Learning from our mistakes : epistemology for the real world
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Bibliographic Information
Learning from our mistakes : epistemology for the real world
Oxford University Press, c2021
- : hardcover
Available at 1 libraries
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Content Type: text (rdacontent), Media Type: unmediated (rdamedia), Carrier Type: volume (rdacarrier)
Includes bibliographical references (p. [335]-344) and index
Summary: "In Learning from Our Mistakes: Epistemology for the Real World, Talbott provides a new framework for understanding the history of Western epistemology and uses that framework to propose a new way of understanding rational belief. His proposal makes epistemology relevant to the real world, which he illustrates with a new theory of racial, gender and other kinds of prejudice, a new diagnosis of the sources of the inequity in the U.S. criminal justice system, and insight into the proliferation of tribal and fascist epistemologies based on alt-facts and alt-truth. Talbott's new model of rational belief is not a model of a theorem prover in mathematics. It is a model of a good learner. Being a good learner requires sensitivity to clues, the maginative ability to generate alternative explanatory narratives that fit the clues, and the ability to select the most coherent explanatory narrative. Sensitivity to clues requires sensitivity not only to evidence that supports one's own beliefs, but also to evidenc