Lecture on Epistemology & Conservative Ideology: Skepticism, Caution, and Conservatism

Dr. Ichikawa's talk will articulate and challenge the orthodox assumption that skepticism and suspension of belief is intimately tied up with caution or carefulness. I’ll argue that, given plausible connections between epistemology and action, this thought is tied up in important ways with conservative assumptions about the status quo — if things are basically fine as they are, then the salient risk an agent faces is the risk of messing things up. If so, being slower to believe, and so slower to act, will mitigate this risk. This association between natural epistemic ideas and political ideas actually constitutes a conservative ideology. This reasoning relies implicitly on the false assumption that there is risk associated with mistakenly leaving things as they are. This is an instance of what Hundleby (2016) calls the “status quo fallacy.” This may help explain Charles Mills’s Mills (1994, p. 230) suggestion that in some contexts, a focus on skepticism can seem like a “perk of social privilege”.

*The event is also accessible virtually: https://lafayette.zoom.us/j/91532759166