Culturing Belief

What kind of being are we? This of course is one of the oldest questions in philosophy. In earlier eras, answers were often non-naturalistic (we are animals with souls, for instance). Today, one of the oldest answers is also one of the most popular: with Aristotle, we often think we are distinguished from other animals by our rationality. This chapter suggests that another answer is at least as defensible: we are epistemically social animals. In making the case for this answer, it provides some of the background for the account of belief formation developed in the book. It highlights evidence from cultural evolution for our epistemic dependence on one another. Cultural evolution shows how human flourishing is due to cultural knowledge that escapes the grasp of individuals and that is the product of evolutionary processes. The chapter then turns to our central paradigm of a successful epistemic enterprise: modern science. It argues that science, too, owes its success to the way in which cognition is distributed across agents, groups, and even artifacts.

How Our Minds Are Made Up

This chapter argues that epistemic dependence is a routine and rational part of ordinary life. It focuses on implicit deference, in particular deferring to others to learn what we should, or even already do, believe. Using the example of “never Trumpers”—Republicans who abjured Donald Trump but often came to embrace him—it argues that our belief representations are surprisingly fragile, because we rely on others and on the world to tell us what we believe. In this light, it argues, we should be less concerned than is sometimes thought by ordinary people’s ignorance about important questions: what matters is not whether they know, but whether they know how to find out.

The Division of Epistemic Labor

This chapter builds on the author’s programmatic approach to research in social epistemology, according to which such research involves the systematic investigation of the epistemic significance of other minds. This research program is developed by appeal to the thesis of the Division of Epistemic Labor. After formulating this thesis as a thesis of epistemic dependence, the chapter illustrates several ways in which individual subjects are epistemically dependent on one or more of the members of their community in the process of knowledge acquisition. Such an account supports various conclusions about the cognitively distributed nature of some knowledge acquisition, and the chapter ends with these.

Foundations and Applications of Social Epistemology

This book collects twelve recent papers by the author on social epistemology. Roughly half of them propose a research program for social epistemology—including an animating vision, foundational questions, and core concepts—and the other half are applications of this vision to particular topics. The author characterizes the research program itself as the exploration of the epistemic significance of other minds. Such a program will enumerate the various ways in which we depend epistemically on others, it will describe the proper way to evaluate beliefs according to the sort of dependence they exhibit, and it will provide the basis for identifying and characterizing various dysfunctions of our epistemic communities. The book suggests that several core concepts will be helpful as part of this exploration: epistemic dependence (direct and diffuse); entitlements (epistemic as well as those deriving from our social practices); the normative expectations we have of one another as epistemic subjects; and the socio-epistemic practices in which we participate. It goes on to put this program and these concepts into practice by exploring such topics as the epistemic agency exhibited in inquiry, the practices that constitute news coverage, the basis for allegations of what we or others should have known, how reliance on another’s testimony contrasts with reliance on an instrument, our reliance on others as consumers of testimony, and the epistemic upshot of non-epistemic social norms (whether these are moral, political, professional, or relationship-based).

Who Speaks for Science?

Ironically, flat-Earthers, anti-vaxxers, and climate change naysayers trust in science. Unfortunately, they trust the wrong science. That conundrum lies at the heart of scientific literacy in an age of well-funded commercial and ideological interests and overwhelming digital information. The core question for the citizen-consumer is not philosophically “why trust science?” (Oreskes 2019) but sociologically “who speaks for science?” Teachers can help students learn how to navigate the treacherous territory of inevitably mediated communication and the vulnerabilities of epistemic dependence. Students need to understand the role of science communication practices (media literacy) and the roles of credibility, expertise and honesty and the deceptive strategies used by imitators of science to seem like credible voices for science.

Trustworthy simulations and their epistemic hierarchy

We analyze the usage of computer simulation at the LHC and derive seven jointly necessary requirements for a simulation to be considered ’trustworthy’, such that it can be used as proxy for experiments. We show that these requirements can also be applied to systems without direct experimental access and discuss their validity for properties that have not yet been probed. While being necessary, these requirements are not sufficient. Such trustworthy simulations will be analyzed for the relative epistemic statuses of simulation and material measurements, from which we argue that claims of their parity are unfounded. Instead, using credibility as a measure for epistemic status, and in view of the temporal and epistemic dependence of simulation on material measurements, we argue that the latter have a higher epistemic status than the former. We further argue that suggestions to qualify the epistemic status by ’defocussing’ on the material connection to the target system of either human or natural experiments are misleading.

Narrative testimony

Epistemologists of testimony have focused almost exclusively on the epistemic dynamics of simple testimony. We do sometimes testify by ways of simple, single sentence assertions. But much of our testimony is narratively structured. I argue that narrative testimony gives rise to a form of epistemic dependence that is far richer and more far reaching than the epistemic dependence characteristic of simple testimony.