What are the proper epistemic aims of social media sites? A great deal of social media critique presupposes an exceptionalist attitude, according to which social media is either uniquely good, or uniquely bad for our collective knowledge-generating practices. Exceptionalism about social media is troublesome, both because it leads to oversimplistic narratives, and because it prevents us making relevant comparisons to other epistemic systems. The goal of this chapter is to offer an anti-exceptionalist account of the epistemic aims of social media. (...) I will argue that social systems (and epistemic institutions in general) ought to pursue three distinct epistemic goals: promoting good epistemic outcomes for users, realising epistemically good institutional features, and achieving structural epistemic justice. Although these goals are often mutually supportive, I will consider a number of cases in which these values conflict. This means that there are epistemic dilemmas about how to design social media platforms (and other kinds of epistemic system) which can only be resolved by appealing to ethical considerations. This discussion highlights that just as in the political realm, there is no such thing as a neutral epistemic system. (shrink)

Behavioral economists have proposed that people are subject to an IKEA effect, whereby they attach greater value to products they make for themselves, like IKEA furniture, than to otherwise indiscernible goods. Recently, cognitive psychologist Tom Stafford has suggested there may be an epistemic analog to this, a kind of epistemic IKEA effect. In this paper, I use Stafford’s suggestion to defend a certain thesis about epistemic value. Specifically, I argue that there is a distinctive epistemic value in being an active (...) producer of epistemic goods, like true belief, as opposed to just a passive recipient of such goods, and that because of this it can be rationally permissible to sacrifice truth in a certain way for the sake of this other value. In particular, it is rationally permissible for an epistemic agent to prefer a belief set that contains fewer overall truths but more truths obtained through the agent’s own intellectual labor, in something like the way that a practical agent might prefer furniture they have made through their own manual labor to inherently superior furniture made by someone else. In making my case, I draw on Ernest Sosa’s discussion of causation and praxical epistemic values, and Jennifer Lackey’s testimony-based criticism of the credit view of knowledge. After defending my thesis about epistemic value, I further clarify it by connecting it to the focus of Stafford’s discussion, conspiracy theorists. (shrink)

Behavioral economists have proposed that people are subject to an IKEA effect, whereby they attach greater value to products they make for themselves, like IKEA furniture, than to otherwise indiscernible goods. Recently, cognitive psychologist Tom Stafford has suggested there may be an epistemic analog to this, a kind of epistemic IKEA effect. In this paper, I use Stafford’s suggestion to defend a certain thesis about epistemic value. Specifically, I argue that there is a distinctive epistemic value in being an active (...) producer of epistemic goods, like true belief, as opposed to just a passive recipient of such goods, and that because of this it can be rationally permissible to sacrifice truth in a certain way for the sake of this other value. In particular, it is rationally permissible for an epistemic agent to prefer a belief set that contains fewer overall truths but more truths obtained through the agent’s own intellectual labor, in something like the way that a practical agent might prefer furniture they have made through their own manual labor to inherently superior furniture made by someone else. In making my case, I draw on Ernest Sosa’s discussion of causation and praxical epistemic values, and Jennifer Lackey’s testimony-based criticism of the credit view of knowledge. After defending my thesis about epistemic value, I further clarify it by connecting it to the focus of Stafford’s discussion, conspiracy theorists. (shrink)

Barry Allen defends a highly unorthodox and compact account of humans and their evolutionary adventure, which comprises inter alia epistemological, alethic, technological, and artistic aspects. His anthropocentric view distinguishes itself from traditional forms of realism and anti-realism by virtue of its dynamic and non-reductionist character. Allen adopts a certain perspective of techno-artistic and onto-epistemic construction, which we dub “panartifactualism,” claiming principally that nothing at all escapes the artifactualizing power of human beings. We maintain that, under closer scrutiny, various dimensions of (...) Allen’s account conflict and that his philosophical approach to “being” and “making” ultimately gives rise to a rather problematic ontological picture. Having pointed out its shortcomings and untenable results, we spell out the conceptual contours of a contemporary and far more attractive version of realism which suffers neither from the issues faced by views like panartifactualism nor from the obvious difficulties of noumenalist realism justifiably opposed by Allen. (shrink)

In the article I argue that intellectual arrogance can be an individual, collective and even corporate vice. I show that arrogance is in all these cases underpinned by defensive positive evaluations of epistemic features of the evaluator in the service of buttressing its illegitimate social dominance. Individual arrogance as superbia or as hubris stems from attitudes biased by the motive of self-enhancement. Collective arrogance is underpinned by positive defensive attitudes to a one’s social identity that seeks to maintain its unwarranted (...) social dominance. Finally, corporations are arrogant when their attitudes are the aggregation of the arrogant dispositions of its managers or when these corporations have inherited structures and policies that are defensive of its illegitimately dominant social status. (shrink)

We present a novel model of individual people, online posts, and media platforms to explain the online spread of epistemically toxic content such as fake news and suggest possible responses. We argue that a combination of technical features, such as the algorithmically curated feed structure, and social features, such as the absence of stable social-epistemic norms of posting and sharing in social media, is largely responsible for the unchecked spread of epistemically toxic content online. Sharing constitutes a distinctive communicative act, (...) governed by a dedicated norm and motivated to a large extent by social identity maintenance. But confusion about this norm and its lack of inherent epistemic checks lead readers to misunderstand posts, attribute excess or insufficient credibility to posts, and allow posters to evade epistemic accountability—all contributing to the spread of epistemically toxic content online. This spread can be effectively addressed if people and platforms add significantly more context to shared posts and platforms nudge people to develop and follow recognized epistemic norms of posting and sharing. (shrink)

Paulo Freire is undeniably a prominent figure who greatly influenced 21st century higher education. More specifically, architectural education been greatly affected by Freire’s thinking in relation to producing a design project with dialogue and consciousness. This study aims to implement Freire’s thoughts in contemporary design studios, where the core courses of architectural education occur. This study employs a narrative methodology and in-depth interviews with third-year students from the design studios of two universities, one public and another private. The study investigates (...) the impact of the concept of ‘dialogue’ on student creativity, and ‘banking education’ thought of Freire to determine how this idea affects students’ consciousness of their learning process. Therefore, this research attempts to apply three of Freire’s key thoughts that have been discussed in his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed: ‘dialogue’, ‘consciousness’, and ‘banking education’. As a result, banking education applied by local-experienced instructors in the public university has confused students when applying given information to the theoretical part of their projects, which directed them to show fewer creative concepts. On the other hand, the students had greater consciousness of their learning process, awareness of their strengths and weaknesses in regard to the concepts of their design projects, and involvement in their classes when they felt a dialogue by the abroad-experienced instructors in the private university. This study shows that architectural education in that region requires a serious consciousness of Freirean theory. (shrink)

It is well known that on the Internet, computer algorithms track our website browsing, clicks, and search history to infer our preferences, interests, and goals. The nature of this algorithmic tracking remains unclear, however. Does it involve what many cognitive scientists and philosophers call ‘mindreading’, i.e., an epistemic capacity to attribute mental states to people to predict, explain, or influence their actions? Here I argue that it does. This is because humans are in a particular way embedded in the process (...) of algorithmic tracking. Specifically, if we endorse common conditions for extended cognition, then human mindreading (by website operators and users) is often literally extended into, that is, partly realized by, not merely causally coupled to, computer systems performing algorithmic tracking. The view that human mindreading extends outside the body into computers in this way has significant ethical advantages. It points to new conceptual ways to reclaim our autonomy and privacy in the face of increasing risks of computational control and online manipulation. These benefits speak in favor of endorsing the notion of extended mindreading. (shrink)

This article provides a conceptual clarification of the complementary relationship between teachers’ research literacy and their role-based agency. In many countries, teachers are increasingly expected to actively use and develop research. However, without taking account of teachers’ distinct conditions of agency, this expectation may weaken rather than strengthen the profession. Top-down mechanisms that push teachers to follow rigid evidence-based procedures diminish their professional autonomy. At the same time, conceptual research on teachers’ agency has developed new tools for promoting research literacy (...) in a way that is conducive to professional autonomy. By conceptualizing research literacy as shaped by polyphonic agency, the article clarifies this field to support future teachers in terms of teacher education and working life. The article also articulates strategies for enhancing agency, such as raising awareness of the relevant standards, responding to accountability mechanisms, and developing teacher education programs. (shrink)

The way digital information technologies work and, more specifically, the possibilities for action that technological devices offer to us affect our processes of political belief formation. In particular, there seems to be a close connection between our digital affordances and the increase of the sort of polarization that threatens the proper functioning of democracy. In this paper, we analyze whether the type of polarization linked to the use of digital technologies, and which endangers the health of public deliberation, has to (...) do with the adoption of beliefs whose contents are increasingly extreme—extremism—or, on the contrary, has more to do with increasing our credence in the core beliefs of our political identity—radicalism. (shrink)