Consider the following two popular and plausible principles. First principle: facts about what you ought to do are tightly bound up with facts about what there’s reason to do. For example, if you ought to Φ, then there must be more reason for you to Φ than there is for you to not-Φ. Second principle: ought is ‘upwards monotonic’—if Φing entails Ѱing, then if S ought to Φ is true, so is S ought to Ѱ. I argue that these two principles are incompatible. If I’m right, then respecting the connections between reasons and oughts requires giving up monotonicity, and so requires giving up the classical semantics for deontic modals. We need something new. I sketch a non-monotonic meaning for ‘ought’ which builds the ought/reason connections directly into the semantics, while aiming to accommodate the data that made monotonicity look attractive in the first place.

Abstract Philosophers, psychologists and linguists routinely use truth-value judgments as a source of evidence for the meaning of specific expressions. This method presupposes that truth-value judgments track whether what was said corresponds with facts. However, a growing body of evidence suggests that ordinary people’s behavior on the truth-value judgment task is sensitive to a range of factors beyond correspondence with facts. In this paper, we investigate how judgments of truth are influenced by considerations of truthfulness. In a series of three experiments, we present results indicating that the truth-truthfulness entanglement is at the heart of the debate over the semantics of color predicates. We use these findings to challenge contextualism about color predicates. While our substantive contribution is quite targeted, we show that the methodological lessons are likely to generalize broadly to other areas of research in cognitive science.

Abstract In this paper, I argue that epistemic reparations are complex social achievements. Previous accounts of epistemic reparations have failed to highlight the complex social nature of the epistemic goods that constitute epistemic reparations. To generate the knowledge required, a speaker must successfully communicate evaluatively robust content in a way that generates common knowledge. It is not sufficient for a speaker to offer information , they must generate knowledge . I argue that there are two conditions for a successful epistemic reparation: it must receive audience uptake , and it must generate a reparative response . Since most cases of egregious wrongdoing intersect with systematic oppression and active ignorance, the barriers to epistemic reparations are high. Epistemic reparations are achievements because of myriad barriers to successful uptake and response. This shows an additional value to epistemic reparations. Epistemic Reparations can serve as a work of epistemic justice by providing pinpricks of light in systems of epistemic oppression.

Abstract The notion of epistemic reparations has recently gained increasing attention in social epistemology. These are reparations due to victims of distinctively epistemic wrongs attaching to gross human rights violations. An example of such a wrong is not having the true story about yourself known due to being wrongfully convicted of murder (Lackey, 2022). In the last few years, several authors have proposed accounts of epistemic reparations under various labels (Almassi, 2018; Lackey, 2022; Hull, 2022; Song, 2021). Although these views gesture at structural ways in which victims can be wronged, we do not yet have an account of how accepting this structural dimension might introduce distinctive features or difficulties for the notion of epistemic reparations. In this paper, I argue that certain structural wrongs, such as the epistemic wrongs of colonialism, turn out to be irreparable on the existing backward-looking epistemic reparations framework. A more promising model for redressing such injustices, I argue, is Iris Marion Young’s social connection model, supplemented by some tools from the group responsibility literature. The arguments bring into dialogue three bodies of scholarship that are currently not talking to each other—on epistemic reparations, structural injustice, and collective agency. This dialogue will not only be of mutual theoretical benefit to all three but will also up our chances of attaining epistemic justice.