Hrishikesh Joshi

This paper defends a provocative thesis: namely, that the present structure and composition of the academy undermines democratic legitimacy. Political philosophers have often stressed that universal suffrage by itself is not sufficient for such legitimacy. In these critiques, they have focused on the disproportionate power of the wealthy to shape politics and public discourse. I argue here that there is a deeper and relatively unnoticed problem in this vein: the university system exerts enormous power in shaping the perspectives of the public, through a variety of means. Yet, the academy is democratically unaccountable for all practical purposes. Moreover, as has been documented in a range of empirical work, it is politically homogenous. As a result, I argue, this asymmetric power undermines the legitimacy of the political system, viewed as a whole. This can be seen from within three influential accounts of democratic legitimacy: republicanism, public reason liberalism, and consent theories. The paper concludes by exploring some potential remedies in the service of moving towards democratic legitimacy.

Epistemic paternalism involves interfering with the inquiry of others, without their consent, for their own epistemic good. Recently, such paternalism has been discussed as a method of getting the broader public to have more accurate views on important policy relevant matters. In this paper, I discuss a novel problem for such paternalism—what I call epistemic spillovers. The problem arises because what matters for rational belief is one’s total evidence, and further, individual pieces of evidence can have complex interactions with one another. Because of this, I argue that justified epistemic paternalism requires the would-be paternalist to be in an unusually strong epistemic position, one that most would-be paternalists are unlikely to meet.

In philosophical work on the ethics of conversational exchange, much has been written regarding the speaker side—i.e., on the rights and duties we have as speakers. This paper explores the relatively neglected topic of the duties pertaining to the listeners’ side of the exchange. Following W.K. Clifford, we argue that it's fruitful to think of our epistemic resources as common property. Furthermore, listeners have a key role in maintaining and improving these resources, perhaps a more important role than speakers. We develop this idea by drawing from Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber's “interactionist” picture of reason, which suggests that reasoning is essentially dialogical and relies on the epistemic vigilance of listeners. The paper defends an imperfect, prima facie duty to listen, one that is sufficiently strong to place substantial demands on individuals, but not so overly demanding as to be implausible.

This paper argues for the existence of a certain type of defeater for one’s belief that P—the presence of social incentives not to share evidence against P. Such pressure makes it relatively likely that there is unpossessed evidence that would provide defeaters for P because it makes it likely that the evidence we have is a lopsided subset. This offers, I suggest, a rational reconstruction of a core strand of argument in Mill’s On Liberty. A consequence of the argument is that on morally and politically laden issues in particular, a high degree of doxastic openness might be appropriate.

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.