Open research questions in Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics
77 unresolved questions extracted from the limitations and future-work sections of 5,725 Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics papers in our library. Each links back to the study that raised it.
What the literature leaves open
At this stage, it’s natural to wonder: how much of the philosophy of explanation might our model be able to account for, with suitable augmentations? There are several avenues which future work might address; we give three below. This requires not only causal cognition, but also cognition relating to language (Beller and Gerstenberg, 2024); future work could explore what this cognition looks like, using our framework to test when it has occurred.
Nevertheless, even if we set aside the troubling idea that AEL advocates must postulate that logical inquirers should explicitly articulate an account of coherence to explain how their logical beliefs are warranted, the case for interpreting the abductiv- ist view in a tolerant manner can still be made.
One reason for this is that it remains an open and empirical question the extent to which a normal epistemic subject ought to trust their faculty of memory to provide them with a reliable memory belief forming process and with this reliably accurate memory beliefs. Address- ing this problem is beyond the scope of this paper, but it is a serious enough pitfall to highlight.
By arguing that conspiracy belief often manifests as (dis)trust, I challenge a common assumption in the philosophy of conspiracy theories that conspiracy belief, understood as taking conspiracy explanations to be true, can always serve as an appropriate basis for asking when believing conspiracy theories is warranted.
I argue that ‘conspiracy theory’ and ‘conspiracy theorist’ as commonly employed are ‘tonkish’ terms (as defined by Arthur Prior and Michael Dummett), licensing inferences from truths to falsehoods; indeed, that they are mega-tonkish terms, since their use is governed by different and competing sets of introduction and elimination rules, delivering different and inconsistent results.
‘Conspiracy Theory’ as a Tonkish Term: Some Runabout Inference-Tickets from Truth to Falsehood · 2023 · DOIWe claim that attention to the threefold distinction we advance allows us to better understand and evaluate existing views and debates in the field; identify and appreciate new or underexplored theoretical options in the field; and avoid important defects and ambiguities in our research on epistemic topics.
This paper considers an underexplored area of epistemology, namely knowledge of persons: if propositional knowledge is a state of mind, consisting in a subject’s attitude to a (true) proposition, the account developed here thinks of interpersonal knowledge as a state of minds, involving a subject’s attitude to another (existing) subject.
Originality/value On the basis of specific symbolic-metaphorical representation, this paper provides a relatively new concept of information which may help bridge observed gaps in the understanding of information in various scientific fields, as well as in its understanding as an objective or subjective phenomenon.
Yet, after almost a half century of social science research on judgment and decision making, much still remains to be learned about how decision makers achieve wise judgments (Hammond, 2010).
Science and Sympathy: "Intuition" and the Ethics of Human Judgment · 2016The results, based on both between‐subjects and within‐subjects experiments, demonstrate that there were significant recency effects with inconsistent evidence as predicted, larger recency effects when the inconsistent evidence was farther apart in subjective value as predicted, and significant recency effects even when subjects were given training designed to both help them understand the task as completely as possible and to be better able to assess the pieces of evidence.
Abstract The current study tests for the presence of differential order effects in evaluation tasks with consistent and inconsistent evidence as predicted by the Hogarth and Einhorn (1992) belief‐adjustment model.
e situations in which the rational choice is not well defined The paradoxes of backward induction find their place here, as do the existence and importance of genuine uncertainty (as distinct from risk) On the other hand, the article discusses the question whether preferences can be said to be rational.
His methods and axioms may not help a geometer who wants know whether there is a single tile, copies of which can cover a plane only nonperiodically-an open question in plane geometry in 1980 (see Box 1).
The truth is not that IQ is eighty-five percent inherited or forty-five percent inherited, but that the data give conflicting results and that we simply do not know and are not likely to know in the near future what percentage of IQ scores is inherited.
The sheer pace and obvious and pervasive importance of urbanization and urban growth, coupled perhaps with age-old fear of the urban masses, has prompted much of the limited research in the field; it has grown like Topsy. Yet, in fact, to date there is not only no consensus, but so far as I am aware there is little discussion regarding priority questions.
The ten- dency to consider either all the desirable or all the undesirable consequences as most likely to occur in general situations should be investigated since it reflects an extreme distortion of judgment. Finally, the present studies should be replicated with individuals other than college stu- dents. One limitation should be noted to the tendency observed in Study I to judge both the best and the worst consequences as highly likely to occur.
Future research should examine the effects of different tasks, payoffs, the influence of subjects being able to see their previous estimates while stating intervals, etc. Moreover, the interval results are congruent with the variance judgment results discussed earlier (Beach and Scopp, 1968; Hofstatter, 1939; and Lathrop, 1967), suggesting that there may be sufficient generality to warrant further investigation.
That one factor but not the other should exert a significant influence on the de- pendent variable is not in itself surprising, since rank-ordering data must, because of their limited information-transmitting capacity, show sensitivity for one in- dependent variable at the expense of sensitivity for another.
THE PURPOSE of this paper is to clarify some of the logical problems raised by certain uses of the word “imply”which, although very familiar in ordinary language, have not been adequately investigated by philosophers.
Ascendancy of the Emotional over the Rational The fundamental question remains to be answered: why ·does the indi vidual tend to accept or reject the validity of the syllogism in accordance with the trend of the reaction which has been evoked by the affective sym bols of the context ? Why is the emotional reaction ascendant over the rational reaction? We offer the following as a tentative, general explanation.
This is because the derogatory public use of the phrase “conspiracy theories” is not limited to theories that involve preternaturally intelligent and powerful people and groups.
Despite being notably under-researched, rare findings suggest scientistic beliefs share a similar cognitive footprint with antiscientific beliefs, being positively related to dogmatism and negatively to cognitive reflection and general cognitive abilities.
Second, our metaphysical claim is that the existence of LLM credences is at least plausible, although current evidence is inconclusive.
Can we make sense of these latter situations? To account for their occurrence, it is common to point out that people’s ability to argue is flawed, that an “argumentative culture” is lacking, and that emotional and other non-rational factors often interfere in confrontative situations.
Abstract Epistemic trust in others frequently cannot be disentangled from interpersonal trust more generally, but the epistemic implications of how we affectively express our trust in others are under-investigated.
Most-cited papers in Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics
- How people decide what they want to know · Nature Human Behaviour · 2020 · 294 citations
- “I Know Things They Don’t Know!” · Social Psychology · 2017 · 136 citations
- Understanding psychology's resistance to intersectionality theory using a framework of epistemic exclusion and invisibility · Journal of Social Issues · 2020 · 134 citations
- Experimental methods: Eliciting beliefs · Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization · 2021 · 119 citations
- Mistrust and misinformation: A two-component, socio-epistemic model of belief in conspiracy theories · Journal of Social and Political Psychology · 2020 · 118 citations
- The effect of audit seniors’ decisions on working paper documentation and on partners’ decisions · Accounting Organizations and Society · 1999 · 100 citations
- Fairness as Appropriateness · Science Technology & Human Values · 2009 · 99 citations
- Conversational Implicature, Conscious Representation, and the Conjunction Fallacy · Social Cognition · 1991 · 98 citations
- Are Republicans and Conservatives More Likely to Believe Conspiracy Theories? · Political Behavior · 2022 · 86 citations
- Possibility studies: A manifesto · Possibility Studies & Society · 2022 · 86 citations
Most recent work
- Ideological neglect of unwarranted trust in science · Theory and Society · 2026
- Double-Checking: In Speech and in Private · Episteme · 2026
- Non-Bivalent Validity · Studia Logica · 2026
- On the tracking account of inferential knowledge · Inquiry · 2026
- How Evidential Pluralism Mitigates Epistemic Injustice in Evidence-Based Evaluation · Philosophy of the Social Sciences · 2026
- How Gödel Both Did and Did Not Steal from Schmidt · Erkenntnis · 2026
- Plausibility, persuasion, and truth: why language models may appear designed to deceive · Humanities and Social Sciences Communications · 2026
- Epistemic Stabilization Under Constraint: Confidence as a Downstream Signal, Not an Upstream Warrant (v1.2) · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026
- Intuition is Evidence · Acta Analytica · 2026
- Memory Beliefs: A Psychological and Justificatory Account · Philosophia · 2026
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