Applied Epistemology
Edited by JENNIFER LACKEY
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1. Applied Epistemology
Lackey
2. When Freeing Your Mind Isn’t Enough: Framework Approaches to Social Transformation and Its Discontents 19 Kristie Dotson and Ezgi Sertler
3. Situated Knowledge, Purity, and Moral Panic
Quill R. Kukla
4. Epistemology and the Ethics of Animal Experimentation
Mylan Engel Jr.
5. A Tale of Two Doctrines: Moral Encroachment and Doxastic Wronging
Rima Basu
6. Predatory Grooming and Epistemic Infringement
Lauren Leydon-Hardy
7. Epistemic Degradation and Testimonial Injustice 151 Geof Pynn
8. My Body as a Witness: Bodily Testimony and Epistemic Injustice 171 José Medina and Tempest Henning
PART 5: EPISTEMOLOGY, RACE, AND THE ACADEMY
9. Te ‘White’ Problem: American Sociology and Epistemic Injustice 193
Charles W. Mills
10. A Tale of Two Injustices: Epistemic Injustice in Philosophy 215 Emmalon Davis
PART 6: EPISTEMOLOGY AND FEMINIST PERSPECTIVES
11. Rape Culture and Epistemology
Bianca Crewe and Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa
12. Feminist Pornography as Feminist Propaganda, and Ideological Catch-22s
Aidan McGlynn
13. Epistemic Responsibility in Sexual Coercion and Self-Defense Law
Hallie Liberto
14. Sexual Consent and Epistemic Agency
Jennifer Lackey
15. Te Epistemology of Consent
16. Te Internet and Epistemic Agency
Hanna Gunn and Michael Patrick Lynch
17. How Twitter Gamifes Communication
C. Ti Nguyen
18. Te Epistemic Dangers of Context Collapse Online
Karen Frost-Arnold
19. ‘Yikkity Yak, Who Said Tat?’ Te Epistemology of Anonymous Assertions
Applied Epistemology
Jennifer Lackey
Applied epistemology brings the tools of contemporary epistemology to bear on particular issues of social concern. While the feld of social epistemology has fourished in recent years, there has been far less work on how theories of knowledge, justifcation, and evidence may be applied to concrete questions, especially those of ethical and political signifcance. Te present volume flls this gap in the current literature by bringing together essays from leading philosophers in a broad range of areas in applied epistemology. Te potential topics in applied epistemology are many and diverse, and this volume focuses on seven central issues, some of which are general, while others are far more specifc: epistemological perspectives; epistemic and doxastic wrongs; epistemology and injustice; epistemology, race, and the academy; epistemology and feminist perspectives; epistemology and sexual consent; and epistemology and the internet. Some of the chapters in this volume contribute to, and further develop, areas in social epistemology that are already active, and others open up entirely new avenues of research. All of the contributions aim to make clear the relevance and importance of epistemology to some of the most pressing social and political questions facing us an agents in the world.
One question that might be taken up in applied epistemology concerns the power of knowledge or understanding to bring about concrete social change in the world. In Chapter 2, “When Freeing Your Mind Isn’t Enough: Framework Approaches to Social Transformation and Its Discontents,” Kristie Dotson and Ezgi Sertler ask what relationships framework shifs have to social transformation. In particular, they explore whether a framework shif might have a radical causal impact on actual social arrangements. Dotson and Sertler understand social transformation as concrete changes in the structures and realities that are being “framed,” where the actual structures or social arrangements are not reducible to the frameworks. Tey then turn to an example of a framework approach to social justice: the framework analysis around “political prisoners,” which is ofen taken to be a discourse aimed at liberating “political prisoners.” Tey examine whether generating a new understanding of “prisoners” who are “political,” and shifing our understanding of the current social arrangements, has the potential to bring about change in how “political prisoners” are managed by the states in question. Dotson and Sertler argue that the conceptual resilience of carceral
Jennifer Lackey, Applied Epistemology In: Applied Epistemology. Edited by: Jennifer Lackey, Oxford University Press (2021). © Jennifer Lackey. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198833659.003.0001
logic and its practices reveals the signifcant limitations of this approach. “Carceral logic,” according to Dotson and Sertler, refers to a dominant and epistemologically resilient logic that legitimizes statecentric practices of incarceration, which are exercised through prisons that impose punitive exclusions through disciplinary containment. Tey consider a disaggregation approach, which identifes who a “political prisoner” is and thus intends to separate this category from other kinds of “prisoners,” and a comprehensive approach, which holds that all “prisoners” are in some sense “political prisoners” because the nature of imprisonment is political. According to Dotson and Sertler, the disaggregation approach strengthens the assumption that there are correctly imprisoned people by identifying the category of “political prisoners.” In addition, understanding “political prisoners” diferently does not guarantee understanding violence, objection, dissidence, and so on, diferently. Te comprehensive approach, Dotson and Sertler argue, targets the punitive dimension of the current imprisonment system, leaving the preventive aspect untouched. In this way, delegitimizing the punitive aspect of a resilient system does not result in delegitimizing the preventive aspect of it and this, in turn, can legitimize the confnement of all “political prisoners.” Dotson and Sertler conclude that bringing about social transformations through framework shifs is dubious, at best, and ought to be rejected, at worst. In the particular case at hand, they claim that intellectual approaches to social transformation change neither the structural realities of imprisonment nor the epistemological resilience of carceral logic.
In Chapter 3, Quill R. Kukla looks at contemporary epistemology in “Situated Knowledge, Purity, and Moral Panic,” and argues that much of it is driven by a kind of a moral panic regarding the concern that there are no “pure” epistemic practices, perspectives, or standards detachable from the social situation of knowers. While some epistemologists argue that various traditional epistemological notions, such as knowledge or justifcation, are ineliminably situated, others respond by carving out smaller spaces of epistemic purity. Kukla argues that this dialectic is driven in large part by fear rather than by intellectual tension, and that while epistemic practices are ineliminably situated in multiple ways, this should not be feared. Given this, Kukla claims that the quest for purity is misguided, and that the collective goal should be to recognize the fear as a product of ideology, accepting situatedness as an everyday phenomenon. Kukla concludes by arguing that an appropriate naturalized, non-ideal epistemology will treat situatedness not as something mysterious or fearful, but as an empirical fact about our epistemic practices.
In Chapter 4, “Epistemology and the Ethics of Animal Experimentation,” Mylan Engel Jr. argues that a close examination of the epistemology of animal experimentation shows that such research is neither epistemically nor morally justifed and should be abolished. Engel argues that the only serious attempt at
justifying animal experimentation is the benefts argument, according to which animal experiments are justifed because the benefts that humans receive from the experiments outweigh the costs imposed on the animal subjects. According to Engel, the benefts we allegedly receive from animalbased biomedical research are primarily epistemic in that experimenting on animal models is supposed to provide us with knowledge of the origin and proper treatment of human disease. However, Engel argues that animal models are extremely unreliable at predicting how drugs will behave in humans, whether candidate drugs will be safe in humans, and whether candidate drugs will be efective in humans. In addition, Engel shows that animalbased biomedical research has a proven track record of unreliability when it comes to determining the origin, pathology, and treatment of human disease. Since methods that are known to be unreliable are not sources of justifcation, evidence, or knowledge, regardless of whether one espouses externalism or internalism in epistemology, Engel argues that animalbased research fails to provide the epistemic benefts needed to justify its continued use. Given its unreliability, Engel concludes that animal experimentation does not, and cannot, provide the epistemic benefts needed to outweigh the harms inficted on the animal subjects involved, and thus animal experimentation is neither epistemically nor morally justifed.
One of the more fertile areas of inquiry in applied epistemology concerns epistemic and doxastic wrongs, both questions about how to understand them and examinations of particular instances of such wrongs. In Chapter 5, “A Tale of Two Doctrines: Moral Encroachment and Doxastic Wronging,” Rima Basu argues on behalf of two theses whereby morality bears on belief—moral encroachment and doxastic wronging—and clarifes the relationship that holds between them. According to moral encroachment, moral features make a diference to whether a given belief is epistemically justifed, and thus epistemic justifcation is not purely a matter of the epistemic. Doxastic wronging is the thesis that because beliefs mediate our interpersonal relations to others, they can be the source of moral wrongdoing. Basu argues that doxastic wrongs are (i) directed; (ii) committed by beliefs, rather than the consequences of acting on beliefs; and (iii) wrongs in virtue of the content of what is believed. Basu concludes that while moral encroachment and doxastic wronging are conceptually distinct, evidenced at least in part by the fact that some endorse one thesis while denying the other, we should accept both.
In Chapter 6, “Predatory Grooming and Epistemic Infringement,” Lauren LeydonHardy identifes, develops, and applies a new concept in the epistemological literature—what she calls epistemic infringement. To epistemically infringe on another is to violate interpersonal social and epistemic norms so as to encroach upon or undermine that person’s epistemic agency. Epistemically infringing behavior standardly involves complex projects of deceit, manipulation, and
coercion. LeydonHardy focuses on the phenomenon of predatory grooming to provide a powerful case study of epistemic infringement. Grooming behavior is familiar from some very highprofle cases of sexual abuse, such as those of Jerry Sandusky and Larry Nassar. While grooming ofen involves adults preying on young children, it can also occur between adults, and even among peers. More precisely, predatory grooming is a process whereby targeted individuals are primed, coached, or generally readied for conduct that is exploitative in nature. Drawing on work in forensic psychology, LeydonHardy presents a general model of grooming that involves cycling through phases in a nonlinear process that is called test–operate–test, where groomers “take the temperature” of their victims, wait for feedback, and then engage in damage control or push boundaries further, depending on the victims’ reactions. LeydonHardy then shows that a central and entirely ignored dimension of predatory grooming is the epistemic force of this phenomenon. Indeed, it is only by viewing this exploitative behavior through an epistemic lens that we can gain a full picture of both the wrongness of the grooming and the most efective ways to respond to it. In particular, LeydonHardy argues that grooming aims at masking abuse even by the lights of the abused and thus crucially involves the cultivation of an unknowingness in its victims. In this way, grooming is not just a lie or a form of deception, but a sustained campaign of manipulation and coercion that untethers victims from their own epistemic resources and from their ability to marshal those resources appropriately.
Tis distinctively epistemic explanation helps explain some of the harms that victims sufer, such as feeling complicit in their own victimization because of their relationships with the groomers, or how they struggle with the fact that they were harmed in plain sight, ofen right under the noses of those who love them most. LeydonHardy also shows how epistemic infringement is unlike any other concept at work in the area of social epistemology. Most forms of epistemic wrong discussed in the literature focus on the inability of people to efectively communicate their own experiences and beliefs because of various kinds of systematic prejudice. For instance, testimonial injustice occurs when a speaker receives a credibility defcit because of a bias that targets his or her social identity; hermeneutical injustice1 involves a gap in the discursive resources, such as the absence of the concept of sexual harassment, that prevents a speaker from articulating aspects of her social experience; and testimonial smothering2 is at work when a testifer engages in selfsilencing because she has reason to believe that she will not receive uptake. But the distinctively epistemic wrong sufered by victims of epistemic infringement cannot be captured in any of these alreadyexisting terms in the philosophical literature. For what is epistemically problematic in grooming does not in any way involve a credibility defcit, a conceptual lacuna, or a form of
1 See, for instance, Fricker (2007).
2 See Dotson (2011).
selfsilencing. Rather, LeydonHardy argues that norms of trust are used to turn victims against themselves as epistemic agents, leaving them untethered to their own experiences and beliefs. Tis is a unique, and particularly pernicious, epistemic wrong.
One of the most important and widely discussed areas of inquiry in the current philosophical literature is the intersection of epistemology and various kinds of injustice. In Chapter 7, “Epistemic Degradation and Testimonial Injustice,” Geof Pynn asks what is the nature of the wrong involved in cases of testimonial injustice. More precisely, when a person’s testimony is given less credibility than it ought to receive, and this is due to a prejudice on the part of the hearer, how should we understand the wrong that the speaker sufers? Afer raising problems for accounts that explain the wrong in terms of objectifcation, where speakers are treated as mere sources of information rather than as informants, and in terms of derivatization, where speakers are treated as if their epistemic contributions are solely in support of, and not in tension with, any of our own capacities, Pynn proposes what he calls a degradation account of the wrong of testimonial injustice. Te wrong of testimonial injustice involves epistemic degradation, which consists in a public violation of a speaker’s epistemic statuslinked entitlements. Drawing on the view that knowledge is the norm governing epistemically proper assertion, Pynn argues that a knowledgeable speaker whose assertion is rejected on the basis of an identityprejudicial credibility defcit sufers a violation of her entitlement to acceptance. According to Pynn, any violation of the knowledge norm will tend to represent the testifer as a nonknower, and thus be moderately degrading. However, where the violation is rooted in a systematic negative identity prejudice, the rejection will also represent the speaker as a nonknower who is debased in the ways encoded by the stereotype in question. For instance, the diminished representation may depict a speaker as untrustworthy in virtue of his blackness or irrational in virtue of her femininity. In this way, the wrong of testimonial injustice is a distinctive kind of epistemic degradation that excludes victims from the social and epistemic rank shared by other conversational participants.
José Medina and Tempest Henning examine the role that bodily testimony can play in social and political epistemology in Chapter 8, “My Body as a Witness: Bodily Testimony and Epistemic Injustice.” Tey develop an account of how to understand the testimonial force and content of nonverbal communicative acts, such as gestures and facial expressions, that depends on three features: the communicative context, the embodied positionality of the communicator, and the communicative uptake that the audience gives, or fails to give, to the expressive behavior of the body. In particular, Medina and Henning argue that under conditions of racial oppression, all racialized bodies—nonwhite as well as white—are epistemically valued in diferent ways, and thus receive diferent kinds of communicative uptake. Tis diferential valuing of racialized bodies and their bodily testimonial expressions, according to Medina and Henning, can result in
testimonial injustice that targets nonwhite bodily testimony. At the same time, Medina and Henning argue that bodily group testimony is well suited for cultivating ingroup communicative solidarity and for giving centerstage to ingroup members in testimonial dynamics, and so bodily communication can be used in resistant testimony. In this way, Medina and Henning conclude that bodily testimony can provide a powerful way to circumvent verbal limitations when people cannot talk openly and safely about certain issues and can provide a powerful critical tool for resisting epistemic oppression and for creating communicative solidarity.
In addition to the examination of general epistemic wrongs, epistemological tools can be applied to concrete issues, such as the role that race plays in academic disciplines. Trough a careful examination of the treatment of race in American sociology, Charles W. Mills argues for a radical expansion of the concept of epistemic injustice in Chapter 9, “Te ‘White’ Problem: American Sociology and Epistemic Injustice.” Mills focuses on two senses of racism: the mental/psychological—or racism as sentiment and/or belief—and the institutional/societal—or racism as structural domination/illicit advantage. According to Mills, a discipline does not begin ex nihilo, but rather from preexisting beliefs, concepts, frameworks, and norms, and the atmosphere of the United States of the late nineteenth century was deeply pervaded with racist assumptions that had originally developed in the colonial period to justify and rationalize African slavery. More generally, Mills argues that in societies characterized by deep structural oppression, hermeneutical obstacles will be far more extensive and entrenched than a few missing concepts. Te main axes of social subordination—in this case, “race”— will act as powerful generators of cognitive distortion in felds. Because of this, Mills argues that “race” not only has to be rethought in sociology in particular, and in academic disciplines more broadly, but its linkages also need to be reconceived. In addition, Mills shows that the ideological is linked to the material, and thus social structures and institutions constitute the material base of dominantgroup ideologies and place restrictions on the class of respected cognizers. Given this, Mills concludes that the academy exemplifes epistemic injustice on a massive scale, shattering the boundaries typically assigned to the concept.
In Chapter 10, “A Tale of Two Injustices: Epistemic Injustice in Philosophy,” Emmalon Davis identifes two diferent kinds of testimonial injustice— identitybased and contentbased—and then argues that they can be used to provide an epistemic explanation for the persistent lack of diversity in academic philosophy. Identitybased testimonial injustice involves a prejudice or other unjust assessment regarding a contributor’s social identity—such as gender, race, ability, and so on—that infuences an audience’s assessment of the contributor’s epistemic standing, compromising the audience’s willingness to consider or fairly engage the contributor and contribution. Contentbased testimonial injustice involves a
prejudice or other unjust assessment regarding social identity-coded content such as gendercoded, racecoded, abilitycoded, and so on—of a contributor’s contribution that infuences an audience’s assessment of the contributor’s epistemic standing, compromising the audience’s willingness to consider or fairly engage the contributor and contribution. An example of the former is the rejection of a speaker’s report simply because she is a woman; an example of the latter is the dismissal of a speaker’s research simply because it is regarded as the kind of work women do. Davis argues that both kinds of testimonial injustice are ubiquitous in academic philosophy and that the prevalence of these injustices provides signifcant bar riers to those targeted that can explain philosophy’s lack of diversity. In particular, targets of either form of testimonial injustice may have their contributions dismissed or ignored, be denied opportunities for sharing their ideas or shaping discussions, have their views attributed to someone else, and so on. Given that philosophy is a discipline that is carried out largely through written and spoken discourse, these communicative obstacles can have profound efects.
Continuing the application of epistemological tools to concrete issues, several authors in this volume explore the intersection of epistemology and feminist perspectives. In Chapter 11, “Rape Culture and Epistemology,” Bianca Crewe and Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa focus on the question of how institutions and individuals should respond to sexual assault allegations that haven’t been established in legal settings. One tempting view, they suggest, is that institutions and individuals should be deferential to law enforcement, allowing the criminal justice system to handle the central epistemological dimensions of sexual assault allegations. However, Crewe and Ichikawa argue that it is crucial to assess this response within the broader social and political context in which sexual assault occurs, including cultural attitudes about sexual assault, women’s credibility, and misogynist assumptions about access and entitlement to women’s bodies. In particular, Crewe and Ichikawa maintain that deference to the law should be theorized within the context of rape culture, which is a cultural environment in which sexual assault and sexualized violence is an expected type of interaction. Moreover, the political and ideological afliations of legal systems themselves impact whether sexual assault is reported and the corresponding responses. For instance, Crewe and Ichikawa argue that when individuals testify that they were sexually assaulted, their testimony is ofen considered to be less reliable than most other testimony, as they are frequently regarded as either lying or deluded.
Turning to the connection between knowledge and action, Crewe and Ichikawa consider whether an argument on behalf of deference to the law might be grounded in the connection between knowledge and action, which can be captured in the connection between knowledge and reasons for action. On this view, one’s reasons constitute all and only that which one knows. Accordingly, if there is
a doubt, even one that is unwarranted, then one does not know, and hence one does not have a reason to act. By way of response, Crewe and Ichikawa argue that in cases of unwarranted doubts, it is still the case that one should know, and thus inaction is epistemically impermissible. Tus, deference to the law cannot be justifed through the connection between knowledge and action.
Afer considering and rejecting a further response drawing on pragmatic encroachment, Crewe and Ichikawa explore the complex relationship between feminist epistemology and contextualism. Contextualism about knowledge ascriptions is the view that sentences containing “knows” are context sensitive. According to Crewe and Ichikawa, a contextualist can tell a simple and plausible story about diferential standards for action in criminal contexts and other contexts, such as in a university setting: one can count as “knowing” that someone has committed a serious ofense in a conversation about how the university ought to respond to it, without counting as “knowing” it in a conversation about whether the state ought to incarcerate the perpetrator. Tey conclude by noting that, given contextualism, the fexibility of knowledge ascriptions comes along with signifcant social power, and that the decision to employ some standards rather than others is a political one. Furthermore, they argue that this power tends to be wielded in a way that protects the interests of the status quo. In this way, they conclude that their project can be seen as a continuation of the work of feminist philosophers who argue that the “view from nowhere” is in fact ofen a view from a very particular and situated location.
In Chapter 12, Aidan McGlynn explores whether feminist pornography might have a positive epistemic function in efectively countering the propagandic power of mainstream pornography in “Feminist Pornography as Feminist Propaganda, and Ideological Catch22s.” McGlynn understands pornography as sexually explicit materials that have the primary purpose of sexually arousing their audience and propaganda as media or speech that acts to spread ideology, where ideological attitudes are characteristically insensitive to evidence. McGlynn is specifcally interested in feminist pornography that aims to (i) guarantee appropriate standards of health and safety for those involved in its making, and to minimize the chances that they have been victims of human trafcking; and/or (ii) present a more egalitarian picture of gender and sexuality through, for instance, placing an emphasis on explicit consent, female sexual agency, and so on. Te central question McGlynn takes up, then, is whether feminist pornography might be an efective vehicle for a more egalitarian, positive view of human sexual relations. McGlynn argues against this use of feminist pornography, particularly the proposals made by A. W. Eaton and Catarina Dutilh Novaes, showing that they leave us in what he calls an “ideological Catch22 situation”: either feminist pornography has the power to reshape our sexual desires and attitudes, but we are lef without an explanation of how to persuade consumers of
mainstream pornography to watch feminist pornography rather than mainstream pornography prior to that reshaping; or the propagandic force of pornography is seen as lying in the way it exploits and spreads preexisting sexist ideology, leaving it a mystery how feminist pornography could bring about a shif in sexual ideology, even in principle. McGlynn concludes that mainstream pornography plays a distinctive role in the lives of its audience, and it is unclear how we can replace it with feminist pornography without censorship or some other kind of practically—and possibly morally—problematic intervention into people’s lives.
While there is a great deal of work in the philosophical literature on the nature of sexual consent, very little has been done on its epistemic dimensions. Tree authors in this volume take up this issue and, in so doing, lay the groundwork for a muchneeded expansion of our understanding of sexual consent. In Chapter 13, “Epistemic Responsibility in Sexual Coercion and SelfDefense Law,” Hallie Liberto focuses on a kind of responsibility that is epistemic in nature: the responsibility to gather information so as to be appropriately epistemically positioned to act on one’s beliefs. She then explores how to assign and respond to the adjudication of this kind of epistemic responsibility in cases of sexual coercion and selfdefense in criminal law. In particular, Liberto argues that it is problematic to assess whether those accused of sexual coercion and unjustifed killing had reasonable beliefs, or whether they acted as reasonable people would act. For instance, feminists have long noted the problems that arise when juries are asked to gauge the reasonableness of fear when applying a “reasonable man” standard and have suggested that courts appeal to a “reasonable woman” standard in determining the actus reus of criminal cases in sexual assault and coercion. However, drawing on the work of Hubin and Healey, Liberto argues that a “reasonable woman” standard will not help in the prosecution of rape cases, as a “reasonable man” standard would still need to be applied in order to establish the mens rea of sexual ofenses. Liberto then presents an alternative suggestion by Hubin and Healey, the “reasonable expectation from state” (REfS) standard, which asks: what is it reasonable for the state to expect of a person? Liberto argues that a REfS standard is preferable to the “reasonable person” standard currently used and should be adopted for adjudicating both selfdefense and sexual coercion cases. One advantage of the REfS standard is that it goes some way towards preventing racism: instead of being asked what a reasonable man would believe about a woman’s consent, for instance, the jury would be asked if the man had met the reasonable expectations of the state to be sure of the woman’s consent—expectations that would be the same whether the victim was black or white. Liberto concludes that, in contrast to Hubin and Healey, the expectations of the state need to be outlined ahead of time and be made known to the public in both sexual coercion and selfdefense cases.
In Chapter 14, “Sexual Consent and Epistemic Agency,” Jennifer Lackey examines sexual consent in the context of the widely accepted thesis that knowledge is sufcient for epistemically permissible action; that is, the view according to which if someone knows a given proposition, then it is epistemically permissible for that person to act on it. To the extent that this is denied, it is argued that either more or less than knowledge is required, such as certainty or justifed belief. In this chapter, Lackey shows that being able to act on knowledge that someone has consented to sex provides an interesting challenge to this framework. In particular, Lackey argues that someone may know that another consents to sex and yet it may still be epistemically impermissible to act on this knowledge. Tis is clearest when the knowledge of the consent in question is secondhand, rather than frsthand. When this happens, the problem is not that more, or less, than knowledge is needed to warrant action, but, rather, that a particular kind of epistemic support is required, one that involves testimony from the consentee herself. Tis is due to the fact that the consentee is uniquely positioned with respect to the question of her own consent, both agentially and epistemically. Lackey further argues, however, that it doesn’t follow from this that knowing frsthand that another consents to sex is sufcient for it to be epistemically permissible to act on this knowledge. For someone might also have background beliefs, either in general or about another in particular, that function as defeaters for such action. Tus, a single instance of testimony granting consent needs to be viewed in a broader evidential framework, one where this piece of evidence alone might not be enough to warrant action on this occasion. In this way, Lackey defends the total evidence view of the epistemology of sexual consent. Te upshot of these considerations is that determining whether sexual consent has been given, especially in light of how high the stakes can be, requires that agents be epistemically responsible, where this can go beyond what is required in standard cases of action.
In Chapter 15, “Te Epistemology of Consent,” Alexander A. Guerrero examines two diferent dimensions of consent. In Part 1 of the chapter, Guerrero focuses on the nature of consent—that is, the question of what it is for an agent, A, to consent to some state of afairs, SA. According to the attitudinal view, specifc mental attitudes are both necessary and sufcient for consent. In particular, A consents to SA if, and only if, A has an attitude of afrmative endorsement toward SA. While Guerrero doesn’t provide a defense of the attitudinal view in this chapter, he argues that reluctance to endorse it is ofen due to a failure to appreciate that another agent, B, can nonculpably act as if A consents to SA only if B justifably believes that A has an attitude of afrmative endorsement towards it. Tis leads to Part 2, where Guerrero takes a close look at the epistemological dimensions of justifable belief that another person has consented to some state of afairs. He argues that moral stakes matter when the epistemology of consent is concerned in at least one of the following two ways: (i) the moral stakes or context matter to whether B justifably believes, or knows, that A consents to SA; or
(ii) the moral stakes or context matter to whether it is morally objectionable for B to act based on justifed belief or knowledge that A consents to SA and whether B is nonculpable for acting as if “A consents to SA” is true. Guerrero goes on to show that in some cases where consent is at issue, the moral stakes are high and thus require that B possess more or stronger evidence in order to justifably believe, or nonculpably act as if, A consents. Since cases for which sexual consent and consent to medical treatment are at issue are also ones in which there are high moral stakes, Guerrero concludes that B must possess more or stronger evidence in order to justifably believe, or nonculpably act as if, A consents in these cases.
In the fnal section of this volume, epistemic dimensions of the internet, both general and specifc, are explored. In Chapter 16, “Te Internet and Epistemic Agency,” Hanna Gunn and Michael Patrick Lynch examine the connection between epistemic agency and the internet. Tey begin by identifying two conditions that are true of responsible epistemic agency: frst, responsible epistemic agents aim to develop epistemic virtues, merit, and capacities that help them to responsibly change their epistemic environment, as well as the capacities that enable them to recognize and respect these epistemic traits in others. Second, responsible epistemic agents treat other epistemic agents with a form of respect that demonstrates a willingness to learn from them. Gunn and Lynch then highlight three ways in which the internet has led to the “democratization” of knowledge. In particular, it (i) makes bodies of knowledge more widely available; (ii) makes knowledge production more inclusive; and (iii) is used in ways that expand epistemic participation, and thus enhance epistemic agency, through the development of challengespecifc prizes. At the same time, Gunn and Lynch show that the very ways in which the internet makes information and knowledge more widely available can also undermine our ability to be responsible epistemic agents and may even undermine epistemic agency itself. One way this happens is that the accessibility of information itself can lead to increased epistemic arrogance which, in turn, can give rise to testimonial injustice by unjustifably discounting the credibility of others. Since showing such respect is one of the features of being an epistemically responsible agent, epistemic arrogance can undermine responsible epistemic agency. In addition, Gunn and Lynch argue that the personalization of online spaces can unwittingly lead users into echochambers and flterbubbles and away from a diverse range of epistemic perspectives, and fake news and information pollution can make for a hostile online epistemic environment. Tis makes it difcult for online users to fulfll their epistemic obligations. Finally, Gunn and Lynch show that online anonymity can undermine both the responsible acquisition and dissemination of knowledge through testimony.
C. Ti Nguyen explores our interaction on a specifc online platform in Chapter 17, “How Twitter Gamifes Communication,” arguing that by ofering immediate, vivid, and quantifed evaluations of conversational success, Twitter
gamifes communication and, in so doing, changes the nature of the activity. A “design for communication” is the designed technology that ofers points and scores. On Nguyen’s view, “gamifcation” occurs when a player interacts with design for gamifcation and in fact adopts these points and scores as the primary motivators during the activity, that is, when the activity becomes something like a game for them. Nguyen argues that pregamifcation, the values of conversation are complex and many, involving understanding the world, transmitting information, persuading, connecting to one another, and so on. In contrast, Twitter’s scoring mechanism invites us to replace these values with another, much simpler goal: that of maximizing one’s Likes, Retweets, and Follower. As Nguyen argues, “[g]ames ofer us a momentary experience of value clarity. Tey are a balm for the existential pains of real life.” But when we gamify conversation in this way, we are imposing value clarity on a set of complex and nuanced values. Twitter scores, for instance, make salient the number of users with positive reactions, while deemphasizing the quality of any particular interaction. In this way, gamifcation instrumentalizes the goals of our reallife activities, which is problematic when the goals themselves are independently valuable. Nguyen concludes by drawing a connection between gamifcation, echo chambers, and moral outrage porn: all share a willingness to instrumentalize what shouldn’t be instrumentalized. In particular, echo chambers instrumentalize our trust, moral outrage porn instrumentalizes our morality, and gamifcation instrumentalizes our goals.
In Chapter 18, “Te Epistemic Dangers of Context Collapse Online,” Karen FrostArnold provides a close analysis of the epistemological challenges posed by context collapse in online environments and argues that virtue epistemology provides a helpful normative framework for addressing some of these problems. “Context collapse” is the blurring or merging of multiple contexts or audiences into one. For instance, Facebook users may collapse multiple contexts of social relations into one audience when they share a post with all of their Facebook friends, which may include family members, close friends, acquaintances, work colleagues, and complete strangers. Te frst epistemic challenge that FrostArnold identifes is that context collapse facilitates online harassment, which causes epistemic harm by decreasing the diversity of epistemic communities. For instance, a surreptitiously recorded lecture in a feminism course on a college campus might be shared on Reddit, leading to the trolling and harassment of the professor. Te second epistemic problem with context collapse is that it threatens the integrity of marginalized epistemic communities in which some types of true belief fourish. For instance, marginalized people may need to create their own language in which to describe their oppression. Context collapse can disrupt these epistemic communities and thereby hinder the production of knowledge. Te third epistemic challenge with context collapse is that it promotes misunderstanding. Understanding relies on background knowledge which, in turn, is ofen
context sensitive. If testimony in one context is imported to another without shared background knowledge about the setting of the conversation, the speaker and hearer, past conversations, the goals of the conversation, and so on, then the hearer may misinterpret the speaker’s utterance. FrostArnold then argues that we can cultivate and promote the epistemic virtues of trustworthiness and discretion in order to address some of these problems. When we are trustworthy, we are motivated to avoid taking advantage of the vulnerability of those who trust us and when we are discreet, we use good judgment in sharing speech, especially in a way that is attentive to the costs to others.
Veronica Ivy takes up the issue of the epistemology of anonymous assertions in Chapter 19, the fnal chapter in this volume—“Yikkity Yak, Who Said Tat? Te Epistemology of Anonymous Assertions.” According to Sanford Goldberg,3 there are three central problems with the epistemic status of anonymous assertions. First, hearers do not have access to the kind of information on which necessary credibility assessments of speakers are based. Second, and because of this, hearers lack the sort of counterfactual sensitivity to defeaters, or counterevidence, that responsible hearers need. And, fnally, since it is clear that hearers can’t hold speakers responsible for making epistemically defective assertions, speakers lose their motivation to avoid making them. Ivy argues that Goldberg’s third concern depends on a “punitive model of assertoric behavior.” According to this model, speakers generally assert properly only because hearers have the ability to hold speakers accountable for their assertions and are able to punish them in some sense when they assert improperly. Ivy argues against this model by showing that we assert truthfully even when there are no punitive disincentives for lying, and we feel badly for asserting falsely even when there are no punitive consequences. In this way, Ivy claims that it is typical for speakers to exhibit prosocial behaviors—speakers tend to experience an internal duty of honesty and truthfulness and this is what drives assertoric practices. In contrast to Goldberg, then, Ivy maintains that speakers should adopt a default attitude of trust toward assertions, including those that are anonymous. Tis trust is defeasible: if speakers have strong positive reasons to doubt the assertion, then these reasons serve as defeaters. However, Ivy argues that anonymity itself is not a defeater and, thus, that doubting anonymous assertions is the exception, not the rule. Finally, while using the social media platform Yik Yak as a model—where fully anonymous unknown assertions are made—Ivy takes up Goldberg’s frst two concerns and argues that hearers can form justifed, testimonybased beliefs from anonymous assertions on either of the main views in the epistemology of testimony.
3 Goldberg (2013, 2015).
References
Dotson, Kristie (2011). “Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing.” Hypatia 26: 236–57.
Fricker, Miranda (2007). Epistemic Injustice: Power & the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Goldberg, Sanford (2013). “Anonymous Assertions.” Episteme 10: 134–51.
Goldberg, Sanford (2015). Assertion: On the Philosophical Signifcance of Assertoric Speech. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
