scholarly journals No-Platforming and Higher-Order Evidence, or Anti-Anti-No-Platforming

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 487-502 ◽  
Author(s):  
NEIL LEVY
Keyword(s):  
Free Speech ◽  
Higher Order ◽  
Disadvantaged Groups ◽  
Intellectual Autonomy ◽  
Higher Order Evidence

AbstractNo-platforming—the refusal to allow those who espouse views seen as inflammatory the opportunity to speak in certain forums—is very controversial. Proponents typically cite the possibility of harms to disadvantaged groups and, sometimes, epistemically paternalistic considerations. Opponents invoke the value of free speech and respect for intellectual autonomy in favor of more open speech, arguing that the harms that might arise from bad speech are best addressed by rebuttal, not silencing. In this article, I argue that there is a powerful consideration in favor of no-platforming some speakers: allowing them a platform generates genuine higher-order evidence in favor of their claims. When that higher-order evidence would be misleading, we may reasonably believe it should not be generated.

scholarly journals Bad Beliefs

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil Levy
Keyword(s):  
Climate Science ◽  
Higher Order ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Alternative Account ◽  
Epistemic Agency ◽  
Rational Agents ◽  
Intellectual Autonomy ◽  
Popular View ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
Higher Order Evidence

Why do people come to reject climate science or the safety and efficacy of vaccines, in defiance of the scientific consensus? A popular view explains bad beliefs like these as resulting from a range of biases that together ensure that human beings fall short of being genuinely rational animals. This book presents an alternative account. It argues that bad beliefs arise from genuinely rational processes. We’ve missed the rationality of bad beliefs because we’ve failed to recognize the ubiquity of the higher-order evidence that shapes beliefs, and the rationality of being guided by this evidence. The book argues that attention to higher-order evidence should lead us to rethink both how minds are best changed and the ethics of changing them: we should come to see that nudging—at least usually—changes belief (and behavior) by presenting rational agents with genuine evidence, and is therefore fully respectful of intellectual agency. We needn’t rethink Enlightenment ideals of intellectual autonomy and rationality, but we should reshape them to take account of our deeply social epistemic agency.

Higher-Order Evidence

2019 ◽  
pp. 312-344
Author(s):  
Declan Smithies
Keyword(s):  
Higher Order ◽  
Epistemic Rationality ◽  
Total Evidence ◽  
Epistemic Akrasia ◽  
Level Splitting ◽  
Higher Order Evidence

Chapter 10 explores a puzzle about epistemic akrasia: if you can have misleading higher-order evidence about what your evidence supports, then your total evidence can make it rationally permissible to be epistemically akratic. Section 10.1 presents the puzzle and three options for solving it: Level Splitting, Downward Push, and Upward Push. Section 10.2 argues that we should opt for Upward Push: you cannot have misleading higher-order evidence about what your evidence is or what it supports. Sections 10.3 and 10.4 defend Upward Push against David Christensen’s objection that it licenses irrational forms of dogmatism in ideal and nonideal agents alike. Section 10.5 responds to his argument that misleading higher-order evidence generates rational dilemmas in which you’re guaranteed to violate one of the ideals of epistemic rationality. Section 10.6 concludes with some general reflections on the nature of epistemic rationality and the role of epistemic idealization.

Artists in Courts

Art Attacks ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 58-88
Author(s):  
Malvika Maheshwari
Keyword(s):  
Free Speech ◽  
Electoral Politics ◽  
Institutional Logics ◽  
Economic Liberalization ◽  
Critical Element ◽  
Hindu Nationalism ◽  
Disadvantaged Groups ◽  
Regulatory Bodies ◽  
The Law

Chapter 2 of this first section turns to independent India’s concerns with law as a broader problem and solution to this issue of violence, and questions whether legal-institutional logics might have produced not less but more offence-taking. The idea here is not simply to ‘critique’ vigilant, and even, as many would argue, necessary laws and regulatory bodies, or to suggest that they are the cause of the escalation of violence against artists. The widespread and dramatic increase in criminalized competitive and communal electoral politics, the onslaught of globalized media since the economic liberalization of the 1990s, the rise and radicalization of Hindu nationalism since the mid-1980s, the politically creative and deepening bargaining capacity of hitherto disadvantaged groups—all have played a part in the definitive increase in the anxieties around free speech and the attacks against artists. However, if the violence of offence-taking steadily came to not so much dislocate but relocate itself in the courts, the courts themselves remain a critical element among many others that contributed to the precariousness of free speech, with the law emerging as a medium of harassment.

Can Your Total Evidence Mislead About Itself?

2019 ◽  
pp. 298-316
Author(s):  
Alex Worsnip
Keyword(s):  
Mathematical Model ◽  
Higher Order ◽  
Total Evidence ◽  
Simple Mathematical Model ◽  
First Order ◽  
Higher Order Evidence

It’s fairly uncontroversial that you can sometimes get misleading higher-order evidence about what your first-order evidence supports. What is more controversial is whether this can result in a situation where your total evidence is misleading about what your total evidence supports: that is, where your total evidence is misleading about itself. It’s hard to arbitrate on purely intuitive grounds whether any particular example of misleading higher-order evidence is an example of misleading total evidence. This chapter tries to make progress by offering a simple mathematical model that suggests that higher-order evidence will tend to bear more strongly on higher-order propositions about what one’s evidence supports than it does on the corresponding first-order propositions; and then by arguing that given this, it is plausible that there will be some cases of misleading total evidence.

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