Division Chairs: Paul Gunn, University of London, and Jacob Roundtree, Harvard University
Political epistemology is based on the recognition that to understand people’s political decisions, it is necessary to study the sources and content of their political beliefs; and that to assess these decisions normatively, we need to study whether the beliefs are accurate. Why do different people interpret the political world in different ways? How do they interpret either their own interests or the public interest; from what sources are these interpretations drawn; and how do these interpretations motivate political action? Given political actors’ imperfect knowledge, how do they try to approximate full knowledge of the likely consequences of their actions—and how successful are these attempts? Under what conditions do political beliefs tend to be true? These epistemological questions have often been neglected within political science, and research on them is frequently scattered in different subfields, with researchers unaware of their peers’ compatible work.
Inasmuch as the Political Epistemology section was approved by APSA in 2014, the APSA meetings in San Francisco mark our first opportunity to hold panels and roundtables explicitly aimed at illuminating questions of political epistemology. We encourage contributions from any of the four subdisciplines on such topics as (for example) media and cultural influence on the beliefs of ordinary citizens or political elites, canonical political theorists’ epistemological views, or methods of assessing the accuracy of political beliefs or drawing normative implications from possible inaccuracy. Panel and roundtable proposals that include both normative theorists and empirical researchers will be especially welcome.
