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This paper identifies and elucidates a hitherto unnamed epistemic vice: epistemic insouciance. Epistemic insouciance consists in a casual lack of concern about whether one's beliefs have any basis in reality or are adequately supported by the best available evidence. The primary intellectual product of epistemic insouciance is bullshit in Frankfurt's sense. This paper clarifies the notion of epistemic insouciance and argues that epistemic insouciance is both an epistemic posture and an epistemic vice. Epistemic postures are attitudes towards epistemic objects such as knowledge, evidence, or inquiry. Epistemic vices are defined as character traits, attitudes, or thinking styles that systematically obstruct the gaining, keeping or sharing of knowledge. Epistemic insouciance is not just a posture but an affective posture. Such postures are distinguished from epistemic stances, which are policies that one can adopt or reject. Epistemic malevolence is an example of an epistemically vicious epistemic stance that issues in active attempts to undermine the knowledge possessed by a specified group of individuals. An example of epistemic malevolence in action is the so-called 'tobacco strategy.' I argue that epistemic malevolence undermines knowledge by instilling doubts about respectable sources of evidence.
Vice epistemology is the philosophical study of the nature, identity, and epistemologi-cal significance of intellectual vices. Such vices include gullibility, dogmatism, prejudice, closed-mindedness, and negligence. These are intellectual character vices, that is, intellectual vices that are also character traits. I ask how the notion of an intellectual character vice should be understood, whether such vices exist, and how they might be epistemologically significant. The proposal is that intellectual character vices are intellectual character traits that impede effective and responsible inquiry. I argue that situa-tionist critiques of virtue epistemology pose no significant threat to this proposal. Studies by social psychologists of belief in conspiracy theories suggest that it is sometimes appropriate to explain questionable beliefs by reference to intellectual character vices. Neither 'regulative' nor 'analytic' epistemology has any good reason to question the epistemological significance of such vices.
According to the overconfidence hypothesis (OH), physician overconfidence is a major factor contributing to diagnostic error in medicine. This article argues that OH can be read as offering a personal, a sub-personal or a systemic explanation of diagnostic error. It is argued that personal level overconfidence is an " epistemic vice ". The hypothesis that diagnostic errors due to overconfidence can be remedied by increasing physician self-knowledge is shown to be questionable. Some epistemic vices or cognitive biases, including over-confidence, are " stealthy " in the sense that they obstruct their own detection. Even if the barriers to self-knowledge can be overcome, some problematic traits are so deeply entrenched that even well-informed and motivated individuals might be unable to correct them. One such trait is overconfidence. Alternative approaches to " debiasing " are considered and it is argued that overconfidence is blameworthy only if it is understood as a personal level epistemic vice rather than a sub-personal cognitive bias. This paper is published as part of a collection on self-knowledge in and outside of illness.
What is closed-mindedness, and if it is an intellectual vice, what makes it so? This is the second in a series of three papers on closed-mindedness. It adopts a working analysis of closed-mindedness as an unwillingness or inability to engage seriously with relevant intellectual options. It distinguishes between three different kinds of intellectual vice—effects vice, responsibilist vice, and personalist vice—and argues that closed-mindedness can take each of these forms.
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society: Supplementary Volume
THE VIRTUES OF RELATIVISM: From Relativism Symposium Maria Baghramian and Martin Kusch2019 •
What is it about relativism that justifies, or at least explains, its continued appeal in the face of relentless attacks through the history of philosophy? This paper explores a new answer to this old question, casting the response in metaphilosophical terms. §i introduces the problem. §ii argues 10 that one part of the answer is that some of the well-known defences of relativism take it to be a philosophical stance-that is, a broad perspective or orientation with normative consequences-rather than a doctrine or a thesis. §iii draws attention to an assumption, not always explicitly stated by its proponents, that the relativist stance leads to the cultivation 15 of some key intellectual virtues. Open-mindedness, tolerance, intellectual humility, and curiosity are examples of the intellectual virtues that relativ-ism can foster. §iv argues that the defence of relativism on the basis of the virtues that are assumed to follow from it, at best, is only partially successful. Moreover, there is a range of epistemic vices, resulting from the 20 stance, that undercuts the virtue-based defence presented in §iii.
This is the penultimate version. The final version is forthcoming in Philosophical Issues. Abstract: Vice epistemology is in the business of defining epistemic vice. One of the proposed requirements of epistemic vices is that they are reprehensible-blameworthy in a non-voluntarist way. Our problem, as vice epistemologists, is giving an analysis of non-voluntarist responsibility that will count just the right qualities, no more and no less, as epistemic vices. If our analysis of non-voluntarist responsibility ends up being too narrow, then it risks excluding some qualities that we want to count as epistemic vices, such as implicit biases. Whereas, if it ends up being too broad, it risks including qualities that we do not want to count as epistemic vices, such as impaired vision. I recommend a three-step program for vice epistemologists: 1. admit that we have a responsibility problem; 2. strive to define the responsibility problem; 3. work together with specialists in non-voluntarist responsibility to solve the responsibility problem. Vice epistemology aims to answer three sets of questions. First, what qualities count as epistemic vices and why? What features of a quality make it an epistemic vice? Second, how are epistemic vices connected to epistemic goods like knowledge? Must epistemic vices impede knowledge? And, third, how can we rehabilitate or ameliorate epistemic vices? What is the role of the individual and the environment in curbing epistemic vice? 1 My project here falls under the first set of questions. It focuses on the claim that epistemic vices require the agent who possesses them to be responsible for them. Vice epistemologists have largely embraced the thesis that it is possible for an agent to have epistemic vices that are 'out of her control.' To explicate, there is growing consensus among vice epistemologists that an agent can possess epistemic vices over whose initial acquisition she lacked control. 2 This happens when, for instance, indoctrination causes closed-mindedness, and social oppression causes intellectual servility. 3 More controversial, but also in play, is the thesis that an agent may never gain control over her continued possession of an epistemic vice. This happens when her initial possession of the vice prevents her from developing the ability to change direction. 4 Either way, if we lack control over the possession of some of our epistemic vices, then we won't be responsible for those vices in the traditional sense; that is, we won't be "accountable" for them (Watson 2004). This invites the astute objection that vice epistemologists are letting the
Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective
On the Nature of Intellectual Vice2017 •
Harms and Wrongs in Epistemic Practice: Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 84
Harms and Wrongs in Epistemic Practice2018 •
Jeroen de Ridder, Rik Peels, and René van Woudenberg (eds.) Scientism: Prospects and Problems (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
Is Scientism Epistemically Vicious?International Journal for Philosophy of Religion
The duty to believe according to the evidence2008 •
Virtues of Argumentation: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference of the Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation (OSSA), May 22–25, 2013, Dima Mohammed & Marcin Lewinski, edd.
Fallacy and argumentational vice2013 •
Theory and Research in Education
Open-Mindedness and Intellectual Humility2012 •
2014 •
Baehr, J. (ed.) 2016. Intellectual Virtues and Education: Essays In Applied Virtue Epistemology
Problems of Assessment in Educating for Intellectual Virtue2016 •
Social Epistemology
A Virtue Epistemology of the Internet: Search Engines, Intellectual Virtues and Education2018 •
Forthcoming in Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences
Was Sir William Crookes Epistemically Virtuous?Political Studies Review
Virtue Epistemology and the ‘Epistemic Fitness’ of Democracy2012 •
Religious Inquiries
Epistemic Virtue from the Viewpoints of Mulla Sadra and Zagzebski2013 •
2011 •
Educational …
Expanding the Dimensions of Epistemic Cognition: Arguments From Philosophy and Psychology2011 •
The final publication is available at link.springer.com. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11245-014-9296-x
On the priority of agent-based argumentative norms2016 •