Abstract
What is indoctrination? This paper clarifies and defends a structural epistemic account of indoctrination according to which indoctrination is the inculcation of closed-minded belief caused by “epistemically insulating content.” This is content which contains a proviso that serious critical consideration of the relevant alternatives to one’s belief is reprehensible whether morally or epistemically. As such, it does not demand that indoctrination be a type of unethical instruction, ideological instruction, unveridical instruction, or instruction which bypasses the agent’s rational evaluation. In this way, we can account for why indoctrination can occur for liberal democratic beliefs as much as it occurs for fascist, fundamentalist, or fanatical belief: for indoctrination is fundamentally a structural epistemic phenomenon.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 61-80 |
| Number of pages | 20 |
| Journal | American Philosophical Quarterly |
| Volume | 59 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| Early online date | 1 Jan 2022 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Jan 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:this paper was made possible by project EXTREME (Extreme Beliefs: The Epistemology and Ethics of Fundamentalism), which has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 851613).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.