07-10-2024, 07:48 AM
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1470594X20901346 wrote:What are the chances you’re right about everything? An epistemic challenge for modern partisanship
Abstract
The American political landscape exhibits significant polarization. People’s political beliefs cluster around two main camps. However, many of the issues with respect to which these two camps disagree seem to be rationally orthogonal. This feature raises an epistemic challenge for the political partisan. If she is justified in consistently adopting the party line, it must be true that her side is reliable on the issues that are the subject of disagreements. It would then follow that the other side is anti-reliable with respect to a host of orthogonal political issues. Yet, it is difficult to find a psychologically plausible explanation for why one side would get things reliably wrong with respect to a wide range of orthogonal issues. While this project’s empirical discussion focuses on the US context, the argument generalizes to any situation where political polarization exists on a sufficiently large number of orthogonal claims.
Quote:On the face of it, these propositions seem to be orthogonal.1 That is, your position on one of them doesn’t commit you to any particular position on the others.
Yet, in the context of the current political climate in the US, particular answers to these questions are strongly correlated. For instance, if you find that a randomly selected individual agrees with Abortion and disagrees with Policing, what would you expect them to say about Guns? You’d probably expect them to disagree with that claim. Likewise, if a person agrees with Wages and disagrees with Immigration, you’d expect them to disagree with Affirmative Action. Of course, not every individual will answer in this way, as there are people who do not fall neatly within either cluster of opinion. However, there are two noticeable clusters of opinion in the American context, and the partisan divide has been getting stronger.2
The fact that doxastic attitudes toward orthogonal propositions cluster together among the population raises an epistemological problem. Suppose a person finds herself having the beliefs that are typical of one of the clusters of political opinion. Such a person, I shall argue, should moderate her political beliefs. For, the orthogonality of the issues involved makes it highly likely that something is going awry epistemically – either her beliefs have been subject to problematic irrelevant influences or she is in possession only of a biased subset of relevant evidence.3
