ABSTRACT
The most important dynamic in political beliefs in the contemporary United States is polarization. Polarization means a bunch of different things; in this chapter, we consider the phenomenon of sorting, in which political beliefs on different issues come to be correlated with one another. We consider an argument from Hrishikesh Joshi, which holds that beliefs about different political issues are orthogonal to one another, and concludes from this that if we notice that our political beliefs have been “sorted” into one camp or another, we should take ourselves to be irrational, and thus reduce our certainty in our political beliefs. We also examine the work of C. Thi Nguyen on epistemic bubbles and echo chambers and some other issues related to humility and to understanding people on the other political side.
