Politically Motivated Reasoning and Evidence ResistanceMona Simion

1 June 2023

Mona Simion (University of Glasgow), 17:15 - 18:45, presents her project in the Interdisciplinary Research Seminar of the GRK "Collective Decision-Making”.

This seminar will take place in person. Please register (if you haven’t already) here if you want to attend the seminar. We invite everyone interested to attend!

Location: Room 0079, Von-Melle-Park 5

Abstract

This paper looks into what best explains and how to best address the widely spread phenomenon of resistance to scientific evidence, and its dire consequences. I first examine a popular hypothesis in social psychology - the politically motivated reasoning hypothesis - and argue that it fails on both extensional adequacy and prior plausibility. I go on to develop an account of evidence resistance that does better on both fronts, in that it successfully distinguishes epistemically problematic evidence resistance from epistemically justified evidence rejection. Further on, I argue that this model helps us design adequate intervention strategies.

Find the abstract as PDF here.