Event Details

"Rumination and Wronging: The Role of Attention in Epistemic Morality"
The idea that our epistemic practices — from the ways we regard others’ credibility, to our evidence-gathering practices, to the beliefs we harbor —can be harmful has been the core observation driving the growing literature on epistemic injustice, doxastic wronging, and moral encroachment. But, one element of our epistemic practice has been starkly absent from this discussion of epistemic morality: attention.

While the topic of attention has been a mainstay of empirical literature in psychology and neuroscience, it has only recently become commonplace in philosophy of mind and related fields. In this talk, the speaker will show that attention is a worthwhile focus for epistemology, and especially for the field of epistemic morality. After presenting a new dilemma for proponents of doxastic wronging, the speaker will show how focusing on attention not only allows us to defuse that dilemma, but also helps to substantiate accounts of what goes wrong in cases of doxastic wronging.