March, 2017
March 26, 2017
The Epistemic Pollution of Racism

I have recently finished Jeffrey Toobin’s The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson, on which a similarly named television show is based. The book is a detailed blow-by-blow retelling of the famous court case that exercised America. One theme from the book stuck out to me: how all participants in the case—prosecutors, defendants, jurors, police officers, observers—had to battle with a constant sense of epistemic pollution by racism, and to some degree, celebrity culture.

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March 23, 2017
Reflections on PPE

A recent Guardian long read on the history of PPE—the Philosophy, Politics and Economics degree at Oxford—has made me reflect again on different experiences with the degree. I’ve also read the somewhat unnecessarily detailed “The Poverty of PPE”, written in 1968 by Trevor Pateman. But there are lots of other articles critical of PPE which are useful points of departure.

I have studied Philosophy & Economics as an undergraduate in Germany, at a small, provincial Bavarian university (Bayreuth); and then later I found myself a some-time teacher to Oxford PPE undergraduates. My German course was clearly started as an homage to the enormous success of the Oxford degree, even if curriculum-wise it was far from a copy. (More on that later.) Indeed, PPE is en vogue: it has spawned a variety of copycats across the world, and new programmes continue to crop up. So here are some observations regarding the promise, and shortcomings, of PPE.

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March 9, 2017
No Single Mind Can Capture The Truth

It is clear that none of us can know everything. Especially in politics, the extent of individual ignorance is significant. As I argued in a previous series of posts, I suspect that each of us is simply not competent to decide large-scale political issues. To put this in a slightly pretentious slogan, no single mind can capture the truth. A second observation I have stressed is that people strongly, deeply and reasonably disagree about the truth. Even where we do think we have captured the truth, we seriously disagree over what it is.

It’s useful to think about how these two different observations fit together. In some philosophical quarters, there is optimism that intellectual diversity is a good thing, rather than a disadvantage. The idea is that we all possess a different piece of the truth—disagreement indicates that we need to fit these pieces together. Call this the puzzle metaphor. On the puzzle metaphor, it’s not greatly troubling that we disagree and that no single mind can capture the truth, as long as we are decently cooperating in putting the puzzle pieces together. Disagreement is a challenge, but a surmountable one.

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