Expanding and Challenging the Relevance of Experience: Epistemic and Deontic Incongruities in Radio Phone-Ins

• In Event: 470 - Regular Session. Social Action and Epistemics

Abstract

When callers offer their experience in a radio phone-in, they often not only claim it to be true but also suggest that it provides guidance as to what should be done. We explore two practices that hosts employ to resist these latter, deontic implications. First, whereas experience cannot be challenged as such, its relevance can be particularized. Hosts single out the caller as a naive individual for blindly trusting his own perceptual judgment, thereby also dismissing any deontic implications arising from that experience. When callers expand the relevance of their experience by claiming that science is on their side, hosts undermine the caller’s right to act as science’s spokesperson and to claim deontic rights on that basis. While the authenticity of the caller’s experience and the validity of science itself are left untouched, both practices undermine the caller’s rationality and portray his experience as not having any broader significance.

Authors

• Wytske Versteeg, University of Twente

• Hedwig te Molder, Wageningen University