On Friday, April 8, at 2:00pm, Professor Bondy will deliver a virtual lecture entitled "Can Rational Persuasion be Epistemically Paternalistic?" for University of Windsor's Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation and Rhetoric. His talk will be delivered on Zoom and is free and open to the public.
Here is the Zoom information for Dr. Bondy's talk:
Friday, April 8, 2022, 2:00pm (Central)
Join Zoom Meeting: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/85435542661
Zoom Meeting ID: 854 3554 2661
Here is the abstract for the talk:
"Can Rational Persuasion be Epistemically Paternalistic?" addresses two related questions about belief, inquiry, and persuasion. The first is a question about the nature of epistemic paternalism, which is, roughly, the activity of interfering in other people’s inquiry, for their own epistemic benefit. I want to provide a characterization of epistemic paternalism that is a bit different from how it is usually characterized in the literature. The second question is about rational persuasion, and whether it can ever be paternalistic, or (better) whether it can be disrespectful and prima facie wrong in the same way that at least some cases of paternalism are disrespectful and prima facie wrong. Tsai (2014) has argued persuasively that rational persuasion can in fact be paternalistic. I argue here that, while Tsai is on to something important about the paternalistic use of reasons, his central example of a paternalistic use of reasons to persuade someone in fact falls short of the ideal of rational persuasion.