The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on March 4th from 4:15-6:15 in room 7314 of the CUNY Graduate Center for a talk by Eric Bayruns Garcia (CUNY).

The CUNY Graduate Center will be closed on Monday, March 4th. This meeting is cancelled. 

Title: Coverage-Reliance Ignorance

Abstract: I argue that racial injustice can make a subject’s news sources unreliable because of the effect of (1) racial prejudice and (2) society’s unjust structure on the news-gathering-and-disseminating processes a subject relies on.  I assume that societies with entrenched racial injustice have widespread racial prejudices and that these societies are unjustly structured.  I argue that racial injustice can undermine a subject’s capacity to be properly sensitive to her social conditions such that she is doxastically justified in her coverage-supported belief. In section one, I describe features of coverage-reliance ignorance, its relation to coverage-supported belief and white ignorance, its bad epistemic consequences and a case of coverage-reliance ignorance where a subject holds a true, but unjustified, belief.  In section two, I argue that racial prejudice can make a news source less reliable because racial prejudice can make it less likely that news sources report on racial injustice related topics.  In section three, I argue that a society’s unjust structure can make a news source less reliable because it can make it less likely that reports on racial-injustice-related topics reach subjects who lack information on these topics.  In section four, I argue that racial injustice can undermine a subject’s capacity to be properly sensitive to her social conditions such that she is doxastically justified in her coverage-supported belief.

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