An Epistemology for Listening Across Religious, Cultural, and Political Divides

Abstract

The rhetoric of cultural populism exploits and exacerbates the natural tendency for human communities to define their own identities by contrasting themselves with imagined Others. This heightens the already formidable epistemic challenge of understanding such Others. This chapter proposes an epistemology of intergroup understanding that is relational, recursive, eschatological, and sacrificial. It argues that coming to understand Others across group boundaries requires an ongoing process of listening and a willingness to sacrifice aspects of one’s own identity that prove to be grounded in self-serving misconstruals of the Other. Such listening requires open-mindedness, empathy, epistemic justice, epistemic charity, intellectual humility, and epistemic selflessness, which are therefore crucial to the functioning of a pluralistic society, especially one that is polarized along religious, cultural, or political lines.

This is the author’s original preprint manuscript. Final published version in Engaging Populism: Democracy and the Intellectual Virtues, ed. Gregory R. Peterson, Michael C. Berhow, and George Tsakiridis, 185–214 (Palgrave, 2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05785-4_10