On Epistemic Justice

The paper deals with the concept of epistemic justice and analyses two types of epistemic injustice - testimonial and hermeneutical. The latter is given priority due to the fact that any individual inteгaction involves an individual as а member of а certain social group or community. This requires а study into collective epistemic attitudes, first of all - collective prejudices which Ыосk epistemic resources required for understanding and discussing personal and collective experience. The paper also looks into two related topics - the proЬlem of expertise and the phenomenon of post-truth. S. Fuller's charitaЫe interpretation of post-truth helps to show that this approach can solve the main proЬlem of epistemic justice - that of unequal epistemic status of knowers. However, the price of such levelling-down is too high and would require а complete overhaul of the expertise system.

Dr Livingstone, I Presume?

Presumption is often discussed in law, less often in epistemology. Is it an attitude? If so where can we locate it within the taxonomy of epistemic attitudes? Is it a kind of belief, a judgment, an assumption or a supposition? Or is it a species of inference? There are two basic models of presumption: judgmental, as a kind of judgment, and legal, taken from the use of presumptions in law. The legal model suggests that presumption is a practical inference, whereas the judgmental model suggests that presumption is an epistemic attitude. I argue that presumption is neither a practical inference nor a merely epistemic attitude: it involves both, within the category of what we may call the inquiring attitudes.

Acculturation Coalesce Between Islamic Leadership with Minangkabau Local Wisdom

The Minangkabau community has a long history of Islamic culture. This historical fact is assisted by the Minangkabau natural Tambo which contains philosophy, goals, ideals, normativity, regulations, and proverbs that presuppose consensus as to the goals of society. The purpose of this study, using the perspective of Jurgen Habermas, which is based on the theory of communicative action, the researcher is helped in studying the forms of deliberation from the democratic system of the Minangkabau natural society. Qualitative research is the research method used. The critical paradigm is the chosen solution. In this study, which is combined with the concepts of shari'a associated with communication theory, Habermas’ critical hermeneutic theory will be used. The results of this study show the discursive decision-making process in the Nagari, which is then questioned with the lareh dualism that gave birth to the Tuah sakato democracy. Then from a long study related to how the deliberation process in the Minang realm has the potential to be epistemic in the post-secular era, the researchers also found that the IKM regional organizations as developers of these potentials were outside the realm and had an impact on the Minang realm itself. The results of this study can trigger further researchers to participate in cultural studies and human resources related to the importance of epistemic attitudes in the post-secular era.

Moral values and trait pathogen disgust predict compliance with official recommendations regarding COVID-19 pandemic in US samples

Emergency situations require individuals to make important changes in their behavior. In the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, official recommendations to slow the spread of the virus include costly behaviors such as self-quarantining, which individuals might be reluctant to adopt. However, whether or not people adopt those behaviors could make a huge difference in the impact of the pandemic. In this context, it is important to elucidate what psychological traits underlie people’s (lack of) compliance with official recommendations to slow the spread of the virus. In three exploratory studies and one preregistered replication in a representative sample of US participants, we found converging evidence that compliance with official recommendations is not related to epistemic attitudes such as beliefs in conspiracy theories and pseudoscience, fear, or psychological reactance. Instead, participants’ behavioral intentions were predicted by their (1) disgust towards pathogens, and (2) moral values regarding the importance of caring about others.

Puzzling about Epistemic Attitudes

Chapter 8 discusses the relation between coarse- and fine-grained attitudes. It begins with two questions: how do elements in a given attitudinal space relate to one another? and how do elements across attitudinal spaces do so? The chapter argues that coarse- and fine-grained attitudes are sui generis operators within their own spheres of influence. A familiar contradiction is generated by placing natural-looking norms for belief and credence together with a plausible story about how the attitudes fit together. A space of reactions is laid out and its eliminativist elements are rejected. Two options are then discussed: belief-first epistemology says that belief is fundamental, and confidence-first epistemology says that confidence is fundamental. Matching psychologies for these pictures are discussed.

Epistemic architecture: steering the public perception of the messy problem of antibiotic resistance

In this perspective, we discuss non-experts’ beliefs about the complex and ‘messy' problem of antibiotic resistance (ABR). First, we explain what we mean by complex and messy problems and why ABR fits that description. We then suggest that the attitudes of non-experts are particularly relevant to these problems. This gives rise to social epistemic risks; risks that involve the collective and social aspects of the formation of epistemic attitudes. Steering these epistemic attitudes as a way of handling these risks can take the form of creating what we call ‘epistemic architecture’. That is, a planned design of the structure within which the formation of epistemic attitudes takes place. This entails risks of its own, which leads us to conclude that there is an important responsibility for experts to take these social epistemic risks into account when communicating on messy problems, such as ABR.

Kollektives Verstehen

Many epistemic attitudes including belief and knowledge have already been examined to determine the extent to which they can be attributed to collectives. The epistemological literature on explanatory understanding and objectual understanding, on the other hand, has focused almost exclusively on individual subjects. However, there are many situations that can be described by sentences of the form “We understand P”, “We understand why p”, “Group G understands P”, or “G understands why p”. As I shall show, these situations can be classified into five categories: distributive, common, joint, deferential, and cooperative understanding. Based on a definitional scheme, according to which the general concept of understanding has a cognitive component, a factivity component, and an epistemic-pro-attitude component, this paper aims to analyse these five types.

Theme: Bayesian Philosophy of Science

This chapter sets the stage for what follows, introducing the reader to the philosophical principles and the mathematical formalism behind Bayesian inference and its scientific applications. We explain and motivate the representation of graded epistemic attitudes (“degrees of belief”) by means of specific mathematical structures: probabilities. Then we show how these attitudes are supposed to change upon learning new evidence (“Bayesian Conditionalization”), and how all this relates to theory evaluation, action and decision-making. After sketching the different varieties of Bayesian inference, we present Causal Bayesian Networks as an intuitive graphical tool for making Bayesian inference and we give an overview over the contents of the book.

Ersatz Belief and Real Belief

Philosophers have given much attention to belief and knowledge. Here I introduce an epistemic category close to but different from belief, that I call ‘ersatz’ belief. Recognition of this category refines our catalogue of epistemic attitudes in an important way.