VI. The Wider Picture Institutional Inaction, Bullshit, and Lying do not exist in a vacuum. Frustratingly, their effects are have ramifications for our understanding of truth far outside of the immediate 'truth value of X'. Indeed, when we make epistemic missteps, it can affect our entire worldview, degrade the assurances we have of knowledge, and provoke disaster far down the line. William Clifford showed us the danger of a boat captain ignoring good epistemic virtues, but what of an entire institution seemingly afflicted by such illnesses of belief? For that, we will need to open the question of how institutions learn and adapt to problems. Surprisingly, there are a good deal of parallels to Kuhn's perspectives on philosophy of science:
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Such narratives, theories, and paradigms compose the body of thought employed by an institution, and decisions made by high-level actors are modeled along those same lines. The largest danger of Institutional Inaction, when examining the matter from an epistemic perspective, is that it can prevent dissenting or contradictory views from being properly disseminated, in essence 'blacking out' certain types of data from the bottom of the pyramid. If such information cannot be widely circulated, discussed, and acknowledged - even as an exception to a held theory - an institution has no possibility of learning or adapting to the world around …show more content…
From there, we defined our term of Institutional Inaction, and juxtaposed it to bullshit and lying. This led us to questions of epistemology - of exactly what we did when we practiced inaction. Curiously, we found the need to quantify - at least in some fashion - how much of a shit we were ethically and epistemically obliged to give. This question put us firmly on the track of practical philosophy, and from there, we discussed the mechanics of learning within institutions, challenges to effective learning, and how to mitigate the negative effects of institutional
Such narratives, theories, and paradigms compose the body of thought employed by an institution, and decisions made by high-level actors are modeled along those same lines. The largest danger of Institutional Inaction, when examining the matter from an epistemic perspective, is that it can prevent dissenting or contradictory views from being properly disseminated, in essence 'blacking out' certain types of data from the bottom of the pyramid. If such information cannot be widely circulated, discussed, and acknowledged - even as an exception to a held theory - an institution has no possibility of learning or adapting to the world around …show more content…
From there, we defined our term of Institutional Inaction, and juxtaposed it to bullshit and lying. This led us to questions of epistemology - of exactly what we did when we practiced inaction. Curiously, we found the need to quantify - at least in some fashion - how much of a shit we were ethically and epistemically obliged to give. This question put us firmly on the track of practical philosophy, and from there, we discussed the mechanics of learning within institutions, challenges to effective learning, and how to mitigate the negative effects of institutional