Philosophical Judgment between Thinking for Yourself and Epistemic Dependence: Epistemic Foundations and School Practice

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Dominik Balg; Professor Dr. Thomas Grundmann
• Subject Area: Theoretical Philosophy
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 566636338

K The ability to think for oneself and to form autonomous judgments are core epistemic ideals of responsible citizens in enlightened societies. At the same time, we live in times that are characterized by an unprecedented abundance and differentiation of scientific expertise. In everyday life, we ubiquiously rely on the professional judgments of experts. Laypeople are largely epistemically dependent on experts. There is an obvious tension between the ideal of mature thinking for oneself and the epistemic orientation towards the judgments of others. In fact, this tension also occurs in areas in which consensual judgments by experts are rather rare. Philosophy is a paradigm example. Here, independent cognitive efforts by non-experts are considered the ideal. At the same time, this self-reliance seems epistemically questionable against the background of stable disagreement within philosophy. As long as even expert philosophers disagree, laypeople should actually suspend judgment. This problem becomes particularly urgent in the context of philosophical education in schools: students are supposed to learn philosophizing by assessing philosophical problems that have been controversially discussed in academic philosophy for centuries. Such an approach appears problematic not only from an epistemological but also from a purely pedagogical point of view. The proposed project aims at developing an appropriate understanding of the relationship between epistemic autonomy and epistemic dependence in philosophical judgment against the background of a more precise epistemological and didactic analysis of the problems outlined above. A guiding hypothesis will be that the distinction between beliefs and acceptances can help to resolve the emerging conflict. The aim is to investigate whether laypeople are not allowed to make independent judgments in terms of acceptances where they are not allowed to form their own beliefs. On this basis, possible solutions will be discussed, developed and evaluated, with a specific focus on concrete contexts of philosophical education at school.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: USA
• Cooperation Partners: Professor Dr. Will Fleisher; Professor Dr. Jonathan Matheson