The Crisis of Epistemic Authority” by Brian Leiter

The article is here; the introductory part:

Every society has mechanisms for inculcating its citizens with beliefs about the world, about what is supposedly true and known. These epistemological mechanisms primarily include the mass media, the education system and the courts. Sometimes these social mechanisms convey true beliefs, sometimes false ones, and most often a mixture. What for the vast majority believe Telling the truth about the world (sometimes even when it is not) is crucial to social peace and political stability, regardless of whether the society is democratic or not. In developed capitalist countries, like the United States, relatively free from political oppression, these social mechanisms functioned in predictable ways until recently. They ensured that most people accepted the legitimacy of their socioeconomic system, that they agreed with the economic hierarchy in which they found themselves, that they accepted the official election results, and that they also formed a set of true beliefs about the causal Structure of this system appropriated the natural world, the laws discovered by physics, chemistry, medical sciences, etc.

Although ruling elites throughout history have always aimed to instill in their subject populations moral and political beliefs conducive to their own continued rule, it has also been true that the interests of ruling elites, particularly in the post-Scientific Revolution world , often depended on a correct understanding of the causal order of nature. You can’t extract wealth from nature, let alone prepare for physical or biological disasters, if you don’t understand how the natural world actually works: what earthquakes do, how disease spreads, where fossil fuels are and how to extract them. This is undoubtedly why both authoritarian regimes (such as that in China) and neoliberal democratic regimes (such as that 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 to about 2000), the main epistemic mechanisms in society at large contributed to a world of causal truths being the common currency of at least some parts of public policy and discourse in relatively democratic societies. Of course, there were exceptions: the panic over water fluoridation in the 1950s is the most obvious example, but it was also unusual. Even false claims about race and gender (which were widespread in traditional media until the 1960s and 1970s) were met with greater resistance in pre-Internet media, particularly from the 1960s onwards. But the basic pattern was clear: social mechanisms shaped many true beliefs about how that naturally The world works, while performance is much more uneven where powerful social and economic interests are at stake.

The Internet has turned this situation on its head: it is the epistemological catastrophe of our time, setting in motion mechanisms that ensure that millions of people (perhaps hundreds of millions) have false ideas about the causal order of nature – about climate change etc. Effects of vaccines, the role of natural selection in the evolution of species, the biological facts about races – although there is no controversy among experts. In fact, a prominent and dangerous achievement of the Internet age has been to discredit the idea of ​​“expertise.” when experts believe something is the case, That’s a reason for everyone else to believe it. In this parallel cyberworld, experts are disguised partisans, conspirators, and claimants of epistemic privilege, while the actual partisans and conspirators are supposedly purveyors of knowledge.

Legal philosopher Joseph Raz’s analysis of the concept of “authority” is helpful for thinking about what we mean when we invoke the idea of ​​“authority” in epistemic contexts: that is, contexts in which we want to know something dem we should believe if we seek the truth. An epistemic authority, in this sense, is someone who advises people about what they should believe, thereby increasing the likelihood that those people will believe what is true (that is, they will believe what they should believe). All other things being equal), as if they were left to figure out for themselves what they are entitled to believe.

For example, suppose I want to understand the “Hubble constant,” which captures the expansion rate of the universe. I could try reading various scientific journal articles to find out what I should believe about it. It is unlikely that I will be able to make sense of this material as I lack the relevant knowledge of mathematics and astrophysics. Alternatively, I could consult my colleague at the University of Chicago, astronomer Wendy Freedman, an outstanding scientist who has done groundbreaking work on the Hubble constant. I am confident that for me Freedman is an epistemic authority on the Hubble constant and cosmology in general; I am more likely to have the right views on these things by attending their lectures (for undergraduate students, no doubt) than if I tried to figure these things out on my own.

Why am I confident that she is an epistemic authority? That’s obviously it not because I have undertaken an evaluation of their research and published results, which I am not in a position to do (if I were, I would not need to consult an epistemic authority on the subject). Rather, I rely on the opinions of others we could call upon metaepistemic authorities: That is, those who can provide reliable evidence about who has epistemic authority on a topic. For example, in Freedman’s case, I rely 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 the advice of a philosopher of science with whom she worked and with whom I have special affinity Confidence in terms of its metaepistemic authority based on prior experience.

Epistemic authority is always relative. For me, Professor Freedman is an epistemic authority on the expansion of the universe, but he would not have been, for example, compared to the Nobel Prize winner and cosmology expert Steven Weinberg. Likewise, I am an epistemic authority on Raz’s conception of authority toward my students and colleagues, but not toward Leslie Green, Raz’s student who recently retired from Raz’s chair at Oxford. Epistemic authority is relative both to what the alleged authority knows and to what the subjects of the authority themselves might know. In short, epistemic authorities help their subjects believe what is true (or more likely to be true), and without this help, these subjects would be more likely to end up believing falsehoods or partial truths.

Here is the key epistemological point: Almost everything we claim to know about the world at large—the world beyond our immediate perceptual experience—requires our reliance on epistemic authorities. These include our beliefs about Newtonian mechanics (true about medium-sized physical objects, false at the quantum level), evolution by natural selection (the central fact in modern biology, even if it may not be the most important mechanism of evolution), and climate change (humans cause it), resurrection from the dead (it doesn’t happen) or the Holocaust (it happened). Aside from a few simple laboratory experiments that students actually perform, much of science education is about accepting what epistemic authorities report about the nomic and causal structure of the world. The same applies to most educational offerings in the areas of history and empirical social sciences.

The most successful epistemic norm of modernity that drove the scientific revolution—empiricism—requires that knowledge be based at some (inferential) point on sensory experience, but almost no one believes that evolution by natural selection or the reality of the Holocaust has any sensory ones Evidence that supports these 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 eyewitness accounts of the events they describe.) Dependence on epistemic authority is not limited to ordinary people: most trained engineers, for example, rely on epistemic authorities of the universe, such as themselves, for their beliefs about the age Most lawyers rely on epistemic authorities for their beliefs about who wrote the U.S. Constitution and why.

But epistemic authority cannot be maintained by empiricist criteria alone. Excellent anecdotal empirical evidence, the favorite tool of propagandists, appeals to ordinary belief in the senses but is easily exploited because most people understand neither the dangers of induction nor the intricacies of sampling and Bayesian inference. The maintenance of epistemic authority critically depends on social institutions that inculcate reliable second-order norms about whom to believe; that is, it depends on the existence of recognized metaepistemic authorities. Pre-university education and especially the media of mass communication have been essential to the dissemination and maintenance of such norms in the modern era of popular democracy.

Consider one of the most important newspapers in the United States, The New York Timeswhich, despite certain obvious ideological biases (in favor of America, in favor of capitalism) on many issues, has served as a fairly good conveyor of epistemic authority. It has created a bulwark against those who deny the reality of climate change or the human contribution to it; It has debunked those who believe vaccines cause autism; it gives no comfort to creationists and other religious zealots who would deny evolution; and it treats real 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 without such epistemic mediators The New York Times.