Fake News, False Beliefs, and the Fallible Art of Knowledge Maintenance
Item Type
Author
Language
English
Abstract
The term ‘fake news’, it is argued in this chapter, captures a novel kind of social-epistemic dysfunction that arises from systemic distortions of established processes of creating, disseminating, and consuming news-like content. Navigating informational environments populated by fake news requires the cultivation of epistemic routines that reduce our exposure to misleading and deceptive information, while at the same time continuing to allow us to partake in the collective growth of knowledge. Shifting the focus to epistemic routines steers a middle path between two frequently encountered dichotomous responses to the problem of fake news: viz., between emphasizing the individual’s responsibility to ‘think critically and check one’s sources’ and advocating technological tweaks (such as automated fact-checking). While epistemic agents ought to be held responsible for the epistemic routines they commit themselves to, there is also a collective need for making the predictable effects of such choices transparent to individuals, wherever technologically possible.
Subject
Fake news
Attention economy
Epistemic coverage
Epistemic routines
Prebunking
Publication Title
Publication Year
2021
Publication Date
2021
Publisher
Source
University Press Scholarship
License
ISBN
978-0-19-886397-7
Publication Place
Oxford