Epistemic Paternalism Defined

The previous chapter argued that recent research on our dual tendency for bias and overconfidence suggests that we cannot rely on ourselves for epistemic improvement, and that our best bet is to instead impose certain external constraints on information access, collection and evaluation. The purpose of this chapter is to argue that practices involving such external constraints are properly termed epistemically paternalistic. One of the few previous discussions of epistemic paternalism is provided by Alvin Goldman.1 Goldman suggests that certain forms of information control practised in society are motivated with reference to how they make us epistemically better off by protecting us from our cognitive failings, but he neither discusses the important role our tendencies for overconfidence play in motivating such protection, nor attempts to define the relevant kind of epistemic paternalism. Because we discussed the former issue in Chapter 1 , let us turn to the latter.