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In Learning from Our Mistakes: Epistemology for the Real World, William J. Talbott provides a new framework for understanding the history of Western epistemology and uses it to propose a new way of understanding rational belief that can be applied to pressing social and political issues. This framework is used to articulate a new theory of prejudice and a new diagnosis of the sources of inequity in the U.S. criminal justice system, as well as insight into the proliferation of tribal and fascist epistemologies based on alt-facts and alt-truth.
List of contents
- Part I. The Proof Paradigm and the Causal Revolution in Epistemology
- Introduction
- Chapter 1. The Proof Paradigm
- Chapter 2. Two Crises for the Proof Paradigm in the Enlightenment
- Chapter 3. The End of the Proof Paradigm?
- Chapter 4. The Causal Revolution in Epistemology
- Part II. A New Way of Understanding Epistemic Rationality
- Chapter 5. An Alternative to the Proof Paradigm for Ground-Level Rationality
- Chapter 6. Two More Principles of Epistemic Rationality
- Part III. And Epistemic Irrationality
- Chapter 7. Epistemology for the Real World: Prejudices and Other Kinds of Epistemically Irrational Biased Beliefs
- Chapter 8. Internally Inconsistent, Self-refuting, and Self-Undermining Views
- Part IV. More on Epistemic Rationality
- Chapter 9. Bayesian Accounts of Epistemic Rationality
- Chapter 10. An Alternative to the Proof Paradigm for Metacognitive Rationality
- Chapter 11. Necessity and Universality
- Chapter 12. The Evolutionary Naturalist Challenge to the Reliability of Particular Epistemic Judgments
- Part V. Clarifications, Responses to Objections, and Conclusion
- Chapter 13. Clarifications and Objections
- Conclusion
- Appendix A
- Appendix B
- References
About the author
William J. Talbott is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Washington, Seattle. He teaches and has published articles in epistemology; moral and political philosophy, including the philosophy of human rights; rational choice theory; and the philosophy of law. He is the author of a book on reliabilist epistemology, The Reliability of the Cognitive Mechanism and two books in the philosophy of human rights: Which Rights Should Be Universal? and Human Rights and Human Well-Being (both OUP).
Summary
In Learning from Our Mistakes: Epistemology for the Real World, William J. Talbott provides a new framework for understanding the history of Western epistemology and uses it to propose a new way of understanding rational belief that can be applied to pressing social and political issues.
Talbott's new model of rational belief is not a model of a theorem prover in mathematics – It is a model of a good learner. Being a good learner requires sensitivity to clues, the imaginative ability to generate alternative explanatory narratives that fit the clues, and the ability to select the most coherent explanatory narrative. Sensitivity to clues requires sensitivity not only to evidence that supports one's own beliefs, but also to evidence that casts doubt on them. One of the most important characteristics of a good learner is the ability to correct mistakes.
From this model, Talbott articulates nine principles that help to explain the difference between rational and irrational belief. Talbott contrasts his approach with the approach of historically important philosophers, including Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Wittgenstein, and Kuhn, as well as with a range of contemporary approaches, including pragmatism, Bayesianism, and naturalism.
On the basis of his model of rational belief, Talbott articulates a new theory of prejudice, which he uses to help diagnose the sources of inequity in the U.S. criminal justice system, as well as to provide insight into the proliferation of tribal and fascist epistemologies based on alt-facts and alt-truth. Learning from Our Mistakes offers a new lens through which to interpret the history of Western epistemology and analyze the complicated social and political phenomena facing us today.
Additional text
Talbott's sophisticated theory of rationality is wide-ranging and innovative, and should interest any serious epistemologist.
