Severin Rohrer
University of Vienna
How we form beliefs about our friends sometimes differs from how we form beliefs about strangers. More specifically, we often seem to be partial in favour of our friends, e.g. by imposing higher evidential thresholds to form negative beliefs about them or by preferring charitable interpretations of their prima facie bad behaviour. I call this phenomenon amical epistemic partiality. In my talk, I argue that amical epistemic partiality is best understood as a matter of epistemic style. First, I critically discuss Kawall’s (2013) attempt to capture this phenomenon. Kawall’s attempt is flawed because it does not take into account the aspects of amical epistemic partiality that go beyond differing evidential thresholds for belief uptake. Consequently, Kawall fails to provide a unified explanation of the difference in cases involving our friends and cases involving strangers. Second, I argue that the shortcomings of Kawall’s account can be overcome by applying the notion of epistemic styles developed by Flores (2021) to amical epistemic partiality. According to Flores, epistemic styles are unified ways of engaging with evidence; agents may take up different styles in different contexts. When we engage with evidence concerning our friends, we adopt an epistemic style different from the one we use when engaging with evidence concerning strangers, which is how epistemic partiality arises. Lastly, I consider an objection. Given that Flores takes epistemic styles to be both unified and general, i.e. not object-centered, one may wonder whether a style account of amical epistemic partiality can make sense of cases where one receives evidence that concerns, at the same time, both a friend and a stranger, yet where one treats each differently. I contend that an account in terms of epistemic style can indeed deal with cases like these because such differential treatment may be accounted for within the amical epistemic style, after all.
Chair: tba
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SOPhiA 2026 