This PhD position is part of the interdisciplinary UU PhD programme of the Faculty of Humanities, funded by the administrative agreement (‘bestuursakkoord’) between the Ministry of OCW and the universities. We are seeking to hire a highly motivated, driven, and talented PhD candidate to carry out this project in a period of four years. The PhD project will be located in the Theoretical Philosophy group at the Research Institute for Philosophy and Religious Studies, Utrecht University.

Political polarisation and, more generally, the polarisation of opinions (be it on climate change and how to combat it, or on how best to respond to a pandemic) is to some extent the result of our communication environments and the technologies that shape them. The beliefs that individuals in a society end up with are not just an outcome of these individuals weighing the evidence that they possess (as traditional epistemology would have it), but are also influenced by the structure of the large-scale communication environments these individuals are embedded in.

Primarily, communication has the effect of spreading information across an epistemic community. But when communication is iterated and pursued over an extended time horizon, further effects can occur. For instance, an agent’s current belief, as formed by things heard or learned early on in the process, may not only affect what kind of information they search for next, but also which types of incoming messages they might or might not trust. Moreover, iterated communication may reshape the underlying communication network itself, leading agents to connect to their like-minded peers and shy away from others. In principle, these mechanisms are epistemically neutral, but they may have a number of long-term effects. Those may be beneficial for epistemic communities – for instance by enabling the spread of reliable information, the emergence of expert networks, or the creation of a resilient civil society – but they can also have detrimental effects – leading to polarisation, echo chambers, and even societal and economic inequalities.

The guiding question of the project is how superficially similar structural features of communication networks can lead to vastly diverging epistemic outcomes. For instance, how can the rational exclusion of certain sources of information and epistemic trust in specific informants lead to expert networks and scientific progress in one case but to blind belief in debunked conspiracy theories in another? The PhD candidate will (i) explore the epistemic effects of agents’ trust-relations, vulnerabilities, and action structures on the structures of communication networks and (ii) identify epistemic structures that increase polarisation of beliefs or opinions among individuals. One hypothesis to be explored is that a methodological shift from the isolated epistemic focus of much existing work in network analysis to a more encompassing view that incorporates both the agents’ epistemic and practical considerations allows for a more fine-grained analysis that can explain the different epistemic outcomes of seemingly similar communication structures.  

Methodologically, the project may combine a number of techniques, including classic philosophical analysis and formal tools such as epistemic network models and computer simulations thereof. In doing so, the project pursues two directions. On the one hand, we want to obtain a better assessment of existing structures, say, how actual communication can lead to polarisation or even conspiracy theories. On the other hand, we take an idealised perspective to better understand certain phenomena – for instance, whether conspiracy theories or political polarisation may also occur among ideally rational agents. This understanding, we hold, can further philosophical theories, but also a sociological understanding of the underlying phenomena. The project will emphasise this interdisciplinary aspect through organising a series of interdisciplinary workshops that bring together researchers working on epistemic networks in philosophy and the social sciences.