Science Communication, Paternalism, and Spillovers

Epistemic paternalism involves interfering with the inquiry of others, without their consent, for their own epistemic good. Recently, such paternalism has been discussed as a method of getting the broader public to have more accurate views on important policy relevant matters. In this paper, I discuss a novel problem for such paternalism—what I call epistemic spillovers. The problem arises because what matters for rational belief is one’s total evidence, and further, individual pieces of evidence can have complex interactions with one another. Because of this, I argue that justified epistemic paternalism requires the would-be paternalist to be in an unusually strong epistemic position, one that most would-be paternalists are unlikely to meet.