Robin McKenna

Conference banner. Contains the list of speakers: J Adam Carter, Mikkel Gerken, Allan Hazlett, Anne Meylan, Miriam McCormick, me, Lena Mudry and Chris Ranalli. Also some art but that's not essential.

Chris Ranalli and I are organising a workshop on the "Politics of Scepticism" at VU Amsterdam, 23-24th June. Registration is free but you need to contact me (r.j.mckenna@liverpool.ac.uk) or Chris Ranalli (c.b.ranalli2@vu.nl) if you want to attend.

running a mailing list is a surprising amount of work, but running a mailing list that doesn't work properly is far more work.

Science Communication as Propaganda A Strategic Approach to Manufacturing Consensus

This argues that a popular approach to science communication is best understood as a form of propaganda. It's a synthesis of my interest in the ethics of science communication and my new-found interest in propaganda. I try to connect this with science scepticism, though that might be a stretch.

Ich halte den stumpfen Vorzeichenwechsel von woke zu anti-woke nicht für einen echten „vibe shift“. Es ist derselbe vibe, nur von der anderen Seite. Ich habe das Buch AGAINST IDENTITY noch nicht gelesen, aber immer wenn ich den Titel sehe, denke ich: Ja, DAS wäre ein echter Shift!

Guter Text dazu:

Be More Interesting I started studying philosophy in a windy town on the east coast of Scotland in 2004.

I wrote this for the Republic of Letters about why the right response to an increasingly politicised environment is not to lean into that politicisation but to try and escape it. Also contains an argument that politicisation is a deeper problem than polarisation.
open.substack.com/pub/therepub...

I think something like this would be good in philosophy, though I may personally publish a bit too much to be able to say it entirely in good faith.

Robin McKenna, Sophistry on Steroids? The Ethics, Epistemology and Politics of Persuasive AI - PhilPapers This paper examines the ethical, epistemological, and political implications of persuasive AI technologies. Recent research suggests that AI is roughly as persuasive as humans in many contexts. Should...

This is big picture and I imagine very teachable. Maybe more ethics than epistemology, but I know from experience that some epistemologists disagree with what I say here.

philpapers.org/rec/MCKSOS-2

My stance on online conferences has always been that I'm in favour of them but I don't really want to attend them. This leads to obvious problems when that stance is widely shared.

ordered, thanks!

contemporary analytic philosophy is certainly not very Wittgensteinian--to the anger of Wittgensteinians!

related, but it's a different thing-a theory of rationality isn't a "system" in that grand philosophical sense of the term.

no it still exists! But what struck me today was that a lot of the incentives you are under as a researcher count against this sort of paper, and this is reflected in a lot of what you can read.

A Pathology of Analytic Philosophy This is admittedly a little niche

Today I read some proper analytic epistemology the first time in a while. It was perfectly good but there was something I found a bit odd about it. This is my attempt to explain what that is.

open.substack.com/pub/rbnmcken...

Our special issue with @martinkusch.bsky.social is finally complete and here’s at long last our introduction. I pitched the idea to him in 2019! Thank you for your patience and generosity, Martin. I am proud of this manifesto and hope colleagues will join us in rethinking this old debate #philsci

This semester I am teaching a course about technocracy and its discontents. It will be a mix of theory (what is technocracy, why do we have it) and case studies. Ideas for reading suggestions? They need to be relatively accessible, and make a good basis for discussion.

please do!

I'm not totally convinced; sociology of philosophy (which is essentially what this is) is typically incredibly contentious, but not really a core part of the discipline. I care about it, but I'm not convinced it is terrifically important. If I was, I probably would write a paper about it.

I just said to someone that I *didn't* want to turn this into a proper paper but thanks for the tip--there couldn't be a more ideal venue for it! The problem I think is that the argument relies on another paper that I haven't published yet, but also carries a lot of the argumentative weight.

what is the paper? I briefly considered trying to write a paper version of this but decided I would only be able to get it through peer review if I spent an ungodly amount of time on it.

Against "Epistemic Injustice" On the Epistemic Injustice as a Central Organising Concept

I've been meaning to write this for *months*. I'm increasingly unhappy with the focus on epistemic injustice and cataloguing the various things that can go wrong in information exchange. But I suspect my reasons for being unhappy are different to the usual.

open.substack.com/pub/rbnmcken...

does anyone actually have this combination of views, or is it just people angling for a job after the AI jobs apocalypse?

Various Routledge books including Popper's The Open Society and its Enemies, a book on Expertise, Weber's The Protestant Work Ethic, Weil's The Need for Roots, Schumpeter's Socialism, Democracy and Capitalism, Murdoch's Sovereignty of Good and Midgely's Myths we live by.

I can tell I’m becoming some sort of political philosopher because now when I get the chance to order free books to not read I choose things like this rather than books like “Can you know the bank is open on Saturday? It depends” and “10 new kinds of epistemic injustice”.

yes I was trying to find my feeling of conviction that I was born in 1986 and I couldn't summon it.

Reading about belief as a feeling of conviction. Seems like a problem for the theory that I presumably have beliefs but have no idea what conviction is meant to feel like. Starting to worry I might be a philosophical zombie.

unfortunately nowadays you also often do it to saddle yourself with even more unpayable debt than you had before.

I don't even want to look it up, but I suspect the difference in price of a MA in 2008 and now might make a bit of a difference here. While I don't exactly discourage students from doing a MA, I don't feel comfortable recommending it to anyone who is not already enthusiastic for this reason.

If I had any of the necessary skills I would love to be a plumber. As it is I can't even fix a toilet flush.

I suspect the current/looming graduate jobs crisis is going to lead to an uptick in applications for Masters programmes. I must admit to being in a real moral quandary here, given that the vast majority of such programmes won't materially improve job prospects. But what else is there?

I want to hear more about my new argument for pragmatism

My understanding is that nowadays people think he had a point because he meant there would not be a successor ideology to liberalism/capitalism, not that nothing else would ever happen again, so the seeming dawn of a post-ideological age is not really a falsification of the thesis. Will report back.