The APSE Group is organising a talk on Thursday, November 30th, 3-5pm in HS 3A. The speaker is Professor Alessandra Tanesini (Cardiff University).
Title: Epistemic Nudging is Cognitive Scaffolding
Abstract: In this talk I argue that, under certain conditions, beliefs arrived at by being nudged can be justified and be instances of knowledge. The basic idea is that nudges function as cognitive scaffolds for the resulting beliefs. These beliefs acquire their positive epistemic statuses by being arrived at by means which in the epistemic environment curated by the creators of the nudges are reliable and "certified" by the nudgers. Hence, knowledge or justified belief by intentional benign brute doxastic nudging is a form of non-testimonial knowledge transmission. The talk defends this view by showing how it differs from, and why it is to be preferred to, two alternatives: Grundmann's (2021) view that brute nudges can be methods for the formation of reliable and safe beliefs and Levy's (Levy, 2021, 2022) position that nudges are implicit testimony.
All welcome!
