According to a common view, prejudice always involves some form of epistemic culpability, i.e., a failure to respond to evidence in the appropriate way. I argue that the common view wrongfully assumes that prejudices always involve universal generalizations. After motivating the more plausible thesis that prejudices typically involve a species of generic judgment, I show that standard examples provide no grounds for positing a strong connection between prejudice and epistemic culpability. More generally, the common view fails to recognize the extent to which prejudices are epistemically insidious: once they are internalized as background beliefs, they quite reasonably come to control the assessment and interpretation of new evidence. This property of insidiousness helps explain why prejudices are so recalcitrant to empirical counterevidence and also why they are frequently invisible to introspective reflection.
As a general rule, whenever a hearer is justified in forming the belief that p on the basis of a speaker's testimony, she will also be justified in assuming that the speaker has formed her belief appropriately in light of a relevantly large and representative sample of the evidence that bears on p.1 Typically, we may take it that p and q are in some kind of apparent tension, so that the speaker can rely on the hearer to recognize that rational commitment to one proposition would prima facie exclude rational commitment to the other (e.g., "My opponents will tell you that I am too young and inexperienced to be a leader, but I say, this country is ready for change.").
Belief polarization (BP) is widely seen to threaten havoc on our shared political lives. It is often assumed that BP is the product of epistemically irrational behaviors at the individual level. After distinguishing between BP as it occurs in intra-group and inter-group settings, this paper argues that neither process necessarily reflects individual epistemic irrationality. It is true that these processes can work in tandem to produce so-called “echo chambers.” But while echo chambers are often problematic from the point of view of collective rationality, it doesn't follow that individuals are doing anything wrong, epistemically speaking, in seeking them out. In non-ideal socio-epistemic contexts, echo chamber construction might provide one's best defense against systematic misinformation and deception.
So far the book has worked on the assumption that the confrontation with contrary evidence always requires rational believers to reduce their credence in the relevant propositions. This chapter introduces the notion of “evidential preemption,” which occurs when a testifier, in addition to offering testimony that p, also warns the hearer that others will try to persuade them of contrary views. This chapter argues that whenever it is rational for someone to accept the “ground-level” testimony on offer, it is also rational for them to accept the warning about what others will tell them. When they are subsequently confronted with this testimony, its evidential force has effectively been neutralized, since it is, essentially, information the subject has already conditionalized on. In this way, evidential preemption can serve as a tool for “epistemic inoculation,” all but ensuring that subjects cannot make beneficial use of the contrary evidence to correct their beliefs.
This article surveys the major historical developments in Western philosophical reflection on war. Section 2 outlines early development in Greek and Roman thought, up to and including Augustine. Section 3 details the systematization of Just War theory in Aquinas and his successors, especially Vitoria, Suárez, and Grotius. Section 4 examines the emergence of Perpetual Peace theory after Hobbes, focusing in particular on Rousseau and Kant. Finally, Section 5 outlines the central points of contention following the reemergence of Just War theory in the 1970s. 2
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