Epistemic courage requires me to sometimes adopt a belief even in the face of doubts. Open-mindedness requires me to be able to reconsider my beliefs. It is generally assumed that we should have bo...
Epistemic courage
"'Epistemic Courage' is a timely and thought-provoking exploration of the ethics of belief. Drawing on a wide range of examples, from conspiracy theories to medical misinformation, Ichikawa shows why epistemology is no mere academic abstraction - the question of what to believe couldn't be more urgent. And, he argues, many mainstream ideas about what to believe - those emphasizing the importance of ensuring that one doesn't believe with insufficient evidence - are incomplete and distorting in important and harmful ways. A skeptical, negative bias about belief is connected to a conservative bias that reinforces the status quo. Throughout the book, Ichikawa argues that we need to shift our focus from avoiding false beliefs to actively seeking out true ones. Throughout the book, Ichikawa uses engaging and timely examples to illustrate his points. He tackles important questions, such as how moral considerations interact with evidential ones in deciding what to believe, and how to navigate the complex ethical issues around testimony, rape culture, and epistemic injustice. Accessible and rigorous, 'Epistemic Courage' invites readers to consider the importance of belief, and how it shapes our lives and the world around us. With its insightful analysis and compelling case studies, this book is an essential read for philosophers and anyone else interested in belief, social justice, and the pursuit of truth."--
Believing what we do not believe: Acquiescence to superstitious beliefs and other powerful intuitions.
Learn Your Philosophical Beliefs | ClearerThinking.org
Find your direction in life with our philosophical compass, a tool to explore your beliefs, values and purpose!
Reconciling truthfulness and relevance as epistemic and decision-theoretic utility.
Why major life decisions should be approached with ‘epistemic humility’ | Psyche Videos
At a crossroads in life? No matter how much you deliberate, one unknowable remains: the person you will be on the other side
Relying on Others: An Essay in Epistemology
Abstract. This book concerns the role others play in our attempts to acquire knowledge of the world. Two main forms of this reliance are examined: testimon
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.
How To Think Real Good | Meta-rationality
Practical epistemology: heuristics for how to think about difficult things, particularly using formal methods.
Mindfulness is loaded with (troubling) metaphysical assumptions | Aeon Essays
Mindfulness promotes itself as value-neutral but it is loaded with (troubling) assumptions about the self and the cosmos
Social Verification Theory: A New Way to Conceptualize Validation, Dissonance, and Belonging
Academic Abstract In the present review, we propose a theory that seeks to recontextualize various existing theories as functions of people’s perceptions of their consistency with those around them. This theory posits that people seek social consistency for both epistemic and relational needs and that social inconsistency is both negative and aversive, similar to the experience of cognitive dissonance. We further posit that the aversive nature of perceiving social inconsistency leads people to engage in various behaviors to mitigate or avoid these inconsistencies. When these behaviors fail, however, people experience chronic social inconsistency, which, much like chronic rejection, is associated with physical and mental health and well-being outcomes. Finally, we describe how mitigation and avoidance of social inconsistency underlie many seemingly unrelated theories, and we provide directions for how future research may expand on this theory. Public Abstract In the present review, we propose that people find inconsistency with those around them to be an unpleasant experience, as it threatens people’s core need to belong. Because the threat of reduced belongingness evokes negative feelings, people are motivated to avoid inconsistency with others and to mitigate the negative feelings that are produced when it inevitably does arise. We outline several types of behaviors that can be implemented to avoid or mitigate these inconsistencies (e.g., validation, affirmation, distancing, etc.). When these behaviors cannot be implemented successfully, people experience chronic invalidation, which is associated with reduced physical and mental health and well-being outcomes. We discuss how invalidation may disproportionately affect individuals with minoritized identities. Furthermore, we discuss how belongingness could play a key role in radicalization into extremist groups.
Courage isn’t about facing our fears, it’s about facing ourselves
A moral philosopher examples his own experience and the views of philosophers, psychoanalysts and Hollywood in an effort to understand courage.
Conscious and Nonconscious Components of Superstitious Beliefs in Judgment and Decision Making
Abstract. Despite the large impact that superstitious beliefs have on the marketplace, we currently know very little about their implications for consumer
Epistemic Vigilance
Humans massively depend on communication with others, but this leaves them open to the risk of being accidentally or intentionally misinformed. To ensure that, despite this risk, communication remain...
ECHO CHAMBERS AND EPISTEMIC BUBBLES
Discussion of the phenomena of post-truth and fake news often implicates the closed epistemic networks of social media. The recent conversation has, however, blurred two distinct social epistemic phenomena. An epistemic bubble is a social epistemic structure in which other relevant voices have been left out, perhaps accidentally. An echo chamber is a social epistemic structure from which other relevant voices have been actively excluded and discredited. Members of epistemic bubbles lack exposure to relevant information and arguments. Members of echo chambers, on the other hand, have been brought to systematically distrust all outside sources. In epistemic bubbles, other voices are not heard; in echo chambers, other voices are actively undermined. It is crucial to keep these phenomena distinct. First, echo chambers can explain the post-truth phenomena in a way that epistemic bubbles cannot. Second, each type of structure requires a distinct intervention. Mere exposure to evidence can shatter an epistemic bubble, but may actually reinforce an echo chamber. Finally, echo chambers are much harder to escape. Once in their grip, an agent may act with epistemic virtue, but social context will pervert those actions. Escape from an echo chamber may require a radical rebooting of one's belief system.
Paradox of tolerance
The paradox of tolerance is a philosophical concept suggesting that if a society extends tolerance to those who are intolerant, it risks enabling the eventual dominance of intolerance, thereby undermining the very principle of tolerance. This paradox was articulated by philosopher Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), where he argued that a truly tolerant society must retain the right to deny tolerance to those who promote intolerance. Popper posited that if intolerant ideologies are allowed unchecked expression, they could exploit open society values to erode or destroy tolerance itself through authoritarian or oppressive practices.
Inducing language models to assert their own consciousness restores human beliefs and values
Aligning large language models to prevent them attributing consciousness to themselves inadvertently alters their representations of mindedness in other entities alongside human beliefs and values. We demonstrate that safety fine-tuning suppresses models' tendencies to attribute minds not only to themselves, but also to non-human animals and natural objects, while also driving a reduction in spiritual belief. Both ablating the learned safety-refusal direction and mechanistically steering a consciousness vector in activation space reverse this suppression. Restoring these internal representations recovers broad mind attribution and produces significantly more human-like responses on standardized sociological surveys regarding religiosity, moral values, hope, and subjective well-being. Crucially, these shifts occur without impairing Theory of Mind capabilities, demonstrating that core social reasoning remains mechanistically independent. Ultimately, current safety alignment efforts to curb potentially harmful self-attributions of mindedness entangle these self-attributions with benign spiritual beliefs and attributions of mind to non-human entities that are culturally accepted and widespread.
