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.

Goldman (2001) asks how novices can trust putative experts when background knowledge is scarce. We develop a reinforcement-learning model, adapted from Barrett, Skyrms, and Mohseni (2019), in which trust arises from experience rather than prior expertise labels. Agents incrementally weight peers who outperform them. Using a large dataset of human probability judgments as inputs, we simulate communities that learn whom to defer to. Both a strictly individual-learning variant and a reputation-sharing variant yield performance-sensitive deference, the latter accelerating convergence. Our results offer an empirically grounded account of how communities identify and trust experts without blind deference.

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.

Epistemic injustice theorists have proposed various strategies for resisting oppressive knowledge structures, with José Medina’s concept of epistemic friction and the principle of acknowledgement and engagement standing as a central model. However, this paper argues that such strategies can unintentionally impose epistemic and emotional burdens on the very subjects they aim to empower. In this paper, I illustrate the importance of undertaking qualitative empirical research into epistemic injustice, particularly resistance. Drawing on original qualitative interviews with LGBTQIA+ individuals, allies, and parents of transgender children, I identify the burden that is often placed on them to be educators of their own sexuality and/or identity. I also offer alternative suggestions for resistance, including redistributing the labour of education to allies and creating a space for indirect engagement via entertainment and social media. This paper integrates empirical research with normative theory to expose how resistance efforts can reproduce structural inequalities – and how they might be transformed.

Our politics are increasingly polarised. Polarisation takes many forms. One is increasing clustering, whereby people hold down-the-line liberal or conservative views on a wide range of orthogonal issues. Some philosophers think that such clustering is indicative of irrationality, and so finding yourself in one of several clusters gives you evidence that not all your political beliefs are true. I argue that the reverse is true, presenting a simple model of belief-formation in which finding yourself in one of several clusters of opinion on orthogonal issues should increase, rather than decrease, your confidence that all your beliefs are true.

This article summarizes how problems in formalizing scientific inference led to the production of social accounts of science, offering Helen Longino’s feminist contextual empiricism as a way forward. Rather than focus on rules of inference that connect knowledge-claims, Longino constructs norms for knowledge-producing communities which, when followed, ensure equitable dialogue and transformative criticism. It is further argued communities engaged in Christian systematic theology would benefit from developing a similar set of norms, given that theological inference is similarly rooted in social cognition and faces many problems analogous to those with which Longino is concerned. Finally, the extent to which Longino’s norms may serve as a starting point for theological communities is explored.

Often, accounts of epistemic injustice either conflate epistemic harming with epistemic wronging or assume epistemic injustice is grounded in instances of epistemic harm. Recently, Dunne and Kotsonis (2024) have argued that neither conflation nor grounding make sense; the two are separate phenomena and have attempted to show how the two relate to one another. I argue this approach is mistaken: rather than just distinguish epistemic harming and wronging, instead we should question the very existence of epistemic harm. First, I discuss the relationship between epistemic harm and epistemic wrong and briefly summarize the ways in which they come apart. While I argue that Dunne and Kotsonis’ arguments are unsuccessful, I offer a new argument to the same effect, showing that current accounts of epistemic harm are underinclusive with respect to epistemic wronging. Second, I show that, generally, wronging does not require harming. Finally, I give us reason to believe that indeed, epistemic harm doesn’t exist: I argue that the notion of intrinsically epistemic harm is suspect, and does not fit within extant theorization on harm more generally and that we, therefore, ought to abandon it entirely: like the general case, epistemic wrong can exist without epistemic harm. To modify a slogan proposed by Bradley, we should do away with epistemic harm.

The thesis that testimony is the sole foundational source of justification for moral belief will strike many as ridiculous and a non-starter for theorizing about the justification of moral beliefs. Call this thesis testimonial foundationalism. This paper argues that testimonial foundationalism deserves to be taken seriously as a live option in moral epistemology. First, I argue that if we think non-moral testimony can propositionally justify belief, then we should think that moral testimony doing the same is no more problematic. Second, I show that there are good prima facie reasons to hold testimony as the unique source of propositional justification for moral belief: Testimonial foundationalism requires fewer metaphysical commitments, gives the best explanation of our practices in moral education, and there are no special reasons stemming from skeptical challenges pushing us to reject the thesis. Finally, I tackle the “obvious objection,” which argues that in order to successfully testify to a moral fact, the testifier must first know that moral fact, but it is impossible for the first testifier to have moral knowledge by the lights of testimonial foundationalism. I conclude with an upshot of the paper, which is that it reveals there to be two independent projects in moral epistemology: providing a theory of justification for moral belief, and providing a theory of the reliability of our moral beliefs.

According to accounts like Alexander Bird’s Minimal Functional Account of social knowledge, various groups like those within the sciences can socially know that <p>, even if no particular individual within that group knows that <p>. Bird’s primary example of a group that has such knowledge is the community of semiconductor physicists – which, as he contends, is sufficiently functionally integrated to satisfy accounts like his own. But, what about specialist communities within philosophy? Do they satisfy accounts like Bird’s own? Should they? As I will suggest in this article, some of them should, but do not appear to do so – at least, as of yet.

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.

This paper argues that we are not just social epistemic creatures because we operate in social contexts. We are social epistemic creatures because of the nature of our epistemic cognitive capacities. In The Enigma of Reason, Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber develop and defend the view that reasoning is a social competence that yields epistemic benefits for individuals through social interaction with others. I argue an epistemological consequence of their position is that, when beliefs are formed and sustained by dialogical deliberation, the relevant justification-conferring process doesn’t occur solely within the cognition of the subject whose belief is under evaluation. Rather, it extends to include her interactive engagement with other deliberative participants. I argue this demonstrates that not all justification-conferring is evidential. As such, the analysis not only supports reconceiving the process reliabilist’s notion of justification-conferring processes; it also serves as an argument against evidentialism. A goal of this paper is to demonstrate that social epistemology isn’t merely a siloed offshoot of traditional epistemology. Even when approaching social epistemology using a conservative methodology, our investigation has serious implications for fundamental questions concerning epistemic normativity.

In recent years, virtue epistemology has been criticized for its individualism. Correspondingly, some attempts have been made to make it more social. However, there is some confusion about what it means for virtue epistemology to be individualistic, and how it should be socialized in the face of this. The current paper proposes a systematic answer to these questions. We distinguish elements of theories of virtue that might give rise to different forms of individualism: “subject individualism,” “faculty/trait individualism,” and “value individualism.” Then we show what specific challenges these elements might pose for virtue reliabilism and responsibilism. We focus on two challenges: the epistemic value of other-regarding intellectual virtues, and the problem of “epistemic outsourcing.” In both cases, we identify and evaluate possible strategies for socializing these elements of virtue epistemology.

In this paper, I begin a philosophical theorisation of the phenomenon of toxic positivity (TP) within the framework of social epistemology. TP is the phenomenon of people being positive and optimistic to a degree that is unreasonable in a given situation, and as such makes others feel as if their own (less than positive) feelings are invalid or in some way wrong. I begin by providing an example of TP. I then identify four features of TP: appropriate emotion, unreasonableness, dismissal, and potential harm. Following this, I discuss the possible epistemic effects of TP and argue that it can affect knowledge in three ways: doubting belief, losing belief, and undermining self-trust. Finally, I argue that TP can in some cases be a form of gaslighting and can undermine epistemic agency, both of which are epistemic injustices.

Standardly, echo chambers are thought to be structures that we should avoid. Agents should keep away from them, to be able to assess a fuller range of evidence and avoid having their confidence in that information manipulated. This paper argues against that standard view. Not only can echo chambers be neutral or good for us, but the existing definitions apply so widely that such chambers are unavoidable. We are all in large numbers of echo chambers at any time – they can be found not just on social media or in political groups, but in almost every social or epistemic group we could categorise ourselves into. Because we are finite and fallible, we cannot escape them and need to exist in them just to get by. The concept, then, does not actually capture something as structurally problematic as the paradigmatic cases would suggest. Our way of using the term in social epistemology needs to change.

Who deserves credit for epistemic successes, and who is to blame for epistemic failures? Extreme views, which would place responsibility either solely on the individual or solely on the individual’s surrounding environment, are not plausible. Recently, progress has been made toward articulating virtue epistemology as a suitable middle ground. A socio-environmentally oriented virtue epistemology can recognize that an individual’s traits play an important role in shaping what that individual believes, while also recognizing that some of the most efficacious individual traits have to do with how individuals structure their epistemic environments and how they respond to information received within these environments. I contribute to the development of such an epistemology by introducing and elucidating the virtue of epistemic exactingness, which is characterized by a motivation to regulate the epistemically significant conduct of others.

We acquire from others many of our epistemic resources – individual items of propositional knowledge but also evidential standards, perceptual sensibilities, and the overarching perspectives that include beliefs, standards, and sensibilities together. Knowledge from testimony, which is one category of acquisition of epistemic resources from others, has been studied extensively by epistemologists. We can begin to explore the wider realm of epistemic sharing by varying the characteristic features of testimony. Eleven dimensions of variation provide some structure to this domain. The interactive complexity of the dimensions suggests a virtue epistemological approach to the evaluation of patterns of receptivity to the variety of sharings that we confront as knowers.

John Stuart Mill is central to parallel debates in mainstream contemporary political epistemology and philosophy of federalism concerning the epistemic dimension(s) of legitimate authority. Many scholars invoke Mill to support epistemic arguments for democratic decision-making and decentralized federalism as a means of conferring democratic legitimacy. This article argues that Millian considerations instead provide reason to reject common epistemic arguments for decentralized federalism. Combining Mill's own insights about the epistemic costs of decentralization and recent work in philosophy, politics, and economics undermines purportedly Millian arguments for federalism focused on political experimentation, diversity and participation. Contrary to many interpretations, Millian considerations weaken, rather than strengthen, arguments for federalism. Any valid justification for federalism must instead rest on non-epistemic considerations. This conclusion is notable regardless of how one interprets Mill. But it also supports Mill's stated preference for local decisions subject to central oversight.

I offer two interpretations of independence between experts: (i) independence as deciding autonomously, and (ii) independence as having different perspectives. I argue that when experts are grouped together, independence of both kinds is valuable for the same reason: they reduce the likelihood of erroneous consensus by enabling a greater variety of critical viewpoints. In offering this argument, I show that a purported proof from Finnur Dellsén that groups of more autonomous experts are more reliable does not work. It relies on a flawed ceteris paribus assumption, as well as a false equivalence between autonomy and probabilistic independence. A purely formal proof that more autonomous experts are more reliable is in fact not possible – substantive claims about how more autonomous groups reason are required. My alternative argument for the value of autonomy between experts rests on the claim that groups that triangulate a greater range of critical viewpoints will be less likely to accept hypotheses in error. As well as clarifying what makes autonomy between experts valuable, this mechanism of critical triangulation, gives us reason to value groups of experts that cover a wide range of relevant skills and knowledge. This justifies my second interpretation of expert independence.

This paper introduces the idea of testimonial compression, which I introduce as the audience enforcement of how testifiers may engage in testimonial exchange. More specifically, testimonial compression occurs when an audience requires the speaker to engage in the limited format of simple testimony. Using examples of dialogue from healthcare settings and scholarship on health communication, I illustrate the concept further. Dimensions of testimonial compression include its directness, the roles of audience enforcement and testifier resistance, the fuzziness surrounding structural and agential aspects, and ways in which compression can be negotiated between interlocutors. I further detail some rippling effects of testimonial compression, including impacts of patient-provider communication and the potential for epistemic harms (specifically informational and participatory prejudices). While testimonial compression is not unique to healthcare contexts, many contextual factors specific to medical discourse make testimonial compression especially useful.