Welcome to the Discourse Machine

Welcome to the Discourse Machine, a new public philosophy project on political epistemology. My name is Birch Smith, and I’m an incoming PhD student at Baylor University specializing in this field, and trying to understand the place of epistemic issues in our political lives. While I’ve had long-standing interests in related areas of philosophy, like political theory and ethics, I’ve also spent the last decade-and-a-half watching the American body politic embrace conspiracies, violence, and post-truth politics. This project is my attempt to contribute to our understanding of “why?” Scholars in many other fields are studying the “how” of illiberal populism as a political phenomenon, the new wave of conspiracy theories, the impact of big tech, and the political science of institutional decay. I want to ask how America’s fractured ability to know, or our damaged epistemic environment, helped create these problems. I think that philosophy, particularly social epistemology and virtue epistemology, has some of those answers. I hope you find this project as useful as I find it interesting

So what’s next? 

First, please subscribe to this newsletter, and share it with your friends in real life and on social media. Your genuine recommendation (or ‘testimony among members of an epistemic community’ as we call it on the philosophy farm) is the best form of marketing I can ask for! 

Second, check out our corresponding podcast — also called Discourse Machine — on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you listen to podcasts. Our weekly episodes, delivered on Thursday, will break down national political news, international developments, and even social media drama with an eye towards epistemology. It’ll be more informal than the blog. Think of it as an experiment in what happens when a professional-philosopher-in-training sits down with a layman cohost and asks “wait, why are people so crazy on the internet?” Eventually, we plan to start hosting guests, so watch out for that. We hope you enjoy! 

Finally, please engage!  Part of building a healthier political discourse is doing healthy political discourse, not just listening to some guy who does philosophy for a living tell you how he thinks you should do it. I welcome constructive criticism, feedback, comments, suggestions, and whatever else you might have to say.