Fixing Subjects, Fixing Outcomes: Civic Epistemologies and Epistemic Agency in Participatory Governance of Climate Risk

Participatory forms of policy-making have often been criticized for insufficiently theorizing the coproduction of publics and matters of concern. This paper seeks to investigate this relationship further by analyzing how the concept of civic epistemologies (CEs) can provide insights for understanding how political contexts shape both publics and contestable debates. Presenting fieldwork on cyclone governance in Odisha, India, based on the analysis of interviews with vulnerable fishing communities and state actors, the article shows how CEs influence the interdependent formation of vulnerable fisher and state subjectivities on one hand with representations of risk located in external biophysical atmospheric gases on the other, thereby sustaining reductive roles and futures. At the same time, the paper develops the concept of CEs by examining them as performative acts carried out by marginalized communities and state actors at the subnational level of a nonindustrialized country, thereby indicating sites at which epistemic agency can be increased and governed. Participatory knowledge production needs to understand how it is affected by CEs if it is to generate effective expertise for transformative futures in the face of increasing climatic risks.

Bad Beliefs

Why do people come to reject climate science or the safety and efficacy of vaccines, in defiance of the scientific consensus? A popular view explains bad beliefs like these as resulting from a range of biases that together ensure that human beings fall short of being genuinely rational animals. This book presents an alternative account. It argues that bad beliefs arise from genuinely rational processes. We’ve missed the rationality of bad beliefs because we’ve failed to recognize the ubiquity of the higher-order evidence that shapes beliefs, and the rationality of being guided by this evidence. The book argues that attention to higher-order evidence should lead us to rethink both how minds are best changed and the ethics of changing them: we should come to see that nudging—at least usually—changes belief (and behavior) by presenting rational agents with genuine evidence, and is therefore fully respectful of intellectual agency. We needn’t rethink Enlightenment ideals of intellectual autonomy and rationality, but we should reshape them to take account of our deeply social epistemic agency.

Is Testimonial Injustice Epistemic? Let Me Count the Ways

Miranda Fricker distinguishes two senses in which testimonial injustice is epistemic. In the primary sense, it is epistemic because it harms the victim as a giver of knowledge. In the secondary sense, it is epistemic, more narrowly, because it harms the victim as a possessor of knowledge. Her characterization of testimonial injustice has raised the following objection: testimonial injustice is not always an epistemic injustice, in the narrow, secondary sense, as it does not always entail that the victim is harmed as a knowledge-possessor. By adopting a perspective based on Robert Brandom's normative expressivism, we respond to this objection by arguing that there is a close connection, conceptual and constitutive rather than merely causal, between the primary and the secondary epistemic harms of testimonial injustice, such that testimonial injustice always involves both kinds of epistemic harm. We do so by exploring the logic and functioning of belief and knowledge ascriptions in order to highlight three ways in which the secondary epistemic harm caused by testimonial injustice crystallizes: it undermines the epistemic agency of the victim, the epistemic friction necessary for knowledge, and the possibility of occupying particular epistemic nodes.

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).

“Absent Contrary Indication”: On a Pernicious Form of Epistemic Luck, and its Epistemic Agency Antidote

It is widely accepted that knowledge is incompatible with the presence of non-neutralized defeaters. A common way of addressing this issue is to introduce a condition to the effect that there are no non-neutralized defeaters for the belief that p (i.e. a “no-defeaters condition”). I argue that meeting this condition leaves open a possibility for defeaters to squander our knowledge. The no-defeaters condition can be fortuitously met, and as a result it can be met luckily. I shall argue that this kind of luck is inconsistent with knowledge. In order to prevent this pernicious form of luck I introduce a “defeaters-responsiveness” condition, according to which subjects ought to be disposed to adequately address defeaters if they were to arise (even if they in fact do not arise).

Attention, Consciousness, and Linguistic Cooperation with AI

Contemporary debates on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) center on what philosophers classify as descriptive issues. These issues concern the architecture and style of information processing required for multiple kinds of optimal problem-solving. This paper focuses on two topics that are central to developing AGI regarding normative, rather than descriptive, requirements for AGIs epistemic agency and responsibility. The first is that a collective kind of epistemic agency may be the best way to model AGI. This collective approach is possible only if solipsistic considerations concerning phenomenal consciousness are ignored, thereby focusing on the cognitive foundation that attention and access consciousness provide for collective rationality and intelligence. The second is that joint attention and motivation are essential for AGI in the context of linguistic artificial intelligence. Focusing on GPT-3, this paper argues that without a satisfactory solution to this second normative issue regarding joint attention and motivation, there cannot be genuine AGI, particularly in conversational settings.