AAP 2026 CONFERENCE

This paper explores the debate between transmissive and generative views of testimony. According to the generation view, testimony can generate knowledge even when neither the testifier nor the testimonial chain previously possessed that knowledge. While this view has been extensively developed since Lackey’s seminal work, Wright (2016) argues that the central issue in the transmissive/generative dispute concerns justification rather than knowledge, particularly propositional justification. However, a corresponding generation view of testimonial justification remains underdeveloped.
A parallel debate has emerged in the epistemology of memory. Although generative accounts of memorial knowledge were initially proposed by Lackey (2005) in a manner analogous to generative accounts of testimony, subsequent discussions have focused primarily on whether memory preserves or generates propositional justification since Senor (2007). These works have produced increasingly fine-grained accounts of the preservative/generative distinction.
I argue that these developments in the epistemology of memory can illuminate the testimonial case. Drawing on Miyazono and Tooming’s (2025) analysis of the preservative/generative distinction, I reassess existing generative accounts of testimony and develop a more precise framework for understanding when testimony transmits justification and when it generates it. This framework clarifies the structure of the transmissive/generative debate and provides resources for responding to Wright’s challenge.

In discussions of social epistemology, Jennifer Lackey (2021) argues that ‘a significant percentage of a group’s operative members who believe that p’ is a necessary condition for ‘a group believes that p.’ Meanwhile, with respect to group evidence, she maintains that, in certain cases, evidence possessed by a minority of members can constitute group evidence. However, in ordinary thought, there is an intuition about evidence according to which only propositions that a subject takes to be true can serve as that subject’s evidence. This intuition is also widely endorsed in philosophical discussions of evidence by scholars such as Jessica Brown (2022). In response, this paper formulates a requirement on evidence based on this intuition and uses it to argue that Jennifer Lackey’s position in social epistemology is internally inconsistent.

Recent survey data (Romm & Waldman 2025) suggests that university students often project ideological alignment with their professors and classmates in order to succeed socially and academically. In other words, university students virtue signal in the classroom. In this paper, I set out to answer three questions: (1) What is classroom virtue signalling? (2) What are the impacts of classroom virtue signalling on the goals of university education? (3) What, if anything, should be done about classroom virtue signalling? In response to (1), I offer a characterisation of classroom virtue signalling. In response to (2), I argue that classroom virtue signalling compromises three educational goals: the acquisition of epistemic goods, the cultivation of autonomy, and the cultivation of intellectual virtues. In section (3), I argue that students, professors, and universities have duties to disrupt the practice of classroom virtue signalling so that the educational goals of universities can be better realised.  

Lacanian critical theory provides invaluable resources for social critique, but must always do so by negotiating between its account of “constitutive” and “constituted” alienation – between the unavoidable forms of alienation involved in entering into socio-linguistic life, and the historical forms of alienation which arise due to particular social conditions. Theorising this connection remains necessary for a historically informed social critique which is nevertheless able to recognise the unavoidable structural forms of alienation of any such human society. Here, Robert Pippin’s Hegelian theorisation of alienation as a failure of self-reflexive social agency provides an important normative framework. 
Critique thus relies upon a particular image of  “human nature”. The “natural” in “human nature”, however, cannot be separated from its emergence from “nature as such, against Pippin’s insistence on the strict separation between nature and spirit. Here, the role of “habit” in G.W.F. Hegel’s account of the transition from “nature” to “spirit” (or “second nature”) thus allows for critique to be grounded in the conditions of life itself. Drawing on findings from philosophical anthropology, and building upon what theorists such as Slavoj Žižek and Catherine Malabou identify as its transformative core, far from being mere unconscious repetition, habit rather represents a heuristic for critical social analysis attendant to the historical and transhistorical forms of social life, one cognisant to the relationship between constitutive and constituted alienation. 

Can practical reasons ever override epistemic reasons for belief — and if so, how should the two be weighed against each other? Existing accounts of how to weigh epistemic and practical reasons face serious problems: the combinational problem of how to combine permissive and prohibitive balancing, accusations of being ad hoc, and the inability to provide usable advice. Additionally, existing arguments for privileging one type of reason over the other are vulnerable to intuitive counterexamples. This talk will outline the problems faced in the existing literature and argue for a position that cuts through the existing debate: epistemic reasons carry genuine normative authority, but are always weaker than practical reasons. This position handles the aforementioned counterexamples and avoids the problems of existing weighing accounts. I conclude by addressing Hannon and Woodard's (2026) argument that social coordination provides a practical reason to always follow the epistemic norm, arguing that this does not hold in all cases.