Truth and Politics: A Political Epistemology Conference

Political epistemology has become a well-established subfield at the intersection of epistemology and political philosophy in recent years. It circumscribes a number of phenomena such as fake-news, post-truth, polarization or populism. At the core of all these debates stands the observation that the relationship between truth and politics is somehow complicated, ambiguous and tense. Not only since the advent of corona-vaccine-conspiracy-theorists, one might start to wonder whether such a politicization of knowledge has turned into the leitmotiv of 21st century political philosophy.

With our conference, we would like to further advance these debates by bringing together scholars from diverse fields such as political philosophy, epistemology, but also cognitive science, communication science, psychology and others. There will be keynote talks by Fabienne Peter (University of Warwick) and Kai Spiekermann (LSE).

Potential topics include but are not limited to

• The role of truth in politics

• Democracy and collective intelligence

• Deliberative democracy and its challenges, both conceptual and empirical

• The problem of deep disagreement

• Epistemic paternalism

• The epistemology and politics of trust

• Epistemic injustice

• The epistemology of ignorance

• The epistemology of propaganda

• Cognitive biases and politics

• Formal models of democratic processes

• Epistemic Democracy and its flaws

We also invite submissions that address new or underexplored topics or bring together insights from different sub-topics, including interdisciplinary works.

Women*, young scholars, and members of underrepresented groups are especially encouraged to submit.