Amen to daat: on the foundations of Jewish epistemology

I argue that the Hebrew Bible adopts a non-doxastic account of propositional faith. In coming to this conclusion, we shall discover that Biblical Hebrew has no word for belief. What ramifications might this have had for biblical and Jewish epistemology? I begin to trace the sort of epistemic norms that might emerge from an epistemology that approaches knowledge by thinking about faith, rather than belief.

How we learn whiteness: Disciplining and resisting management knowledge

In management studies, whiteness is learnt through the discipline’s epistemic norms and conventions, received intellectual history, conceptual canon, driving logics and institutional frameworks. The foundational white epistemology of management produces and secures racial inequality while insisting that race is irrelevant and racism is obsolete in a post-racial imaginary. In this conceptual piece, I explore how scholars of colour and our knowledge experience a phenomenon of seen invisibility. This dialectical condition is reproduced through mechanisms and practices by which our discipline is disciplined within the prevailing racial order. After analysing examples of these normalised mechanisms and practices through the testimonies of scholars of colour who research, review, teach and edit management theorising in the Global North, I discuss how we might unlearn whiteness in our discipline through epistemic resistance.

The Epistemic Commitments of Nondiscrimination

A commitment to nondiscrimination at times appears to require both that one not act in particular ways and that one not believe certain things. This is potentially troubling if one ought to believe what one has warrant to believe, and to the extent that one can take actions that affect what one comes to believe, one ought to do so with the aim of acquiring true beliefs. This article argues that current social controversies—like the debate over the memo by the Google employee which claimed that women are less suited for careers in technology fields—demonstrate that some defenders of norms of nondiscrimination understand these norms as including epistemic commitments. The article articulates what these epistemic commitments are, explores whether they can themselves be epistemically justified and, if not, situates the popular controversy in a philosophical debate about whether moral considerations properly encroach on epistemic norms.

Knowledge and reasoning

This paper develops a novel, functionalist, unified account of the epistemic normativity of reasoning. On this view, epistemic norms drop out of epistemic functions. I argue that practical reasoning serves a prudential function of generating prudentially permissible action, and the epistemic function of generating knowledge of what one ought to do. This picture, if right, goes a long way towards normatively divorcing action and practical reasoning. At the same time, it unifies reasoning epistemically: practical and theoretical reasoning will turn out to be governed by the same epistemic norm—knowledge—in virtue of serving the same epistemic function: generating knowledge of the conclusion.

Epistemic Blame and the Normativity of Evidence

The normative force of evidence can seem puzzling. It seems that having conclusive evidence for a proposition does not, by itself, make it true that one ought to believe the proposition. But spelling out the condition that evidence must meet in order to provide us with genuine normative reasons for belief seems to lead us into a dilemma: the condition either fails to explain the normative significance of epistemic reasons or it renders the content of epistemic norms practical. The first aim of this paper is to spell out this challenge for the normativity of evidence. I argue that the challenge rests on a plausible assumption about the conceptual connection between normative reasons and blameworthiness. The second aim of the paper is to show how we can meet the challenge by spelling out a concept of epistemic blameworthiness. Drawing on recent accounts of doxastic responsibility and epistemic blame, I suggest that the normativity of evidence is revealed in our practice of suspending epistemic trust in response to impaired epistemic relationships. Recognizing suspension of trust as a form of epistemic blame allows us to make sense of a purely epistemic kind of normativity the existence of which has recently been called into doubt by certain versions of pragmatism and instrumentalism.

Enquiry and Normative Deviance

It is argued that science denialism brings about an aberrant form of enquiry that deviates in significant ways from the epistemic norms governing scientific enquiry. Science denialism doesn’t involve just a rejection of a scientific theory; it also challenges the practice of continuously and impartially testing research methods, theories, and evidential sources with the aim of improving the accuracy of our theories. This chapter provides an in-depth analysis of the epistemic mechanisms at work. It develops a fine-grained framework to model a variety of normative deviances that may take place in enquiry. Through analysing two case studies, it is argued that fake news plays two pivotal roles in shaping epistemic norms operating within science denialism. First, it discredits a variety of (institutional) sources of evidence; second, it also plays a part in building the alternative explanation of the target phenomena.

Philosophy of Science Analytic Feminist Approaches

Feminist philosophy of science in the analytic tradition converges towards feminist empiricism that comes in three types: critical contextual empiricism, radical empiricism, and standpoint empiricism. Each type of feminist empiricism provides important resources for feminist philosophers of science especially when they seek to solve the bias paradox. The bias paradox arises when one aims to criticize some biases as epistemically harmful while at the same time acknowledge that some other biases are epistemically beneficial. The challenge is to understand how pernicious bias can be distinguished from an innocuous one. Critical contextual empiricism aims to solve the bias paradox by introducing epistemic norms for scientific communities and radical empiricism by subjecting biases to empirical testing. Standpoint empiricism emphasizes the importance of generating new evidence by empowering disadvantaged social groups. While feminist philosophers of science have abandoned the ideal of value-free science, they have not given up the concept of objectivity. Objectivity of scientific knowledge comes in degrees and depends on how well scientific communities facilitate criticism and succeed in eliminating pernicious bias.

Predatory Grooming and Epistemic Infringement

Predatory grooming is a form of abuse most familiar from high-profile cases of sexual misconduct, for example, the Nassar case at Michigan State. Predatory groomers target individuals in a systematic effort to lead them into relationships in which they are vulnerable to exploitation. This is an example of a broader form of epistemic misconduct that Leydon-Hardy describes as epistemic infringement, where this involves the contravention of social and epistemic norms in a way that undermines our epistemic agency. In this chapter, Leydon-Hardy looks at the distinctive epistemic harm caused by epistemic infringement. She argues that this harm cannot be understood simply as the victim’s having a false belief, or even as her being alienated from her belief-forming mechanisms. A deeper understanding of the harm caused by infringement shows that it stems from damage to one’s epistemic agency, and indeed, to one’s personhood.