Herbert Paul Grice and political epistemology

speranza

Many scholars claim that liberal democratic societies are very effective at producing knowledge. Put generally, democratic decision-making processes are valued at least in part for their epistemic benefits. Yet real-life political debates are often characterized by appeals to emotion, ignorance of the details of policy, and the repeated assertion of talking-points to which factual rebuttals are ignored. Further, a survey of the recent literature in psychology reveals that humans are prone to all sorts of cognitive and emotional biases that are highly relevant to the epistemic ideal of liberal democratic deliberation.