Authority as epistemic capital

Fundamentalism and Epistemic Authority

I will discuss three questions in my paper: 1. What are the essential elements of fundamentalism? 2. What is the role of authority as a source of fundamentalism? 3. What is the role of trust in the spreading of fundamentalism? For each question I will outline a possible answer from a special theoretical point of view. What is " fundamentalism " ? There is an ongoing discussion about this questi...

Negotiating Epistemic Authority

Why do we trust what other people say, and form beliefs on the basis of their speech? One answer: they are taken to have epistemic authority. Intuitively this means that the other person (or institution, or group) is taken to be authoritative in what they say, at least with respect to a particular domain. Here, we want to claim that there are (at least) two varieties of epistemic authority, one...

Says Who ? : Epistemic Authority Effects in Social Judgment ©

Arnon Keren * Epistemic Authority , Testimony and the Transmission of Knowledge

I present an account of what it is to trust a speaker, and argue that the account can explain the common intuitions which structure the debate about the transmission view of testimony. According to the suggested account, to trust a speaker is to grant her epistemic authority on the asserted proposition, and hence to see her opinion as issuing a second order, preemptive reason for believing the ...

Reconsidering Authority Scientific Expertise, Bounded Rationality, and Epistemic Backtracking

How to regard the weight we give to a proposition on the grounds of its being endorsed by an authority? I examine this question as it is raised within the epistemology of science, and I argue that “authority-based weight” should receive special handling, for the following reason. Our assessments of other scientists’ competence or authority are nearly always provisional, in the sense that to sav...