Political Epistemology

This conference will bring together scholars working at the intersection of political philosophy and epistemology.
The term “political epistemology” is fairly new, but we think it captures an important intersection between political philosophy and epistemology that has become especially important in the current political climate, where broad challenges to the notion of truth threaten the social fabric of our democracy.
This conference will bring together scholars working at the intersection of political philosophy and epistemology. The conference theme, Political Epistemology, is deliberately broad because there many ways in which epistemologists can learn from political philosophers and vice versa. For example, political philosophers have long been interested in reasonable disagreements, or what Rawls called “the fact of reasonable pluralism,” while disagreement has only recently become widely discussed in epistemology. There are also many unexplored ways in which theorizing about politics might benefit from the conceptual tools of epistemology; for instance, contemporary epistemology has focused on the social dimensions of knowledge, the epistemology of testimony, the norms governing assertion, and group belief.
This event is supported by generous contributions from the Institute of Philosophy, the Mind Association, the Society for Applied Philosophy, and the Aristotelian Society.