Shifty Speech and Independent Thought

This is an essay in epistemology and the philosophy of language. It concerns epistemology in that it is a manifesto for epistemic independence: the independence of good thinking from practical considerations. It concerns philosophy of language in that it defends a functionalist account of the normativity of assertion in conjunction with an integrated view of the normativity of constative speech acts. The book defends the independence of thought from the most prominent threat that has surfaced in the last twenty years of epistemological theorizing: the phenomenon of shiftiness of proper assertoric speech with practical context. It does four things: first, it shows that, against orthodoxy, the argument from practical shiftiness of proper assertoric speech against the independence of proper thought from the practical does not go through, for it rests on normative ambiguation. Second, it defends a proper functionalist knowledge account of the epistemic normativity of assertion, in conjunction with classical invariantism about knowledge attributions. Third, it generalizes this account to all constative speech. Last, it defends detailed normative accounts for conjecturing, telling, and moral assertion.

Message Repetition and Epistemic Overinclusion

Chapter 9 discusses how message repetition can undermine citizens’ internal deliberations by leading them to double-count the same piece of information. When speakers do not maintain their epistemic independence, they can lead their listeners to attribute to much weigh to their claims in internal deliberation—a case of epistemic overinclusion. This threat to informal networked deliberation can be mitigated through the adoption of special deliberative norms by citizens and influentials alike and the redesign of social media platforms.

Stories of Change: Comparative Time-Framed Experience Telling in Health Promotion Group Discussions

In this article, we examine comparative time-framed experience telling: episodes of interaction in health promotion group discussions in which one of the participants tells their experience and, in response, another participant tells their own experiences from separate moments or periods of their life and compares them. In so doing, group members reinforce and encourage the previous speaker’s positive stance or challenge the negative stance toward contextually relevant objects: behavior change and suggested solutions. This practice allows group members to demonstrate their independent access to experiences that are similar to those of the other, present evidence of similarities and differences between the experiences, and show their epistemic independence regarding their claims. By recontextualizing the experience of the other in this way, it becomes possible for the group members to interpret and even oppose it while maintaining a level of understanding of the differences between the experiences in question and respecting them.

Against Bot Democracy: The Dangers of Epistemic Double-Counting

The article focuses on the question of how each of us should deliberate internally when forming judgements. That is a matter of political consequence, insofar as those judgements stand behind our votes. I argue that some violations of epistemic independence like message repetition can, if the receivers are not aware of the repetition, lead them to double-count information they have already taken into account, thus distorting their judgments. One upshot is that each of us should ignore or heavily discount certain sorts of inputs (e.g., bot messages or retweets) that are likely just to be repetition of what we have already taken into account in our internal deliberations. I propose various deliberative norms that may protect our internal deliberations from epistemic double-counting, and argue that opinion leaders have special epistemic duties of care to shield their audiences from clone claims.

Is an Appeal to Popularity a Fallacy of Popularity?

It is common to view appeals to popularity as fallacious. We argue this is a mistake and that Condorcet’s jury theorem can be used to justify at least some appeals to popularity as legitimate inferences. More importantly, the conditions for the application of Condorcet’s theorem (binary claim, competent judge, epistemic independence) can be used as critical tools when evaluating appeals to popularity. The application of these three concepts to appeals to popularity provide a more fine-grained critical strategy for argument evaluation and, also, allow us to see the real problems that often arise with such appeals more clearly.

When (not) to claim epistemic independence

The goal of this article is to demonstrate that the Japanese final particles ne and yone are systematically used to adopt different epistemic stances and thereby achieve different interactional consequences. Using conversation analysis, the article analyses the particles used in two specific sequential environments: (1) responses to informing and (2) first and second assessments. It is demonstrated that yone is used to claim that the speaker has arrived at the view independently prior to the ongoing conversation (epistemic independence) as well as knows or has experienced the referent first-hand (independent access) while ne is used to claim independent access but not epistemic independence. This analysis allows us to identify interactional contexts in which it is appropriate for participants to claim epistemic independence with the use of the particle yone and when it is not.

Responding and Clarifying

This paper utilises the methodology of Conversation Analysis (CA hereafter) to report on the Spanish particle pues in Mexican Spanish talk. Two general sequential contexts are examined: 1) pues-prefacing in the second pair-part of an adjacency pair, i.e., in the second pair-part of an assessment sequence and in response to questions; and 2) turn-final pues and pues at the end of a turn-constructional unit. The analysis of assessment sequences shows that pues is used to treat the previous assessment as obvious and index epistemic independence; in addition, pues can be one of the elements used to formulate a delicate disagreement. In response to questions, pues either signals unstraightforwardness in answering or indicates that the answer is obvious which challenges the relevance of the question. Similarly, pues, in response to challenges, prefaces the obvious actions to fulfil the request, making the response a riposte. Turn-final pues and pues at the end of the turn constructional unit mark repair after interactional trouble. Finally, in a news delivery sequence, sí pues treats the previous talk as not news for the recipient.