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Semester 1

Social Epistemology (PHIL10203)

Subject

Philosophy

College

CAHSS

Credits

20

Normal Year Taken

3

Delivery Session Year

2023/2024

Pre-requisites

Visiting students must have completed at least 3 Philosophy courses at grade B or above; we will only consider University/College level courses. **Please see Additional Restrictions below**

Course Summary

Epistemology has traditionally focussed on individuals and asked what it takes for their beliefs to be justified, count as knowledge, and contribute to understanding. Moreover, epistemology has often pursued answers to these questions that abstract away from social context. In response, this course focusses on the ways social context is important for thinking about justification, knowledge, and understanding. We consider topics such as the role of testimony in transmitting and expanding knowledge within groups of people, the idea of aggregating judgment within a group to form a collective opinion and realise the possibility of common knowledge and group understanding , the challenge of identifying and relying on experts, the role of social-political structures in enhancing or detracting from individual and group knowledge and understanding, and the phenomena of echo chambers and epistemic bubbles in the formation of political beliefs.

Course Description

Epistemology has traditionally focussed on individuals and asked what it takes for their beliefs to be justified, count as knowledge, and contribute to understanding. Moreover, epistemology has often pursued answers to these questions that abstract away from social context. In response, this course focusses on the ways social context is important for thinking about justification, knowledge, and understanding. The precise topics covered may vary year to year and depending on who is teaching, but they will typically include 3-4 of the following: **1. Epistemology of testimony: Much of what we know comes from relying unquestioningly on the word of others, but not everyone is trustworthy. So does knowledge acquired through the testimony of require prior grounds for the reliability of the source, or is testimony a freestanding and fundamental source of knowledge. So here we consider various answers to this question. **2. Judgment aggregation and the wisdom/stupidity of crowds: What does the jury think about the guilt of the defendant, what does the scientific community think about the truth of some hypothesis, what does the market regard as a fair price for the commodity? Questions like these require a theory of how to aggregate diverse views of some group in order to articulate the group's view. So here we investigate several theories of how to do this and consider some of the many challenges to doing so well. **3. The challenge and importance of identifying experts: When forming beliefs about something complex and difficult, it is generally good to rely on the word of people that know more about the topic than you do, but how do you tell who the 'experts' are? And how can diverse expertise be integrated across various topics and fields, so that groups of people can advance their holistic understanding of multifaceted phenomena such as climate change, immigration, mental health, etc.? So here we evaluate several theories of expertise that seek to answer questions such as these. **4. Social structures and the promotion/deterioration of knowledge and understanding: One of the mantras of the philosophical and political enlightenment of the 18th century was that people should throw off the shackles of indoctrination and take responsibility for thinking for themselves in order to become free. But we know that what and how one thinks is hugely influenced by family, educational, cultural, and economic factors. So here we examine what kinds of social structures promote/undermine more knowledge and understanding, both in individuals and groups. **5. Democracy, markets, and knowledge: Generally, decisions based on knowledge are better than those based on ignorance. But voters in democracies are often thought to make their political decisions with relatively low levels of relevant knowledge, whereas consumers in capitalistic markets are often thought to make their economic decisions with relatively high levels of relevant knowledge (especially of comparative values and opportunity costs). Nevertheless, many would be loathed to say that market forces rather than political forces should be relied on for making collective decisions about how to live together. So here we explore this rich and thorny issue. **6. Echo chambers, epistemic bubbles, and polarisation: The contemporary (social-) media landscape has been described as creating echo chambers, wherein one only hears others who have similar views to oneself. This can have the effect of intensifying one's political views and the confidence with which one holds them. But there is different phenomenon of epistemic bubbles whereby one hears views that disagree with one's own but all too quickly discounts their reliability because they come from sources whose trustworthiness has been undermined in some way by one's original source of information. This sometimes has the effect of perpetuating conspiracy theories or epistemic injustice. So here we examine these phenomena and consider what might be done to mitigate their bad effects.

Assessment Information

Written Exam 0%, Coursework 100%, Practical Exam 0%

Additional Restrictions

Unless you are nominated on a Philosophy exchange agreement, visiting students are only permitted to enrol in only one 3rd year Philosophy course each, per semester, before the start of the relevant semester’s welcome period – and spaces on each course are limited so cannot be guaranteed for any student. Enrolment in additional courses from this subject area will depend on whether there are still spaces available in the September Welcome Period, and cannot be guaranteed. It is NOT appropriate for students to contact staff within this subject area to ask for an exception to be made; all enquiries to enrol in these courses must be made through the CAHSS Visiting Student Office. This is due to the extremely limited number of spaces available in this very popular subject area.

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