Epistemic Diversity and Deliberation: Managing Conflict and Polarization in Pluralistic Societies

We live in uncertain times. In the midst of polarization, the rise of fake news and disinformation and with expert knowledge and scientific argumentation losing credibility in the public sphere, social and political epistemology may offer philosophical insights that can offer new insights. To tackle the questions that citizens and policymakers face, it may be tempting to rely solely on well-established homogeneous processes of knowledge production and dissemination, such as scientific argumentation. This strategy, however, fails to acknowledge the fundamental and legitimate pluralism of beliefs, interests and values in contemporary societies, and does not make use of the valuable insights that the resulting epistemic diversity provides. This tension — between the worrisome and harmful effects of polarization, disinformation and the loss of credibility of traditional sources of knowledge on the one hand, and the wish to value and acknowledge epistemic diversity on the other — is the topic of this dissertation.

To address the aforementioned tension, an agonistic approach to political and social epistemology on questions of epistemic diversity, polarization, misinformation and interdisciplinarity is helpful. Combining lessons from contemporary social epistemology with agonistic political theory may explain the aforementioned epistemic developments, while also demonstrating why epistemic diversity remains desirable and viable. By combining research from analytic and continental philosophy, this dissertation reflects on the tension between polarization and epistemic diversity to formulate an account that is not merely epistemic, but also political and social.

This dissertation is split into three parts. In the first part, Popper’s paradox of tolerance is discussed in Chapter 1. This chapter argues that a purely epistemic approach to delineating the limits of tolerance does not adequately address how values play an important role in how we wish to determine the rules of deliberation and argumentation in the public sphere. The second chapter reflects on existing second-personal and procedural approaches to managing (peer) disagreement, and argues that an agonistic framework offers an alternative explanation for persistent disagreement and conflict.

In the second part of this dissertation, this theoretical framework is put to work by developing two strategies to manage the tension between polarization and epistemic diversity. In Chapter 3, an approach based on the use of personal narratives in situations of disagreement is presented. This chapter argues that personal narratives can help foster respect and mutual understanding by transferring standpoint knowledge. In Chapter 4, a strategy is discussed that explores how the design of physical spaces can improve practices of diverse deliberation by implementing norms that support valuing diverse forms of knowledge.

Finally, in the third part of this dissertation, two institutional contexts are evaluated where the aforementioned tension between conflict and polarization and epistemic diversity are at play. Chapter 5 argues that legal adjudication on matters pertaining to disinformation may at first glance appear to be a sensible strategy. However, this approach misunderstands the function of the legal sphere as being primarily epistemic, as opposed to being focused on conflict resolution. Chapter 6 discusses that the interdisciplinary integration of different types of scientific knowledge is much more epistemically challenging than is often presumed, and that a more thorough analysis of epistemic goods in different academic disciplines could show that these goods may be impossible to reconcile in certain instances.

This dissertation thus presents an account of epistemic diversity in social epistemology that takes seriously questions of conflicting political interests, the role of power hierarchies, and a diverse range of extra-cognitive and socio-political factors that are at play in situations of epistemic diversity in contexts of disagreement and polarization.