Pacific Islands Society

PO Box 632 | Ebensburg, PA 15931 | USA

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Domestic Non-Profit Organization
The Social Epistemology of
Maritime Piracy
Guest: Mr. Michael Edward Walsh
Affiliation: SOAS, University of London
Published: August 25, 2014

The central focus of your doctoral research
is to provide a social epistemological
account of maritime piracy. Why is this
research topic so important?

In our pursuit of knowledge about maritime
piracy, we must be attentive to the question of
justified true belief. While some social scientists
abstract from the question of whether our
beliefs are true/false and/or reliable/unreliable,
the standard account of knowledge requires
more than just the study of the generation,
transformation, and dissemination of beliefs.
1

For, if we limit the field to these topics, then we
fail to recognize that maritime piracy requires
more than the collective recognition by
epistemic agents that some individual counts as
a pirate or some event counts as a piracy
incident. It also requires that various external,
objective features be satisfied above and
beyond mere beliefs.
2
This obliges an
epistemological account of maritime piracy
grounded in true-belief conduciveness.
It is therefore my contention that we must not
give into the temptation to treat as immaterial
whether a person genuinely qualifies as a
pirate so long as everybody believes that he
does and acts accordingly.
3
Indeed, this
temptation is especially strong in the case of
maritime piracy, since the simple fact is
everyone hates pirates.
4
Accordingly, if
everyone believes that a particular person killed
or captured off the coast of Somalia is a pirate,
it is quite easy to forget about the conditions
needed for that particular person to qualify as a
pirate since the public sentiment of outrage will
be appeased, the preventative effect on
prospective wrong-doers will be achieved, and
the (victims) will feel avenged.
5
But, this
would undermine our knowledge of maritime
piracy. Practically speaking, it would also make
it more difficult for individuals to understand the
policy tradeoffs at stake in counter-piracy
discourses.
Recently, there was a report of a piracy
attack underway in the Western Indian
Ocean.
6
Some have attributed this report to
fear mongering by private military
contractors. How big of a concern are such
cases from an epistemological perspective?
The false alarm aboard the MT Bon Atlantico
should serve as a reminder that higher-level
epistemic agents always have a responsibility to
not blindly accept knowledge claims advanced
by lower-level epistemic agents. There are a
number of reasons why this is the case. The one
that has drawn the most interest in the press is
the fact that not all epistemic agents are
motivated by true-belief oriented values and
goals.


1 This approach is known as doxology as opposed to
epistemology.
2 Finn Collin. Social Reality. New York: Routledge,1997,
pg. 133.
3 Ibid, pg. 134.
4 Shashank Bengali. Suspected Pirates Face
Unprecedented Trial in U.S. Court, Los Angeles Times,
6/1/2013.
5 Collin, pg. 134.
6 David Rider. Indian Tanker False Alarm in Gulf.
Maritime Security Review, 8/13/14.

Interviews

Pacific Islands Society Interviews | August 25, 2014
Pacific Islands Society
PO Box 632 | Ebensburg, PA 15931 | USA
843.271.6891 ph pacificislandssociety.org web
Domestic Non-Profit Organization
As a consequence, it is often argued that
certain actors (e.g., private military contractors,
foreign navies, ship-owners) are prone to
intentionally report false beliefs or not report
true beliefs. Obviously, such social practices
undermine public knowledge about maritime
piracy if they go undetected.

While I share this concern and accept that it is
an endemic problem, our collective fascination
with the behavior of private military contractors
and foreign navies obscures a much larger
issue. At the bottom of the epistemic agent
pyramid for maritime piracy, we typically have
seafarers, private military contractors, and
military professionals. For arguments sake, let
us assume that these agents are motivated
solely by veritistic virtue. As a consequence,
they are not reporting false beliefs or pragmatic
acceptances. This alone does not mitigate
concerns about the truthfulness and reliability of
their reporting. Even in this case, they can still
report a (sincere) belief that turns out to be
neither true nor justified.

A social epistemological account of maritime
piracy must therefore better address all such
cases. It must account for true cases of piracy
that go unreported and false cases that are
reported. Our failure to do so systemically
undermines public knowledge claims made by
higher-level epistemic agents since this
problem is located at the lowest level in the
epistemic agent pyramid. The only way to fix
this problem is to change social practices at
multiple levels of the epistemic actor pyramid.
We must ensure that relevant data is more
reliably collected, processed, analyzed, and
disseminated through individual and social
knowledge pathways.

You highlighted the case of someone
sincerely reporting a false belief. What is the
criterion by which a specific belief about
maritime piracy is determinately false?

There are a number of reasons why someone
might report a belief that is not true. If the case
is determinate, we might say that individual(s)
reported a false belief. We can do so in the
case of social facts like maritime piracy under a
number of specific conditions. One is when a
pattern of outward behavior is traced back to
an inner meaning (belief) to the effect that this
pattern of action was agreed on in a
community-wide decision and should be
adhered to.
7

With respect to maritime piracy, that
community-wide decision was declared in
Articles 100 - 107 and 110 of the United Nations
Convention on the Law of Sea (UNCLOS).
Maritime piracy is therefore a term with a fairly
determinate field of application. There are a set
of corresponding rights and obligations to
ensure that the convention is upheld so long as
there remains collective agreement that it
should be adhered to by the contracting
parties. And, UNCLOS remains a living
document housed in a membership
organization (IMO) that helps to maintain the
collective acceptance of this fact. Maritime
piracy is thus an exemplar institutional fact.

It is important to also point out that a belief that
is not true need not necessarily be false. There
are many reasons for indeterminacy in a social
facts field of application. One of the most
important is the phenomenon of vagueness. In
some sense, most if not all social facts exhibit
some degree of vagueness since they are
brought into being through linguistic social
practices. As a consequence, they often exhibit
borderline cases, lack sharp boundaries, and
are susceptible to sorties paradoxes.

Since there remains great disagreement - even
among philosophers - over whether these cases
should be considered true, indeterminate, or
false, one cannot blame a seafarer for
extending a pragmatic halo of truth over these
cases and accepting the fact that someone is a
pirate even if that individual genuinely
considers it an indeterminate case.


7 Collin, pg. 134.

Answers: 2014 Michael Edward Walsh