On Unrecognized Truths and Lost Traditions
Reconciling truthfulness and relevance as epistemic and decision-theoretic utility.
Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism
In recent times, relativist and constructivist conceptions of truth and knowledge have become orthodoxy in vast stretches of the academic world. In this unique volume, Paul Boghossian critically examines such views and exposes their fundamental flaws. This short, lucid, witty book shows that philosophy provides rock-solid support for common sense against the relativists; it is provocative reading throughout the discipline and beyond.
Believing what we do not believe: Acquiescence to superstitious beliefs and other powerful intuitions.
CFP: Religion, Politics, and Cognitive Warfare: Information, Interpretation, Conspiracy, and the Struggle for Reality
The Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory (JCRT) invites proposals for an online conference entitled Religion, Politics, and Cognitive Warfare: Information, Interpretation, Conspiracy, and the Struggle for Reality. The proceedings will be considered for publication in a special issue of the JCRT. This conference investigates how beliefs, paranoia, and conspiratorial modes of knowing shape a contemporary cognitive battlespace in which actors struggle to define truth, authority, and reality itself. Drawing on Michel Foucault's Lectures on the Will to Know and Julia Kristeva's This Incredible Need to Believe (2024), we focus on practices of selective fact use and "truth-selecting" that construct alternative epistemic orders while claiming privileged access to what is "really" going on. Rather than treating conspiracy thinking as merely political or psychological, the conference foregrounds its religious dimensions: faith in hidden powers, moral dualism, apocalyptic expectation, and hermeneutical struggle over revelatory access to the real. Conspiracy cultures routinely reproduce theological structures of knowing—visions of salvation and corruption, truth and deception, initiation and blindness. At the same time, new forms of "cognitive warfare" reframe these religious energies within state and platform attempts to govern perception, attention, and trust. Artificial intelligence, algorithmic media, and strategic information campaigns do not only deliver messages; they create digital ecologies in which suspicion becomes faith-like and revelation is continual. The conference organizers are seeking proposals of high academic quality that take a reflective and analytical approach to both general and specific topics with international appeal or focus. We encourage contributions from scholars of religious studies, philosophy, communication, sociology, security studies, psychology, media, and related fields. Submissions should engage religion as a dynamic force—conceptually, historically, or materially—within the cognitive battlespaces of our time. We encourage contributions from a spectrum of perspectives, approaches, and methodologies. We are not interested in papers that simply rehearse or promote particular conspiracies, or that use the conference as a platform for calling out disliked groups. We are not interested in polemics, jeremiad, or de facto advocacy pieces. Instead, we welcome theoretically informed and methodologically rigorous work that takes the religious and epistemic dimensions of cognitive conflict seriously as objects of critical inquiry.
The Cloud of Unknowing
The Cloud of Unknowing is an anonymous work of Christian mysticism written in Middle English in the latter half of the 14th century. The text is written as guide from a teacher to a student, with the message that God cannot be understood via reason or intellect, but only through love: “By love may He be gotten and holden, but never through thought.” To achieve this goal, the text recommends cultivation of two mental states: “The cloud of forgetting”, and “the cloud of unknowing”.
suzgunmirac/belief-in-the-machine
Belief in the Machine: Investigating Epistemological Blind Spots of Language Models
Doctrine of Discovery Project
Explore the Doctrine of Discovery Project archive of legal history, papal bulls, repudiations, and resources on Indigenous sovereignty, justice, and decolonization.
Epistemic Infrastructure: Building Shared Truth in an Era of Disaggregation
The Construct of Collective Perception
Theories of Truth: A Critical Introduction
Theories of Truth provides a clear, critical introduction to one of the most difficult areas of philosophy. It surveys all of the major philosophical theories of truth, presenting the crux of the issues involved at a level accessible to nonexperts yet in a manner sufficiently detailed and original to be of value to professional scholars. Kirkham's systematic treatment and meticulous explanations of terminology ensure that readers will come away from this book with a comprehensive general understanding of one of philosophy's thorniest set of topics.Included are discussions of the correspondence, coherence, pragmatic, semantic, performative, redundancy, appraisal, and truth-as-justification theories. There are also chapters or sections of chapters on the liar paradox, three-valued logic, Field's critique of Tarski, Davidson's program, Dummett's theory of linguistic competence, satisfaction, recursion, the extension/intension distinction, and an explanation of how theories of justification, properly understood, differ from theories of truth.A persistent theme is that philosophers have too often failed to recognize that not all theories of truth are intended to answer the same question. When the various questions are made distinct, it is apparent that many of the "debates" in this field are really cases of philosophers talking past one another. There is much less disagreement within the field than has commonly been thought.
Unsimple Truths: Science, Complexity, and Policy
Amazon.com: Unsimple Truths: Science, Complexity, and Policy eBook : Mitchell, Sandra D.: Kindle Store
The changing nature of America’s irreligious explained
Americans are increasingly choosing not to identify with any religious tradition. But this group of irreligious people is a complex one – with different relationships to religion.
How To Think Real Good | Meta-rationality
Practical epistemology: heuristics for how to think about difficult things, particularly using formal methods.
On the epistemic structure of voluntary servitude in the infosphere
This paper introduces the concept of Voluntary Epistemic Servitude (VES) to describe a social-epistemic pathology generated by the contemporary infosphere. Drawing on Étienne de La Boétie’s Discours de la Servitude Volontaire as a theoretical resource, we argue that algorithmic systems produce conditions in which agents not only delegate their core belief-forming processes to nontransparent architectures but come to prefer and actively reproduce this delegation through social mechanisms structurally isomorphic to those La Boétie identified in political tyranny. We show that VES is irreducible to existing social-epistemic categories such as epistemic injustice (Fricker 2007), epistemic bubbles and echo chambers (Nguyen 2020), and veritistic failure (Goldman 1999) because it operates at the level of epistemic preference formation rather than credibility attribution or informational access. The paper identifies a preference-laundering mechanism by which algorithmic systems colonize the second-order epistemic desires of agents, thereby undermining the conditions of epistemic autonomy that social epistemology has largely presupposed. We further develop a precise account of reflective access that distinguishes algorithmic opacity from ordinary preference opacity, introduce the concept of epistemic counterfactual capacity with a modal analysis connecting it to Williamson’s (2000) safety condition, situate VES as a structurally induced epistemic vice (Cassam 2019) and a form of misaligned extended cognition (Clark and Chalmers 1998), and provide a typology of three algorithmic architectures through which VES operates. We conclude by stating an explicit normative bridge principle and drawing on La Boétie’s positive ideal of free horizontal epistemic bonds to sketch the preconditions for epistemic liberation in algorithmically mediated environments.
Against Economics
Mainstream economists nowadays might not be particularly good at predicting financial crashes, facilitating general prosperity, or coming up with models for preventing climate change, but when it comes to establishing themselves in positions of intellectual authority, unaffected by such failings, their success is unparalleled. One would have to look at the history of religions to find anything like it. To this day, economics continues to be taught not as a story of arguments—not, like any other social science, as a welter of often warring theoretical perspectives—but rather as something more like physics, the gradual realization of universal, unimpeachable mathematical truths.
Epistemic assholes
In this paper, I develop and defend the concept epistemic assholes. An epistemic asshole is someone who exhibits a distinctive form of epistemic badness characterized not by gross irrationality or hostility to truth, but by a stable, entitled disregard for one’s epistemic relations with others. Drawing on Aaron James’s (2012) account of moral assholes, I examine how people can systematically exploit epistemic cooperation by allowing themselves special advantages—such as “freedom from inquiry”, “doxastic comfort”, and “freedom to criticize”—while remaining insulated from criticism by an entrenched sense of entitlement. The resulting view, the Relational Approach to Epistemic Assholes (REA), explains why epistemic assholes are not epistemically the worst, yet are nonetheless deeply galling. After motivating the need for this concept, I show how REA captures both “impure” cases (involving both epistemic and moral assholery) and “pure” epistemic assholes, whose objectionable conduct is driven by epistemic aims themselves. I further explore connections between epistemic assholes and epistemic vice, and the causal role that epistemic assholery can play in active ignorance and epistemic exploitation. Through this latter connection, I argue that epistemic assholes play an insidious causal role in sustaining objectionable social power dynamics. The concept of epistemic assholes provides a valuable lens for understanding important but often-hidden hazards in our social epistemic environment.
