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First Annual Applied Epistemology Workshop: The Epistemology of the Media
September 9, 2022 - September 10, 2022
The Epistemology of the Media: New Directions
The first “kickoff” workshop for The Applied Epistemology Project will be on the epistemology of the media. It will be held at UNC Chapel Hill, beginning at 3:30 pm on Friday, September 9, and continuing all day Saturday, September 10. The schedule can be found HERE.
About the workshops:
Each of the four years of the Project, we will be hosting a workshop on a particular “domain” of applied epistemology. The first will be on the epistemology of the media; future topics may include the epistemology of democratic politics, the epistemology of science communication, the epistemology of the law, the epistemology of tech, and the epistemology of education. Each workshop will aim to bring together philosophers and social scientists working on related issues to learn from each other.
Workshop speakers:
- Yuval Avnur (Philosophy, Scripps College)
- Jianing Li (Communication, University of South Florida)
- Alice Marwick (Communication, UNC)
- Shannon McGregor (Journalism, UNC)
- Regina Rini (Philosophy, York University)
- Susanna Siegel (Philosophy, Harvard)
Workshop description: One feature of the recent applied turn in epistemology has been a sudden burst of philosophical work on “fake news.” But beyond this, the epistemology of the media remains relatively underexplored within philosophy. This workshop will aim to bring together scholars both from philosophy and from fields such as communications and journalism to identify and explore new questions and problems in this important area, at a time of unique challenges for news production and consumption caused by new media technologies. We also aim to better understand how philosophy can help to inform social scientific work in this area, and vice versa. Topics for exploration might include, but are by no means limited to:
- How should we understand the epistemology of testimony in the context of media and social media?
- Does contemporary media coverage produce too much doubt and skepticism or too little?
- How should media outlets cover issues about which there is very widespread public disagreement?
- What are the responsibilities of news consumers in deciding which media sources to consume (if any at all)?
- What role should ideals of truth, knowledge and rationality play in a vision of contemporary journalism?
