Joshua Habgood-Coote
Biographic Data
| ID | 460572 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Joshua Habgood-Coote |
| GIVEN NAMES | Joshua |
| FAMILY NAME | Habgood-Coote |
| SIGNATURE | HABGOOD-COOTE J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Leeds |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3427-3325 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 11 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 8 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 11 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2018 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Collective action, work, and partial plans
Philosophers of action have for the most part ignored work as a case of collective action. Michael Bratman’s distinction between shared co-operative activity and prepackaged co-operation goes further, claiming that any kind of co-operation involving a division of labour is at best an attenuated form of collective action. This paper uses Bratman’s discussion to lays the groundwork for thinking about work as a genuine form of collective action. Con…
Receptive Publics
It is widely accepted that public discourse as we know it is less than ideal from an epistemological point of view. In this paper, we develop an underappreciated aspect of the trouble with public discourse: what we call the Listening Problem. The listening problem is the problem that public discourse has in giving appropriate uptake and reception to ideas and concepts from oppressed groups. Drawing on the work of Jürgen Habermas and Nancy Fraser,…
Search Engines, White Ignorance, and the Social Epistemology of Technology
How should we think about the ways search engines can go wrong? Following the publication of Safiya Noble's Algorithms of Oppression (Noble, 2018), a view has emerged that racist, sexist, and other problematic results should be thought of as indicative of algorithmic bias. In this paper, I offer an alternative angle on these results, building on Noble's suggestion that search engines are complicit in a racial contract (Mills, 1997). I argue that …
What’s the Point of Authors
In this paper, I want to start to untangle some of the philosophical issues associated with our practices of ascribing authorship for collaborative work, with an eye to formulating better guidelines for authorship. I will focus on the following questions: 1. What epistemic, social, and ethical functions are played by our practices of ascribing authorship for academic papers? 2. What ways of ascribing authorship would best address these functions?…
Deepfakes and the epistemic apocalypse
It is widely thought that deepfake videos are a significant and unprecedented threat to our epistemic practices. In some writing about deepfakes, manipulated videos appear as the harbingers of an unprecedented epistemic apocalypse . In this paper I want to take a critical look at some of the more catastrophic predictions about deepfake videos. I will argue for three claims: (1) that once we recognise the role of social norms in the epistemology o…
Group Inquiry
Group agents can act, and they can have knowledge. How should we understand the species of collective action which aims at knowledge? In this paper, I present an account of group inquiry. This account faces two challenges: to make sense of how large-scale distributed activities might be a kind of group action, and to make sense of the kind of division of labour involved in collective inquiry. In the first part of the paper, I argue that existing …
Fake news, conceptual engineering, and linguistic resistance
In Habgood-Coote (2019. “Stop Talking about Fake News!”. Inquiry: an Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 62(9–10): 1033–1065) I argued that we should abandon ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’, on the grounds that these terms do not have stable public meanings, are unnecessary, and function as vehicles for propaganda. Jessica Pepp, Eliot Michaelson, and Rachel Sterken (2019. “Why We Should Keep Talking About Fake News”. Inquiry: an Interdisciplinar…
Knowing more (about questions)
How should we measure knowledge? According to the Counting Approach , we can measure knowledge by counting pieces of knowledge. Versions of the Counting Approach that try to measure knowledge by counting true beliefs with suitable support or by counting propositions known run into problems, stemming from infinite numbers of propositions and beliefs, difficulties in individuating propositions and beliefs, and cases in which knowing the same number…
Stop talking about fake news!
Since 2016, there has been an explosion of academic work that fixes its subject matter using the terms ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’. In this paper, I argue that this terminology is not up to scratch, and that academics and journalists ought to completely stop using the terms ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’. I set out three arguments for abandonment. First, that ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’ do not have stable public meanings, entailing that they are …
Group Knowledge, Questions, and the Division of Epistemic Labour
Discussions of group knowledge typically focus on whether a group's knowledge that p reduces to group members' knowledge that p. Drawing on the cumulative reading of collective knowledge ascriptions and considerations about the importance of the division of epistemic labour, I argue for what I call the Fragmented Knowledge account, which allows for more complex relations between individual and collective knowledge. According to this account, a gr…
Knowing-how, showing, and epistemic norms
Deepfakes and the epistemic apocalypse
It is widely thought that deepfake videos are a significant and unprecedented threat to our epistemic practices. In some writing about deepfakes, manipulated videos appear as the harbingers of an unprecedented epistemic apocalypse . In this paper I want to take a critical look at some of the more catastrophic predictions about deepfake videos. I will argue for three claims: (1) that once we recognise the role of social norms in the epistemology o…
What’s the Point of Authors
In this paper, I want to start to untangle some of the philosophical issues associated with our practices of ascribing authorship for collaborative work, with an eye to formulating better guidelines for authorship. I will focus on the following questions: 1. What epistemic, social, and ethical functions are played by our practices of ascribing authorship for academic papers? 2. What ways of ascribing authorship would best address these functions?…
Knowing-how, showing, and epistemic norms
Stop talking about fake news!
Since 2016, there has been an explosion of academic work that fixes its subject matter using the terms ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’. In this paper, I argue that this terminology is not up to scratch, and that academics and journalists ought to completely stop using the terms ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’. I set out three arguments for abandonment. First, that ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’ do not have stable public meanings, entailing that they are …
Group Knowledge, Questions, and the Division of Epistemic Labour
Discussions of group knowledge typically focus on whether a group's knowledge that p reduces to group members' knowledge that p. Drawing on the cumulative reading of collective knowledge ascriptions and considerations about the importance of the division of epistemic labour, I argue for what I call the Fragmented Knowledge account, which allows for more complex relations between individual and collective knowledge. According to this account, a gr…
Group Inquiry
Group agents can act, and they can have knowledge. How should we understand the species of collective action which aims at knowledge? In this paper, I present an account of group inquiry. This account faces two challenges: to make sense of how large-scale distributed activities might be a kind of group action, and to make sense of the kind of division of labour involved in collective inquiry. In the first part of the paper, I argue that existing …
Fake news, conceptual engineering, and linguistic resistance
In Habgood-Coote (2019. “Stop Talking about Fake News!”. Inquiry: an Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 62(9–10): 1033–1065) I argued that we should abandon ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’, on the grounds that these terms do not have stable public meanings, are unnecessary, and function as vehicles for propaganda. Jessica Pepp, Eliot Michaelson, and Rachel Sterken (2019. “Why We Should Keep Talking About Fake News”. Inquiry: an Interdisciplinar…
Knowing more (about questions)
How should we measure knowledge? According to the Counting Approach , we can measure knowledge by counting pieces of knowledge. Versions of the Counting Approach that try to measure knowledge by counting true beliefs with suitable support or by counting propositions known run into problems, stemming from infinite numbers of propositions and beliefs, difficulties in individuating propositions and beliefs, and cases in which knowing the same number…
Deepfakes and the epistemic apocalypse
It is widely thought that deepfake videos are a significant and unprecedented threat to our epistemic practices. In some writing about deepfakes, manipulated videos appear as the harbingers of an unprecedented epistemic apocalypse . In this paper I want to take a critical look at some of the more catastrophic predictions about deepfake videos. I will argue for three claims: (1) that once we recognise the role of social norms in the epistemology o…
Receptive Publics
It is widely accepted that public discourse as we know it is less than ideal from an epistemological point of view. In this paper, we develop an underappreciated aspect of the trouble with public discourse: what we call the Listening Problem. The listening problem is the problem that public discourse has in giving appropriate uptake and reception to ideas and concepts from oppressed groups. Drawing on the work of Jürgen Habermas and Nancy Fraser,…
Search Engines, White Ignorance, and the Social Epistemology of Technology
How should we think about the ways search engines can go wrong? Following the publication of Safiya Noble's Algorithms of Oppression (Noble, 2018), a view has emerged that racist, sexist, and other problematic results should be thought of as indicative of algorithmic bias. In this paper, I offer an alternative angle on these results, building on Noble's suggestion that search engines are complicit in a racial contract (Mills, 1997). I argue that …
What’s the Point of Authors
In this paper, I want to start to untangle some of the philosophical issues associated with our practices of ascribing authorship for collaborative work, with an eye to formulating better guidelines for authorship. I will focus on the following questions: 1. What epistemic, social, and ethical functions are played by our practices of ascribing authorship for academic papers? 2. What ways of ascribing authorship would best address these functions?…
Collective action, work, and partial plans
Philosophers of action have for the most part ignored work as a case of collective action. Michael Bratman’s distinction between shared co-operative activity and prepackaged co-operation goes further, claiming that any kind of co-operation involving a division of labour is at best an attenuated form of collective action. This paper uses Bratman’s discussion to lays the groundwork for thinking about work as a genuine form of collective action. Con…
Epistemology (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Law (6 works) · Political science (6 works) · Sociology (6 works) · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics (5 works) · Computer Science (4 works) · Mathematics (3 works) · Metaphysics (3 works) · Misinformation and Its Impacts (3 works)