AAP 2026 CONFERENCE

Individuals and groups frequently resist well-evidenced claims while readily accepting others that are, on more objective examination, highly dubious or false. Philosophical analyses of this phenomenon tend to focus on right-wing or conservative predispositions, invoking mechanisms such as motivated reasoning, deference to unreliable authorities, and epistemic pollution by vested interests. These analyses rarely apply equivalent scrutiny to left-wing or progressive patterns of selective receptivity to evidence.

It appears, however, that the underlying mechanisms of belief formation and resistance to unwelcome truths operate symmetrically across the political spectrum. People evaluate evidence through filters shaped by their core values, social identities, prior commitments, and off-the-shelf worldviews or ideologies. Information that coheres with these feels intuitively vindicating and is readily assimilated, while dissonant information triggers suspicion, rationalization, rejection, or moral outrage.
Thus, conservatives and libertarians have often resisted well-established findings in climate science where they appeared to threaten commitments to free markets, technological optimism, and small government. But many self-identified liberals or progressives have been quick to endorse dubious claims – such as characterizations of Israel’s military operations in Gaza as “genocidal” – despite countervailing arguments and evidence.

This underscores the importance of epistemic humility, self-reflective scrutiny of one’s own priors, and efforts at detached objectivity.

We extend trust to those we deem trustworthy.  Trustworthiness involves both a competence component and a motivation component. Insofar as we aim to trust only those who are trustworthy, we have reason not to extend our trust when the target is either incompetent or not properly motivated. However, of these two ways that trust can be violated, the latter tends to elicit much stronger reactive attitudes: here we speak of resentment and betrayal, modulated perhaps by whether the violation of trust was out of ill will (when we think they weren't truthful) or insufficient care and attentiveness. In this paper I explore whether the desire to avoid situations that might elicit these stronger reactive attitudes -- especially those having to do with being deemed untruthful -- may have a significant effect on our epistemic lives. I venture that this desire may partly explain our tribalistic tendencies and our tendency to seek out and remain in epistemic bubbles. If this is correct, it might also explain why generating fear – in particular, fear that others do not share our values – is one of the most effective ways to sow the seeds of polarization.

The question whether truth is correspondence, coherence, pragmatic utility, or something else is a perennial philosophical question for which there has so far been no decision procedure. In this talk I propose a decision procedure for this question. The basis for this decision procedure is the consideration of what we lose and what we don’t lose when we lose truth in a “post-truth” crisis. “Post-truth crisis” can be understood, in this context, either as the actual crisis taking place today or as a thought experiment. 

This paper examines why we intuitively regard truth as valuable. Philosophical theories of truth are traditionally divided into normativism (e.g., coherence theory, pragmatism), which treat truth as a normative property, and non-normativism (e.g., correspondence theory, deflationism), which do not (Wrenn, 2023). While normativism can account for truth’s value directly, non-normativist theories require additional explanation. Within non-normativism, object-given views attribute value directly to truth, whereas state-given views locate value in truth-oriented states or activities (Ferrari, 2018; Lynch, 2004; Motiva, 2021; Wrenn, 2023). Although state-given accounts avoid problems faced by object-given approaches, they struggle to explain why we intuitively see truth itself as valuable—a phenomenon termed the object-given intuition.
This paper offers a game-based model to address this. Drawing on Nguyen (2019)’s notion of “striving-play” games, truth-seeking is treated as a provisional, goal-directed activity analogous to a game, where the apparent aim (i.e., truth) is pursued for a deeper purpose (i.e., understanding). The object-given intuition arises because agents overgeneralize the temporary value of truth within inquiry to the value of truth itself. This framework preserves the strengths of state-given accounts while explaining the object-given intuition, contributing to debates on truth’s value without positing truth as independently valuable.