Two skeptical challenges have recently been raised against the existence of epistemic blame. One challenge argues that all seeming instances of epistemic blame are nothing more than moral blame in disguise. The second challenge asserts that epistemic blame is in fact nothing more than mere negative evaluation. I aim to simultaneously defend the existence of epistemic blame against both forms of skepticism. But rather than directly defending epistemic blame, I build an indirect case for the phenomenon’s existence. To do so, I return to the moral domain and examine three of what I call blame’s neighboring phenomena: excuses, exemptions, and the objective attitude. I develop domain-generalizable connections between each of these phenomena and blame. Next, I return to the epistemic domain, providing examples of excuses, exemptions, and objective attitudes being offered or adopted in response to poor epistemic performances. Given our derived evidentiary connections, I argue that the presence of these phenomena in the epistemic domain is compelling evidence for the existence of epistemic blame.
Several philosophers have recently debated whether something called ‘epistemic blame’ exists. Others have proposed that there also exists ‘aesthetic blame’, ‘epistemic praise’, ‘epistemic atonement’, ‘epistemic hypocrisy’, and it isn’t hard to imagine others still arguing for the existence of things like ‘zetetic blame...
Arata Hamawaki proposes that external world skepticism arises from dissatisfaction with the limitations of ordinary epistemic life. He offers a Davidson-style transcendental argument in response, urges that certain views of perceptual knowledge lead to skepticism, and suggests that we can’t properly claim to know the...
Adam Leite· International Journal for th...· 0 citations
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...
Blake Roeber’s
Political Humility
is a wonderful piece of work; it’s clear and accessible enough that I’d expect a general educated audience with no philosophical background to profitably read all but the last two chapters (which get more into the epistemological weeds than the earlier parts of the book), while sti...
Daniel Greco· Canadian Journal of Philosop...· 0 citations
This paper levels a charge of free riding against the figure of the radical sceptic. Due to their persistent resistance to attributing knowledge to themselves and others, the radical sceptic limits their contributions to the social context to “mere estimates” or “mere opinions.” Through these “careful beliefs,” they ai...
Jesús Navarro· Principia: An International...· 0 citations
We often accuse others, and sometimes ourselves, of engaging in, as psychologists are apt to term it, “motivated reasoning.” This is the charge that the collection, use, and interpretation of information have been warped by one'sdesires, andis often regarded as amounting to a charge of epistemic irrationality. In a 2...
Yuval Avnur, Dion Scott-Kakures· Philosophical Perspectives· 0 citations
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