers

about certain propositions with a social content concerning the group(s) to which they
belong.
• Evidential sources: evidential sources for gossip are mainly first-hand evidence and testimony.
As we will see in section 5, dedicated to gossip and inquiry, instances of testimony can be
inferentially matched (also with evidence) and become new sources of testimony.
• Epistemic outcomes for evaluation: the epistemic outcomes of gossip are plausible beliefs about
the state of things in one’s social group, which afford pragmatically rewarding predictions.
Also, from a group perspective, the epistemic outcome is a global picture of the current state
of affairs within the group (Bertolotti and Magnani 2014).
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The real conundrum of gossip with respect to social-epistemological classification resides in

the second of Goldman’s parameters, namely the type of agent or system that makes the choices
or selections. Goldman suggests two main categories of agents: individual doxastic agents with
social evidence (IDAs) and collective doxastic agents (CDAs). Gossip is composed by individuals who
gossip, and their gossiping is based on social evidence, which would direct us toward labeling
gossip as a system of the first kind. It is also true, though, that individuals gossip as a preroga-
tive of belonging to a group, and literature has shown how gossip is aimed at sharing social
knowledge and pragmatic stances among group members (Gluckman 1963; Yerkovich 1977;
Baumeister et al. 2004; Dunbar 2004; Beersma and Van Kleef 2011).Therefore, some of the dox-
astic attitudes supported by gossip seem proper of collective doxastic agents, which would direct
us toward labeling gossip as a system of the second kind. Goldman explores the possibility of
hybrid agent systems, which he calls epistemic systems proper of systems-oriented social epistemology:
“[E]‌pistemic system” designates a social system that houses social practices, procedures,
institutions, and/or patterns of interpersonal influence that affect the epistemic
outcomes of its members. The outcomes typically involve IDAs as doxastic agents, but
in special cases could involve CDAs.
Goldman 2011: 18–19
Bertolotti and Magnani proposed a solution to this conundrum concerning the individual-
based vs. group-based epistemic nature of gossip by introducing the notion of epistemic synergy,
a function-dominant interaction able to project a higher organizational level:
An epistemic synergy is a “soft-assembled epistemic system.” More specifically, it obtains

when a number of individual epistemic agents join their efforts and temporarily act
as one collective epistemic agent: this also means that some prerogatives that are usu-
ally comprised and carried out by one epistemic agent –i.e. knowledge gathering,
inferencing, assessing, and so on –can be dislocated among the parts of the synergetic
group so that individuals, instead of being full epistemic agents, may concentrate on
empowered epistemic faculties.
Bertolotti and Magnani 2014
4. Gossip and testimony

In social epistemology, when dealing with testimony as a source of knowledge, gossip is
hardly ever one of the first topics at stake. And yet, at the same time, most comprehensive
accounts of testimony cannot avoid dealing with gossip.2 The reason, we suggest, is that gossip
is a complex epistemic phenomenon, which can be theoretically broken down into several
subparts: testimony-based knowledge, inquiry, and pragmatic effects.3 This subdivision, though,
only makes sense at a theoretical level and it is hard to reveal it in actual instances of gossip.
C. A. J. Coady explored the possibility that gossip was a “pathology” of testimony, but ultim-
ately resolved that gossip, at least the way he presented it, “is not a pathological form of tes-
timony but a normal form of it” (Coady 2006: 262): most of his argument was a rebuttal or
minimization of philosophical and moral objections against gossip, to differentiate it from “mali-
cious speculation” (2006: 254).
The problem is that gossip is far from being a normal form of testimony although it clearly
includes a part of normal testimony-based knowledge. Commonly conceived, testimony is taken
to involve a source on whom the addressee has an epistemic dependence. The first peculiarity of
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gossip is that most of the time testimony is offered rather than solicited, especially when setting
off a gossiping exchange. The epistemological debate on testimony concentrates on the modal-
ities of testimony and especially on the reasons and the conditions that make it acceptable for
the receiver to base her knowledge on the testimony of the source. Even if the receiver may
resort to previously gathered knowledge or other local clues to assess the testimony’s trust-
worthiness (or lack thereof), the source and the receiver of the testimony should not be epi-
stemic peers on the matter of testimony. Otherwise, there would be no reason for the receiver
to rely on the former’s testimony: the epitome of this view is expert testimony. Gossip is closer
to simple instances of mundane testimony (I come home and tell my wife it was raining down-
town) than to expert testimony (Scientists tell me that average temperatures have soared over
the past century).
The epistemological relationship between gossip and testimony is rather peculiar: indeed,
gossip is mostly about offering testimony, but the agents involved in gossip benefit from a
quasi-total epistemic equality. For a socially and morally relevant testimony to be gossip, all
of the participants must be part of the same group, and hence share a great deal of previously
gathered knowledge about the broad framework of gossip, and about the trustworthiness of
sources: these are all parts of a specific social knowledge base, shared and updated through
gossip by group members in virtue of being members of the same group (Bertolotti and
Magnani 2014). The fact that gossip consists in testimony exchanged in virtue of a common
membership seems to turn the whole group into a good informant (Fricker 2012), but the
group is at the same time the recipient of testimony as well. In gossip, testimony seems to be
accepted as a sui generis source of knowledge because if needed it can be very easily justified
or rejected by appeal to more basic sources: a rapid and usually viable resort to empirical evi-
dence and/or inference based on memory (that is on one’s previous knowledge of the social
knowledge base).
From a related ethical perspective, Louise Collins’s “feminist” defense in Good Gossip is illu-
minating about the commonly perceived malicious intent of gossip as a means of spreading lies
and falsities serving a strategic goal:
If all gossip aims at denigrating its subject, whom will it persuade? My malicious intent
will usually only succeed where those whom I seek to persuade do not see my aim. If
all those who gossip admit to the aim of denigration, their co-gossips have no reason
to interpret their claim about S, the subject, as telling them anything about S, except
that the malicious gossip does not like her.
Collins 1994: 108
In other words, the question that a receiver asks upon obtaining some gossip is not necessarily
“Is that true?” but more precisely “Why are you saying that?” and “Why should I be interested?”
To sum up, gossip does not fully belong to the domain of a proper analysis of testimony. If it
is forced into it, it will necessarily result as inadequate. And yet, theories of testimony appear to
be extremely informative about the epistemic nature of gossip.
Miranda Fricker explores social epistemology through the lenses of rational authority and
social power (Fricker 2011). The mutual relation between the two is crucial as far as gossip and
testimony are concerned. Though, to fully understand the peculiarity of the discourse, our ana-
lysis must be framed as evolutionary social epistemology.
Testimony and competence naturally go hand in hand. A good informant is a competent and
willing source of testimony-based knowledge. The relationship between competence and social
power is just as natural, making rational authorities into social authorities at the same time.4
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Gossip
Gossip, conversely, is an egalitarian practice. It is social, it relates to power dynamics, but it

does so by a common knowledge-based competence. In gossip, anyone can be both a source and
a recipient of testimony. If one acquires an enhanced competence over a person or a situation,
it is usually a matter of sheer luck and because of the very functioning of gossip, the knowledge
that gave the first person her competence (and hence her authority) becomes common knowledge
at she shares it.
Here an evolutionary detour is mandatory. Gossip is an epistemic primer: as far as testi-
mony epistemology is concerned, it can be said that testimony was born with gossip, especially
if we accept Dunbar’s theory that the origins of language and the origins of gossip are strictly
connected (Dunbar 2004). Language –because of its gossip-enabling features –could outdo
grooming in affording larger human communities by creating a sense of commitment, and by
singling out parasites and free riders.
Gossip as an egalitarian epistemic phenomenon resonates with the paleo-anthropological
theory advocating the egalitarian syndrome (Boehm 1999). According to this view, original human
societies were animated by a common animosity against alphas and physically overwhelming
individuals ruling over the group by brute force and by deriving a social authority from one’s
proficiency in hunting –with the result of a reduced phenotypic variation between individ-
uals. Newer “egalitarian” societies promoted variance reduction by sharing the game more
than the hunting effort: this can be paralleled by an epistemic system that encouraged mutual
testimony-dependence over a common knowledge topic (gossip about the group), favoring
many exchanges of testimony filling minor epistemic gaps.
Gossip can be seen as embedding a kind of grooming-vouched testimony, reflecting its evo-
lutionary origins.Testimony is inductively accepted on the basis of trust among group members,
and it is the practice of gossip itself that fosters trust, together with the ability to gossip according
to the rules of the group.
This does not mean that gossip testimony is never challenged, but that the acceptance follows
a default pathway. This can be understood by referring to Paul Thagard’s hybrid model of tes-
timony. Interestingly, his definition makes sense if we exchange the word “testimony” with the
word “gossip”:
A general theory of [gossip] has to be able to explain both how [gossip] is usually
accepted automatically but also how it sometimes provokes extensive reflection about
the claim being made and the claimant who is making it.
Thagard 2006: 297 [the original reads “testimony” instead of “gossip”]
Gossip as an egalitarian testimony practice, taking place in a society of experts that just by con-
tingent matters fall short of being epistemic peers, explains the existence of a default pathway for
acceptance. Which, in turn, accounts for the diffusion of gossip across time and all geographies
despite its ill repute. At the same time, the diffusion of gossip does not amend its ill repute: even
if one does not take it to be necessarily mendacious, gossip is still perceived as an epistemically
loose and shallow ground for forming one’s beliefs. Indeed, if on the one hand we are wired for
the acceptance of gossip, it also often activates a reflective pathway of careful (albeit quick) evalu-
ation of the claim, of its sources, and its global coherence.
5. Gossip and inquiry

Admitting that the veracity (or at least the bona fide) of testimony is not a main issue of gossip,
there is something about gossip by which it is sensed as remote from the truth, especially if we
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conceive truth as a set of unchanging facts (i.e., true facts are not supposed to change over time).
The problem with gossip is its extreme fluidity or “shakiness.”What is endorsed by gossip today
might not be tomorrow, or a very different version might be circulating. In this sense, a very
critical approach to gossip is presented by Mary S. Morgan:
Gossip is thought to destroy gradually any initial nuggets of facts that were involved
in the first place: The content of the fact is changed each time it is passed along, just
as in the game where children repeat a whisper around a circle. Rumour, in contrast,
is usually characterised as a process of additions: The claim gains the kind of detail we
associate with the factual, but is, in reality, a process of adding falsehoods, as in wartime
rumours of invasion.
Morgan 2011: 17
As epistemic agents, we have a natural inclination toward acquiring beliefs that are true, or at
least rational and plausible in order to make pragmatically viable, goal-oriented predictions.This
results in a low tolerance for mistakes and an even lower one for intentional lies. Gossip, as a
system of fast-paced epistemic exchanges between quasi-peers (hence with a small epistemic
differential), aims at keeping in check both mistakes (if I gossip about something I misperceived
or misunderstood, I will be corrected in the matter of a few gossip sessions) and intentional lie-
mongering.This fact was stressed by Collins in Good Gossip (1994; see also the Collins quotation
in section 4).5
According to Morgan, the factual content of gossip is changed (hence impoverished) every
time it is passed along. But is gossip really just about passing bits of information along? That is
to say, is that what gossipers think they are doing, and furthermore are they doing it wrong?
As we said, testimony-based knowledge is only one side of the coin. The other one is enquiry.
Maryann Ayim, in her article “Knowledge through the Grapevine: Gossip as Inquiry” (Ayim
1994), relies on the characterization of science depicted by Charles Sanders Peirce: “the pursuit
of those who are devoured by a desire to find things out” (Peirce 1931–1958: 1:8).
Gossip’s model captures several aspects of Peirce’s notion of a community of

investigators. Describing what he sees as the causes of “the triumph of modern
science,” Peirce speaks specifically of the scientists’ “unreserved discussion with one
another, … each being fully informed about the work of his neighbour, and availing
himself of that neighbour’s results; and thus in storming the stronghold of truth one
mounts upon the shoulders of another who has to ordinary apprehension failed, but
has in truth succeeded by virtue of the lessons of his failure. This is the veritable
essence of science” (Peirce 1931–1958: 7:51). … If Peirce is right that the unre-
served discussions with one another are a cornerstone in the triumph of modern
science, then gossip, by its very nature, would appear to be an ideal vehicle for
the acquisition of knowledge. Gossips certainly avail themselves of their neighbors’
results, discussing unreservedly and sharing results constitute the very essence of
gossip.
Ayim 1994: 87
Ayim –forerunning social epistemology –observes that the epistemic ground and the social
one are deeply intertwined in gossip, just as they are in science. After all, part of the success of
scientific endeavor rests in the asymmetry between what a scientist may individually know, and
what is known in the whole body of scientific literature.
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Gossip
The analogy, though, is not only about the presence of a community but also about the infer-
ential component as well.The root, Ayim contends, has to be traced back to the Peircean notion
of abduction (Magnani 2009): “The good scientist, as described in the work of Charles Sanders
Peirce, will be likely to start with a hunch, or retroduction, [or abduction] as Peirce calls it, a ten-
tative hypothesis appealing because of its great explanatory capacity” (2009: 89).
Ayim does not further investigate the abductive nature of gossip as its inferential basis, but
there is more to be said on the matter. Let us consider a famously straightforward Peircean
schema of abduction (Peirce 1931–1958: 5.189):
1 . The surprising fact C is observed.

2. But if A were true, C would be a matter of course.
3. Hence there is reason to suspect that A is true.
As we have already noted gossip is often thought to have an “evaluative” component. What if
the evaluative component of gossip should refer to the action of making an appraisal rather than
stressing the judgmental feature? Then gossiping interactions could consist in inquiries that
inferentially expand upon testimony in order to achieve a more consistent picture of what is
going on in the social group. Gossip is not an indiscriminate changing of the facts at each step,
as stigmatized by Morgan, but a progressive inferential refinement of what is to be taken as a
(social) fact. We could schematize by suggesting the presence of three phases:
• In-Gossip Phase: Testimony describes a surprising situation.

• Inferential Phase: A plausible explanation for the situation.
• Out-Gossip Phase: Surprising testimony clustered with explanation.
Ayim, optimistically but not without a certain reason, stresses how this hypothetical (qua
abductive) nature of gossip should make it a viable way for achieving truth on social matters.
The fact that (abductive) gossip can be withdrawn is compared to how scientists hold scientific
truth –that is, provisionally.
On this analysis of the scientific process, gossip may appear to be even more analo-
gous to science in its procedure for arriving at the truth, with gossipers, ever ready
to attribute no security whatever (CP 6.470) to the beliefs and claims of others,
subjecting them to the harshest of critical analyses, adopting such claims and beliefs
“only … on probation” (7.202), insisting on the stringent tests that Peirce saw as a vital
component of scientific progress, and standing “ready to abandon one or all as soon as
experience opposes them” (1.635). The difference between science and gossip lies not
in their procedure, then, but in the type of subject matter that will characteristically
interest them.
Ayim 1994: 90; Brackets refer to paragraphs in Peirce 1931–1958
The gossip dynamic can then be seen in finer detail. The production of gossip equates to
making an abduction upon a series of contextual clues, and what can be called the base. The
constitution of the base reflects a dual nature: one part coincides with the individual’s best-
updated knowledge about the group, the other with her disposition.The disposition is composed
of the agent’s feelings, her mood, her personal cognitive endowments (for instance, being good
at recognizing faces rather than remembering names), and so on: in sum, it is what affects the
abductive capacities of an individual in virtue of being that precise individual and not any other
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one in the group. Conversely, the individual knowledge, mirroring the group knowledge, affects
the abductive capacities of an individual in virtue of being part of the group itself.
Nevertheless, if the model so far could resume gossiping information exchange, it would be
all too easy. Gossip is in fact not a solipsistic informational activity, but it is engaged between
two or more parties, gossiping together. The party emitting the information is mirrored by one
or more receiving parties, whose reception is not passive but consists of an abductive counter-
appraisal. This process is crucial if we keep in mind the definition of gossip as a “soft-assembled
epistemic system,” in which the prerogatives that are usually comprised and carried out by one
epistemic agent –i.e., knowledge gathering, inferencing, assessing, and so on –can be dislocated
among the parts of the synergy. Even if making sense of cues and providing a general explanation
is the most patent example of abductive inference, also matching an explanation against one’s
background is an abductive activity, leading to the acceptance or the rejection of the proffered
explanation. Thus, as shown when dealing with the definitional issues of gossip, a passive hearer
may not refrain from participating in the abductive interaction even by being a simple gate-
keeper, evaluating the retransmission of the information she received.This is the reflective pathway
suggested by Thagard’s hybrid view of testimony quoted at the end of section 4.
The effectiveness of the informational exchange rests significantly on the counter-
appraisal: thus, even apparently passive participants act as gatekeepers, whose aim is to assess as
best as possible the abduction that leads the first speaker to gossip by matching her statement
against the receiver’s own individual knowledge, and against the best informed (abductive) guess
about the speaker’s disposition.
6. Relevance and the epistemic juiciness of gossip

Margaret A. Cuonzo elaborated an intention-based account whereby she defines gossip as follows:
In uttering p, A gossips to B about C if, and only if (i) A believes that C would not like
A to reveal the information contained in p to B; (ii) A would be disinclined to utter p
to B with C present; (iii) A believes that uttering p will be pleasurable to A and/or B;
and (iv) p contains information about C.
Cuonzo 2008: 132
According to her, a gossiper intends to say something that will elicit some pleasure in the
receiver, and that would not be uttered in the presence of the interested party. This brings us to
yet another essential element of gossip, that is the relevance of what is discussed –or commonly
said, its juiciness. This trait had been acknowledged by Yerkovich as well, who pointed out how:
The immediacy of the sociable communicative event and the style in which the infor-
mation is presented (e.g., with overtones of urgency, newness, scandal) make the infor-
mation salient. Out of this context, the information relayed in gossiping takes on a
“so-what?” quality, evoking a justifying comment on the part of the speaker to the
effect of “Oh, you just have to know him or her to understand.” Information, no
matter how salient or scandalous, isn’t gossip unless the participants know enough
about the people involved to experience the thrill of revelation.
Yerkovich 1977: 196
Philosopher Paul Grice introduced what he defined as conversational maxims, guidelines for a
cooperative exchange (Grice 1975). Whereas the maxims of quantity, clarity, and manner are
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Gossip
often violated, gossip leverages the maxim of relevance. Indeed, the main risk faced by gossipers
is to be deemed irrelevant. People uttering dull remarks, or repeatedly failing to make relevant
points, are considered mentally defective or uninteresting, while the opposite gains social pres-
tige in the gossip community (Dessalles 2000).
When dealing with the epistemology of gossip and testimony, we hinted at a peculiarity of
gossip, that is that testimony is usually offered spontaneously rather than solicited, at least when
beginning a gossip exchange. Now, considering relevance, if sometimes it is difficult to give
someone a relevant answer to a question, it is even more difficult to make a relevant statement
out of the blue.
Relevance is a relative concept: it depends on previous knowledge (and hence on the esti-
mation of the other’s previous knowledge) and on timeliness. When gossiping, some new and
coherent information (or explanation) has to be introduced in the conversation in order to
avoid the “so what?” reaction. Failing to do this will result in being considered a poor gossip
companion and impair one’s future credibility.
In an epistemological discourse, relevance affects coverage-dependent systems through the
notion of newsworthiness (Goldberg 2011), which can be easily extended to the analysis of gossip:
It should be clear that one’s sense of newsworthiness is relevant to the justification of

one’s coverage-supported belief: a subject whose sense of newsworthiness is radically
different from that of the sources on which she is relying risks forming coverage-
related beliefs in propositions regarding which she has no reliable coverage. … The
relevant notion is the one possessed not just by those who report the news but also
by those who consume it –at least if the latter hope to be able to exploit the coverage
they receive. The relevant point here is simply that the individual’s notion must be
synchronized with the notion of those who are or would be most likely to acquire and
disseminate the information in question.
Goldberg 2011: 103
In gossip, relevance is about collaboration and synchronization. Given the fast pace of infor-
mation exchanges aimed at maintaining a constant coverage, fine-tuning is necessary in order
to provide testimony and inferential inquiries that are able to fill in the epistemic gaps as they
emerge at the right time. This is much akin to what is the case in corporate news business. This
will to keep relevant contributes to answering Morgan’s unease about facts continuously chan-
ging in gossip. “Facts” change just as they change in the news: a central core may be maintained,
but novel testimony or interpretation has to be added in order to maintain the relevance.
Notes
1 In this chapter we will deal with gossip between and about peers, friends, and acquaintances. We will
not explore the topic of gossip about celebrities, such as tabloid gossip. In the latter case, an article
by Alla V. Tovares exemplifies the similarities, demonstrating that “participants’ talk about the tele-
vision show is akin to gossip, in the sense that in both ‘ordinary’ gossip and in conversations about
TV programs, participants evaluatively talk about an absent third party and by doing so they cement
friendships, establish alliances, create and recreate social values, and draw delight from entertaining one
another” (Tovares 2006).
2 Contrarily to gossip, many discourses pertaining to rumor, urban legends, etc., embed what Jennifer
Faust, describing religious belief, called doxastic arguments. Doxastic arguments are not formally question-
begging, but one is inclined to believe that they are sound only if she already (independently) believes
the conclusion (Faust 2008). They are typical of political discourse, intense activism, and conspiracy
theories.
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3 We will not concern ourselves with the pragmatic effects of gossip when remote from the epistemo-
logical implications, mainly because it would fall outside of the aim of this chapter and because they have
been extensively studied by already cited psychological, anthropological, and philosophical research.
4 According to such a paradigm, epistemic inequalities trigger social inequalities –that in turn reproduce
epistemic inequalities and so on. Consider a usually trusted source of testimony, such as a doctor. The
latter is sought for his medical testimony, and the acquired social power involves an income which allows
him to afford a similar education for his offspring, thus reproducing the epistemic privilege originating
from his social condition. Louise Collins presents gossip as the egalitarian, traceless, and easily disposable
discourse of subjugated classes (women, slaves, foreigners) who could not afford nor were allowed higher
forms of speech (Collins 1994). Gossip as a key tool in women’s ways of knowing has frequently been
explored by feminist epistemology (Adkins 2002).
5 The frugality of gossip makes it a thriving ground for informal fallacies, many of which are configured
as particular forms of abduction (Bardone and Magnani 2010).
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Economic Review, 4(3): 307–16.
Goldberg, S. C. (2011). “If That Were True I Would Have Heard It by Now,” in A. I. Goldman and
D. Whitcomb (eds.), Social Epistemology: Essential readings. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Goldman, A. I. (2011). “A Guide to Social Epistemology,” in A. I. Goldman and D. Whitcomb (eds.), Social
Epistemology: Essential readings. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Goodman, R. F. and Ben-Ze’ev A. (eds.). (1994). Good Gossip. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas.
Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and Conversation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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Gossip
Magnani, L. (2009). Abductive Cognition: The epistemological and eco-cognitive dimensions of hypothetical reasoning.
Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer.
Merten, K. (2009). “Zur Theorie des Gerüchts.” Publizistik, 54(1): 15–42.
Morgan, M. S. (2011). “Travelling Facts,” in P. Howlett and M. S. Morgan (eds.), How Well Do Facts Travel.
Paine, R. (1967). “What is Gossip About? An alternative hypothesis.” Man, 2(2): 278–85.
Peirce, C. S. (1931– 1958). Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (Vols. 1– 8). Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.Vols. 1–6, Hartshorne, C., and Weiss, P. (eds.);Vols. 7–8, Burks, A. W. (ed.).
Peirce, C. S. (1878). “How to Make Our Ideas Clear.” Popular Science Monthly, 12: 286–302.
Thagard, P. (2006). “Testimony, Credibility, and Explanatory Coherence.” Erkenntnis, 63(3): 295–316.
Tovares, A.V. (2006). “Public Medium, Private Talk: Gossip about a TV show as ‘quotidian hermeneutics’.”
Text & Talk, 26(4/5): 463–91.
Wilson, D. S., Wilczynski C., Wells A., and Weiser L. (2002). “Gossip and Other Aspects of Language as
Group-Level Adaptations,” in C. Hayes and L. Huber (eds.), The Evolution of Cognition. Cambridge, MA:
The MIT Press.
Yerkovich, S. (1977). “Gossiping as a Way of Speaking.” Journal of Communication, 27: 192–96.
Further reading
Goodman, R. F. and Ben-Ze’ev A. (eds.). (1994). Good Gossip. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas.
The epistemological literature about gossip is scarce. The essays included in this volume remain a
fundamental reference for exploring several philosophical issues able to elicit some epistemological
reflections.
Bertolotti, T., and Magnani, L. (2014). “An Epistemological Analysis of Gossip and Gossip- Based
Knowledge.” Synthese, 191: 4037–67. This article focuses on the relationship between gossip and
abductive inference, both from the individual and the group perspective.
Gelfert, A. (2014). A Critical Introduction to Testimony. London: Bloomsbury. Other aspects of the epistemo-
logical approach to gossip, especially as far as testimony is concerned, are offered in this volume in the
dedicated section.
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21
THE APPLIED EPISTEMOLOGY
OF CONSPIRACY THEORIES
An overview
M R. X. Dentith and Brian L. Keeley1
1. Introduction
In some sense, conspiracy theories have been around as long as people have plotted secretly
in the attempt to bring about ends in situations where doing so publicly and individually
would seem less likely to succeed. In other words, conspiracy theories have likely been
around as long as humans have conspired, probably since Homo became sapiens.2 However,
with the coming of the twenty-first century, especially in a political context, concern over
conspiracy theories has seemingly taken on an urgent tone. There have always been concerns
over conspiracies, whether it be the Freemasons of the eighteenth century, The Protocols of
the Elders of Zion in the nineteenth century, or the Red Scare and the assassination of U.S.
President John F. Kennedy in the twentieth century. But now some feel the need to talk
of conspiracy theories (and the conspiracy theorists who hold them) as a social problem in
need of a solution. For example, in 2008, former Administrator of the U. S. White House
Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and current Harvard Law Professor, Cass
Sunstein co-authored a paper with Adrian Vermeule that speaks of contemporary con-
spiracy theorists as suffering from a “crippled epistemology.” In response, they seek “to offer
suggestions for governmental responses, both as a matter of policy and as a matter of law”
(Sunstein and Vermeule 2008: 203). Philosophers have also weighed in: Quassim Cassam
(2016) has discussed conspiracy theorists under the rubric of “vice epistemology” (a play on
the label “virtue epistemology”), presenting conspiracy theorists as people suffering from
excessive epistemic vices.
This academic, professional, and philosophical attention to the phenomenon of conspiracy
theories is relatively recent, although the negative and foreboding turn it has taken in some con-
temporary discussions harkens back to what may be the wellspring of twentieth-century philo-
sophical concern with them. In a short passage in the second volume of The Open Society and
Its Enemies, Sir Karl Popper warns against what he derides as “the conspiracy theory of society.”
This is a tendency to explain the events of history by (perhaps unfalsifiable) reference to the
mysterious machinations of off-stage plotters: “It is the view that whatever happens in society…
are the results of direct design by some powerful individuals or groups” (Popper 1972: 341).
Such explanations lack utility at best and promote corrosive cynicism at worst –they are bad
history, bad politics, or both.3 Similarly, starting in 1964, historian Richard J. Hofstadter warned
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Epistemology of conspiracy theories
of the rise of “movements of suspicious discontent” within mid-twentieth century American

politics and of the “paranoid style” of thinking, particularly among disaffected constituencies.
The upshot of these discussions of conspiracy theorizing is that there is something wrong
with conspiracy theories themselves, or with the individuals who author, promote, or entertain
them. While this is a hypothesis deserving of consideration, making good on what precisely
is supposed to be wrong with conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorizing is a surprisingly
daunting task. The chief difficulty for such a task is revealed by the equally plausible hypoth-
esis that there are many theories involving conspiracies that appear to have significant –if not
overwhelming –merit, from the role of U.S. President Richard Nixon’s administration officials
in the Watergate burglary and subsequent cover-up, the role of the U.S. Federal Bureau of
Investigation in infiltrating political opposition groups in the late 1960s, to the assassination of
Julius Caesar in 44 BCE. History is littered with examples of actual conspiracies, many of which
were initially ignored because they were deemed to be mere “conspiracy theories.” The task
here, then, is to figure out how to separate the wheat from the chaff; to discover some “mark of
the incredible” to help us distinguish those theories that we should reject from those that we
should accept.
Our view is that such a simple-minded task is simply a mug’s game, and our discussion below
will point to why we believe this is the case. More significant, though, is our belief that the
question of which theories to accept and which to reject is, in an important sense, ill-formed.
To see why, one must reflect on the observation that perhaps unlike theories in the sciences, if
there is knowledge of conspiracy theories, it is largely improvised knowledge.
2. Conspiracy theories defined

Our first order of business is definitional. Just what is a conspiracy theory? To answer that
question, we need to get to grips with the most minimal definition of what counts as conspira-
torial.We argue that the most minimal conception of what counts as a conspiracy should satisfy
the following three conditions:
1 . There exists or existed some set of agents with a plan;

2. Steps have been taken by the agents to minimize public awareness of what they are up to;
3. Some end is (or was) desired by the agents.
These conditions are both individually necessary and jointly sufficient for some activity to be
classified as conspiratorial. Such a definition rules in a lot of everyday activity as conspiratorial;
the organization of a surprise party, secret meetings about a hostile takeover of a company, and
disinformation campaigns are all covered by this definition.
We argue that such a minimal definition is necessary when analyzing these things called “con-
spiracy theories.” Such a definition, being general, means that there are no artificial restrictions
on what counts as “properly” conspiratorial, and this is important, because restricting what
counts as conspiratorial has flow-on effects when it comes to analyzing conspiracy theories. It
is fair to say that many beliefs about the likeliness or unlikeliness of conspiracy theories hinge
on the definition of what counts as conspiratorial. If you build into your definition of what
counts as conspiratorial that such events are unlikely, as Karl Popper does (1962), or that what
is properly conspiratorial –say, political conspiracies –is only a subset of conspiratorial activity
generally, then that changes our understanding as to whether belief in theories about conspir-
acies (defined, for example, as either prima facie unlikely or restricted in scope to momentous,
political activities) can ever be considered rational.
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3. Generalist vs. Particularist approaches

The rationality of belief in conspiracy theories is, of course, the vexing question at the heart of
the matter. Much ink has been spilt dissecting belief in these things called “conspiracy theories,”
and while there is no clear consensus on the matter, there is a sharp, dividing line between two
camps of conspiracy theory theorists. In an article called “Conspiracy Theories and Fortuitous
Data,” Joel Buenting and Jason Taylor (2010) argue that when we look at the academic literature
about these things called “conspiracy theories” there are, broadly, two camps of theorists: the
Generalists and the Particularists.
According to the Generalist, the rationality of conspiracy theories can be assessed without
considering particular conspiracy theories. On this view, conspiratorial thinking qua conspiracy
thinking is itself irrational.4
The Particularist, however, denies that the rationality of conspiracy theories can be assessed
without first considering particular conspiracy theories. That is to say, the Particularist claims
that no matter our views about conspiracy theories generally, we cannot dismiss particular con-
spiracy theories; rather, we must evaluate them on their individual merits (Buenting and Taylor
2010: 568–69).
So, when we talk about conspiracy theories generally being unwarranted, this kind of view
falls under the rubric of Generalism. If we phrase talk of belief in conspiracy theories being
warranted in a range of cases, and the only way to work out whether belief in a particular con-
spiracy theory is warranted is by looking at the evidence, then this is a Particularist view.
It is fair to say that the Generalist view is deeply embedded in much of the academic work
on belief in conspiracy theories. From the work of Karl Popper (1962) and Richard Hofstadter
(1964) to more recent work such as that of Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule (2008), Quassim
Cassam (2016), and David Robert Grimes (2016), belief in conspiracy theories is taken to be
generally pathological. It is also fair to say that much of the recent work in philosophy bucks
this trend; philosophers such as Charles Pigden (1995, 2006), Lee Basham (2002), David Coady
(2006), and ourselves (Keeley 1999; Dentith 2014) have presented a variety of arguments which
share the common theme of challenging Generalist construals of the irrationality of belief in
conspiracy theories by showing that, in a range of cases, belief in particular conspiracy theories
turns out to be warranted.
4. Conspiracy theory theorists and conspiracists

Given the above, it is helpful in the analysis of these things called “conspiracy theories” to intro-
duce some terms and concepts to help frame the discussion about what is going on when we
talk about conspiracy theories and the various attitudes toward them in the academic literature.
For example, one of us identifies the set of people named in the previous paragraph as “con-
spiracy theory theorists”; that is, academics who think that conspiracy theories are phenomena
worth studying (Dentith 2014: 8). In other words, the conspiracy theory theorist thinks that
the phenomenon of conspiracy theorizing is worth developing theories about. Philosophers, in
particular, are used to this somewhat “meta” stance, but there are also conspiracy theory theorists
in political science (e.g., Joseph E. Uscinski and Joseph M. Parent), social psychology (Karen
Douglas), media studies (Jack Z. Bratich), to name only a few scholars in a few academic discip-
lines. These conspiracy theory theorists do not promulgate (or denigrate) specific theories –at
least, that is not their primary aim –rather, they are interested in explaining the nature of such
theories, under what conditions they arise, what impact they have on other phenomena, etc.
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As Dentith describes it, within academia there is a subset of conspiracy theory theorists –
the conspiracy theory skeptics –who believe that there is not sufficient rationality underlying
conspiracy theories such that any theory of them is worth pursuing. These skeptics are, in the
parlance of Joel Buenting and Jason Taylor, Generalists (as they take it there is a general case of
a prima facie suspicion toward these things we call ‘conspiracy theories’). On this view, to believe
in conspiracy theories is to be irrational. There is a bit of useful terminology, credited to his-
torian Daniel Pipes (1997): Pipes observes that, “Conspiracy theories have a way of growing
on a person, to the point that they become a way of seeing life itself. This is conspiracism, the
paranoid style, or the hidden-hand mentality” (1997: 22, emphasis in original).5 From this, Dentith
takes the terms “conspiracism” and “conspiracist,” which are meant to capture the contem-
porary, pejorative sense of conspiracy theory, as when one derides a proffered explanation by
responding, “Oh, that’s just a conspiracy theory!” As Dentith puts it, “A conspiracist is someone
who believes in the existence of conspiracies without good reason.The terms ‘conspiracism’ and
‘conspiracist’, then, are pejorative labels which reflect a pathological belief in conspiracies sans
evidence” (2014: 33, emphasis in original).6
The charge of conspiracism is a knock against a person; a charge that a given individual
possesses the opposite of epistemic virtue; that they are guilty of a kind of epistemic viciousness
(Cassam 2016; but see also Pigden 2016). It identifies the locus of concern with the person
holding the theory, rather than with the theory itself. But this represents an important distinc-
tion in how one should go about studying the kind of improvised knowledge represented by
many conspiracy theories. Should one focus on the theorists or on the theories? That is, if you
think there is possibly a problem here, is the crux of this problem the people generating or
believing the theories or is it rather with the theories produced? The charge of conspiracism
implies the former.
5. How likely are conspiracy theories?

If we are concerned about evaluating particular conspiracy theories (as surely we are, no matter
whether we sit on the side of “Conspiracy theories are typically unwarranted” or “Belief in
conspiracy theories is justified in a range of cases”), one big question (as well as a potential sig-
nificant problem), is the question of just how common conspiracies are.
For example, if we could state outright just how common conspiracies are here and now, we
could then speak to the issue of how to set the burden of proof of people who propose con-
spiracy theories. After all, in a world where people rarely conspire, it would be understandable if
we dismissed (or just played down) conspiracy theories upon hearing them.7
However, in a world where people conspire all the time, it would be inappropriate to dismiss
talk of conspiracy theories generally. In such a world, the evidence and incidence of past con-
spiratorial activity should inform our judgments about the possibility of a conspiracy occurring
here and now. This, in turn, means we should take any claim of conspiracy –a conspiracy
theory –in such a world seriously. Nothing about this story tells us that the conspiracy theory
in question will be warranted, because even in a highly conspired world, some –if not many –
conspiracy theories may still turn out to be false.
Why is this important? Well, Lee Basham, for one, has explored how our idea of the prior
probability of conspiracy affects our belief of whether theories about conspiracies are worth
investigating. In discussing this issue, he presents an analogy of two families: one that “lives
together in peace and high mutual regard; a family that supports itself in ways that are trans-
parent to most of the members” and another “that has a history of stunning lies by its elders and
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more influential members, a pattern of cliquish betrayals, a way of doing business in the larger
society that makes deception and collusion a way of life” (Basham 2001: 65).
Basham takes it that the prior probability (or, more accurately, the perception by epistemic
agents of the prior probability) “determines the birth and evidential development of conspiracy
theories” (Basham 2001: 64).What we perceive to be the case about the kind of world in which
we live –whether we come from the “good” or “bad” family –determines how likely we think
certain kinds of theories are. If you live in a world chock-a-block with conspiracies, then you
will think the world is highly conspired. Conversely, if you live in a world where conspiracies
are rare, and even then seldom successful, then you will likely dismiss conspiracy theories in
general as unlikely. As such, your beliefs about the prior probability of conspiracies in your
society goes some way to motivating whether you will investigate or ignore putative claims of
conspiracy. It is for this reason that we cannot make claims about the relative likelihood of con-
spiracy theories without considering claims about the probabilities of conspiracies themselves.8
This is all to say that our judgment of just how likely conspiracies are informs our judgment
about whether we should take any particular conspiracy theory seriously. With this in mind,
when we hear about some conspiracy theory, we need to ask the salient question: “Should we
investigate it?” After all, if it turned out that there really is a conspiracy in existence, surely we
ought to know about it. Therefore, what is the threshold for investigating such claims in order
to find out?
This brings us back to those pesky definitions of both “conspiracy” and “conspiracy theory.”
Our judgment of prior probability of how conspiratorial the world is depends to a certain
extent on just what we think gets ruled in and out of both our definition of “conspiracy”
and “conspiracy theory.” Take, for example, conspiracy: Pete Mandik (like Popper before him)
claims that theories about known conspiracies should not be considered conspiracy theories.
Why? Well, if a conspiracy has not been kept secret, then it is not the kind of thing we typically
talk about when discussing conspiracy theories (Mandik 2007: 213).
The notion that a conspiracy is something that has been kept secret is not itself surprising.
However, if we restrict talk of what counts as properly conspiratorial to cases where the con-
spiracy is never revealed, then we have a problem. Such a definition artificially restricts what
counts as conspiratorial and has some strange corollaries. For one thing, if we accept such a
stipulation, then there is a question as to whether conspirators could believe in the existence
of their own conspiracies. Given that conspiracies are meant to be kept secret, if anyone knows
about the conspiracy, then it is not being kept properly secret. Now, someone running a critique
such as Mandik’s could and should respond by saying that the conspiracy must be kept secret to
people outside the set of conspirators. However, in this case, the only people who could reason-
ably posit a conspiracy theory would be the people who have good grounds to believe it to be
true –to wit, the conspirators.9
It follows, then, that from such a definition, conspiracy theories themselves will be unlikely
in a trivial sense, because if someone outside the conspiracy posits the existence of a conspiracy,
then either the conspiracy was not kept properly secret –and thus is not, after all, a theory about
a conspiracy –or the conspiracy –should it exist –was kept secret and thus the conspiracy the-
orist has no grounds to believe it. In either case, belief in the conspiracy theory will be irrational
because it cannot, by definition, be a belief based upon good evidence for the existence of a
conspiracy.
As we can see, an awful lot hinges on what is captured by the term “conspiracy.” If we stick
to the minimal definition of conspiracy defended earlier, then all that needs to be said when
it comes to talk about the secretive nature of conspiracies is that conspirators will be more or
less successful at keeping their existence and activities secret. If we rule out certain kinds of
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conspiratorial activity for either not being secret enough (or as not being of interest), then that
affects our probability estimates concerning how likely or unlikely conspiracies turn out to be.
Why is it important to make claims about the prior probability of conspiratorial activity?
Well, a notable feature of the academic debate about the supposed irrationality of belief in con-
spiracy theories is how various theorists account for cases of warranted conspiratorial activity in
the historical record. It turns out that whatever your definition of conspiracy, you might have to
explain away how examples of known conspiratorial activity (and theories about that activity)
are either not really conspiracies, or not the proper subject of conspiracy theories.
Of course, our estimates as to how likely conspiracies are will vary over time. In a closed
society –such as that of the Ancien Régime in pre-Revolutionary France –conspiracies were
not just common, but the standard operating procedure for the monarchical government. More
open societies (presumably societies somewhat like ours, although any conspiracy theorist
worth their salt will contest this) may well be less conspired. However, defining away particular
cases of known conspiracies as not secret enough moves the problem of assessing the likelihood
of conspiracy theories away from talk of the evidence to simply being a matter of definitions.
So, how likely –in an independent sense –are conspiracies? On one level this is not an easy
question to answer, because we do not know.This is, after all, an empirical question. On another
level, however, we can say that we typically artificially lower the independent likeliness of con-
spiracies just by defining away examples of conspiracies. As one of us has argued (Dentith 2016),
it is fair to say that people either underestimate or underplay both historical and contemporary
accounts of events which cite conspiracies as salient causes. Part of this relies on the definitional
issue raised earlier. How we define what counts as conspiratorial, or what is the proper subject
of a conspiracy theory heavily affects (a) just how common we think conspiratorial activity is,
and (b) whether we have grounds to be suspicious of theories about conspiracies.
This, at the very least, suggests that conspiracies are more independently likely than most of
us typically think. Of course, claiming we typically underestimate the independent likeliness of
conspiracies does not mean that we should consider conspiracies independently likely as salient
causes for all kinds of events.
6. Conspiracy theories as improvised knowledge

In some sense, conspiracy theories are theories like any other. Yet there is something special
about the term “conspiracy theory.” Take, for example, scientific theories. There are an awful
lot of scientific theories being generated on a daily basis, many of which –in the fullness of
time –will turn out to be false.10 The process of assessing scientific theories is one of sorting out
the wheat from the chaff.Yet we do not think of scientific theories as inherently or prima facie
unwarranted. Rather, we realize that the process of discovering scientific truths requires postu-
lating new theories, testing said theories, and abandoning bad theories for good ones.
So, one way in which conspiracy theories are different from other, related areas –such as the
sciences –is that the issue is not so much about what we know or don’t know, or even about
what we are warranted or not warranted to believe, but, rather, it is about what calls for inves-
tigation, or perhaps even merits a skeptical response. And as the example of scientific theories
underlines, saying that something calls for investigation doesn’t necessarily mean that we, ourselves,
are capable of carrying out the called-for investigation. This, in turn, points to the “improvised”
element of the epistemology of conspiracy theories. In the case of science and medicine, there
is a clearly defined group of experts, as well as a means of disseminating knowledge, and the rest
of us non-experts are supposed to ingest and trust those results. But this is not the case when it
comes to those phenomena conspiracy theories tend to be about.
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Yes, there are investigative reporters, and official agencies, but it is a much more hap-
hazard epistemic system because there are no recognized experts in these things we call
“conspiracy theories.” (For example, most of us are not climatologists, and thus claims about
the complex climate models that underpin the claim that anthropogenic climate change is a
serious and immediate threat –and not a conspiracy by the Reds posing as the Greens –is
something most of us have to take on a certain amount of trust.) Since there are no equiva-
lent experts in the case of conspiracy theories, it is up to citizens to make a stink and push
for further investigation by the designated experts when the available explanations are unsat-
isfying in one way or another. This is especially true in a democracy. Notice that a significant
amount of recent conspiratorial activity has been uncovered by the work of such loose-
knit organizations as Wikileaks or Anonymous, or by such lone whistleblowers as Edward
Snowden (apparently at great personal cost). That there aren’t clear parallels to Wikileaks and
Snowden in the world of science and medicine indicates the different epistemic situations
at play here.11
The result of this situation is that there is a significantly higher degree of uncertainty in
theories about the presence or absence of conspiracies in the social worlds of politics, business,
and other social domains that, as we described above, are not uncommonly chock-a-block
with opportunity, means, and motive for collective, clandestine activity. As one of us has argued
elsewhere (Keeley 2007), agnosticism about a claim is not necessarily called for when one
has investigated, and corroborating evidence is not forthcoming. However, in situations where
investigation has not been carried out –or where the process of investigation is, in fact, more
haphazard and fraught with inadequacies and challenges –agnosticism is concomitantly more
merited.
This point is relevant to the further complaint leveled against some conspiracy theorists that
they hold mutually contradictory theories. For example, it has been suggested that some con-
spiracy theorists actively entertain both the theory that President John F. Kennedy was murdered
by the American “military industrial complex” (because of his, in their eyes, disastrous ideas
about foreign policy) and that he was accidentally shot by a member of his Secret Service
detail in the aftermath of Lee Oswald’s wayward shots at his car (a fact later covered up by the
embarrassed agency charged with his protection). On the surface, to entertain two such mutu-
ally exclusive explanations of the events of November 22, 1963, would appear to smack of inco-
herence. If, however, they are understood as interesting avenues of investigation rather than beliefs,
then there’s no prima facie problem with holding contradictory theories.
To see more clearly why this is the case, we need only to look at a related class of theories
that hold a similar relationship to investigation: theories of criminal action (of which –no sur-
prise –theories of political assassination are but one striking example). Take, for instance, the
fact that a good homicide detective might investigate the possibility the husband had the wife
killed and she accidentally stumbled onto a burglary in progress and was killed as a result. Both
hypotheses cannot be true, but until you know which one (if either), the good detective should
consider both. The improvised nature of belief and investigation into conspiracy theories is
similar.
7. Investigating conspiracy theories

How would one, then, go about investigating some conspiracy theory? Even if we end up
thinking that there might be an awful lot of conspiracies out there (a view informed by what
kind of conspired or unconspired society we believe we live in), surely a great many of them are
going to turn out to be unwarranted.
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Now, there is a tendency among generalists to claim that if a conspiracy were going on, then
we would know about it (presumably because conspiracies always leak), or that there are suf-
ficient checks and balances in place to ensure that –by-and-large –those who hold power in
Western societies will not get away with acting conspiratorially. Yet there is another approach to
this issue we should consider, one philosophers such as Charles Pigden (1995) and Lee Basham
(2001) have long challenged us to acknowledge, a point which really should be basic to anyone’s
understanding of politics and business: conspiracies are everywhere, and not just that; they are
normal.
If conspiratorial activity is normal in everyday life, why would we think it is abnormal (and
thus accusations thereof being deserving of ridicule) in corporate or political life? After all, we
still live in largely hierarchical societies, where much information comes down from the top.
If we acknowledge that those at the top act as conspiratorially as everyone else down the line,
then we have to question how we evaluate the claims that emanate from such information
hierarchies.
That is to say, if we accept (and surely we do) that conspiratorial activity is not exactly rare,
why are we so loathe to talk about it when it comes to government and corporate activity?
The answer is, we think, a combination of the common wisdom (everyone thinks this, because
everyone has been told to think this by people who already thought it in the past!) as well as a
certain kind of establishmentarian thinking (it is best people think of conspiracy theories deri-
sively, because we don’t really want people questioning the very underpinnings of our Western
democracies).
In other words, the kind of thing we are told we are interested in when talking about the-
ories about conspiracies turn out to be theories about conspiracies that are typically unlikely
(or, at least, epistemically suspicious). This, at the very least, is the research project that drives
much of the work in social psychology, wherein belief in conspiracy theories is taken to be
prima facie problematic because the truth of such theories is taken to be unlikely. The project
in the social sciences is often about getting to the root causes of belief in such theories. Given
that it is trivial to list off examples of weird and wacky conspiracy theories believed by all sorts
of people, it is understandable that social scientists have asked, “Why do people believe weird
things?” However, the mistake, surely, is to then characterize conspiracy theories as inherently
weird and unwarranted.
Characterizing certain kinds of conspiracy theories as unlikely seems fair enough (although
that alone does not tell you that such theories are unwarranted), but restricting the definition
of what counts as a conspiracy theory generally, such that all such theories are unlikely commits
the same basic error as restricting the definition of what counts as a conspiracy. Not just that,
but by restricting talk of conspiracy theories to a discussion of prima facie unlikely hypotheses,
we end up dismissing conspiracy theories out of hand for just being conspiracy theories.
Now, the conspiracy theory skeptics are right to be interested in conspiracy theories, because
such theories present an interesting problem. On the one hand, there are so many conspiracy
theories that it is hard to know when –if ever –we should take any of them seriously, let alone
expend resources in investigating them.
On the other hand, if some claim about the existence of conspiracy, say, involving the members
of an influential, public institution turned out to be true, then we would be obliged to take
action.The existence of conspiracies does not just threaten our trust in the influential institutions
that make up our societies, they can also pose a direct threat to members of the public.
For example, imagine you’ve heard stories that the police and upper echelons of govern-
ment are protecting a group of high-profile sexual offenders from investigation and prosecution.
Such a conspiracy would seem unthinkable, because surely this kind of thing could not happen
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(because it is unthinkable), and if it had happened, it would have been revealed to the public by
the authorities (because who could keep such unthinkable acts secret).
Except it did happen. As the recent Operation Yewtree investigation in the UK has shown,
prominent Britons (and at least one Australian) in the seventies and eighties not only success-
fully sexually predated on young men and women, but the attempts to expose this scandal were
at best ignored, and at worse, covered up by influential members of British society.
There are numerous other examples, such as the Moscow Show Trials of the 1930s, the Gulf
of Tonkin Incident in 1964, and, of course,Watergate (to name but a few). In each case someone
or some set of bodies that claimed ‘Conspiracy!’ were charged with being conspiracy theorists
and only later vindicated for being right in the first place.
Each and every one of us has a limited set of hours in a day, some of which are taken up with
the necessities of day-to-day living, and others of which we apportion according to our needs
and desires. Questioning each and every piece of information we hear, whether it be from the
government, local business leaders, or just the odd neighbors who live across the street, would
be both time consuming and arduous.What we need, then, is epistemic and ethical guidance on
these issues. We need to know what we should be looking out for, and also who to trust. Not
just with respect to what is said, or who said it, but also with respect to who can be reasonably
relied upon to assess the claims that fall outside our epistemic remits.
The risks are real. In an environment in which people take a dim view of conspiracy theories,
conspiracies may multiply and prosper. Conversely, in an environment in which conspiracy the-
ories are taken seriously and investigated by journalists, police and the like, conspiracies should
be much more likely to fail. Thus, influential institutions, and the people who run them, are
more likely to be trustworthy if they are not automatically trusted, but, rather, are subject to the
vigilance of, say, an investigative press which does not think it a mark of intellectual sophistica-
tion to dismiss conspiracy theories out of hand, and a public who know not just when they are
obliged to ask questions, but when they can expect others to do likewise.
8. Conclusion
As we have seen, a lot depends on how we define “conspiracy,” “conspiracy theory,” and “con-
spiracy theorist,” with much of the academic debate over the warrant of belief in conspiracy
theories being very much predicated on which side of the definitional coin you take.This speaks
very much to the improvised nature of conspiracy theories in general; there are no accredited
experts, no institutions of learning devoted to studying such things, and, as such, there is little
consensus on these things called “conspiracy theories.” This has led some scholars –such as
David Coady (2012) and Lance deHaven-Smith (2013) –to argue that we should drop the
terms “conspiracy theory” and “conspiracy theorist.” Rather, they suggest that we should focus
on conspiratorial explanations and the evidence for and against them.
We advise against such a move. While it is tempting to wipe the slate clean, and approach
talk of conspiracies in a fresh (less pejoratively labeled) light, all such a move does is further
cement the pejorative take on these things called “conspiracy theories” in public discourse.
Indeed, while there might be some debate over how we define both conspiracies and conspiracy
theories, there is much interesting work to be done with them. The improvised nature of such
theories –and belief in them –is fertile soil for the applied epistemologist. From the analysis
of issues such as how our definition of what counts as a conspiracy informs how conspired
we think society is, to talk about how we should appraise the merits of theories concerning
conspiracies, the philosophical discussion of these things called “conspiracy theories” raises
interesting –and, we argue, essential –questions. For example, what obligations –if any –do we
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have when we find out about some putative conspiracy? Or how, exactly, should we proceed
when investigating conspiracy theories? While conspiracy theories might sometimes be thought
of as an unfortunate and undesirable epiphenomenon of political culture, an examination of
issues such as these is of great interest to the applied epistemologist.
Notes
1 Order of authors is alphabetical. Both authors contributed equally to this chapter.
2 Perhaps it goes back even further than that, if what primatologists tell us about the social interactions
and social intelligence of our ape relatives is true, e.g., as described in Frans De Waal’s Peacemaking
Among Primates (1990).
3 For a good exploration of how Popper’s early discussions of conspiracy theories are misguided, see
Pigden (1995).
4 It is logically possible that there could be generalists who argue that all conspiracy theories are
warranted, but we can find no examples of academics espousing such a view.
5 The term “paranoid style” comes from the work of Richard Hofstadter (1964), but its current formu-
lation in the social science literature on belief in conspiracy theories owes itself more to Pipes’s refor-
mulation of the concept than it does to Hofstadter’s initial discussion.
6 For a more fulsome analysis of the terms ‘conspiracism’ and ‘conspiracist’, see Dentith’s “The Problem
of Conspiracism” (2017).
7 That does not mean that such claims should not be investigated, of course. Unless you are certain con-
spiracies do not occur in your society, the threat of a conspiracy even in a largely unconspired world
is something worth taking seriously. We are merely committed to saying that in such an unconspired
world, it is understandable as to why claims of conspiracy might be treated with due skepticism.
8 For further discussion of the role that prior probabilities play in judging our beliefs about the possibility
of conspiracies happening here and now, see “When Inferring to a Conspiracy Theory Might Be the
Best Explanation” (Dentith 2016).
9 For further discussion of the role of secrecy in understanding belief in particular conspiracy theories,
see “Secrecy and Conspiracy” (Dentith and Orr 2017).
10 Within philosophy of science, this claim is discussed under the label of the “pessimistic induction” or
the “pessimistic meta-induction.” As glossed in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “If one considers
the history of scientific theories in any given discipline, what one typically finds is a regular turnover of
older theories in favor of newer ones, as scientific knowledge develops. From the point of view of the
present, most past theories must be considered false; indeed, this will be true from the point of view of
most times. Therefore, by enumerative induction (that is, generalizing from these cases), surely theories
at any given time will ultimately be replaced and regarded as false from some future perspective. Thus,
current theories are also false.” The locus classicus of this position is Laudan (1981). For a more recent
discussion of debates over this proposal, see Chakravartty (2011: Section 3.3), the source of the pre-
ceding quoted passage.
11 Although the computer hacker(s) behind the exposure of the “Climategate” emails may indicate that
these situations aren’t always as different as we are suggesting here.
References
Basham, L. (2001). “Living with the Conspiracy.” The Philosophical Forum, 32(3): 265–80. Reprinted in
Coady (2006).
Basham, L. (2002). “Malevolent Global Conspiracy.” Journal of Social Philosophy, 34(1): 91–103. Reprinted
in Coady (2006).
Buenting, J., and Taylor, J. (2010). “Conspiracy Theories and Fortuitous Data.” Philosophy of the Social
Sciences, 40(4): 567–78.
Cassam, Q. (2016). “Vice Epistemology.” The Monist, 99: 159–80.
Chakravartty, A. (2011). “Scientific Realism,” in E. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall
2015 Edition). Retrieved October 27, 2016, from http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2015/entries/
scientific-realism/.
Coady, D. (ed.). (2006). Conspiracy Theories: The philosophical debate. Burlington,VT: Ashgate.
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Coady, D. (2012). What to Believe Now: Applying epistemology to contemporary issues. Malden, MA:
Wiley-Blackwell.
deHaven-Smith, L. (2013). Conspiracy Theory in America. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
de Waal, F. (1990). Peacemaking among Primates. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Dentith, M. R. X. (2014). The Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Dentith, M. R. X. (2016). “When Inferring to a Conspiracy Might Be the Best Explanation.” Social
Epistemology, 30(5–6): 572–91. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02691728.2016.1172362.
Dentith, M. R. X. (2017). “The Problem of Conspiracism.” Argumenta, 3(2): 327–43.
Dentith, M. R. X., and Orr, M. (2017). “Secrecy and Conspiracy.” Episteme: A Journal of Social Epistemology.
Early access http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/epi.2017.9.
Grimes, D. R. (2016). “On the Viability of Conspiratorial Beliefs.” PLOS One, 11(1): e0147905. Retrieved
from http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0147905.
Hofstadter, R. (1964). “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” Harper’s Magazine, 229(1374): 77–86.
Keeley, B. L. (1999). “Of Conspiracy Theories.” Journal of Philosophy, 96: 109–26. Reprinted in Coady
(2006).
Keeley, B. L. (2007). “God as the Ultimate Conspiracy Theory.” Episteme: A Journal of Social Epistemology,
4(2): 135–49.
Laudan, L. (1981). “A Confutation of Convergent Realism.” Philosophy of Science, 48: 19–49.
Mandik, P. (2007). “Shit Happens.” Episteme: A Journal of Social Epistemology, 4(2): 205–18.
Pigden, C. (1995). “Popper Revisited, or What is Wrong with Conspiracy Theories?” Philosophy of the Social
Sciences, 25(1): 3–34. Reprinted in Coady (2006).
Pigden, C. (2006). “Complots of Mischief,” in D. Coady (ed.), Conspiracy Theories: The philosophical debate.
Burlington,VT: Ashgate.
Pigden, C. (2016). “Are Conspiracy Theorists Epistemically Vicious?” in K. Lippert- Rasmussen,
K. Brownlee, and D. Coady (eds.), A Companion to Applied Philosophy. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.
Pipes, D. (1997). Conspiracy: How the paranoid style flourishes and where it comes from. New York: Free Press.
Popper, K. R. (1962). The Open Society and Its Enemies: The high tide of prophecy: Hegel, Marx and the after-
math. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Popper, K. R. (1972). Conjectures and Refutations: The growth of scientific knowledge. London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul.
Sunstein, C., and A. Vermeule (2008). “Conspiracy Theories: Causes and cures.” The Journal of Political
Philosophy, 17(2): 202–27.
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PART VII
Theory and practice

in philosophy
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PHILOSOPHICAL EXPERTISE
Bryan Frances
1. Introduction
Poets are experts at poetry, chemists are experts at chemistry, and philosophers are experts at
philosophy –or so it seems. In most fields it is agreed that there are experts and that they have
plenty of subject-specific knowledge that people outside the field lack. The pressing questions
for those fields involve issues such as trust, fallibility, and public recognition. But in philosophy
things are more controversial. Even if it’s plausible to understand philosophical expertise as
involving special knowledge that non-philosophers tend to lack, what might this knowledge,
call it p-knowledge, be? Before we can get to any issues such as those concerning the epistem-
ology of expertise (e.g., the role of “intuition”), we need to know if there is any philosophical
expertise at all. First things first.
Some philosophers have told me, in casual conversation, that they think philosophical
expertise just doesn’t exist. I don’t know how seriously to take this claim. For instance, it should
be clear that if a person has been declared an epistemologist, by the profession as it were, has
published a half-dozen research papers in epistemology, and has been granted tenure based on
those publications, then she has some kind of expertise not had by an arbitrarily chosen under-
graduate or even a philosopher who has done virtually no work in epistemology. The task is to
figure out what that expertise consists in.
On the one hand, p-knowledge might consist mainly of knowledge of truths. If so, then the
next task is to characterize the body of truths philosophical experts know and others generally
do not know. If this can’t be done, then the claim of propositional p-knowledge is suspect. One
might think the task can’t be done. After all, it seems as though philosophers disagree on just
about everything of philosophical substance. So how could there be widespread p-knowledge
among philosophers of some philosophical doctrine when so few philosophers will even believe
it? And given the amount of disagreement in philosophy, even if some of us have true beliefs in
substantive philosophical claims, don’t the facts about disagreement provide defeaters for many
of those true beliefs, thereby ruling them out as knowledge?
On the other hand, perhaps p-knowledge is more like the expert knowledge poets have –
whatever exactly that kind of expertise is (e.g., some kind of know-how). We wouldn’t say
that expertise in poetry primarily consists in knowledge of truths, at least in any straightfor-
ward sense, so maybe p-knowledge isn’t primarily knowledge of truths either. Of course, poets
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know many truths that non-poets lack; truths about meter, rhyme, and the history of poetry
for instance. But that’s not the main part of expertise in poetry. Might p-knowledge be closely
akin to whatever expert knowledge poets have, something far from knowledge of truths? The
idea is prima facie implausible given how different philosophy and poetry are (please: let’s not be
sentimental here).
In the next section I’m going to argue that a great deal of p-knowledge is straightforwardly
factual –and I do this without claiming that know-how doesn’t compose much p-knowledge.
The main reason this thesis is surprising is that philosophers focus almost all their attention on
the controversial aspects of philosophy and ignore the uncontroversial bits that constitute our
expert knowledge. In subsequent sections, I take up the question of how philosophical expertise
and philosophical progress are related, and the question of whether there are worrisome skep-
tical challenges to the existence of propositional p-knowledge. I will also briefly compare
expertise in philosophy with that of the hard sciences. I will not have occasion to address the
question of philosophical “intuitions.”
2. A body of knowledge of philosophically substantive truths

Philosophers like to think that they are particularly good at a certain type of critical thinking,
one that is difficult to characterize but might be thought to be one kind of philosophical
expertise. That may be so, but in this essay I will focus on the issue of what kinds of substan-
tive philosophical content that philosophers know and non-philosophers know only rarely. In this
section I will defend the thesis that there are four classes of propositional p-knowledge.1
It’s worth starting with the obvious.We know what the main subfields are in philosophy, and
we know what the topics, questions, problems, tasks, concepts, arguments, thought experiments,
and proposals are in those subfields. We often write whole books, textbooks, conveying this
information, much of which can be stated in straightforward factual terms. We tend to agree
on this body of knowledge, when it comes in the form of claims (e.g., most philosophy of
mind textbooks look awfully similar in content). This is the first of four classes of claims we
have p-knowledge of: what I will call Textbook claims. Non-philosophers have very little of this
knowledge. This puts us on a par with the chemists in one respect: there is a great deal of factual
p-knowledge.
At this point many people will complain that although philosophers know many Textbook
claims (and non-philosophers don’t know them), philosophy is still very different from chem-
istry and other fields in which it’s clear that experts have a great deal of substantive propositional
knowledge not had by non-experts. It’s different in the interesting sense that knowledge of
philosophically substantive truths, as opposed to chemically substantive truths, is vanishingly small.
I suspect this is false. Arbitrarily confining ourselves to epistemology, I list fifteen substantive
truths, which are among those I will call the Basic claims. Most philosophers know most of these
truths. However, it’s not the case that most non-philosophers know most of these truths. And
while some non-philosophers are or would be disposed to believe some of these truths, many
would fail to know them. Overall, knowledge of these truths, among non-philosophers, is much
rarer than it is among philosophers.
1. Beliefs can be positive, negative, trivial, controversial, silly, serious, short-term, long-term, and
concern just about any topic.
2. Some beliefs are true while others are false.
3. Evidence can be positive or negative. Positive evidence for a belief B is evidence that suggests
B is true; negative evidence regarding B is evidence that suggests B is false.
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4. One’s overall evidence is the combination of all one’s evidence regarding that belief. Overall
evidence can be weak or strong (or somewhere in between).
5. Two people could have the same belief but one person’s belief is irrational while the other’s
is rational, often due to the fact that the first person’s belief is based on weak overall evi-
dence and the second person’s is based on strong overall evidence.
6. A belief can be reasonable but false provided the person with the belief bases it on excellent
overall evidence.
7. A belief can be unreasonable but true provided the person with the true belief has very
poor evidence that she is basing her belief on.
8. There are at least three important cognitive attitudes one can take to a claim: believe it,
disbelieve it, or suspend judgment on it. Moreover, one can endorse a claim to different
degrees, as when one person is extremely confident it’s true while another person agrees it’s
true but isn’t as confident as the first person that it’s true.
9. In some cases, suspension of judgment is temporary; other times it is permanent.
10. Just because you suspend judgment on some claim (so you don’t believe it or disbelieve it)
doesn’t mean that you can’t act on it.
11. Knowledge requires truth: you can’t know something unless it’s true.
12. Knowledge requires good evidence, of some kind or other: you can’t know something
unless your belief is based on good overall evidence. However, we have to be open-minded
about the radically different forms evidence comes in.
13. Knowledge is objective in this sense: just because someone thinks she has knowledge doesn’t
always mean that she really does have knowledge.
14. One can have a true belief without it amounting to knowledge.
15. One can have a belief based on excellent overall evidence that doesn’t amount to knowledge.
Not every philosopher, or even epistemologist, will agree with each of (1)–(15), but I suspect
that for each claim over 90% of epistemologists will accept it (some of the claims may well
receive nearly 100% endorsement). The list is not anywhere in the vicinity of being exhaustive;
with effort any competent team of expert epistemologists could make it a couple hundred
claims long. I am not saying that every area of philosophy can generate long lists of agreed-upon
Basic claims, but I think it can be done with many if not most areas of philosophy.
Agreement is important: in order for a claim to qualify as part of philosophical expertise,
the experts in question have to actually know it; and in order to know it as a body, they have
to agree to it as a body.
Each of (1)–(15) is a substantive claim about notions central to epistemology: belief, true
belief, evidence, knowledge, etc. Philosophers who actually listen carefully to their youngest
students, before teaching or indoctrinating them, will realize that few of the fifteen claims
are obvious to non-philosophers. I suppose the realization of this fact is highly dependent on
(i) where one teaches, and (ii) how much one shuts up and listens to one’s students’ “unfiltered”
views. For instance, I recently read an article on the difficulties in using ‘belief ’ in characterizing
Islamic religious attitudes, and the author was utterly confused about how ‘belief ’ functions in
English despite his being a native speaker of English (this is not to say that all philosophical
uses of ‘belief ’ are synonymous with non-philosophical uses). The basics of epistemology are
basics only to philosophers. And even though the fifteen claims are considered obviously true to
almost all philosophers, this is no mark against the idea that they are substantive. It’s also obvious
that the earth is round, electrons weigh less than protons, and that other things being equal
10 kg objects fall at the same rate as 5 kg ones, but those are still substantive claims of physics.
Substantive ≠ controversial.
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Experts in philosophy also have impressive factual knowledge that is less mundane,
so to speak. Here is a sample of much more advanced claims that something like 90% of
philosophers with the relevant expertise (i.e., several publications in the “area of specializa-
tion”) will agree on:
1 . Epistemicism faces a serious objection regarding how sharp meanings are fixed.
2. There are good reasons to think that truths about causation are closely connected to certain
counterfactual truths and/or truths about laws of nature.
3. The thesis that our belief contents are fixed by the internal goings-on of our bodies faces a
serious challenge from Putnam’s elm-beech story, in which the two terms counterfactually
switch meanings while the protagonist is the same physically from the skin in.
4. Solving the problems of material composition will probably require solutions to various
puzzles about vagueness, such as the forced-march sorites paradox.
5. Kripke’s puzzle about belief provides a strong challenge to the basic Fregean argument that
the interchange of coreferential proper names in belief contexts doesn’t always preserve
truth-value.
6. Most initially intuitive solutions to the alethic paradoxes are inadequate, as they stand,
because they are unable, as they stand, to successfully deal with certain clever “revenge”
sentences.
7. The plausible idea that the traditionally conceived God would have to make the best uni-
verse within his power to make is challenged by the idea that there are good non-religious
grounds for thinking there is no such possible universe.
8. When people who are mathematically not sophisticated make the base rate fallacy in
arguing for a certain conclusion, although their conclusion may not be supported by their
evidence, they are in an important epistemic sense blameless in drawing that conclusion.
9. If there are good non-theistic, purely naturalistic reasons for thinking that we are truly awful
at judging when an instance of suffering is directly or indirectly paired with an outweighing
good, then there is a good chance the theist has a reasonable response to the problem of
gratuitous evil.
10. The presentist idea that what really exists doesn’t include past or future entities faces a ser-
ious challenge from the General Theory of Relativity.
I call these Reasons claims because they are claims about reasons for or against key philosoph-
ical positions (and I could not think of a better name). Continuing the list is a mere matter of
patience and, of course, expertise in the relevant subfields of philosophy. I am not saying that
every area of philosophy can generate a long list of Reasons claims that garner expert agreement
rates of over 90%, say, but I would guess that most could.
Those ten claims are, I claim, both substantive and very widely agreed upon by philosophers with
the relevant expertise (e.g., multiple research publications in the relevant field).
Regarding the second point, about large percentages of agreement, there are some points
worth making. First, the claims are intended to be sociological facts about the opinions
of the philosophical community when it’s doing its best. For instance, when (1) says that
epistemicism faces a “serious” objection, what is meant is that the relevant community of
experts judges the objection to be one that is important in some relevant manner –and the
judging in question is the usual kind of careful thinking employed by philosophers who are
pretty much doing their best. The use of ‘good’ is similarly interpreted. Second, just because
there is agreement doesn’t of course mean the agreed-upon claims are all true. Third, there
is of course no universal agreement about any of the ten claims, even restricting the pool of
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philosophers to those with the relevant expertise. But that is true for just about any field of
study that has at least a thousand thoroughly trained practitioners. Philosophy is different
from other fields –probably almost all other fields –in that no matter how carefully a claim
is formulated, a relevantly competent and informed philosopher can be found who won’t
accept it, even after a great deal of expert reflection on the matter. At the outer limit, a phil-
osopher might think that in order to “accept” a claim one has to hold that it’s true, but truth
is an inconsistent and hence empty concept (as the alethic paradoxes show, or so she thinks);
as a result, she refuses to accept literally any claim (even the claim that truth is inconsistent;
this is a tricky position to maintain, as she has to give a slightly different interpretation of
‘maintain’ or ‘endorse’).
Regarding the first point, about the substance of the ten claims, I have four comments. First,
think about how long and hard one must work before one realizes the truth of (1)–(10): it can
take months of exposure to many readings and lectures before a student can even fully grasp
(1)–(10). They are hardly trivial claims. Second, it took researchers many years to establish them.
Third, these are not merely claims about the “current state of play,” at least if that phrase is
supposed to indicate a consensus that lasts for only a few years. For instance, it’s been known for
centuries that substance dualism faces a difficult (not to say insurmountable) problem of inter-
action (that’s an eleventh Reasons claim). Fourth, these claims guide our research in enormous
ways, again suggesting their importance. For these reasons, there is good reason to include them
as “substantive.”
The fourth and final category of p-knowledge claims are perhaps more familiar if harder
to formulate, and for that reason alone I am less sure of their existence: I call these Conditional
claims; they are conditional claims about the truth-values of various philosophical claims (and
not merely the reasons for and against claims, as with the previous category). Example 1: a
philosopher might not agree with ‘There is a priori knowledge’, because she is an anti-realist
about knowledge, but she will agree with ‘If anti-realism about knowledge is false, then there
is a priori knowledge’. Example 2: a philosopher might not agree with ‘Content externalism
is true for belief contents’, because she thinks there is no such thing as sharable belief content,
but she will agree with ‘If there is sharable belief content, then content externalism is true
for such content’. Example 3: a philosopher might not agree with virtue ethics, because she
thinks consequentialism is superior, but she will agree with ‘If consequentialism is false, then
virtue ethics is true’, as she thinks that deontological theories are all false. Example 4: I may
not agree with ‘Propositions contain concepts as parts’, because I’m a nominalist, but I will
agree with ‘If propositions exist, then they contain concepts as parts’. Example 5: although an
epistemologist doesn’t agree that external world skepticism is false, she agrees that if epistemic
externalism is true, then external world skepticism is false. Example 6: although I don’t think
presentism is true, I do think that if the General Theory of Relativity is false, then presentism
is true.
None of the above are good examples of Conditional p-knowledge claims, because too few
philosophers are even disposed to believe them. But think about how informal philosophical
discussion often proceeds. Suppose there are five philosophers sitting at table having a meal.
One says P and another expresses disagreement. In the ensuing discussion, the two of them
wholeheartedly agree that if Q and R, then P. This type of “antecedent building” can continue
until all five philosophers with the relevant expertise agree on the conditionalized claim.
In order to win significant agreement among philosophers, one has to pack significant
material in the antecedents of the Conditional claims. Without offering any defense, I want to
leave room for the view that one doesn’t have to pack so much in that the conditionals become
logically, conceptually, or trivially true. So at least some of the conditionals may be substantive.
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3. Comparing philosophy and science

Someone might think that since philosophical disagreement is rife compared to that of other
fields, there is much less expert factual knowledge in philosophy. And if that’s right, then there
must be something wrong with the preceding arguments.
There are two claims here: (1) there is much more disagreement in philosophy than in other
fields, and (2) if (1) is true, then there is much less expert factual knowledge in philosophy. I will
examine just (1).
I agree that there are many central philosophical problems that have been unsolved for cen-
turies. The results of the 2009 PhilPapers survey regarding thirty central philosophical issues
supports that thesis (Bourget and Chalmers 2009, 2010). But three things are worth keeping in
mind when thinking about age-old philosophical controversy.
First, the same is true for virtually any scientific field that has been around for centuries, even
the most successful ones. For instance, a team of competent physicists would not have too much
trouble coming up with thirty questions in physics that got comparable rates of disagreement –
despite the fact that that field is probably the most successful empirical one ever.
Second, some of the open questions in physics –the ones for which there is little expert
agreement –have been around for centuries, just like in philosophy. Hence, even though the
problem of universals and the sorites paradox, for instance, have been around for millennia and
are still unsolved (at least at the community level; there may be few geniuses who know the
solution, and not merely have true beliefs in it), we are in the same boat as physicists –a pretty
impressive boat.
Third, it is not at all obvious that most of the questions that we find most important were
addressed at all many centuries ago, appearances to the contrary. For instance, the metaphysical
mind-body problem was not nearly as well recognized before Descartes’s time as it is now.
However, expertise in physics seems importantly different from expertise in philosophy, at
least when it comes to factual knowledge. There is a set of “textbook” claims: the ones that are
taught to undergraduates. But the Textbook claims in philosophy are more about the appar-
atus of philosophical thinking, whereas in the hard sciences they are more about the results and
methods of obtaining results.The analogy to Basic claims would, I guess, be simple claims about
mass, momentum, electricity, force, etc.The primary analogy to Reasons claims would be claims
of the form ‘This data supports this hypothesis’. I assume there are analogies to Conditional
claims as well, involving advanced hypotheses.
This essay is on the metaphysics of philosophical expertise: what does such expertise consist
in? The epistemology of philosophical expertise is another issue: what is the actual, operative,
epistemic basis for such expertise? I will not address the latter issue (e.g., regarding philosoph-
ical “intuitions”).
4. Skeptical challenges to philosophical expertise

There are at least two interesting skeptical issues about philosophical expertise. The first one,
which I take up in the first subsection, is whether there are any skeptical challenges to expert
philosophical belief that undermine the existence of p-knowledge that goes beyond the four
classes of claims mentioned above. A particularly interesting issue is whether a good portion
of philosophers have knowledge of philosophical claims that are controversial even among
philosophers. The second issue, which I take up in the second subsection, concerns whether
there is a more radical skeptical challenge that undermines the alleged knowledge in the four
classes of claims mentioned above.
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The first challenge

There is good reason to think that philosophers have very little knowledge of philosophical claims
that are controversial among philosophers.The basic idea here has nothing specifically to do with
philosophy however, as it will apply to many other fields as well provided the practitioners are
suitably reflective (more on that issue below). Briefly put, when one knows that one’s belief is
highly controversial, then one has available a good if potentially defeasible reason R for ser-
ious doubt; if R isn’t defeated, then it looks as though one’s belief won’t amount to knowledge.
Since so many of the philosophical theses we debate are obviously highly controversial, it looks
as though we lack knowledge of them unless there are quite a few defeaters of R lying around.
Let’s say that the controversy skeptic thinks that even if a controversial belief starts out as know-
ledge, once one appreciates the controversy one’s belief will no longer amount to knowledge,
or, if it does, there is something unwise in the belief retention.2 In philosophy, the cases of con-
troversy that generate powerful arguments for types of skepticism that have real bite typically
satisfy the following conditions.
The belief B in question has been investigated and debated (i) for a very long time by
(ii) a great many (iii) genuine experts on the relevant issues who (iv) have worked very
hard (v) under good conditions to figure out if B is true. (vi) These people have not
come to any significant agreement on B’s truth-value, and (vii) those who endorse B
are not, as a group, in a significantly better position to judge B than those who reject it.
Do (i)–(vii) mean that all or most members of the philosophical community lack knowledge
of B?
There are four relevant sets of philosophers to consider, assuming that each believes B:
a. Those who think that B isn’t controversial among philosophers because most of them accept
it. They reject some or all of (i)–(vii).
b. Those who agree with (i)–(vii) but also think that the group of philosophers who endorse
B are much better positioned to judge B than those who reject it.
c. Those who agree with (i)–(vii), admit that the philosophers who reject B are in no worse
position to judge B, but who also think that this time around the ones who got it right were
the ones who endorsed B –a bit similar to how two athletes can be equally “positioned”
to make a particular kind of play but on the occasion in question one did it right while the
other didn’t.
d. Those who agree with (i)–(vii), at least dispositionally, but have no significant dispositions
about the facts about the controversy.
Regarding groups (a) and (b), it’s at least arguable that if one happens to have excellent overall
evidence for B, and B is true, then one’s false belief that there is no real controversy over B, or
that the supporters of B are much better positioned to judge B, does not ruin one’s chances of
knowing B. Yes, the person has a false and probably unjustified belief that they probably should
have avoided: the belief that there is no expert controversy, or that B’s supporters are much
better positioned than B’s detractors. But that is arguably a separate matter, one that may not
mean that their justified belief in B fails to amount to knowledge. For similar reasons, I think
the members of group (d) might be able to know B even though they are missing some infor-
mation they probably should be aware of. Those in group (c) may not have made any epistemic
mistake but I suppose one could question the basis for their confident opinion that they are the
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ones who happened to get B’s truth-value right, given that they have admitted that the deniers
of B were just as well positioned to judge B correctly.
In any case, we see that there may be ways to know B even though B is controversial among
experts, although this is a tricky issue.3
Even if this skeptical challenge fails, so at least some philosophers can know philosophical
claims that are in fact controversial in the way specified by conditions (i)–(vii), it remains true that
the philosophers in groups (a) and (b) are making serious epistemic mistakes, as they have false
and unjustified beliefs that they probably should not have, given their place in the philosophical
community (we should, as philosophers, know when our theories are controversial in our own
community). If so, then we have avoided one epistemic pitfall –believing but not knowing B –
for another epistemic pitfall –having a false and unjustified belief we shouldn’t have.
Whether the members of groups (a)–(d) can know the controversial B probably depends
on what knowledge comes to. Over the centuries many philosophers have thought that know-
ledge is something pretty special, something that has to be fought for with real cognitive power.
Others have thought that any two-year-old child has loads of knowledge: if she is minimally
functioning, then she will know an enormous number of mundane facts. I won’t enter that
debate here.
The second challenge

There is a much more devastating skeptical challenge, one that applies to many more philosoph-
ical beliefs but does not infect non-philosophers.
Philosophers often embrace radically anti-commonsensical theories, even today. Some of
them say that there are no baseballs. Or that nothing is morally wrong. Or that twice two isn’t
four. Others truly believe that there are no beliefs. Or that taking one cent from a rich person
can instantly make them no longer rich. Or that no claims using vague concepts are true. Some
hold that nothing is true, as truth is an inconsistent concept. Some think that fire engines aren’t
red (or any other color). And, of course, some hold that we know next to nothing about the
external physical world.
It’s arguable that these theories satisfy (i)–(vii) among the relevant sets of philosophical
specialists. If the conjunction of these conditions, or our awareness of its truth, provides an
undefeated hurdle to knowing the falsehood of any of those theories, then we fail to know that
they are false. For instance, we will believe but not know that there are trees.
This skeptical challenge probably doesn’t apply to non-philosophers, as they are not part of
the philosophical community and are non-blamelessly completely unaware of the controversy
surrounding them. I won’t take up an evaluation of this skeptical challenge here.
5. Expertise and philosophical progress

Assume for a moment that I’m right that there are these four classes of claims that a decent
portion of philosophers know but the vast majority of non-philosophers fail to know. Assume
further that this propositional p-knowledge is a large portion of expertise in philosophy. Then
it isn’t difficult to see what one large part of philosophical progress is: it’s progress in the four
classes.The most obvious source of progress will probably be in the Reasons claims. Most of the
ten I listed in section 2 are twentieth century results. But the set of Textbook claims changes sig-
nificantly over the centuries and decades as well, as new thought experiments, central arguments,
distinctions, theories, topics, questions, problems, tasks, and proposals are discovered while old
ones might be discarded due to the judgment that they are not useful.
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However, even under those assumptions it’s not simple to evaluate progress in philosophy. I’ll
look at just three reasons why.
First, in order to evaluate progress one should not focus just on success –new members in
the sets –but failures, of at least two kinds: (a) truths that used to be known but are lost through
neglect or other factors, and (b) falsehoods that come to be endorsed by many experts. For an
example of kind (a), it might be the case that insights into the metaphysics of thought con-
tent that were revealed in the heyday of work on that topic, roughly 1975–95 (think of Fodor,
Dretske, and Millikan here), are in the process of being lost since a great many philosophers of
mind since then have been focusing more on consciousness and perception and less on thought
content. For an example of kind (b), imagine that knowledge is just true belief and the Gettier
cases show only how ‘knows’ has odd semantics and pragmatics; if so, then the last fifty years
have seen a great many philosophers endorsing falsehoods.
Second, I suppose we can agree that not all philosophical claims are equally important,
although it will be more difficult to agree on particular cases. It’s natural to think that of two
additions C1 and C2 to our p-knowledge, one might be more of a contribution to philosophical
progress than another. However, it might be the case that we can keep track of that difference in
contribution through the number of subsidiary truths added: perhaps C1 adds many more elem-
ents to the four sets than C2. An analogous idea would apply to subtractions from the four sets.
Third, the expansion of philosophical expertise is clearly not the whole of philosophical
progress. By my lights, the largest progress is made when philosophy positively and significantly
influences or even creates fields or intellectual movements that become more or less inde-
pendent of philosophy: think of symbolic logic, the set-theoretic foundations of mathematics,
computational theory, decision theory, the enormous influences in linguistics and psychology,
etc. And that’s just the beginning. But this isn’t a paper on philosophical progress.
Notes
1 Much of this section is taken from Frances (2017).
2 The next few paragraphs are modified from Frances (2015, 2017, 2018).
3 Fumerton (2010), Kornblith (2010, 2013), Goldberg (2009), Frances (2010, 2013), and Christensen
(2015) each address the epistemology of controversial belief.
References
Bourget, D., and Chalmers, D. (2009). PhilPapers Survey. Retrieved from www.philpapers.org/surveys/.
Bourget, D., and Chalmers, D. (2010).“On the Conception and Design of the PhilPapers Survey.” Retrieved
from http://philpapers.org/surveys/designthoughts.html.
Christensen, D. (2015). “Disagreement and Public Controversy,” in J. Lackey (ed.), Essays in Collective
Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Frances, B. (2010). “The Reflective Epistemic Renegade.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research,
81: 419–63.
Frances, B. (2013). “Philosophical Renegades,” in J. Lackey and D. Christensen (eds.), New Essays on
Frances, B. (2015). “Religious Disagreement,” in G. Oppy (ed.), Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy of
Religion. Durham: Acumen Press.
Frances, B. (2017). “Extensive Philosophical Progress and Agreement.” Metaphilosophy, 48: 47–57.
Frances, B. (2018). “Skepticism and Disagreement,” in D. Machuca and B. Reed (eds.), Skepticism: From
antiquity to the present. New York: Bloomsbury.
Fumerton, R. (2010). “You Can’t Trust a Philosopher,” in R. Feldman and T. Warfield (eds.), Disagreement.
Goldberg, S. (2009). “Reliabilism in Philosophy.” Philosophical Studies, 124: 105–17.
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Kornblith, H. (2013). “Is Philosophical Knowledge Possible?” in D. Machuca (ed.), Disagreement and
Skepticism. New York: Routledge.
Kornblith, H. (2010).“Belief in the Face of Controversy,” in R. Feldman and T.Warfield (eds.), Disagreement.
Further reading
Frances, B. (2014). Disagreement. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Williamson, T. (2011). “Philosophical Expertise and the Burden of Proof.” Metaphilosophy, 42(3): 215–29.
Nado, J. (2015). “Philosophical Expertise and Scientific Expertise.” Philosophical Psychology, 28(7): 1026–44.
Nado, J. (2014). “Philosophical Expertise.” Philosophy Compass, 9(9): 631–41.
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23
ETHICAL EXPERTISE
Christopher Cowley
In the past thirty years or so, more and more ethical ‘consultants’ have been hired by hospitals,
businesses and governments (Aulisio et al. 2003). In carrying out their job, they seem to possess
and to be offering the fruits of some kind of expertise.1 If we take such consultants as a central
example, we can then ask three inter-related sets of philosophical questions.
• The existence problem. Does ethical expertise exist? What exactly is it –a body of knowledge,
or a skill, or something else? How does it differ from other kinds of legitimate expertise? If
it does not exist, what exactly do the above consultants possess?
• The credentials problem. Who exactly is the ethical expert, and how is she to be identified by
non-experts? How does such a person become an ethical expert? Do people with a PhD
in moral philosophy, for example, automatically count as ethical experts (see Cholbi 2007)?
• The deference problem. Should ethical non-experts defer to experts? Why exactly? Is it because
ethical experts reliably do something better? What does deference involve here, exactly?
In this chapter, I survey some recent answers to these three sets of questions and develop my
own skeptical position. In the final sections, I want to link the questions to similar debates
surrounding the problem of ethical testimony and wisdom.
Legitimate expertise
I will take it as relatively uncontroversial that there are legitimate experts in many different
domains, such as the medical doctor, the tax advisor, the professional musician, the car mech-
anic, and the historian.2 In each domain, the expertise comprises a body of reliable and demon-
strable knowledge and/or skills that are greater than those of the average adult.The expert “gets
it right” (a diagnosis, a prediction), “does it better” (more efficiently, profitably, beautifully), or
simply “knows more” (academic disciplines, fan clubs). Often the expert has also undergone a
domain-specific training at a recognizable institution, where experts teach them to be experts
through a defined career path and grant them a certificate upon successful completion.
Different domains of expertise will be more or less accessible to non-experts, depending
on the amount of ‘folk-knowledge’ about the domain: if the roof is still leaking, it is clear that
the recent expert intervention has not worked, and the expert’s authority is thereby weakened.
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Some domains are so esoteric that we lack the folk-knowledge to do much more than take the
expert’s word for it (as when we have our healthy kids vaccinated).
Normally it is reasonable for me, as an avowed non-expert, to defer to the expert. This
might mean that I reject my own intuitions on the matter and accept the expert claim; it might
mean I refuse to think anything at all. On some occasions, as with the leaking roof, I will have
grounds to ask the expert to re-examine her handiwork, but that does not mean I have a better
idea of what to do. On other occasions, I might ignore the doctor’s advice if it sounds too
painful or too expensive. But note that in so doing I am not disagreeing with the doctor; I am
weighing costs and risks and benefits in accordance with the doctor’s expert advice.
Every domain of expertise is defined by a certain body of knowledge, with a core that all
experts must accept in order to be an expert in that domain.This is compatible with a penumbra
where experts can reasonably disagree with each other without undermining their claim to
expertise and without yielding license to general skepticism about the possibility of expertise
in that domain.3 Indeed, every disagreement requires a shared background of agreement against
which the two incompatible claims can be recognized as a disagreement about a single problem.
(An academic discipline can be partly defined by the long-standing disagreements between its
members.) This fact allows us to reject one obvious objection to the possibility of ethical expertise,
which runs as follows: given that so many people have such profound, intractable disagreements
about so many ethical issues (be they matters of policy or matters of once-only decision), it is
surely impossible for one person to pronounce on an ethical matter with the requisite authority.4
The best response to this is: we can and do agree on many ethical issues; indeed, we must agree
on many issues in order to take the trouble, in many instances, of trying to persuade another person
ethically. In contrast, it is most often pointless –and we know it is pointless –to try to persuade
someone on a genuine matter of taste.5 The second-best response to the “argument from disagree-
ment” is: in many ethical disputes there are mistakes and gaps in matters of fact. It may be that the
acquisition of new facts by one or both parties may lead to some convergence in some disputes.6
Given the above understanding of legitimate expertise, the biggest question is whether ethics
is a domain that would admit of expertise of an analogous type. Many people are skeptical about
this right away. In the relevant Routledge Encyclopedia entry, Hooker says:
In mainstream Western culture to call someone a moral expert would seem ironic.
It would typically be thought to suggest that the person is judgemental, interfering,
condescending, self-important, hypocritical, and perhaps closed-minded about morality.
Hooker 1998
Many philosophers are also skeptical. Here is a famous passage by C. D. Broad:
It is no part of the professional business of moral philosophers to tell people what they
ought or ought not to do … Moral philosophers, as such, have no special informa-
tion not available to the general public, about what is right and what is wrong; nor
have they any call to undertake those hortatory functions which are so adequately
performed by clergymen, politicians, leader-writers…
Broad 2014: 314
Perhaps the most scathing of all:
‘Clinical ethics’ is not medicine, which is to say it is not science, which is to say it is to
a very large degree whatever anyone wants it to be … The surgeon’s recommendation
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Ethical expertise
rests on an agreed upon set of facts and criteria … The philosopher’s recommendation
depends on a set of criteria that is not agreed upon, but varies from culture to culture
and, more and more, from individual to individual. One man’s categorical imperative
is another man’s heresy.
Shalit 1997: 24
A credible account of ethical expertise will have to meet this sort of spontaneous skepticism.
Some philosophers are confident. Bernard Gesang (2010: 158) declares forthrightly: “only
ethicists reach correct moral judgements with high probability and for the right reasons,”
whereas “the decisions of ordinary people can only be dominated by intuitions.”7 In a seminal
piece in the modern discussion of the subject, Peter Singer says:
someone familiar with moral concepts and with moral arguments, who has ample time
to gather information and think about it, may reasonably be expected to reach a soundly
based conclusion more often than someone who is unfamiliar with moral concepts and
moral arguments and has little time. So moral expertise would seem to be possible.8
Singer 1972: 117
In between the confidence of Gesang and Singer on the one hand, and the skepticism of Broad
and Shalit on the other, lie a number of possible versions of ethical expertise.
One version could start with moral realism –the existence of moral facts –and argue that
this must entail the existence of ethical experts. Since most of us, in our ethical beliefs and con-
cern about the world and in our activities of ethical argument with others, seem to presuppose
the existence of some kind of ethical truth of the matter, then most of us should accept the
existence of ethical experts, at least in principle. Here is Sarah McGrath, arguing on the basis of
the analogy between ethical and non-ethical facts:
After all, when it comes to deep and unobvious facts about the empirical world, we
readily defer to others … who are better placed to discover those facts than we are.
In such cases, even a very sweeping kind of deference to expert opinion seems appro-
priate. If, similarly, there is a domain of deep and unobvious moral facts, then it is
natural to expect that some of us—intuitively, the “moral experts”—would be better
placed to discover these facts than others. In principle then, moral deference should
strike us as no more peculiar than deference about scientific matters or geography.
McGrath 2011: 12
It is worth stressing, however, that ethical expertise does not require moral realism (Yoder 1998),
since there are many other metaphysical conceptions of ethical belief acquisition and ethical
dispute resolution that would be compatible with various kinds of non-realism. I fear I do not
have the space to say anything more about the metaphysics here.
A familiar form of ethical ‘expertise’

Before we examine the putative expertise of the ethics consultant more closely, it is worth separating
off one familiar kind of ethical expertise: that of the adult in comparison with the child.The child
struggles not only to learn ethical concepts and apply them correctly to paradigms (“Harry Potter
is brave”), but also struggles to identify and perform the brave action herself, under encourage-
ment. In both aspects, the child will rely on regular feedback, not only from her parents and other
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authority figures, but indeed from any adult. In this way, the child’s struggle to learn ethical concepts
is part of her wider struggle to master a form of life.This includes, centrally, learning a natural lan-
guage as a mother tongue; but it also involves learning the key ethical practices of, for example,
promise-keeping, reason-giving, praise and blame; learning other quasi-ethical conventions (polite-
ness, tidiness, patience); and generally learning how to orient oneself in the adult world. Becoming
a competent adult means becoming an expert relative to non-expert children, and that includes
ethical expertise in this basic sense of language, conduct, and understanding.9
It is not clear if we can really call this ‘expertise’ –if every competent adult is an expert,
then effectively none are, at least in the sense of the legitimate expertise described at the begin-
ning. But this point about the moral education of children is important for two reasons. First,
it shows how familiar ethical problems, ethical deliberation, and ethical advice are, right from
our youngest years; it is part of the deep fabric of all human lives, unlike the complex details
of tax law and the human body. Second, it means that any ethical theory has to be anchored in
common-sense morality, and any expert ethical advice has to be intelligible to the non-expert.10
The tax lawyer and the car mechanic and the dentist can try to explain things in lay terms, but
in the end they may be forced to say, “I have expertise and you do not, so I’m afraid I cannot
fully explain the reasoning behind my advice and you will just have to trust me.” But the puta-
tive ethics expert has to give intelligible reasons for the advice she gives, reasons that go all the
way down.The client, in trying to deal with her ethical perplexity, then has to take these reasons
or leave them; but if she takes them, she thereby makes them her own reasons, without deference.
This is not to deny the existence of ethical expertise, but only to suggest that if it does
exist, it has a very different nature than the kinds of non-ethical expertise we surveyed at the
beginning. One difference is that when the putative ethical expert attempts to persuade the
non-expert, she is not essentially trying to impart new information (though she may be doing
that as well) but is instead trying to bring the non-expert to see the situation from her point of
view. However, there is an important sense in which the non-expert retains the ‘rational right’
to refuse, that is, without necessarily being thought irrational or culpably stubborn. This is a
point about moral autonomy made familiar by Kant. Any significant moral deference vitiates
the moral value of any subsequent action performed out of such deference.11
If ethical expertise involves bringing-to-see by means of reasons, what else can we say about
such expertise? Let me return to the point about ethics being about the mastery of ethical
concepts and of the form of life within which those concepts make sense.This implies not only
a general expertise among all adults qua competent, but also a continuum along which some
adults might develop further than others. Bernard Williams puts the point in terms of ‘thick’
concepts, which are concepts that are partly descriptive and empirical, partly moral and action-
guiding, concepts such as ‘brave’, ‘cruel’, or ‘treachery’, (as opposed to thin concepts such as
‘right’ or ‘good’).The thought is that an attenuated form of expertise might comprise the skillful
deployment of thick concepts as part of the bringing-to-see.
If we concentrate on thick concepts, we do indeed have something like the notion of

a helpful informant. We have the notion of a helpful advisor. This is somebody who
may be better at seeing that a certain outcome, policy, or way of dealing with the situ-
ation falls under a concept of this kind, than we are in our unassisted state, and better
than other people who are less good at thinking about such matters. … he or she can
see, for instance, the situation as being an example of treachery, something that hadn’t
occurred to the rest of us.
Williams 1995a: 235
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Ethical expertise
Perhaps this could be taken as an encounter between a ‘more expert’ and a ‘less expert’ indi-
vidual, but it is important to see how far this remains from the tax advisor, doctor, and car
mechanic. The obvious problem is that Williams’s helpful advisor may not be able to point to
any training course that establishes her credentials to a degree sufficient to be employed as a
hospital ethics consultant.12
The moral philosopher as ethical expert?

Insofar as the ethics consultant is the most obvious candidate for ethical expertise, then the most
obvious career path to become such a consultant would be through university education in
professional ethics and philosophy. Such an education would introduce the student to the long-
standing debates in applied ethics, but would also encourage the student to take sides within the
debates, and to increase the precision and subtlety of their thought and self-expression. If they
do well on their philosophy course, they might become a philosophy teacher, and would then
introduce the next generation to the debates.
The philosophy teacher is clearly an expert in philosophy; the moral philosophy teacher is
clearly an expert in moral philosophy. But such expertise is limited to the classroom and to the
particular activity of teaching philosophy; it is not yet ethical expertise. The philosophy teacher
has to convey a certain amount of information, for example about what Kant wrote, or about
what moral realism is, or about Nagel’s interpretation of Kant. Beyond that, however, the phil-
osophy teacher can present and argue for her own interpretation of Kant, or for her own pos-
ition on euthanasia. Importantly, when she argues –and this is surely the essence of philosophy,
and of the teaching of philosophy –she is implicitly or explicitly inviting her students to disagree
with her.They may need some knowledge of Kant to disagree about her interpretation of Kant;
but with euthanasia, the discussion is, as it were, open much wider. Throughout, the fact that
the teacher has a PhD in philosophy does not guarantee that her interpretation of Kant or her
position on euthanasia is ‘correct’ or ‘better’. She may manage to impress and persuade some of
her students; she may anger others and provoke more or less articulate counterargument. Or she
may leave them indifferent.13
Even when the student comes to disagree with the philosophy teacher’s interpretation of
Kant or her position on euthanasia, they still learn from the teacher’s display of rigor and depth,
the organization of argument, the marshalling of evidence, etc. This is where she, as an expert,
“does it better.” But ethics is unlike medicine or tax law precisely because “doing it better” can
apply to the depth and rigor without entailing that the substantive position correspond, or be
more likely to correspond, to a truth of the matter. This ‘procedural’ conception of expertise
allows us to avoid the pitfalls of “getting it right” when applied to ethical judgments: on the one
hand the metaphysical pitfalls associated with moral realism, on the other hand the epistemo-
logical pitfalls associated with verifiability.14
For completeness, it is worth mentioning a third kind of expertise, alongside the ‘substantive’
expertise of the car mechanic and the procedural expertise of the philosophy teacher. Bruce
Weinstein (1994) discusses the ‘performative’ expert, who manages to do it better (and to get
it right), but without the ability to justify or explain it very deeply, or perhaps at all: in this
respect many athletes and musicians are performative experts. It is revealing that the majority of
athletes and musicians are unable to succeed as coaches or teachers or commentators because
they cannot explain what they do to non-experts. Many substantive experts also have moments
of performative expertise, when they invoke their experience and judgment to ‘see’ the correct
option, without being fully able to justify it at the time.
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Can the philosophy teacher deploy her procedural expertise in the clinical ethics committee,
and thereby approach a bona fide ethical expertise? Engelhardt (2002) describes the process by
which academic bioethicists are ‘ordained’ as secular ethical experts.15 With respect to the med-
ical ethics consultant, there are two important principles that govern the relationship between
the doctor and the consultant: first, it is the doctor who decides whether and when to call the
ethics consultant in the first place; second, it is the doctor who makes the final treatment decision,
and who carries full legal and ethical responsibility for that decision, regardless of whether the
doctor summoned the consultant or heeded her advice.The ethical aspects of the situation might
already be clear to the doctor. Or, if the doctor is ethically perplexed, she may prefer to discuss the
matter with a colleague, or a friend, in order to come to see what ought to be done. If the doctor
ends up calling the ethics consultant, she may ignore the advice entirely, and without ‘owing’
any reasons to the consultant. The doctor has just as much of a claim to ethical expertise, if not
more, simply by having had to face these ethical dilemmas on a regular basis as part of her job, by
having discussed many such dilemmas with her colleagues, and by having to defend many ethical
decisions to patients, to families, to management, and perhaps in the occasional malpractice suit.
Insofar as the medical ethics consultant can facilitate an ethical discussion at the clinical ethics
committee, could she do so with expertise? Certainly. But it is not obvious why a specifically
philosophical training would make someone a good facilitator of ethical discussions. People with
many other non-medical backgrounds might be just as good.16 And facilitators will increase
their expertise on the job and increase their authority in challenging the doctor’s ethical pos-
ition, as they learn more about the human body, about possible medical interventions, about the
institutions of medicine, and about medical law.17
Ethical testimony18
There are two further topics that need to be considered, both relevant to ethical expertise: ethical
testimony and ethical wisdom.The debate about ethical testimony goes deeper into the question
of what one person can learn, ethically, from another, be she a putative expert or non-expert.
As such, the problem of ethical testimony begins upstream from the problem of ethical
expertise, since the testimony in question makes no overt claim to authority, let alone to
credentials. In the same way that I set out the problem of expertise by comparing ‘legitimate’
non-ethical forms to putative ethical forms, so too the literature on testimony usually compares
the non-ethical to the ethical, taking the former to be largely uncontroversial and necessary
(see Coady 1992).When I am in a foreign town, it is rational to ask for directions, and to follow
those directions (if they cohere with what else I know about the town); when I am unsure how
to make a change in an institutional setting, I consult my colleague who has been demonstrably
correct in her past advice (without claiming to be an expert on the institution). When I am
ethically perplexed, I can ask my (non-expert) friend for advice. Here the skeptic would say that
it is not appropriate to follow such advice blindly, without first ‘adopting’ the advice as mine.
Let us explore this position. (The exception would again be with children who usually ought
to defer to the ethical testimony of adults.)
As before, skepticism about ethical testimony essentially relies on the Kantian idea of moral
autonomy. Hills, following Hopkins (2007), says:
Once you have reached maturity as an adult and have the ability to think about moral
questions by yourself … you have strong reasons to do so, indeed that refusing to do
so is unacceptable.
Hills 2009: 95
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Ethical expertise
And Hills offers the following example:
VEGETARIAN: Eleanor has always enjoyed eating meat but has recently realized
that it raises some moral issues. Rather than thinking further about these, however,
she talks to a friend, who tells her that eating meat is wrong. Eleanor knows that her
friend is morally trustworthy and reliable, so she believes her and accepts that eating
meat is wrong.
Hills 2009: 94
Sliwa (2012) defends ethical testimony by arguing that it is essentially no different from non-
ethical testimony. Whenever we are ethically perplexed about whether to choose option A or
option B, we can, do, and should consult those whom we already trust, especially the judgment
of a friend who already knows us well, who is thoughtful and caring, and who has given us
good advice in the past. As Sliwa puts it, “in relying on someone else’s moral judgement, we
acknowledge that the other person is in a better epistemic position with respect to the particular
moral judgement than we are” (Sliwa 2012: 179). Our own position, we acknowledge, might
be undermined by ignorance of other relevant facts or implications or likely consequences, or
undermined by more or less conscious bias or self-interest. A friend, almost by definition, is
someone who has the ability and the standing and the concern to compensate for our ignor-
ance and bias.
Sliwa makes an important point about the role of friends as ethical advisors, which is separate
from the role of putative ethical experts at the hospital. However, she fails to undermine Hills’s
Kantian argument. Consider again Eleanor’s conversion to vegetarianism, and how she might
explain it to her surprised carnivorous friends. I suggest she would not say, “I became a vege-
tarian because my friend advised me to”; instead, she would make reference to the reasons that
her friend adduced for being a vegetarian, reasons which Eleanor herself chose to adopt as her
reasons. The friend is part of the story of how she became a vegetarian, perhaps, but in ethical
terms, what persuaded Eleanor was not the friend but the reasons.19 Of course counterfactually,
Eleanor might have consulted other people, might have received the opposite advice, and might
have made a different ethical decision (Sliwa 2012: 187).20 But that does not take away from
the fact that it is Eleanor who leads her life and makes her own ethical decisions based on the
reasons available to her, regardless of the source (or indeed reasons which might just occur to
her without consultation). Of course, Eleanor might have been biased in any number of ways,
but that does not undermine her moral autonomy: she may well revisit her ethical decision
later, discover that she was biased, and change her mind. But this too will be an expression of
her autonomy.
There is a question here about the role of reasons, not only in cases of ethical persuasion, but
also in cases of ethically changing one’s mind. One could imagine a vegetarian friend gripping
Eleanor by the arm, fixing her in the eye, and urging her to stop taking part in the slaughter of
animals. If Eleanor changes her mind, this will not be on the basis of new reasons supplied by
the friend; nor would Eleanor explain her change of mind with reference to reasons: she might
instead say something like: “I suddenly realized that I could no longer eat meat.”The friend has
not persuaded Eleanor but has brought Eleanor to see something that she did not see before.
I would accept this but would deny that this is a case of deference to testimony, for the final
assent –the final decision about what Eleanor puts in her mouth –remains Eleanor’s.
Mogensen (2015) accepts a basic pessimism about the possibility of ethical testimony, and
then seeks an explanation for it. He considers and rejects the Kantian autonomy line, in favor
of an “ideal of authenticity,” which sees ethical beliefs as central to one’s self. As a result, it is
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Christopher Cowley
particularly important that ethical beliefs come from within rather than without, and authen-
ticity requires the individual to navigate a complex world of incentives and threats in order to
decide-and-discover what she most cares about.
Wisdom
The above has been generally skeptical about the existence of ethical expertise and testimony.
Such skepticism would seem to double when we turn to a similar concept, wisdom. For while
it at least makes sense to ask what subject the expertise is on, how it was acquired, and what
credentials might underpin it, none of that can easily be said about wisdom. Sometimes wisdom
might just be a synonym for expertise; but when it is not, what is it exactly? And can one be a
skeptic about the possibility of ethical expertise and yet acknowledge the existence of ethical
wisdom?
Despite the greater cause for skepticism, the concept has a much older lineage than expertise,
and is better covered in the philosophy encyclopedias, so I do not need to survey the scene;21
suffice to make some brief remarks to compare it to expertise. For a start, they are obviously not
co-extensive: it is perfectly possible for a tax advisor and a car mechanic to lack wisdom, just
as it is possible for a wise person to lack any credentials-based expertise in a particular domain.
Notoriously, it also seems to be perfectly possible for a moral philosopher to lack wisdom, espe-
cially a philosopher with a more technical approach to ethics.22
In parallel to the ethical ‘expertise’ that adults possess in comparison to children, so too
adults necessarily have more enlightened self-interest: canny street-smartness, the ability to spot
connections and causal patterns, to avoid compromising situations, to defer gratification, and
to distinguish between the useful and the pleasurable (Nozick 1989: 269). But wisdom is more
than enlightened self-interest and includes an ethical dimension; the wise person orients her
life toward the good –at least according to the traditional conception. There is a debate about
whether a life-long gangster such as Marlon Brando’s Don Corleone can be wise, however
revered and admired (and feared) he might be.
One essential difference between expertise and wisdom seems to be that the former is
domain-specific, whereas we tend to think of the wise person as having wisdom to offer across
many domains, including new and unfamiliar domains; while at the same time relying on
accurate self-knowledge to recognize the limits of her wisdom and the occasional need to defer
to experts. While expertise is often based on training paths and credentials, there is no obvious
single route to wisdom. Public figures such as Nelson Mandela and Mother Teresa seem to be
wise in very different ways, without any necessary relation to their ‘day jobs’. We could say that
wisdom is an aspect of the person as such, of their particular character, rather than something
detachable possessed by the person, like expertise.23 Even though the expert may closely iden-
tify with their domain of expertise, it still makes sense to imagine the bank manager being quite
ordinary outside the bank; whereas Mandela and Mother Teresa would be extraordinary in
almost every context. (Although note the adage that “no man is a hero to his valet.”)
In addition to wise public figures, each of us knows a great-aunt24 whom we would consult
because of a wisdom borne of many years of rich personal experience. But mere experience is
not enough; there has to be a certain capacity to reflect on the experience, to build on it toward
a deep sympathetic understanding of human beings, and to strive to articulate it accurately and
forcefully. There also has to be a sense that the wise person is living their own life and nobody
else’s; and that they stand clearly behind everything they say. However, it is not accidental that
the wise person (like the good person) will find it difficult to describe themselves as wise (or
good), however entitled they might be to do so.
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Ethical expertise
Perhaps certain groups of people are more likely to develop wisdom than others. A long his-
tory of relatively intimate interaction with people, especially people from diverse backgrounds,
and especially people in crisis, might help. I have in mind the wisdom of teachers, social workers,
psychotherapists, priests, nurses, and doctors. Perhaps novelists as well, given the extent and detail
of their imaginary encounters with others. There is no guarantee that their experience will gen-
erate wisdom, of course: it might be just as likely to produce cynicism, and there is a real question
about whether wisdom and cynicism are compatible. Similarly, prolonged adversity can make
one wise or it can make one self-absorbed or bitter or petty, or it can crush the spirit.
John Kekes (1983: 277–78) sought to define wisdom by looking at what a paradigmatically
unwise person lacked, and he chose Tolstoy’s Ivan Illyich. Illyich clearly possessed cleverness, skill,
and expertise in many domains, as well as the necessary worldliness to get along well in life; and
yet he was ignorant about the important questions of life, and therefore unprepared for the reality
of his imminent death. In moving from panic and indignation to serene acceptance, we would be
inclined to say that Illyich was growing wiser. I contend that this kind of ‘ultimate’ wisdom is a far
richer notion than mere ethical expertise, and more appropriate for philosophical examination.
Notes
1 Two points about terminology. First, I will take ethics to be synonymous with morality, and ethical
expertise as synonymous with moral expertise. Some authors make use of the distinction, such as
Steinkamp et al. (2008b), in their response to Scofield (2008). Rasmussen (2011) uses the distinction
to argue that moral expertise is dubious for lots of familiar reasons, while ethical expertise is legitimately
claimed, not so much by individuals, but by ethics committees. Second, I want to avoid the term ‘ethicist’,
which is not only ugly, but also has misleading phonetic associations with the legitimate expertise of
the anesthetist and physicist.
2 For a general overview of expertise, see Selinger (2006).
3 See the project ‘When Experts Disagree’: http://whenexpertsdisagree.ucd.ie/ (accessed June 2018).
4 For an explicit discussion of authority in the context of medical ethics consultation, see Agich (2009).
5 There is one disanalogy between scientific disagreement and ethical disagreement. In the scientific case,
scientists will usually agree on a particular test, either now, or under conditions of sufficient funding or
time, that would reveal the truth to both disputants. In the case of an ethical disagreement, it is possible
to imagine the disputants to be fully informed of all relevant information, such that no test would gen-
erate new evidence to resolve the issue.This would lend support to the skeptical position, although the
point about the widespread background agreement remains.
6 See McGrath (2008); Archard (2011); and the most recent version of the ‘argument from disagreement’
by Cross (2015).
7 For a rejection of Gesang, see Cowley (2011).
8 For a useful dialectic, see Crosthwaite (1995) in support of ethical expertise. Cowley (2005) responds,
more skeptically. Crosthwaite (2005) responds to Cowley. And then Eriksson et al. (2006) comment on
the debate.
9 Driver (2013) develops the analogy between language and ethics further.
10 Archard (2011: 119) develops this point. But see the criticisms of Archard by Gordon (2014) and
Vogelstein (2015).
11 McGrath puts it thus: “if an agent Φ’s because of her belief that Φ-ing is the right thing to do, but she
does not understand why Φ-ing is the right thing to do, this detracts from the status of her action”
(2011: 31). The extension of this is a principle of democratic citizenship, according to which demo-
cratic participants should be encouraged to understand the issues and vote on them autonomously
rather than deferring to ‘experts’ (Dietrich 2012).
12 Williams (1995b) develops this point further, while strongly rejecting the idea of a full ethical expertise
comparable to that in the legitimate domains surveyed.
13 There is an additional element that applies to the ethics teacher, which does not apply to the car
mechanic or the musician. The ethics teacher’s political opinions and religious beliefs will often affect her
substantive ethical beliefs. Once such ‘background’ beliefs are known, this may undermine the students’
acceptance of the teacher’s substantive ethical claims (see Powers 2005).
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14 “By contrast [with non-moral judgment], there seems to be no analogous way to calibrate the accuracy
or reliability of someone’s moral judgment, because one lacks the relevant kind of independent access
to the moral facts” (McGrath 2011: 26).
15 See the recent special issue of the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy,Vol. 41(4) (2016), devoted to ethical
expertise in the healthcare context.
16 Cf. Vogelstein: the ethical expert contributes to clinical decision-making through “(1) mediation
and consensus-building, (2) clarification and explanation of moral issues, concepts and arguments”
(2015: 330). Walker (1993) suggests that the ethics consultants can be ‘architects’ who keep space open
for moral reflection and deliberation about professional practice. The Medical Mediation Foundation
in the UK offers relevant courses: www.medicalmediation.org.uk/medical-mediation-foundation/
(accessed June 2018).
17 Yoder (1998: 18) draws an interesting, but ultimately incomplete analogy.The ethics consultant is like a
project manager, who is in charge of a team, who knows a little about every aspect of the project, and
who co-ordinates, guides, and ensures coherence. However, this is not the best analogy because even
if the ethics consultant chairs the meeting, ultimately it is the doctor who is in overall charge of the
‘project’ and who bears legal and ethical responsibility for the final decisions.
18 The literature concerns the term ‘moral testimony’, but I will use ‘ethical’ without drawing any distinctions.
The 2014 Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume,Vol. 88(1) has several pieces on moral testimony.
19 Confusingly, Sliwa (2012: 181) draws an analogy between consulting an ethically discerning friend
and consulting an “experienced supervisor” when learning how to read an X-ray. This would bring
her point about moral testimony into the debate about ethical expertise. As I have been arguing, how-
ever, ethical discernment is very different from the clinical-diagnostic discernment because of the
supervisor’s clear authority and experience, and because of the inductive patterns and post-mortem
verifiability underlying the diagnosis.
20 There is a separate debate about whether the historical contingency of my present ethical views
undermines any robust conception of ethical objectivism.
21 See Sharon Ryan’s 2013 entry ‘Wisdom’ in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; Nicholas Smith’s
1998 entry ‘Wisdom’ in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. For other useful surveys, see Whitcomb
(2011) and Grimm (2015).
22 In the London Review of Books,Vol. 24, No. 16, dated August 22, 2002, Stephen Mulhall offers a scathing
review of Jeff McMahon’s The Ethics of Killing (OUP, 2001).While acknowledging the author’s prowess
and technical skill (expertise), Mulhall has severe doubts about McMahon’s deeper understanding of
morality and of the human condition (wisdom). Indeed, Mulhall notes that the dust jacket blurb (by
Peter Singer) describes McMahon as “novel and ingenious” rather than “wise and insightful.”
23 Jason Smartwood (2012) tries to bring expertise and wisdom together by modeling wisdom on expert
skill. Such stipulative resolution is fine as far as it goes, but I do not think it goes very far.
24 Sliwa’s understanding of a friend in her discussion of ethical testimony (see above) could be a case of a
personally ‘tailored’ wisdom, based on her knowledge of me and my life.
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24
THE DEMISE OF GRAND
NARRATIVES?
Postmodernism, power-knowledge,
and applied epistemology
Matthew Sharpe
Introduction
If applied epistemology is “the study of whether systems of investigation that purport to
be seeking the truth are well engineered to lead to true beliefs about the world” (Laudan
2011: 272), then it can be said that ‘postmodernism’ entered philosophy as applied epistem-
ology, albeit in an ironically grand style. “The object of this study is the condition of know-
ledge in the most highly developed societies,” Jean-François Lyotard begins the landmark
1979 work The Postmodern Condition (Lyotard 1984 [1979]: xxiii1): “The text that follows
is an occasional one: it is a report on knowledge in the most highly developed societies …
presented to the Conseil des Universités of the government of Quebec at the request of its
President” (1984 [1979]: xxv).
‘Postmodernism’ has since 1979 become a highly contested, multivalent term, in part due
to the succès de scandale of Lyotard’s study. The descriptor has been widely conflated by critics
with the term ‘post-structuralism’, also intended to categorize the group of post-1960 French
thinkers led by Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, and Gilles
Deleuze. Yet with the exception of Lyotard, none of these thinkers has strongly identified with
either Anglophone categorization. In the conservative media in the United States and elsewhere,
‘postmodernism’ has been arraigned as a polemical, somewhat indiscriminate term in the ‘cul-
ture wars’ to denigrate the New Left social movements politicizing race, gender, and identity as
hopelessly modish and relativistic.
The term ‘postmodernism’ begun its life in the arts, notably in architecture and literature.
Here it was used (from the 1970s onwards) to describe highly self-reflexive artworks which
at once break with older, modern and classical paradigms, and ironically blend elements of
different genres in unlikely pastiches (Jameson 1991). Again reflecting Lyotard’s influence, and
his own book’s ‘postmodern’ inter-disciplinarity, the variant term ‘postmodernity’ then emerged
in the 1980s in the social sciences as a periodizing label. Here, often closely associated with the
descriptors ‘post-industrial’ or ‘post-ideological’, ‘postmodernity’ aimed to describe large-scale
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319
The demise of grand narratives?
social transformations associated with new forms of capitalism and advanced technologies in the
developed countries (Harvey 1989).
Lyotard himself situates his claims in The Postmodern Condition in relation to “technological
transformations” since the Second World War in the West. In particular, he singles out:
(1) the increasing importance of forms of expert knowledge and computer technologies in the
economies of advanced countries;
(2) the development of the ever-smaller forms of information-processing devices, with the
concomitant explosion in the quantity and availability of information.
“[T]‌he miniaturization and computerization of machines is already changing the way learning
is acquired, classified, made available, and exploited,” Lyotard claims:
It is reasonable to suppose that the proliferation of information-processing machines is

having, and will continue to have, as much of an effect on the circulation of learning
as did advancements in human circulation (transportation systems) and later, in the
circulation of sounds and visual images (the media).
Lyotard 1984 [1979]: 4
The titular “postmodern condition” that has emerged under these changed socio-political
conditions is above all characterized by what Lyotard calls “an incredulity toward metanarratives”
(1984 [1979]: xxiv). The Postmodern Condition claims:
(1) that older claimants to knowledge, whether scientific or narratival (“traditional”) are no
longer defensible, given ‘postmodern’ social and technological changes;
(2) that this is not cause for mourning but should be both accepted and cultivated in ways we
will see.
This chapter introduces postmodern epistemology by focusing on Lyotard’s now-canonical

“report on knowledge” (xxv). Our rationale for this approach is that, while some of The
Postmodern Condition’s concerns and categories are unique to this text, Lyotard’s position stakes
out the broader lineaments of an epistemological perspective shared by many “postmodernist”
authors working in philosophy, the humanities, and the social sciences since the early 1980s
(e.g., Rorty 1979).
In section 1, I examine the social and historical bases of Lyotard’s claims concerning “know-
ledge in highly advanced societies.” In section 2, I turn to his claims about the alleged pro-
liferation of “language games” in these societies. In section 3, I look specifically at Lyotard’s
“applied” claims concerning the “scientific language game,” undermining its claims to epistemic
difference and superiority over “traditional” or “narrative” forms of knowledge. Section 4 then
looks at the resulting epistemic relativism Lyotard defends in The Postmodern Condition: an
“agonistics” (16) which assigns positive value to the “paralogical” disruption of existing forms
of consensual knowledge, over traditional epistemic norms like truth, verisimilitude, simplicity,
falsifiability, etc. (60–67). In section 5, I look at one instance of what a postmodern, paralogical
“applied epistemology” looks like: the famous case of Pierre Rivière as analyzed by Michel
Foucault in the early 1970s.
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Matthew Sharpe
1. The postmodern “incredulity toward metanarratives”

“Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodernism as incredulity toward metanarratives,”
Lyotard pronounces in his Preface to The Postmodern Condition (xxiv). The simplification
has become epigrammatic. Lyotard continues poetically: “The narrative function is losing
its functors, its great heroes, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal” (Lyotard 1984
[1979]: xxiv).
Lyotard’s famous claim is first of all a factual one, like Nietzsche’s “death of God” obser-
vation about declining Christian observance in nineteenth-century Europe. Today, Lyotard
argues, most people just do not accept the “grand narratives” of human progress that allegedly
characterized the “modern” era –roughly 1789 to 1945.
Lyotard associates ‘modernity’ with two such “metanarratives.” The first is the metanarrative
of progress in liberty. It is ethical or political, and concerns “practical philosophy.” It involves
a grand historical tale about the liberation of human beings from unnecessary forms of social
and political tutelage, so they can determine their ends for themselves in forms of discursive,
democratic will formation (31–32). The second, intersecting metanarrative is more “specula-
tive.” More specifically epistemic in its concerns, it narrates a grand collective tale of progress in
human knowledge, spearheaded by the natural and social sciences. Its iconic form is the German
philosopher W. G. F. Hegel’s conception of human history as the “dialectical” progress of the
Geist of the human species toward encyclopedic “absolute knowledge” and optimally rational
forms of governance (32–37).
The wider importance of these narratives, Lyotard contends, relates to the way each served
to “legitimate” social, political, educational, and scientific institutions. The formation and
funding of modern universities, for instance, long drew upon the narrative of humanity’s
collective self-emancipation to legitimate itself. On the German Humboldt model, univer-
sities aimed at the Bildung (ethical as well as intellectual training) of citizens capable both of
serving the greater good as laid out in the “grand narrative” of progress in human “spirit”
(the second modern grand narrative), and of deliberating intelligently in public forums or
offices of the state (as per the first metanarrative) (32–34). In this way, these metanarratives
served a comparable functional role in modern Western social reproduction to that played by
the traditional Christian epos of fall, incarnation, and redemption in pre-and early modern
European societies.
The principal cause Lyotard sees underlying the postmodern incredulity toward the moderns’
grand legitimizing stories is socio-political or technological (3–5, 14–17). As we commented
above, Lyotard assigns great significance to the advent of new information-processing technolo-
gies (4–5). These have vastly increased the quantity of information in cultural circulation, far
beyond what any individual or collective subject could unify. They have also changed the face
of modern nation-states, whose material reproduction increasingly turns on what is called “the
knowledge economy” –the generation of surplus value through the production and exploit-
ation of high technologies whose bankable “intellectual property” is known only to a small
number of specialists.
Today, people are exposed to vastly larger quantities of information, hailing from a greater
number of sources, on a greater number of devices and in a greater range of institutional
contexts than ever before. If Lyotard is right, we are experiencing a kind of societal informa-
tion overload that gives the lie to any and all hopes for some single grand story that could unify
the totality –whether social scientific, and functionalist, or a political metanarrative like that
of Marxism concerning class struggle (11–14). Within tertiary institutions previously devoted
to such cultural comprehension (as per the second modern grand narrative), “the speculative
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hierarchy of learning gives way to an immanent, and as it were, ‘flat’ network of areas of inquiry,
the respective frontiers of which are in constant flux” (39). The postmodern individual, Lyotard
hence claims, “exists in a fabric of relations that is now more complex and mobile than ever
before” (40). Indeed, faced with the proliferation of “local” discourses (63), and the sheer
wealth of information and competing perspectives available to us, courtesy of our postmodern
information-processing technologies:
The social subject itself seems to dissolve in this dissemination of language games
[see below]. The social bond is linguistic, but it is not woven with a single thread. It is
woven by … an indeterminate number of language games, obeying different rules…
Lyotard 1984 [1979]: 40
2. A multiverse of “language games”: from fact toward value

Importantly, however, The Postmodern Condition argues that the modern metanarratives of liberty
or Geist collapsed as much from the weight of their own internal contradictions, as through the
force of these historical, socio-political and technological factors (38–39). If progress in delib-
erative liberty was the modern goal (first metanarrative), then this goal sits uneasily with the
valorized progress of the descriptive sciences central to the second metanarrative (38–40).These
sciences were long celebrated for discovering causal determinisms everywhere. Immanuel Kant,
the modern philosopher par excellence, already wrestled with the apparent incommensurability
between theoretical-scientific and practical-moral reason, with its presupposition of free will.
His difficulties in reconciling the subject matters of his first and second Critiques reflect for
Lyotard the ways that science “has no special calling to supervise the game of praxis … science
is incapable of legitimating the other language games. The game of prescription, for example,
escapes it…” (40).
Lyotard’s use of the term “language games,” which we have cited now several times, is telling
in situating what he calls his “method” in The Postmodern Condition (9). In an important critical
response to Lyotard, Seyla Benhabib (1984) situates Lyotard’s philosophical presuppositions in
relation to three convergent, wider lines of criticism of “modern epistemological philosophy’s”
alleged, founding conception of the individual subject. This is a subject who aims at a clear
and distinct set of internal representations of the world (a “mirror of nature”), so he can subor-
dinate it to his own volitional control (Rorty 1979). First, there is the lineage running through
Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. This argues that individuals and their self-conceptions are
always socially, economically, or ‘libidinally’ shaped in ways recalcitrant to their self-conscious,
volitional control. Second, there is the lineage running from Nietzsche through Heidegger and
the Frankfurt School which sees the “modern episteme as an episteme of domination”: fore-
closing alternative cultural forms and despoiling the natural world (Benhabib 1984: 109).Third,
there is the linguistic turn spanning the analytic-continental divide: the different Pierceian,
Fregean, Wittgensteinian, hermeneutic, and structuralist paradigms which unite in stressing
(first) the transindividual, “public and shared” nature of language use; and (second) the consti-
tutive importance of language in humans’ ability to make sense of their experiences (Benhabib
1984: 108–9).2
Lyotard’s predominant terminology of “language games” in The Postmodern Condition is post-
Wittgensteinian. Sometimes, he calls his approach a “pragmatics” (9). On this model, any lin-
guistic utterance of whatever kind “positions its sender (the person who utters the statement),
its addressee (the person who receives it), and its referent (what the statement deals with) in
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a specific way…” (9). Vitally, then, this pragmatic framework can be applied equally to the
modern sciences and to the kinds of premodern mythological narratives of tribes like the
Cashinuba, to whom Lyotard devotes several pages of his book (20–22).
In this “traditional” culture, Lyotard notes, there are closely circumscribed, if implicit and
prereflective rules governing the “language game” of the transmission of the group’s founda-
tion stories. The narrator in each retelling of the myth is positioned as an epistemic authority.
This, both on the basis of having himself been previously an “addressee” of the time-honored
tale, and as the bearer of a name “declined at the end of the narrative … given to him in con-
formity with the canonic narrative legitimating the assignment of patronyms” (20). The myths
themselves blend together denotative statements about the world, quasi-historical claims about
ancestors, implied interrogatives to new hearers, and normative claims about how to live as a
Cashinuba.These are all “ordered by the unified viewpoint characteristic of this kind of know-
ledge” (20). The retelling of the same tale across generations thus plays a foundational cultural
role in establishing and maintaining the identity of the tribe:
The consensus that permits such knowledge to be circumscribed and makes it possible
to distinguish one who knows from one who doesn’t (the foreigner, the child) is what
constitutes the culture of a people.
Lyotard 1984 [1979]: 19
According to Lyotard the modern sciences, comparably, involve a “set of statements” positioning
authorities and addressees. But these statements are of a solely denotative (true or false) kind
(25). Lyotard sometimes equivocates, and notices that the sciences also “rely on appeals to argu-
mentation and proof ” in ways traditional narratives do not (27, 62–65). Nevertheless, Lyotard
insists:
The statements [of the sciences] are [alike] “moves” made by the players in the frame-
work of generally applicable rules; these rules are each specific to each particular
kind of knowledge [scientific or traditional-narratival]; and the “moves” judged to be
“good” in one cannot be of the same type as those judged “good” in another, unless
it happens that way by chance.
Lyotard 1984 [1979]: 28
“Knowledge [savoir] in general cannot be reduced to science, nor even to learning [connaissance],”
Lyotard stresses. Rather:
what is meant by the term knowledge is not only a set of denotative statements, far from
it. It also includes notions of “know-how,” “knowing how to live,” “how to listen”
[savoir-faire, savoir-vivre, savoir-écouter], etc. Knowledge, then, is a question of compe-
tence that goes beyond the simple determination and application of the criterion of
truth, extending to the determination and application of criteria of efficiency (tech-
nical qualification), of justice and/or happiness (ethical wisdom), of the beauty of
sound or color (auditory and visual sensibility), etc.
Lyotard 1984 [1979]: 20
Sometimes using the Kuhnian term, Lyotard insists that each of these kinds of prescriptive,
denotative, technical … “language games” is strictly “incommensurable” with every other. Yet,
Lyotard contends there is one mark that above all sets off the modern scientific “language game”
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from all others. This is science’s claim to being not only commensurate with, but epistemically
superior to all previous denotative language games (25) like that played out within the nesting
myths of the Cashinuba tribe or medieval Christendom (63). This claim indeed lies at the
heart of the second modern metanarrative of cumulative, progressive growth in humans’ col-
lective understanding, if not of what Lyotard dramatically calls “the Occident” more widely (8).
Accordingly, at the heart of Lyotard’s argument for the ‘postmodern condition’ lies a concerted
attempt to undermine science’s “modern” claims to epistemic superiority.
It is to this critique of scientific knowledge’s putative pretentions that we now turn.
3. Postmodern applied epistemology 1: relativizing the sciences

In his claims concerning science, Lyotard’s debts to radically conservative narratives about
science, technology, and its role in modern societies, mediated through Martin Heidegger
in particular, become clear. “Do we ourselves, at this moment, not feel obliged to mount a
narrative of scientific knowledge in the West in order to clarify its status?” he asks rhetorically
(28). Lyotard’s narrative about science and its cultural significance pitches all the way back to
Plato’s Republic and the Socratic dialogues. It would include all “the great ancient, medieval,
and classical philosophies,” if there was more space to unfold its “endless torment” (29). “We
all know its symptoms,” Lyotard declaims: “it is the entire history of cultural imperialism from
the dawn of Western civilization” (27). Indeed, one of several tensions that run through The
Postmodern Condition involves Lyotard’s claims concerning the nigh-universal predominance of
the technical “efficiency” he associates with the modern sciences in the same advanced societies
whose proliferation of information and language games he proposes has already ushered in the
postmodern condition:
The decision makers, however, attempt to manage these clouds of sociality according
to input/output matrices, following a logic which implies that their elements are
commensurable and that the whole is determinable. They allocate our lives for the
growth of power. In matters of social justice and of scientific truth alike, the legitim-
ation of that power is based on its optimizing the system’s performance—efficiency…
Lyotard 1984 [1979]: xxiv
Lyotard’s key claim about the sciences is that, although science claims to embody a post-
traditional, non-narratival form of knowledge (xxiii), it cannot legitimize itself. “The language
game of science desires its statements to be true,” Lyotard observes. But it “does not have the
resources to legitimate their truth on its own” (28).
Even if we assume that forms of methodologically controlled scientific inquiry do achieve
superior epistemic access to natural phenomena, Lyotard argues that science cannot answer
the question of why we should want to achieve such knowledge. “Why do philosophy?” the
Athenians asked Socrates at the inception of classical philosophy. Books VI and VII of the
Republic give Plato’s answer, as Lyotard (arguably rightly) reads the canonical text: in the
allegory of the cave “which recounts how and why men yearn for narratives [doxa?] and fail
to recognize knowledge” (28–29). From this time forward, philosophy and its modern pro-
geny, the sciences, have had to address the “why?” question about their activities. They have
had to justify the pursuit of knowledge, and associated questioning of the claims of received
narratives, to wider society. Scientific activity, as a form of collective inquiry and then as a
profession, requires economic inputs and social institutions (25). Yet in order to justify these
extra-scientific inputs to potential clients, patrons, or investors, scientists or philosophers of
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science must have recourse to narrative claims about the progress, worth, and needfulness
of their activities. “A crude proof,” Lyotard offers, is how scientists respond in news media
interviews about new ‘discoveries’:
they respond with an epic of scientific knowledge which is in fact wholly unepic.
They play by the rules of the narrative game: its influence remains considerable not
only on the users of the media, but also on the scientist’s sentiments.3
Lyotard 1984 [1979]: 28
Science (or philosophy) conceived from the outside as a social or political phenomenon is not
free-standing and cannot be taken for granted.Yet the “discourses” that justify its social and pol-
itical existence are not themselves scientific. To the extent that certain narratives about science
suppress “the paradoxical return of the non-narrative [science] to the narrative [to justify them-
selves], in one form or another” (27), Lyotard suggests they are misleading.
A more radical, ‘internal’ critique of science’s claims to epistemic superiority over traditional,
narratival forms of knowledge can also be found in The Postmodern Condition. Here Lyotard
targets scientific “research” itself (24) and directly challenges its proponents’ claims to be able
to denote mind-or language-independent realities more accurately than other forms of dis-
course –even leaving aside the question of how science’s pursuits might be narrativally justified
to outsiders. The “truth-value” of any given scientific assertion involves the ostensible correl-
ation between what the statement sets out as being the case and some “referent … in principle
external to the partners involved in scientific dialectics,” Lyotard notes (26). Yet he skeptically
denies that “the referent (‘reality’) [can be] called to the stand and cited in the debate between
scientists” without circularity (44).
Any new scientific statement, in order to be accepted as “true” in the “scientific language
game,” must be subject to repeatable experimental proof. The ostensible aim of institutional-
izing such testability is so as to verify, as often as is required, that new, disputed claims catch
hold of some invariant, discourse-independent reality or realities –rather than reflecting the
projected hopes, fears, or illusions of their initial claimants. Only thus will scientific consensus
about some proposition’s validity be achieved. Lyotard, however, takes science’s emphasis on
testability to point, as it were, in the exactly opposite, anti-realist direction: “Not: I can prove
something because reality is the way I say it is [a realist view]. But: as long as I can produce
proof, it is permissible to think reality is the way I say it is” (24).
While this formulation remains consistent with a minimally realist account of science’s epi-
stemic ideals, Lyotard goes farther:
It is recognized that the conditions of truth … the rules of the game of science, are
immanent in that game … there is no other proof that the rules are good than the consensus
of the experts.
Lyotard 1984 [1979]: 29, my emphasis
At this point, the distinction between scientific truth-claims and narratival forms of know-
ledge –myths, for instance, which ask to be believed on the basis of appeal to time-honored
authorities, if not “experts” –begins to disappear. “The truth of a statement necessarily draws
a consensus,” Lyotard reflects (24). Indeed, its ‘truth’ can consist in no more than this consensus:
it depends on whether or not the statement proposed is considered by one’s peers to

be worth discussion in a sequence of argumentation and refutation. The truth of the
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statement and the competence of its sender are thus subject to the collective approval
of a group of persons who are competent on an equal basis…
Lyotard 1984 [1979]: 24
The apparent question of reference, and thus of a possible correlation between propositions
and a discourse-independent reality, accordingly devolves into a different inquiry: one as to
how a particular group of people, the scientists, come to be taken to be uniquely competent
to judge disputed truth-claims. But this is a question of the “diachronics” of teaching and
pedagogy, not the “synchronics” of the way the natural world discernibly is. New scientists
are initiated into the body of truths presently considered proven by today’s “community of
experts,” and the protocols considered authoritative for establishing such truths (44). In the
scientific community, as among the Cashinuba tribe, that is, established truth-claims from
previous authorities are accepted by novices as the means of qualifying themselves as eligible
epistemic authorities. In neither case are prior or external tests available to assess the truth
or falsity of the initiatory claims, outside the constitutive “rules” of the language game in
question.
Lyotard underscores this relativizing terminus by stressing what other authors call the
theory-laden nature of scientific observations. But he takes it in his own, unusual direction. Any
proposed scientific fact “has to be observed in order to stand proven,” Lyotard notes (44). Yet,
as Bacon and Descartes stressed at the origin of the modern sciences: “[s]‌enses are deceptive,
and the range and power of their discrimination are limited” (44). How then can we guarantee
the truth or accuracy of any given observational claim? “This is where technology comes in,”
Lyotard tells us.Yet, in what looks very like a non sequitur, he then reasons:
Technical devices … follow a principle, and it is the principal of optimal perform-

ance: maximizing output (the information or modifications obtained) and minimizing
input (the energy expended in the process).Technology is therefore a game pertaining
not to the true, the just, or the beautiful, etc., but to efficiency…
Lyotard 1984 [1979]: 44
In this way, scientific verification is devolved into “technology” and “technology” into “the
principal of optimal performance.” It is only a short step then to recasting the scientific “lan-
guage game” as the completely heteronomous product and servant of its socioeconomic
preconditions, and the “modern” cult of efficiency. Lyotard does not hesitate:
By the end of his Discourse, Descartes is already asking for laboratory funds. A new
problem appears: devices that optimize the performance of the human body for the
purposes of producing proof requires existing expenditures. No money, no proof—
and that means no verification of statements and no truth.
Lyotard 1984 [1979]: 44–45, my emphasis
4. Power-knowledge
Lyotard’s post- Wittgensteinian “method” in the applied epistemology in The Postmodern
Condition, it can be argued, involves a set of strong ontological commitments in the philosophy
of language which significantly predetermine the ensuing depictions both of the sciences and
postmodern society. “It is useful to make the following three observations about language
games,” we are told in section 3 of The Postmodern Condition:
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The first is that their rules do not carry within themselves their own legitimation, but
are the object of a contract, explicit or not, between players … The second is that if
there are no rules, there is no game, that even an infinitesimal modification of one
rule alters the nature of the game, that a “move” or utterance that does not satisfy the
rules does not belong to the game they define. The third remark is…: every utterance
should be thought of as a “move” in a game.
Lyotard 1984 [1979]: 10
If these stipulations seem more or less uncontroversial, Lyotard then stresses what he terms
an “agonistics” allegedly at work in the language games constitutive of social life, which
Wittgenstein and other philosophers of language have missed:
This last observation brings us to the first principle underlying our method as a
whole: to speak is to fight … and speech acts fall within the domain of a general agonistics.
Lyotard immediately qualifies this statement, disavowing that he means to equate all dis-
course with contest, combat, or war (10). Yet warlike descriptions of the language games and
“institutions” into which he sees postmodern society being divided re-emerge throughout The
Postmodern Condition. A little further on, we thus read:
In the ordinary use of discourse—for example, in a discussion between two friends—

the interlocutors use any available ammunition, changing games from one utterance to
the next: questions, requests, assertions, and narratives are launched pell-mell into battle.
Lyotard’s sense firstly of the particular or “local” (66), and secondly of the dynamic, provisional
and agonistic nature of language games is thus not simply methodological. It underlies his strong
substantive oppositions both to any “cybernetic” view of communication as the peaceable trans-
mission of information between language-using “atoms”; and secondly to any understanding
of “communicative action,” like that of Jürgen Habermas, which sees language use as aiming
at a more or less stable “consensus” between speakers (11–13, 60–67). The picture that Lyotard
instead presents of postmodern social life as the text proceeds is a distinctly neo-Nietzschean
one (38–39) of ceaseless becoming, collision, and reaction of opposing forces:
The atoms are placed at the crossroads of pragmatic relationships, but they are also
displaced by the messages that traverse them, in perpetual motion. Each language
partner, when a “move” pertaining to him is made, undergoes a “displacement,” an
alteration of some kind that not only affects him in his capacity as addressee and ref-
erent, but also as sender. These moves necessarily provoke “countermoves” …
Lyotard 1984 [1979]: 16
Seyla Benhabib, in the aforementioned rejoinder to The Postmodern Condition, notes that one
striking feature of Lyotard’s position is “that he no longer distinguishes between power and val-
idity” (Benhabib 1984: 114).We can see why from section 3 above. As Lyotard conceives things,
no proposition –even those claims made in the “games” of scientific research –can ground its
claim to our assent on norms or achievements of a rationality that could precede or transcend
the local “language game” within which they are staked.4 As in traditional, narrative forms of
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knowledge, all claims to our assent draw on particular “rules.” These rules also performatively
stake out the standards according to which their own “validity” can be assessed. In this way, as
we might put it, fact and value collapse in a ubiquitous postmodernist, naturalistic fallacy:
narratives, as we have said, determine criteria of competence and/or illustrate how

they are to be applied. They thus define what has the right to be said and done in
the culture in question, and since they are themselves a part of the culture, they are
legitimated by the simple fact of what they do.
Should two “language games” seemingly take the same object, issue, or domain as their subject,
their claims about this subject are in no way truly “commensurable”: capable of being compared
and evaluated. Instead, they reflect the incommensurable differences between two language
games that Lyotard elsewhere calls a “différend” (Lyotard 1988).
A more traditional philosophical perspective would look to the, at least, partial commen-
surability of competing “discourses” –say, two competing claimants to revealed truth –as the
necessary condition for any kind of peaceable negotiation between them. (Although theo-
logical convictions between two sects may fundamentally differ, for instance, both might share
overlapping ethical values that could be appealed to so as to encourage mutual respect, etc.)
Lyotard and postmodernists more widely venture an opposing perspective. For postmodernism,
it is commensurability itself that is arraigned as deleteriously “violent” or “terroristic.” For by
seeking out any “common ground” to mediate or adjudicate linguistic disputes, we “threaten
to eliminate” all those players who refuse to accept such common ground, but want to sing to
a different tune (63):
Where, after the metanarratives, can legitimacy reside? … Is legitimacy to be found in

consensus obtained through discussion, as Jürgen Habermas thinks? Such consensus
does violence to the heterogeneity of language games…
Lyotard 1984 [1979]: xxiv–v; 65–66, my emphasis
Faced with today’s proliferation of different, specialized, or technical languages, Lyotard mostly
argues that “all we can do” is adopt a kind of second-order stance of openness toward this multi-
verse. Eschewing any dreams of synthetic comprehension, we can only “gaze in wonderment at
the diversity of discursive species, as we do at the diversity of plant or animal species” (26).With
that said, The Postmodern Condition does introduce in its closing section a competing, first-order
basis for epistemic “legitimation” (60). Lyotard labels it “paralogy”:
Postmodern knowledge is not simply a tool of the authorities [sic]; it refines our sen-
sitivity to differences and reinforces our ability to tolerate the incommensurable. Its
principle is not the expert’s homology, but the inventor’s paralogy.
Lyotard 1984 [1979]: xxv
Lyotard’s notion of paralogy involves the deliberately paradoxical, reflective cultivation of dis-
sensus (65–66). Here, recurring to Kuhnian language, he differentiates between “moves” made
within established “paradigms,” and new moves which challenge relatively stable, extant, epi-
stemic consensuses.The kinds of examples of paralogy he has in mind are revolutionary scientific
claims like Copernicus’s reversal of geocentrism, largely ignored during his lifetime: “countless
scientists have seen their ‘move’ ignored or repressed, sometimes for decades, because it too
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abruptly destabilized the accepted positions” (63). We now, however, appreciate how many of
these “paralogical” “moves” were decisive steps forward in the history of the sciences, whose
suppression would have been disastrous. With such considerations in view, Lyotard proposes that
postmodernists actively promote the proliferation of any and all such novel epistemic “moves,”
animated by what the last words of The Postmodern Condition call a “desire for the unknown” (67).
5. Applied postmodern epistemology 2: the case of Pierre Rivière

On June 3, 1835, a 19-year-old peasant named Pierre Rivière murdered his mother, sister,
and brother in la Faucterie in France with a pruning knife (Foucault 1975: 5, 24). When
apprehended, he first feigned insanity, then expressed remorse for the bloodbath. While in cus-
tody, Rivière wrote an extraordinary memoir justifying his crime, appealing to divine authority,
and citing his mother’s long-standing mistreatment of his father. Brought to trial, the twelve
jurors found Rivière guilty. But six found extenuating circumstances. Ten of the jurors then
petitioned the King for clemency that was eventually granted, commuting Rivière’s capital
punishment. Pierre Rivière eventually committed suicide in jail, thereby fulfilling his expressed
wish to atone with his life for his crimes.
Over one hundred years later, in 1973, French philosopher-historian Michel Foucault and
a team of researchers collected and published in a single “dossier” documents produced in the
days, weeks, and months after Rivière’s crime, beginning with the criminal’s own extraordinary
memoir. Foucault’s answer to the question of why he should have become interested in this
obscure case from the legal and medical archives of the early nineteenth century is given in the
author’s important “Foreword.” Foucault’s “Foreword” highlights his deep proximities to the
postmodern epistemological perspective which we have been examining, laid out six years later
by Jean-François Lyotard.This remarkable edited collection I, Pierre Rivière, having slaughtered my
mother, my sister, and my brother … also therefore furnishes us with an excellent example of the
kind of applied epistemological work this perspective has engendered.
Many different approaches to Rivière’s case could be, and have been, taken. Feminist critics,
following the appearance of the 1973 dossier, have highlighted the misogynistic dimensions
to Rivière’s crime, and the gendered power-differentials encoded in nineteenth-century
French civil law. Different psychoanalytic, sociological, or criminological perspectives suggest
themselves on the basis of Rivière’s memoirs, as well as the townfolks’ recollections of his
childhood and adolescence. Nevertheless, Foucault eschews these kinds of approaches, which
each claim a privileged access to some posited, decisive or deepest Truth of the Rivière case:
As to Rivière’s discourse, we decided not to interpret it and subject it to any psychi-

atric or psychoanalytic commentary. In the first place because it was what we used
as the zero benchmark to gauge the distance between the other discourses and the
relations arising among them. Secondly, because we could hardly speak of it without
involving it in one of the discourses (medical, legal, psychological, criminological)
which we wished to use as our starting point in talking about it. If we had done so, we
should have brought it within the power relation whose reductive effects we wished
to show, and we ourselves should have fallen into the trap it set.
Foucault 1975: xiii
Secondly, and again as in Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, this plurality of “discourses” about
Rivière and his actions –judicial, medical, in the newspapers, the testimony of townsfolk, from
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psychiatrists and doctors –is depicted by Foucault as not simply of epistemic significance. It is

also a matter of power, and of relations of force between the protagonists of different language
games. If Rivière’s case has such interest for Foucault, it is insofar as it is the site of “a battle
among discourses and through discourses,” in language which might recall Lyotard (Foucault
1975: x). Unbeknownst to the hapless young man, his case came to the attention of the French
criminal justice system at a decisive moment in its modern evolution, when “the debate on the
use of psychiatric concepts in criminal justice” was being heatedly disputed. What would the
emergence of new “human sciences” like psychiatry mean for criminal justice? What might
now count as salient evidence –for instance, childhood behaviors, adolescent misdemeanors,
psychological peculiarities –in assessing the motives of a suspect, and thus shaping society’s
judgment of criminals and crimes? Should concepts like “monomania,” implying a diminished
culpability, be ruled out of court, or would they (as it were) rule out older notions of criminal
responsibility altogether?
Through no intention of his own, Pierre Rivière and his memoirs became “an event that
provided the intersection of discourses that differed in origin, form, organization, and function”
(Foucault 1975: x). Indeed, his biography, crime, and memoirs became the stake of a veritable
“epistemologico-political” battle among representatives of the incommensurable medical, legal,
and psychiatric discourses, all bidding to have the final legislative word:
several separate combats were being fought out at the same time and intersected each
other: the doctors were engaged in a combat, among themselves, with the judges
and prosecution, and with Riviere himself (who had trapped them by saying that he
had feigned madness); the crown lawyers had their own separate combat as regards
the testimony of the medical experts, the comparatively novel use of extenuating
circumstances, and a range of cases of parricide that had been coupled with regicide
(Fieschi and Louis-Philippe stand in the wings); the villagers of Aunay had their own
combat to diffuse the terror of a crime committed in their midst and to “preserve
the honour of a family” by ascribing the crime to bizarre behaviour or singularity;
and, lastly, at the very centre, there was Pierre Rivière, with his innumerable and
complicated engines of war; his crime, made to be written and talked about and
thereby to secure him glory in death, his narrative, prepared in advance and for the
purpose of leading on to the crime, his oral explanations to obtain credence for his
madness, his text, written to dispel this lie, to explain, and to summon death, a text
in whose beauty some were to see as a proof of rationality (and hence grounds for
condemning him to death) and others a sign of madness (and hence grounds for
shutting him up for life).
Foucault 1975: x–xi
In the words of one commentator, Foucault’s presentation of the dossier without “siding”
with any one first-order discourse about Rivière is clearly meant to “show the impossibility
of understanding the events of 1835 from any one, neutral perspective or as a phenomenon
with one single meaning” (Downing 2008: 71). As in Lyotard’s postmodernism, we are instead
invited to document and accept –if not “gaze in wonderment” (26) –at the irreducible plur-
ality of perspectives called into being to try to describe this one nineteenth-century event. And
we are enjoined both not to take sides in the first-order debates between would-be scientific
discourses –as psychoanalytic, Marxist, or feminist authors have continued to do –and also to
be on our guards against the alleged epistemic “violence” of any such desire.
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6. Concluding remarks

“Postmodernism” came into the world a contested term, and it remains so to this day. Critics
of different stripes have noted that its celebration of “local narratives” turns upon a grand-scale
philosophical history with profound debts to reactionary cultural pessimism (Friedrich 2012).
Its relativism has been widely arraigned for leading to crippling performative contradictions
(Habermas 1987). Critics on the Left led by Habermas (1987), Eagleton (1996), Callinacos
(1991) and Norris (1990, 1993) argue that it embodies a pseudo-radical epistemological and
political position that, while presenting itself as “not simply a tool of the authorities” (xxv), robs
us of the cognitive and normative tools to oppose existing forms of socio-political oppression.
If there is no overarching perspective available on the social order, but only petits récits (60),
then oppressed or “othered” groups can develop no external perspective in order to understand
the structural or other causes of their marginalization. If there is no context-or discourse-
transcendent truth, the elementary philosophical distinction between knowledge and opinion
collapses. With it goes the capacity to do anything more than tell competing stories about the
world in which we live. Fact collapses into value, and the only thing “justifying” any given way
of understanding the world is the fact that it happens to presently command some group’s or
groups’ assent. But this is tantamount to completely politicizing or polemicizing epistemology,
since different groups and narratives can find no bases to peaceably adjudicate epistemic, nor-
mative, or other validity-claims. While the rhetoric of war and battle to describe epistemic
debates is superficially liberating, it is troublingly conversant with the most cynical politicization
of any and all attempts to generate more adequate understandings of the world –as “culture
warriors” continuing attempts to paint climate science as a global left-wing conspiracy illustrate.
Critical realists led by Roy Bhaskar have argued that postmodern epistemological skepticism
uncritically rests upon an “epistemic fallacy”: inferring from the true insight that our epistemic
access to the world is mediated by culturally generated discourses to the false conclusion that
all we can meaningfully know or talk about are such “discourses” (Bhaskar 2010). Right-wing
critics have argued that the postmodern celebration of cultural plurality collapses into a hyper-
“liberal” relativism inconsistent with social reproduction, and corrosive of communities’ sense
of their own epistemic and ethical credentials.
Notes
1 From here on, all numbers within parentheses in the text refer to pages within Lyotard (1984).
2 Christopher Norris, probably the most prolific critic of postmodernist epistemology, adds to this
genealogy of postmodernism the post-Kuhnian turn in the philosophy of science (Norris 1985, 1990,
1993). This is a turn which, as in Lyotard’s text (63), has been widely read as disclosing radical revolu-
tionary breaks in the history of science: breaks which speak against the ‘modernist’ notion of cumulative
epistemic progress.
3 Today’s increasingly ubiquitous grant applications are exactly documents wherein intellectuals “legit-
imize” our research in terms of categories accepted by the grant providers: whether these be govern-
mental, as in Lyotard’s report, or private.
4 But see Lyotard (1984: 62, 64–65) where he significantly qualifies his criticism of science, seeing in its
commitment to falsifiability and, in principle, openness to new claims (“revisable consensus”), the basis
for postmodern paralogy.
References
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331
332
INDEX
abolition 109–10; comprehensive 111; democracy advertisers 49, 122

109, 112; prison 111; of slavery 109, 112 affiliations 48, 238–39; institutional 48; political
abortion rights 91, 96 239; religious 238
absence 4, 18, 21, 23, 35, 78, 83, 162, 167, 207, age 104, 145, 243, 273; digital 37; early 119, 219
217, 260–61, 273, 290; of censorship 78; of agencies 103, 106, 111, 159, 161, 163, 203–6;
conspiracies 290; of foreknowledge 207 authorial 102, 110; buffer 161; chained
abuse 110, 148; long-term 30; spousal 186 106; constrained 110; independent testing
accuracy 30–31, 55, 60, 107, 124, 198, 202, 155, 160–61; new 160; official 290; private
204, 221, 243, 248, 262, 325; of impeding intelligence 60; regulatory 160–61, 163–64,
prediction’s 248; predictive 251; strict 251 196; of women 103, 105
Acemoglu, D. 95 agendas 71, 80, 96, 104; political 97; schematic 72;
Achen, C. 89, 94 traditional 4
Acker, M. 168 agents 19, 108, 198, 201, 235, 237, 239, 249,
ACP Journal Club 145 256, 274–76, 285; collective doxastic 17, 275;
acquisition, of knowledge 55–56, 101, 108, 115, epistemically responsible 19; extended 19;
200, 212, 278 human 18–19, 21–22; individual 17, 22–23,
activities 3, 8–9, 55, 74, 89, 115, 138, 162, 198, 203, 89; interacting cognitive 22; technologically
205, 285, 288, 323–24; general 272; particular extended 19
199, 311; secret 288; significant 247; voluntary 75 agnosticism 290
actors 22, 34, 46–48, 89, 97–98, 145–46, 167–69, agnotologists 137–38
199, 201, 234, 236–39, 243, 261–63, 265–66; “agnotology” 134
bad 30, 34; multiple 167–68; public 157 agonistics 319, 326
Acts and Regulations: Credit Rating Agency Reform Ahteensu, M. 155
Act 2006 202–4, 206; Dodd–Frank Act 204–6; Ainslie, G. 256
Securities and Exchange Act 1934 203 air quality 155
adaptive preferences 254–55 Alcoff, Linda 35–36, 101, 105, 240
Adkins, K. C. 259 alcohol consumption 75, 189
Adler, Jonathan 213, 215–16, 224 Alexander, Janet 55, 57
adolescence 328–29 Alexander, Michelle 111
adults 81, 211, 216–18, 222, 227, 310, 312, 314 Allen, Paula Gunn 103
adversarial epistemology 54–59, 61, 63–65; Allport, Gordon 260–65
Cartesian lesson in 56; examples of 56; Humean AllTrials group 148
lesson in 58; proceedings 154–55, 158–60, 164; Almassi, B. 132, 134
work by Descartes and Hume in 64 Althaus, Scott 91–92, 94–95
adversaries 54–55, 57–64; epistemic 54–59, 61, 64; American 91–92, 94, 285, 290; government
motivated 61; mundane 56–57; real-life 57; and agencies 170; hostages 170; inner-city
the use of force 54 communities 170; National Elections 91;
332
333
Index
pragmatist philosophy 9; public attitudes 238; conspiracy theories 167, 169; controversial 303;
ships 125; voters 91 coverage-related 281; current 242; derived 133;
analysis 6–7, 15, 17, 21, 46–47, 101, 105–6, dispositional 18; ethical 309, 313–14; expert
109–10, 112, 159, 200, 276, 279, 281; of gossip philosophical 302; false 56, 169–70, 182, 303;
281; of knowledge 6; of prison abolition 109; of formation of 44–45, 47, 51, 268; inaccurate
racist institutions 112; of testimony 276 93; individual testimony-based 268; justified
analytic epistemology 3–4, 6, 9–10 11, 197, 215, 243, 303; non-deliberative 198;
analytic ethics 3 pathological 287; personal 20; political 136, 166;
analytic movement 9–10 religious 6; sensitive 185, 187–88; sensitivity of
analytic philosophy 4, 9, 222 185–86, 190; spontaneous 118–19; testimonial
Anarchists’ Cookbook 82 265; testimony-based 265; unjustified 303–4;
Andersen, H. 151 well-founded  197
Anderson, E. 132 Benhabib, Seyla 321, 326
Angell, M. 155, 159, 162 Bertolotti, Tommaso 5, 259, 272–81
Anglicanism 242 “best epistemic practices” 196–99, 201–2, 205–7
Anglophone, feminist epistemology 101–2 Betz, G. 131, 136
anthropogenic climate change 45, 131, Bhaskar, Roy 330
136–37, 290 biases 31, 34–37, 46–47, 92, 117, 121–22, 126, 145,
anti-reductionists  44, 46 148, 159, 161, 199, 239, 241; confirmation 15,
anti-rumor campaigns  267 17, 92; systemic 35; unconscious 35
anti-violence campaigns  111 Bible 7–8, 213
Anzaldúa, Gloria E. 103 Biddle, J. 132, 134, 139, 154, 158–59
applied epistemologists 7, 11, 28–29, 31–32, 34, 37, Bierria, Alisa 110
41, 51, 216–17, 292–93 bioethics 3, 111
applied epistemology 3–11, 15, 18, 20, 28, 34–37, biomedical innovations 155, 162–64
101–3, 211, 213, 216–17, 222–23, 227, 240, biomedical research 162–63
318–30; of disagreement 234–35, 240–43; biomedicine 162–63
in early modern philosophy 5; of education Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness,
211–21, 223, 225, 227; of science 37; and social and the Politics of Empowerment 104
epistemology 5 black women 102, 104, 111
applied philosophers 5, 11, 71, 106 blogosphere 15, 56, 124
Arar, Maher 126 blogs 43, 45–46, 48
arguments 71–73, 77–79, 81–82, 93, 97–98, Blome-Tillmann, M. 183, 187
133–36, 138–39, 145–46, 170–71, 221–23, Bluhm, Robyn 142–52
225–26, 242, 266–67, 269; moral 309; negative body language 59
82–83; schematic 71, 77–78 Bonaparte, Napoleon 119
Arnauld, Antoine 7 Bordia, P. 264, 267, 270
Aumann, Robert 239 Borgerson, Kirstin 142–52
autism 157 Bratich, Jack Z. 286
Ayim, Maryann 274, 278–79 Brink, David 80
British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) 115, 131
Backer, Alice 34, 36 Brotherton, R. 171–72
Bacon, Francis 7, 248, 325 Brunswik, Egon 247
Baehr, J. 21, 224, 226–27 burden of proof 179–83, 186–90, 287
banks 61–62, 197, 199–202, 204, 206–7, 314 burdens of proof 10, 179–81, 183, 185, 187,
Bartels, L. 89, 94 189, 191
base rates 182 Burge, T.  44, 46
Basham, Lee 286–88, 291 business ethics 3, 5
Battaly, H. 224–25 business news websites 55
Baudrillard, Jean 318
BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) 115, 131 Caesar, Julius 168, 285
belief formation 22, 126, 196, 198, 215 campaigns 111, 163, 267, 285; anti-rumor 267;
“belief in conspiracy theories” 169, 286–87, anti-violence  111
289, 291–92 candidates 19, 90, 93, 120, 182, 190, 257, 311;
beliefs 50–51, 115–16, 134–35, 166–70, 172–73, available 184; congressional 91; political 270;
185–88, 190, 196–98, 233–36, 263–65, 268–70, potential 182; with voter appeal 120
285–88, 298–300, 303–4; conspiracist 171; in capitalism 91, 104, 112, 116, 319
333
334
Index
Caplan, Bryan 92, 94–95 Coady, C.A. J. 124, 268, 275, 312

Caplow, Theodore  267 Coady, David 3, 3–11, 15, 32, 52, 56, 58, 60, 66,
carceral medicine 111 124–25, 132, 166, 166–73, 266, 268, 272, 275,
cases 44–49, 73, 82–83, 93, 146, 154–60, 180–83, 286, 292
186–89, 234–42, 250, 268–69, 286–89, 313, Code, Lorraine 103
328–29; applied 235, 238–39; civil 179, 185; cognition 18, 20, 51; cultural 135, 137; extended
core 239, 241; individual 240; particular 151, 18–19; and knowledge 20; social 243
235, 240, 243, 289, 305; personal-context 186; Cohen, Joshua 35, 83, 88, 180
standard 132; test 7, 248 Cold War 255, 257
Chalmers, David 18–19, 50, 302 collective doxastic agents 17, 275
Chase, James 3–11 Collins, John A. 110
children 74, 77, 82, 90, 118, 170, 211, 213–23, Collins, Louise 276
226, 278, 310, 312, 314; educating 218; Collins, Patricia Hill 104, 220, 250, 278
indoctrinating 213; non-expert  310 Colmez, C. 183
Chomsky, Noam 124 Colvin, Claudette 106
Christensen, David 235–36 communications 58, 61–62, 79–80, 115, 253–54,
Christianity Not Mysterious 7 259, 261–63, 268, 272–73, 326; defective 115;
Churchill, Winston  95 face-to-face 55, 59; informal 259, 267
Cicero 118 community 32–36, 45, 49, 71, 74, 77–78, 133,
Cisneros, Natalie 110 137–38, 201, 259–60, 262, 265–66, 268, 278–79;
‘citogenesis’ 31 climate-science 131, 138; forums 45; members
civil disobedience 80, 106 28–29; scientific 135, 137, 325
civil liberties 96 companies 41, 49, 149, 160, 199–200, 270,
claims 16–19, 31, 58–60, 72–73, 76–79, 89–91, 285; for-profit 159; insurance 159, 202, 249;
104–8, 131–38, 266, 287–92, 297–302, 319–21, pharmaceutical 158–62, 170
323–24, 326–28; accurate 29; advanced 300; computer scientists 16
advertised 49; causal 151–52; of climate science computer systems 64, 145
134, 137; conditional 301–2; of conspiracy 287; Condorcet’s Jury Theorem  29, 93
disputed 181–82, 324; email 55; epistemological consensus 29, 34, 92, 131–33, 135, 137–38, 239,
6, 142; factual 117, 132, 135–36; to knowledge 292, 301, 322, 324, 326–27; on climate change
105, 121, 301; normative 107, 135, 322; 132–33, 238–39, 324; medical 170
philosophical 301–5; positive 134, 138; putative conspiracies 117, 125, 167–73, 284–92
288; quasi-historical 322; scientific 121, 135–37, conspiracist 166–67, 170–73, 286–87; beliefs 171;
216, 323–24, 327; substantive 299; theoretical ideation 172–73
136; true 32, 136, 233 conspiracy theories 11, 124–25, 166–73, 260,
Clark, Andy 18–20, 50, 247, 253 284–93; anti-vaccination 170–71; belief in 169,
climate change 10, 131–37, 239; anthropogenic 286–87, 289, 291–92; contradictory 125; and
45, 131, 136–37, 290; debate 132; denial David Coady’s rejection of the phrase 125;
community 234; expertise in 217; non-belief defined 285; epistemology of 260, 284–85,
137, 139; research 131, 138 287, 289, 291, 293; evaluating particular 287;
climate experts 132, 134 particular 168, 286, 288; reputation of 169;
climate science 131, 133–39; attacks on 135; skeptics 287, 291; well-documented  169
claims of 134, 137; close studies of 136; conspiracy theorists 125, 166–67, 171, 173, 284,
expertise in 133, 135, 137, 139; institutions of 286–90, 292
138; mainstream 132; political commitments controlled trials (randomized) 143–46, 150–52
and belief in 135; serial exaggeration in 134; Cooper, Anna Julia 21, 102
sociology of 134; trust in 139 corporations 121–22, 162, 198–99, 201, 249; with
climate scientists 131–34, 136–38, 233 multiple aims 198; pharmaceutical 159
climate skeptics 132–34, 137–38 Corry, Richard 132
clinical practices 142, 145–47, 150–51 “coverage reliability” 268–69
clinical research 111, 144–45, 147–48, 154; in Cowley, Christopher 307–15
clinical practice 147; contemporary 150 credit 37, 126, 198, 201–3, 205–6, 268; analysis
clinical trials 143–44, 147–48, 151, 154–55, 199–200; judgment 200
159–60; “all past and present” (AllTrials credit approval process 199–201
group) 148; industry-funded 154; results of Credit Rating Agency Reform Act 2006 202–4, 206
145–46, 151 crime 91, 179–81, 184–89, 328–29
clinicians 111, 142–47, 150–51 crime rates 94
334
335
Index
criminal justice systems 179 disagreement 72–73, 90, 131, 201, 205, 222, 233–43,
criminal law 179 297, 301–2, 308; applied epistemology of 234–35,
criminal trials 179 240–43; contexts of 234, 236, 239–40, 242–43;
Crisp, Roger 78 to display epistemic significance 240; factual 131;
critical thinking 3, 7, 148, 221–23, 225–27, 298; faultless 240; informative 243; in philosophy 302;
children in 223; component of 225–26; exact reasonable 91; truth-conducive  243
nature of 222–23; skills 224, 243; true education Discourse on Method 7
in 223; work on 225 DNA evidence 180–81, 183
Crow, Jim 111 doctors 7, 151, 217, 220, 307–8, 311–12, 315, 329
cryptographic key 62–63 Dodd–Frank Act 204–6
cryptography 62–63 Donnellan, K. 184–85
cultural cognition 135, 137 Dotson, Kristie 101, 103, 108
culture 73–74, 80, 104–5, 166, 171, 197, 223, 248, Doucet, M. 154, 158
255, 309, 322, 327; dominant 105; human 218; Douglas, Heather 110, 136, 168, 170–71
political 293; professional ethics 30; strong risk Douglas, Karen 286
197; traditional 322; the transmission of 218; doxastic systems 22
white mainstream 106 drones 241
Cuonzo, Margaret A. 280 drug problems 117
Curry, Mary 197 drug-testing agencies  161
Curry, Thomas  J.  197 drugs 144, 146, 150, 154–55, 158–63, 170
Dummett, Michael 4, 9
Dadge, David 125 Dunbar, R. I. M. 274–75, 277
DARPA see Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency Eagly, Alice 262
Davis, Angela Y. 103–4, 109, 111–12 EBM see evidence based medicine 142–52
de Beauvoir, Simone 102 Ecker, U. K. H. 270
de Condorcet, M. 93–94 economics 89, 92, 94
de Laat, P. B. 32–34 education 10, 72, 74–78, 81–83, 211–19, 221–27,
de Melo-Martín, I. 134 243, 311; for analytic philosophers 211; applied
De Motu 6 epistemology of 211, 213, 215, 217–19, 221,
death 125, 144, 315, 329; camps 126; consequences 223, 225, 227; epistemic concept of 212; formal
of 116; social 111 75, 77; informal 78, 218; liberal 216, 219;
decisions 23, 90, 97, 144, 147, 151, 155–56, 159, philosophy of 213, 216, 219, 221; provision of
162, 164, 198–201, 204, 308–9, 312; correct 88, 75; university 311
95; ethical 312–13; regulatory 160–61 education system 211, 217–18, 220, 224–25
defense 7, 72–73, 78–79, 82–83, 123, 166, 301; of educational institutions 109, 120, 211, 217–18;
conspiracy theories 166; negative 74; positive exact 218; formal 217; shaping both the content
74–75, 82 and the character of people’s thinking 211
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency 257 Edwards, Paul 97, 136
Deleuze, Gilles 318 elections 92, 96–97, 120, 170, 242, 247, 251
democracies 10, 81, 88–91, 93–98, 126, 217–18, 290; electronic documents 64
liberal 119, 226; modern 96–97; real-life  93, 95 Elgin, Catherine 213
Democracy and Education 10 Elliott, Kevin 155, 160
democratic governments 89, 217–18 Ellul, Jacques 120, 123
democratic politics 95 emails 54–58, 60–62, 64
democratic systems 97–98, 217–18 empirical studies 19, 34, 55, 59, 144, 261; earliest
Democrats 96, 98, 131, 135, 139 systematic 260; multiple 95; of rumors in crisis
Dentith, M R. X. 10, 260, 284–93 situations 261
Derrida, Jacques 318 Encyclopedia Britannica 29, 32
Descartes 4, 7, 54, 56–57, 64, 325 endorsement 23–24, 299; aggregated 24; individual
design systems 159 24; of sources 23
Dewey, John 10, 218 Ennis, R. 222–24
DiCenso, A. 144–45 Enoch, D. 185–88, 190
DiFonzo, N. 262, 267, 270 Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding 6
digital age 37 environment 24, 76, 134, 155–56, 161, 169, 212–13,
digital signatures 63–64 256, 292
Dilts, Andrew 110 EoD see epistemology of disagreement
335
336
Index
epidemio-logical methods  143 epistemology 3–11, 103–4, 107, 115–18, 120, 122,
epidemiological studies 146, 150–51 151, 211–12, 214, 216, 221–22, 224, 297–99,
Episteme 115, 321 302; academic discourses of 103; contemporary
epistemic 197; aims 196–98, 201; analysis 29; 9, 15, 23; of disagreement 234–37, 239–43;
asymmetries 238–39, 241; capabilities 25; and ethics 117; of gossip and testimony 281;
comfort zones 252; communities 37, 204; traditional 3–4; of Wikipedia  28, 32
concepts 4, 212; conclusions 9; conduct 242–43; epistocrats 98
costs 58; democracy 88–98; democrats 88–91, Erhart, E. 30
95–96, 98; dependence 268, 275; design 242–43; errors 30–32, 35, 56, 89, 92, 94–95, 104, 123,
economy 217–18; effects 16–18; feelings 19–20; 133–34, 136, 188–91, 239, 243, 256; basic
function 73, 218, 227, 247–48; interests 16, 19, 291; computational 199, 201; detection of
22, 49, 199; justifications 107; mistakes 303–4; 35; in epistemic judgment 104; fundamental
nature of gossip 276; oppression 105, 108, 111; attribution 249; laboratory 189; public 268;
outcomes of gossip 28, 56–57, 274–75; peers 235, systemic 250; typographical 59
237–39, 276–77; principles 5, 44; problems 4, Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision 6
34–35, 44, 48–49; properties 22, 242–43; essays 3, 6, 89, 105, 110–11, 158, 268, 274,
resources 25, 112; responsibilities 16, 51, 191; 298, 302; Of Miracles 6; Ontological Relativity
risks 22; situations 269, 290; states 184, 243; and Other Essays 3; Philosophical Essay on
superiority 323–24; support 185, 188–90; Probabilities 7
symmetry 238–39; synergy 275; values 5, 30, 105, establishing identity online 57–58, 61–64
119, 136, 186, 188, 197–98, 226 Estlund, David 29, 88, 90
epistemic adversaries 54–59, 61, 64; detecting 58; ethical 3–5, 8–9, 11, 116, 131, 134, 148, 151, 196,
identifying 56, 59; online 55–56, 59; real-life  58 307–15, 320, 322, 327, 330; belief acquisition
epistemic agents 4, 219–20, 248, 275, 278, 309; expertise 307, 307–15; experts 307, 309–13;
280, 288; attributing credibility 108; matters 3, 308; positions 134, 312; practices 3, 310;
collective 275; individual 17, 201, 227, 275; problems 310; testimony 307, 312–13; theory
less-than-virtuous  201 11, 310
epistemic injustice 24, 101, 103, 105–9, 111, ethicists 3, 51, 309
120, 122; and applied methods of feminist ethics 4–5, 11, 107, 116, 126, 151, 196, 215, 222,
epistemology 109; Fricker’s work on 107, 122; 269, 308, 310–11, 314; and the connection with
literature on 101, 105–7, 109; remedying 122; epistemology 117; consultants 309, 311–12;
study of 101; theorists of 108 devoid of sound epistemic foundations 116; and
epistemic institutions 10–11, 211, 217–19, 221, the politics of rumor 269; and the separation
227; particular 218–19, 221; in society 217, from science 116
219, 221 Ethics 7
epistemic logic 9 eudaimonistic justification for teaching intellectual
epistemic practices 17, 49, 156, 197–201, 207; virtue (Siegel) 226
black feminist 104; distributed 22; industry- euthanasia 257, 311
wide best 204 Evans, R. 220
epistemic significance 34, 240–41, 268, 329; evidence 35–36, 115–18, 121–26, 132–33, 136–38,
disagreement’s 235, 240; of rumors 268 144–51, 180–91, 213–16, 233–37, 239–42,
epistemic systems 28, 217, 275, 277; haphazard 260–62, 266, 286–87, 298–300; admissible
290; soft-assembled  280 187; anecdotal 34; backward-looking causal
epistemic virtue 17, 32, 200–201, 211, 287; 182; base rate 180, 182; clear and convincing
developing 243; primary 32; responsibilist 201; 179–80; compelling 148, 185; corroborating
social 201 290; demographic 189–90; DNA 180–81, 183;
epistemological 15, 17, 19, 105, 109, 273; attention empirical 94, 276; eyewitness 181, 190;
15–17; claims of EBM 142; principles 117, 120; first-hand 260–61, 274; forward-looking 182;
problems 9, 64, 108; works 4–6, 8–9, 111 good 83, 89, 139, 288, 299; hierarchy of 143–45,
epistemological significance 234, 239; of 147–48, 150; inadequacy of statistical 185, 187;
disagreement 236–37; and interest of particular independent 260; individualized 181–86, 188,
cases of disagreement 235 190–91; legal 184, 186–87; newspaper 182;
epistemologists 15–16, 18–19, 30, 56, 101, 106, 117, non-causal 183–84; positive 44, 298; provocative
121–22, 127, 152, 188, 297, 299, 301; applied 7, 233; psychological 118; statistical 179–83,
11, 28–29, 31–32, 34, 37, 41, 51, 216–17, 292–93; 185–90, 217; strong 93, 97, 133; testimonial 119
expert 299; feminist 35, 103, 108, 111–12; evidence-based medicine 142–51, 217
individual American 9; social 5, 43, 46, 106, 137 evidential demands 45–46
336
337
Index
evidential sources 44, 274 Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission 205–6

exchange 72–74, 80–82, 199, 220, 272, financial institutions 197, 201, 205–6
277; constructive 73; informational 280; financial services industry 196–200, 207
off a gossiping 276; resuming gossiping financial statements 199–200
information 280 Fine, Gary 260
existence 57, 104, 112, 118, 170, 183, 262, 277, First World War  9
288, 291, 298, 301–2, 309, 314; of conspiracies Fisher, M. 19–20, 185–86
287, 291; of ethical expertise and testimony Foldit system 21
310, 314 Food and Drug Administration 154, 158–61
experience 7, 20, 45, 75, 101–2, 142–43, 146, 199, Ford, Henry 256
255, 262, 272, 279–80, 311, 314–15; clinical forecasting 11, 247–57; art and science of 250;
142, 144, 147; of gossip 272; personal 45, 314; orientations of 248
subjective 19–20; tradition-cum-personal  250 forums 43, 46–48; community 45; deliberative 98;
expert testimony 45, 276 egalitarian 81; particular 49; public 320
expertise 30, 48, 120–21, 131–32, 137–39, 196, Foucault, Michel 110, 318–19, 328–29
220, 252–53, 297–98, 300, 302, 304, 307–12, Fowler, B. 55, 60
314–15; interactive 220; and philosophical Frances, Bryan 95, 253, 297–305, 328
progress 304; in philosophy 298, 302, 304; Franco-Prussian War  253
procedural 311–12; relevant 199, 300–301; Freddie Mac 202
special 199–200; subject matter 220; and free speech 5, 71–77, 79–83; arguments for 73;
wisdom 314 discursive value of 74; positive defense of 75
experts 29–32, 43–44, 48–49, 131–39, 199–200, Freedom as Marronage 110
220–21, 252–53, 289–90, 297–300, 302–5, 307–8, Frické, M. 55, 59
310–12, 314, 324; climate 132, 134; cognitive Fricker, Miranda 24, 44, 46, 101, 107, 116, 120,
139; community of 200, 325; ethical 307, 122, 173, 243, 276
309–13; groups of 89, 132; performative 311; in Frost-Arnold, Karen 4, 28, 28–37, 56, 58
philosophy 300, 311; purported 48; putative 132, Fuller, Steve 247–57
312; relevant community of 49, 300; true 132,
134–35, 137–39 Gans, Herbert J. 122
explanations 132–33, 137, 150, 154, 169, 171–72, Gardiner, Georgi 10, 131, 179–91
184, 186–87, 189–90, 197–99, 237–38, 240, Garton-Ash, Timothy  79
272, 279–81; best 8, 133; complicated 48; gas attack allegations 117
conspiratorial 171–72, 292; demands for 189–90 gatecrashers 180, 182–83, 186
eyewitness reports 181 Gelfert, Axel 5, 259–70, 273
Gelman, A. 92
Facebook 15, 43 gender 101, 103, 105–6, 109, 116, 243, 318
Facione, P. 222, 224 Gilens, Martin 92, 94–96
factual knowledge 300, 302 global financial crisis 5, 196–97, 199, 201–3, 205–7
Faden, Ruth 150 Gluckman, Max 273–75
Fallis, Don 15, 28–32, 54–65 Goertzel, Ted 169–70, 172
falsehoods 139, 267–68, 278, 304–5 Goldberg, Bob 51, 179, 220–21, 268, 281
falsity 169, 182, 276, 325 Goldberg, Sandy 50, 268
Fannie Mae 202 Goldman, Alvin 15, 17, 22, 28, 32, 35, 48, 56, 59,
fascists 80, 116 117, 124, 215, 217, 274–75
FCIC see Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission Good Gossip 274, 276, 278
FDA see Food and Drug Administration Goodin, Robert 88
Federal Reserve 206–7 Goodman, S. N. 259, 274
Feldman, R. 56, 236–37 Google 4, 18, 41, 43–51
feminist 35, 115, 122, 276, 328–29; epistemology Google Search 15, 23
29, 101–11, 115, 122; philosophy 101–2; science googling 41–51; directs us towards sources 44, 46,
studies 35; standpoint theory 103; theories of 49; epistemic vulnerabilities 43; for information
knowledge 104 47; of particular interest 43; possible sources 43;
feminist epistemologists 35, 103, 108, 111–12; results 46; trusting in 43; and verbal testimony
contemporary 103; and theorists of epistemic 44; works 51
injustice 108 Gordon, Jill 148
films 36, 47, 120 gossip 5, 259–61, 269, 272–81; defined 259;
financial crisis 5, 196–97, 199, 201–3, 205–7 diffusion of 277; by group members 276;
337
338
Index
by individuals 275; and inquiry 274, 277; local industry 154, 158–59, 161–62, 199–200, 203;
272; malicious 276; and rumor 259–60, 269, pharmaceutical 148, 154, 159, 161–63; regulated
272; studies 273–74; and testimony 275–76, 281 159, 161; reports 200
gossipers 260, 274, 278–81 information 15–17, 19–20, 23, 41–43, 46–50, 54–58,
gossiping 275, 279–81 63–64, 92–93, 123–27, 199–201, 203–4, 260–70,
Gottschalk, Marie 110 280–81, 319–21; accurate 56–58; disseminating
government 5, 60, 74, 83, 88, 90–91, 95, 97–98, of 57–58; external 19; medical 29, 161; new 16,
119, 121, 125, 163, 172–73, 291–92; agencies 49, 92, 310; political 91–92; privileged 260, 268;
158, 160, 163, 173; departments 121 relevant 15, 235; reliability of 22, 263, 265–66;
Graells-Garrido,  E.  35 sciences 3; social 260, 274; sources of 16, 23, 49,
Grasswick, Heidi 116 56, 264–65, 270; task-relevant 16; testimonial 23;
Greenhalgh, Trisha  149 in Wikipedia 29, 31, 35
Grice, H. P. 280 inquiry 7, 9, 41–45, 47, 50–51, 126–27, 198, 200,
groups 93, 102, 116, 118, 132–33, 145–46, 168–69, 233, 240, 274–75, 277–79, 321, 325; informative
219, 241, 259–60, 273–77, 279–80, 303–4, 330; 169; truth-independent  169
disfavored 116, 118, 122; identifiable 116 institutions 60, 80–81, 95, 98, 107, 109, 119, 138,
guarantees 31, 60, 145–46, 181–85, 190–91, 207, 202, 211, 217–19, 249–50, 291–92, 312; new
311, 315, 325; and causal relations 181; of guilt 109; scientific 134, 320
184–85; and individualized evidence 184 intellectual property 162–64, 320; for biomedical
The Guardian 148 innovations 162–64; in biomedicine 162–63;
Gunn, Hanna Kiri 4, 41–51 protections 162; regimes 162; rights 155, 162–63
Gutmann, J. 218 intellectual virtues 107, 221, 224–27, 251
Guyatt, G. H. 143–44, 148 interests 15, 18–21, 29–30, 73–74, 82–83, 120–26,
132, 151–52, 161–63, 198–201, 203–6, 218,
Habermas, J. 90, 330 222–24, 234–35; educational 217; financial 163;
hackers 60, 64 non-epistemic 134; permanent 72, 82; personal
Halliday, Daniel 5, 71–84 97, 200; of preserving positive epistemic
Hancock, J. T. 55, 57, 59 standing 19; professional 124, 161; vested 48,
health 117, 146, 150–51, 155–57, 159, 163; human 134, 139
155–56; research 155, 157–58, 160–61 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
health care systems 109, 111, 150, 155, 217 131–33, 136–37, 233
Heidegger, Martin 321, 323 interlocutors 236, 238–39, 241, 260–61, 263–64,
Hirst, Paul 216, 219, 221 266–68; chains of 263–64; reliability of 266; uses
Hofstadter, Richard 284, 286 of 326; well-positioned  264
The Hong-Page Theorem  93–95 international law 241
hopeful trust 32–33; approach to 34; attitude of Internet 20, 28, 33, 41–43, 45–49, 51, 54–57,
33–34; openness of 34 59–61, 63–65, 79, 83, 123–24, 148, 257; access
How Propaganda Works 118–19 42; epistemology literature 56, 62; and instant
Howick, Jeremy 150–51 communications 117; platforms 10; searches 42;
Hubbard, T. 155, 162–63 sites 124; sources 49, 56; trolls 46
Hume, David 3–4, 6–7, 44, 54, 58–60, 64 IPCC see Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Husserl, Edmund 117 Change
Iraq War 121, 125, 254
identity online, establishing 57–58, 61–64
ideology 115–27, 234; flawed 118, 120; Jakee, K. 93–94
and propaganda 115–27; and scientific James, Joy 111
understanding 234 James, William  55
Imarisha, W.  112 John, Stephen 131–39
indicators 24, 55–56, 58–60, 64, 201; explicit 24; Jolly, D. 168, 170–71
implicit 24; robust 60 Jones, Ward 183–84, 187, 191, 269, 273
individuality 71–72, 75–76, 78, 83; enduring journalism 117, 121–23
conformism and intolerance of 78; free journalistic studies 122
development of 74, 76; value of 71–72 journalists 55, 119, 121, 123, 217, 292
individualized evidence 181–86, 188, 190–91; journals 3–4, 120, 239; Philosophy and Public
backward-looking 181; forward-looking 181; Affairs 3
the friend of 185; and guarantees of 184; of guilt judgments 23–24, 36, 184–86, 188–89, 196,
181–82; incriminating 188; value of 181 198–200, 203–4, 238, 252–53, 287–88, 299,
338
339
Index
304, 311, 313; accurate 197; good 196, 199, learning skills 212
201, 206–7; suspending of 299 legal burdens of proof 10, 179–81, 183, 185, 187,
juries 102, 185 189, 191
justice 90, 108, 182, 186, 190, 248, 322; criminal Lemnitzer, Lyman 125
91, 329; deontological theory of 90 letters 80, 119, 166–67, 169, 183, 212
Leuschner, A. 134, 139
Kahan, Dan 135–39 liars 46–47, 59
Kahn, Herman 256–57 libel 123, 179, 269
Keeley, Brian L. 10, 167, 171, 260, 284–93 liberal education 216, 219
Kennedy, John F. 167–68, 284, 290 liberty 71–78, 81–83, 320–21; deliberative 321;
Kennedy, Robert 30 metanarrative of progress in 320
Kenyon, Tim  233–43 Lih, A. 30–32, 34
Kidd, I. J. 221, 224 Lincoln, Abraham 168
Kirkland, Frank 110 lineage 314, 321
Kitcher, Philip 10, 48, 139, 154–55, 162–63, 219 Lippert-Rasmussen, Kasper  5–6
knowledge 4–11, 18–21, 50–51, 56–61, 92–94, loaded definitions 171–72
101–4, 115–18, 214–19, 267–68, 274–78, Locke, John 4, 6–7, 224
297–99, 301–5, 318–20, 322–24; absolute 320; logic 7–10, 184, 222–23, 225, 227, 323; basic
acquisition of 55–56, 101, 108, 115, 200, 212, principles of 223; of causation 184; epistemic 9;
278; background 36, 199, 264, 266; children’s hybrid work on epistemology and 7; symbolic
216; demonstrable 307; disseminating 289; 305; teaching of 223, 225, 227
elementary 79; encyclopedic 28; experiential lotteries 182, 188, 249; and cases in epistemology
105; expert 252, 298, 319; general 220–21; 182; newspaper-reported 182; random 98
human 8, 28, 214, 216, 220; machines 21–22; of Ludlow, Peter 60
mechanisms 150–51; of pathophysiology 142, Lynch, Michael P. 4, 41–51
144; of philosophical claims 302–3; political 91, Lyotard, Jean-François 318–28; argument for
96; production 102–4; propositional 105, 212; the ‘postmodern condition’ 323; epistemic
scientific 79, 102, 138, 155, 323–24; and skills relativism 319; important critical response
211; in society 216; special 120, 297; testimony- to claims about the sciences 323; and
based 275–76, 278; of truths 297–98; workers thepostmodernists 327
217, 219
knowledge claims 105, 301 Mach, Ernst 7, 9
Koehler, J. 180 Magnani, Lorenzo 5, 259, 272–81
Kotzee, Ben 10, 211–12, 214, 216, 218, 220–22, Magnus, P. D. 31, 56–57
224, 226 malevolent forces 168–69
Krimsky, S. 155, 160–61 malevolent plots 167
Kripke, S. 184–85 management 197, 201, 312; company’s 200;
Kuhn, Thomas  101 corporate 207
Kukla, Rebecca 106–7 Mandela, Nelson 314
Mandik, Pete 288
labor 139, 219–21 Marlin, Randal 115–27
Lacan, Jacques 318 Marx, Karl 101, 321
Lackey, Jennifer 23, 235, 237, 264 McCabe, Helen 71–83
laissez-faire 74, 76, 81, 83 McGeer,Victoria  32–33
language 9–10, 28, 46, 108, 173, 263, 274, 277, media 47, 119, 123, 125–27, 211, 217–19, 250–52,
310, 321, 325–26, 329; natural 310; philosophy 319, 324; censorship 80; commercial 243;
of 9–10, 325; pragmatics 243; technical 327; conservative 318; independent 123; large
uses of 321, 326 corporate 123; mainstream 124; powerful 123;
language games 319, 321–27, 329; denotative social 43, 45, 47, 79–80, 243; state-controlled
323; dissemination of 321; heterogeneity 120; traditional 16
of 327; indeterminate number of 321; and media reports 31, 126
information 323 media studies 286
Laudan, Larry 10, 179, 318 medical research 148, 154
law 21, 58, 89–90, 95–98, 117, 121–23, 185–86, medicine 7, 111, 121–22, 142, 145, 147–50,
190, 217, 219, 284, 300; basic 262; international 152, 220, 289–90, 308, 311–12; clinical 147;
military 241; late medieval 249; medical 312; cookbook 149; finance-based 148; general 144;
physical 58; tax 310–11 modern 147
339
340
Index
Medina, J. 46, 101, 106 newspapers 16, 36, 77, 80–81, 120, 169, 328; The
Mendelberg, Tali  94 Guardian 148; New York Times 60, 64–65, 119
Mental Math 235–36 Nickel, Philip 138
mental powers 78 non-belief 132–35, 138
mental states 18, 50, 118 non-experts 29, 131–35, 137–39, 289, 298,
Merck & Co 158 307–8, 310–12
Mercury News 125 non-philosophers 11, 297–99, 304
Merlino, Jacques 126 normic support 188–91; and epistemic
Merton, Robert 248, 265, 273 responsibility 191; and error 190; heart of 190;
message 62–63, 65, 119, 121, 251, 262–63, 326; relation 189–90; and sensitivity 190
clinical 143; decrypted 62–63; designated 264; Norris, Christopher 330
flawed 123; implicit 119; intercept 61; mass novices 45, 48–49, 325
media 123; post 46; propagandistic 123 NRSROs see Nationally Recognized Statistical
message recipient 121 Rating Organizations
Metzger, M. J. 23–24
Meyer, Marco 21 obligations 124, 126, 203–4, 214, 241–42, 292;
Middlebrooks, Donald 110 communicative 138; debt service 200, 202;
Mill, John Stuart 5, 8, 46, 71–83, 97, 101, 134; educational 226; moral 196; rational 235, 242
approach to applied philosophy 71; arguments Observations on Man 7
support “deliberation-enhancing forms of OCC see Office of the Comptroller of the Currency
censorship” 80; and the defence of free speech Of Induction, with Especial Reference to Mr. J. Stuart
5, 71, 74, 80, 82–83; defense of his well-known Mill’s System of Logic 8
harm principle 71; and faith in human rationality Of Miracles 6
78, 80; and On Liberty 71; and the optimism of Office of the Comptroller of the Currency
79; and the social sciences 79, 83 196–97, 200
Miller, Boaz 19, 132–33, 262, 264 offline identities 30
Millian (speech) 73, 79–80, 83 On Liberty 71
The Miracle of Aggregation Theorem 93 online content 22–24, 79
misinformation 78, 80, 96, 98, 124 online identity 30, 57–58, 60–64
mode of inquiry 41–44, 50–51 online information 18–20, 22, 60–61
models 94–96, 132, 135–37, 206–7, 251, 263, Ontological Relativity and Other Essays 3
280, 321; abstract 136; complex climate 290; Oppenheimer, D. M. 19, 97
dominant 96; general theoretical 250; good oppression 77, 83, 101–2, 104, 107–8, 110, 118;
predictive 94; issuer pays 204; neural epistemic 105, 108, 111; political 108, 330; racial
network-based 247; serial transmission 264, 267 106; social 108
modern sciences 278, 322–23, 325 Oswald, Lee 290
monopolies 74–75, 162 outcomes 15, 90, 98, 143, 146, 151, 159–60,
Montori,Victor  148 169, 248, 250–53, 255–56, 261–62, 265, 275;
moral expertise 309 addressing patient-important 143; clinical
moral obligations 196 144; crafted 248; democratic 90; dreaded 265;
moral philosophers 308, 311, 314 educational 76; good 88–89, 97; important
moral realism 309, 311 144; multiple 253; negative 198; political 78,
moral suasion 110 97; possible 252–53; projected 249; research
Morgan, Mary S. 278–79, 281 154–55; surrogate 144; undesired 255; worst
Morrison, Toni  104 envisaged 256
mortgage-backed securities  202–7
Moyers, Bill 119 Parent, Joseph M. 286
Muldoon, Ryan 17, 219 passwords 55, 58, 61–62
patients 111, 142–44, 146–51, 312; assigning sicker
Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating 146; of color and clinicians 111; elderly 149;
Organizations 203 individual 143, 146, 149, 151; interests of 147;
Nesson, C. 180 large numbers of 143, 151; single 143
network epistemology 22 Peirce, Charles Sanders 278–79
network individualism 17 personalized searches 15–18
neuromedia 50 Peters, Richard 214, 216, 219, 221, 272
neutral definitions 119, 167–68, 170–72 Pew Research Center Polls 92, 131
New York Times 60, 64–65, 119 philosophers 3–4, 6, 8–10, 45–46, 106, 109–11,
news systems 124 142, 145, 268–69, 284, 286, 297–305, 308–9,
340
341
Index
323; academic 11; analytic 211, 222; and 133; of climate change 133; contemporary 91;
clinicians 142; critical 101; feminist 101–3; international 241; rabble-rousing 79; of rumor
informed 301; of medicine and bioethicists 269; special interest 89
111; modern 321; moral 308, 311, 314; and The Politics of Abolition 109
physicians 145; self-avowed 6; therapeutic 248 Pollock, J. 133
philosophical analysis 6, 15, 22, 107, 162, 198, 275, Popper, Karl 247, 256, 284–86, 288
298–99, 312 population 37, 75, 77, 169, 222, 259, 261–63, 267,
philosophical claims 301–5 270; low-r isk 150; vulnerable 30
Philosophical Essay on Probabilities 7 pornography 82
philosophical expertise 297–305; epistemology Port Royal Logic 7
of 302; expansion of 305; and philosophical Postman, Leo 260–65
progress 298; skeptical challenges to 302 The Postmodern Condition 318–21, 323–28
philosophical progress 298, 304–5 postmodernism 318–30
philosophical studies 9, 109 power 32, 35, 74, 76, 78–79, 88–89, 95,
philosophical work 3, 6–7, 142, 150 97–98, 105, 118, 120, 127, 323, 325–26;
philosophy 3–8, 10–11, 56, 101–3, 105, 110–11, significant 96–98
222–23, 235, 238, 273–74, 297–305, 311, 319, power-knowledge  318–30
323–24; of language 9–10, 325; of mind 10, 106 practices 3–4, 29, 33, 117, 119–22, 125, 143,
Philosophy and Public Affairs 3 148–50, 196–99, 204, 206, 224–25, 227,
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature 3 239–42; bad 121; common 119, 204;
philosophy of science 8–9, 101–2, 136, 138, communicative 273; cultural 105; daily 150;
214; and Anglophone epistemology 102; egalitarian 277; ethical 3, 310; legal 121;
arguments in 136 medical 143; midwifery 105; negative 127;
Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences 8 social 275; substantive 240
physicians 142–43, 145, 148–51, 158, 161–62; precautionary principles 155, 157, 159, 161, 163
decisions of 162 prison abolition 102, 108–12
Physicians’ Information and Education prisoners 108, 180
Resource 145 prisons 110, 112, 180–81
Physicians’ Information and Education Resource propaganda 5, 10, 115–27; activities 115; detecting
(PIER) 145 117; detection and resistance to 125; early World
physicists 31, 302 War II 118; effective 120; harmful 118; and
physics 7, 9, 31, 299, 302 ideology 115–27; in liberal democracies 119;
physiological studies 144, 147 manifestations of 127; political 119; power of
PIER see Physicians’ Information and Education 120; resistance to 125; state 79; techniques 125
Resource psychology 4, 7–9, 135, 166–67, 169, 253, 305; and
Pigden, Charles 168, 172, 174, 286, 287, 291, 293 conspiracy theories 167, 169, 171, 173; literature
Pitts, Andrea 101–12 166–69, 171; moral 103; political 92, 167, 169;
poetry 104, 110, 297–98; expertise in 297–98; and social 20, 266, 286, 291
philosophy 298 punishments 30, 34, 109, 186
police 60, 64, 180, 182, 291–92; officers 184; Putnam, Hilary 4, 106
searches 189; and the upper echelons of
government 291; violence 112 Quine, W. V. O. 3–4, 9–10, 101
policies 28, 31, 89, 92–93, 96, 134, 139, 196–98, Quintero, Derrick 110
200, 205, 207, 251, 308, 310; core content 28; Quod Nihil Scitur 7
foreign 290; internal 205; international 131;
liberal 257; moderate 96; national security 157; Rachels, James 3
postwar reconstruction 254; preferences 92, racial oppression 106
94, 96–97 randomized controlled trials 143–46, 150–52
political beliefs 136, 166 rating agencies 198, 201–7
political judgment 250–52 ratings 198, 203–6
political knowledge 91, 96 ratings process 197, 203–4
political outcomes 78, 97 rational belief 6, 11; in conspiracy theories 11; and
political psychology 92, 167, 169 knowledge 6
political science 96, 250, 286 rational obligations 235, 242
political scientists 92, 94, 97, 171, 250 rational thinking 222
politicians 30, 54, 57, 80, 96–97, 217, 250, 252, 308 RCTs see randomized controlled trials
politics 7, 54, 92–94, 104, 138, 171, 219–20, 226, reforms 134, 161, 205
241, 251–52, 257, 269, 285, 290–91; charged Reiss, J. 154–55, 162–63
341
342
Index
reliability 22–24, 29–32, 34, 37, 44–47, 51, 56, 73, scientific studies 116, 121, 159, 243
133, 234, 240, 249, 264–68, 270; of individual scientific theories 169, 172, 289
testimony-based beliefs 268; of rumors 267; of scientists 3, 8, 22, 30, 136–38, 148, 159–61, 217,
sources of knowledge 29, 36, 116 219–20, 248, 276, 278–79, 323–25, 327; climate
religious beliefs 6 131–34, 136–38, 233; computer 16; high-proof
Rennie, D. 143 136; independent 154, 158–60; mainstream 134;
reports 54, 58–59, 115, 117, 121–22, 124, 132–33, political 92, 94, 97, 171, 250; social 80, 257, 259,
136, 144, 203, 205, 262–63, 266–67, 272–74; 291; specialist 220; university 154
eyewitness 181; incriminating 126; industry 200; search engines 15–17, 41, 43, 45–47
media 31, 126; reliable 126 Sears, David 92
reputation 30, 43, 59, 123–24, 134, 248, 269–70; Second World War 9, 254, 319
risks to 43 secret 62–63, 167, 248, 288–89; intelligence 119
research 16, 19–20, 24, 28, 91, 104, 111, 131, 147–50, securities 43, 61, 63–64, 83, 197, 202, 204–6, 279;
154, 158–64, 170, 253, 263; agendas 10; biased asset-backed mortgage 202; complex 205; fixed
158, 162; biomedical 162–63; climate change 131, income 202; given 204; institute 60; investment-
138; current 102, 157; disruptive 252; empirical grade 202; mortgage-backed 202–7; national
94; historical 106; industry-sponsored 161; 157; risks of residential mortgage-backed 207
mechanisms/physiological 150; medical 148, 154; Securities and Exchange Act 1934 203
philosophical 71; physiological 150; programs 220; Securities and Exchange Commission 203
projects 139, 152, 219, 291 security questions 61–62
research outcomes 154–55 self-interest 5, 34, 313–14
revealed peer disagreement 235–38 Sellars, W.  106
Richie, Beth 110–11 sensitivity 185–86, 188, 190, 234, 239, 327;
risks 22, 24, 41, 43, 47–49, 74–75, 136, 155–57, based approach 186; of beliefs 185–86, 190; to
161, 163, 197–200, 206–7, 254, 281; inductive differences 327; of evidential assessment 239;
135–37, 139; relative 197–99; target 156–57 and incentives 185
Rivière, Pierre 319, 328–29 sequestration 155, 160–61, 163–64; aims to sever
Roberts, Neil 110, 224 contacts between interested sponsors 160; faces
Roberts, Robert C. 225 several limitations 161; of health researchers
Robinson, James 95, 243 155; proposals 160–62
Rorty, Richard 3–4, 8–10, 319, 321 Shadbolt, Nigel 4, 15–25
Rosnow, R. L. 260–62, 265–66, 270 Sharpe, Matthew 310, 318–30
rule of law 95 Shaw, Bernard 34, 122
Rules for the Direction of the Mind 7 Shibutani, T. 262, 264–66
rumor-mongering 260–63, 269–70 Siegel, Harvey 215, 222–23, 225–26
rumors 5, 117, 124–25, 259, 259–70, 272; Simon, J. 31, 56
believing in 269–70; circulation of 263; Simpson, T. W. 15–16, 56
construction 266; control claims 270; Singer, Peter 3, 309
credibility of 117; dissemination 124; dreading Sismondo, S. 154, 158
265; emergence of 261–62; and epistemic skeptics 132–34, 138, 248, 287, 312, 314; climate
dependence 268; propagation 263; purveyors 132–34, 137–38; conspiracy theory 287, 291;
124; reliability of 267; research 261, 264 individual expert 234
skills 20, 97, 126, 132, 142, 144, 147, 211–12, 214,
Sackett, David 143–44, 146–48 222–25, 307, 315; better listening 149; critical
Sanger, Larry 30, 32 appraisal 143; and knowledge 211; learning 212;
Scheffler, Israel 212–13 procedural 29; thinking 222–23, 225
schools 74, 76–77, 83, 118–19, 211, 217–18, slavery 109–10, 112
220–21, 223, 226; contemporary 72; high 61; Smart, Paul 15–25
medical 142; monopoly on provision of 74; smartphones 32, 50, 254
state-funded  75, 82 Smith, Bessie 104
Schwartzberg, Melissa 88 Smith, Dorothy E. 102
scientific consensus on climate change 132–33, Smith, Martin 188
238–39, 324 Snowden, Edward 290
scientific knowledge 79, 102, 138, 155, 323–24 social cognition 243
scientific practice 21, 138–39 social environment 24, 268, 270
scientific processes 21, 279 social epistemology 5, 10, 22, 28–29, 48, 59,
scientific research 136, 158, 326 131, 211, 221, 240, 274–76, 278; applied 218,
scientific researchers 158, 160 240; computational 22; of education 218; of
342
343
Index
epistemic institutions 211; guide to 274; modes studies 9–10, 23–24, 29, 92–94, 96, 101–4, 111,
274; of trust 29 142–47, 149–50, 171, 221–24, 238–39, 273, 318;
social functions 221, 262 journalistic 122; of knowledge 101, 103, 116;
social information 260, 274 physiological 144, 147
social justice 91, 112, 323 study groups 146
social knowledge 272, 275–76 Sudbury, Julia 111
social machines 21–22 superforecasting 253, 256–57
social networks 262–63, 267, 269; extended 268; Swift, Taylor  60
overlapping 17; rumors emerge in 263; sites 15; systems 10, 15, 21, 30–31, 34, 37, 80–81,
theory of 262 111, 116, 144–45, 158–60, 162, 198–200,
social psychology 20, 266, 286, 291 274–75; computer 64, 145; criminal justice
social scientists 80, 257, 259, 291 179; current 162; democratic 97–98, 217–18;
society 17, 21, 71–73, 75–77, 79, 81, 211, design 159; doxastic 22; epistemological 108;
216–19, 221–22, 254, 284, 288–89, 291–92, health care 109, 111, 150, 155, 217; integrated
318–19; advanced 319, 323; closed 289; 150; news 124; non-democratic 97; one-
conspiracy theory of 284; contemporary 21, party 95; regulatory 162; school 118, 216,
137; democratic 90; discursive 78, 81–82; drug 219; social 148, 275; socioeconomic 109;
problems in 117; early modern European transportation 319
320; egalitarian 277; epistemic division of
labor in 221; epistemic institutions in 217, Taber, Charles 92
219, 221; epistemic purpose in 211; epistemic Tate, Marsha 55, 57
specialization in 221; hierarchical 291; human Taylor, Chloe 60, 111, 286
218, 277; liberal 120; modern 323; postmodern Taylor, Jason 286–87
325–26; purging of 79; rumors on public life teachers 51, 75, 214–15, 219, 222–25, 311, 315
and 269; state of knowledge in 216 teaching 147, 211–15, 219, 222–23, 225–27, 299,
sociology 92, 102, 134, 138, 169, 260; of climate 311, 325; of logic 223, 225, 227; of philosophy
science 134; of conspiracy theories 169; of 311; of students 223
rumor echo 260 testimonial exchanges 220–21
Solomon, Miriam 240 testimonial knowledge 23, 43, 46, 260, 266;
Somin, Ilya 91, 93–94 ordinary 261; surrounding 41; and trust 46
sources 29, 36–37, 43–50, 57–58, 60, 64–65, 119, testimony 43–48, 50, 116–17, 120–22, 132–35,
121, 123–24, 144–45, 261, 264–65, 267–69, 137–38, 220–21, 260, 264–65, 268–69, 273–77,
274–77; believable 127; free 32; potential 267; 279–81, 312–14, 328–29; of corporate experts
real 60; reliable 31–32, 51, 64, 116, 266, 268; 137; expert’s 132; first-hand 272; and gossip
testimonial 200 275–76, 281; non-ethical 313; recipients of
Spade, Dean 111 276–77; reliability of 44, 121–22, 124; of science
speakers 44, 46, 59, 220–21, 261, 264–66, 269, 79; sources of 44, 269; theories of 276; trusting
273, 280, 326; marginalized 36; native 299; 44; verbal 44, 46
testimony of 44 Tetlock, Philip 250–53, 257
speech 37, 57, 72, 77–78, 80, 82–83, 109–10, Thagard, Paul 28–29, 54, 56, 277, 280
119–20; acts 45–46, 326; corporate 132; theorems 93–94; Condorcet’s Jury Theorem 29,
demagogic 80; free political 98 93; The Hong-Page Theorem 93–95; The
Spinoza 8 Miracle of Aggregation Theorem  93
sponsors 154–55, 160, 163, 204 theories 4, 6, 56, 88, 91–92, 102, 105, 133–34,
sponsorship bias 154–60, 162–64 167–72, 235, 237, 262, 285–92, 304; anti-
Stanley, J. 118–19 commonsensical 304; computational 305;
state propaganda 79 contradictory 290; correct 91; deontological 90,
statistical evidence 179–91; sufficing for a finding 187 301; developing 286; evolutionary 24; feminist
Steel, Daniel 154–64 104; geometric 6; hegemonic 252; mainstream
Stephenson-Goodknight, Rosie  36 105; moral 90; paleo-anthropological 277;
Stewart, Maria W. 104, 247 pre-existing 6; racial 118; sense-data  9
strategies 23, 36–37, 57, 59, 61–62, 64, 107, 138–39, theorists 101–5, 108, 110–11, 240, 286–87;
162, 253, 257; debiasing 243; final 137–38; of conspiracy 125, 166–67, 171, 173, 284, 286–90,
manufactured dissent 139; political 109; of prison 292; contemporary 101; deliberative 94;
abolitionists 112; rhetorical 110 democratic 90; feminist 105; legal 181; network
students 51, 71, 75–76, 89, 211, 213, 215, 218, 263; political 93
222–26, 299, 301, 311; graduate 241; improving thinking 6, 43, 45, 116–17, 168, 207, 211–12,
222; initiating 218; teaching 223; virtuous 227 222–24, 233, 237, 300, 302, 310, 313; dispositions
343
344
Index
224; effective 224; establishmentarian 291; violence 82–83, 110, 327, 329; administrative 110;
fertile 239; skills 222–23, 225 and depictions of sex 82–83; domestic 182;
Thomson, J. J. 181–85, 190 epistemic 101
Toland, John 7 voters 91–98; individual 91–93; median 94, 96;
Tollefsen, D. P. 31 well-informed  92–93
Tractatus Theologico-Politicus 7
transmission 131, 262, 264–67, 322; modes of Walen, Alec 179
265; oral 265; peaceable 326; reliable 267; Wales, Jimmy 32–34
serial 262–63 Walker, Alice 104
transparency 47, 148–49, 198, 203–4; and critical war 5, 117, 119, 122, 124–25, 157, 254–55,
thinking 148; increased 148 261, 267, 326, 329–30; civil 126; crimes 126;
trials 143, 146–47, 150–51, 184, 186, 292, 328; full-scale 117; games 254; preemptive 157;
criminal 179; explanatory 147; head-to-head thermonuclear 256
150, 154; randomised 143 Ward, A. F. 19–20
Tribe, L. 179, 322 Warenski, Lisa 5, 196–207
true beliefs 10–11, 28–29, 32, 124, 132, 215, 297, warfare 254, 257
299, 302, 305, 318 Warren Commission Report 167
Trump, Donald 55 Web 4, 15, 17–25; based forms of cognitive extension
trust 23, 29, 31–34, 36–37, 43–47, 54, 56, 59–61, 19–20; extended cognizer 19; extended forms of
63–65, 132, 139, 202–4, 277, 289–92; default 44; knowledge 18–19; extended minds 18–20
eroding 155; interpersonal 33; online 59; public websites 23, 31, 43, 48–49, 54–56, 59–60,
158, 190, 198; qualified 33; rational 45 63–64, 126; bank’s 61; fraudulent 54–55,
trustees 32–33 60, 63; particular 59; of reputable sources of
trustworthiness 23–24, 31–32, 34, 43–44, 48, 276; information 60
epistemic 33; human speaker’s 132; inspiring 33; Weinstein, Bruce 311
and perceptions of expertise 24; of sources 276; welfare-state programs  91
vision of 34 Whewell, William  8
truth-claims  325 White, John 216
truth-values 300–301, 303–4, 324 Wikipedia 15, 18, 28–37, 45, 49, 56; active in
truths 10–11, 35, 47–48, 54–55, 72–73, 89–91, different languages 28; attracts trolls and
115–17, 122–26, 212, 215–16, 277–79, 297–301, vandals 30; community 28–29; content 31–32,
304–5, 322–25; accepting 197; counterfactual 37; and damage due to non-expert authorship
300; discerning 117; discourse-transcendent and anonymous editing 29; diversity problems
330; ethical 309; independent 89–90; living 34–35; epistemic goals 34; reliability of 29, 35;
72, 80; moral 90; philosophically substantive and trust 32–34
298; scientific 79, 279, 289, 323; subsidiary 305; Williams, Bernard 310–11
substantive 298; virtue of 107; in Wikipedia  35 Williamson, Jon 151–52
Tubman, Harriet 32 Wilson, John 167, 171, 214, 274
Twitter 15, 24, 60, 63 wisdom 5, 29, 88–89, 91, 93, 95, 98, 224, 234, 255,
Tyson, Sarah 111 307, 314–15; common 291; of crowds 29, 88,
93, 97; and cynicism 315; ethical 307, 312, 314,
United States 95–96, 98, 102, 105, 109, 111–12, 322; general 45; of the process 89; of teachers
121, 124–25, 150, 197, 201–2, 205, 207, 255–57; 315; ultimate 315
and Canada 111; early twentieth-century 104; women 34–36, 102–5, 107–8, 110–11, 115, 118,
and financial institutions 197; nineteenth- 146, 292; biographies of 35; black 102, 104,
century 109; and the Presidential Election 55 111; of color 102–3, 111; of color activists 103;
university education 311 contributions of 36; editors 35; and oppressed
Upshur, Ross 149 groups 108; topics of interest to 35
Uscinski, Joseph E. 286 “Women’s Perspective as a Radical Critique of
Sociology” 102
vaccines 157, 238 Wood Michael J. 167
values 63, 73, 102, 104–5, 117, 119–20, 122, 135–37, workers 218–19
147–48, 197–98, 202–3, 218–19, 221, 254–57; World War  II  267
cultural 135, 137; legal 186–88 World Wide Web see Web
vandals 30 Worrall, John 146
Vermeule, Adrian 171, 263, 284, 286 Wray, Brad 30–31
Vernon, Richard 73
vignettes 180–81, 189 Yerkovich, Sally 273–75, 280
344

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i

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF

• The Internet • Epistemic institutions

James Chase is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Tasmania, Australia. He

ro u tled g e h a n d bo oks i n phi los ophy

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF METAETHICS

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/​

Edited by David Coady and James Chase

First published 2019

Notes on contributors viii

1 The return of applied epistemology 3

2 The World Wide Web 15

5 Adversarial epistemology on the Internet 54

6 John Stuart Mill on free speech 71

8 Epistemic injustice and feminist epistemology 101

9 Propaganda and ideology 115

10 Expertise in climate science 131

11 Evidence-​based medicine 142

12 The precautionary principle in medical research and policy:

13 Psychology and conspiracy theories 166

14 Legal burdens of proof and statistical evidence 179

15 Banking and finance: disentangling the epistemic failings of the

16 Applied epistemology of education 211

21 The applied epistemology of conspiracy theories: an overview 284

22 Philosophical expertise 297

23 Ethical expertise 307

24 The demise of grand narratives? Postmodernism, power-​knowledge,

Tommaso Bertolotti is post-​doctoral fellow in philosophy and adjunct professor of cognitive

Robyn Bluhm is an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at Lyman Briggs

Kirstin Borgerson is an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at Dalhousie

Christopher Cowley is associate professor at University College Dublin, Ireland. He works

Daniel Halliday is senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He

Brian L. Keeley is professor of philosophy at Pitzer College in Claremont, California, where he

Daniel Steel is associate professor at the University of British Columbia, Canada. He

An applied turn in epistemology?

James Chase and David Coady

prominent interpretation of Quine’s project, the traditional agenda of epistemological topics

The return of applied epistemology

Applied epistemology in early modern philosophy

James Chase and David Coady

The return of applied epistemology

James Chase and David Coady

The shape of theoretical epistemology

The return of applied epistemology

James Chase and David Coady

The open future of applied epistemology

Applied epistemology in general is the study of whether systems of investigation that

We think this is insufficiently general. It is certainly insufficiently general to represent the

The return of applied epistemology

discussion of rational belief in conspiracy theories (Chapter 21), or Steve Fuller’s discussion of

James Chase and David Coady

Personalized search: epistemic boon or burden

Paul Smart and Nigel Shadbolt

The World Wide Web

Paul Smart and Nigel Shadbolt

Cognitively potent forms of bio-​technological merger between human agents and

The World Wide Web

Paul Smart and Nigel Shadbolt

The World Wide Web

Paul Smart and Nigel Shadbolt

An epistemically safe environment?

The World Wide Web

Reliability indicators and trust

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/

11 Evidence-based medicine 142

24 The demise of grand narratives? Postmodernism, power-knowledge,

Tommaso Bertolotti is post-doctoral fellow in philosophy and adjunct professor of cognitive

Cognitively potent forms of bio-technological merger between human agents and

Smart, P. R. (forthcoming-a). “Emerging Digital Technologies: Implications for extended conceptions of

Stephenson-Goodknight, R. (2015). “Women … It Takes a Village.” WikiConference USA, October

accreditation/licensing of educators and thus no one is forced to use state-provided education

overlap with attempts to suppress domination. Public-service broadcasting is another potential

In a democratic society no process-independent moral criteria can be referred to in