Please join Bill Talbott, UW Professor of Philosophy, as he discusses his new book, forthcoming from Oxford University Press in spring or summer of 2021.

Former President Obama said recently that we are facing an “epistemological crisis”.  This is undeniable.  The widespread disagreement in the U.S. over the existence and causes of climate change is one example.  The future of our species is under threat because of this irrational disagreement.  The ubiquity of irrational conspiracy theories on social media and their millions of adherents are further symptoms of this crisis.  Not only do we need a vaccine for COVID, we need a vaccine for mass irrationality.

In my book, I ask the question:  Why has Western epistemology been almost useless in providing us with a vaccine against or, at least, guidance for avoiding these and other kinds of irrationality?  To answer that question, I take the reader back to ancient Greece to begin a historical tour of Western epistemology.  I show how what I call the Proof Paradigm for rational belief, which was first articulated in ancient Greece as a way out of an epistemic crisis 2,400 years ago, continues to exert a baleful influence on Western epistemology, even on epistemologists who explicitly reject it. 

Wittgenstein recognized the epistemological crisis in philosophy, but he thought that the problem was epistemology itself.  So he wrote his Philosophical Investigations to, in his own words, “show the fly the way out of the fly bottle”(1958, §309).  The fly trapped in the fly bottle was, of course, the philosopher.  Because Wittgenstein himself was never able to escape the influence of the Proof Paradigm for rational belief, he misdiagnosed the cause of the crisis.  The cause of the crisis was not epistemology.  The cause of the crisis was and is the Proof Paradigm. Epistemology got us into this mess, and only epistemology can get us out. 

In my talk, I will give a brief overview of the history of Western epistemology to illustrate the depth of the crisis.  Then I will outline a pathway out of the crisis that shows the way to an alternative epistemology for the real world.

If you are interested in attending, please contact Jamie Mayerfeld at jasonm@uw.edu, to request a Zoom link.