Current trends in Humanities/Masters’ Academy 16.10.2024 ; 3 p.m.

09 10 2024

The Masters’ School Seminar/ Masters’ Academy will be held on October 16, at  3 p.m.

Our guest is Univ.-Prof. Dr. Paulina Sliwa.

Bad Perspectives

Social epistemologists appeal to “echo chambers” to make sense of a range of phenomena: belief polarisation, conspiracy theories, resistance to expert testimony. But what is an epistemic echo chamber? In an influential paper, Nguyen defines echo chambers as belief systems that constitute ‘distortions in the ecology of trust’: they include beliefs that fellow group members – and only fellow group members – are trustworthy. My aim is to challenge such doxastic accounts of echo chambers. I argue that we should think of echo chambers as constituted by bad perspectives – ways of thinking about a subject matter that include what is salient, what is puzzling, as well as associations and metaphors. This requires both an account of perspectives and what makes them suspect.

BIO:

Paulina Sliwa is Professor of Moral and Political philosophy at the institute of Philosophy, University of Vienna. Prior to that she was senior lecturer at the faculty of philosophy at the University of
Cambridge and a fellow at Senior Sussex College. She studied Physics and Philosophy at Balliol College, University of Oxford and gained a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.