Abstract
The rhetoric of cultural populism exploits and exacerbates the natural tendency for human communities to define their own identities by contrasting themselves with imagined Others. This heightens the already formidable epistemic challenge of understanding such Others. This chapter proposes an epistemology of intergroup understanding that is relational, recursive, eschatological, and sacrificial. It argues that coming to understand Others across group boundaries requires an ongoing process of listening and a willingness to sacrifice aspects of one’s own identity that prove to be grounded in self-serving misconstruals of the Other. Such listening requires open-mindedness, empathy, epistemic justice, epistemic charity, intellectual humility, and epistemic selflessness, which are therefore crucial to the functioning of a pluralistic society, especially one that is polarized along religious, cultural, or political lines.
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Notes
- 1.
For an overview, see Kyle and Gultchin (2018). I will capitalize “Other” to indicate a person belonging to a different religious, cultural, or political group than the epistemic agent.
- 2.
An earlier version of this chapter was delivered as part of the Self, Virtue and Public Life Project of the Institute for the Study of Human Flourishing at the University of Oklahoma on October 9, 2019. I wish to thank the Institute, the audience, and in particular Nancy Snow and Wayne Riggs for their insightful and helpful engagement.
- 3.
This is what Jonathan Kvanvig calls objectual understanding, as opposed to propositional understanding—understanding that something is the case (Kvanvig 2003, 189–192).
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
- 7.
On the “acceptance” of working hypotheses and other “epistemically felicitous falsehoods” that we do not actually believe, see Elgin (2017, 18–20, 23).
- 8.
Geertz describes his project thus: “We are not, or at least I am not, seeking either to become natives (a compromised word in any case) or to mimic them. Only romantics or spies would seem to find point in that. We are seeking, in the widened sense of the term in which it encompasses very much more than talk, to converse with them, a matter a great deal more difficult, and not only with strangers, than is commonly recognized. … Looked at in this way, the aim of anthropology is the enlargement of the universe of human discourse” (Geertz 1973, 13–14).
- 9.
Homola and Tavits propose that this is due to motivated reasoning shaped by political ideology rather than by anti-immigration rhetoric per se.
- 10.
- 11.
Thanks to Wayne Riggs for directing me to this literature.
- 12.
Coplan insists that clear self–other differentiation is essential for empathy.
- 13.
For perseverance to count as an intellectual virtue, Nathan King requires continued pursuit of intellectual goods, with serious effort and despite obstacles, for an amount of time appropriate to the pursuit’s importance and its expected likelihood of success (King 2014, 3057 and passim). Nancy Snow argues that hope can be an intellectual virtue because it motivates the pursuit of understanding and also facilitates it by engendering other epistemically valuable dispositions including perseverance (Snow 2013; cf. Cobb 2015).
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Vishanoff, D.R. (2022). An Epistemology for Listening Across Religious, Cultural, and Political Divides. In: Peterson, G.R., Berhow, M.C., Tsakiridis, G. (eds) Engaging Populism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05785-4_10
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