Seminar cercetare DFT „Dependence and Diversity in Echo Chambers”

„In this talk I take an epistemological look at echo chambers, i.e. social environments that are highly homogeneous with respect to their inhabitants’ viewpoints in a domain. In public reception, echo chambers are held responsible for all sorts of problematic developments, most notably the polarization of some democracies and the radicalization of certain social groups, for example so-called conspiracy theorists. Jennifer Lackey has recently argued that pace their bad reputation, echo chambers per se are epistemically unproblematic: they neither exhibit the problematic dependency of viewpoints standardly ascribed to them, nor is a diversity of viewpoints per se an epistemic asset. I argue that Lackey’s arguments fail. Echo chambers are per se epistemically problematic, and this is due – in part – to problems arising from a high level of dependence and a lack of epistemic diversity.”