Open‐Mindedness as Engagement

Open‐mindedness is an under‐explored topic in virtue epistemology, despite its assumed importance for the field. Questions about it abound and need to be answered. For example, what sort of intellectual activities are central to it? Can one be open‐minded about one's firmly held beliefs? Why should we strive to be open‐minded? This paper aims to shed light on these and other pertinent issues. In particular, it proposes a view that construes open‐mindedness as engagement, that is, a willingness to entertain novel ideas in one's cognitive space and to accord them serious consideration.     

Political Conviction and Epistemic Injustice

Philosophia - Epistemic injustice occurs when we fail to appropriately respect others as epistemic agents. Philosophers building on the work of Miranda Fricker, who introduced the concept, have...     

Epistemic Injustice in Social Cognition

Silencing is a practice that disrupts linguistic and communicative acts, but its relationship to knowledge and justice is not fully understood. Prior models of epistemic injustice tend to characterize silencing as a symptom that follows as a result of underrepresenting the knowledge of others. In this paper, I advance a model of epistemic injustice in which the opposite sometimes happens. Drawing on recent work in experimental cognitive science, I argue that silencing can cause misrepresentations of knowledge and, subsequently, epistemic injustice to occur. Drawing on recent work in epistemology, I also argue that, according to some leading theories, silencing potentially causes ignorance by depriving individuals and communities of knowledge itself. These findings expand our understanding of silencing in social practice, contribute a broader model of epistemic injustice for research at the intersection of ethics and philosophy of mind, and have implications for leading theories of knowledge in epistemology.     

The Beneficent Nudge Program and Epistemic Injustice

Is implementing the beneficent nudge program morally permissible in worlds like ours? I argue that there is reason for serious doubt. I acknowledge that beneficent nudging is highly various, that nudges are in some circumstances morally permissible and even called for, and that nudges may exhibit respect for genuine autonomy. Nonetheless, given the risk of epistemic injustice that nudges typically pose, neither the moral permissibility of beneficent nudging in the abstract, nor its case-by-case vindication, appears sufficient to justify implementing a nudge program in worlds like ours. Drawing on Miranda Fricker’s account of epistemic injustice, I argue that the cogent defense of any nudge program, relative to worlds like ours, stands in need of serious attention to its potential for fostering or sustaining epistemic injustice. A more specific point hinges on recognizing a form of epistemic injustice not enough attended to in the literature to date, which I call reflective incapacitational injustice. This includes relative disadvantages in the attaining of (or opportunity to exercise) the capacity to engage in critical reason, such as the capacity to go in for potentially critical reasoned deliberation and discursive exchange concerning ends. Since Cass Sunstein’s First Law of behaviorally informed regulation would be taken, in worlds like ours, to justify indeterminately many nudges leading to such epistemic injustice we have general grounds for doubting the moral permissibility of this nudge program. We should hence oppose the implementation of any such program until it is shown not to violate the demands of epistemic justice.     

Epistemic and non‐Epistemic Theories of Remembering

Contemporary memory sciences describe processes that are dynamic and constructive. This has led some philosophers to weaken the relationship between memory and epistemology; though remembering can give rise to epistemic success, it is not itself an epistemic success state. I argue that non‐epistemic (causal) theories will not do; they provide neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for remembering that p. I also argue that the shortcomings of the causal theory are epistemic in nature. Consequently, a theory of remembering must account for both its fundamentally epistemic nature and for its constructive and dynamic processes.     

Knowledge‐How and Epistemic Luck

Reductive intellectualists (e.g., Stanley & Williamson 2001; Stanley 2011a; 2011b; Brogaard 2008b; 2009; 2011) hold that knowledge‐how is a kind of knowledge‐that. For this thesis to hold water, it is obviously important that knowledge‐how and knowledge‐that have the same epistemic properties. In particular, knowledge‐how ought to be compatible with epistemic luck to the same extent as knowledge‐that. It is argued, contra reductive intellectualism, that knowledge‐how is compatible with a species of epistemic luck which is not compatible with knowledge‐that, and thus it is claimed that knowledge‐how and knowledge‐that come apart.     

Open‐endedness,Schemas and Ontological Commitment

Second‐order axiomatizations of certain important mathematical theories—such as arithmetic and real analysis—can be shown to be categorical. Categoricity implies semantic completeness, and semantic completeness in turn implies determinacy of truth‐value. Second‐order axiomatizations are thus appealing to realists as they sometimes seem to offer support for the realist thesis that mathematical statements have determinate truth‐values. The status of second‐order logic is a controversial issue, however. Worries about ontological commitment have been influential in the debate. Recently, Vann McGee has argued that one can get some of the technical advantages of second‐order axiomatizations—categoricity, in particular—while walking free of worries about ontological commitment. In so arguing he appeals to the notion of an open‐ended schema—a schema that holds no matter how the language of the relevant theory is extended. Contra McGee, we argue that second‐order quantification and open‐ended schemas are on a par when it comes to ontological commitment.     

Epistemic Injustice and Resistance in the Chiapas Highlands: The Zapatista Case

Though Indigenous women in Mexico have traditionally exhibited some of the highest levels of maternal mortality in the country—a fact that some authors have argued was an important reason to explain the EZLN uprising in 1994—there is some evidence that the rate of maternal mortality has fallen in Zapatista communities in the Chiapas Highlands in the last two decades, and that other health indicators have improved. In this article, we offer an account of the modest success that Zapatista communities have achieved in improving their health levels. In particular, we argue that Zapatista women have implicitly used a form of feminist standpoint theory to diagnose the epistemic (and economic) injustice to which they have been traditionally subjected and to develop an epistemology of resistance that is manifested in actions such as becoming health promoters in their communities. We also argue that this epistemology of resistance is partially responsible for the improvement of health levels in their communities. Finally, on the basis of our discussion of the Zapatista case, we suggest that standpoint theory could play an important role in other healthcare settings involving oppressed minorities.     

Relational Knowing and Epistemic Injustice: Toward a Theory of Willful Hermeneutical Ignorance

I distinguish between two senses in which feminists have argued that the knower is social: 1. situated or socially positioned and 2. interdependent. I argue that these two aspects of the knower work in cooperation with each other in a way that can produce willful hermeneutical ignorance, a type of epistemic injustice absent from Miranda Fricker's Epistemic Injustice. Analyzing the limitations of Fricker's analysis of the trial of Tom Robinson in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird with attention to the way in which situatedness and interdependence work in tandem, I develop an understanding of willful hermeneutical ignorance, which occurs when dominantly situated knowers refuse to acknowledge epistemic tools developed from the experienced world of those situated marginally. Such refusals allow dominantly situated knowers to misunderstand, misinterpret, and/or ignore whole parts of the world.     

Motivated Closed‐Mindedness Mediates the Effect of Threat on Political Conservatism

In this article we synthesize theory and research from several areas of psychology and political science to propose and test a causal model of the effects of threat on political attitudes. Based in part on prior research showing that fear, threat, and anxiety decrease cognitive capacity and motivation, we hypothesize that under high (vs. low) threat, people will seek to curtail open‐ended information searches and exhibit motivated closed‐mindedness (one aspect of the need for cognitive closure). The subjective desire for certainty, control, and closure, in turn, is expected to increase the individual's affinity for political conservatism, insofar as resistance to change and adherence to authority figures and conventional forms of morality are assumed to satisfy these epistemic motives more successfully than their ideological opposites. Consistent with this account, we find in Studies 1a and 1b that putting people into a highly threatened mindset leads them to exhibit an increase in motivated closed‐mindedness and to perceive the world as more dangerous. Furthermore, in Study 2 we demonstrate that a subtle threat manipulation increases self‐reported conservatism (or decreases self‐reported liberalism), and this effect is mediated by closed‐mindedness. In Study 3, we manipulated closed‐mindedness directly and found that high (vs. low) cognitive load results in a greater affinity for the Republican (vs. Democratic) party. Finally, in Study 4 we conducted an experiment involving political elites in Iceland and found that three different types of threat (to the self, group, and system) all led center‐right politicians to score higher on closed‐mindedness and issue‐based political conservatism. Implications for society and for the theory of ideology as motivated social cognition are discussed.     

Epistemic Warrants and Higher‐Order Theories of Conscious Perception

We present a new account of perceptual consciousness, one which gives due weight to the epistemic commitment of normal perception in familiar circumstances. The account is given in terms of a higher‐order attitude for which the subject has an immediate perceptual epistemic warrant in the form of an appropriate first‐order perception. We develop our account in contrast to Rosenthal's higher‐order account, rejecting his view of consciousness in virtue of so‐called ‘targetless’ higher‐order states. We explain the key notion of an immediate perceptual warrant and show both that it requires the content of the higher‐order attitude to match that of the first‐order perception, and also that it gives a new perspective on the intimate relationship, rightly emphasised by Rosenthal, between consciousness and a subject's testimony as to ‘how it is with her’.     

The Empathy Dilemma: Democratic Deliberation,Epistemic Injustice and the Problem of Empathetic Imagination

Res Publica - One of the challenges facing complex democratic societies marked by deep normative disagreements and differences along lines of race, gender, sexuality, culture and religion is how...