This is an introduction to the volume The Epistemology of Group Disagreement (Routledge, forthcoming), (eds.) F. Broncano-Berrocal and J.A. Carter.

Group polarization—roughly, the tendency of groups to incline towards more extreme positions than initially held by their individual members— has been rigorously studied by social psychol- ogists, though in a way that has overlooked important philosophical questions about this phenomenon which remain unexplored. Two such salient questions are metaphysical and epistemological, respectively. From a metaphysical point of view, can group polarization, understood as an epistemic feature of a group, be reduced to epistemic features of its individual members? Relatedly, from an (...) epistemological point of view, is group polarization best understood as a kind of cognitive bias or rather in terms of intellectual vice? This book taxonomizes this possibility space by comparing four models which combine potential answers to the metaphysical and epistemological questions. The models we consider are: group polarization as a collective bias, a summation of individual epistemic vices; a summation of individual biases; and a collective epistemic vice. We defend a collective vice model of group polarization over the competing alternatives. (shrink)

This paper proposes a methodological turn for the epistemology of disagreement, away from focusing on highly idealized cases of peer disagreement and towards an increased focus on disagreement simpliciter. We propose and develop a normative framework for evaluating all cases of disagreement as to whether something is the case independently of their composition—i.e., independently of whether they are between peers or not. The upshot will be a norm of disagreement on which what one should do when faced with a disagreeing (...) party is to improve the epistemic properties of one’s doxastic attitude or, alternatively, hold steadfast. (shrink)

Winning a lottery, being hit by a stray bullet, or surviving a plane crash, all are instances of a mundane phenomenon: luck. Mundane as it is, the concept of luck nonetheless plays a pivotal role in central areas of philosophy, either because it is the key element of widespread philosophical theses or because it … Continue reading Luck →.

A notorious objection to robust virtue epistemology—the view that an agent knows a proposition if and only if her cognitive success is because of her intellectual virtues—is that it fails to eliminate knowledge-undermining luck. Modest virtue epistemologists agree with robust virtue epistemologists that if someone knows, then her cognitive success must be because of her intellectual virtues, but they think that more is needed for knowledge. More specifically, they introduce independently motivated modal anti-luck principles in their accounts to amend the (...) problem of eliminating luck—this makes their views instances of impure virtue epistemology. The aim of the paper is to argue, firstly, that such a move lacks adequate motivation; secondly, that the resulting impure accounts equally fail to handle knowledge-undermining luck. On a more positive note, these results bolster a more orthodox virtue-theoretic approach to knowledge that assigns a fundamental explanatory role to the notion of ability. In this sense, the paper also sketches an account of ability and a corresponding account of knowledge that explains how success from ability is incompatible with success from luck. (shrink)

This essay explains the notion of luck in terms of risk. It starts by distinguishing two senses of risk, the risk that an event has of occurring and the risk at which an agent is with respect to an event. It cashes out the former in modal terms and the latter in terms of lack of control. It then argues that the presence or absence of event-relative risk marks a distinction between two types of luck or fortune commonly overlooked in (...) ordinary usage of the terms “luck” and “fortune.” After offering a detailed account of the notion of control, the essay advances a new version of the so-called lack of control account of luck: lucky events are events with respect to which one is at risk and hence events over which one lacks control in the specified way. Finally, it argues that its account steers clear of counterexamples to the lack of control account of luck. (shrink)

What is the nature of knowledge? A popular answer to that long-standing question comes from robust virtue epistemology, whose key idea is that knowing is just a matter of succeeding cognitively—i.e., coming to believe a proposition truly—due to an exercise of cognitive ability. Versions of robust virtue epistemology further developing and systematizing this idea offer different accounts of the relation that must hold between an agent’s cognitive success and the exercise of her cognitive abilities as well as of the very (...) nature of those abilities. This paper aims to give a new robust virtue epistemological account of knowledge based on a different understanding of the nature and structure of the kind of abilities that give rise to knowledge. (shrink)

In “Knowledge Under Threat” (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 2012), Tomas Bogardus proposes a counterexample to the safety condition for knowledge. Bogardus argues that the case demonstrates that unsafe knowledge is possible. I argue that the case just corroborates the well-known requirement that modal conditions like safety must be relativized to methods of belief formation. I explore several ways of relativizing safety to belief-forming methods and I argue that none is adequate: if methods were individuated in those ways, safety would fail (...) to explain several much-discussed cases. I then propose a plausible externalist principle of method individuation. On the one hand, relativizing safety to belief-forming methods in the way suggested allows the defender of safety to account for the cases. On the other hand, it shows that the target known belief of Bogardus’s example is safe. Finally, I offer a diagnosis of a common error about the kind of cases that are typically considered potential counterexamples to the necessity of the epistemic condition: proponents of the alleged counterexamples mistake a strong condition that I call super-safety for safety. (shrink)

This essay explains the notion of luck in terms of risk. It starts by distinguishing two senses of risk, the risk that an event has of occurring and the risk at which an agent is with respect to an event. It cashes out the former in modal terms and the latter in terms of lack of control. It then argues that the presence or absence of event-relative risk marks a distinction between two types of luck or fortune commonly overlooked in (...) ordinary usage of the terms “luck” and “fortune.” After offering a detailed account of the notion of control, the essay advances a new version of the so-called lack of control account of luck: lucky events are events with respect to which one is at risk and hence events over which one lacks control in the specified way. Finally, it argues that its account steers clear of counterexamples to the lack of control account of luck. (shrink)

An explanatorily powerful approach to the modal dimension of knowledge is Robert Nozick’s idea that knowledge stands in a tracking relation to the world. However, pinning down a specific modal condition has proved elusive. In this paper, I offer a diagnosis and a positive proposal. The root of the problem, I argue, is the unquestioned assumption that tracking is a matter of directly preserving conformity between what is believed and what is the case in certain possible worlds. My proposal is (...) that what we track is whether the conditions for belief formation are appropriate in such worlds. Accordingly, we indirectly track the truth by ensuring that we only use our methods of belief formation in conditions that make it likely that conformity is preserved between what is believed and what is the case. (shrink)

The lottery problem is the problem of explaining why mere reflection on the long odds that one will lose the lottery does not yield knowledge that one will lose. More generally, it is the problem of explaining why true beliefs merely formed on the basis of statistical evidence do not amount to knowledge. Some have thought that the lottery problem can be solved by appeal to a violation of the safety principle for knowledge, i.e., the principle that if S knows (...) that p, not easily would S have believed that p without p being the case. Against the standard safety‐based solution, I argue that understanding safe belief as belief that directly covaries with the truth of what is believed in a suitably defined set of possible worlds forces safety theorists to make a series of theoretical choices that ultimately prevent a satisfactory solution to the problem. In this way, I analyze several safety principles that result from such choices—the paper thus gives valuable insights into the nature of safety—and explain why none solves the lottery problem, including their inability to explain away Gettierized lottery cases. On a more positive note, I show that there is a viable solution in terms of safety if we get rid of the unquestioned assumption that safe beliefs directly track the truth. The alternative is a conception of safe belief according to which what safe beliefs directly track is the appropriateness of the circumstances and, indirectly, the truth. The resulting safety principle, I argue, explains why mere statistical evidence is not a safe source of knowledge. (shrink)

Suppose an inquiring group wants to let a certain view stand as the group's view. But there’s a problem: the individuals in that group do not initially all agree with one another about what the correct view is. What should the group do, given that it wants to settle on a single answer, in the face of this kind of intragroup disagreement? Should the group members deliberate and exchange evidence and then take a vote? Or, given the well-known ways that (...) evidence exchange can go wrong, e.g., by exacerbating pre-existing biases, compromising the independence of individual judgments, etc., should the group simply take a vote without deliberating at all? While this question has multiple dimensions to it—including ethical and political dimensions—we approach the question through an epistemological lens. In particular, we investigate to what extent it is epistemically advantageous and disadvantageous that groups whose members disagree over some issue use deliberation in comparison to voting as a way to reach collective agreements. Extant approaches in the literature to this ‘deliberation versus voting’ comparison typically assume there is some univocal answer as to which group strategy is best, epistemically. We think this assumption is mistaken. We approach the deliberation versus voting question from a pluralist perspective, in that we hold that a group’s collective endeavor to solve an internal dispute can be aimed at different, albeit not necessarily incompatible, epistemic goals, namely the goals of truth, evidence, understanding, and epistemic justice. Different answers to our guiding question, we show, correspond with different epistemic goals. We conclude by exploring several ways to mitigate the potential epistemic disadvantages of solving intragroup disagreement by means of deliberation in relation to each epistemic goal. (shrink)

In a recent article in this journal, Wolfgang Freitag argues that Gettier-style cases that are based on the notion of “distant” epistemic luck cannot be ruled out as cases of knowledge by modal conditions such as safety or sensitivity. I argue that safety and sensitivity can be easily fixed and that Freitag provides no convincing reason for the existence of “distant” epistemic luck.

In what sense do groups have beliefs? This paper provides a novel answer to this question by combining pluralism and summativism about group belief. The resulting view is called pluralistic summativism. The paper starts by critically assessing the three main debates in the literature—the disputes between monism and pluralism, summativism and non-summativism, and believism and rejectionism—and draws a general methodological lesson for the summativism/non-summativism debate—namely, that intuitions about cases alone are not enough to adjudicate between views of group belief, and (...) that the debate would benefit from a reflective equilibrium approach. All of this serves as motivation for the novel pluralist and summative view, which has some advantages, for example, when it comes to moral evaluation. (shrink)

In a series of papers, Jesper Kallestrup and Duncan Pritchard argue that the thesis that knowledge is a cognitive success because of cognitive ability (robust virtue epistemology) is incompatible with the idea that whether or not an agent’s true belief amounts to knowledge can significantly depend upon factors beyond her cognitive agency (epistemic dependence). In particular, certain purely modal facts seem to preclude knowledge, while the contribution of other agents’ cognitive abilities seems to enable it. Kallestrup and Pritchard’s arguments are (...) targeted against views that hold that all it takes to manifest one’s cognitive agency is to properly exercise one’s belief-forming abilities. I offer an account of the notion of cognitive ability according to which our epistemic resources are not exhausted by abilities to produce true beliefs as outputs, but also include dispositions to stop belief-formation when actual or modal circumstances are not suitable for it (precautionary cognitive abilities). Knowledge, I argue, can be accordingly conceived as a cognitive success that is also due to the latter. The resulting version of robust virtue epistemology helps explain how purely modal facts as well as other agents’ cognitive abilities may have a bearing on the manifestation of one’s cognitive agency, which shows in turn that robust virtue epistemology and epistemic dependence are not incompatible after all. (shrink)

In almost any domain of endeavour, successes can be attained through skill, but also by dumb luck. An archer’s wildest shots occasionally hit the target. Against enormous odds, some fair lottery tickets happen to win. The same goes in the case of purely cognitive or intellectual endeavours. As inquirers, we characteristically aim to believe truly rather than falsely, and to attain such standings as knowledge and understanding. Sometimes such aims are attained with commendable competence, but of course, not always. Epistemic (...) luck is a species of luck which features in circumstances where a given cognitive success—in the broadest sense, some form of cognitive contact with reality—is attained in a manner that is interestingly lucky—viz., chancy, accidental or beyond our control. In the paradigmatic case, this involves the formation of a belief that is luckily true, and where the subject plausibly deserves little credit for having gotten things right. Although the literature on epistemic luck has focused predominantly on the relationship between luck and propositional knowledge—which is widely taken to exclude luck—epistemologists are increasingly exploring the compatibility of epistemic luck with other kinds of epistemic standings, such as knowledge-how and understanding. (shrink)

The main lesson from Gettier cases is that while one cannot know a proposition by luck, one can hold a lucky true belief justifiedly. Possibly because the latter is taken for granted, the relationship between epistemic justification and epistemic luck has been less discussed. The paper investigates whether luck can undermine doxastic justification, and if so, how and to what extent. It is argued that, as in the case of knowledge, beliefs can fall short of justification due to luck. Moreover, (...) it is argued that justification-undermining luck is a problem for both internalist and externalist conceptions of justification. Accordingly, it is shown that epistemic luck is a more widespread phenomenon than many in epistemology commonly assume. (shrink)

The traditional view of lying says that lying is a matter of intending to deceive others by making statements that one believes to be false. Jennifer Lackey has recently defended the following version of the traditional view: A lies to B just in case (i) A states that p to B, (ii) A believes that p is false and (iii) A intends to be deceptive to B in stating that p. I argue that, despite all the virtues that Lackey ascribes (...) to her view, conditions (i), (ii) and (iii) are not sufficient for lying. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to explore the hypothesis that luck is a risk-involving phenomenon. I start by explaining why this hypothesis is prima facie plausible in view of the parallelisms between luck and risk. I then distinguish three ways to spell it out: in probabilistic terms, in modal terms, and in terms of lack of control. Before evaluating the resulting accounts, I explain how the idea that luck involves risk is compatible with the fact that risk concerns unwanted (...) events whereas luck can concern both wanted and unwanted events. I turn to evaluating the modal and probabilistic views and argue, firstly, that they fail to account for the connection between risk and bad luck; secondly, that they also fail to account for the connection between risk and good luck. Finally, I defend the lack of control view. In particular, I argue that it can handle the objections to the probabilistic and modal accounts and that it can explain how degrees of luck and risk covary. (shrink)

According to Alan Millar, justified beliefs are well-founded beliefs. Millar cashes out the notion of well-foundedness in terms of having an adequate reason to believe something and believing it for that reason. To make his account of justified belief compatible with perceptual justification he appeals to the notion of recognitional ability. It is argued that, due to the fact that Millar’s is a knowledge-first view, his appeal to recognitional abilities fails to offer an explanatory account of familiar cases in the (...) literature and, as a consequence, of the notion of perceptual justification. (shrink)

I argue that Duncan Pritchard’s anti-luck virtue epistemology is insufficient for knowledge. I show that Pritchard fails to achieve the aim that motivates his adoption of a virtue-theoretic condition in the first place: to guarantee the appropriate direction of fit that known beliefs have. Finally, I examine whether other virtue-theoretic accounts are able to explain what I call the direction of fit problem.

Under what conditions is a group belief resulting from deliberation constitutive of group knowledge? What kinds of competences must a deliberating group manifest when settling a question so that the resulting collective belief can be considered group knowledge? In this paper, we provide an answer to the second question that helps make progress on the first question. In particular, we explain the epistemic normativity of deliberation-based group belief in terms of a truth norm and an evidential norm, introduce a virtue-reliabilist (...) condition on deliberative group knowledge, and provide an account and a taxonomy of the types of group competences that are necessary for this type of collective knowledge. (shrink)

A platitude in epistemology is that an individual’s belief does not qualify as knowledge if it is true by luck. Individuals, however, are not the only bearers of knowledge. Many epistemologists agree that groups can also possess knowledge in a way that is genuinely collective. If groups can know, it is natural to think that, just as true individual beliefs fall short of knowledge due to individual epistemic luck, true collective beliefs may fall short of knowledge because of collective epistemic (...) luck. This paper argues, first, that the dominant view of epistemic luck in the literature, the modal view, does not yield a satisfactory account of lucky collective beliefs. Second, it argues that collective epistemic luck is better explained in terms of groups lacking forms of control over collective belief formation that are specific to the different procedures for forming collective beliefs. One of the main implications of this, we will argue, is that groups whose beliefs are formed via internal deliberation are more vulnerable to knowledge-undermining collective luck than groups that form their beliefs via non-deliberative methods, such as non-deliberative anonymous voting. The bottom line is that the greater exposure to knowledge-undermining luck that deliberation gives rise to provides a reason for thinking that non-deliberative methods of group belief formation have greater epistemic value. (shrink)

This paper critically assesses Sosa’s normative framework for performances as well as its application to epistemology. We first develop a problem for one of Sosa’s central theses in the general theory of performance normativity according to which performances attain fully desirable status if and only if they are fully apt. More specifically, we argue that given Sosa’s account of full aptness according to which a performance is fully apt only if safe from failure, this thesis can’t be true. We then (...) embark on a rescue mission on behalf of Sosa and work towards a weakened account of full aptness. The key idea is to countenance a distinction between negligible and non-negligible types of risk and to develop an account of full aptness according to which even performances that are endangered by risk can be fully apt, so long as the risk is of a negligible type. While this alternative account of full aptness solves the problem we developed for Sosa earlier on, there is also bad news for Sosa. When applied to epistemology, the envisaged treatment of barn façade cases as cases in which the agent falls short of fully apt belief will no longer work. We show that, as a result, Sosa faces a new version of a familiar dilemma for virtue epistemology. Either he construes full aptness as strong enough to get barn façade cases right in which case his view will run right into the problem we develop. Or else he construes full aptness as weak enough to avoid this problem but then he will not be able to deal with barn façade cases in the way envisaged. (shrink)

In a recent contribution to this journal, Fernando Broncano-Berrocal defends the safety conception of knowledge against my counterexamples in Freitag 2014 by adding a new clause to the safety condition. In this brief reply, I argue that Broncano-Berrocal's modification cannot be plausibly understood as a natural development of the original safety idea and that, moreover, the resulting account of knowledge can be refuted by a slight alteration of my original examples.

Previous research suggests a strong association of health indicators with self-report ability emotional intelligence and self-report mixed EI, but a weak or moderate association with performance-based ability EI measures. The size of the association for ability EI may be inaccurately estimated, because there has not been enough research on the relationship of ability EI to health outcomes to allow moderator analyses in meta-analyses. Therefore the present review aimed to synthesize results specifically from studies on the relationship of performance-based ability EI (...) with depression and well-being across adult populations in different settings. We found that maximum-performance measures of ability EI are associated negatively with depression and positively with well-being, and that these associations are moderated and mediated by several factors, including gender and self-report EI. Our analysis highlights limitations in the evidence base and leads to recommendations for future research and for ability EI-based training programs. (shrink)

This article aims to illustrate the development of physiognomy following one of its central themes: moral characterisation. This work deals with the origins of the discipline until the proliferation of works that, during the 16th and 17th centuries, approached the so-called «passions of the soul» from such seemingly disparate points of view as philosophy, optics, comparative anatomy, astrology and medicine. To conclude, two opposite perspectives on the treatment of emotions or «passions of the soul» are discussed: one by René Descartes (...) and another by philosopher-physician Marin Cureau de La Chambre. (shrink)

This article aims to illustrate the development of physiognomy following one of its central themes: moral characterisation. This work deals with the origins of the discipline until the proliferation of works that, during the 16th and 17th centuries, approached the so-called «passions of the soul» from such seemingly disparate points of view as philosophy, optics, comparative anatomy, astrology and medicine. To conclude, two opposite perspectives on the treatment of emotions or «passions of the soul» are discussed: one by René Descartes (...) and another by philosopher-physician Marin Cureau de La Chambre. (shrink)

Este artículo reconstruye algunas líneas fundamentales que componen el programa filosófico-político del ordoliberalismo y su impacto en el proceso de integración europea. En él, se analizan las consecuencias éticas y políticas de las ideas ordoliberales relativas al papel del Estado y la función del mercado a través de sus figuras y nociones claves. Además, se elabora un diagnóstico de la matriz ordoliberal que inspira la política de la Unión Europea desde la perspectiva de un nuevo constitucionalismo disciplinario cuyo objetivo es (...) desvincular las políticas nacionales del control democrático y social mediante su atribución a marcos jurídicos de carácter supranacionales. (shrink)

This commentary explores the use of interaction between moral heuristics and emotional intelligence (EI). The main insight presented is that the quality of moral decisions is very sensitive to emotions, and hence this may lead us to a better understanding of the role of emotional abilities in moral choices. In doing so, we consider how individual differences (specifically, EI) are related to moral decisions. We summarize evidence bearing on some of the ways in which EI might moderate framing effects in (...) different moral tasks such as “the Asian disease problem” and other more real-life problems like “a divorce decision.”. (shrink)

Abstract(1) There is enough contradictory evidence regarding the role of base rates in category learning to confirm the nonexistence of biases in such learning. (2) It is not always possible to activate statistical reasoning through frequentist representation. (3) It is necessary to use the concept of systematic processing in reconsidering the published work on biases.

The sexual double standard refers to the acceptance of different criteria to assess the same sexual behavior in men and women. To date, the few studies that have addressed the relationship between SDS and sexual satisfaction have obtained inconclusive results. In addition, no study has analyzed sexual satisfaction in people who maintain different forms of adherence to the SDS. This study establishes three SDS typologies of adherence in two areas of sexual behavior to examine the predictive capacity of personal variables, (...) interpersonal variables and social variables in sexual satisfaction. A sample of 1194 heterosexual adults aged between 18 and 87 years, who had been in a relationship for more than 6 months, was evaluated. In men, the highest sexual satisfaction levels were obtained in the egalitarian typology in the sexual freedom area. In women, no significant differences were found between the typologies of adherence to the SDS. Regression models showed that relationship satisfaction was the main predictor of sexual satisfaction in all the typologies in both men and women. In addition, the predictive relationship of personal variables with sexual satisfaction varied according to gender and the SDS adherence type. The results show the importance of studying sexual satisfaction by taking into account not only the differences between men and women. Furthermore, it is essential to consider other differences between people; for example, the difference that derives from the way of psychologically internalizing attitude toward the SDS. (shrink)

La epistemología política es un ámbito de investigación en progresiva construcción que se sitúa en la intersección de la filosofía política y de la epistemología, que, quizás por su reciente aparición en la literatura académica, tiene más un aire de familia, que muestran las colecciones de temas (injusticia epistémica, ignorancia estructural, democracia y expertos) que una construcción conceptual que dé cuenta de tal intersección de lo político y lo epistemológico. Este trabajo propone una explicación de este espacio de confluencia y (...) lo entiende como la interacción (positiva y negativa) de las posiciones sociales y cognitivas de los agentes. En este espacio, las demandas de justicia y conocimiento se influyen reforzándose o debilitándose. La dinámica común (justicia-conocimiento) es lo que constituye este campo de investigación en el que la diversidad de temas que han sido tratados hasta el momento son expresiones de las situaciones y circunstancias sociales en las que las virtudes de la justicia y el conocimiento se constriñen mutuamente. (shrink)

In this article, we focus on the link between the new populisms and the crisis of neoliberal capitalism, as well as its post-democratic forms of governance, in the context of digital politics and its social effects, such as the intense polarisation of public life or the distrust of citizens towards traditional forms of politics. Brexit is a paradigmatic case that encapsulates all of these problems and prompts us to think about how philosophy can challenge the way we understand contemporary political (...) coordinates, modes of socialisation, or democratic action. The weakness of our deliberative democracies and the undermining of the bonds, interaction, and decision-making within our civil society seem to have found a compensatory function in the digital world. By carrying out a philosophical-political and film analysis of Brexit: The Uncivil War ; we would like to focus specifically on how digital media foster the conditions for the success of a populist moment like Brexit. (shrink)

Diabetes has been associated with affective disorders which complicate the management of the disease. Emotional intelligence, or the ability to perceive, facilitate, understand, and regulate emotions, has shown to be a protective factor of emotional disorders in general population. The main objective of this study was to systematically review the role of the EI construct in Type 1 and Type 2 diabetics and to observe how EI is related to biological and psychological variables. Comprehensive searches were conducted in PubMed, Scopus, (...) PsycInfo, and Cochrane without time limitations, for studies examining the link between diabetes and EI. A total of 12 eligible studies were selected according to the inclusion criteria. We divided the results into four sections: EI and hemoglobin glycosylated, EI training effects, differences in EI between persons with diabetes and without diabetes, and EI and psychological adjustment and well-being. The results showed negative correlations between EI and HbA1c, positive effects of EI training on quality of life, anxiety, and glycemic control, no differences in EI between people with diabetes and healthy individuals, and, finally, negative correlations between EI and different psychological variables such as diabetes-related anxiety and distress, and positive correlations with quality of life, well-being, and marital satisfaction. This systematic review offers a starting point for a theoretical and practical understanding of the role played by EI in the management of diabetes and reveals that EI is a promising protective factor for biological and psychological variables in this population. (shrink)

I propose to consider the interpersonal character of testimony as a kind of social bond created by the mutual intention of sharing knowledge. The paper explores the social mechanism that supports this mutual intention starting from an initial situation of modelling the other’s epistemic perspective. Accepting testimony as a joint action creates epistemic duties and responsibilities and the eventual success can be considered as a genuine achievement at the social level of epistemology. Trust is presented here as the symptom that (...) both parties are involved in such a social bond. (shrink)