Affective polarization, evidence, and evidentialism

This chapter concerns some ways that political beliefs are formed and maintained in polarized political environments. Specifically, it examines how self-serving, directional biases in the ways that agents gather and process evidence can make their beliefs resistant to change. It argues that although our intuitive judgment is that these mechanisms undermine the justification of resulting beliefs, this is not so according to an evidentialist theory of epistemic justification, which says the epistemic justification of a subject’s doxastic attitude toward a proposition at a time strongly supervenes on the evidence that the person has at the time. It then argues that this gives us some reason to doubt that evidentialism gives us a complete theory of epistemic justification.

Duke Scholars

Author Emily McWilliams DKU Faculty