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\title{AMA Announcement: Wednesday 10/12 11AM ET - Geoff Pynn (Northern
Illinois) on epistemology and philosophy of language}



\author[1]{ADefiniteDescription }%
\author[1]{r/Science AMAs}%
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  \date{April 24, 2026}


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\begin{abstract}
As previously announced, /r/philosophy is hosting an AMA series this
fall semester which kicked off with AMAs by Caspar Hare (MIT), Kevin
Scharp and Kenneth Ehrenberg. Check out our series announcement post to
see all the upcoming AMAs this semester. We continue our series this
upcoming Wednesday with Geoff Pynn, Associate Professor of Philosophy at
Northern Illinois University. Hear it from him: Geoff Pynn is an
associate professor of philosophy at Northern Illinois University. He
earned his PhD from Yale University; specializes in epistemology and
philosophy of language; and regularly teaches early modern European
philosophy, philosophy of religion, and logic. He is also interested in
the philosophical problems posed by addiction, anarchism, conspiracy
theories, moral panics, and social justice movements. His favorite
philosophers are Baruch Spinoza, David Hume, and the nineteenth-century
anarchist feminist Voltairine De Cleyre. His most recent published work
is on contextualism in epistemology. You can download all his papers
from his academia.edu page. He has a number of Wi-Phi videos on:
Critical thinking Deductive arguments Abductive arguments Inductive
arguments (coming soon!) The tracking theory of knowledge Virtue
epistemology Contextualism (coming soon!) Geoff's current research
focuses on social epistemology. Miranda Fricker coined the phrase
``testimonial injustice'' to describe what occurs when some prejudice or
bias causes a person's testimony to be granted less (or more)
credibility than it deserves. For example, imagine a police officer who
refuses to believe a suspect's truthful eyewitness testimony simply
because the suspect is black. Or consider how someone's rural accent or
stilted English can make you more skeptical than you'd otherwise be
about whether he is telling the truth. Intuitively, it seems wrong to
let your prejudices sway your credibility judgments, and it seems like
people who are disbelieved because of someone else's bias have a right
to complain. But it's hard to say why such treatment is wrongful. In one
paper, Geoff is developing an account of the harm of testimonial
injustice. The basic idea is that when you let your prejudices sway your
credibility judgments, you're degrading the speaker. Degradation is a
complex social harm where a person a mistreated in a way that represents
her as if she deserved the mistreatment in virtue of the kind of person
she is. Epistemic degradation may not be as dramatic or painful as
torture, revenge porn, or public humiliation, but it can be extremely
demoralizing and have lasting effects. Like all forms of degrading
treatment, biased credibility judgments reduce a person's social
standing, encouraging and rewarding behavior that treats them as if they
deserved disrespect. (Working on this paper has also sparked Geoff's
interest in degradation, humiliation, shame, and other forms of
psycho-social harm.) Geoff's other current project is on testimonial
injustice, plea bargaining, and false confessions. More than 90 percent
of criminal cases in the U.S. never go to trial. Instead, a prosecutor
extracts a guilty plea from a suspect by either promising him a reduced
sentence in exchange for a guilty plea, or threatening him with a more
severe charge should his case go to trial. While many people who accept
plea bargains are guilty, at least some plead guilty simply to avoid the
risk of a more severe punishment. Such cases involve a particularly
nasty form of testimonial injustice: enticing a speaker to lie in order
to treat her lie as if it were credible enough to justify punishing her.
Geoff is also the graduate adviser for Northern Illinois University's
top-rated philosophy MA program, which caters primarily to students who
want to get a PhD in philosophy, but do not have the background to get
into a PhD program directly. Like many other terminal MA programs, NIU's
offers full funding and living stipends, and Geoff maintains a guide to
funding opportunities at terminal MA programs. He's happy to talk about
any aspect of philosophy grad school. Some relevant papers: An overview
of contextualism in epistemology (forthcoming in Oxford Handbooks) A
piece on the ``intuitive argument'' for contextualism (forthcoming in
the Routledge Companion to Epistemic Contextualism) A new form of
contextualism, designed to side-step a slew of objections to the view
that emerged in the early 2000s An explanation of the ``illusion of
ignorance'' produced by skeptical arguments A sort of math-y piece
dismantling a popular criticism of the Moorean response to skepticism
AMA Professor Pynn will join us Wednesday for a couple hours of live
Q\&A on his research in epistemology, the philosophy of language and
other areas. Please feel free to post questions for Professor Pynn here.
He will look at this thread before he starts and begin with some
questions from here while the initial questions in the new thread come
in. Please join me in welcoming Professor Pynn to our community!%
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