Ephecticism is the tendency towards suspension of belief. Epistemology often focuses on the error of believing when one ought to doubt. The converse error—doubting when one ought to believe—is relatively underexplored. This essay examines the errors of undue doubt. I draw on the relevant alternatives framework to diagnose and remedy undue doubts about rape accusations. Doubters tend to invoke standards for belief that are too demanding, for example, and underestimate how farfetched uneliminated error possibilities are. They mistake seeing (...) how incriminating evidence is compatible with innocence for a reason to withhold judgement. Rape accusations help illuminate the causes and normativity of doubt. I propose a novel kind of epistemic injustice, for example, wherein patterns of unwarranted attention to farfetched error possibilities can cause those error possibilities to become relevant. Widespread unreasonable doubt thus renders doubt reasonable and makes it harder to know rape accusations. Finally, I emphasise that doubt is typically a conservative force and I argue that the relevant alternatives framework helps defend against pernicious doubt-mongers. (shrink)

Through the lens of a neologism, sociocide, the killing of society, Keith Doubt provides persuasive evidence of the social, political, and human consequences of today’s wars, focusing on war crimes, scapegoating, torture, and capitalism.

This study examines the ritualized character of crimes against humanity in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Encompassing a victim, a victimizer, and a witness, degradation ceremonies structured the activity of what is euphemistically called ethnic cleansing. The observing world played the role of witness, which became a perpetuating component of the ritual.The discussion leads to the formulation of evil as the degradation of not only an individual human being but also humanity itself.

This paper provides a phenomenological account of the writing of a young woman diagnosed with schizophrenia. The method of interpretation is to put ourselves in the place of the author drawing upon a combination of sympathy, reason, common-sense, experience, and an intersubjective world, common to us all (Schutz, 1945: 536). The result is the recognition of the person as also capable of putting herself in the place of others so as to understand their behavior. This role-taking success identifies the limits (...) of the current sociological understanding of insanity's significance in social interaction as an instance of role-taking failure (Rosenberg, 1992).The very appearance of a piece of writing often permits one to recognize the presence of schizophrenia. The use of space may be quite bizarre. The varying margins betray the writer's changing mood. The letter may start at the bottom or side of the paper or very close to the top .. (shrink)

The weaponizing of scientific expertise to oppose regulation has been extensively studied. However, the relevant studies, belonging to the emerging discipline of agnotology, remain focused on the analysis of empirical corruption: of misinformation, doubt mongering, and other practices that cynically deploy expertise to render audiences ignorant of empirical facts. This paper explores the wrongful deployment of expertise beyond empirical corruption. To do so, I develop a broader framework of morally subversive expertise, building on recent work in political philosophy (...) (Howard, 2016). Expertise is subversive if it sets up its audience to fail morally, either intentionally or negligently. I distinguish three modes of subversive expertise: empirical subversion (the focus of agnotology), normative subversion and motivational subversion. Drawing on these distinctions, I offer a revisionary account of the Trump Administration’s regulatory science as a case study. I show that the Trump Administration’s use of expertise to dismantle climate regulation, contra the standard charge, cannot be explained using the resources of agnotology alone: the Administration produced highly reliable climate assessments, detailing the risks of climate change, candidly admitting the harms of its proposed policies, and still successfully deployed these findings to justify massive climate deregulation. The lesson of the analysis is that dismissing the expertise that underpins climate deregulation as empirically corrupt ‘anti-science’ both obscures its actual role in the politics of climate change and understates its wrongfulness: it misses the breadth of the assault on moral agency that sustains climate injustice. (shrink)

This paper explores the kind of knowledge that partisans profess in order to contribute to our studies of what has usually been thought of as the “denial of science.” Building on the research of Robert Proctor, Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, I show that the tobacco interests and climate science skeptics usually described as “doubt mongers” also purveyed forms of certainty and rested their arguments on three different registers of truth: that of narrowly defined “facts” that could sustain a (...) controversy, ideological commitments to free enterprise, and the truths of self‐conscious partisans engaged in battle. Thus, in many respects they have used elements of general knowledge, as well as social, economic and political commitments, to argue against specific scientific findings. Further, at least in the case of climate skeptics, this denial has been in the service of an image of the nature of science and its proper relation to politics. Analyzing significant dichotomies in debates that cross the terrains of science and politics, and knowledge and science, I will argue that a clear articulation of the relations amongst them will be critical to our work to understand the character of climate science denial, but also of the climate sciences themselves. (shrink)

In the decades since the Science Wars of the 1990s, climate science has become a crucible for the negotiation of claims about reality and expertise. This negotiation, which has drawn explicitly on the ideas and techniques of science and technology studies, has taken place in genres of fiction as well as non-fiction, which intersect in surprising ways. In this case study, I focus on two interwoven strands of this history. One follows Michael Crichton’s best-selling 2004 novel, State of Fear and (...) its reception by neo-conservatives as a commentary on the mis-uses of facts to stoke fear about anthropogenic climate change. The other considers Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway’s 2010 publishing success Merchants of Doubt as the inverse, a demonstration of the forms of disinformation that have been used to undermine scientific consensus around climate change. I show that both Crichton’s as well as Oreskes and Conway’s approaches were critiqued by academic STS even as their accounts constituted the most high-profile performances of its stakes and the politics of knowledge since the Science Wars. In highlighting the STS practices deployed by each, as well as how those practices were differently linked to accusations of fear-mongering and a perversion of the purity of STS, I demonstrate the need for a reflexive history of STS. Such an approach, I argue, can better consider the social life of STS ideas and practices amidst calls for more politically-engaged approaches to knowledge production. (shrink)

Our goal in this paper is to articulate a precise concept of at least a certain kind of disease-mongering, showing how pharmaceutical marketing can commercially exploit certain diseases when their best definition is given through the success of a treatment in a clinical trial. We distinguish two types of disease-mongering according to the way they exploit the definition of the trial population for marketing purposes. We argue that behind these two forms of disease-mongering there are two well-known (...) problems in the statistical methodology of clinical trials (the reference class problem and the distinction between statistical and clinical significance). Overcoming them is far from simple. (shrink)

Desde mediados del siglo XX ha aumentado progresivamente la incidencia y prevalencia de la depresión y se ha llegado a considerar que existe una epidemia de depresión. Los autores que han analizado esta idea consideran que la evidencia no avala tales extremos, pero señalan diferentes factores explicativos propios del desarrollo histórico de la psiquiatría, de su situación interna y de su relación con la sociedad. Tales explicaciones guardan similitud con las características propias de un proceso de disease mongering que (...) se define por ampliar las fronteras de la enfermedad para expandir los mercados. Mostraré como una revisión del desarrollo histórico de la psiquiatría, en relación con estas posibles hipótesis explicativas, permite afirmar que ciertas actitudes o situaciones han podido fomentar un proceso de disease mongering asociado a intereses privados y valores de los agentes relevantes en el desarrollo de la psiquiatría en cuestiones como: creación de un método diagnóstico, innovación farmacológica y regulación de nuevos fármacos. Sin embargo, debido a limitaciones conceptuales o epistémicas, no se puede realizar una afirmación más fuerte. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that appeals to intuition are strong arguments just in case there is an agreement among the relevant philosophers concerning the intuition in question. Otherwise, appeals to intuition are weak arguments.

In criminal trials, judges or jurors have to decide whether the facts described in the indictment are proven beyond a reasonable doubt. However, these decision-makers cannot always imagine every relevant sequence of events—there may be unconceived alternatives. The possibility of unconceived alternatives is an overlooked source of reasonable doubt. I argue that decision-makers should not consider the defendant’s guilt proven if they have good reasons to believe that plausible, unconceived scenarios exist. I explore this thesis through the lens (...) of the two most influential accounts of rational criminal proof—Bayesian and explanation-based approaches. I draw on related ideas from the philosophy of science to show why and when unconceived alternatives lead to reasonable doubt on either account. (shrink)

Disease-mongering in the case of sexual problems has some special elements. These include that discussions of sex provoke embarrassment and reveal a lack of knowledge on the part of both clinician and patient, the aggressiveness of Big Pharma in the face of the huge profitability of sexual products; and the socially constructed nature of sexual satisfaction. These special elements engender concern for the prospects for patient empowerment and the convergence of patient-clinician power in the consulting room. Consequently, political action (...) to raise public and professional awareness about the realities of commercialisation and conflict of interest, and to resist further medicalisation may be as warranted for concerned scholars as academic analyses, at least at the present time. (shrink)

For Kant, knowledge involves certainty. If “certainty” requires that the grounds for a given propositional attitude guarantee its truth, then this is an infallibilist view of epistemic justification. Such a view says you can’t have epistemic justification for an attitude unless the attitude is also true. Here I want to defend an alternative fallibilist interpretation. Even if a subject has grounds that would be sufficient for knowledge if the proposition were true, the proposition might not be true. And so there (...) is sometimes still rational room for doubt. The goal of this paper is to present four different models of what “certainty” amounts to, for Kant, each of which is compatible with fallibilism. (shrink)

In Doubts on Avicenna, Ayman Shihadeh offers an extended study and critical edition of Sharaf al-Dīn al-Masʿūdī’s al-Mabāḥith wa-l-Shukūk, a key and hitherto unstudied source for twelfth-century Arabic philosophy. This text inaugurates the long commentarial tradition on Avicenna’s Ishārāt.

In On Doubt, Vilém Flusser refines Martin Heidegger's famous declaration that "language is the dwelling of Being." For Flusser, "the word is the dwelling of being," because in fact, in the beginning, there was the word. On Doubt is a treatise on the human intellect, its relation to language, and the reality-forming discourses that subsequently emerge. For Flusser, the faith that the modern age places in Cartesian doubt plays a role similar to the one that faith in (...) God played in previous eras--a faith that needs to be challenged. Descartes doubts the world through his proposition cogito ergo sum, but leaves doubt itself untouched as indubitable and imperious. His cogito ergo sum may have proved to the Western intellect that thoughts exist, but it did not prove the existence of that which thinks: one can eliminate thinking and yet continue being. Therefore, should we not doubt doubt itself? Should we not try to go beyond this last step of Cartesian doubt and look for a new faith? The twentieth century has seen many attempts to defeat Cartesian doubt, however, this doubt of doubt has instead generated a complete loss of faith, which the West experiences as existential nihilism. Hence, the emergent emptying of values that results from such extreme doubt. Everything loses its meaning. Can this climate be overcome? Will the West survive the modern age? (shrink)

Dialetheism is the view that some contradictions are true. This is a view which runs against orthodoxy in logic and metaphysics since Aristotle, and has implications for many of the core notions of philosophy. Doubt Truth to Be a Liar explores these implications for truth, rationality, negation, and the nature of logic, and develops further the defense of dialetheism first mounted in Priest's In Contradiction, a second edition of which is also available.

This volume delves into the question of how, in an Iberian world apparently far removed from the battlegrounds of modernity and secularisation, doubt and unbelief found fertile soil, stimulated by social and religious developments. Adopting a multidisciplinary perspective, the contributors show how the crisis of identity produced by forced mass conversion touched off inner crises about the nature of Truth. By tracing the path from medieval Spain to the Spanish Inquisition, and from the great literary and artistic works of (...) the Spanish Baroque to Sephardic Marranism, this volume fills a historiographical gap in European social and intellectual history, demonstrating the importance of the Iberian world in the evolution of European scepticism. Mercedes García-Arenal is Research Professor at CSIC, Madrid, and Stefania Pastore is Associate Professor at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. They work on tolerance and dissent in Early Modern Iberia: on forced conversion, on the violent world of the Inquisition and the debates and protests that it sparked, and on the complex interplay of minorities. They have recently collaborated on After Conversion. Iberia and the Emergence of Modernity (Brill, 2016) and, as editors, Visiones imperiales y profecía. Roma, España, Nuevo Mundo (Abada, 2018). (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: How Does One Avoid Skepticism? The Experience Machine Contextualism My Take on Skepticism Notes.

The lack of public support for climate change policies and refusals to vaccinate children are just two alarming illustrations of the impacts of dissent about scientific claims. Dissent can lead to confusion, false beliefs, and widespread public doubt about highly justified scientific evidence. Even more dangerously, it has begun to corrode the very authority of scientific consensus and knowledge. Deployed aggressively and to political ends, some dissent can intimidate scientists, stymie research, and lead both the public and policymakers to (...) oppose important public policies firmly rooted in science. -/- To criticize dissent is, however, a fraught exercise. Skepticism and fearless debate are key to the scientific process, making it both vital and incredibly difficult to characterize and identify dissent that is problematic in its approach and consequences. Indeed, as de Melo-Martín and Intemann show, the criteria commonly proposed as means of identifying inappropriate dissent are flawed and the strategies generally recommended to tackle such dissent are not only ineffective but could even make the situation worse. -/- The Fight Against Doubt proposes that progress on this front can best be achieved by enhancing the trustworthiness of the scientific community and by being more realistic about the limits of science when it comes to policymaking. It shows that a richer understanding of the context in which science operates is needed to disarm problematic dissent and those who deploy it. This, the authors argue, is the best way forward, rather than diagnosing the many instances of wrong-headed dissent. (shrink)

Doubt, Conflict, Mediation is an interdisciplinary examination and reassessment of standard assumptions in social theory about modern time. Rethinks capitalist and neo-liberal conceptions of time from both a sociological and anthropological perspective Blends innovative and rich ethnographic studies from around the world with clear theoretical approaches Examines the timescapes of a variety of institutions and social movements, such as biotech laboratories, civic organizations, planning offices, global sea-trade, urban squatting, and state bureaucracies.

We introduce two concepts—social certainty and social doubt—that help to articulate a variety of experiences of the social world, such as shyness, self-consciousness, culture shock, and anxiety. Following Carel's (2013) analysis of bodily doubt, which explores how a person's tacit confidence in the workings of their body can be disrupted and undermined in illness, we consider how an individual's faith in themselves as a social agent, too, can be compromised or lost, thus altering their experience of what is (...) afforded by the social environment. We highlight how a loss of bodily or social certainty can be shaped and sustained by the environments in which one finds oneself. As such, we show how certain individuals might be more vulnerable to experiences of bodily and social doubt than others. (shrink)

In Unnatural Doubts, Michael Williams constructs a masterly polemic against the very idea of epistemology, as traditionally conceived.

The philosophical study of trauma involves considering this concept in a circle of apparently abstract examples, commenting on it from the perspectives of ontology, metaphysics, aesthetics, and ethics. The difficulty with trauma is not simply that it stands as a subject for disciplines of a different kind and intentionality, but that it is inherently bound to resist all theoretical reasoning at all. This notion is not so much contradictory as actively negative in relation to the usual application of theoretical apparatus (...) to it and its like. But the further one deals with trauma, even if one is not a metaphysician, even if one is at its mercy, the more clearly one realizes that thought cannot deny itself for the sake of earthly pain, no matter how much it may feel the urge to accomplish this self-overcoming, that it will remain itself even in the analysis of trauma, i. e., a movement from fact to essence. And accordingly, the trauma will be abstracted and revealed from paradoxical and formal sides, in its otherness and ambiguity. (shrink)

This paper defends doubts about the existence of genuine moral perception, understood as the claim that at least some moral properties figure in the contents of perceptual experience. Standard examples of moral perception are better explained as transitions in thought whose degree of psychological immediacy varies with how readily non-moral perceptual inputs, jointly with the subject's background moral beliefs, training, and habituation, trigger the kinds of phenomenological responses that moral agents are normally disposed to have when they represent things as (...) being morally a certain way. (shrink)

Theologian, philosopher, teacher. There are few religious figures more Catholic than Saint Thomas Aquinas, a man credited with helping to shape Catholicism of the second millennium. In Never Doubt Thomas, Francis J. Beckwith employs his own spiritual journey from Catholicism to Evangelicalism and then back to Catholicism to reveal the signal importance of Aquinas not only for Catholics but also for Protestants. Beckwith begins by outlining Aquinas' history and philosophy, noting misconceptions and inaccurate caricatures of Thomist traditions. He explores (...) the legitimacy of a "Protestant" Aquinas by examining Aquinas' views on natural law and natural theology in light of several Protestant critiques. Not only did Aquinas' presentation of natural law assume some of the very inadequacies Protestant critics have leveled against it, Aquinas did not, as is often supposed, believe that one must first prove God's existence through human reasoning before having faith in God. Rather, Aquinas held that one may know God through reason and employ it to understand more fully the truths of faith. Beckwith also uses Aquinas' preambles of faith--what a person can know about God before fully believing in Him--to argue for a pluralist Aquinas, explaining how followers of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam can all worship the same God, yet adhere to different faiths. Beckwith turns to Aquinas' doctrine of creation to question theories of Intelligent Design, before, finally, coming to the heart of the matter: in what sense can Aquinas be considered an Evangelical? Aquinas' views on justification are often depicted by some Evangelicals as discontinuous with those articulated in the Council of Trent. Beckwith counters this assessment, revealing not only that Aquinas' doctrine fully aligns with the tenets laid out by the Council, but also that this doctrine is more Evangelical than critics care to admit. Beckwith's careful reading makes it hard to doubt that Thomas Aquinas is a theologian, philosopher, and teacher for the universal church--Catholic, Protestant, and Evangelical. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that appeals to intuition are weak arguments because intellectual intuition is an unreliable belief-forming process, since it yields incompatible verdicts in response to the same cases, and since the inference from 'It seems to S that p' to 'p' is unreliable. Since the reliability of intellectual intuition is a necessary condition for strong appeals to intuition, it follows that appeals to intuition are weak arguments.

Argues for a deflationary account of epistemic agency. We believe things for reasons and our beliefs change over time, but there is no further sense in which we are active in judgement, inference, or belief.

This book is an interdisciplinary study of the forms and uses of doubt in works by Homer, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Cicero, Machiavelli, Shakespeare and Montaigne. Based on close analysis of literary and philosophical texts by these important authors, Michelle Zerba argues that doubt is a defining experience in antiquity and the Renaissance, one that constantly challenges the limits of thought and representation. The wide-ranging discussion considers issues that run the gamut from tragic loss to comic bombast, from psychological collapse (...) to skeptical dexterity and from solitary reflection to political improvisation in civic contexts and puts Greek and Roman treatments of doubt into dialogue not only with sixteenth-century texts but with contemporary works as well. Using the past to engage questions of vital concern to our time, Zerba demonstrates that although doubt sometimes has destructive consequences, it can also be conducive to tolerance, discovery and conversation across sociopolitical boundaries. (shrink)