This response addresses critical engagements with The Epistemology of Disaster and Social Change, defending and expanding its core argument: that disasters generate epistemic opportunities capable of reshaping societies, for better or worse. Drawing from feminist and standpoint epistemologies, the authors develop a heuristic of the epistemic watershed to map how positionality, rupture, and solidarity produce or inhibit liberatory change. They confront critiques of epistemic uptake, emphasizing the ethical costs of appropriating marginalized knowledge while asserting its centrality to just disaster response. Case studies from the Altadena wildfires and post-Maria Puerto Rico illustrate how queer and Black feminist practices of survival, refusal, and community-building challenge dominant imaginaries and enable democratic transformation. Acknowledging the real harms of epistemic extraction and backlash, the authors argue for coalitional knowledge practices as essential in moments of crisis. Ultimately, they insist that disaster must be reimagined not as a neutral rupture but as a battleground for justice-oriented futures.

In Chapter 5 of Transparency and Reflection, Matthew Boyle examines an “anti-Egoist” challenge to my reflective knowledge that I am thinking, which says all I really know is that thinking is occurring. Boyle replies that I know something more, namely that a subject is thinking. Even so, he concedes that traditional Egoists like Descartes go too far in claiming reflective knowledge that an object is thinking. However, these comments argue that there is no stable middle ground between Cartesian Egoism and Anti-Egoism. If I know that I am thinking, then I know that an object is thinking.

An aspect of the Indigenous struggle against colonial oppression is the struggle for the inclusion of their knowledge in policymaking. Perceived as epistemically inferior to science, Indigenous knowledge and subsequently interests are systematically excluded in science-based policy. This article advances an anti-colonial political philosophy of science. As Indigenous knowledge feeds into the necessary political value judgments in policy-relevant science, Indigenous knowledge inclusion, I contend, should be treated as a political, not solely epistemic, matter. I further argue that Indigenous peoples, not just scientists, should have the power to make such political value judgments given the politics of representation under coloniality.

I argue that Waheed Hussain’s critique of advanced market economies would be strengthened if, rather than emphasizing how markets draw us into particular patterns of activity in a “judgment-bypassing” way, through changes in prices and wages, he focused more on an idea that he explores in the first two chapters of Living with the Invisible Hand: the need to justify the specific institutional powers that an advanced market economy creates. I examine how this suggestion relates to two of Hussain’s central claims: that markets are mechanisms of decentralized social governance, and that they pose a distinct threat to our freedom.

Waheed Hussain’s Living with the Invisible Hand argues that, although the market economy is valuable for efficiently coordinating production and consumption, it is morally problematic because it draws us into patterns of activity that bypass our own judgment as rational beings. This makes the market potentially “authoritarian.” But what exactly does it mean to say that the market “bypasses our judgment”? In this article, I seek to clarify this idea and suggest that Hussain has actually identified a few separable senses in which it might be true. These different senses are important to distinguish because they call for different remedies.

I introduce the book symposium’s five contributors.

In The Epistemology of Disasters and Social Change (2024)—an energetic dovetail of disaster sociology and feminist epistemology—Pascoe and Stirling claim there is no such thing as a natural disaster, as all disasters are the product/result of human construction. They use Audre Lorde’s poem, “A Litany for Survival” to anchor their project and focus on Lorde’s understanding of the relationship between poetry, knowledge, and survival to critique dominant the disaster imaginaries. I suggest that a more accurate use of “A Litany for Survival” leans toward a phenomenological epistemology of surviving, rather than a focus on the survivor.

A critique of capitalism, in order to count as such, must identify a problem that is not shared by all other feasible economic systems, for this would amount to little more than a complaint (or kvetch) about the human condition. The distinction between critique and kvetch raises the question of what constitutes a feasible alternative to capitalism. Although it sounds as though this is a pragmatic or technical question, I will argue that it is usually normative. With this clarification in place, I will consider whether Waheed Hussain’s concerns about capitalism amount to a critique or a kvetch.

In this précis of Radical Skepticism and Epistemic Intuition (Oxford 2021), I highlight the book’s main lines of argument and provide an overview of each of the book’s three parts. I explain how: part I identifies the best kind of argument for radical skepticism and objects to one of the two main ways of responding to it; part II presents my version of the other main way of responding to that skeptical argument (a version that relies heavily on epistemic intuition); and part III defends epistemic intuition (and, thereby, my response to radical skepticism) from several important objections.

How should you respond to higher-order evidence which says that you have made a mistake in the reasoning from your first-order evidence? It is highly plausible that you should reduce your confidence in your first-order reasoning. However, attempts to precisely formulate how this works have run into problems. I will argue that we should appeal to an independently motivated normative contextualism. That is, normative words like ‘ought’ and ‘reason’ have a different reference in different contexts. The result is that different answers to our question are true in different contexts.

Hinge epistemology’s main claim to fame lies with its purported advantages in dealing with the problem of radical skepticism. In this paper, I argue that two of its most prominent formulations, due to Annalisa Coliva and Duncan Pritchard, are unsuccessful. To the extent that hinge epistemology represents one of the most relevant options available to internalists to avoid skeptical collapse, the results of this discussion contribute to cast a grim light on the chances of a successful defense of internalist epistemic justification more in general.

We offer a novel analysis of conspiracy theorizing, according to which conspiracy theory communities are engaged in collective projects of storytelling. Other recent accounts start by analyzing individual conspiracy theorists’ psychologies. We argue that a more explanatorily unifying account emerges when we start by analyzing conspiracy theorizing as a social practice. This helps us better account for conspiracy theorists’ psychological heterogeneity. Some individual theorists care about uncovering the truth, while others incorporate truth into their theorizing in subtler ways; viewed as a social phenomenon, though, the function of conspiracy theorizing is not to discover the truth, but to tell good stories.

The Practical Self offers a new and gripping account of the conditions on being self-conscious subjects. Gomes argues that self-conscious subjects are required to have faith in themselves as the agents of thinking, sustained and supported by worldly practices. I argue that that Gomes leaves open either theoretical or alternative practical grounds to justify being the agents of thinking and so does not motivate an appeal to faith as the mode of assent. And I ask whether we can make available an alternative account of the tight relation between communal practices and self-consciousness that preserves it, absent faith.

In Transparency and Reflection, Matthew Boyle offers a Sartrean account of prereflective self-awareness to explain the essential link between self-consciousness and rationality, moving away from standard Kantian interpretations that he claims presuppose rather than explain this connection. I argue that Boyle’s account provides useful tools for re-interpreting Kant’s claim that the “I think” must accompany all representations as a form of nonpositional consciousness. I also aim to show that Boyle’s model risks fragmenting the unity of the subject across different representational domains, and that Kant’s account (construed as a kind of prereflective consciousness) has the resources to address this challenge.

Although the harm-reduction approach to policy is most familiar from debates over public health and drug abuse, it provides a perfectly general framework for thinking about normative aspects of policy in non-ideal contexts. This paper seeks to apply a generalized harm reduction approach to the problem of attitudinal racism. Psychological research suggests that racism is unlikely to be completely eradicated, as a result of which a zero-tolerance approach risks becoming both counterproductive and overly punitive. Harm reduction recommends minimization of prevalence with respect to the primary phenomenon combined with attenuation of impact for the ineliminable portion.

The thought that intellectual arrogance consists in, roughly, overconfident resilience in one’s beliefs has been influential in philosophy and psychology. This thought is in the background of much of the philosophical literature on disagreement as well as some leading psychological scales of intellectual humility. It is not true, however. This paper highlights cases (of “stubborn fools” and the “arrogantly open-minded”) that cause trouble for equating intellectual arrogance with overconfident belief resilience. These cases are much better accommodated if we see intellectual arrogance as, instead, a form of vicious intellectual distraction by the ego.

I raise two concerns about Bergmann’s philosophical methodology: the first is a parity problem for his intuition-based “autodidactic” approach; the second is a tension between that approach and the commonsense tradition in which he situates it. I then use his approach to reflect on the limits of rational argument and set it alongside an alternative that likewise emphasizes the personal nature of philosophical inquiry while remaining more neutral about the rational standing of competing intuitions.

Standard conceptions of discrimination cannot account for all that is morally wrong about discrimination, as they cannot explain how individual acts of discrimination wrong not only their direct target but also all members of the targeted social group. In response to this lacuna, I develop a comprehensive account according to which discrimination consists of two interdependent wrongs: to discriminate against B, A must, first, treat B worse than C in a way that is grave enough to make this differential treatment morally wrong; and second, A must do so in a way that is disrespectful to B and to the social group B is perceived to belong to.

To what extent can intellectual humility be formalized? One natural idea links humility to open-mindedness, captured by a regularity principle: no coherent hypothesis should get probability zero. While debates over regularity often concern infinities, my objection is different. Regularity is feasible only for ideally rational, logically omniscient agents. Yet on a common view, humility involves appreciating our limitations—including our failure to be such agents. So whatever its merits for ideal cognition, regularity is a poor model for human humility. Indeed, taking it as such would itself be un-humble, by failing to appreciate our own epistemic limitations.