Hidden figures: epistemic costs and benefits of detecting (invisible) diversity in science

Demographic diversity might often be present in a group without group members noticing it. What are the epistemic effects if they do? Several philosophers and social scientists have recently argued that when individuals detect demographic diversity in their group, this can result in epistemic benefits even if that diversity doesn’t involve cognitive differences. Here I critically discuss research advocating this proposal, introduce a distinction between two types of detection of demographic diversity, and apply this distinction to the theorizing on diversity in science. Focusing on ‘invisible’ diversity (i.e., differences in, e.g., LGBTQ+, religious, or political orientation), I argue that in one common kind of group in science, if group members have full insight into their group’s diversity, this is likely to create epistemic costs. These costs can be avoided and epistemic benefits gained if group members only partly detect their group’s diversity. There is thus an epistemic reason for context-dependent limitations on scientists’ insight into the diversity of their group.

Religious Trust, Anti-Trust, and Reasons for Religious Belief

This chapter begins by distinguishing two kinds of epistemic reasons, one irreducibly first personal, and the other third personal. Here the kinds of reasons that are irreducibly first personal are called “deliberative reasons,” and the kinds of reasons that are third personal are called “theoretical reasons.” The use of the terms “deliberative” and “theoretical” is not essential to the distinction being made, but these terms draw attention to the different functions of the two kinds of reasons in psychology. Epistemic self-trust is an irreducibly first personal epistemic reason, and it is the most basic reason of either kind. Attacks on religious belief are sometimes third personal, but sometimes they are first personal attacks on self-trust or trust in religious communities. Attacks on self-trust require a different kind of response than attacks on third person reasons.

Inference and Rationality

A theory of rational state transition must answer four questions: are shifts within its domain brought about by agents or do they simply happen to them? Is the approach part a theory’s dynamics or kinematics? Does the approach make use of everyday or ideal rationality? Are the mental states involved coarse- or fine-grained? The questions are used to generate a sixteen-fold classification of rational shift-in-view. It is then argued that rational inference leads to the idea of a coordinated epistemic reason: roughly, a reason where causal-efficacy and evidential-relevance fuse together. This idea is illustrated with everyday examples and it is then argued that the theory of rational inference turns crucially on the non-ideal rationality of agential dynamics. The chapter closes by developing a theory of rational inference and a take on the human mind to go with it.

Subjective Experience in Explanations of Animal PTSD Behavior

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a mental health condition in which the experience of a traumatic event causes a series of psychiatric and behavioral symptoms such as hypervigilance, insomnia, irritability, aggression, constricted affect, and self-destructive behavior. This paper investigates two case studies to argue that the experience of PTSD is not restricted to humans alone; we have good epistemic reason to hold that some animals can experience genuine PTSD, given our current and best clinical understanding of the disorder in humans. I will use this evidence to argue for two claims. First, because the causal structure of PTSD plausibly requires reference to a traumatic conscious experience in order to explain subsequent behaviors, the fact that animals can have PTSD provides new evidence for animal consciousness. Second, the discovery of PTSD in animals puts pressure on accounts which hold that animal behavior can be fully explained without reference to subjective experience.

Epistemic Sentimentalism and Epistemic Reason-Responsiveness

Epistemic Sentimentalism is the view that emotional experiences such as fear and guilt are a source of immediate justification for evaluative beliefs. For example, guilt can sometimes immediately justify a subject’s belief that they have done something wrong. This chapter focuses on a family of objections to Epistemic Sentimentalism that all take as a premise the claim that emotions possess a normative property that is apparently antithetical to it: epistemic reason-responsiveness, i.e., emotions have evidential bases and justifications can be demanded of them. This chapter responds to these objections whilst granting that emotions are reason-responsive. This is not only dialectically significant vis-à-vis the prospects for Epistemic Sentimentalism, but also supports a broader claim about the compatibility of a mental item’s being reason-responsive and its being a generative source of epistemic justification.

Indirect epistemic reasons and religious belief

If believing P will result in epistemically good outcomes, does this generate an epistemic reason to believe P, or just a pragmatic reason? Conceiving of such reasons as epistemic reasons seems to lead to absurdity, e.g. by allowing that someone can rationally hold beliefs that conflict with her assessment of her evidence's probative force. We explain how this and other intuitively unwelcome results can be avoided. We also suggest a positive case for conceiving of such reasons as epistemic reasons, namely, that they exhibit a form of interpersonal normative parity that's typical of epistemic reasons but not pragmatic reasons. We then link this discussion to religious belief, suggesting that there are sometimes indirect epistemic reasons for religious belief, and that certain characterizations of religious belief are instructive in thinking about how to take account of indirect epistemic reasons.

The Overall Argument of Alston's Perceiving God

Alston's overall aim in Perceiving God is to show that we are rationally justified in believing that our apparent direct perceptions of God's presence (called ‘M-experiences’) are reliable and thus for the most part veridical, the objective, existentially-committed beliefs based on these experiences thereby being prima facie justified, subject to defeat by certain overriders supplied by some background religion. It is argued that our rational justification for believing this is of both an epistemic and pragmatic (or practical) sort, in which an epistemic reason for believing a proposition is truth conducive, rendering the proposition probable, while a pragmatic one concerns the benefits which accrue from belief. We will begin by considering the pragmatic justification, since the case he makes out for epistemic justification is built on its back.