“First-person authority” refers, roughly, to the deference that we owe one another’s self-ascriptions of mental states in ordinary contexts. What justifies this deference? Here I argue for a pluralistic answer. I argue, first, that the hearer of a self-ascription is justified in deferring to the speaker in part because the speaker expresses her attitude to the hearerby self-ascribing it, and in part because the hearer inferentially determines the content of the attitude expressed by the speaker. I argue, second, that the hearer is justified in deferring to the self-ascriptions of young children because those children thereby express their mental states, whereas the hearer is justified in deferring to at least some self-ascriptions of older people because hearers recognize that more mature cognizers have the authority to self-determine at least some of their mental states through reflective reasoning. I argue, third, that an agent’s justification to regard her own self-ascription as first-person authoritative differs from the justification that others have to regard her self-ascription as such, and that this makes a difference for navigating contexts where one’s first-person authority is challenged.
Tuesday July 7, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST GCI-275 HYBRID
Skeptical invariantists say that “know” refers to a very demanding epistemic relation – call it “absolute knowledge.” Standard invariantists say that “know” refers to a much less demanding epistemic relation – call it “standard knowledge.” Suppose that standard invariantists are right. Suppose also that standard knowledge (i) helps to causally explain behavior and (ii) sets one important kind of normative bar for assertions and actions, just as many standard invariantists think. Does this mean that absolute knowledge is of little epistemological interest? I think not. I will suggest that even given these assumptions, absolute knowledge would still (iii) play a different but powerful role in causally explaining behavior and (iv) set another important kind of normative bar for assertions and actions.
Tuesday July 7, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST GCI-275 HYBRID
Critical thinking as a modern educational concept arguably began with John Dewey’s How We Think (1910), in which he characterized critical thought as reflective, evaluative and directed consideration of our beliefs. Since then, academic conceptualisation of critical thinking has been enriched by rapidly expanding contexts and discipline area growth. But this expansion of breadth has not been accompanied by a corresponding increase in the depth of our understanding of critical thinking or how it is to be developed. Nothing manifests this phenomenon more obviously than the broad range of definitions of critical thinking and the lack of consequent agreement about what it is and how it is best taught. This paper offers a solution to this problem that is both inclusive of existing definitions of critical thinking and more actionable than most in terms of its teaching and development. Using an analogy between science and thinking scientifically, it positions critical thinking as an area of study and thinking critically as a mode of thinking attuned to the quality of inferences.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST Steele-3093 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
As the understanding literature continues to evolve, the notion of group understanding has become increasingly important. With the rise of conversational artificial intelligence (CAI), we may say that AI systems can contribute to group knowledge, but it is an open question as to whether or not they can contribute to group understanding. In what follows, I argue that CAI agents can be contributing members of group understanding in inflationary cases. In the next section, I lay out Kenneth Boyd’s (2019) account of deflationary and inflationary group understanding. In section three, I consider what it means to call a CAI an agent. In section four, I look at CAI agents in deflationary group understanding cases and conclude that the obstacles are too much to overcome. In section five, I look at AI agents in inflationary group understanding cases and argue that we can decouple trust relations from group grasping. In section six, I consider objections to my view.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST GCI-273 HYBRID
At least since Francis Bacon, the slogan “knowledge is power” has been used to capture the relationship between decision-making at a group level and information. We know that being able to shape the informational environment for a group is a way to shape their decisions; it is essentially a way to make decisions for them. This paper focuses on strategies that are intentionally, by design, impactful on the decision-making capacities of groups, effectively shaping their ability to take advantage of information in their environment. Among these, the best known are political rhetoric, propaganda, and misinformation. The phenomenon this paper brings out from these is a relatively new strategy, which we call slopaganda. According to The Guardian, News Corp Australia is currently churning out 3000 “local” generative AI (GAI) stories each week. In the coming years, such “generative AI slop” will present multiple knowledge-related (epistemic) challenges. We draw on contemporary research in cognitive science and artificial intelligence to diagnose the problem of slopaganda, describe some recent troubling cases, then suggest several interventions that may help to counter slopaganda.
Wednesday July 8, 2026 4:30pm - 5:25pm AEST Steele-3093 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Virtue epistemology has emerged as an influential alternative to traditional knowledge theories. It has two main branches: reliabilism, which sees epistemic virtues as cognitive faculties that reliably produce true beliefs (Sosa, 2007), and responsibilism, which prioritizes acquired epistemic habits over innate faculties, considering them "appropriate objects of praise and blame" (Axtell, 1997, p. 26). Virtue epistemology, in either of its classical strands, argues that the epistemic arises from personal virtues. This has been questioned as it understands both cognitive faculties and responsibilist virtues as traits of the individual agent and difficult to apply to collective agents (see Navarro & Pino, 2021). In our presentation, we argue that virtues can be traits of the group, of society, based on networks of trust and collaboration (see Broncano, 2020). Many have developed a reliabilist virtue epistemology grounded not in an individual agent but in a collective agent (see Kellestrup, 2020). However, if these new reliabilist models aim to account for how agents come to know (based on reliable dispositions) in collective terms, the main thesis of our presentation is that this new way of understanding virtue epistemology is insensitive to social structures that generate ignorance and epistemic injustices, such as meritocracy and ableism.
Thursday July 9, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST GCI-275 HYBRID
One site of agreement among several proponents and opponents of the knowledge norm of justified belief (KNJ) is that some senses of justification ought to be unified. Consider the deontic sense of justification, whereby one’s belief itself is justified just in case it follows the norm of belief, and the hypological sense of justification, whereby the believer herself is justified in their belief just in case her epistemic performance in so believing is positively evaluable to a sufficient degree. Littlejohn, for instance, leverages the equation of these two senses – i.e., one’s belief is deontically justified if and only if one is hypologically justified in so believing (DHJ) – to undermine non-factive norms of justification. Now, DHJ does not suffice to establish KNJ, but I argue that the most plausible way to do so is by an infallibilist interpretation of DHJ, called DHJ-i: infallible hypological justification just is infallible deontic justification. I also argue that DHJ-i is a more defensible principle than DHJ. Therefore, given that DHJ is independently plausible outside of KNJ’s truth-value, this spells trouble for opponents of KNJ: they must either deny their very position or commit to a problematic denial of this way of unifying justification’s different senses.
Thursday July 9, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST GCI-275 HYBRID
Impurists about knowledge believe practical factors and considerations about what might be rational for an agent to choose might impose constraints on the scope of what she might know. I shall argue that the most familiar and influential impurist views are mistaken. These impurist views must be mistaken because they are incompatible with something I've dubbed "epistemic encroachment". Epistemic encroachment occurs when considerations about what we know impose constraints on what might rationally be chosen. Epistemic encroachment makes sense of some seemingly robust but puzzling intuitions about choice that, I shall argue, our impurists about knowledge cannot make sense of given their distinctive views about the relationships between belief, credence, and choice.
Thursday July 9, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST Steele-3143 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
