Abstract:
Disagreement in moral and political matters is particularly widespread and often resists easy resolution. Recent work by social epistemologists and psychologists has offered useful tools for analyzing disagreement and polarization both online and in person, by describing how general cognitive biases and heuristics, as well as the affective dimension of normative judgments, make certain moral and political beliefs resistant to rational revision through reasonable discourse. This talk draws from recent work in 'hinge epistemology' to analyze a limited but troubling range of deep disagreement in morality and politics, and discusses implications for the possibility of moral and political knowledge.