Michael P Lynch: The Value of Truth

By Dilip - Friday, March 05, 2021

Interest in how knowledge is acquired and distributed in social groups has long been a substantive field of inquiry in the social sciences. But with notable exceptions - such as W. E. B. DuBois, John Dewey, Thomas Kuhn, and Michel Foucault - twentieth-century philosophers mostly focused on the individual: their central concern was how I know, not how we know. But that began to change near the end of the century, as feminist theorists such as Linda Alcoff and Black philosophers such as Charles Mills called attention to not only the social dimensions of knowledge but also its opposite, ignorance. In addition, and working largely independent of these traditions, analytic philosophers, led by Alvin Goldman, launched inquiries into questions of testimony (when should we trust what others tell us), group cognition, and disagreement between peers and experts.

The overall result has been a shift in philosophical attention toward questions of how groups of people decide they know things. This attention, not surprisingly, is now increasingly focused on how the digital and the political intersect to alter how we produce and consume information. This interest is on display in Cailin O’Conner and James Weatherall’s recent book The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread (2019), as well as in C. Thi Nguyen’s work on the distinction between echo chambers (where members actively distrust “outside” sources) and epistemic bubbles (where members just lack relevant information). These examples highlight how philosophy can contribute to our most urgent cultural questions about how we come to believe what we think we know.

A notable theme running through much of this work is that we can study the social foundations of knowledge without having to punt on concepts like objectivity and truth, even if we must reimagine how we access and realize them as values. And that is notable at a time when many see the value of truth in democracy as under threat….

http://bostonreview.net/philosophy-religion/michael-patrick-lynch-value-truth

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