Dominik Jarczewski OP
Back to the Theoretical Wisdom: Epistemic Authority in the Post-truth World
Success:
SONATA 17 Grant Programme from National Science Center 2021/43/D/HS1/00977 for 2022-2025
Contemporary societies have long experienced a profound crisis – of knowledge and information. Never before has there been such easy and widespread access to information. At the same time, the lack of proper understanding in particular fields by the general public and the lack of recognition of the authority of experts prevent ordinary people from acquiring well-founded knowledge. On the one hand, legitimate epistemic authority is ignored; on the other hand, such authority is unjustifiably attributed to certain people and institutions that do not deserve it. In particular, the authority of scientists is recklessly rejected in favour of home-grown charlatans.
Publicists, media scholars, sociologists and social psychologists comment on these and similar topics. But doesn’t philosophy have something important to add? For more than 30 years, there has been an intense development of the so-called ‘virtue epistemology’, which investigates which character traits and cognitive mechanisms allow us to be successful in our search for truth and understanding. This research is extended by social epistemology to the topic of mechanisms for sharing knowledge and trusting our informants. However, it is not only a question of a mere description of these mechanisms that is at stake here. What norms are we subject to when we rely on the opinion of others? What are we responsible for and how can we most effectively expand our cognitive competence?
In 2022, I was awarded a National Science Centre Sonata 17 grant for a 3-year study on epistemic authority. I propose a return to the classical concept of theoretical wisdom. Through research placements at Northwestern and Fordham Universities in the US and the University of Glasgow, I will be investigating: what understanding we expect of a wise person, what virtues should be formed in her, and what commitments we as a society make to experts. This work will result in a series of articles in prestigious international journals.
However, my project is not about satisfying personal curiosity and purely speculative considerations. The study of epistemic authority is extremely relevant in an age of new technologies, fake-news and impermeability to evidence, which are destroying Western societies. Furthermore, the theoretical conclusions of the research may be of interest to educators and teachers calling for a new strategy that focuses on the formation of good epistemic agents rather than information holders. I will be willing to share the results of my research with them and to design such educational strategies together.
My name is Dominik Jarczewski. I was born in 1986 in Warsaw. I entered the Order in 2005. I received my PhD in 2019 in Paris under the supervision of Prof. Jocelyne Benoist. I am currently an assistant professor at the Institute of Philosophy of the Jagiellonian University. I have always been passionate about issues related to cognition, rationality and raising a mature and responsible human being. I am happy not only to be able to do research on these issues, but also to share this passion with my students at the College of Philosophy and Theology and the schools of philosophy and theology at our priories, where I teach, among other things, epistemology, contemporary philosophy, virtue ethics, and aesthetics.