Greetings, dear writers! As long promised, I am sharing the fruits of my labor this past semester in thinking through fake news, social epistemology, public opinion, and the Internet. Since this is a lengthy post, I’ll skip the usual intro section here and get right to it. Let me quickly note here that while I wrote this in an academic context, I aimed for broad accessibility. Also, while this post functions as a standalone piece, there are a few places where I refer to earlier/later sections of the paper not included here, so just ignore that. (I’m happy to send the full 22 page paper to anyone interested in reading it.)
Excerpt 1: Epistemic Injustice and The Internet
In her 2007 book Epistemic Injustice, Miranda Fricker seeks to “bring to light certain ethical aspects of two of our most basic everyday epistemic practices: conveying knowledge to others by telling them, and making sense of our own social experiences.” Fricker notes that these are both epistemic enterprises, situated within social contexts and involving social relations. The social dimensions implicit in testimony and interpretation open us up to particular forms of social vices that constitute epistemic injustices, by which is meant harms that we suffer as knowers in our efforts to know. Fricker outlines two forms of such injustice, testimonial and hermeneutical. She explains that “testimonial injustice occurs when prejudice causes a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s word” and “hermeneutical injustice occurs at a prior stage, when a gap in collective interpretive resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experiences.”
These two forms of epistemic injustice can both intersect and compound, as in the case where I convince my female colleague that her testimony about experiencing sexual harassment in the workplace is invalid because she is just being “sensitive” or “irrational.” Here, my treatment of her testimony constitutes testimonial injustice (whether I intend this or not), but to the extent that I successfully convince her to second guess her own experience, it is likely because she is situated within a social context of interpretation wherein she has internalized troubling messaging about her own emotions and agency.
A point I wish to underscore here and throughout my paper is that while blame can be assigned to individuals corresponding to considerations of will and intention, it is more often the case that agency itself is obscured by social contexts and structures that shape and constrain that agency, an obscuring that can in turn lead to further ambiguities in our efforts to properly understand reality.
While Fricker’s specific considerations of particular instances of epistemic injustices is helpful, I am interested in the underlying concept more broadly. I am especially interested in how lies can engender false beliefs that appear as knowledge. If we combine Fricker’s insights about the vulnerabilities implicit in social epistemic operations with the insights on the ambiguous layers of mediated experience presented in mass media and the Internet, we can start to get a better sense of the meaning of oft-used terms like “disinformation” in the context of social media. In the context of consuming information, whether in print or online, I might suffer epistemic harms because of your deliberate efforts to deceive me, with your efforts constituting “disinformation.” If I then share messaging sourced in that disinformation because I genuinely imagine these false beliefs to be knowledge, I am perpetuating “misinformation” and potentially compounding the harm despite my own intentions.
Beyond the initiating bad agent who specifically intends harm, it can be difficult to further determine how to conceive of agency and assign degrees of culpability as misinformation spreads through an information flow embedded in a social ecosystem. This is especially the case when users within that ecosystem have varying levels of knowledge and varying levels of epistemic ability, whether considered as cognitive features or intellectual virtues. Here the interpretive challenges posed by the layers of mediation and potential ambiguities noted in the first section become particularly relevant. How can a user distinguish between appearing and being, believing and knowing, in the various claims rooted in these information flows?
Asking such a question is an important reformulation of Dewey/Lippman debates over democracy. Positive political outcomes in a democracy that enables broad participation relies (at least theoretically) on the sound knowledge of participants in their decision-making. But forget about the ideal epistemic agent who is both well endowed cognitively as is morally perfected; how are the rest of us with our cognitive limitations and various moral defects to deal with the problem of knowledge, given the vulnerabilities, the ambiguities, and the lies? And who are we to blame when the conditions for establishing knowledge are weakened, and when false beliefs undermine the democratic project and lead to violence?
…
In 2017, Edgar Maddison Welch was sentenced to four years in prison for firing an assault rifle in a DC pizza parlor. Welsh entered Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in December 2016 to investigate reports he had heard that Hillary Clinton (and other prominent Democrats) operated a a child sex ring there, an online conspiracy known as “pizzagate.” Welch, who genuinely believed the claims embedded in the conspiracy, drove to the pizzeria with the quixotic aim of saving the children.
In a PBS article relating the courtroom proceedings, the pizzeria owner describes pizzagate as a “viscous web of lies.” I am interested in pressing on that metaphor. On the one hand, we could imagine this web” as a static collection of interconnected lies that together form the conspiracy. I imagine that this is akin to what the pizzeria owner had in mind. This use of the metaphor presents us with an abstracted bundle of beliefs forming an artifact, much like the museum setpieces from Section 1 of this paper. But on the other hand, given this paper’s explorations, I think there are more fruitful ways to employ the metaphor. For example, this vice-based web also illustrates the social interactions of testimony and interpretation embedded in various social ecosystems. Pictured this way, social media users find themselves embedded in structures of information, misinformation, and disinformation, leading to a proliferation of narratives that appear as offering knowledge. This use of the metaphor can help us see Welch as both someone who perpetuated harm (endangering the lives of others) and suffered harm (being the victim of lies sourced in disinformation.)
Philosopher Robin K. Hill (University of Wyoming; 2019) uses the pizzagate incident as an illustration of how the Internet enables instances of epistemic injustice. Hill notes the previously mentioned distinction between knowledge and true belief, where only the former has adequate justification. She then adds a parallel distinction between a willful denial of truth and mere false belief, where the former is intuitively understood as being worse. But she notes that in grounding that intuition, we need to have a sense of what vices are involved in the truth denial. As Hill explains, in these instances of disinformation, “there's some kind of involvement, some willfulness, more blameworthy than non-knowing.” We saw in the discussion of epistemic injustice that the vulnerabilities inherent to receiving testimony is directly tied to the knowledge problem. In the case of Welch, the testimony he received as credible was not in fact credible, and thus the knowledge that he thought he had regarding the pizzeria was not in fact knowledge but rather false belief deliberately presented to him as a dangerous lie.
Our vulnerability to false testimony is again, not a new issue. And the connections between false knowledge and lamentable violence (or in Welch’s case, threat of violence) embedded within interpersonal social webs is not new either. For example, in Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello, the protagonist is deceived by the deliberate machinations of his supposed close friend (where the vulnerability is compounded in direct proportion to the trust inherent to the friendship even as the credibility of the deception is tailored to the specific interpersonal knowledge), inciting the protagonist to kill his own wife. We can (and should!) denounce Othello’s violence, which was blameworthy even if his wife had been unfaithful to him as Iago had led him to believe. But we still sympathize with Othello’s plight inasmuch as we recognize that he suffered a great evil (an epistemic injustice) in Iago’s betrayal. And likewise, while Iago did not commit the murder or even suggest it, we nevertheless sense that he bears some level of culpability for it, though parsing that culpability is challenging.
Nevertheless, while the underlying dynamics of what Hill calls vice epistemology thus predate the Internet, the Internet does introduce new considerations, beyond simply sheer scale (which is itself notable.) Hill observes that “one aspect of our new problem is that the isolated extreme epistemological vice that was once embodied in the local crank with crazy theories has been replaced by the pervasive extreme epistemological vice that is, so to speak, disembodied in a strange coterie of provocateurs, some human and some robotic.” Going back to my fictional Twitter user “MarkOfTheBeast666,” in my efforts to judge the credibility of his testimony, how can I determine whether the social identity he/she/they/it present is “true” - whether in terms of purported age, sex, ethnicity, or any other conceivable social marker? Can I even know that this user is a human being and not a Russian bot created by bad actors to intentionally sow dissension and disinformation? Paradoxically, the ambiguity latent in these questions correspond to the degree of my knowledge of social conditions such as the proliferation of Russian bots on Twitter. And that means both that less sophisticated users have greater vulnerability but also that more sophisticated users, in being more aware of ambiguities, are thus more hermeneutically burdened and perhaps more likely to experience disillusionment, alienation, or even nihilism - all of which can lead to problems both distinct and overlapping.
In the case of Othello, we see that even in the context of friendships with flesh-and-blood people, there is often great risk in receiving testimony. The Internet magnifies that risk in at least three key ways: 1): by introducing greater social ambiguity in sourcing claims or verifying them, thus requiring greater interpretive work (see Section 1) which increases the propensity for interpretive errors; 2): by allowing greater obscuring of identity behind testimony, making instances of explicit epistemic injustice more likely as the work of adequate interpretation increasingly exceeds individual ability; 3): by enabling the easy and rapid spread of disinformation and extending the reach of that disinformation, which empowers bad actors in direct proportion to the asymmetries between their knowledge/ability and that of their victims.
What I Am Reading Elsewhere:
In Aeon magazine, Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft considers Leo Strauss’ call for esoteric writing and asks if the Straussian project is fundamentally at odds with love for ordinary life and the city: “Despite my political and philosophical distance from Strauss, I return to him because I sympathise with his dream of private coherence, of philosophers reaching understanding, appreciative minds despite the failings of the public at large. Publics are made up of confusing, obscuring things – circulated opinion and the misinterpretation of facts, our failure to trust our own judgment, and our sheer hunger for recognition.”
For Plough, Susannah Black interviewed the Italian astronomer Sperello di Serego Alighieri, Dante's descendent - they talked about contemporary cosmology, Dante's world-picture, and a return to faith.
Speaking of science, here’s an important article by Yuval Levin for AEI arguing that in the efforts to upgrade our R&D capabilities, we need to ensure that we maintain funding for basic science research including the purely theoretical where tangible applications are not preknown.
Strong Towns founder Charles Marohn argues that The Modern Approach to Development Doesn't Work for Local Communities: “Traditional cities were designed to have money that entered the community circulate locally and stick around as long as possible before exiting the community. These places would sacrifice absolute growth in order to experience greater wealth creation."
Bruce Katz (coauthor of The New Localism) and Colin Higgins have a great article on Financing the Inclusive City Post Pandemic: Lessons from Jane Jacobs
In Boston Review, Ben Zdencanovic considers the “fiscalization” of social policy: "By the 1990s and early 2000s, most wealthy countries cut direct social spending, replacing them with new or expanded tax breaks to fulfill social policy objectives."
In Bloomberg News, Leslie Kaufman considers how some federal disaster aid may be deterring cities and states from making better climate policies.