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Interesting read<\/a> over at the Leiter Reports (by guest blogger Peter Ludlow<\/a>).\u00c2\u00a0 A taste:<\/p>\n Yesterday some friends on Facebook were kicking around the question of whether there is such a thing as applied epistemology and if so what it covers.\u00c2\u00a0 There are plenty of candidates, but there is one notion of applied epistemology that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been pushing for a while \u00e2\u20ac\u201c the idea that groups engage in strategies to undermine the epistemic position of their adversaries.<\/p>\n In the military context this is part of irregular warfare (IW) and it often employs elements of PSYOPS (psychological operations).\u00c2\u00a0 Applied epistemology should help us develop strategies for armoring ourselves against these PSYOPS.<\/strong>\u00c2\u00a0 \u00c2\u00a0I wrote a brief essay on the idea\u00c2\u00a0here<\/a>. What most people don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t realize is that PSYOPS aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t just deployed in the battlefield, but they are currently being deployed in our day-to-day lives, and I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t just mean via advertising and public relations.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This very much seems like a job for\u00c2\u00a0fallacy theory, broadly speaking.\u00c2\u00a0 Here’s an example from the article referred to above:<\/p>\n One of the key observations by Waltz is that an epistemic attack on an organization does not necessarily need to induce false belief into the organization; it can sometimes be just as effective to induce uncertainty about information which is in point of fact reliable. When false belief does exist in an organization (as it surely does in every organization and group) the goal might then be to induce confidence in the veracity of these false beliefs. In other words, epistemic attack is not just about getting a group to believe what is false, it is about getting the group to have diminished credence in what is true and increased credence in what is false.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n One obvious mechanism for this goal is the time-honored art of sophistry.<\/p>\n Thanks Phil Mayo\u00c2\u00a0for the pointer!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Interesting read over at the Leiter Reports (by guest blogger Peter Ludlow).\u00c2\u00a0 A taste: Yesterday some friends on Facebook were kicking around the question of whether there is such a thing as applied epistemology and if so what it covers.\u00c2\u00a0 There are plenty of candidates, but there is one notion of applied epistemology that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve … Continue reading Applied epistemology<\/span>