Papers by Elise Woodard
Philosophical Studies
In this paper, we argue that there are epistemic norms on evidence-gathering and consider consequ... more In this paper, we argue that there are epistemic norms on evidence-gathering and consider consequences for how to understand epistemic normativity. Though the view that there are such norms seems intuitive, it has found surprisingly little defense. Rather, many philosophers have argued that norms on evidence-gathering can only be practical or moral. On a prominent evidentialist version of this position, epistemic norms only apply to responding to the evidence one already has. Here we challenge the orthodoxy. First, we argue that there is no significant normative difference between responding to evidence you have and gathering more evidence. Second, we argue that our practices of epistemically criticizing agents for their poor evidence-gathering indicate the existence of epistemic norms on evidence-gathering. Finally, we show that our thesis has important implications for recent debates about the relationship between epistemic norms and inquiry.
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Deep Blue (University of Michigan), 2022
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Episteme
Can you rationally double-check what you already know? In this paper, I argue that you can. Agent... more Can you rationally double-check what you already know? In this paper, I argue that you can. Agents can know that something is true and rationally double-check it at the very same time. I defend my position by considering a wide variety of cases where agents double-check their beliefs to gain epistemic improvements beyond knowledge. These include certainty, epistemic resilience, and sensitivity to error. Although this phenomenon is widespread, my proposal faces two types of challenges. First, some have defended ignorance norms, on which agents are only allowed to inquire about things they don't already know. Second – motivated by strong conceptions of belief or pragmatic encroachment – some have argued that double-checking destroys knowledge. I argue that these competing views fail to capture both the epistemic value of double-checking and the many reasons why agents might double-check. Moreover, they rely on overly strong assumptions about what inquiry, knowledge, or belief requ...
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Foucault Studies, 2015
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Journal of Visual Culture, 2015
Georges Didi-Huberman argues that with the Museum Without Walls, André Malraux invented a new typ... more Georges Didi-Huberman argues that with the Museum Without Walls, André Malraux invented a new type of art book based on the concept of the family album. Here, the family – with its resemblances, dissemblances, portraits in beauty and monstrosity – is Malraux’s attempt to encompass art from the world over. If he was largely successful in this endeavor, it was not only because Malraux had a broad vision honed in the heyday of collage and montage, but also because he knew how to assemble a peerless team of technicians to help him realize the vast project. Despite their extremely divergent idioms, the explorations of Walter Benjamin and André Malraux met at several surprising points: Didi-Huberman identifies yet another of these affinities by showing the parallels between the Museum Without Walls project writ large and the general theory of the creator in Benjamin’s ‘author as producer’.
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Philosophical Topics
Can agents rationally inquire into things that they know? On my view, the answer is yes. Call thi... more Can agents rationally inquire into things that they know? On my view, the answer is yes. Call this view the Compatibility Thesis. One challenge to this thesis is to explain why assertions like “I know that p, but I’m wondering whether p” sound odd, if not Moore-Paradoxical. In response to this challenge, I argue that we can reject one or both premises that give rise to it. First, we can deny that inquiry requires interrogative attitudes. Second, we can deny the ignorance norm, on which agents are not permitted to both know and have interrogative attitudes, such as wondering. I argue that there are compelling reasons to deny the former and reasons to question the latter. Both options pave the way for further work on further inquiry.
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Noûs, 2021
In this paper, I motivate a puzzle about epistemic rationality. On the one hand, there seems to b... more In this paper, I motivate a puzzle about epistemic rationality. On the one hand, there seems to be something problematic about frequently changing your mind. On the other hand, changing your mind once is often permissible. Why do one-off changes of mind seem rationally permissible, even admirable, while constant changes seem quintessentially irrational? The puzzle of fickleness is to explain this asymmetry. To solve the puzzle, I propose and defend the Ratifiable Reasoning Account. According to this solution, as agents redeliberate, they gain inductive evidence that they will not settle and higher-order evidence that they are unreliable and their resultant beliefs unstable. Nonetheless, this evidence can be defeated or outweighed in cases where one has good reason to think one is epistemically improving each time. In addition to solving the puzzle, my account allows me to capture a wide range of contextual factors that are relevant for our judgments.
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It is widely accepted that consent is a normative power. For instance, consent can make an imperm... more It is widely accepted that consent is a normative power. For instance, consent can make an impermissible act permissible. In the words of Heidi Hurd, it "turns a trespass into a dinner party… an invasion of privacy into an intimate moment." In this chapter, I argue against the assumption that consent has such robust powers for moral transformation. In particular, I argue that there is a wide range of sex that harms or wrongs victims despite being consensual. Moreover, these cases are not limited to those where consent is vitiated by background conditions. I start by calling this category of consensual sex Bad Sex. I then distinguish subspecies of this category, including psychological pressure, social coercion, and epistemically unsafe sex. I end by responding to an objection on which we should treat at least some subspecies of Bad Sex as rape. Though this alternative proposal is often motivated by ameliorative and strategic considerations, I argue that such considerations actually count against collapsing the categories of Bad Sex and rape.
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In this paper, I explore a practical version of the skepticism-dogmatism debate. On the one hand,... more In this paper, I explore a practical version of the skepticism-dogmatism debate. On the one hand, phenomena such as implicit bias put pressure on us to be skeptics about our beliefs. On the other hand, phenomena such as gaslighting put pressure on us to be dogmatists about our beliefs, to stick to our guns. This gives rise to a puzzle. Intuitively, we want to say that the person with implicit bias and the person who is gaslighted differ with respect to their epistemic status, yet things look the same on the inside to each of them. Thus, the internalist faces a problem in accounting for the epistemic differences between them. In contrast, although the externalist can account for an epistemic difference between the gaslighted woman and the man with implicit bias, the externalist still faces two objections, according to which externalism fails to offer a genuinely normative epistemology. First, it fails to capture the sense in which agents who ignore misleading higher-order evidence are blameworthy. Second, it fails to offer action-guiding norms. In response to the first objection, I reject the presupposition. I argue that to blame people like the gaslighted woman is to be an epistemic fetishist. In response to the second, I endorse an Epistemic Affirmative Action proposal. Ultimately, I think that phenomena such as gaslighting encourage us to rethink what it means for an epistemological theory to be normative.
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Other by Elise Woodard
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Updated March 2022
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Translations by Elise Woodard
Foucault Studies
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Angelaki
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Angelaki
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Georges Didi-Huberman argues that with the Museum Without Walls, André Malraux invented a new typ... more Georges Didi-Huberman argues that with the Museum Without Walls, André Malraux invented a new type of art book based on the concept of the family album. Here, the family – with its resemblances, dissemblances, portraits in beauty and monstrosity – is Malraux’s attempt to encompass art from the world over. If he was largely successful in this endeavor, it was not only because Malraux had a broad vision honed in the heyday of collage and montage, but also because he knew how to assemble a peerless team of technicians to help him realize the vast project. Despite their extremely divergent idioms, the explorations of Walter Benjamin and André Malraux met at several surprising points: Didi-Huberman identifies yet another of these affinities by showing the parallels between the Museum Without Walls project writ large and the general theory of the creator in Benjamin’s ‘author as producer.’
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Michel Foucault’s “Standing Vigil for the Day to Come” was a review of Roger Laporte’s novel, La ... more Michel Foucault’s “Standing Vigil for the Day to Come” was a review of Roger Laporte’s novel, La Veille, published by Gallimard earlier that year. Although Laporte’s work never received the wide readership it deserved, Foucault held it in high esteem, praising it in his assessment as one of the “most original” and “most difficult” of his time and, subsequently, urging Derrida to read it. This article is most appropriately situated in the series of literary reviews Foucault composed between 1961 and 1966, in which his marked attempts to understand the relationship between language and thought drew him to the works of Roussel, Klossowski, Hölderlin, Mallarmé, and, of course, Laporte. Foucault finds Laporte’s treatment of the subject-matter particularly satisfying because it provides a non-reductive account of thought and its relationship to language; thought is neither identical with nor distinct from language. Foucault sees Laporte as relying on an important Nietzschean insight that thought is both too funda- mental and too archaic to be reduced to philosophy or to require a Cartesian ego. In this way La Veille is naturally of interest to Foucault because it deals with the relationship of a writer to an anonymous other; it is this other — not the writer — that makes writing possible. With the role of the subject de-emphasized, Foucault finds in Laporte a starting point for talking about language in contemporary literature and thought in post- Cartesian philosophy.
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Papers by Elise Woodard
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