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Tragic Flaws

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 September 2021

NATHAN BALLANTYNE
NATHAN BALLANTYNE*
Affiliation:
FORDHAM UNIVERSITY n.ballantyne@gmail.com
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Abstract

In many tragic plays, the protagonist is brought down by a disaster that is a consequence of the protagonist's own error, his or her hamartia, the tragic flaw. Tragic flaws are disconcerting to the audience because they are not known or fully recognized by the protagonist—at least not until it is too late. In this essay, I take tragic flaws to be unreliable belief-forming dispositions that are unrecognized by us in some sense. I describe some different types of flaws and consider what we might do about them. Then I examine three types of policies for managing our tragic flaws: doxastic, dispositional, and methodological.

Keywords

social epistemologybiasesignoranceself-judgmentintellectual humility
Type
Article
Information
Journal of the American Philosophical Association , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , Spring 2022 , pp. 20 - 40
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Philosophical Association

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Footnotes

For helpful comments and conversations, I am indebted to a number of people: Teresa Allen, Alex Arnold, Jason Baehr, Michael Bergmann, John Heil, Tomás Bogardus, Charlie Crerar, Carlo DaVia, David Dunning, Peter Graham, Paul Gooch, Noah Hahn, Madeline Jalbert, Samuel Kampa, Hilary Kornblith, Michael Lynch, Gordon Pennycook, Tenelle Porter, Norbert Schwarz, Peter Seipel, Fritz Strack, Joseph Vukov, Craig Warmke, Benjamin Wilson, Lynn Zhang, anonymous referees, and two editors of this journal. Thanks to John Conley and Carlo DaVia for their help translating the epigraph from the Marquise de Sablé. My special thanks go to Shane Wilkins for helpful input on several early drafts and for designing the Tree of Tragic Flaws in LaTeX.

I presented versions of this material to audiences at the University of Arizona, University of California at Irvine, University of California at Riverside, the University of Connecticut's Social Epistemology Working Group, and the New York City Epistemology and Psychology Workshop at Fordham University. I am grateful for questions from audience members.

For generous support during my work on this project, I want to thank the John Templeton Foundation and the University of Connecticut's Humanities Institute.

I learned about Shakespearean tragedy in a high school English class. We were either reading Macbeth or Hamlet—I can't remember which. But I still remember the moment my teacher, Mr. Best, told us about hamartia. I sat there in the classroom, dumbstruck by the certainty that I had some unrecognized flaws. I am grateful to Stephen Best, Rita D'Angelo, Noah Leznoff, David McAdam, and Brenda McLeod.

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