The sensitivity principle in epistemology has faced numerous, considerable, and relentless challenges since it emerged in Nozick’s Philosophical Explanations (1981). In this paper, I develop a version of sensitivity, based on Dretske’s notion of conclusive reasons (1971), that responds to the complaint that sensitivity is either incompatible with or makes an unprincipled mess of higher-level knowledge. There are three key moves in formulating reasons-based Dretskean sensitivity (RDS). First, sensitivity is conceived in terms of reasons, rather than beliefs, that track the truth. Second, focus shifts from whether S would have those reasons in the relevant counterfactual worlds to whether those reasons would be the case. Third, closer attention is paid to the structure of reasons. Critics of Nozick point out that, typically, even when S knows that they do not have a false belief that p, if S were to have a false belief that p, S would nonetheless believe that they do not have a false belief that p, violating Nozickean sensitivity. I explain how this fact does not preclude higher-level knowledge according to RDS, even if the false belief that p were based on their actual method.

I propose a novel account of epistemic reputation as the social standing of agents, groups, and institutions based on their epistemic profiles within a community. Using a functionalist approach, I argue that epistemic reputation is pervasive in our societies because it facilitates navigation within social epistemic networks. Consequently, it holds significant importance as second-order evidence in testimonial belief formation. This proposal integrates reputation research, which has traditionally been relegated to the periphery of social epistemology, into the core of epistemology of testimony. As a result, we gain a deeper understanding of the burden and epistemic responsibility associated with epistemic injustice. This approach also promises to illuminate the concept of humility for experts in a new light.

Epistemic injustice theorists have proposed various strategies for resisting oppressive knowledge structures, with José Medina’s concept of epistemic friction and the principle of acknowledgement and engagement standing as a central model. However, this paper argues that such strategies can unintentionally impose epistemic and emotional burdens on the very subjects they aim to empower. In this paper, I illustrate the importance of undertaking qualitative empirical research into epistemic injustice, particularly resistance. Drawing on original qualitative interviews with LGBTQIA+ individuals, allies, and parents of transgender children, I identify the burden that is often placed on them to be educators of their own sexuality and/or identity. I also offer alternative suggestions for resistance, including redistributing the labour of education to allies and creating a space for indirect engagement via entertainment and social media. This paper integrates empirical research with normative theory to expose how resistance efforts can reproduce structural inequalities – and how they might be transformed.

Rationally speaking, receiving testimony from an epistemic authority seems better than receiving testimony from anyone else. But what explains this?

According to the Preemptive Reasons View (PRV), the difference is one in kind, i.e., authorities provide you with preemptive reasons, whereas everyone else provides you with evidence. In this paper, I develop a novel problem for the PRV. In a nutshell, the problem is that the PRV cannot account for why there are cases in which the opinions of epistemic apprentices should count for something too. I conclude by offering a new reason for endorsing the Authorities-as-Advisors View (AAV). According to the AAV, testimony always provides you with evidence; it is just that relying on the say-so of an epistemic authority provides you with better evidence than relying on the say-so of anyone else.

Recent work in social epistemology has discussed obligations to engage with challenges to our beliefs like climate change denial or anti-vaccine sentiment, and the potential benefits and dangers for both the engager and the engaged from doing so. The spotlight being trained here, however, has elided a key issue: the possible risks from engaging for third-party observers, not merely the engager and the engaged. In this paper, I argue that not only are these risks an underappreciated aspect of engaging that should be discussed, but also their neglect is especially concerning as the potential negative epistemic fallout threatens to overwhelm any possible benefits that may be gained from engaging, regardless of how the engagement actually goes. I close by drawing out the theoretical and practical implications from this and sketch a few strategies to conceivably avoid said risks.

The best strategy for getting away with lying is to lie small by only deviating from the truth as much as is necessary to achieve the intended deception. Why then do some demagogues lie big? One set of views has it that the only difference between small and big lies concerns the size of their contents. They claim that the purpose of big lies is the formation of false beliefs in their literal contents via counterfactual reasoning, conspiracy theories, or the illusory truth effect. The negative part of this paper questions these accounts. The positive part proposes a different explanation for why demagogues use big lies and argues that big lies may serve three distinct purposes for demagogues: they reinforce their supporters’ deeply held beliefs, test the loyalty of their close followers, or publicly demonstrate the demagogue’s power. For a big lie to serve these purposes, genuine belief in the lie is not required – in fact, few are likely to believe it. What matters is that the demagogue’s supporters publicly endorse the lie. We contend that they do so, either because they interpret them as motivational statements or use them to express or justify their shared emotions or convictions.

Although we have gained considerable insight through first-person accounts into the experience of credibility deflation that can accompany the attribution of delusion, its workings may remain somewhat undertheorised in relevant fields such as philosophical psychiatry. Such experience is often linked to negative perceptions or stereotypes, given the association of delusion with formally diagnosed mental health disorders, yet we have a limited explanatory account for the logics and dynamics of testimonial injustice in action. This paper goes back to the sociological work of Bateson (2000 [1955]) and Goffman (1974) on framing theory in order to move us forwards towards new interdisciplinary understandings of how it operates to the detriment of those attributed with delusion. We extend our insights into a reimagined conceptualisation of frame trap, which describes how the frame is reinforced with resistance to it. As this holds the potential to cause considerable and sustained distress through habitualised action, we consider its relevance to those lay-attributed with delusion in the familial context. Contrasting clinical with lay attribution in our analytic discussion allows us to redefine both the epistemic and deontic underpinnings of the framing of delusion, potentially informing better practices of communication through enhanced theoretical understandings.

Many widely discussed historical and contemporary views in epistemology rely on conditions requiring that evidence be causally related to the event that is the subject of belief. Such ‘causal conditions’ have also appeared both in normative debates about when belief is rational and in metaphysical debates about the relationship between belief and credence. Drawing on this literature, our paper formulates and then carefully scrutinises a range of plausible causal conditions on rational belief. A series of counterexamples leads us to rule out, in turn, distinct attempts to formulate such a condition. We then devise a condition that withstands our test cases. Ironically, though, this condition is ill-suited to play the roles for which causal conditions on rational belief have been theorised in the first place. Our result casts doubt on whether epistemologists should devote further attention to causal conditions, whether on rational belief or on other epistemic states.

Imagination plays various epistemic roles but can it help us address dream skepticism? This paper explores different conceptions of imagination – propositional, processual, and imagistic – and examines their relevance to the Cartesian dream argument. I distinguish between the phenomenology of dreaming and its epistemological threat, arguing that dream skepticism arises not from the content of dreams, but from the immersive, belief-like quality of dream experience. While some models treat dreaming as propositional or inferential, I argue that these fail to capture the distinctive imagistic nature of dream experience. This kind of imagination, vivid and involuntary, simulates the phenomenology of belief without involving actual belief formation. By interpreting dream skepticism through the lens of imagistic imagination, we gain a better understanding of why the dream scenario remains epistemically troubling – despite attempts to explain it away through propositional or inferential models.

By considering real-life cases of epistemic reparations (Lackey 2022), such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in Canada, I identify and characterize a form of epistemic injustice that I call “collective amnesia.” I distinguish this phenomenon from other recognized forms of epistemic injustice and argue that collective amnesia specifically leads to primary and secondary epistemic harms in the form of distorted representations of a community’s past, preventing an even broader epistemic community from gaining adequate knowledge of its past and present identities. More precisely, I argue that collective amnesia arises as an interplay of negative hermeneutical injustices, whereby conceptual tools are lacking (Fricker, 2007), and “positive” hermeneutical injustices, whereby the positive presence of distorting and oppressive concepts defeats or prevents the application of more adequate concepts or narratives (Falbo, 2022). In addition, I address and respond to four objections. The first two objections allow me to identify two necessary conditions under which instances of collective forgetting are morally relevant and thus may count as instances of collective amnesia as an epistemic injustice: they must be partly agential, whether on the part of individuals or structures, and due to hermeneutical marginalization. The last two objections enable me to precisely define the scope of this epistemic injustice.

Recent epistemological debates have increasingly focused on the contentious counter-closure principle, which holds that, necessarily, if an agent S believes q solely on the basis of a competent inference from p, and S knows q, then S also knows p. This principle has drawn attention due to various challenges, particularly the issue of inferential knowledge derived from false premises. In this article, we pursue two objectives. First, we argue that the counter-closure principle is untenable but for reasons that depart from traditional critiques. Specifically, we will present a novel argument against the internalist approach that supports the cases of knowledge from falsehoods. Second, we show that the counter-closure principle’s failure can be better addressed within an externalist framework by exploring novel theories of defeaters and the relationship between doxastic and propositional warrant.

It is both unavoidable and rational to form beliefs on the basis of testimony. But whose testimony should I trust? To whom would it be rational to outsource my beliefs? In this paper, I explore the role (if any) that intellectual virtues might play in rational belief formation on the basis of testimony. I begin by considering Linda Zagzebski’s proposed intellectual virtue of being able to recognize reliable authority. I argue that this quality, which is surely an excellence, is better categorized as a skill than a virtue. Then I explore whether other intellectual virtues contribute to assessing the reliability of a testifier. I consider two options: the role of virtues in (1) directly assessing a testifier and (2) indirectly assessing a testifier. With respect to (1), I follow Neil Levy and argue that such assessment requires like expertise to the testifier as opposed to intellectual virtue. With respect to (2), I argue that intellectual virtues are helpful in performing indirect assessment and they enable us to avoid social structures that undermine our ability to perform this assessment. Given that we all must form beliefs on the basis of testimony, this role for intellectual virtues is of great importance.

Often, accounts of epistemic injustice either conflate epistemic harming with epistemic wronging or assume epistemic injustice is grounded in instances of epistemic harm. Recently, Dunne and Kotsonis (2024) have argued that neither conflation nor grounding make sense; the two are separate phenomena and have attempted to show how the two relate to one another. I argue this approach is mistaken: rather than just distinguish epistemic harming and wronging, instead we should question the very existence of epistemic harm. First, I discuss the relationship between epistemic harm and epistemic wrong and briefly summarize the ways in which they come apart. While I argue that Dunne and Kotsonis’ arguments are unsuccessful, I offer a new argument to the same effect, showing that current accounts of epistemic harm are underinclusive with respect to epistemic wronging. Second, I show that, generally, wronging does not require harming. Finally, I give us reason to believe that indeed, epistemic harm doesn’t exist: I argue that the notion of intrinsically epistemic harm is suspect, and does not fit within extant theorization on harm more generally and that we, therefore, ought to abandon it entirely: like the general case, epistemic wrong can exist without epistemic harm. To modify a slogan proposed by Bradley, we should do away with epistemic harm.

According to the orthodox comparativist approach in rational choice theory, the ultimate conative basis for an agent’s preference ordering – and thus for their rational choice – is their comparative evaluation among competing options. However, it has been shown extensively in experimental psychology that an agent’s judgments about an option can be distorted by the contrast effects from their contextual reference point, which can sometimes be provided by the very competing option that they compare with. Such contrast effects from competing option, I argue, raise a new problem for comparativism: Sometimes an agent’s comparative evaluation might favor an option A over another option B only because their judgments about A’s appealing intrinsic features are distorted by B’s contrast effects. Such a comparative evaluation from contrast effects, however, is not only epistemically defective but also likely to lead to post-choice disenchantment with option A once the contrast effects from the competing option B are removed. While comparativists can either rationalize the choices made on the basis of comparative evaluations from contrast effects or idealize the type of comparative evaluations they appeal to, I argue that both strategies still face significant problems.

This paper focuses on the epistemic significance of disagreement for a specific kind of contractualist (not contractarian) moral theory. I argue that a purely hypothetical version of contractualism excludes a prima facie attractive conciliationist view of disagreement simply because of the way it constructs the moral point of view. There is no room, in such an approach, for rational, hypothetical peer disagreement within the monological deliberative procedure itself. Attempts to supplement this monological procedure with a kind of post hoc appeal to actual disagreement undermine the basic rationale for adopting a hypothetical approach in the first place. An actual agreement approach to contractualism, by contrast, is well-positioned to take disagreement seriously. For such an approach, moral disagreement signals a failure to fully validate or constitute a binding norm, one that may produce – rather than merely result from – genuine moral indeterminacy. Furthermore, as each of our positions within contractualist discourse reflects a defeasible conviction about what could be the subject of genuine, intersubjective agreement among all affected, when we encounter disagreement that is not subject to clear defeaters, we do indeed have grounds to think our convictions may be mistaken, or that we must modify our credences in ways that reflect the risks we consciously run in defending and acting on convictions that do not enjoy justificatory completion.

According to the traditional conception of epistemic responsibilist virtue, virtuous traits are evaluatively and conceptually primary. Virtuous acts are derived from, or proceed from, virtue. If an agent performs an act based on good epistemic motives but does not possess the virtue, it is merely an act that a virtuous agent would perform, but is not itself virtuous. In contrast, according to the view I propose and call Act First Responsibilism (AFR), virtuous acts are evaluatively and conceptually primary. Acts based on good motives are virtuous regardless of whether they issue from a virtuous trait. The possession of a virtuous trait is defined derivatively in terms of the performance of virtuous acts. With the new dispositional model of virtues I propose, AFR provides the metaphysical foundation for taking virtuous acts as evaluatively and conceptually primary. I argue that AFR is not normatively slight, meets the demands of an exemplarist virtue theory, and fares better than the traditional view in explaining, predicting, understanding, and evaluating an agent, as well as considering someone worthy of imitation.

When we learn that someone holds irrational beliefs, we often respond by reducing our epistemic trust in them. In this paper, I will propose a novel account of such trust reductions. The recently popular relationship-modification account (RMA) of epistemic blame will serve as a foil for this project. RMA says that epistemically blaming others for their epistemic failings involves modifying our epistemic relationships with them, paradigmatically via a reduction of epistemic trust. RMA has recently faced two challenges of extensional inadequacy, which I will show result from a mistaken view about what type of response trust reductions are. I will draw on resources from legal theory to show that trust reductions bear all the hallmarks of so-called non-punitive measures, which serve preventative collective purposes. I will argue for an account of trust reductions as non-punitive epistemic measures that serve the purpose of preventing unreliable informants from negatively affecting the epistemic commons. My account explains when and why it is appropriate to reduce epistemic trust and shows where RMA goes wrong.

According to a well-known aphorism attributed to Francis Bacon, knowledge is power. But what does it mean for knowledge to be power? This paper addresses the question not by offering a new theory of knowledge, but by examining how, and under what conditions, knowledge places an epistemic subject at an advantage over those who lack it. The account developed here does two things: first, it explicates the widely held intuition that possessing knowledge confers an empowering advantage; second, it explains why, in certain contexts, increased knowledge can paradoxically generate a sense of powerlessness. This account diverges from both causal and practicalist views of the power of knowledge: the former takes power to be a causal consequence of possessing knowledge, while the latter understands knowledge as inherently linked with the ability to perform potentially useful actions. In contrast, I argue that the power of knowledge is best understood as a probabilistic advantage, namely, an increase in the likelihood that an epistemic subject will be more successful in interacting with the outside world.