Social Epistemic Warrant? You’re Covered!

Abstract In a recent paper in this journal, Hrishikesh Joshi (building on Ava Thomas Wright) argues that unless experts are seen to address even poor objections to their views, laypeople and experts lose warrant to believe claims about topics in expert domains. Warrant for such beliefs rests on our capacity to trust the experts, but we lose our grounds for such trust in the face of objections we do not see properly addressed. In response, I argue that if the threat were as great as Joshi thinks, it could not be neutralized, because we’re no more able to assess the adequacy of responses to objections than we are to assess the quality of the objections themselves. Fortunately, I argue, the threat is not one we need a response to: our warrant in expert testimony is underwritten by a conditional closely analogous to Goldberg’s coverage-conditional.