Fondecyt Regular #1210724 (2021-2025) Epistemic Pathologies of the Public Sphere: The Remedial Role of Intellectual Other-Regarding Virtues

The central aim of the project is to identify epistemic pathologies of the political public sphere and examine the role intellectual other-regarding virtues play in remedying them. More specifically, this project aims to show that certain epistemic pathologies concerning the deliberative argumentation of political issues and the transmission of information related to those issues can be counteracted by means of socially-oriented intellectual virtues, so to achieve an epistemically healthier public sphere.Since the second part of the 20^thC, democracy has been regarded as the only legitimate political arrangement. On a normative level, democracy now represents an undisputed background and deliberative democracy is regarded as one of the most promising approaches within democratic theory. This particular normative framework sees the communicative processes in which decision-making procedures are embedded as the primary source of political legitimacy. So it puts an emphasis on the notion of the political public sphere and the deliberation by which it is constituted, as well as highlighting the outmost importance of such deliberation being adequate. Importantly, ordinary citizens are required to adequately engage in deliberative argumentation and natural testimony for political legitimacy. However, there seems to be a public sphere crisis, in which the deliberative quality of the communicative processes is affected, and certain epistemic pathologies of deliberative argumentation and natural testimony seem to contribute to it. So this project aims to identify some such pathologies which are the result of implicit processes related to cognitive biases and social prejudices and which require, at least partly, a corrective at the personal level (and not only at the structural one). Moreover, the project aims to show that the identified pathologies can be counteracted by certain intellectual other-regarding virtues, which aim to perfect our epistemic interactions with others, and show that their realistic development stands in need of a socio-educational process, hence requiring the educational system to foster the intellectual character that increases the epistemic performance of citizens in the political public sphere.