Disagreement and Echo Chambers

It is a common feature of all of our epistemic lives that sometimes we disagree with one another in ways that resist resolution. It is an unfortunate feature of some epistemic lives that they are conducted in an echo chamber, in the grip of skewed structures of trust. In this talk, I suggest ways that we can: have more productive disagreements; make it harder for those of us not in echo chambers to fall into them; and help those who are in echo chambers escape from them. This talk is partly theoretical—it’s partly about how to think about the epistemology of disagreement and echo chambers. But it’s also partly practical—there are lessons we can all deploy as we go about our epistemic business.

Chris Blake-Turner is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Oklahoma State University. Their work centers on epistemology, philosophy of action, and philosophy of logic, with a particular focus on normativity across these fields. Much of their research examines what it means to act or believe on the basis of a reason, exploring how this concept underlies rational activities ranging from everyday interpretation to formal inference. They earned their PhD from UNC Chapel Hill, following a BPhil at Oxford.

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