On Critical Cyborg Literacy: A Reply to Azamnia, Laura Forlano and Danya Glabau Our book Cyborg, which was published in 2024 as part of the MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series, set out to revisit and extend feminist cyborg theories for the 21st century. We argue that it is possible to understand…

The Constraints of Technical Practices or Epistemological Commitment? A Reply to Ting and Montgomery, Jill Morawski Carol Ting and Martin Montgomery (2024) ground their perceptive analysis of experimental social science in its optimistic albeit problematic adoption of the experimental methods of…

On Atkins’s Average Believer: Reflection, Inquiry, and Epistemic Responsibility, Jeff Kasser “Apology for an Average Believer” (2024) casts judgment on those who would judge our ordinary fellow citizens “irrational” for believing “demonstrably false” claims such as that significant irregularities…

Truths Beyond Our Ken: Responding to McCraw, Peter Baumann I am very grateful to Benjamin McCraw for his recent contribution and continuation of our discussion of the “Reidian Transcendental Argument” (RTA) (see McCraw 2026). I think that McCraw is bringing up a new and very important point: one…

Beyond Representation: Systemic Epistemic Alterity and the Architecture of Knowledge in the Contemporary Academy, Part II, Wael Saleh 3. Productive Intersections Between Systemic Epistemic Alterity and Other Traditions in the Study of Knowledge and Power Placing Systemic Epistemic Alterity in…

Beyond Representation: Systemic Epistemic Alterity and the Architecture of Knowledge in the Contemporary Academy, Part I, Wael Saleh Abstract This article advances Systemic Epistemic Alterity as a critical analytical framework rather than a comprehensive empirical model. It does not claim to…

Intellectual Vices: Perhaps More is More? A Reply to Matheson, Francesca Pongiglione Abstract Jonathan Matheson’s critique (2025) of my paper “Epistemic Hubris” (2025) hinges on the claim that the vice I describe is not novel, but rather a variation of familiar epistemic vices—namely, intellectual…

No Such Thing as Reliable Bullshit Machines: A Reply to Hauswald, Moti Mizrahi Abstract In Mizrahi (2025a), I sketch two arguments against the claim that LLMs should be granted the status of epistemic authorities worthy of epistemic respect. Rico Hauswald (2026) objects to the second premise (2,…

Further Reflections on Epistemic Hubris: A Reply to Lanius, Francesca Pongiglione In commenting on my paper “Epistemic Hubris” (2025), David Lanius (2025) makes several interesting observations, all of which point to the need for a deeper exploration and clearer definition of this epistemic…

SERRC Volume 15, Issue 2, 1–106, February 2026 Volume 15, Issue 2, 1–106, February 2026 ❧ Hauswald, Rico. 2026. “Why Shouldn’t There be Reliable ‘Bullshit Machines’? A Response to Mizrahi on Artificial Epistemic Authorities.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 15 (2): 1–7. ❧ McCraw,…

Why Epistemic Criteria Are Not Primary and Not Enough: A Response to Holst’s Epistemic Approach to Democratising Expertise, Hannah Hilligardt Within the values in science debate, it is a popular position to allow for social values and aims to shape scientific research as long as they do not…

Radical Universalism: A Review, Mark D. West The Enlightenment’s universalist wager now faces coordinated assault from positions that ostensibly oppose one another. On the right, nationalism and civilizational particularism treat universality as a naïve fiction or, worse, as a solvent of the…

Maintenance, Repair, and the Nature of Artifacts: Comments on Lawler and Vega-Encabo, Tim Juvshik Two recent trends have emerged in two separate subfields of philosophy which have increased our understanding of the nature of artifacts—things like cellphones, chairs, and hammers. First, analytic…

Dialectical Neglect, Principles, and Pragmatic Deep Disagreement Optimism: A Second Reply to Serebrinsky, Scott F. Aikin and Alison Emery Abstract In “Epistemic Principles and Dialectical Neglect,” Dalila Serebrinsky defends her development of the principles approach to deep disagreements, noting…

Knowledge Management Against Scientific Autonomy? An Interview with Steve Fuller, Yang Yang This interview engages with Steve Fuller’s analysis of knowledge management (KM), focusing on its implications for scientific autonomy, epistemic values, and the governance of innovation under contemporary…

How to Respond to Generalism about Contrarian Conspiracy Theories: A Reply to Duetz, Kurtis Hagen Arguably the most contested area in the epistemology of conspiracy theories is the epistemic status of conspiracy theories that conflict with an “official account” (variously defined). In a recent…

Structure, Culture, and Norms: A Further Dialogue with Mangraviti, Colin R. Caret In “The Logician’s Responsibility: A Response to Caret” (2025), Franci Mangraviti takes me to task (Caret 2025) for underplaying logic’s contribution to epistemic injustice. My skepticism is said to be “stuck between…

If It’s Too Good to be True, It Ain’t: On Feminist Epistemology and a Historical Myth, Part II, Valeria Edelsztein and Claudio Cormick Section 4: … And Its Philosophical Uptake According to Natalie Ashton and Robin McKenna (2018), it is: [N]ow accepted that the peak in sexual activity during…

If It’s Too Good to be True, It Ain’t: On Feminist Epistemology and a Historical Myth, Valeria Edelsztein and Claudio Cormick According to an account popularized by Kim Wallen (and, more importantly, according to the appropriation of this story by feminist epistemologists), it was only since 1976…

On Reasonable Cooperation and Vaccine Hesitancy Among Ethnically Marginalized Communities: A Reply to Kelsall and Sorell, Tarun Kattumana In “Two Kinds of Vaccine Hesitancy”, Joshua Kelsall and Tom Sorell (2025) consider whether it is reasonable to be vaccine hesitant. The paper discusses a number…

Will the Anti-Skeptic Ever Go Away? A Continuing Dialogue with Baumann, Benjamin W. McCraw I want to extend an additional and deeper thanks to Peter Baumann for the continued dialogue stemming from my paper. Baumann’s charitable, yet critical, continued discussion models what is best in the…

Why Shouldn’t There be Reliable “Bullshit Machines”? A Response to Mizrahi on Artificial Epistemic Authorities, Rico Hauswald In a recent contribution to SERRC, Moti Mizrahi criticizes current attempts to make conceptual space for the idea of artificial epistemic authorities (AEAs), that is, large…

SERRC Volume 15, Issue 12, 1–80, January 2026 Volume 15, Issue 1, 1–80, January 2026 ❧ Kukkonen, Karin. 2026. “A Response to Caracciolo’s Reply to ‘Designing an Expert Setting for Interdisciplinary Dialogue’.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 15 (1): 1–6. ❧ Shajahan, Muhammed Shah.…

Measures of Epistemic Autonomy: Remarks on Beebe’s Scales, Heather Battaly James Beebe’s “The Pitfalls of Epistemic Autonomy without Intellectual Humility” (2024) asks whether intellectual humility can prevent epistemic autonomy from becoming an extreme form of intellectual individualism. More…

Death as an Epistemological Foundation, Ilina Marinova Debates over brain death and organ donation are often framed as technical or ethical disputes. This article argues that something more fundamental is at stake. It examines death as a functional epistemic category that modern societies rely on…

Gnostic Populism or What I Learned on X, Bernard N. Wills One of the most striking things about our contemporary culture (and its assumed ‘secularity) is the degree to which it recapitulates mythic and theological patterns long assumed lost and superseded.  This is especially true in the political…

A “Parasitology” of Interdisciplinary Collaborations: Theorizing the Add-on Role of Social Sciences and Humanities, Judith Igelsböck Abstract Anita Välikangas’s analysis of a broad selection of interdisciplinary funding programs shows that the Social Sciences and Humanities’ (SSH) relegation to…

Understanding, Teaching, and Phenomenology in the Age of LLMs: Critical Reply to Malfatti’s “ChatGPT, Education, and Understanding”, Jacob Rump In “ChatGPT, Education, and Understanding” (2025), Federica Isabella Malfatti provides a thought-provoking account of what it would take for an Large…

What Are We to Do About Vicious Distrusters? A Reply to Carter and Meehan, Johnny Brennan The pursuit of knowledge can go wrong in many ways. It can go wrong when trying to gain knowledge through reasoning. We jump to conclusions, ignore disconfirming evidence, improperly interpret evidence,…

Interstitial Justice and Erasure: A Response to Richardson, Ásta A lot of philosophical work in the last two decades has been at the intersection of theoretical and practical philosophy, especially concerning social aspects of epistemic, linguistic, or ontological phenomena. Although the…

Restricting AI to Its Proper Sphere: A Response to Blok, Jonas Hallström In his fine and philosophically well-argued article “Economics and Politics in the Age of AI” (2025), Vincent Blok asserts that the “technological advancements in digital technologies like AI raise societal concerns about the…

Thinking Dwelling with Heidegger and Asad: Existence, Authority, and the Problem of Home, Muhammed Shah Shajahan Muhammed Nishad’s reflections on Martin Heidegger’s notion of dwelling (wohnen) to interpret the social and political significance of Mosques in the South Indian region of Malabar open…

A Response to Caracciolo’s Reply to “Designing an Expert Setting for Interdisciplinary Dialogue”, Karin Kukkonen, My proposal in the initial article (2024) was that literary texts and the expertise of literary scholars have an important role to play in developing new means for exchange and…

SERRC: Of Note, 2025 My sincerest thanks to the SERRC’s contributors in 2025. Your work cultivated the reception of select articles published in Social Epistemology and Techné and produced insights about ongoing dialogues and projects. I am particularly grateful for the continuing engagement of…

SERRC: Volume 14, Issue 12, 1–71, December 2025 Volume 14, Issue 12, 1–71, December 2025 ❧ Basham, Lee. 2025. “Response to Napolitano and Harris on Epistemic Authority.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 14 (12): 1–10. ❧ Tuckwell, William. 2025. “A Comment on Anderson’s ‘Virtuous…

Epistemic Agency Is Enhancing Your Power to Know: A Reply to Coeckelbergh, Gärtner, Steup and Xu, Adam Riggio A massively important concern for our time, at the moment, is the question of epistemic agency, how we can develop it, and how we can protect it from pernicious forces and influences that…

Twenty Years After Kitzmiller: Towards a Different Science-Religion Relationship, Steve Fuller On 20 December 2005, Judge John Jones decided in favour of the plaintiffs in Kitzmiller et al v Dover Area School District at the Mid-Pennsylvania US District Court in Harrisburg. I testified as an…

Why Should We Read Old Books in the Time of LLMs? (And, No, Not Because Using LLMs is Cheating), Ljiljana Radenovic Recently on X (formerly Twitter), an account that promotes various uses of LLMs (Large Language Models) to their academic followers posted a thread on how to write 4,000 words of…

“Hope Does Not Put Us to Shame”: A Final Anti-Skeptical Reply to Tőzsér, Bálint Békefi In my review (2024) of János Tőzsér’s monograph The Failure of Philosophical Knowledge (2023), I developed three main lines of criticism, which I then defended (2025) against his response (2025a). In his latest…

Four Questions about Expertise and Epistemic Authority, Jonghyeon Kim and Nathan Ballantyne Intuitively, it is rational for laypeople to defer to experts’ testimony, even when the laypeople’s prior beliefs are in tension with expert opinion. After all, experts are, by definition, a more reliable…

Philosophy for Daleks: Nick Bostrom’s Shallow Utopia, Dylan Evans I’ve studied now Philosophy And Jurisprudence, Medicine,— And even, alas! Theology,— From end to end, with labor keen; And here, poor fool! with all my lore I stand, no wiser than before. — Goethe, Faust Part I If Nick Bostrom’s…

Yes, Save the Children from Fake AI “Friends”, Jeremy Weissman It is common to equate technological innovation with socio-political progress. In many ways this is not an unreasonable reaction. Afterall, what moves forward the course of history and our socio-political arrangements more than changes…

Calculated Belief: On Bayesian Reason and the Ethics of Judgment, Boecyàn Bourgade We live in a world overflowing with predictions; from recommendation algorithms to risk scores that tell judges, doctors, and even dating apps what to expect next. Behind many of these systems sits a quiet…

Knowledge Socialism and/or Capitalism in the Context of AI and Knowledge Governance in China and the West: An Interview with Steve Fuller, Yang Yang This interview with Professor Steve Fuller continues a dialogue that began in two earlier conversations—"Knowledge Socialism and/or Capitalism? An…

A Comment on Anderson’s “Virtuous Virtue Signaling, Morally Good Grandstanding”, William Tuckwell To virtue signal is to say or do things in order to enhance or preserve one’s moral reputation (Tosi and Warmke 2020, 14–23).[1] Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke (2016; 2020) argue that because of its…

Response to Napolitano and Harris on Epistemic Authority, Lee Basham “Show Me”—a slogan commonly associated with the state of Missouri, US. There is a third perspective on conspiracy theory and epistemic authority that might be helpful in any discussion of epistemic authority.[1] One skeptical of…

I can discuss many reasons for why we founded and developed the SERRC, but here's a handy one for current times: "Major AI conference flooded with peer reviews written fully by AI" www.nature.com/articles/d41...

SERRC: Volume 14, Issue 11, 1–81, November 2025 Volume 14, Issue 11, 1–81, November 2025 ❧ Koopman, Colin. 2025. “Associationist Philosophy of Technology and Liberal Political Philosophy.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 14 (11) 1–10. ❧ Gärtner, Klaus. 2025. “AI and Epistemic…

From Grok to Grokipedia: Sociological Propaganda and Chatbot Epistemology, Eric D. Berg Abstract Susan Schneider’s article (2025) on the epistemology of Chatbots is the start to a much larger conversation scholars and educators need to have about the influence these technologies have on knowledge…

Slicing the Scientific Realism/Antirealism Debate too Thin: A Review of Lyons’s Scientific Realism, Moti Mizrahi Timothy Lyons's Scientific Realism (2025) is a book in the Cambridge Elements in the Philosophy of Science series. Like all books in this series, its purported aim is to provide an…