“The mistake is to group together in an all-or-nothing package complete sets of claims whose epistemological credentials are quite varied. It also often involves the collapse of epistemic and moral concerns.”
In the following guest post, Eric Winsberg, Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Florida and British Academy Global Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge, discusses why he has become “extremely skeptical of the recent philosophical work, both in social epistemology and philosophy of science, around topics such as misinformation or fake news.”
This is the third in a series of weekly guest posts from different authors on Daily Nous this summer.
(Posts in this series will remain pinned to the top of the home page for several days after initial publication.)
(Robert Longo, drawings from the series “Men in the Cities”)
Misinformation errors
by Eric Winsberg
I recently reviewed a book by Paul Thagard called Falsehoods Fly: Why Misinformation Spreads and How to Stop It For him Value Inquiry Diary. (It got some acceptance here.) The main reason I was eager to review this particular book is that I have become extremely skeptical of recent philosophical work, both in social epistemology and philosophy of science, around topics like misinformation or fake news. . . If readers are interested in the topic, I urge them to read the review before joining the discussion on this topic below. This is not just because I want the clicks. It is because to understand and appreciate the root of my skepticism it is necessary to overcome some of the (admittedly) tedious scrutiny to which I subject some of Thagard’s claims. The book covers a number of topics, including the war in Ukraine, inequality, and political conspiracy theories such as Pizzagate, but I focus primarily on the chapters on the Covid-19 pandemic and climate change, because they are areas on which I have some (admittedly limited) experience, and because those two topics share a couple of characteristics that I think aggravate a wound in the disinformation discourse in philosophy.
What pair of characteristics do the Covid-19 pandemic and climate change share? First of all, both subject areas are based on certain well-established propositions which, however, are questioned by a very vocal minority. Covid-19 was a real virus that killed millions of people. Carbon dioxide is a heat-trapping gas that has contributed in part to the observed warming of the planet over the last century and, if emissions are not reduced, will continue to warm the planet in the future. Some of the people who doubt the truth of these propositions have bad intentions; some of them are just confused.
If Thagard’s book is representative when it comes to claims about misinformation (and I think it is), people often want to do more than condemn the denial of these epistemologically safe claims. This points out the second characteristic that Covid-19 and climate change share. In both issue areas, people like Thagard want to condemn those who deny claims that are you are welcome epistemologically secure. These include claims, for example, that SARS-CoV-2 has a natural zoonotic origin; that all Covid-19 vaccines stopped spread of the virus, and provided overwhelmingly more benefits than risks to all; that models that made projections of the likely impact of adopting, or not adopting, various non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) always reflected the best available evidence; that climate change, if left unchecked, will kill a net 50,000,000 people from malnutrition, disease and heat stress between the years 2030 and 2050.(1) My view is that all of these claims are uncertain and at least some will prove to be true. certain. FAKE. (If you’re keeping score, the two that I’m pretty sure are false are the one about the NPI models and the one that all vaccines provided a net benefit to everyone, including previously infected healthy children.)
In the review, I show that in discussing these issues, Thagard makes a large number of factual errors. In fact, Thagard often gives an argument that says, with respect to a given claim C, “only careless and motivated reasoning could lead anyone to doubt C, because reasons x, y, and z,” but where at least some of x, y and z are contradicted by registration issues. To give an example, Thagard states that “(clinical) trials have shown that vaccines produced by Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca and other companies are effective in preventing the spread and reducing the severity of COVID-19.” But while it is obviously true that all of these trials demonstrated that the vaccines were effective in reducing gravity of Covid, not a single clinical trial showed that any Covid-19 vaccine was effective at all in preventing spread. In fact, the balance of real-world evidence strongly suggests that this is not the case. (If you doubt any of these statements, check your receipt review.)
The reason I tediously compared so many of Thagard’s claims with the best available evidence was to make a general point. And the general point is that many of the empirical claims that people fight over when it comes to policy decisions (such as enacting mask mandates, imposing lockdowns, requiring Covid-19 vaccines for children and young adults in the university, or supporting various climate measures) mitigation or adaptation measures) are really difficult to get to the bottom of and ultimately uncertain. I worry that this will be underestimated by many of the people who work on disinformation, especially those (like Thagard) who think the solution to disinformation lies in censorship, regulation of social media companies, or even enforcement. consumer pressure on social media companies to make regulation voluntarily.
I think many of the parties that contribute to this line of thinking are making a fundamental mistake. The mistake is to bundle into an all-or-nothing package whole sets of claims whose epistemological credentials are quite varied. It also usually involves the collapse of epistemic and moral concerns. To give just one example, consider the claim that the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine has No lives saved. We should all be extremely sure that this claim is false. And we should all be concerned that the people who make this claim are guilty of poor moral practices. When these convictions come into force, there is a natural moral-epistemic heuristic that leads many to assume that anyone even close to these claims is equally factually wrong and equally morally reprehensible. Suddenly, the conviction is not only that MMR vaccines have saved lives, is that each Covid-19 vaccine provides a net benefit to everyone, in any number of doses. Or even simply that there is incontrovertible evidence that climate change will take the form of a specific disaster at a specific time. We saw this again and again during the pandemic, where people equated skepticism about any particular Covid mitigation policy with “Covid denialism.”(2)
To some extent, I understand this moral-epistemic heuristic and I’m sure I employ it at times. But what I firmly believe is that it is not the job of philosophers, especially philosophers of science and social epistemologists, to try to find a philosophical foundation for this heuristic as if it were actually a safe way to reason. It is not a good way to reason and there are no shortcuts to discovering which policy-relevant facts are true by consulting the tribal affiliations of their exponents. And if Thagard’s book is any guide (and I think it is), this is exactly what much of the philosophical literature on disinformation is devoted to.
(Addendum: Justin specifically asked me to comment on Cailin O’Connor and James Weatherall’s work on misinformation, pointing me to this article they wrote in the Boston Review. Justin pointed out that what they say about the pandemic is not that different from what I say , for example: “This legitimate uncertainty means that experts and journalists who treat claims supporting hydroxychloroquine (and other controversial claims during the pandemic) as typical misinformation are misdiagnosing the situation.” that all of the philosophical literature on misinformation addresses this. In fact, O’Connor and Weatherall never say anything about what “typical misinformation” is. More importantly, they are not doing what Thagard and many other disinformers do: claiming to provide simple tools for identifying misinformation and making recommendations on how to remove it. It is noteworthy that critics often comment that readers are likely to find this aspect of his book “disappointing.” In fact, I would argue that his work has little to do with “misinformation” as it is commonly understood, but is simply a book about how falsehoods of any kind persist. But it is clear that Thagard does not equate misinformation with falsehood. He thinks that truths can be misinformation, and he believes that some misinformation is a particularly morally laden type of falsehood. And it is easy to see by examining the philosophical literature on misinformation that most contributors think that misinformation per se needs analysis, and that this is a novel topic in relation to the analysis of truth and falsehood that goes back at least to Aristotle).
(1) See the review for evidence that Thagard condemns people either explicitly for denying these claims or for making value judgments that implicitly assume these claims are known with certainty. (For example, he condemns people for valuing corporate profits at more than 50,000,000 lives, rather than considering the possibility that they consider the claim uncertain, or viewing the cost-benefit analysis in different terms.)
(2) In fact, even in the last few days, “Philosopher Jersey Flight” on Twitter/X said my review was “like people trying to argue that Covid wasn’t real.”
