ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes politically perilous epistemic vices, primarily those with significant social consequences, such as close-mindedness, sloth, intellectual arrogance, cowardice, dishonesty, epistemic injustice, and dogmatic intellectual self-affirmation. We link them here with two areas of interest: first, the rise of populism in politics, and second, on the explanatory side, cognitive miserliness, the human cognitive apparatus’ feature responsible for systematic defects of cognitive processing. We argue that they are responsible for blocking the central epistemic motivation for democratic deliberation.
