Abstract

Under review at Social Epistemology. The normative status of partisan of epistemology has been the subject of much recent philosophical attention. It is often assumed that partisan epistemology is evidence of directionally motivated reasoning in which concerns about group membership override concerns about accuracy. I outline an alternative account which seeks to explain the data assuming people are motivated by accuracy. I argue that this theory offers a superior explanation of partisan epistemology than alternative social-benefits theories of the phenomenon. Since one important benefit of these theories has been taken to be that they’re at a special advantage in accounting for (the patterns of) belief in misinformation, I also argue that this advantage is smaller than it seems.