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Switch to: References
Citations of:
Overdoing Democracy: Why We Must Put Politics in its Place
New York: Oup Usa (2019)
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A prevalent political narrative is that we are facing an epistemological crisis, where many citizens no longer care about truth and facts. Yet the view that we are living in a post-truth era relies on some implicit questionable empirical and normative assumptions. The post-truth rhetoric converts epistemic issues into motivational issues, treating people with whom we disagree as if they no longer believe in or care about truth. This narrative is also dubious on epistemic, moral, and political grounds. It is (...) |
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Predictable polarization is everywhere: we can often predict how people’s opinions, including our own, will shift over time. Extant theories either neglect the fact that we can predict our own polarization, or explain it through irrational mechanisms. They needn’t. Empirical studies suggest that polarization is predictable when evidence is ambiguous, that is, when the rational response is not obvious. I show how Bayesians should model such ambiguity and then prove that—assuming rational updates are those which obey the value of evidence—ambiguity (...) |
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Recently, researchers and reporters have made a wide range of claims about the distribution, nature, and societal impact of political polarization. Here I offer reasons to believe that, even when they are correct and prima facie merely descriptive, many of these claims have the highly negative side effect of increasing political polarization. This is because of the interplay of two factors that have so far been neglected in the work on political polarization, namely that (1) people have a tendency to (...) |
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It has recently been suggested that politically motivated cognition leads progressive individuals to form beliefs that underestimate real differences between social groups and to process information selectively to support these beliefs and an egalitarian outlook. I contend that this tendency, which I shall call ‘egalitarian confirmation bias’, is often ‘Mandevillian’ in nature. That is, while it is epistemically problematic in one’s own cognition, it often has effects that significantly improve other people’s truth tracking, especially that of stigmatized individuals in academia. (...) |
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An introduction to philosophy of language since Frege, focusing on the 20th century. |
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In this chapter, we turn our attention to the effects of the attention economy on our ability to act autonomously as a group. We begin by clarifying which sorts of groups we are concerned with, which are structured groups (groups sufficiently organized that it makes sense to attribute agency to the group itself). Drawing on recent work by Purves and Davis (2022), we describe the essential roles of trust (i.e., depending on groups to fulfill their commitments) and trustworthiness (i.e., the (...) |
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I examine the possibility of civic friendship to solve the problem of over-doing democracy, paying close attention to how it can counter affective polarization and social homogeneity. In Section I, I explore civic friendship as a solution to polarization. In section II, I argue that Talisse’s civic friendship—in the context of nonpolitical collaboration—is akin to Aristotle’s utility and pleasure-friendships. Given the nature of civic friendship, in Section III–VI I make amendments to Talisse’s proposal. I argue that if civic friendship is (...) |
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The concept of adversariality, like that of argument, admits of significant variation. As a consequence, I argue, the question of adversarial argument has not been well understood. After defining adversariality, I argue that if we take argument to be about beliefs, rather than commitments, then two considerations show that adversariality is an essential part of it. First, beliefs are not under our direct voluntary control. Second, beliefs are costly both for the psychological states they provoke and for the fact that (...) |
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Reflectivists consider reflective reasoning crucial for good judgment and action. Anti-reflectivists deny that reflection delivers what reflectivists seek. Alas, the evidence is mixed. So, does reflection confer normative value or not? This paper argues for a middle way: reflection can confer normative value, but its ability to do this is bound by such factors as what we might call epistemic identity: an identity that involves particular beliefs—for example, religious and political identities. We may reflectively defend our identities’ beliefs rather than (...) |
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In this open access book, Timothy Aylsworth and Clinton Castro draw on the deep well of Kantian ethics to argue that we have moral duties, both to ourselves and to others, to protect our autonomy from the threat posed by the problematic use of technology. The problematic use of technologies like smartphones threatens our autonomy in a variety of ways, and critics have only begun to appreciate the vast scope of this problem. In the last decade, we have seen a (...) |
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Political polarization is one of the most discussed challenges facing contemporary democracies and is often associated with a broader epistemic crisis. While inspiring a large literature in political science, polarization’s epistemic problems also have significance for normative democratic theory, and this study develops a new approach aimed at understanding them. In contrast to prominent accounts from political psychology—group polarization theory and cultural cognition theory—which argue that polarization leads individuals to form unreliable political beliefs, this study focuses on system-level diversity. It (...) |
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Are extreme beliefs constitutive of echo chambers, or only typically caused by them? Or are many echo chambers unproblematic, amplifying relatively benign beliefs? This paper details the conceptual relations between echo chambers and extreme beliefs, showing how different conceptual choice-points in how we understand both echo chambers and extreme beliefs affects how we should evaluate, study, and engage with echo chambering groups. We also explore how our theories of extreme beliefs and echo chambers shape social scientific research and contribute in (...) |
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Political epistemology is a newly flourishing area of philosophy, but there is no comprehensive overview to this burgeoning field. This chapter maps out the terrain of political epistemology, highlights some of the key questions and topics of this field, draws connections across seemingly disparate areas of work, and briefly situates this field within its historical and contemporary contexts. |
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With what modes of mentality can we build a visceral, subjective sense of being in some specific mass-political society? Theorists and political cultivators standardly call upon the imagination – the kind prompted by symbols and rituals, for example. Could perception ever play such a role? I argue that it can, but that perceptions of mass-political publics come with costs of cruelty and illusion that neither democratic theorists nor participants should be willing to pay. The clearest examples of such perceptions are (...) |
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This dissertation presents a philosophical inquiry into the concept of intelligence by reconstructing John Dewey’s theory of intelligence and investigating its educational implications. It presents three critiques of educational practices and theories that, from a Deweyan point of view, are built on misconceptions or oversimplifications of intelligence. While his theory of intelligence is primarily expressed in implicit terms, it offers a nuanced analysis of the sociality and contextuality of intelligence, questioning some of its traditional or mainstream conceptions. The reconstructed theory (...) |
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This review essay critically discusses Robert Talisse’s account of democracy and polarization. I argue that Talisse overstates the degree to which polarization arises from the good-faith practice of democratic citizenship and downplays the extent to which polarization is caused by elites and exacerbated by social structures; this leads Talisse to overlook structural approaches to managing polarization and leaves his account of how citizens should respond to polarization incomplete. I conclude that Talisse’s insights should nevertheless be integrated into a broader agenda (...) |
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Some artificial intelligence systems can display algorithmic bias, i.e. they may produce outputs that unfairly discriminate against people based on their social identity. Much research on this topic focuses on algorithmic bias that disadvantages people based on their gender or racial identity. The related ethical problems are significant and well known. Algorithmic bias against other aspects of people’s social identity, for instance, their political orientation, remains largely unexplored. This paper argues that algorithmic bias against people’s political orientation can arise in (...) |
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Since at least the 1980s, the role of adversariality in argumentation has been extensively discussed within different domains. Prima facie, there seem to be two extreme positions on this issue: argumentation should never be adversarial, as we should always aim for cooperative argumentative engagement; argumentation should be and in fact is always adversarial, given that adversariality is an intrinsic property of argumentation. I here defend the view that specific instances of argumentation are adversarial or cooperative to different degrees. What determines (...) |
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Argumentation is important for sharing knowledge and information. Given that the receiver of an argument purportedly engages first and foremost with its content, one might expect trust to play a negligible epistemic role, as opposed to its crucial role in testimony. I argue on the contrary that trust plays a fundamental role in argumentative engagement. I present a realistic social epistemological account of argumentation inspired by social exchange theory. Here, argumentation is a form of epistemic exchange. I illustrate my argument (...) |
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Public engagement is one of the fundamental pillars of the European programme for research and innovation _Horizon 2020_. The programme encourages engagement that not only fosters science education and dissemination, but also promotes two-way dialogues between scientists and the public at various stages of research. Establishing such dialogues between different groups of societal actors is seen as crucial in order to attain epistemic as well as social desiderata at the intersection between science and society. However, whether these dialogues can actually (...) |
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In his recent book, Joshi (2021) argues that the open exchange of ideas is essential for the flourishing of individuals and society. He provides two arguments for this claim. First, speaking your mind is essential for the common good: we enhance our collective ability to reach the truth if we share evidence and offer different perspectives. Second, speaking your mind is good for your own sake: it is necessary to develop your rational faculties and exercise intellectual independence, both of which (...) |
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It is widely believed that democracies require knowledgeable citizens to function well. But the most politically knowledgeable individuals also tend to be the most partisan, and the strength of partisan identity tends to corrupt political thinking. This creates a conundrum. On the one hand, an informed citizenry is allegedly necessary for a democracy to flourish. On the other hand, the most knowledgeable and passionate voters are also the most likely to think in corrupted, biased ways. What to do? This paper (...) |
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A striking feature of political discourse is how prone we are to disagree. Political opponents will even give different answers to factual questions, which suggests that opposing parties cannot agree on facts any more than they can on values. This impression is widespread and supported by survey data. I will argue, however, that the extent and depth of political disagreement is largely overstated. Many political disagreements are merely illusory. This claim has several important upshots. I will explore the implications of (...) |
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Frente a problemas de decisión colectiva de cierta complejidad, distintos métodos de votación pueden considerarse igualmente democráticos. Ante esta situación, argumento que es posible investigar cuáles de esos métodos producen mejores resultados epistémicos sobre asuntos fácticos. Comienzo ilustrando la relación entre democracia y métodos de votación con un sencillo ejemplo. Muestro cómo el uso de modelos idealizados permite descubrir algunas propiedades de los métodos de votación; varios de estos descubrimientos muestran que, frente a problemas de cierta complejidad, no hay una (...) |
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The way digital information technologies work and, more specifically, the possibilities for action that technological devices offer to us affect our processes of political belief formation. In particular, there seems to be a close connection between our digital affordances and the increase of the sort of polarization that threatens the proper functioning of democracy. In this paper, we analyze whether the type of polarization linked to the use of digital technologies, and which endangers the health of public deliberation, has to (...) |
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