Abstract:

It is not unusual to find the content of an epistemic agent’s utterance not wanted because it elicits a repulsive reaction in us. What could explain this sort of reaction to a speaker’s utterance? In this paper, I propose an “epistemic disgust” concept to explain this reactive attitude. Epistemic disgust refers to a phenomenon whereby an epistemic agent feels repulsion for a speaker’s utterance either due to the speaker’s personality (over time or present) or the content of the speaker’s utterance, thus causing the agent to reject the speaker’s utterance from contributing to her epistemic system.