Cognitive/Epistemic Authority

In this article, we analyze three cases in which subordinates' oral claims are refuted by superiors who draw on written documents of which the subordinates are the (in)direct authors. In this ventriloquization process (Cooren, 2012), the superiors construct these written documents as facts, which have institutionalized the evidential status of the claims. In particular, we use courtroom data and data from performance appraisal interviews in a medical organization. This comparison revealed that the latter allowed for a more flexible handling of written documents, while the former displayed a much more rigid structure in which the 'incorporation' of written records immediately entailed a number of interactionally non-negotiable implications. Overall, it became clear that by drawing on the different ontological status of written records, superiors subject subordinate participants to their authority, as such constituting the organization in the name of which they are acting and which reflexively entitles them to act in this way. Keywords discourse analysis-performance appraisal interviews-courtroom interactions-written documents-ventriloquization-authority * We would like to thank François Cooren for his comments on an earlier version of this article.

According to The Consensus Gentium Argument from the premise: “Everyone believes that God exists” one can conclude that God does exist. In my paper I analyze two ways of defending the claim that somebody’s belief in God is a prima facie reason to believe. Kelly takes the fact of the commonness of the belief in God as a datum to explain and argues that the best explanation has to indicate the truthfulness of the theistic belief. Trinkaus Zagzebski grounds her defence on rationality of epistemic trust in others. In the paper I argue that the second line of reasoning is more promising and I propose its improved version.

This paper tackles the problem of defining what a cognitive expert is. Starting from a shared intuition that the definition of an expert depends upon the conceptual function of expertise, I shed light on two main approaches to the notion of an expert: according to novice-oriented accounts of expertise, experts need to provide laypeople with information they lack in some domain; whereas, according to research-oriented accounts, experts need to contribute to the epistemic progress of their discipline. In this paper, I defend the thesis that cognitive experts should be identified by their ability to perform the latter function rather than the former, as novice-oriented accounts, unlike research-oriented ones, fail to comply with the rules of a functionalist approach to expertise.

This review reflects on animal history as a subfield of the discipline of history and presents its main arguments and future tasks. Its main goal is to identify the new research prospects and potentials proposed by the book edited by Susan Nance, The Historical Animal. These include such topics as the problem of " the animal's point of view, " animal agency (animals understood as " historical " agents and actors), the problem of identifying traces of animal actions in " anthropocentric " archives and searching for new historical sources (including animals' testimonies). It also explores methodological difficulties, especially with the idea of the historicization of animals and the possible merger of the humanities and social sciences with the natural and life sciences. The review considers how studying animals forces scholars to rethink to its foundations history as a discipline. It claims that the most progressive proposals are coming from scholars (many of whom are historians) who advocate radical interdisciplinarity. The authors are not only interested in merging history with specific sciences (such as animal psychology, ecology, ethology, evolutionary biology, and zoology), but also question basic assumptions of the discipline: the epistemic authority claimed by historians for building knowledge of the past as well as the human epistemic authority for creating such knowledge. In this context several questions emerge: can we achieve " interspecies competence " (Erica Fudge's term) for creating a multispe-cies knowledge of the past? Can research on animals' perception of change help us to develop nonhistorical approaches to the past? Can we imagine accounts of the past based on multispecies co-authorship?

This article focuses on the relationship between attenuation and lack of epistemic authority. It draws on the data from Tena Kichwa, an endangered Quechuan language spoken in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Tena Kichwa has a paradigm of markers which are cognates of evidential markers in other Quechuan varieties, but which in this language are related to epistemic authority: ‘the speaker’s right to know or claim’ (Stivers et al. 2011).

The article describes the semantics of the two ‘epistemic authority’ markers, =mi and =cha, and focuses on the discursive effect of attenuation which can be achieved through the use of =cha. It proposes that through encoding ‘lack of epistemic authority’ =cha achieves the a subtle attenuative effects of ‘distancing speakers from their statements’ and ‘reducing the communicative force of an utterance’ (Briz & Albelda 2013). Interestingly, this effect does not consist in reducing the speaker’s commitment to the veracity of the proposition. Thus, the attenuative analysis of the Tena Kichwa =cha opens some interesting questions about the  conceptual boundaries of what can be considered as an strategy for linguistic attenuation.

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Este artículo se enfoca en la relación entre atenuación y falta de autoridad epistémica. Los datos analizados en el artículo provienen de tena kichwa, una lengua quechua en peligro de extinción, hablada en la Amazonia Ecuatoriana. La lengua posee un paradigma de marcadores que son cognados de los marcadores evidenciales en otras lenguas quechuas, pero que en tena kichwa se relacionan con la autoridad epistémica:  ‘el derecho del hablante a saber o sostener algo’ (Stivers et al. 2011).

El artículo describe la semántica de los dos marcadores de autoridad epistémica en tena kichwa: =mi y =cha. Se concentra sobre todo en los efectos de atenuación que se pueden lograr a través del uso de =cha. Propone que el marcador, que codifica ‘la falta de autoridad epistémica del hablante’, puede tener un sutil efecto atenuativo, ya que ‘distancia al hablante de la elocución’ y ‘reduce la fuerza comunicativa de la oración (Briz & Albelda 2013). Destaca que este efecto atenuador no consiste en reducir el compromiso del hablante con la veracidad de la aseveración. Por lo mismo, el análisis atenuativo de =cha en tena kichwa abre preguntas teóricas interesantes en cuanto a lo que se puede considerar una estrategia de atenuación en el discurso.

The Web and its main tools (Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter) deeply raise and renew fundamental questions, that everyone asks almost every day: Is this information or content true? Can I trust this author or source? These questions are not new, they have been the same with books, newspapers, broadcasting and television, and, more fundamentally, in every human interpersonal communication. This paper is focused on two scientific problems on this issue. The first one is theoretical: to address this issue, many concepts have been used in library and information sciences, communication and psychology. The links between these concepts are not clear: sometimes two concepts are considered as synonymous, sometimes as very different. The second one is historical: sources like Wikipedia deeply challenge the epistemic evaluation of information sources, compared to previous modes of information production. This paper proposes an integrated and simple model considering the relation between a user, a document and an author as human communication. It reduces the problem to three concepts: credibility as a characteristic granted to information depending on its truth-value; trust as the ability to produce credible information; authority when the power to influence of an author is accepted, i.e., when readers accept that the source can modify their opinion, knowledge and decisions. The model describes also two kinds of relationships between the three concepts: an upward link and a downward link. The model is confronted with findings of empirical research on Wikipedia in particular.

Il concetto di autorità è ampiamente utilizzato in diversi ambiti di ricerca e tra questi non fa eccezione la storia del pensiero filosofico. Il significato specifico di questo concetto rimane tuttavia spesso inesplorato. In questo articolo si vuole mostrare come un’analisi della struttura dell’autorità epistemica intesa come relazione possa contribuire a gettare luce su questo fenomeno e a comprendere il suo significato per la storia della filosofia. Viene proposto un modello analitico la cui applicazione consenta in particolare di comprendere le relazioni di  autorità nelle tradizioni testuali. L’efficacia del modello viene dimostrata attraverso lo studio di un caso dalla storia della filosofia antica e tardoantica: la creazione e la ricezione dell’autorità pitagorica nella storia del platonismo.

Epistemic paternalism is the thesis that in some circumstances we are justified in interfering with the inquiry of another for their own epistemic good without consulting them on the issue. In this paper, I address the issue of who is rationally entitled to undertake paternalistic interferences, and in virtue of which features one has this entitlement. First, I undermine the view according to which experts are the most apt people to act as paternalist interferers. Then, I argue that epistemic authorities are in a better position to satisfy the requirements of justified epistemic paternalism, when conceived according to the service model of epistemic authority. Finally, I offer a virtue-based account of paternalist interferers and show how it can apply to cases in which the interferer is a group or an institution.

According to a recent account of epistemic authority proposed by Linda Zagzebski (2012), it is rational for laypersons to believe on authority when they conscientiously judge that the authority is more likely to form true beliefs and avoid false ones than they are in some domain. Christoph Jäger (2015) has recently raised several objections to her view. By contrast, I argue that both theories fail to adequately capture what epistemic authority is, and I offer an alternative account grounded in the abilities that different kinds of authorities are required to possess.

This article explores how the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change(IPCC) has dealt with growing public scrutiny of its workings. It reviews recent initiatives set up to respond to the Climategate controversy. An inde-pendent review of the IPCC undertaken by an international scientific um-brella body—InterAcademy Council—can be shown to have triggered oneof the turning points in the debate, placing the focus of attention on theIPCC’s transparency and accountability. However, the council’s recommen-dations have been implemented by the IPCC in such a way that the issue of public trust is treated as one of effective communication. The article then ex-plains how IPCC’s responses to Climategate can be traced back to the linearmodel of expertise. The article concludes with a discussion why the chal-lenge of producing policy-relevant knowledge under conditions of height-ened public scrutiny also requires new forms of scientific appraisal aimed atwider publics.

What must laypersons understand about science to allow them to make sound decisions on science-related issues? Relying on recent developments in social epistemology, this paper argues that scientific education should have the goal not of bringing laypersons' understanding of science closer to that of expert insiders, but rather of cultivating the kind of competence characteristic of “competent outsiders” (Feinstein 2011). Moreover, it argues that philosophers of science have an important role to play in attempts to promote this kind of understanding, but that to successfully fulfill this role, they will have to approach central questions in the field differently.

‘Authority’ is a widely used, but not very well-defined concept in scholarly discourse. Epistemologists have become increasingly interested in the concept of epistemic authority specifically. So far, however, their discussions have not been brought to bear upon historical scholarship. We propose a model, then, for examining epistemic authority in texts and textual traditions. In order to do so, we examine the ontology and epistemology of epistemic authority. We argue that epistemic authority is not just a scholarly tool, but a phenomenon belonging to social reality. Ultimately, it is constituted by single acts of attribution, which are then, in one way or another, communicated and disseminated. We also specify the different elements that make up the structure of the authority relation and specify its varieties due to the epistemological quality of the attributed property as well as the grounds for its attribution. This results in a grid of parameters that helps to disambiguate the term ‘authority’, facilitating a comparison across case studies from various domains. The model is descriptive and offers a means by which to classify de facto attributions of authority, whether these attributions are legitimate or not. A few examples from scholarship on ancient Platonism illustrate the complexity of the issue and the benefits of our model.

This article explores a key facet of the ideational dynamic underlying the politics of the global financial crisis, examining the interpretative and communicative practices through which the two most powerful central banks in the world—the Fed and the ECB—made sense of the events. Drawing on a constructivist neoinstitutional perspective, the study traces and analyzes the diagnoses and causal accounts of the global financial crisis formulated and voiced by these two actors, mapping and examining their evolution from the beginning of the events in the American subprime market in mid-2007 through the peak of the crisis in global financial markets in mid-2009. The analysis assesses the extent to which the two central banks diagnosed and explained the crisis in ways that challenged dominant notions and conceptual assumptions regarding the economic field, particularly the financial realm, or rather in ways that served to ratify them. While in the first stages of the crisis the diagnoses and causal accounts tended to ratify dominant notions and understandings of the financial field, they later evolved as involving a partial, but still significant, reassessment of established truths. These coherent and detailed sense-making plots touched upon some of the most basic attributes of global financial capitalism, carrying with them the potential for helping to open up the political space for a reevaluation of some of its ideational underpinnings.

W niniejszym artykule autor analizuje teorię autorytetu przedstawioną przez Trinkaus Zagzebski. Teoria ta podkreśla rolę zaufania w uzasadnianiu zdań, m.in. wskazu-jąc na ograniczenia stanowiska egoizmu poznawczego, dla którego ideałem jest sytuacja, w której podmiot, uzasadniając swe przekonania, polega tylko na własnych zdolnościach poznawczych. Trinkaus Zagzebski broni uniwersalizmu poznawczego, wg którego już sam fakt, że osoba x, głosi że p, jest prima facie racją za p. W tekście autor wskazuje na słabe punkty uniwersalizmu i konkluduje, że albo uznamy to stanowisko z jego konsekwentnym odrzuceniem tezy o równości podmiotów poznających, albo też mimo wszystko opowiemy się za egoizmem poznawczym. Autor uznaje przy tym, że amerykańska filozofka daje nam wskazówki, jak ulepszyć owo stanowisko, by nie prowadziło ono do twierdzeń sprzecznych z intuicją.

The evolution of the Public Understanding of Science (PUS)  studies has been marked by the controversies around the so-called laypeople’s “cognitive deficit”. In this essay I propose an approach that seeks to overcome this actually sterile discussion. It will be argued that the socio-epistemic interaction through which knowledge circulates among  experts and laypeople  does not substantially differ from those set with the same purpose within specialised communities. In both contexts, the dialogue enrols in a similar thread of epistemic and extra-epistemic factors – such as the role of credit and authority attribution, the assessment of the informants’ reliability and trustworthiness, the adoption of a stance of trust and an attitude of epistemic deference – which shapes its dynamic and results.

According to preemptionism, a layperson should treat the fact that an epistemic authority believes p as a reason to believe p that replaces her other reasons relevant to believing p and is not simply added to them. Many authors have found the unqualified version of preemptionism, as defended by Linda Zagzebski, too strong. At the same time, a number of them have recently advocated weakened or qualified preemptionist accounts. In this paper, I criticise these accounts. I argue that some of them cannot explain the possibility of rational persistent disagreements between laypeople and epistemic authorities, while those that can explain it fail to account either for the extent to which justification is a holistic phenomenon or for the role of what I call 'control reasons' in the laypeople's epistemic conduct.

This chapter gives an account of epistemic trust. It argues that trust in general is a matter of declining to take precautions against the trustee’s failing to come through, and that this amounts in the epistemic case to declining to rely on evidence for the testified proposition, instead relying solely on the testifier. But if this is so, how can trust play a positive role in securing knowledge? The key, it is argued, lies in recognizing that trust is preemptive: Trusting someone entails believing that she is trustworthy, and this belief preempts other evidence about whether she will come through. In other words, this belief gives the truster himself a good reason to desist from relying on evidence other than the trustee’s word. But if trust is preemptive, how is it compatible with epistemic responsibility, which seems to involve relying on your own evidence? Because, it is claimed, preempting your own evidence in favor of the testifier’s say-so enables your belief to be supported by her evidence – which, we may assume, is superior to your own. Far from forfeiting epistemic responsibility, then, epistemic trust on the preemptive account gives you justificatory access to a swathe of evidence that you would not otherwise have had.

‘Authority’ is a widely used, but not very well-defined concept in scholarly discourse. Epistemologists have become increasingly interested in the concept of epistemic authority specifically. So far, however, their discussions have not been brought to bear upon historical scholarship. We propose a model, then, for examining epistemic authority in texts and textual traditions. In order to do so, we examine the ontology and epistemology of epistemic authority. We argue that epistemic authority is not just a scholarly tool, but a phenomenon belonging to social reality. Ultimately, it is constituted by single acts of attribution, which are then, in one way or another, communicated and disseminated. We also specify the different elements that make up the structure of the authority relation and specify its varieties due to the epistemological quality of the attributed property as well as the grounds for its attribution. This results in a grid of parameters that helps to disambiguate the term ‘authority’, facilitating a comparison across case studies from various domains. The model is descriptive and offers a means by which to classify de facto attributions of authority, whether these attributions are legitimate or not. A few examples from scholarship on ancient Platonism illustrate the complexity of the issue and the benefits of our model.