Speaker: Tommaso Piazza (Università di Pavia). As part of the Polpost Meetings
Abstract: In this talk I attempt to do two things. Firstly, I propose an account of epistemic blameworthiness–of what it takes to deserve intellectual blame for what one believes–based on a distinction drawn by W. Alston between a proper and a derivative sense of blameworthiness. According to this account, roughly, we can be blamed (in the derivative sense) for believing P iff we should have exercised due control on the belief-influencing factor(s) resulting in our believing P, and we can be blamed (in the proper sense) for having failed to do so. Secondly, I resort to this account in addressing the question whether ordinary consumers of fake news–namely, social media users who believe the fake news they are fed with within their favorite social media–are blameworthy for their beliefs. Here I apply the results of a different paper (Croce & Piazza ms.) where we argue that by simply acquiring the habit of consuming mainstream media, one would considerably reduce one’s tendency to believe in fake news. Within the normative framework delineated in the first part of the paper, this result motivates the conclusion that ordinary consumers of fake news are mostly criticizable for their beliefs, for they are criticizable for their failure to enlarge their information diet in feasible ways.