Workshop Concept

We live in the age of strange conspiracy theories, fake news and “alternative truths”: from Pizza-gate and 5G conspiracies, to denying the results of properly organized elections and climate skepticism, many people seem to accept as true claims that are in no way substantiated by evidence. Following Neil Levy, we could call these bad beliefs.
 
Why do people hold bad beliefs? While it is customary, in traditional analytic epistemology, to study the individual features of people (their reliability, their epistemic virtues or vices etc.) in order to understand how they arrive at knowledge or end up with bad beliefs, recent work in social epistemology has pointed to the importance of epistemic networks in elucidating this matter. People’s beliefs, especially when it comes to social and political matters that pertain to their identity, are often shaped by the social networks the individuals are embedded in.
 
The objective of the workshop is to discuss the way bad believing (i.e., believing in scientifically unsubstantiated claims that concern vaccines, climate change, migration etc.) is shaped by the epistemic networks of the believers.

Where:
Open Science Lab, room OSL 3, Zellescher Weg 25, 01217 Dresden.
As a hybrid event all talks will also be streamed on Zoom.

Find out more here