An epistemic agent A is a false epistemic authority for others iff they falsely believe A to be in a position to help them accomplish their epistemic ends. A major divide exists between what I call "epistemic quacks", who falsely believe themselves to be relevantly competent, and "epistemic charlatans", i.e., false authorities who believe or even know that they are incompetent. Both types of false authority do not cover what Lackey (2021) calls "predatory experts": experts who systematically (...) misuse their social-epistemic status as a cover for predatory behavior. Qua experts, predatory experts are competent and thus could (and maybe sometimes do) help their clients. But should we count them as genuine epistemic authorities? No, I argue, they are false epistemic authorities because, in addition to their practical and moral misconduct, such experts systematically deceive their clients, thereby thwarting the clients’ epistemic ends. (shrink)

The scope and role of theological bioethics has become a growing controversial topic. For instance, some bioethicists have adopted a strong stance on the meaning of “Christian bioethics,” as not ex...

Various emerging technologies, from social robotics to social media, appeal to our desire for social interactions, while avoiding some of the risks and costs of face-to-face human interaction. But can they offer us real friendship? In this book, Alexis Elder outlines a theory of friendship drawing on Aristotle and contemporary work on social ontology, and then uses it to evaluate the real value of social robotics and emerging social technologies. In the first part of the book Elder develops a robust (...) and rigorous ontology of friendship: what it is, how it functions, what harms it, and how it relates to familiar ethical and philosophical questions about character, value, and well-being. In Part II she applies this ontology to emerging trends in social robotics and human-robot interaction, including robotic companions for lonely seniors, therapeutic robots used to teach social skills to children on the autism spectrum, and companionate robots currently being developed for consumer markets. Elder articulates the moral hazards presented by these robots, while at the same time acknowledging their real and measurable benefits. In the final section she shifts her focus to connections between real people, especially those enabled by social media. Arguing against critics who have charged that these new communication technologies are weakening our social connections, Elder explores ways in which text messaging, video chats, Facebook, and Snapchat are enabling us to develop, sustain, and enrich our friendship in new and meaningful ways. (shrink)

In this paper, I will critique Paul Draper’s recent model of God’s motivational structure, according to which God can make hard choices. I will argue that this model illegitimately treats value in a purely teleological way, as something to be promoted. Following T.M. Scanlon’s work on value theory, when we consider the fact that value is to be respected rather than merely promoted, this realization will significantly foreclose on the possible cases in which hard choices can conceivably be made by (...) God. Most importantly, I challenge the idea that God can face hard choices between aesthetic and moral value in the way Draper suggests. (shrink)

The starting point regarding consent has to be that it is both extremely important, and that it is often suspicious. In this article, the author tries to make sense of both of these claims, from a largely liberal perspective, tying consent, predictably, to the value of autonomy and distinguishing between autonomy as sovereignty and autonomy as nonalienation. The author then discusses adaptive preferences, claiming that they suffer from a rationality flaw but that it's not clear that this flaw matters morally (...) or politically. What matters is whether they suffer from an autonomy flaw. To answer this question, the author develops an account of autonomy failure, according to which a preference is nonautonomous if an injustice played an appropriate role in its causal history. The author then discusses the moral implications—and in an initial way, the political ones as well—of proclaiming a preference, or consent based on it, nonautonomous in this way. (shrink)

Lately, it seems a number of philosophical memory theories are incorporating false memory phenomena into their conceptual frameworks. At the same time, scientific research is extending its analysis of false memories to nondeclarative forms of memory. However, both sides have paid little attention to the notion of false procedural memory. Yet, from everyday experience as well as from psychological investigation, we are aware of different ways procedural memory goes wrong. Here, I characterize the conceptual foundation of (...) class='Hi'>false procedural memory. First, I distinguish remembering-how from knowing-how by proposing that remembering-how requires the performance of an act. Accordingly, genuine remembering-how is characterized as the performance of an act for which a respective ability has been acquired that is instrumental in the execution of said act. False remembering-how is identified as a kind of error where a subject acquires the ability to perform a certain act, which is then correctly executed, but is not what the subject tried to perform. This framework of false procedural memory is delineated from notions of interference and crosstalk. A comparison with current philosophical theories of false memory and analysis showing the relevance for current psychological research and everyday life concludes the paper. (shrink)

Starting from a recent ideological and political controversy regarding the devaluation of the concept of “nationalism” in relation to that of ‘patriotism”, the author – following his own years-long investigations on the subject – historically and philosophically reframes each of these concepts from the perspective of rhetoric and argumentation. It is shown, in this context, that the arguments in question are fallacious (and even, in some applications, clearly perverse) and a radical and provocative reformulation of the aforementioned concepts and the (...) controversy involved is proposed – a reformulation which, eventually and at best, may give rise to a new historiography on the subject. (shrink)

Occasionally, doctors and health providers have to choose whom they save from death and this is an extremely hard decision to take. Here, I work on what I deem to be a crucial caveat: scarcity of resources should never be used as an alibi for bad, and sometimes wicked, public policies. In other words, if scarcity is somewhat produced or at least induced, it should never serve as a pretext to put the blame or the responsibility on medical doctors, nurses (...) and other people who are at the front of the war against COVID-19. During the COVID-19 pandemic, an ethical question was often raised: if resources are scarce (and they often have been), whom should you prioritize? Should we protect first of all those who are young and can then have a long life before them? Or should we rather prioritize those who have rendered important services to health, or broadly to mankind, and could, therefore, bring other good results to society? This discussion is of course important, but it leaves aside something more fundamental: the fact that resources are not simply scarce, they have been made scarce in the last years by a series of public policies nourished by an economic view that sacrificed social welfare on behalf of neoliberal beliefs. (shrink)

This essay is concerned with some of Michel Foucault's writings on art. The author talks about the analyses of painting Foucault conducted during the period in which Foucault was developing the philosophical methodology known as archaeology. Despite archaeology's strong epistemological orientation, that methodology gives rise to a form of seeing that suspends the imperatives for the production of meaning that accrue around works of art. Some of the consequences of this suspension are explored in the final section of this essay (...) where the author describes archaeology as giving rise to an artistic‐philosophical thought that operates outside of the bounds of truth and falsity. The author contends that it is particularly well suited for approaching the artistic products created during and after the breakup of mimesis, the European cultural paradigm that articulated strong connections between art – considered as representation – and reality. (shrink)

Social philosophers often invoke the concept of false consciousness in their analyses, referring to a set of evidence-resistant, ignorant attitudes held by otherwise sound epistemic agents, systematically occurring in virtue of, and motivating them to perpetuate, structural oppression. But there is a worry that appealing to the notion in questions of responsibility for the harm suffered by members of oppressed groups is victim-blaming. Individuals under false consciousness allegedly systematically fail the relevant rationality and epistemic conditions due to structural (...) distortions of reasoning or knowledge practices, undermining their status as responsible moral agents. But attending to the constitutive mechanisms and heterogeneity of false consciousness allows us to see how having it does not eo ipso render someone an inappropriate target of blame. I focus here on the 1889 anti-suffragist manifesto “An Appeal Against Female Suffrage,” arguing that its signatories, despite false consciousness, satisfy both conditions for ordinary blameworthiness. I consider three prominent signatories, observing that the irrationality characterisation is unsustainable beyond group-level diagnoses, and that their capacity to respond appropriately to reasons was not compromised. Following recent work on epistemic injustice, I also argue that culpable mechanisms constituted their false consciousness, rendering them blameworthy for the Appeal. (shrink)

Astrobiology aims to determine the distribution and diversity of life in the universe. But as the word “biosignature” suggests, what will be detected is not life itself, but an observation implicating living systems. Our limited access to other worlds suggests this observation is more likely to reflect out‐of‐equilibrium gasses than a writhing octopus. Yet, anything short of a writhing octopus will raise skepticism about what has been detected. Resolving that skepticism requires a theory to delineate processes due to life and (...) those due to abiotic mechanisms. This poses an existential question for life detection: How do astrobiologists plan to detect life on exoplanets via features shared between non‐living and living systems? We argue that you cannot without an underlying theory of life. We illustrate this by analyzing the hypothetical detection of an “Earth 2.0” exoplanet. Without a theory of life, we argue the community should focus on identifying unambiguous features of life via four areas: examining life on Earth, building life in the lab, probing the solar system, and searching for technosignatures. Ultimately, we ask, what exactly do astrobiologists hope to learn by searching for life? (shrink)

Many authors have argued that epistemic rationality sometimes comes into conflict with our relationships. Although Sarah Stroud and Simon Keller argue that friendships sometimes require bad epistemic agency, their proposals do not go far enough. I argue here for a more radical claim—romantic love sometimes requires we form beliefs that are false. Lovers stand in a special position with one another; they owe things to one another that they do not owe to others. Such demands hold for beliefs as (...) well. Two facets of love ground what I call the false belief requirement , or the demand to form false beliefs when it is for the good of the beloved: the demand to love for the right reasons and the demand to refrain from doxastic wronging. Since truth is indispensable to epistemic rationality, the requirement to believe falsely, consequently, undermines truth norms. I demonstrate that, when the false belief requirement obtains, there is an irreconcilable conflict between love and truth norms of epistemic rationality: we must forsake one, at least at the time, for the other. (shrink)

False polarization (FP) is an interpersonal bias on judgement, the effect of which is to lead people in contexts of disagreement to overestimate the differences between their respective views. I propose to treat FP as a problem of applied social epistemology—a barrier to reliable belief-formation in certain social domains—and to ask how best one may debias for FP. This inquiry leads more generally into questions about effective debiasing strategies; on this front, considerable empirical evidence suggests that intuitively attractive strategies (...) for debiasing are not very effective, while more effective strategies are neither intuitive nor likely to be easily implemented. The supports for more effective debiasing seem either to be inherently social and cooperative, or at least to presuppose social efforts to create physical or decision-making infrastructure for mitigating bias. The upshot, I argue, is that becoming a less biased epistemic agent is a thoroughly socialized project. (shrink)

Quite likely the most sacrosanct principle in epistemology, it is near-universally accepted that knowledge is factive: knowing that p entails p. Recently, however, Bricker, Buckwalter, and Turri have all argued that we can and often do know approximations that are strictly speaking false. My goal with this paper is to advance this nascent non-factive project in two key ways. First, I provide a critical review of these recent arguments against the factivity of knowledge, allowing us to observe that elements (...) of these arguments mutually reinforce respective weaknesses, thereby offering the non-factive project a much stronger foundation than when these arguments were isolated. Next, I argue tentatively in favor of Bricker’s truthlikeness framework over the representational adequacy account favored by Buckwalter and Turri. Taken together, while none of this constitutes a knock-down argument against factivity, it does allow us to quiet some of the more immediate worries surrounding the non-factive project. (shrink)

In the criminal legal system, confessions have long been considered the ‘gold standard’ in evidence. An immediate problem arises for this gold standard, however, when the prevalence of false confessions is taken into account. In this paper, I take a close look at false confessions in connection with the phenomenon of testimonial injustice. I show that false confessions provide a unique and compelling challenge to the current conceptual tools used to understand this epistemic wrong. In particular, I (...) argue that we cannot make sense of the unjust ways in which false confessions function in our criminal legal system by focusing exclusively on speakers getting less credibility than they deserve. I conclude that the way we conceive of testimonial injustice requires a significant expansion to include what I call agential testimonial injustice – where an unwarranted credibility excess is afforded to speakers when their epistemic agency has been denied or subverted in the obtaining of their testimony. (shrink)

"Why should we care about having true beliefs? And why do demonstrably false beliefs persist and spread despite consequences for the people who hold them? Philosophers of science Cailin O’Connor and James Weatherall argue that social factors, rather than individual psychology, are what’s essential to understanding the spread and persistence of false belief. It might seem that there’s an obvious reason that true beliefs matter: false beliefs will hurt you. But if that’s right, then why is it (...) irrelevant to many people whether they believe true things or not? In an age riven by "fake news," "alternative facts," and disputes over the validity of everything from climate change to the size of inauguration crowds, the authors argue that social factors, not individual psychology, are what’s essential to understanding the persistence of false belief and that we must know how those social forces work in order to fight misinformation effectively."–Publisher’s description. (shrink)

This paper argues that some widely used laws of implication are false, and arguments based upon them invalid. These laws are Exportation, Commutation, (as well as various restricted forms of these), Exported Syllogism and Disjunctive Syllogism. All these laws are false for the same reason – that they license the suppression or replacement in some position of some class of propositions which cannot legitimately be suppressed or replaced. These laws fail to preserve the property of sufficiency of premiss (...) set for conclusion. They are false, and can be seen to be false, independently of their respon- sibility for the paradoxes. Hence the main ‘independent’ argument for the paradoxes – that they follow from an allegedly immaculate set of laws – is undermined. Counterexamples to all these laws are produced. (shrink)

Madole & Harden's assertion that the effects derived from within-family genome-wide association studies (GWASs) and from randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are equivalent is misleading. GWASs are substantially more “non-unitary, non-uniform, and non-explanatory” than RCTs. While the within-family GWAS bring us closer to identifying genetic causes, whether it will change behavioral genetics into a causal science is an open question.

In this article I explore a tantalising definition of cinematic belief as a belief without belief by briefly considering the way in which film theory and film-philosophy have engaged with the question of belief in cinema. I also take into account Simon Critchley’s discussion of religious belief in The Faith of the Faithless (2012) within the context of anthropological studies of religion such as that by Émile Durkheim. In addition, I discuss Sigmund Freud’s 1927 reflection on religion in “The Future (...) of an Illusion”. I then show that this line of thought can be linked to the philosophical discussion around the so-called paradox of fiction and introduce the idea that belief can be understood itself as an emotion or mood. I argue in favour of the solution to the paradox that claims that emotions experienced in response to fictional entities are quasi-emotions but radicalise this claim by showing that this must imply that all emotions are in fact structured like quasi-emotions and that we do not require an essentialist understanding of emotion in the first place. Throughout I use the example of the various cinematic representations of the life of St Francis to flesh out the argument, including Roberto Rossellini’s Francesco, giullare di Dio / Francesco, God’s Jester / The Flowers of St Francis (1950) but particularly Franco Zeffirelli’s much maligned Brother Sun, Sister Moon (1972). (shrink)

When seriously ill patients reach the end of the standard treatment trajectory for their condition, they may qualify for the use of unapproved, investigational drugs regulated via expanded access programs. In medical-ethical discourse, it is often argued that expanded access to investigational drugs raises ‘false hope’ among patients and is therefore undesirable. We set out to investigate what is meant by the false hope argument in this discourse. In this paper, we identify and analyze five versions of the (...) false hope argument which we call: (1) the limited chance at benefit argument, (2) the side effects outweighing benefits argument, (3) the opportunity costs argument, (4) the impossibility of making informed decisions argument, and (5) the difficulty of gaining access argument. We argue that the majority of these five versions do not provide normative ground for disqualifying patients’ hopes as false. Only when hope is rooted in a mistaken belief, for example, about the likelihood of benefits or chances on medical risks, or when hope is directed at something that cannot possibly be obtained, should it be considered false. If patients are adequately informed about their odds of obtaining medical benefit, however small, and about the risks associated with an investigational treatment, it is unjustified to consider patients’ hopes to be false, and hence, to deny them access to investigational drug based on that argument. (shrink)

False dilemma is a specific form of reasoning : despite the fact that it is based on a deductively valid argument form, it is rightly depicted as fallacy. A systematic exposition of false dilemma is missing in theoretical approaches to fallacies. This article formulates six criteria for a well-grounded exposition of a fallacy, suggesting also a systematic exposition of false dilemma. These criteria can be used to both explain, and categorise, the various false dilemma fallacies. The (...) article introduces distinction between four types of false dilemma : False quandary, Defeasible sound quandary, False obstruction and Defeasible sound obstruction. The types of criticism appropriate for each variant of false dilemma are suggested. Being able to discover false dilemma in situations when it is important to make good and free choices is a significant dimension of critical thinking. It may liberate us from accepting the consequences that necessarily follow from prearranged alternatives, when these are not the only alternatives possible. It may also liberate us from refraining from actions on the basis of obstructive disjunctive statements. In that respect, the faculty of critical thinking directed at uncovering reasoning based on false dilemma may also initiate the discovery of new alternatives, or discover the ways of unifying seemingly opposing alternatives. Thus, a well-developed ability to understand the tricky argumentative moves of false dilemma may be a good step towards initiating some features of creative thinking. (shrink)

The DSM‐5 highlights two essential psychological features of anorexia nervosa (AN): recalcitrant fear of gaining weight and body image disturbance. Prominent accounts grant false beliefs about body weight and shape a central role in the explanation of AN behavior. In this article, we propose a stronger emphasis on recalcitrant fear. We show that such fear can explain AN behavior without the intermediary of a false belief, and thus without the associated explanatory burdens and conceptual difficulties. We illustrate how (...) shifting the emphasis from false belief to recalcitrant fear can supplement a number of different non‐doxastic models of AN. (shrink)

In this paper I present a problem for the Marxist idea of false consciousness, namely how it is vulnerable to accusations of dogmatism. I will argue that the concept must be further developed if it is to provide a plausible tool for systematic social analysis. In the second half of the paper I will show how this could be done if the account of false consciousness incorporates Shaun Gallagher’s theory of the socially extended mind. This is a theory (...) that explores how the mind expands towards external objects and systems. I will conclude that it helps to reinstate false consciousness as a reliable tool for the analysis of cognitive dynamics within power structures. (shrink)

Romanis and Adkins discuss pregnancy loss in relation to artificial amnion and placenta technology (AAPT) for treatment of extremely preterm infants.1 I agree with the authors that AAPT, although it is expected to provide better care for extremely preterm infants, will also be challenging for parents. I, therefore, commend Romanis and Adkins for promoting a more holistic care that includes parents and pregnant persons. However, I believe that they create two false dichotomies, one between the pregnant person/parent and the (...) fetus/child and one between current neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) and AAPT that hinder holistic care. Romanis and Adkins correctly point out that much of the discourse and care surrounding preterm deliveries focuses mainly on the infant. I agree with Romanis and Adkins that true holistic care should also include the parents rather than focusing exclusively on the child. However, the language they use to petition for more inclusive care can be problematic and counteractive to achieve holistic care. The problem is that they accuse any fetal/child consideration of being fetal-centric and, in the same breath, they state that it is something to be challenged. This attitude is problematic as it feeds into the rhetoric of the maternal–fetal conflict. This is a common rhetoric in reproductive and neonatal care used mainly in situations …. (shrink)

This paper assumes that success on false-belief tasks requires a kind of folk psychological know-how, i.e. gradable knowledge how to perform skilful social cognitive acts. Following Ryle, it argues the folk psychological know-how required for success on a false-belief task cannot be reduced to conceptual knowledge as this would lead to an infinite regress. Within the skilled performance literature, Intellectualists have attempted to solve Ryle’s regress by appealing to automatic mechanisms similar in kind to some Theory-of-Mind explanations of (...) folk psychology. Exploring this similarity, the paper examines the epistemic commitments of two recent pragmatic Theory-of-Mind accounts of cross-cultural false-belief task data. By drawing on Fridland’s argument against Intellectualist explanations of know-how, it is argued that neither of these pragmatic Theory-of-Mind accounts can adequately explain gradable folk psychological know-how and escape Ryle’s infinite regress objection if these accounts are indeed committed to Intellectualism. The paper ends by supplementing Fenici’s account with the enactive framework to both bolster Fenici’s explanation of false-belief task know-how and avoid Ryle’s regress objection. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on one of the common fallacies in Western philosophy, 'false dilemma (FD)'. According to Andrea A. Lunsford, John J. Ruskiewicz, and Keith Walters, a FD tends to “reduce a complicated issue to excessively simple terms” or, when intentionally created, tends to “obscure legitimate alternatives”. FD reflects incorrect thinking because it presents a problem or issue as having only two possible solutions when in fact there are more. Liam Dempsey noted that shows such as The Daily Show (...) and The Colbert Report often employed FD in order to highlight the “theatrics” that are found in political events or the use of FD by politicians. Politics aside, an FD exists anytime an extreme dichotomy of choices appears as the only possible answers. Advertisers also create an FD when creating a situation with only two outcomes and the only correct or positive outcome leads to their brand. (shrink)

This chapter explores a species of false modesty, false intellectual humility, which is defined as affected or pretended intellectual humility concealing intellectual arrogance. False intellectual humility is situated in a virtue epistemological framework, where it is contrasted with intellectual humility, understood as excellence in self-attribution of intellectual weakness. False intellectual humility characteristically takes the form of insincere expressions of ignorance or uncertainty – as when dogmatically committed conspiracy theorists insist that they just want to know what’s (...) going on – and, in such cases, false intellectual humility is a kind of false skepticism or false fallibilism. In connection with this, the chapter further explores the relationship between the concepts of intellectual humility, skepticism, and fallibilism. A distinction can be drawn between the virtues of intellectual humility, skepticism, and fallibilism, but the traditional association of skepticism and fallibilism with intellectual humility is vindicated by the fact that the virtues of intellectual humility, skepticism, and fallibilism overlap. (shrink)

Roche and Sober (2013; 2014; 2017; 2019) have offered an important new argument that explanatoriness lacks confirmatory significance. My aim in this paper is not only to contend that their argument fails to show that in confirmation ‘there is nothing special about explanatoriness’ (Roche & Sober, 2017: 589), but also to reveal what is special confirmationwise about explanatoriness. I will argue that much of the heavy work in Roche and Sober's argument is done by the dichotomy into which they carve (...) up the philosophical options: either explanatory considerations per se are confirmatorily relevant or they acquire whatever confirmatory significance they may possess only by way of background beliefs and so no differently from non‐explanatory considerations. I will argue that this is a false dichotomy: Explanatoriness per se can have confirmatory relevance even while explanatory considerations acquire their confirmatory relevance only through background opinions. Furthermore, there is ‘something special’ about the background opinions concerning explanations that allow explanatoriness in itself to have confirmatory impact. Unlike other sorts of background, having some background opinions expressly about explanations is indispensable to being an observer at all. (shrink)

In the Deese-Roediger/McDermott paradigm, distinctive encoding of list items typically reduces false recognition of critical lures relative to a read-only control. This reduction can be due to enhanced item-specific processing, reduced relational processing, and/or increased test-based monitoring. However, it is unclear whether distinctive encoding reduces false recognition in a selective or global manner. To examine this question, participants studied DRM lists using a distinctive item-specific anagram generation task and then completed a recognition test which included both DRM critical (...) lures and either strongly related lures or weakly related lures. Compared to a read-control group, the generate groups showed increased correct recognition and decreased false recognition of all lure types. We then estimated the separate contributions of encoding and retrieval processes using signal-detection indices. Generation improved correct recognition by both increasing encoding of memory information for list words and by increasing memory monitoring at test. Generation reduced false recognition by reducing the encoding of memory information and by increasing memory monitoring at test. The reduction in false recognition was equivalent for critical lures and related lures, indicating that generation globally reduces the encoding of related non-presented items at study, while globally increasing list-theme-based monitoring at test. (shrink)

Despite the growing body of work exploring the weaknesses of police performance systems and the displacement of their goals, less attention has been given to why police officers resist and circumvent by false reporting. Whether police report honestly on their activities is a matter of considerable significance given the role that police have in a broadly democratic society, and the overall question is whether the false reporting undermines the integrity of the police or if it is a collective (...) coping strategy that safeguards the police ethos? This survey reveals that 25% of respondents (n = 2248) had manipulated the numbers at least once in the previous year. To identify why they did so, the variables selected for analysis are those determining their view of the Management by Objective (MBO) system, how far they have participated in the MBO process and how often they are unable to assist a member of the public. Our results show that men are more likely to manipulate the numbers than women and non-leaders are more likely to do so than leaders. Respondents were more likely to submit false reports if they had not participated in the MBO process, were not motivated by MBO goals, believed the MBO indicators misdirected their focus and frequently felt that they were forced to reject members of the public they would like to help. Our findings further show that public servants can be corrupted, though they do not “bring” vices to work with them, but rather acquire vices through what is required of them. (shrink)