Simpson, Robert Mark;
Handfield, Toby;
(2025)
Against Radical Epistemic Environmentalism (Or Why Uncritically Deferring to Authority is Still Irrational).
Episteme
pp. 1-15.
10.1017/epi.2025.23.
(In press).
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Abstract
Neil Levy’s book Bad Beliefs defends a prima facie attractive approach to social epistemic policy – namely, an environmental approach, which prioritises the curation of a truth-conducive information environment above the inculcation of individual criti cal thinking abilities and epistemic virtues. However, Levy’s defence of this approach is grounded in a surprising and provocative claim about the rationality of deference. His claim is that it’s rational for people to unquestioningly defer to putative authorities, because these authorities hold expert status. As friends of the environmental approach, we try to show why it will be better for that approach to not be argumentatively grounded in this revisionist claim about when and why deference is rational. We identify both theoretical and practical problems that this claim gives rise to.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Against Radical Epistemic Environmentalism (Or Why Uncritically Deferring to Authority is Still Irrational) |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1017/epi.2025.23 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2025.23 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited. |
| Keywords: | Expertise rationality; epistemic networks; misinformation; virtue epistemology |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Dept of Philosophy |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10207856 |
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