Towards deliberation as a civic virtue

Tthe justification of testimonial beliefs in school and public media

Authors

• Mika Perälä Helsingin yliopisto

DOI: https://doi.org/10.33350/ka.110856

Keywords:

deliberation, virtue, critical thinking, democracy, epistemic injustice, public media, media literacy, multiliteracy, citizen, liberal, Bildung, belief, justification

Abstract

Liberal democracy that is based on civic participation and public deliberation requires that citizens are committed to critical thinking. Even if critical thinking can be misunderstood and be harnessed to serve anti-scientific and anti-democratic purposes, as the recent anti-vaccine movement shows, it is, correctly understood, compatible with showing trust on knowledge that is produced and transmitted by specialists in various fields of study. The article explores what the conditions are for a justified belief that is based on the testimony of a teacher in school, on the one hand, and on the testimony of a reporter in public media, on the other hand. Even if the two cases are very different, the first being epistemically much more secure than the second one, it will be argued that in both cases, for the belief to be justified, the hearer must satisfy three conditions: (i) she must understand what the speaker asserts, and on what grounds she does so, (ii) she must have reason to assume that the speaker is sincere and competent in matters related to her assertion, and (iii) she must be sensitive to factors that might defeat the justification of her belief in contexts that are relevant to her belief. It will be argued that a hearer who satisfies these conditions in some cases does not necessarily show the virtue of deliberation (which is an ideal), but a deliberate person (if there are such persons) forms beliefs that are justified in the suggested way in all cases. Based on this argument, the article outlines the virtue of deliberation as a civic virtue and shows how the national core curricula for basic education and for general upper secondary education in Finland comprise this virtue.