Fake news, relevant alternatives, and the degradation of our epistemic environment

ABSTRACT

This paper contributes to the growing literature in social epistemology of diagnosing the epistemically problematic features of fake news. I identify two novel problems: the problem of relevant alternatives; and the problem of the degradation of the epistemic environment. The former arises among individual epistemic transactions. By making salient, and thereby relevant, alternatives to knowledge claims, fake news stories threaten knowledge. The problem of the degradation of the epistemic environment arises at the level of entire epistemic communities. I introduce the notion of an epistemic environment, roughly the totality of resources and circumstances relevant to assessing the epistemically interesting statuses, such as knowledge. Fake news degrades our epistemic environment by undermining confidence in epistemic institutions and altering epistemic habits, thereby making the environment less conducive to achieving positive epistemic statuses. This is problematic even if the decrease in confidence and the altering of habits are rational. I end by considering solutions to these problems, stressing the importance of reproaching each other for proliferating fake news. I argue that we should reproach even faultless purveyors of fake news. This is because fake news typically arises in abnormal epistemic contexts, where there is widespread ignorance of, and noncompliance with, correct epistemic norms.

KEYWORDS:

• Social epistemology
• fake news
• relevant alternatives
• epistemic environment
• reproach

Acknowledgments

This paper grew out of a presentation I gave at UNC's ‘Philosophy in 15 Minutes’ event. I’m grateful to Mariska Leunissen for the invitation to present and so the opportunity to think about these issues. Thanks also to Joanna Lawson, Silvan Wittwer, and Alex Worsnip for helpful input at various stages of this project. Finally, thank you to two anonymous reviewers, whose generous comments improved the paper greatly.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

ORCID

Christopher Blake-Turner http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1509-0649

Notes

1 At least from its letter. Rini (2017, n. 6) herself flags the point about bullshit that I’m about to raise.

2 Several classic formulations of the view are clear that the focus is as much on the theory of knowledge, as on the theory of knowledge ascription (Dretske 1970; Stine 1976; Cohen 1988; Lewis 1996). Hence, as I shall understand it here, the relevant alternatives framework is concerned primarily with whether a subject knows that $p$, rather than whether it is correct to ascribe knowledge to her. So it is not in itself a form of semantic contextualism (see DeRose 1992, 1995; Hawthorne 2003; Nagel 2008). The theory of knowledge is also what I’m interested in here, though given the T-schema equivalence between ‘“$S$ knows that $p$” is true’ and ‘$S$ knows that $p$’, there is of course important interaction between theories of knowledge and theories of knowledge ascription. The taxonomic contours – for instance between invariantism, contextualism, and relevant alternatives theories – are complicated (Stoutenburg 2017). Rather than getting bogged down in classificatory subtleties, I intend my characterisation of the relevant alternatives view to be stipulative.

3 For a different kind of view that might lay claim to the title of a ‘relevant alternatives’ view (but see n. 2) that is not context dependent in this way see Rysiew (2001, 2007).

4 Since I am taking the relevant alternatives framework to be a theory of knowledge, rather than a form of semantic contextualism, I focus on the subject's context, rather than the ascriber's. See n 2.

5 The term ‘encounters’ is supposed to cover various possibilities: reading, overhearing, being testified to, and so on.

6 Unless otherwise referenced, details are taken from https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/tim-tebow-kneel-anthem.

7 See https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/30/sports/colin-kaepernick-collusion-case-nfl.html.

8 I don't know the exact provenance of the Tebow story, but it is likely that it is a piece of fake news in the sense defined in §1. Does that piece of information now put you in a position to rule out Tebow? That is a tricky question, to which I’ll return in §4.

9 Does this undermine the problem that fake news is supposed to raise? No. Lots of fake news stories, like the one about Tebow, make salient alternatives to potential knowledge claims that many agents are not in positions to rule out.

10 One might think this is too scant a basis on which to know that Obama was born in the USA. If so, the present objection doesn't get off the ground, since the problem is supposed to be that knowledge is too easily lost.

11 The phrase can be found in Levy (2018), though he leaves its characterisation completely intuitive.

12 For ease of exposition, I’ll use knowledge to stand for all the various epistemically interesting statuses that we might be concerned with.

13 A complication that I mention to set aside: an epistemic environment may be assessed along different dimensions, according to different epistemic statuses. For instance, consider an environment in which you’re deceived by a strange demon. They make the world appear such as to enable you to garner all sorts of rational beliefs, though knowledge is extremely difficult to come by.

14 It would be good to have empirical support for this claim, but I’m not aware of anything available other than anecdotal evidence.

15 This might help to explain why some people are prone to skepticism about official versions of events. Their habit of generating alternatives to official explanations makes it harder for them to know those explanations. This point is neutral on the issue of whether such habits are, following Cassam (2016), to be seen in general as intellectually vicious or, following Coady (2003, 2012) and Pigden (2017), as epistemically called for in many environments, including our own.

16 Note that this is weaker than the conclusion Rini argues for, namely that partisan epistemology can be virtuous, or reasonable, or justified with respect to fake news. Moreover, while I think many agents may be excused for propagating fake news, I don't require partisan epistemology to be the exculpating factor. More on this in §4.1.

17 A word about how my discussion of fake news meshes with Levy’s (2017). On his view, the main problem posed by fake news stems from our individual psychological constitutions. He brings to bear recent work in cognitive science on how agents’ beliefs are self-ascribed, and how they persist in the face of countervailing evidence, and argues that fake news stories are likely to have similar features. In particular, even when representations are stored explicitly not as beliefs – even as false or fictional – they might later be self-ascribed as beliefs, or might nonetheless have effects on agents’ behavior. This is because, Levy argues, representations are not stably and systemically tagged with attitude flags – belief, imagination, and so on. Rather, the attitude ascriptions that representations receive are malleable. Thus even though an agent represents $p$ initially as part of a fictional narrative, she might later treat $p$ as the content of a belief, either in self-ascription or in behavior. This is all compatible with the account I’ve given. I read Levy as interested primarily in expounding the cognitive mechanisms that fake news might problematically exploit, rather than its more general normative assessment.

18 To be clear, Rini does not claim that it is not needed. We may not disagree much at all about how to tackle fake news, but to the extent that we do, it is primarily over emphasis. See especially Rini (2017, 55).

19 This is a point that some feminist theorists, such as Bartky (1990), have argued for in the context of dominance and norms of oppression. However, this is a point of active contention in the feminist literature. For recent top-down approaches, see Young (2011) and Haslanger (2015).

20 For arguments against Rini's defence of epistemic partisanship, see Worsnip (2019).

21 http://www.snopes.com

22 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/27/world/europe/gatwick-airport-drone.html