Title: Friends, What Should We Believe About Each Other?
By Esther Goh (Rutgers, Philosophy)
Date: Monday, February 23, 2026
Time: 1730-1900
Room: Humanities Seminar Room (H232)
Abstract: Standard epistemic norms tell us to believe according to our evidence. Yet when the evidence reflects poorly on a friend, some argue that being a good friend requires being a bad believer. Rather than believing as an impartial observer would, a good friend’s belief set, they observe, is (and ought to be) positively biased toward their friend. Others reject this view, objecting that real friendship demands seeing our friends clearly, flaws and all. This debate in epistemic partiality (i.e., between those who think that friendship requires positively biased beliefs about our friends and those who defend believing according to our evidence) rests, as I will argue, on a false assumption: that there is only one kind of doxastic response friends ought to adopt about each other across all contexts. In fact, considerations motivating both sides suggest a more nuanced picture; friendship calls for different doxastic responses based on various contextual features, such as the kinds of friendship goods (or bads) at stake and the kind of friendship involved. I develop a more fundamental friendship norm on belief that explains when friendship calls for positive beliefs, when it calls for accurate beliefs, and surprisingly reveals that friendship may sometimes require believing more negatively about our friends than we would about strangers.
About the speaker: Esther Goh is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at Rutgers University. Her dissertation, co-advised by Ernest Sosa and Andy Egan, develops an ethics of our cognitive lives that is attentive to the relational duties and expectations we bear as social agents. Her research lies primarily in epistemology and metaethics, with a particular focus on the normative dimensions of belief, inquiry, and intellectual responsibility. Her work has appeared in journals such as Synthese and Epistemology and Philosophy of Science.
Organized by the Department of Philosophy