#937 Oliver Traldi - Political Beliefs: A Philosophical Introduction

00:00 Ricardo Lopes: Hello everybody. Welcome to a new episode of the Center. I'm your host as always Ricard Lob and to the MG by Doctor Oliver Oliver Tralee. He is a John and D Bery postdoctoral research fellow at the James Medicine program at Princeton in University. He studies epistemology with the focus on the epistemology of politics. And today we're talking about his book, Political Beliefs, uh Philosophical Introduction. So Oliver, welcome to the show. It's a pleasure to everyone.

00:30 Oliver Traldi: Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

00:33 Ricardo Lopes: So tell us first, perhaps what is political epistemology and how did you get interested in that specific? Uh I mean, sub discipline of epistemology, I guess.

00:49 Oliver Traldi: Yeah. So um the, the second question is easier than the first one A as I was applying to, to phd programs. Uh IN 2017, it basically was in the early days of the, the Trump era, right, of the early days of the Trump presidency and a lot of a lot of public discussion, not discussion in academia but public discussion um about the Trump presidency uh and the Trump campaign. Uh AND American politics around then was about epistemology in a sense, right? So you had terms like fake news, alternative facts being thrown, thrown around. You had these discussions of um you know, information bubbles, information cascades. Um And you had other words, which to me felt a little epistemological even though nobody else had, had given an account of them uh in terms like normalization, um you had talked conspiracy theories, things like that. So political epistemology was very much in the air um in the early days and it, and it kind of related back to some things I'd studied as an undergraduate as an undergraduate. I was a classics major with an interest in politics. I ended up going to law school for a year after that and I worked on a political campaign in 2008 and things like that. Um And I had studied polarization in college. Uh And I was familiar with CASS Sunstein account of uh belief polarization and going to extremes and uh his account of the way the internet related to that by, by putting people in these bubbles. There was a great article by Ty Gin um in a eon called a, a public article about uh well, what he calls uh epistemic bubbles and echo chambers. Um THAT also there was also an academic article in epistemic um on the same topic that he wrote. Uh So I was basically seeing all this stuff um about the Trump presidency, but also I was having my own doubts about, you know, having been sort of a political progress in my whole life. I started having these questions about, you know, why do I have so little contact um, with this whole other group of people, uh, who, who are voting in ways that, you know, nobody, nobody who I'm around ever understands. Um, WHERE do their beliefs come from? Are their beliefs based on reasons, um, and talking to them improve my own beliefs. Uh This was also, uh you know, it's funny that these things happened at the same time, but the term campaign was happening around the same time as a lot of the uh the Open Science movement um and Heterodox Academy and efforts like that, that were about, on the one hand, um you know, eee even things like statistical practices or peer review in the Science sciences preprints, um avoiding p hacking, avoiding um fraud and science. Um But on the other hand about the, you know, the political skew of the Academy, um and where, where our supposedly expert beliefs come from, uh and things like that. So it was basically a moment where there was all this talk of political epistemology and I wasn't sure that it was being directed in, in the right way. Uh It felt to me like, maybe, maybe there was this sort of expert community that was actually the one that should be, you know, where, where we should be putting a lot of uh critical attention. Um So, OK, that's sort of my personal story. Your question, what is political epistemology? Um Well, so we can, we can start with, you know, traditional epistemology. We're, we're just thinking about, you know, how can we justify our beliefs, how can we possibly have knowledge? Um What do you know, what sources of evidence do we have? Um And are they good sources of evidence, things like, uh you know, mathematical intuition or, or perception? Um Those are the sorts of things that Descartes, for instance, might have been interested in um uh deductive versus inductive reasoning, you know, human skepticism about causation, things like that. Then social epistemology is concerned about a subset of those sources, the ones where the information comes from other people. Um So questions about how can we tell when somebody is an expert, what should we do when somebody disagrees with us? Um You know, what justifies you, you know, I was in Europe a couple of months ago, which I don't travel that much. Um And uh so it was a big deal for me. Uh You're on the street. I mean, among other things, I didn't realize everybody speaks English. So I can just go up to somebody and ask them in English even if it's, you know, you know, in Europe uh in a non English speaking country. So I go up and ask, you know, where's the museum? You know, where's the the modern art museum in this town. Um And they give me an answer, why do I trust that answer? What, like what licenses me in trusting that answer. Um So the nature of trust, the nature of other people's testimony. Uh So that's a source of my belief about where the museum is. That's a social source. So that then we get to social epistemology, then political epistemology um sort of means a few different things at once. Uh One of them is just uh the epistemology of political beliefs and how we answer political questions and come to our beliefs about political questions. Um BUT that's very broad, right? So like, for example, um if I've proven uh that, you know, one policy will result in, you know, a low number, yy, you know, say five injuries at my workplace and another policy will result in 5000 injuries that were at my workplace. Um Obviously, I need to do a little math to know that 5000 is greater than five. But math, you know, mathematical epistemology is not generally thought of as we just take that sort of stuff for granted once we're in the political realm, right? So the most characteristic part of political epistemology is the part that's sort of still social. Um So questions about political disagreement, what, what do we do when we disagree with others about politics? Um Questions about, should we trust people in our political party more than people in another political party. Are there experts in politics? Um So some of these, some of these questions come from the nature of politics that's involving groups, right? So that there are different groups in politics. And there's questions about OK, social epistemology. I'm thinking about how does my epistemology change based on the awareness that there are multiple people and political epistemology in one sense is how did my, how does my epistemology change based on the awareness that there are multiple groups? Uh But an another aspect of political epistemology is just that there are these phenomena that happened in politics. Um And we want to investigate kind of all the possible epistemological contours of them uh phenomena that could be types of beliefs or types of causes of beliefs. Um So, for example, belief polarization uh seems to be something that causes our beliefs to get into sets, you know, sort of party platforms and also seems to be something that pushes maybe people's beliefs away from each other. Um uh So it's what I call in the book sorting and extremism. On the other hand, the cons conspiracy theories seem to be types of beliefs. Um And so we can ask, is there anything general we can say about this type of belief? Um But though they both fall under political epistemology because they're, they're both related in some way to po politics. So it's, you know, it's not a well defined term. Um But it you know, it refers to the, the broad fact that, that there's a lot of interesting stuff going on here that a lot of people want to study basically. Um And, you know, just one other thing to say is that there's, there's a, you know, there's this other tradition of political epistemology um in Marxist thought, um and radical thought which has to do with the notion of ideology. Um And uh there's sort of questions about that because, you know, it's not clear that if you're a Marxist materialist, that you should think that the epistemology matters that much, you should probably just think that like the class relations and the material relations are, are um what, what causes everything. So there's questions about kind of the, the structure of the theory there. Um But so there's, you know, so yeah, there's a history of political epistemology and a lot of different political and philosophical traditions.

09:32 Ricardo Lopes: But what actually counts as political because people might say that they have, for example, a political disagreement that they're having a political debate that when they're discussing a particular subject, they're talking politics there. And there are people that even claim and we can get a little bit more into that, that everything is actually political. So, but, but what does really count as something political? This is

10:04 Oliver Traldi: a question um This is the question that I start my book with and I, I've, I've talked about this with a lot of people and I haven't, I haven't been super satisfied by any of the answers. There are some things that seem obviously political. You know, if, if I, you know, if you go to Washington DC and you see people yelling at each other about what the tax rate should be and then people maneuver and there's sort of like, you know, some compromise or they're trading favors. If you vote on this bill this way, then I'll vote on that bill that way. Um Or if they, or if they go to war or try to win an election against each other or try to get a judge appointed or something like that, these things seem obviously political. Um So there are questions about what makes these things, um, political, one aspect is that there seems to be some kind of struggle in a lot of them, right? Um So there's some sort of dispute uh at the beginning and resolving that dispute or kind of, you know, failing to resolve that dispute. Um WHETHER you resolve it or not, uh That seems to be part of the politics of what's going on. Another aspect is that sort of the dispute is resolved by the goal of the dispute is to sort of, that's something up in society in a certain way, right? Um Whether it's the tax rate or the, you know, a question of whether we'll go to war or not. So these are what I call conflict and order in the book. So uh you start with conflict, you wanna set something in order. Um And uh then, then there's another notion which I've never been quite as clear on, um which is the notion of power. Uh So a lot of people say, and this has to be included just because, you know, this is a book that's academic facing, but also public facing. And in public, a lot of people will just say the phrase politics is about power. Um So I don't really know what any of the words in that sentence mean. Um You know, we're trying to define politics, trying to define power. The word about is like one of these insanely vague words that can mean completely different things in different contexts. Um uh But it seems like here, the power has to do with the, the setting in order. So it's about the power to determine how things will go. Um And uh it does seem like even if you're not setting something specific in order, if you're trying to gain power for some future goal of setting things in order to resolve a conflict or to win in a conflict, then then you're doing politics as well. Um The, unfortunately, it just seems that there's also, you know, we can come up with counter examples to, to all of these, you know, power conflict in order. There's, there's counterexamples where OK, you're using power, but it's not political power, there's a conflict, but it's not a political conflict. You made some arrangement, but it's not a political arrangement and you can even have all three at the same time. So it doesn't seem necessarily the case that there, there seems to be maybe some background notion of political um where we, we have an idea of what is a political conflict and a non-political conflict. We have an idea of what is political power and non-political power. We have an idea of what is a political arrangement and the non-political arrangement. Um So that's, you know, that whatever that background idea is, um that, that's sort of what we want to figure out and I don't think I made any progress on figuring that out. Um I hope somebody else does um regarding this question of whether everything is political, um you know, the first thing to say, which I don't think I, I even mentioned in the book, but one of the first things you see when people talk about this online is basically like, you know, any word that actually applies to everything, you know, ceases to be meaningful, right? Um You know, if, if you think extensionally about definitions, right? A definition is meant to pick some things out and exclude other things. That's how you communicate information, right? Um So if somebody says, well, I'm gonna get a little political here, you have like a rough idea of the sorts of topics they might discuss. Right. They're probably not going to talk about the weather unless they're talking about climate change. Right. Um, THEY might not talk about television unless they're talking about the political content of some show or if they're talking about, you know, what is the government body that regulates what's on television or something like that? That would be political. Um, BUT saying what happened on the soap opera yesterday, that doesn't seem political. Right. Um So basically, first of all, it seems like the word political has to, it has some information in it and if everything is political, then I can't really have any information. Um But people also, you know, people give arguments uh to the effect that everything is political. Um And I also, you know, I just in general think that they're not very good arguments. Um One of the arguments that I sort of make fun of the most is that, you know, everything has some, you know, everything that that exists now is the way that it is because of the past, right? Because of history and that history involves political history, right? Um uh But at the same time, you know, the history also involves a lot of other things and generally we don't say like, you know, um that, that, that something's history makes it what it is, right? Um If, uh you know, I'm sitting in a certain kind of chair, maybe the person got inspired to make this chair because uh he saw a sculpture, but that doesn't make the chair a sculpture, right? That's just sort of like a, a random fact about the history of the chair, right? So you have these random facts about the histories of objects and situations and people um that can involve political facts, but that doesn't, you know, this is just not the way that we use words, right? Um So I've been, I've always been very confused by the notion that everything is political. Um I have some suspicions about what people's motivations are in saying that. Um, BUT one way in which I do think it's important to have a somewhat expanded concept of the political uh is, you know, just comes from the sorts of things I argue about and in, in my public work and, and with a lot of other people. Um So I don't wanna say that the political is just like passing laws going to war, things like that, right? Um Because there are these chains of reasoning that justify or at least when it comes to political belief, right? There are these changes of reasoning that justify those actions going to war, passing a law. Um And it seems like our disputes about items of those changes of reasoning can themselves be political and the the beliefs we have that go into those change of reasoning can, can themselves be political. So if I believe, you know, somebody says we should go to war because uh this, this dictator is oppressing his own people. Um uh So, well, my, you know, my belief about whether the dictator is oppressing his own people, that seems like a political belief um in part because it affects political decision about whether or not to go to war. Right? So in the book, I think of political beliefs as being the things that affect political decisions, the things that, that can, that are involved in public disputes that, that, that relate to political actions. Um Now you ask, what is a political action? I'm gonna table that, right? I'll let somebody else figure that out.

17:25 Ricardo Lopes: OK. So, but, but since we're talking here about political beliefs, what are political beliefs really about? I mean, there's a proposal that some people have that what they, they are really about what we ought to do and if that's the case, then they are mostly moral beliefs. Uh What do you think about that? And if you disagree, uh I mean, what's your take on what the political belief is? Yeah.

17:56 Oliver Traldi: So, yeah, so like what I, like I was saying, I think political beliefs um are belief that are involved in these chains of reasoning. At least the theory I give in the book, I'm sure somebody will prove it wrong. But the theory that I give in the book is political beliefs. Well, there's two types I mentioned before how politics, a lot of politics is about being in groups, right? So one type of political belief is a belief that sort of says I'm in this group, you're in that group. Um And one issue in American politics, at least is that we seem to have a lot of beliefs like this right now. Um This is what Robert Tali calls political saturation. Um So non Americans are often surprised when I explain this. But um so like Republicans tend to drink coffee from one coffee company, and Democrats tend to drink coffee from another coffee company. So you might say our beliefs about which coffee is better or political beliefs because they, they sort of, you know, they, they separate one group for another. Um I don't know, I don't know. That's, again, that's something, you know, I'll, I'll let other people decide. I, I more want to bridge the issue on that kind of topic. The other kind, which is maybe a little bit more central. Uh IS that when we have chains of reasoning about what to do in politics, what political actions to take? It seems to me that whenever items in those chains are in dispute or in conflict, um our beliefs about them are political. Um So of course, it's a poli a political belief whether or not we should raise the tax rate. Um But I, you know, one item in that chain of belief might be uh does raising the tax rate. I disincentivize people from starting businesses for example, right? Some economists might think, yes, some economists might think. No, that's an, that's a question in economics, but my belief about it, I'm calling a political belief because the dispute about it could be a dispute that, you know, the resolution of which would resolve the question about the political action if that makes sense. Um So basically, whenever anything in one of these kind of publicly controversial change of reasoning is in dispute, I'm gonna call it a political dispute and I'm gonna call the beliefs people have about it, political beliefs, that's my approach at the moment must be I end up with in the book,

20:25 Ricardo Lopes: right? But when there's a political disagreement or political disputes, where does the disagreement stem from? Is it uh because people disagree over facts or values because they just use words differently because they struggle over particular kinds of issues like finite resources or something like that? I mean, and is it usually just one single issue? I mean, would there be a, an overarching theory of political conflict here or not?

21:01 Oliver Traldi: Yeah. So I'm a, unfortunately, I'm sort of boring about this issue. Um I call, I call myself boring whenever I don't have like a big theory and I say there's like different types, you know, so there are people who have big theories about this. So, um in particular, you have these political realists, some of whom seem to say, well, there's all, all the apparent disagreement is kind of like papering over the, like, hobby and struggle for, for resources. Right? Just I want something you want the same thing. Maybe we come up with these pretend reasons why I should get it and you should not get it. But those are all the basic fact is that we want the same thing. Right? And, and the reasons are just us trying to justify and us trying to, to rationalize getting what we want. That's not what I believe. Um I believe the these four sources of conflict you talk about are all present in politics. Um And I think it's really important not to. Um THERE'S an old blog post by a blogger called Scott Alexander where he talks about, he gives sort of like a sim a simpler and like a little bit less clear um version of this question of where does political conflict come from. Um And yeah, so he calls one type of theory, mistake theory and another type of theory, conflict theory um where the mistake theory is. Yeah, but there's political disagreements because, you know, and political conflict because some people make mistakes, right? Just like you might, if you're, you know, if you're doing the math, you come up with the wrong answer. So we have different answers and then other people think, oh yeah, we're, we're, we have different values or we're arguing over resources. Um Well, I just think sometimes each of those things can happen you know, it's just a complicated world, different sorts of things happen at different times. Um So I don't, I, I don't, I'm not really, I'm not motivated to say any of these things as sort of like the central or univocal cause, um, or unique cause I guess is the right word of a political conflict. I certainly think that, you know, drilling down one thing I talk about when, when I talk with, uh, you know, state college students about, I how to argue with people about politics and how to make those conversations productive. Um, IS sort of like, yeah, you wanna drill down and get at what is the root of the, the conflict, right? What is really driving this conflict? Um And sometimes it can be different values, right? Like, you know, why does one person support gun rights and the other one doesn't, well, maybe the first person just thinks self reliance is just so important. People should be able to be self reliant even if, even if there's a, it raises the chance that they accidentally shoot themselves, right? It's the price we pay, right. Safety is not as important as self reliance. Other people say no safety, safety is like one of my most important values. I don't want people to be injuring themselves with guns. Right. So that seems like, um, you know, and that's a pretty tame way maybe of putting that disagreement, but it seems that we can have those disagreements where there are these principles or values and people just weigh them differently. Um, AND, uh, you know, some of the psychological theories of political beliefs seem to be about that seem to be about how do we, how do we weigh these values? And are there different types of people who weigh values in different ways? Um, ON the other hand, you know, some people could also just say like, well, I looked at the statistics uh and there just are so many, you know, self inflicted injuries from guns that even if you only weigh safety a little bit, you should be against them or you might say, well, actually there are basically none. So even if you weigh safety a lot, you shouldn't, it shouldn't worry you that much, right? So the empirical question of like how many injuries actually are there, um if say different people are studying this issue with different methodologies or if the data is unclear or fuzzy or something like that, um which is the case in studying so many political issues. Um It's just very hard to get the the the right answers. And um you know, especially for somebody like me with a kind of broad skepticism about uh kind of like the current knowledge production, uh industry and expertise then yeah, you can have a disagreement which is over empirical facts and that can generate a political disagreement, right? And then you can have, you know, you can have these verbal disagreements. Uh, WELL, you know, sometimes you think you're disagreeing with somebody and it just turns out, you know, uh, you know, if somebody says Trump is a fascist and I say, I don't think Trump is a fascist and they think, oh, this guy loves Trump. Um, AND, uh, then we start arguing and then it comes out of the argument. That's just like, oh, no, we just think about fascism, you know, like I'm just using this term, you know, in a slightly different way than you are. And, you know, we're, we're both on the same side of the politics of it. Um So we're really disagreeing about the word fascism rather than about Trump or about politics. Now, it could still be that, you know, whether a verbal dispute, verbal disputes can still be important in various ways. Um But I feel like it's important to know when, when, when that's what you're arguing about rather than arguing about the world or arguing about what's important or valuable. Um And then for this last type of conflict, this sort of raw conflict, I think that is a type of conflict that is really important to, you know, take in, in political theory. And this is an area where I don't know much, you know, like, I haven't read, you know, a lot of like Hobbes and Rousseau and people like that are not, I'm reading a lot of contemporary epistemology books of the time, right. But I know that in Hobbs and Rousseau, there are these questions of, you know, does the world start with conflict or not? You know, is there if you go back before political institutions, to what extent do we have conflict? Maybe, maybe it's just a state of peer conflict, right? Um, WITHOUT anything to resolve that conflict, without the politics to resolve that conflict. And so these peer conflicts in our sort of modern society where we're always arguing about politics and giving reasons and things like that, the peer conflict might start to dissipate in our, in our thinking. Um But it also may be that this is sort of like, you know, pretty fundamental to why we even have politics to begin with. Um So I think, I think it's important to keep the possibility of just pure conflict over resources, you know, pure struggle. Um Me wanting one thing and you wanting another, it's really important to keep that in mind. Um uh It's, it's like a fact of it's an in inimitable fact of human life

27:50 Ricardo Lopes: and another very important thing here for us to try to understand these or, or at least that people try to explain is where political beliefs come from, where they stem from. There are different theories of political beliefs out there and you go, we list through the main ones in your book. So, uh I would like to ask you about each particular one of them to tell us about what you think are their strengths and limitations. So to start with the theories based on uh type or personality we have, for example, moral foundations, a theory by Frank and he uh theories based on particular personality traits, like authoritarian is more, for example, people that do work based on the big five personality traits, sometimes talk about openness to experience conscientiousness and other kinds of personality traits. So what do you make of those types of theories?

28:50 Oliver Traldi: Yeah, I think in general, I think there's two things for me to say one is sort of like my background intuition just based on my experiences in the world. And the other is sort of my evaluation of the ability of these theories. Once I looked at them sort of academically to explain political beliefs. So my experience of the world is really that you have in all different political groups, you have different types of people. Um AND in each political group, you have leaders and followers in each political group, you have moralists and pragmatists and idealists, you know, ideologies need to be able to bring in all sorts of people. You have true believers and grifters, you know, um take, you know, online, I participate in this sort of like social justice and antisocial justice, you know, wars, culture, wars, right? And on, on each side, you have people who really believe what they're saying. And you also have people who are you know, trying to sell something, you know, who are kind of like trying to make a buck by becoming like an influencer or something like that. Right? Um So it's my impression is just that politics always involves at least in terms of political actors, there's all different types of people and each group will have, you know, different types of people in different ways. The, the, the other thing to say is sort of like examining these theories, you, you start to have questions about what the measures of personality are and just how correlated they are with politics. So for example, looking at the, the Publications and Moral Foundations Theory, which has been pretty influential and in my circles have been pretty influential, right? Because like I said, at the beginning, my circles are, these are, or at least where I started out in my public writing and thinking about these issues, um were sort of circles with these liberals who were sort of like, well, the we don't understand conservatives and maybe if we try to understand conservatives better, um we'll understand politics better, we'll understand American politics better, we'll understand why people have reasons for their beliefs. Um AND we'll be able to improve our own beliefs, right? That's the dream in a sense, the epistemological dream, right? Improving our beliefs now. So the idea of one of the motive, you know, one of the attractions of moral foundations theory was that it gave us a, a clean way of saying what are we not appreciating about conservatives? Right. So we weren't appreciating that there were, there were these, uh so just to give an overview of moral foundations theory, moral foundations theory is, is the idea that there are these um that there, there's a set of kind of basic moral principles or ways of looking at the world or perspectives. Um A set of five or six of these, uh some of which are based individualistically and some of which are not solely about individuals. And the claim of moral foundations theory is that liberals have liberals see the world morally in terms of these individualistic foundations, but not the other ones. Whereas conservatives have both the individualistic and the sort of group based or purity based or loyalty based foundations that aren't about individuals per se. Um You know, individualistic ideas are sort of like safety care, liberty, um respect dignity, all things that you could say, I respect a person, a person should be safe, you know, the human dignity, things like that. Um And these, these other, these other values are more about hierarchy and community and the sanctity of symbols and things like that. And the idea is that those are the conservative ones. So the notion was if we liberals start thinking in terms of these other things, then, you know, maybe we'll appreciate where conservatives are coming from, at least, right? But it turns out if you look at the, you know, if you look at the actual data in the papers on moral foundations theory, the sort of correlations of these so called foundations showing up in the research. It's not like, you know, it's not a chart that is like this, this incredibly big line, right? It's actually a very smooth, you know, is a very smooth and gentle change from becoming liberal to becoming conservative, right? Um And it doesn't make it scientifically uninteresting, but it makes it a little less clear how we can turn it into a theory of politics. Um And a political belief, another issue is that all of these foundations and kind of attached to different things. And it started to seem to me and I don't, I don't think I really explained this in the book as I was going through this theory, but it started to seem to me that or, you know, what political group we're a part of depends much more on what these notions attached to rather than whether we have these notions at all. Right? Um So I, you know, one thing, one thing a lot of people said in say 2017, 2018 when they were reading moral foundations theory, this notion of purity, um which was supposed to be a solely conservative notion. A lot of people said, well, there are left wing notions of, you know, purity trying to make sure you're not involved in anything problematic, trying to make sure you don't use the wrong words, trying to make sure that you, you don't use the wrong symbols. That seems like a kind of notion of purity, right? Um And similarly, like, take the, this so called individualizing foundation of care. Um Well, there's a question of who do you care about, right? You're gonna care more about some people than others. And that seems like a political question as well. Um So it seemed to me that it started to seem to me that most of politics is not in these foundations but is in sort of like, what are the, what are the real world dynamics of how people apply these foundations? Um And how they apply them selectively. And that is, yes,

35:09 Ricardo Lopes: go, go ahead. Sorry,

35:11 Oliver Traldi: sorry, I was gonna say that is, you know, moral foundations theory is probably the best of those theories. A lot of the other theories that are based on personality um are, are, are much more, they just start from the perspective that, you know, he at least started from the Jonathan height, the sort of the guy behind moral foundation, he at least started from the perspective of, well, let's try and understand every, you know, let's try and understand people and see what we can appreciate about different views. Um A lot of the personality theories and really a lot of the psychological theories of political belief overall, they start from the perspective of, you know, I know what's right and wrong in politics. And so I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna explain the deviancy of the people who disagree with me in some time or another. So the idea of the authoritarian personality is a great example of this or the idea of the rigidity of the right, that's a model under which right wingers are just sort of like cognitively inflexible. Um But you also see this stuff from centrists where they, they kind of take these sorts of models and just apply them to everybody on the extreme. So if you're, if you're an extremist of some sort, you must, you know, it's almost a way of saying if you're an extremist, you have a personality disorder, right? And that's the explanation for political beliefs. Um OR, or, you know, correlations with dark triad traits. Um So the dark triad of uh Machiavellian is and narcissism and psycho psychopathy um or sociopathy, uh some studies have suggested there are correlations with that and political extremism. So I, I think, you know, II I find flaws in all these things, but I also have just sort of like this background view of like this isn't the way we should proceed in political epistemology. We shouldn't start by, you know, sort of like hating people we disagree with and trying to justify it basically, you know, um I don't, I don't think that's the right way and it's not, um it's not an approach that is consistent with the epistemological perspective, which is one which entertains the possibility of error and doubt and skepticism. Um And has since Descartes, if not before, you know,

37:27 Ricardo Lopes: so another set of theories is based on ideology. What do you make of them and what do you think, or how do you look at the role that ideology might play in political beliefs?

37:41 Oliver Traldi: Yeah. So I, I think I ideology is a really interesting notion. Um And I have certain kinds of skepticism about uh whether people really have ideologies. Um So ideological theories try to explain, at least, at least in the most classical Marxist sense, ideological theories. I'm probably gonna make some mistakes here. Ideological theories try to explain why society is stable using uh posits about the beliefs that people have. So, you know, if you start from the perspective of we live in a super unjust society that doesn't benefit the people in it then or, or most of the people in it or something like that, then you have to give an explanation of why are these, the people in this society? Why are they not changing things up? Why are they not having a revolution or why are, why are not, why are less of them going on strike or something like that? And you posit ideology uh to say, well, they've been there, these beliefs have been sort of put in their heads which tell them you shouldn't have a revolution, right? It's ok, it stabilizes the society if they say to themselves, it's ok that I have less money than the other person because I don't deserve it. Right. Um, SO that's ideology in the Marxist sense is when, when people say, well, I have this background sense of how things ought to be and that makes it ok, that society is the way that it is and that stabilizes society. So that's why a lot of theories of ideology talk about it as having a functional role. Um And that also means that the concept of ideology has an explanatory role when it comes to uh the stability of society. And the fact that there aren't revolutions, the fact that we're still in a capitalist system, um capitalism, they're not meaning an ideology of capitalism, but just capitalism as a, you know, certain social structure. Um So this narrative has been extended past the Marxist. Um YOU know, one thing that has happened, uh you know, since the sixties uh in academia is that different sorts of Marxist theories have been applied to categories like race and gender. Um And so you have uh basically theories of ideology explaining, you know, you know, why, why are, you know, why would a, a black person accept racial inequality or why would a woman accept sex inequality? Well, it's because there's this ideology of white supremacy or this ideology of patriarchy um which to an extent has been internalized. So these ideology theories are often theories of uh the internalization and legitimation and moralization of unjust um social structures. Um Now, what do I think of ideology theory? This is a good question. One thing to say about ideology theories is that this functional role aspect um is something, is something that I have some skepticism about. Um I think that if you, if you look at people's political beliefs and say, well, this is sort of, this is sort of coming at them from above. Um FOR this uh nefarious reason. Um I sort of start out with a lot of skepticism towards that idea of how people get their, their beliefs to begin with, right? Um I tend to think most people get their beliefs, including their beliefs about politics from having some sort of contact with reality. Um And in fact, in the Marxist theory, there's the ideology theory is sort of combined with the opposite theory, which is class consciousness, which says yes, from being in, in the lower class, you do have an enhanced contact with reality, right? Um You actually have an epistemic advantage. Um uh THE class disadvantage in, in Marxism leads in at least some part, you know, some cir Marxist circles leads to an epistemic advantage. Um I also don't, so if we think of an ideology as sort of comprehensive or sort of big in some way, right? It structures the way people look at the world, which is one way people think about ideology. Um, IT'S not clear to me so it's really easy for somebody like a philosopher to say, well, of course, people have all these ideas in their heads and they're trying to make them consistent and they're making inferences from them and they're constantly, like, cogitating and intellectualizing everything they experience. Um, IT'S not clear to me that most people, you know, that is like a sort of anxious response, you know, and it's sort of overthinking that we find maybe intellectually productive use for in academic philosophy. Um But it, it doesn't seem to me that I, most people have such structured ways of thinking about the world. And in fact, there's classic work by the political science scientist, Philip Con, um which suggests, yeah, most people don't seem to have ideologies and I, you know, there's work by people like Michael Hannon, early femi time, Taiwo uh about what whether, you know, whether people have these political beliefs to begin with, uh whether people really have any political beliefs at all. So I think, I think I have some skepticism that these, that these big structures which are really um sort of intellectual organizations, uh whether they really can play any causal role when it comes to thinking about people's individual political beliefs. Um Now, that doesn't mean the ideology, it could be, it could be that the notion of ideology still has, you know, can still be an important notion in political theorizing. Um But that would be different than saying that individuals have ideologies, right? Um So for example, here's one way that here's one way that you could have an ideology at the level of society without individuals having an ideology, right? It could be that, you know, different people have different pieces of the ideology and for various reasons, you know, the person with this piece of the ideology gets to say at this moment and the person with that piece of the ideology gets to say at that moment. Um And so that's a way that you could have without individuals having an ideology, you could still have some sort of society wide ideology. Um Now, would it then be best to think of it as a set of political beliefs? Well, probably not exactly, it would be better to think of it as sort of like a, a set of social incentives and a set of um dynamics in which in which you had different people are brought forward at different times or have, have power in different contexts. Um And this has to do with how conducive those people's views are to, to some, I don't know, some power structure or whatever you would want to call it. Um So you can still have, maybe the notion of ideology can still be useful even if you don't think people have ideologies or individuals have ideologies. Um I also, you know, in the book, I make this quick note which I've considered coming back to. Um, SO, and maybe we'll talk about this later. Uh There's this notion of conspiracy theory, um, uh, which is a big, uh, a big topic in political epistemology. Um, JUST because conspiracy theorizing seems a lot of people to be very bad, it's bad for society and also seems to people to be bad reasoning. Um, BUT a lot of theories of ideology, sort of, kind of sound like conspiracy theories, right? They sort of sound like, well, there's this group of people who are advantaged in society and they sort of put a lot of ideas in people's heads to pull the war over their eyes about what's really going on, right? Um In order to keep their power. Um And uh yeah, so I have a lot of skepticism about narratives like that. Um Not because I think so, I've skepticism about, about that because I don't think it's so easy to pull the wall over people's eyes. I do think people want to pull the wall over each other's eyes, right? Like people aren't, people aren't so great. Um But I, but I also don't think people are that gullible either.

46:21 Ricardo Lopes: What about group membership? What do you make of the theories that try to explain political beliefs on the basis of a group membership?

46:32 Oliver Traldi: Yeah. So, yeah, so this is sort of like the other side of the coin that I was talking about where, you know, in the Marxist conception, the relevant groups are classes, right? Um OR economic strata or different relations to the uh to production groups with different relations to production. Now, these, these theories can be very useful uh especially in American politics, right? A lot of American political commentary is, you know, well, you know, turns out actually, you know, there's more, you do a poll and there's more Hispanic support for Donald Trump this time than there was last time. So then you're like, wow, what are, you know, what is this? You know, why do Hispanics like Trump more? And you have this whole and uh there do seem to be correlations where, you know, men vote Republican more often and women vote Democrat more often, white people vote Republican more often and black people vote Democrat more often. So in the US, it seems really useful. But on the other hand, um these, you know, these correlations are not actually that strong either, right? Um So for example, Hispanics, uh these days, it's around maybe two thirds vote for Democrats and one third vote for Republicans. Um So to me that's not gonna be, that doesn't seem like we're gonna get a great background view of, of where people's political beliefs come from. Um And in fact, all these theories, we were just talking about theories of ideology, they're there precisely to explain why the correlations aren't that strong, right? The notion is precisely, well, actually the lower classes, some of them believe in cal, right? Like some of them don't, some of them aren't Marxists. We have to explain that. So we, we, we throw in this notion of ideology, right? Um So in general, I think that uh theories of group membership, uh they're just not really full theories of political belief. Um BECAUSE everybody acknowledges that, you know, any given member of any demographic or economic group could support, you know, could support the, you know, the exact opposite of what everybody else does, right? And yeah, so there are they the source of, and I don't know how good a job I did explaining this in the book. Um Thinking back now, probably not that great. The source of in Marxism, the, the source of the group or the class, political belief has something to do with the interests of the class, right? So it's sort of like, you know, the, the proletariat class interests will determine the proletariat beliefs and the capitalist class interests will determine the capitalist beliefs in some sense or another. It's important to distinguish this from theories of individual interest. Um So that's another kind of mysterious question of how do I sort of conceive of myself as a member of a class or group rather than an individual and sort of magically get the class interest into my head. There's obvious reasons why, you know, we have a sense of our own individual interest because we have a sense of our desires, right? Um It's not clear, this is another instance, the notion of class interest seems very intellectual and abstract. It's not clear to me that most humans are gonna are gonna be thinking about politics in this way, um whether explicitly or implicitly.

50:01 Ricardo Lopes: So another set of theories has to do with social isolation. So what are the claims there?

50:09 Oliver Traldi: Yeah. So these are, these are the that um fit really well with contemporary American politics and of course, with all these things, there's a difficulty of, you know, this book is a very American book, right? I'm, I'm writing about dynamics that seem to be present in American politics right now, right? Um So the, these, these theories about social groups uh are they're different from the group membership theories um because they have to do with the incentives people have uh to sort of not avoid going against their group, right? Um So these incentives could be kind of internal or external, right? Um So the external incentive is like, if I'm a democrat and I say taxes should be lower and everybody should own a gun, then maybe my friends aren't friends with me anymore, right? Maybe I get socially um ostracized or something like that. The internal one is like, and this is the one that is really, really keyed to this current moment in American politics. The internal one is about maybe my sense of myself is tied up in a certain way with being a good Democrat or being a good Republican or being a good progressive or being a good conservative or whatever it is. And that means if I go against the group on a political issue internally, I feel a struggle internally. I start saying who am I, I start worrying that I can't make sense of my own identity, right? Um And so you have these two sources of pressure from the notion of political identity. And so, yeah, the theory basically says our political beliefs exist in part or we have the political beliefs we do in part reserve the external and internal appearance of having some kind of identity that corresponds with the political group. Um And yeah, so this is, it's very, it's still a notion that it's based on the fact that there are political groups. Um But the groups in question are different uh than in, than in the group membership. The, and uh the relationship is also different. Um uh It's much more a relationship based on psychological incentives and things like that. Um And one thing to say about these identity and partisanship type theories is that they're not theories on which our political beliefs come out looking very rational. Um These are theories on which, you know, we're doing motivated reasoning to avoid upsetting our sense, upsetting our social circle or upsetting our sense of who we are, you know. Um And uh that's not, you know, that's not epistemological, secure right. That's not looking at the evidence and making a recent judgment. Um It's sort of uh you know, reacting on instinct, um reacting out of a sense of threat or something like that, a social or psychological

53:29 Ricardo Lopes: threat. So let me ask you about one final set of theories before we move on to another topic, you also cover theories based on cognitive heuristics. So what are these about?

53:43 Oliver Traldi: Yeah. So this is, this is um this is really just one theory from the late Jeffrey Friedman, who was a, I wouldn't say a mentor but invited me to a thing at Berkeley. And we had a lot of talks about political epistemology when I was just starting out in grad school. Um So he has basically a theory. Uh IT takes as its starting point, sort of like the complexity of the modern world. Um And Friedman Friedman's notion is that we have to do something to cognitively to simplify the modern world. We have to be able to understand the modern world in some way. And I don't, I forget if he uses the term cognitive heuristics, it might be the term I use. Basically, the notion is we need a way to categorize all the different inputs we're we're getting um maybe we need some information is more important than others, or some people can be trusted and other people can't um or some phenomena we reach for certain sorts of explanations, right? Rather than others because if we couldn't do that, then, you know, you try to make you just, just think of how many things are happening in the world. And if you're on, you're on Twitter like me, I think how, just how many world events you see, you, you're, you, you're familiar with the internal politics of all these different countries. You know, whenever I wake up early I see all these tweets from my British friends about all, all everything that's happening in British politics. Um And then the Americans wake up and I hear about American politics and then, you know, there's Asian politics and it's sort of like, you know, if I want to make sense of this. Um AND avoid it being uh you know, Friedman is working from sort of American pragmatist tradition. I think it's William James who he, he quotes. That's maybe, maybe someone else. But there's this phrase uh about the uh I think about babies where before they have categories for their experience, they experience the world as a blooming buzzing confusion. Um IS the phrase, right? So the idea is if we don't want the world to just be like a confusing assortment of signs and symbols, um we need boxes to put the things in. Um And Friedman basically said that there's no rational way to pick one kind of categorization or over another one set of heuristics over another. Um Because you're sort of pre rational the, the, the way you organize your information is prior to the rationality of, of, of digesting it um and making inferences based on it. Um And so he basically thinks all of your politics will be determined by the set of cognitive heuristics that you're working with to simplify uh the informational sphere. Um So an example that he, I think, and his life sort of went back and forth on maybe in some sense, uh is the notion that people respond to incentives, which obviously is an assumption that economists make and political libertarians and other sorts of, you know, economic determinist and materialists, um uh and reduction, you know, economic reductionist make, class reductionist and Marxism make um the notion that people are gonna respond to incentives uh also helps us explain a lot of different things. Um Yeah, but according to Friedman, it's one of these, like, you, you can't really get behind it, right? It's not something that you can assess. It's just sort of like a way of um a way of making sense of the world. Um AAA kind of heuristic or, or, or, or even a kind of bias. Um So that's, so that's Friedman's notion. It's, it's an interesting notion. I, I don't, I don't know if to me that there's, it seems a little um I don't know if I really believe in the hierarchy of there are these different kinds of things by one of which is a heuristic and then there's the perception and the heuristic and they're like completely different types of, you know, maybe he doesn't need to make such a strong assumption. Um But to me, it's always seemed that we can, we can re evaluate our heuristics. Um If they, if they, you know, if they lead us astray, um, it can be very difficult obviously and we can get stuck in them, especially as we get older, less flexible. Um, BUT I'm not, I'm, I don't think we get stuck in quite the way. Um I call it tunneling. It's like tunnel vision you get right when you have these year, I don't think, I don't think it's necessary that we get tunnel vision in this way. Um I think a lot of people do um but that's sort of out of, you know, the explanation for that is not gonna be from like first principle. So he thinks this is like a first principle. It's just the way perception and complexity work that we have to have these simplifications. I think it's more about like people are a little lazy and stuff like

58:33 Ricardo Lopes: that. So uh let me ask you now about the epistemology of democracy, which is also something that you cover in the book. So what is this about? Exactly? I mean, what are the kinds of questions that people raise when they talk about the epistemology of democracy? And since we're talking about epistemology here, should we trust what the majority beliefs?

59:00 Oliver Traldi: Yeah. Good question. Um So the notion of the epistemology of democracy, yes, basically this question that, that, that you just asked, uh should we trust the majority um in the la sorry. In the late 17 hundreds, um people started being interested in sort of a, you know, statistical and mathematical justifications for democracy. Um And one of them uh from the Marquis de Conor site, very, very simple notion is just about uh how majority votes go if the voters are sort of independent. Um And it turns out that, uh you know, the more people you have voting, as long as they're reliable and reliable, you know, to a very small degree, just like better than chance, right, better than a coin flip to the extent that people are better than a coin flip as you add, people who are in some sense are correlated with one another. Um You actually get a completely reliable um majority vote um if the number of voters is high enough. Um So this is like a ma uh a mathematical fact. Um And so the epistemology of democracy um or democratic epistemology is sort of a research program where people debate. What did these, what does this mathematical fact have to do with real world democracy? Um IN a sense. Well, this is, this is one side of the epistemology of democracy, the other sense that that's what I call aggregate, right? Where you're aggregating, aggregating a lot of different people um the other side of the epistemology of democracy uh is about deliberation and the notion that, yeah, if you have a group of people talking something over, just think about when you go to, you know, when you have a hard decision, you ask other people for advice, right? Um It just seems that if we deliberate in a group, we get more reasons, we have more minds, right? We have more people helping to figure something out. Um It seems like bringing in other people, other smart people always helps us make decisions. That's what we do. Um Very, very common practice for people to ask and advice in this way. And so you have these two sides, the aggregation and the deliberation. Um And in political theory, you would be using these to say, well, this is why democracy is good, right? Um That's not exactly my goal is the epistemological goal of the individual, which is sort of like, say, I say, I know that a group of people deliberated and came to a certain conclusion. Uh Should I trust that conclusion or like under what conditions should I trust that conclusion or say, I see that there's a majority vote under what conditions should I trust that majority vote? And so just taking these one by one in the deliberating case, one thing we might want to say is, well, it depends on the internal dynamics of the deliberating group, right? So if there are sort of, you know, uh, I think Helen Land more or somebody calls it reputational influences. Right. Um, IF there are, or maybe it's what K Sunstein calls it, if there are these reputational influences where there, there's one person in there who everybody likes, you know, um, or maybe he's, like, really physically attractive or something and nobody wants to, you know, nobody wants to disagree with them. Right. So, they're just gonna say what they want and everybody's just gonna go along with them. That's not a group, I'm gonna trust, right? Unless I trust that one person, everybody's going along with the one person I trust. But then it's basically just the equivalent of only trusting one person, right? Did everybody feel free to speak things like that? That'll affect whether I trust, whether I trust the group. What are the, basically what are the incentives for giving good reasons or giving bad reasons? Um In the aggregate case, I, you wanna know sort of like how good, how good are the people who I'm aggregating and making decisions, their competency. And if, if it turns out that most people who are voting get things wrong most of the time, then you're not gonna trust the vote, right? But if it turns out that most people, most of the people voting get things right? Most of the time, then you are gonna trust the vote, the other issue which is very dear to my heart. Um Probably to me, one of the most important things in the book, one of the most important notions of the book is this notion that if people are making up their minds independently, the group, the majority vote of the group will be, will be more reliable. Um And this, yeah, this is just what Connor says, jury theorem says um and can be seen uh you know, mathematically. So in, in the book, I have two diagrams, you know, of if you have three people and three issues and each, each person is right about two out of the three issues and wrong about one, well, if they're wrong all wrong about the same issue, then the majority vote will get that wrong, right? But if they're all wrong about different issues, then the majority vote will get every issue. Right. Right. Um So it's a way of, you know, if, if you think about it's almost like investments, it's a way of like diversifying risk or something like that, right? Like it's a way of, it's a way of unc correlating the risk making sure that mistakes don't happen at the same time if people are thinking independently. Um NOW there's a sort of paradox here which is like this is a reason to trust majority votes or to trust deliberation. But in trusting these democratic mechanisms, I reduce the independence of my own decision making, right? By looking to them as a source for my beliefs. And that makes me actually worse at contributing to them. Right? So there's a sense in which they are epistemic responsibility in terms of our own beliefs may not be the same as our epistemic responsibility and some broader sense of contributing to a group if that makes sense. Um I don't know if that does make sense.

1:04:58 Ricardo Lopes: Y yes, it does. And, but then an alternative to the epistemology of democracy would be to trust the experts. Uh What do you make of that? Yeah,

1:05:10 Oliver Traldi: I think that so in the, in the book, I, I lay out, I think seven different questions about the nature of expertise. Um But the, you know, the main question is uh you know, like, how well are the experts doing right now? Um Well, so there, there's two main questions for, for a novice, right? One is how well are the experts doing right now? And the other is, can I even, can I even figure out who the experts are? Right? Um So the second question, can I even figure out who the experts are? This is called the no novice expert question um or the no sex problem by Alan Goldman uh has a classic paper experts. Which ones can you trust um about this problem? So the question is basically like, you know, s you know, there's some mathematicians disagreeing about a proof um two of them and I'm trying to decide which one of them is, right? One of them thinks is valid. The other one thinks is in God. And so then I look at all, you know, how do I decide who's the math expert? Well, I can look at all the other opinions about math. Mhm. Why? I don't know if they read about those either. Right. Because I'm not the math expert. So there's a sense in which to evaluate which one of them is a math expert. I have to be a math expert, right to even know who the expert is, especially in a case where experts are disagreeing. Um And I think this is important in political questions because in political questions, as we said, we're always in this situation of dispute or conflict, right? And one thing you see very commonly uh especially in American politics, people will say, well, they have their experts and we have ours, right? You have think tanks, for example, you have right wing and left wing think tanks which come up with the published research, I maybe even peer reviewed articles and the different experts think different things. Um So it's, you know, it can be very difficult if you have just one large literature on one side, one large literature, on the other side. If you're not going to take the time to be an expert yourself, it's actually very difficult to choose a lot of the time. Um And this is, you know, again, this is gonna be very difficult to get out of political epistemology because politics involves conflict um and involves dispute. So they are gonna be experts disputing these things most of the time. Now, the question of how all the experts are doing, I talked before about, you know, the these questions from a little under a decade ago, about uh the state of academic research, the state of social science, the state of psychological research. Um uh FOR me, one of the lessons of the replication crisis of social psychology and also just one of the lessons from my own experience in academia, you know, getting to know some experts seeing what's, what's put into different fields. Um And it's not so much, you know, expert knowledge is always changing, it's always in flux. Um Some of that is improvement, some of it is fashion. But I, I think my sense is that an ordinary person um if they see some press release, so say, let's get, let's take a, a practical situation, right? An ordinary person sees some press release uh that says, you know, a scientist at our, you know, at our university. Uh THEY, they prove this in their lab. Um And this is gonna be so amazing and it's gonna have these great results. So just my experience, first of all, did they actually prove it or not? Who knows if it'll replicate, who knows if the statistics were, were satisfying? Who knows if there's another scientist on the other side of the issue who has another paper saying the opposite. Right. Second question is, is the, is the finding even being reported accurately. Sometimes you talk to a scientist and they say, oh, it's so embarrassing. The university wanted to hype me up. And so they pretended I'd made this big claim, but really, I'm making this very small academic point, you know, so there's also a question of, uh you know, as a reader can, I even can I even really completely understand what's being claimed um in this scientific paper. Um So there's all, there's all these sorts of problems and you start to, you know, then you know, another, another question is which, which, which research gets in, you know, it becomes known to you as a normal person to begin with. Um Is it gonna be the sort of depoliticized day to day, highly reliable workmanlike research of a scientist? No, it's probably gonna be the sort of research, the sort of thing that would make waves, especially in the angry Clickbait era. The sort of research that is gonna make its way to your consciousness as a normal person probably is going to be research that is political, that is likely to be in dispute, that is likely to be controversial in some way and that people will think is relevant to political questions. So it's not, you know, it's not clear to me that, you know, the evidentiary value of the missives that a normal person gets from above from the experts is gonna be very high to begin with, right? Because we don't know where they came from. We don't know what the state of the debate behind them is. We don't know exactly how to make sense of them and the incentives that lead them uh to make their way to us are probably not great. So my, my general view is that, um and this is all apart from the question of whether we can even make notion of the sense of we make sense of the notion of a political expert, right? Um And whether there are moral experts and things like that. So my sense is that it's, it's very difficult um Even if one wanted to trust the experts, it's difficult to find them. Um And it's difficult to interpret uh their sort of signs and symbols.

1:11:17 Ricardo Lopes: So in the book, you also go through some political issues that people worry about like polarization, conspiracy theories, fake news. Uh Let's talk perhaps about conspiracy theories. You alluded to that earlier in our conversation. So, um what would you have to say from an epistemological standpoint about conspiracy theories?

1:11:45 Oliver Traldi: Yeah. So I think conspiracy theories um are difficult for epistemology. It, it seems to, I think to a lot of epistemology, it seems like there must be something wrong with, with conspiracy theories. Um But it can be very hard to characterize exactly what and in fact, it can be a little difficult to even characterize what a conspiracy theory is. So for example, uh in Ancient Rome, there is a conspiracy that resulted in Julius Caesar being killed, right? Believing that doesn't seem to make me a conspiracy theorist. Um Even though I believe in the conspiracy, maybe because it's become established fact or maybe because it's so long ago or something like that, then you also have these non-political conspiracies. So when I taught a class, what were they? Um THERE'S a famous rapper from the 19 nineties, Tupac. So one of the conspiracy theories somebody came up with was that Tupac was still alive. Um So that was their notion of a conspiracy theory is that, you know, is that a conspiracy? Well, I guess it depends on how many people know and how, you know, how they, they were involved with him. So I think it, it can be a little bit hard to get a handle on exactly which phenomenon we're talking about. When we talk about conspiracy theories, there is something that obviously seem like they're just like core instances of the phenomenon of conspiracy theories. And I do think that sometimes, you know, there's basically two approaches when you have trouble defining something you can say, well, let's work through all the examples and counter examples unless you know, we really have to make sure should this be in, should this not be in, in other words to just say, well, let's just talk about there are some things that are obviously like core instances, the phenomenon, let's just talk about them, right? So that's something we could have done when we were worrying about the definition of politics, we could have said. Well, let's just think about the things everybody that must be politics, you know, going to war, you know, signing a bill that says we're going to go to war, right? When the Republican and Democrats disagree about it or something like that. So with conspiracy theories, you know, the core ones, so take in America, the Qanon theory, um this is, you know, ok, I'm forgetting what it is. I think it involves a guy called, you call himself Q who claims to have some sort of inside source on government information, maybe claims to be a government agent himself who makes these online posts that says that, you know, here's what's going on within the government, here's what the information drop is gonna be about. You know, the abuses people are doing or Hillary Clinton is doing that or Bill Clinton is doing this. Um And uh you know, a lot of people are covering it up, you know, a lot of the government is implicated or a lot of the powerful people are implicated and they're doing this for their own advantage. I mean, sometimes for a very nefarious kind of advantage, right? Maybe, maybe to abuse Children or something. So that obviously seems like a conspiracy theory that posits a conspiracy, the conspiracy goes against um the, the official story of the US government and of US power. Um It's uh you know, a lot of people are, are acting badly, right. They're, they're doing it for nefarious or evil purposes. Um They're doing it secretly, they're doing it through secret mechanisms, things like that. So that seems like a clear case of conspiracy theory. Um On the other hand, if we look at those aspects, it's hard to say which of those renders the belief irrational. Because certainly believing that people act in evil ways for their own interests is not by itself irrational. Believing that people act in secret is not by itself irrational. Believing that powerful people can act in concert with each other, can coordinate their actions that's not irrational. Um And believing that sometimes your government is wrong, that doesn't seem irrational either, right? Uh So once we come up with it, even in the core case, once we say these are the things that seem to have contributed to it being a conspiracy theory, it's hard to say which of these is really the problem. Uh WHERE, where did these people really go wrong? Um No, of course. So that's the problem with generalism, right? Generalism is sort of like we try to identify the aspects of the conspiracy theory and we say one of this just is irrational. Now, particular is, is the approach where you look at a specific conspiracy theory and you say, well, they just don't have very good evidence for this. No, of course, that's probably true. In a lot of the case, obviously in Qanon, it's true in the case of Qanon is true. But that's something where you can just say, well, there's this guy saying some stuff is gonna happen and mostly it doesn't happen. You only have one source, uh, everybody else, you know, disagrees with the guy. So you sort of have, you know, in general, you know, if 100 people say one thing and one person said another thing in general, you go with 100 people, right? Um So in the case of qanon, you know, there's gonna be specific things where you can look at here are the dynamics of the theory. Here are the dynamics of how people are acquainted with the theory. And those dynamics don't suffice to make a belief in irrational. Um But those dynamics will be different from one theory to another, right? They'll be different for different conspiracy theories, things that interest me. Um And this sort of came up with the, the notion of ideology. Uh There's this way of people, people will take kind of conspiratorial beliefs and make them, they'll remove this sort of individual agents from them and just say, well, the conspiracy is sort of like internalized or in people's heads somehow. Um Nobody is intentionally doing this, it just sort of emerges um out of the structure of society, the conspiracy emerges out of the structure of society. Um THAT I've never really understood why that's any different than a normal, I mean, individual agency, people always act with individual, you know, whether they act with individual agency or don't, you know, like that doesn't seem like something that licenses or, or, or changes the rationality of, of a conspiracy theory to me. Um So there's two types of explanation. It doesn't seem to me that one of them is gonna be, you know, if one of them is super irrational, the other one probably will be too. So basically, and I think this is the philosophical consensus right now. Um Basically, we have to look at conspiracy theories on their merits. Um Often they don't have, you know, often they're not meritorious belief, um rationally, not epidemically meritorious. Um But it's gonna be hard to say something very general about what's wrong with conspiracy theorizing.

1:18:36 Ricardo Lopes: So let me ask you ju uh about just one last topic. So, uh because there are people that make claims about how the history of a particular society might also influence people's political beliefs. So does that happen? I mean, does the history of our society that society have any bearing on our political beliefs?

1:19:00 Oliver Traldi: Yeah, absolutely. Um Yeah. So I think in the most general sense, um the way our societies develop are going, you know, are going to affect social circumstances. Um AND they're going to affect kind of traditions, as well as intellectual traditions, there's gonna be received wisdom and things like that. Um One thing I found interesting in writing this book was the sort of different uh views. Once I recognized the tradition was part of political epistemology. Um It struck me that, you know, different political groups are characterized in part by different attitudes towards tradition. Um So obviously, conservatives are usually bigger fans of tradition and progressives, not so much, right? Um In a way it's in the name, right? So progressives think we make progress and conservatives want to keep what we've already got, right? Um uh And neither, you know, without saying more, neither of those seem bad, right? What, what if we could make progress while also keeping the good things we already have, that would be insanely good, right? Um That would make for a really great society. Um But so there's a few different ways of looking at. So from the progressive side, there's this fact that I think to a lot of people at least seems difficult to, to dispute this fact of moral progress. So the fact that for almost all of human history, um there wasn't, it wasn't taken as obvious that you shouldn't own slaves. Um Of course, in America, we had a chattel slavery which was racialized, um a war which was just, you know, based on race or whatever the right word is. Um But, you know, even in other, you know, there were Aristotle root in favor of slavery um or defended slavery. Uh You had, you had slavery. And basically, you know, my understanding is most civilizations um for most of human history. Um So we've made progress by recognizing that slavery in some sense is just an extreme affront to morality and dignity and things like that. Um And so the progressive view might be, well as time goes on, we'll keep having, you know, we'll keep figuring out what's right and wrong, you know, we'll keep making progress with that, we'll keep figuring it out. Um And uh on the other side, you have some arguments about uh why we shouldn't change things so much. Now, 11 argument. So GK Chesterton has a couple arguments, you know, he's a great British traditionalist, um or conservative or whatever the right word is uh defender of tradition. One argument is the, the idea of the democracy of the dead, basically. Like, you know, if you believe in democracy and believe that adding people makes things better. Why not, why not include the perspectives of people who have, who have already come before us, right? Um And another is this idea of Chesterton's fence. So he says, you know, before you destroy something in society, you have to make sure you understand why it's there, right? Um The people who built it know why they built it. And if you don't know why it's there, that means that they have the advantage over you, right? That means you should trust them because they're an expert on experts on why it was built then in a slightly different way. Friedrich Hayek uh has the same view. I mean, Hayek believes that nobody, even the people who built it probably don't understand why it was there. Um So Hayek has a more sort of invisible hand evolutionary type approach where he says, you know, just as no one person can understand why an item is priced the way it is. No one person can understand why a social structure is what it is and what functions it might start. So, just like, um you know, just like the theories of ideology, he talks about the functional role that things play in society. Um But he thinks that those functions can be very obscure to us. Um And so in terms of resolving, you know, resolving these disputes about political epistemology between um progressives and traditionalists. Well, I, I don't think it's, you know, I, I don't think it's something um that, that has a final resolution um necessarily, or at least not one that I've found. But I have, you know, I did start to wonder about this notion of moral progress a little bit as I was writing and I started to wonder why, you know, OK, so I know obviously we're doing better now from my perspective than we were back when people didn't realize how bad slavery was, right. We've made progress in figuring out the slavery is bad. And then maybe in 100 years there will be another change where people say this thing is good or this thing is bad and they'll disagree with me. One thing I didn't quite understand when I was thinking about moral progress is why, you know, what is it about 100 years passing? That should make me think they're right and I'm wrong. Why shouldn't I say? Well, I'm the high point, I'm right about everything people in the past were wrong about slavery, then it'll change again and people in the future will be wrong about this other thing, but I can stick with my own beliefs, right? Um And so I was trying to figure out why that was one is just maybe you just infer from the fact that progress has been made so far. Um The notion that it will continue to be made, um That seems like a strong, you know, that seems like an unlikely inference. Yeah. So I, I'm still thinking about this question of moral progress. Um A lot. Uh And there's, you know, there's different areas, uh there's different areas of political life where, where, where the notion of moral progress is relevant. II, I really think it's um it's an under discussed notion, uh the notion of progress. Uh There's questions of whether morality really works like science, what, what assumptions do you need to make about morality and politics? To even think that there's an analogy um between moral or political progress and scientific progress. Um Probably some pretty robust assumptions. Uh So that I'm glad you asked about that. That is, you know, so the connection between political epistemology and history probably of everything in the book. Um It is the thing that has been that that's like completely new. Um I, I don't think anybody has discussed that before. Um So I'm excited to see what people think of it at least. But uh yes, I appreciate you asking

1:25:40 Ricardo Lopes: about it. Great. So the book is again, political beliefs of philosophical introduction. And I'm leaving a link to it in the description of the interview and Oliver just before we go apart from the book, would you like to tell people where they can find you when your work on the internet?

1:26:00 Oliver Traldi: Yeah. So I keep a site on Weebly uh Oliver tral.weebly.com. You can find, I do a lot of public writing so you can find my book reviews and, and cultural essays and things like that there. Um I have a Twitter account but usually, you know, I'm not very good at Twitter so um people can find me there if they like. Um uh And yeah, um I appreciate you having me on.

1:26:24 Ricardo Lopes: No, of course. I really love the book. So thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. It's been fun to talk with you. Yeah. Thank you. Hi guys. Thank you for watching this interview. Until the end. If you liked it, please share it. Leave a like and hit the subscription button. The show is brought to you by N Lights learning and development. Then differently check the website at N lights.com and also please consider supporting the show on Patreon or paypal. I would also like to give a huge thank you to my main patrons and paypal supporters, Perego Larson, Jerry Muller and Frederick Suno Bernard Seche O of Alex Adam Castle Matthew Whitting Bear. No wolf, Tim Ho Erica LJ Connors, Philip Forrest Connelly. Then the Met Robert Wine in NAI Z Mar Nevs calling in Hobel Governor Mikel Stormer Samuel Andre Francis for Agns Ferger Ken Hall, her ma J and Lain Jung Y and the Samuel K Hes Mark Smith J. Tom Hummel s friends, David Sloan Wilson, Yaar Roman. Roach Diego, Jan Punter, Romani Charlotte, Bli Nicole Barba, Adam Hunt, Pavlo, Stassi, Nale Me, Gary G Alman, Samo, Zal Ari and YPJ Barboza Julian Price Edward Hall, Eden Broner Douglas Fry Franka La Gilon Cortez or Scott Zachary ftdw Daniel Friedman, William Buckner, Paul Giorgio, Luke Loki, Georgio Theophano, Chris Williams and Peter Wo David Williams, the Ausa Anton Erickson, Charles Murray, Alex Shaw, Marie Martinez, Coralie Chevalier, Bangalore Larry Dey Junior, Old Ebon Starry Michael Bailey. Then Spur by Robert Grassy Zorn, Jeff mcmahon, Jake Zul Barnabas Radick Mark Temple, Thomas Dvor Luke Neeson, Chris Tory Kimberley Johnson. Benjamin Gilbert Jessica week in the B brand Nicholas Carlson Ismael Bensley Man, George Katis, Valentine Steinman, Perros, Kate Van Goler, Alexander, Abert Liam Dan Biar Masoud Ali Mohammadi Perpendicular J Ner Urla. Good enough, Gregory Hastings David Pins of Shan Nelson, Mike Levin and Jos Net. A special thanks to my producers is our web, Jim Frank Luca Toni, Tom Ween, Bernard N Cortes Dixon Bendik Muller Thomas Trumble, Catherine and Patrick Tobin, John Carl, Negro, Nick Ortiz and Nick Golden. And to my executive producers, Matthew Lavender, Si Adrian Bogdan Knits and Rosie. Thank you for all.