The Pursuit of Truth

I pride myself on my “open mind” – although I do realise that I am as guilty as anyone of confirmation bias. On the Covid issue, I have followed Dr John Campbell whose daily videos I and so many others found so helpful during the pandemic. However, some of his recent posts have caused me concern for the airtime he has offered to some very dubiou. s characters – right-wing European MPs and a UK MP voicing anti-vaccine views. And, a few months back, he agreed to take part in a video series managed by the conspiracy historian Neil Oliver. At the time, I felt this was a serious lapse of judgement but, in the event, I was wrong. The discussion helped me understand his thinking - namely a slow and reluctant recognition that the UK government has, in recent years, betrayed the trust we have put in evidence-based science.

Ours is very sceptical generation – a combination of education and socal media has made us so. We now question the narratives put up by both the commercial and government worlds – our own explanations have become legitimised. I’ve written about “Fake News” only a couple of times – first at the start of the pandemic and then more recently when I wrote -

“when we decry those who deny climate change and the benefits of vaccination, WE are guilty of the same behaviour – namely that we choose to trust our own preferred groups of people. This is the basic message of a new book - Bad beliefs – “Why they happen to good people” (2022) - by philosopher Brian Levy which has just been made freely available by the publisher and author but which I don’t recommend because it contains so much jargon.

Very few of us have the scientific training to “follow the science”. What those of us who accept that climate change is a reality have done is defer to those with the expertise. Those who deny simply don’t share our faith in science – let alone government – and choose to trust those found on social media. Of course, there is the little matter of the “falsifiability” embodied in scientific method – requiring theories to be set aside when evidence emerges that challenges them. Something called The Institute for Arts and Ideas (IAI) expressed things rather nicely in its “aims” -

There is little that we can be certain about, but we can be confident that a time will come when our current beliefs and assumptions are seen as mistaken, our heroes - like the imperial adventurers of the past - are regarded as villains, and our morality is viewed as bigoted prejudice. So the IAI seeks to challenge the notion that our present accepted wisdom is the truth. It aims to uncover the flaws and limitations in our current thinking in search of alternative and better ways to hold the world.

The IAI was founded in 2008 with the aim of rescuing philosophy from technical debates about the meaning of words and returning it to big ideas and putting them at the centre of culture. Not in aid of a more refined cultural life, but as an urgent call to rethink where we are.

That rethinking is urgent and necessary because the world of ideas is in crisis. The traditional modernist notion that we are gradually uncovering the one true account of reality has been undermined by a growing awareness that ideas are limited by culture, history and language. Yet in a relative world the paradoxes of postmodern culture has left us lost and confused. We do not know what to believe, nor do we know how to find the answers. 

I’ve made no secret of my sympathies for those who see multiple realities – who assert that there is no single truth. How could I do otherwise when I have argued there were 57 different ways of understanding capitalism? Or when I celebrate that outsiders are generally more insightful y virtue of the sense of different worlds they bring with them? But in all this, I insist on proofs of falsifiability. Mere assertion is no use – what disturbs me is that the new “deep sceptics” (who bring the scepticism I have always admired into gross disrepute) have no such criterion – or preferred group. They seem to oppose just for the hell of it.

It’s at times such as this that I begin to question my admiration for such contrarians as Chris Hitchens who took such joy in the process of disputation. The profession of lawyers has that same inclination and is it, therefore, any wonder that the USA, having the largest number per capita of litigious lawyers, just happens to be the country in which “fake news” has become so dominant? The author of the book with which I started this post – Brian Levy – has a more readable article here in which he reasserts his basic point that we all need a group we can trust

No doubt, psychological biases play a role in what people end up believing (though the extent to which we are irrational when we rely on these biases is open to question). No doubt there are many irrational and uninformed people around. But these facts don’t explain the partisan split we see on surveys, or indeed the many bizarre claims attributed to our fellow citizens.

Many of these reports are hugely exaggerated; inflated through some combination of expressive responding, the use of partisan heuristics or the sheer unwillingness to admit ignorance and downright trolling. To the degree there is a partisan divide, it doesn’t arise from their stupidity or our rationality. It arises from the fact that we place our trust in different sources.

A simple question, therefore – where do we find the verifiable sources quoted by the “deep sceptics”??

Disinformation and Fake News – interim report was the result of the Select Committee’s interesting deliberations….….raising the sort of questions we are beginning to ask about how the commercial world is using social media and algorithms - and trying to give preliminary answers in terms citizens can understand. They are the same issues which Shoshana Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism deals with. The Select Committee’s Final Report – like all such reports – iwas written in exceptionally clear language.

The results of the fake news can be seen in Brexitannia (2017) - a thoughtful film of an almost sociological depth based on about 200 in-depth interviews the length and breadth of the UK. It’s reviewed here by Zero Anthropology. On this issue, I also recommend Dave Pollard’s latest post

update; The UK has just started a "Counter Disinformation Unit" which produced this useful video from Dr Campbell