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When Is Company Unwelcome?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 December 2020

Neil Levy Open the ORCID record for Neil Levy [Opens in a new window]
Neil Levy*
Affiliation:
Macquarie University, NSW, Australia and University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
*
Email: neil.levy@philosophy.ox.ac.uk
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Abstract

In a recent paper in this journal, Joshua Blanchard has identified a novel problem: the problem of unwelcome epistemic company. We find ourselves in unwelcome epistemic company when we hold a belief that is also held mainly or most prominently by those we regard as morally or epistemically bad. Blanchard argues that some, but not all, unwelcome epistemic company provides higher-order evidence against our belief. But he doesn't provide a test for when company is unwelcome or a diagnosis of why it is unwelcome. I provide both. On my disjunctive test, unwelcome epistemic company provides us with a defeater when either there is a match between the content of the belief and the properties that make our company unwelcome, or there is reason to suspect that the belief arose via a shared, unreliable, causal process.

Keywords

Higher-order evidenceagreementdisagreementdefeaters
Type
Article
Information
Episteme , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , March 2023 , pp. 101 - 106
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

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