Limiting Knowledge in Democracy: Philip Kitcher

Note - Whoever is our "Tech Master", feel free to cut this with a read more link. I'm still a little fuzzy on how to do it and this write-up is sort of long!

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I found the lecture by Columbia University Professor Philip Kitcher really interesting. It concerned arguments for and against the limiting of knowledge in democracy, and he framing his argument by using the philosophies of writer John Milton and philosopher John Stuart Mill. Both suggested the idea of an equal playing field for truth in falsity to interact so that people could make a final assessment on the two.

What it boiled down to, he said, was the idea of "Freedom of Inquiry" - an idea that the people of a democracy have the freedom to pursue their own good in their own way without impeding of the good of others. In order to obtain this good, truth and knowledge are important as they guide us to make decisions which aid in finding this good in our lives. In other words, we should be on an equal playing field, all of us, in terms of finding out for ourselves what is good, and the only way for us to know is to be given straight truth.

The conflict nowadays, according to Kitcher, is that the free discussion of truth gets in the way of good, and this is because of ignorance (he, at this point, put a Fox TV/News logo up on the projection screen). Ignorance, he said, gets in the way of good in a multitude of ways: Remedial Ignorance (as in, you have enough background to consult sources and make decisions. Indirectly remedial would be that you know the experts who have this background) and Irremedial Ignorance (You cannot even determine the experts, who in some cases base their information of the motivations of people or certain views). Disputing the expertise of those discussing these topics calls into question the idea of expertise itself. According to Kitcher "There is an ethical responsibility for people who of themselves as pursuing free inquirers"

In this case, knowledge is invested in Journalists, Academics and Scientists. To Kitcher, they are responsible for finding out information for purely people, so they can "pursue their own projects in their own way".