The Volokh Conspiracy
Mostly law professors | Sometimes contrarian | Often libertarian | Always independent
Journal of Free Speech Law: "Free Speech on the Internet: The Crisis of Epistemic Authority," by Brian Leiter
A new article from the Daedalus (Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences) Future of Free Speech Symposium.
The article is here; the introductory section:
Every society has mechanisms for inculcating in its citizens beliefs about the world, about what is supposedly true and known. These epistemological mechanisms include, most prominently, the mass media, the educational system, and the courts. Sometimes these social mechanisms inculcate true beliefs, sometimes false ones, and most often a mix. What the vast majority believe to be true about the world (sometimes even when it is not) is crucial for social peace and political stability, whether the society is democratic or not. In developed capitalist countries that are relatively free from political repression, like the United States, these social mechanisms have, until recently, operated in predictable ways. They insured that most people accepted the legitimacy of their socioeconomic system, that they acquiesced to the economic hierarchy in which they found themselves, that they accepted the official results of elections, and that they also acquired a range of true beliefs about the causal structure of the natural world, the regularities discovered by physics, chemistry, the medical sciences, and so on.
Although ruling elites throughout history have always aimed to inculcate moral and political beliefs in their subject populations conducive to their own continued rule, it has also been true, especially in the world after the scientific revolution, that the interests of ruling elites often depended on a correct understanding of the causal order of nature. One cannot extract wealth from nature, let alone take precautions against physical or biological catastrophe, unless one understands how the natural world actually works: what earthquakes do, how disease spreads, where fossil fuels are and how to extract them. This is, no doubt, why both authoritarian regimes (like the one in China) and neoliberal democratic regimes (like the one in the United States) invest so heavily in the physical and biological sciences.
In the half-century before the dominance of the internet in America (roughly from World War II until around 2000), the most prominent epistemological mechanisms in society generally helped ensure that a world of causal truths was the common currency of at least some parts of public policy and discourse in the relatively democratic societies. There were, of course, exceptions: the panic over fluoridation of water in the 1950s is the most obvious example, but it was also anomalous. Even false claims about race and gender (that were widespread in the traditional media until the 1960s and 1970s) were met with more resistance from the pre-internet media, especially from the 1960s onwards. The basic pattern, however, was clear: social mechanisms inculcated many true beliefs about how the natural world works, while performing much more unevenly where powerful social and economic interests were at stake.
The internet has upended this state of affairs: it is the epistemological catastrophe of our time, locking into place mechanisms that ensure that millions of people (perhaps hundreds of millions) will have false beliefs about the causal order of nature—about climate change, the effects of vaccines, the role of natural selection in the evolution of species, the biological facts about race—even when there is no controversy among experts. Indeed, a distinguishing and dangerous achievement of the internet era has been to discredit the idea of "expertise," the idea that if experts believe something to be the case, that is a reason for anyone else to believe it. Experts, in this parallel cyber world, are disguised partisans, conspirators, and pretenders to epistemic privilege, while the actual partisans and conspirators are supposed to be the purveyors of knowledge.
Legal philosopher Joseph Raz's analysis of the concept of "authority" is helpful in thinking about what we mean when appealing to the idea of "authority" in epistemic contexts: that is, contexts in which we want to know whom we should believe when we seek the truth. An epistemic authority, on this account, is someone who by instructing people about what they ought to believe makes it much more likely that those people will believe what is true (that is, they will believe what they ought to believe, ceteris paribus) than if they were left to their own devices to figure out for themselves what they are justified in believing.
Suppose, for example, I want to understand the "Hubble constant," which captures the rate of expansion of the universe. I could try reading various technical articles in scientific journals to figure out what I ought to believe about it. It is unlikely I could make good sense of this material, given my lack of background in the relevant mathematics and astrophysics. Alternatively, I could consult my University of Chicago colleague, astronomer Wendy Freedman, an eminent scientist who has done seminal work on the Hubble constant. I am confident Freedman is an epistemic authority about the Hubble constant and cosmology generally, vis-à-vis me; I am more likely to hold correct views about these matters by attending her lectures (for undergraduates no doubt) than if I tried to figure these matters out for myself.
Why am I confident that she is an epistemic authority? It is obviously not because I have undertaken an evaluation of her research and published results, something I am not competent to do (if I were, I would not need to consult an epistemic authority on this topic). I rely, rather, on the opinions of others we might call meta-epistemic authorities: that is, those who can provide reliable guidance as to who has epistemic authority on a subject. So, for example, in the case of Freedman, I am relying on the facts of her appointment as a university professor at a leading research university and her election to the National Academy of Sciences, as well as guidance from a philosopher of science with whom I have worked, and in whom I have particular confidence with regard to his meta-epistemic authority based on past experience.
Epistemic authority is always relative. Professor Freedman is an epistemic authority on the expansion of the universe vis-à-vis me, but would not have been vis-à-vis the Nobel laureate and cosmology expert Steven Weinberg, for example. Similarly, I am an epistemic authority on Raz's view of authority vis-à-vis my students and my colleagues, but not vis-à-vis Leslie Green, Raz's student who recently retired from Raz's chair at Oxford. Epistemic authority is relative both to what the purported authority knows and what the subjects of the authority would be able to know on their own. Epistemic authorities, in short, help their subjects believe what is true (or more likely to be true), and without that help, those subjects would be more likely to end up believing falsehoods or partial truths.
Here is the crucial epistemological point: almost everything we claim to know about the world generally—the world beyond our immediate perceptual experience—requires our reliance on epistemic authorities. This includes our beliefs about Newtonian mechanics (true with respect to midsize physical objects, false at the quantum level), evolution by natural selection (the central fact in modern biology, even though it may not be the most important evolutionary mechanism), climate change (humans are causing it), resurrection from the dead (it does not happen), or the Holocaust (it happened). Most education in the natural sciences, apart from some simple lab experiments students actually perform, is a matter of accepting what epistemic authorities report is the case about the nomic and causal structure of the world. The same is also true of most education about history and the empirical social sciences.
The most successful epistemic norm of modernity, the one that drove the scientific revolution—empiricism—demands that knowledge be grounded, at some (inferential) point, in sensory experience, but almost no one who believes in evolution by natural selection or the reality of the Holocaust has any sensory evidence in support of those beliefs. Hardly anyone has seen the perceptual evidence supporting the evolution of species through selection mechanisms, or the perceptual evidence of the gas chambers. Instead, most of us, including most experts, also rely on epistemic authorities: biologists and historians, for example. (The latter, of course, rely in part on testimony from witnesses to the events they describe.) The dependence on epistemic authority is not confined to ordinary persons: most trained engineers, for example, rely on epistemic authorities for their beliefs about the age of the universe, just as most lawyers rely on epistemic authorities for their beliefs about who wrote the U.S. Constitution and why.
But epistemic authority cannot be sustained by empiricist criteria alone. Salient anecdotal empirical evidence, the favorite tool of propagandists, appeals to ordinary faith in the senses, but is easily exploited given that most people understand neither the perils of induction nor the finer points of sampling and Bayesian inference. Sustaining epistemic authority depends, crucially, on social institutions that inculcate reliable second-order norms about whom to believe; that is, it depends on the existence of recognized meta-epistemic authorities. Pre-collegiate education and especially the media of mass communication have been essential, in the modern age of popular democracy, to promulgating and sustaining such norms.
Consider one of the most important newspapers in the United States, The New York Times, which, despite certain obvious ideological biases (in favor of America, in favor of capitalism), has served as a fairly good mediator of epistemic authority with respect to many topics. It has provided a bulwark against those who deny the reality of climate change or the human contribution to it; it has debunked those who think vaccinations cause autism; it gives no comfort to creationists and other religious zealots who would deny evolution; and it treats genuine epistemic authorities about the natural world—for example, members of the National Academy of Sciences—as epistemic authorities. Recognition of genuine epistemic authority cannot exist in a population absent epistemic mediators like The New York Times.
