Epistemic Questions

Core terms and formalism:
1. Do reason, rational belief, evidence, closedmindedness, truth, knowledge, critical thinking, intellectual virtues, the qualitative natures of beliefs, explanations, and IBE (inference to the best explanation) need to be formalised or sharply demarcated? If so, what are they?
2. What does it mean for a belief to be “likely true”, “probable”, or “plausible”?
3. What is an inference to the “best” explanation?
4. What is meant by an extraordinary claim?

Having evidence:
5. In the most general sense, what is an instance of evidence?
6. What forms of evidence are there? Does it exclude intuition?
7. Is anecdote ever useful?
8. What is it to have evidence? Must it be occurrent?

Evidential support:
9. What is strength of evidence and extraordinary evidence?
10. How should we weigh evidence?
11. Does everyone weigh the evidence differently according to what they want or don’t want to believe?
12. How do NHST, RCTs, crucial experiments, replication, consensus, triangulation etc give evidential support?
13. When is the evidence sufficient for belief?
14. What conditions are sufficient to act?
15. Do we need to formalise our justification for every belief?
16. Is it ever ok to believe without evidence?
17. Is Bayesianism true?
18. How should conflicts of interest (cui bono) affect weighing of evidence?
19. Why are RCTs sometimes dethroned from “the gold standard in the evidence hierarchy”?

Open-mindedness:
20. How does/should evidence relate to closed-mindedness?
21. What determines the burden of proof/responsibility in a disagreement? eg on the minority view / those disagreeing / those wanting to persuade someone else.
22. Can we choose what to believe?
23. What is the extent of one’s obligation for inquiry? eg engaging with dissenters, diligence in comprehension-checking, and seeking counterevidence.
24. How much curiosity, counterargument-seeking, homophily and truth-seeking is healthy?
25. Can we really choose our attitude of openmindedness?

Strength of belief:
26. What can be meant by a strong belief?
27. Can we specify its relationship with evidence?
28. When should you have a strong belief?

Types of knowledge:
29. What, if any, is the taxonomy of non-scientific knowledge?
30. Does reason have a monopoly on finding truth? Are there ways of knowing other than reason?
31. Why, if at all, might some applications of intuition or faith be ok but others not? Who decides?
32. What is social science? and are its claims credible? Can skeptics’ epistemology accommodate it?

The nature of science:
33. Does science need to be sharply demarcated?
34. Is science IBE?
35. Is it a problem that science isnt deductively sound?

Testimony:
36. What is Hume’s maxim (on miracles) saying and is it correct?
37. How do we fight conspiracy theories? Is pre-bunking effective?
38. What justifies any list of techniques to fight fake news?
39. How does the novice identify experts?
40. If we should value expert consensus, then why?
41. What justifies any suggested criteria for a novice to identify expertise?
42. Is articulacy a valid indicator of expertise?
43. Are there experts on controversial topics like ethics or politics?
44. What determines whether to defer to experts here or answer them as best as we can?

Values in science:
45. Is science value-free?
46. What are the important questions in SSK?

The ethics of truth-seeking and error-avoiding:
47. Is knowledge better than ignorance? If so, why?
48. Should we always persuade people out of believing falsehoods? If so why? If not, when should we?
49. How do we identify harmful beliefs?
50. Should we lie to children? eg Santa, fairytales, earthquakes / car crashes, sex education. When does setting their expectations matter?
51. What determines the ideal practice of intellectual virtues?
52. Can doubt become unhealthy?

Anger, idiosyncrasy, and belief:
53. Do we need to formalise motivated reasoning?
54. Does critical thinking involve regulating emotion? And if so, how?
55. Are all beliefs emotionally led?
56. Can we choose what we believe?
57. Does all belief-selection inevitably rest upon idiosyncratic values, inscrutably personal judgements and intuitions?
58. Can we ever escape them?
59. Does being rational mean not having emotions? or avoiding/not stoking them?

Persuasion:
60. What persuades people?
61. When do we believe things?
62. Does reasoning ever change minds? When? How often?
63. When is stridence more useful than calm?

Misc:
64. To what extent should good thought be principled?
65. Why value deduction?
66. How should we deal with disagreements over intuitive judgements?
By whom should qualitative matters be judged?
When do we endorse majority/consensus rule?
67. What is bias?
68. Is operationalism true?