‘Epistemic Closure’? Those Are Fighting Words.

[elleng]

It is hard to believe that a phrase as dry as “epistemic closure” could get anyone excited, but the term has sparked a heated argument among conservatives in recent weeks about their movement’s intellectual health.

The phrase is being used as shorthand by some prominent conservatives for a kind of closed-mindedness in the movement, a development they see as debasing modern conservatism’s proud intellectual history. First used in this context by Julian Sanchez of the libertarian Cato Institute, the phrase “epistemic closure” has been richocheting among conservative publications and blogs as a high-toned abbreviation for ideological intolerance and misinformation.

Conservative media, Mr. Sanchez wrote at juliansanchez.com — referring to outlets like Fox News and National Review and to talk-show stars like Rush Limbaugh, Mark R. Levin and Glenn Beck — have “become worryingly untethered from reality as the impetus to satisfy the demand for red meat overtakes any motivation to report accurately.” (Mr. Sanchez said he probably fished “epistemic closure” out of his subconscious from an undergraduate course in philosophy, where it has a technical meaning in the realm of logic.)

As a result, he complained, many conservatives have developed a distorted sense of priorities and a tendency to engage in fantasy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/28/books/28conserv.html?8dpc

[marybourg]

1. Is that the same as "wingnut"? nt.

[cliffordu]

2. I heartily encourage all republicans to engage in every fantasy

that strikes their fancy.

'specially the one that lets them feel like Palin is good for the party.

[nadinbrzezinski]

3. If Nash is worried...

well perhaps Fukuyama was right... we have reached the end of history... as in the end of the history of the modern American Conservative movement.. and have entered the stage of reaction.

[muriel_volestrangler]

4. Their problem is agnotology

I saw this word in a blog about the right-wing sniping war, and I think it fits the conservative tactics well over the past 30 years or so - the deliberate cultivation of ignorance and misinformation. Conservative 'intellectuals' have spent so long trying to make the public misinformed, they've forgotten how to find real facts and information about society or science.

A prime example of the deliberate production of ignorance cited by Proctor is the tobacco industry's conspiracy to manufacture doubt about the cancer risks of tobacco use. Under the banner of science, the industry produced research about everything except tobacco hazards to exploit public uncertainty.<5><6> Some of the root causes for culturally-induced ignorance are media neglect, corporate or governmental secrecy and suppression, document destruction, and myriad forms of inherent or avoidable culturopolitical selectivity, inattention, and forgetfulness.<7>
...
Dr. Proctor was quoted using the term to describe his research "only half jokingly," as "agnatology" in a 2001 interview about his lapidary work with the colorful rock agate. He connected the two seemingly unrelated topics by noting the lack of geologic knowledge and study of agate since its first known description by Theophrastus in 300 BC, relative to the extensive research on other rocks and minerals such as diamonds, asbestos, granite, and coal, all of which have much higher commercial value. He said agate was a "victim of scientific disinterest," the same "structured apathy" he called "the social construction of ignorance."<8>

He was later quoted as calling it "agnotology, the study of ignorance," in a 2003 New York Times story on medical historians testifying as expert witnesses.<9> In 2004, his wife, Londa Schiebinger,<10> also a science history professor, gave a more precise definition of agnotology in a paper on eighteenth-century voyages of scientific discovery and gender relations, and contrasted it with epistemology, the theory of knowledge, saying that the latter questions how we know while the former questions why we do not know: "Ignorance is often not merely the absence of knowledge but an outcome of cultural and political struggle."<11>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnotology

Applying it to tobacco and lung cancer is very interesting; the same methods and groups have been used to spread doubt about global warming. Conservatives are now at a point where they cannot learn anything from academics, because they have spent too much time claiming that academia has a liberal bias and makes everything up to get research grants etc., they cannot accept information from abroad because it comes from foreigners they have demonised as 'anti-American', and they cannot listen to anything from any part of the media to the left of Fox News, because they've painted it all as the Liberal Media (or 'Lamestream Media' - thanks, Empress of Alaska :eyes:). So they're left with "I know this is true, because it comes from the Heritage Foundation/AEI/Weekly Standard". And those just recycle each others' ideas.

[elleng]

5. I like the 'word,' concept.

All derives from 'propaganda.' Freud, Bernays. playing serious games seriously, for a long time, truth and facts fall by the wayside, and we the people suffer greatly as a consequence.