Fake
news, dodgy experts, mendacious media: it's more crucial than ever to
work out what's true ourselves. Doing that means first overcoming our
own biases
Carolyn Drake/Magnum Photos
Inside knowledge: How to tell truth from lies
POST-TRUTH
was 2016’s word of the year, according to Oxford Dictionaries. Not
least in the furious debates surrounding the UK Brexit vote and Donald
Trump’s election as US president, claims and counter claims of fake
news, dodgy experts and media mendacity have been flying around.
For a hardcore of relativist philosophers, that’s all a storm in a
teacup – there’s no such thing as objective truth that exists outside
our minds. Nonsense, harrumphs Peter van Inwagen
of the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. If a doctor says I have
cancer of the gut, he says, “whether that is true depends on what is
going on in my gut, and not on what is going on in my doctor’s mind”.
Accept that, and the challenge – in the post-truth era as much as in
the pre-post-truth era – is to ensure that our inside knowledge is
aligned as far as possible with outside truth.
That’s hard, not least because in a complex society we rely on the knowledge of others, even when we don’t realise it. Ask someone if they know how an everyday object such as a ballpoint pen works and they’ll generally say yes, until you ask them to explain it. It turns out that our confidence in our own knowledge is often based on the certainty that somebody else knows.
Link: https://youtu.be/twwd_LLVmDM
That’s hard, not least because in a complex society we rely on the knowledge of others, even when we don’t realise it. Ask someone if they know how an everyday object such as a ballpoint pen works and they’ll generally say yes, until you ask them to explain it. It turns out that our confidence in our own knowledge is often based on the certainty that somebody else knows.
Link: https://youtu.be/twwd_LLVmDM
noun: obfuscation; plural noun: obfuscations
- the action of making something obscure, unclear, unintelligible,dark, or difficult to understand."when confronted with sharp questions they resort to obfuscation" i.e. Trump Admin. apologists K. Conway and Spicer
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