Comment by nyokodo
1 year ago
> Perhaps the idea of a "fact" is something that needs revisiting as a concept
The field of epistemology is ancient. The problem of what can be known and how we can know is even older. I don't think this conflict raises any fundamentally new questions on an epistemic level.
This is a terrible point because what philosophers know have nothing to do with what the general public needs to learn right now. The idea of a "fact" absolutely needs revising for almost all people.
I don't think that fact is an 'idea'; if something can't be proven to be true, it isn't a fact. We should consider calling it something else.
The concept that needs revising is our understanding of social media posts as being automatically considered 'facts'.
If it can't be proven, if we can't trust any vehicle to independently verify its veracity, then we simply have to check as many sources as we can and consider it as a possibility, not a fact.
No, but decline of traditional journalism, social media, artificial intelligence, and post-truth society sure calls into question a lot of best practices to figure out probable facts.
Epistemology hasn't changed; but the engineering of how one ensures they are probably reliably informed sure has.
On the flipside, we have a lot more information about how brains tend to process and weigh information to form beliefs.
> I don't think this conflict raises any fundamentally new questions on an epistemic level.
There are plenty of philosophers that rejected the idea that objective consensus is possible, even more so when faced with assigning a truth value to arbitrary phrases. Off the top of my head, both Hume and Kant noted the impossibility of true posteriori certainty. You're quite correct that this is well-tread territory, but you're wrong to think that there's some widely agreed-upon, well-defined theory of truth or knowledge.
Pragmatically, we're completely immersed in floating signifiers and appear to rely on them for fundamental communication, so I'm more arguing for a move to discussion of degrees of certainty & consensus rather than a binary understanding of knowledge.
(...and this is even before diving into gettier problems!)