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Political Epistemology: Debating the Burning Issue(s)

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Abstract

Political epistemology is rich with thought experiments. Their most systematic function in the field is the construction of ideal theory. We present a sketch of a kind of political thought experiments, in fact, our preferred version of contractualist ones, in Scanlonian tradition. Following the contemporary pattern, we use some retouch: slightly idealizing the participants, making them reasonable and well informed. (Our brief example is an imagined debate about the moral status of migration and migrants). We offer an epistemically oriented analysis of the way contractualist political thought experiments function within the human cognitive apparatus, from mental modeling and simulation through empathy and sympathy to intuition. The whole process we describe, if successful, leads to understanding. And this providing of understanding, factual and normative, is a very important, if not indeed the most important role of thought-experimenting in political epistemology.

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Notes

  1. I have learned a lot from the discussion in Bled. Special thanks go to Sarah Wright and Simon Rippon.

  2. For a short very informative general overview, see, for example, List and Valentini (2016).

  3. For an overview, see Miščević (2018).

  4. For more on the topic, see Miščević (2013)

  5. Atwood (2011) and a discussion by Eriksen and Gjerris (2017).

  6. See also Scanlon (2018).

  7. Here is the characterization from Quong:

    3.2 Fairness Contractualism. In fairness contractualism, the aim is to situate contractors in such a way that the choice of a rule or set of rules, R, to govern a situation gives us good reason to believe that R is fair, just, or morally correct. Jonathan Quong (2017)

  8. I have been mostly inspired by the work of Kieran Oberman, in particular his 2016 paper, and by his insistence that introducing human rights does not make the proposal unmanageably absolutistic.

  9. His German term is “Rollenübernahme” and “universelle Austauschbarkeit” between the participants.

  10. Other important materials are Peacocke (1995); Gordon (1986); Davies (1994); and Davies and Stone (1995a, b). See also Currie (2002).

  11. Two excellent recent volumes on imagination and empathy are Kind (2016) and Maibom (2017).

  12. See for instance Ure and Frost (2014) and Ala Sirriyeh (2018).

  13. Or we can see it as a judgment about what should be done. The simulation philosophers, above all Goldman, mostly talks about “judgment” (2006: 291 ff.)

  14. For further complexities see Antti Kauppinen (2017).

  15. At the Bled conference, Hilary Kornblith was praising the defense of the positive role of discussion by Sperber and Mercier (2017), and I asked him whether he would extend it to imagined discussions, and a debate ensued. No participant was sure about the answer.

  16. For a fine overview of the topic, see Valentini (2012a, b).

  17. The whole issue of Hypatia, 2009, vol. 24, no. 4 on standpoint theory, where Rolin’s paper is published, gives the extensive information about it a reader might need.

  18. See, for instance, Sarah Fine (2018) on the 2015 refugee crisis. What a ‘decent human life’ or ‘being able to control one’s environment’ means should take account of first-person testimonies of refugees. The stereotypes should be cleaned away by the idealization of full information.

  19. Michel Foucault (1997) Il faut défendre la société. Paris: Seuil, Gallimard, in particular Cours du 7 janvier 1976, see in English (1997). pp. 8–9.

  20. For the contrast between a temporal theory of the ideal and the end-state ideal theory, see Valentini (2012a, b). For my proposal of classification of types of ideal theories, see Miscevic (to appear, 2019)

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  1. University of Maribor, Maribor, Slovenia

    Nenad Miščević

  2. CEU, Budapest, Hungary

    Nenad Miščević

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Miščević, N. Political Epistemology: Debating the Burning Issue(s). Acta Anal 35, 333–350 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-020-00443-z

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