The Epistemic Blindness of White Solipsism

This paper focuses on a specific type of knowledge, this being the type of knowledge that allows for the ability of an individual to know another person. I analyzed Shannon Sullivan’s book Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege to gain insight into an individuals ability to know another person. Within the text, I concentrated on the first chapter “Ignorance and Habit”, and the argument Sullivan articulates in this chapter. This argument is in regard to the consequence of what Sullivan describes as white solipsism and how it can cause unconscious habits. To better display Sullivan’s argument, I used the epistemic framework articulated in Bernard Lonergan’s cognitional theory and his three stages of knowing. These stages of Experience, Understanding, and Judging, were used to explain how white solipsism could affect a white person’s ability as a knower in the first stage of Experience. From this, I described how white solipsism causes the inability of a white person to have knowledge of people of different racial backgrounds from themselves. Ultimately, I conclude that white solipsism causes white people to have false knowledge because they are no longer looking for new experiences and that white solipsism causes ignorance and epistemic blindness regarding alternate viewpoints

Expert judgment in climate science: How it is used and how it can be justified.

Like any science marked by high uncertainty, climate science is characterized by a widespread use of expert judgment. In this paper, we first show that, in climate science, expert judgment is used to overcome uncertainty, thus playing a crucial role in the domain and even at times supplanting models. One is left to wonder to what extent it is legitimate to assign expert judgment such a status as an epistemic superiority in the climate context, especially as the production of expert judgment is particularly opaque. To begin answering this question, we highlight the key components of expert judgment. We then argue that the justification for the status and use of expert judgment depends on the competence and the individual subjective features of the expert producing the judgment since expert judgment involves not only the expert's theoretical knowledge and tacit knowledge, but also their intuition and values. This goes against the objective ideal in science and the criteria from social epistemology which largely attempt to remove subjectivity from expertise

Machine learning and the quest for objectivity in climate model parameterization

Parameterization and parameter tuning are central aspects of climate modeling, and there is widespread consensus that these procedures involve certain subjective elements. Even if the use of these subjective elements is not necessarily epistemically problematic, there is an intuitive appeal for replacing them with more objective (automated) methods, such as machine learning. Relying on several case studies, we argue that, while machine learning techniques may help to improve climate model parameterization in several ways, they still require expert judgment that involves subjective elements not so different from the ones arising in standard parameterization and tuning. The use of machine learning in parameterizations is an art as well as a science and requires careful supervision