Open science is good for both epistemic and social reasons, but in nonobvious ways, it can have detrimental epistemic side effects. Drawing on case studies and the social epistemology of science, I show how practices intended to increase transparency, communication, and information sharing in science can backfire. We should not reject Open Science, just implement it carefully. I argue that we can do so by treating openness as a governing value in science, and thus, that our pursuit of openness needs to be balanced against our pursuit of the whole scheme of values that govern science.

Epistemic paternalism involves interfering with the inquiry of others, without their consent, for their own epistemic good. Recently, such paternalism has been discussed as a method of getting the public to have more accurate views on important policy matters. Here, I discuss a novel problem for such paternalism—epistemic spillovers. The problem arises because what matters for rational belief is one’s total evidence, and further, individual pieces of evidence can have complex interactions. Because of this, justified epistemic paternalism requires the would-be paternalist to be in an unusually strong epistemic position, one that most would-be paternalists are unlikely to meet.

Which additional epistemic skills or attributes must a competent journalist possess in order to produce competent science journalism? I aim to answer this question by bringing together insights from journalism, science communication, and epistemology. In Section 2, I outline the Epistemic Challenge for Science Journalism. In Section 3, I present the dominant answer in the literature, the Knowledge-Based Solution, and argue against it. In Section 4, I propose an alternative, the Confirmation-Based Solution. In Section 5, I argue that this solution can address recent concerns regarding journalistic objectivity. Section 6 discusses my proposal in the context of epistemological debates about norms of assertion. Section 7 concludes.

Blind review is ubiquitous in contemporary science, but there is no consensus among stakeholders and researchers about when or how much or why blind review should be done. In this essay, we explain why blinding enhances the impartiality and credibility of science while also defending a norm according to which blind review is a baseline presumption in scientific peer review.

What is persuasion and how does it differ from coercion, indoctrination, and manipulation? Which persuasive strategies are effective, and which contexts are they effective in? The aim of persuasion is attitude change, but when does a persuasive strategy yield a rational change of attitude? When is it permissible to engage in rational persuasion? In this paper, I address these questions, both in general and with reference to particular examples. The overall aims are (i) to sketch an integrated picture of the psychology, epistemology, and ethics of persuasion and (ii) to argue that there is often a tension between the aim we typically have as would-be persuaders, which is bringing about a rational change of mind, and the ethical constraints which partly distinguish persuasion from coercion, indoctrination, and manipulation.

Many AI development organizations advertise that they have offices of ethics that facilitate ethical AI. However, concerns have been raised that these offices are merely symbolic and do not actually promote ethics. We address the question of how we can know whether an organization is engaging in ethics washing in this way. We articulate an account of organizational power, and we argue that ethics offices that have power are not merely symbolic. Furthermore, we develop a framework for assessing whether an organization has an empowered ethics office—and, thus, is not ethics washing via a symbolic ethics office.