Misinformation, Rhetoric, and (Post)Modernism

What can Plato tell us about today’s dominant mode of fact-based argumentation and the consensus it seeks?

M.L.D.

Oct 11, 2024

This is the first part in a three part series on misinformation, so-called “postmodernism,” and the nature of truth. It is in part a response to

Dan Williams

over at

Conspicuous Cognition

. Dan has written a lot about misinformation and those who claim that we need a “science of misinformation” to help the voting public sift the truth from the lies. In particular, it is partly a response to his controversial claim that “The deep question of social epistemology—the genuine puzzle—is not why people hold false beliefs. It is why people sometimes form true beliefs.” It is also a post about why Plato’s Gorgias, named after a famous ancient Greek orator who is sometimes associated with the dread “sophists,” is still relevant today, particularly when considering these topics. In the first part I lay out an alternative framework for understanding misinformation that borrows heavily from Dan’s own excellent work while pointing to some areas of disagreement. In the second part I provide some context on the Gorgias and an optional summary of the dialogue for those readers who have not read it themselves. In the third part I offer a reading of the Gorgias that hopes to clarify what is at stake in the question of misinformation today, and some preliminary conclusions that might be drawn from it.

Fake News and Misinformation

“Fake news” started off taking during the 2016 election as a way of describing how the right-wing mediasphere packaged and spun Donald Trump’s inveterate lying. By 2017, Trump’s own communications professionals were using terms like “Alternative Facts.” Trump may lie, said the MAGA crowd, but the left does it too. By 2020 terms like “misinformation” were being flung back and forth in battles over what was “true,” what was “false,” and what was merely “misleading,” on topics ranging from covid vaccines and the spread of viruses to white fragility and antiracism. Right-wing media, from small fry podcasts to the most popular cable news channel in America, thrive on reactionary stories about how everyone to their left is a Communist, Marxist, “woke” zealot who wants to destroy America, and make a lot of money advertising what are basically scams to their audience. “Mainstream media” like the New York Times, pop stars like Taylor Swift, and even scientific journals like Nature, spend their diminishing reputational capital openly endorsing Kamala Harris and running often dubious “fact-checks”on Elon Musk tweets, while decrying those to their right as fascists, racists, and bigots who actually want to overthrow democracy. Left-wing media personalities on podcasts and Youtube mostly criticize each other, and are content to play to a shrinking audience that has been disillusioned by the fizzling out of Bernie Sanders’s back-to-back losses in the primaries.

Now, in 2024, many people think it is worse than ever. To everyone neither captured by the cult of personality surrounding Donald Trump, nor dependent on stoking right-wing outrage for their livelihood, however, it seems obvious that the right-wing media lies more often, cares less about facts, and is more comfortable making intentionally deceptive arguments in order to advance their agenda. Trump repeats a lie he saw “on tv”, and J. D. Vance doubles down on the “Haitians are eating our cats” narrative. Trump surrounds himself with deranged people like Laura Loomer, while outlets like Tenet Media, cofounded by Laura Chen, are indicted by the FBI for receiving millions of dollars from Russia to pay internet commentators producing pro-Russian propaganda aimed at the MAGA crowd. After 8 years of Donald Trump, we still haven’t seemed to hit rock bottom for some of these people. How much farther can the floor on epistemic hygiene be?

As Dan and others have pointed out though, the media rarely lies outright.1 This has therefore led to a temptation to broaden the concept of “misinformation” to include “misleading” information, which fails to provide the “appropriate” context, at least as determined by the fact-checkers. But as Dan points out, there can’t be a science of misinformation because:

All communication is necessarily selective. We must choose what to say and what not to say. Therefore authors will inevitably choose not to say a lot, and that choice is a subjective one.
Misleadingness as a category is overbroad, since even the most “reliable” and grounded communicators cannot control how their audience interprets what is being said. If something is “misleading” when the audience forms incorrect or inappropriate conclusions, then everything can be misleading because even such places as the NYT, favored by many fact-checkers, have many readers with false beliefs and unpopular/inappropriate opinions.
Cognitive biases are an ineradicable feature of human brains. We are all human animals,2 and cognition runs on a substrate of meat. We can work to ameliorate these biases by being aware of them and the limits they impose. But there is no God’s-eye view of the truth untainted by these biases.

There are social determinants of belief that are only loosely tethered to truth-seeking. Socially adaptive beliefs are adopted in response to incentives like status, inclusion in the in-group, and money. Alliances can encourage the adoption of beliefs out of political expediency. Science itself is value-laden and shaped by social determinants. All of the above factors make a broader science of “misinformation,” one that seeks to correct “misleading” statements and police broader conclusions about the world, impossible.

Ordinarily, as we move about the world in our day-to-day lives, we form beliefs aimed at truth. Our brains have evolved to reliably tell us where that chair is so that we don’t bump into it. We have learned how to prepare or acquire food to sustain us. We learn the social norms that permit us to do our jobs and reliably navigate through the world. As our web of beliefs extends outwards, we form mental models about things like politics, war, theology, and economics that cannot be directly reality-tested by ourselves. But the world is too big and too complex for anyone to fully understand. We inevitably have to rely on reports from others who claim to be in a position to tell us the truth about things that we cannot access ourselves, and even then, we can only take in so much information during our short lifespans. Forming beliefs about the wider world is inevitably an ad hoc, desultory affair, governed by social incentives and aesthetic preferences as much, if not more than, a desire to seek the truth. Dan identifies four major biases affecting belief-formation about the wider world not directly connected to our day-to-day functioning:

Motivated cognition
Coalitional psychology
Advocacy-biased cognition
Social signaling

Once we factor in all of our cognitive biases, how can we really trust that any of us have true beliefs about anything beyond some very basic facts in our local environment? Dan points to one constraint on belief formation that might offer some hope:

As Ziva Kunda puts it,
‘[T]here is considerable evidence that people are more likely to arrive at conclusions that they want to arrive at, but their ability to do so is constrained by their ability to construct seemingly reasonable justifications for these conclusions.’

In other words, people, generally speaking, want to have coherent worldviews. Not all people, not all the time. But, in general, when conflict between two or more beliefs are brought to someone’s attention, they seek to resolve the conflict somehow: either abandoning one or more beliefs, or qualifying one or more beliefs, or rationalizing why an apparent conflict is not a real conflict, or burying the conflict through distraction. Otherwise, the conflict sits in the background like grit in the gears of cognition, more or less vexing, depending on how important the belief is to a person’s sense of identity and equanimity.

Despite his strident skepticism of “misinformation” and his pessimism about the “marketplace of ideas,” Dan believes that the ideals of open, liberal societies are “some of humanity’s most important and most fragile achievements.” The category of “misinformation” can be conceived of narrowly as pertaining to the truth and falsehood of “facts.” It is possible, and admirable, to point out when people are lying or mistaken about facts. It can also be conceived of more broadly as pertaining to “misleading” media that include technically true “facts” but deceptive contexts. The politically-motivated application of the broader concept by ostensibly “objective” media insidiously erodes public trust in the institutions and norms that scaffold our society’s collective knowledge-making.

The problem is not so much with facts. Falsehoods are not actually that common and oftentimes don’t have much impact. People do disagree, often and vociferously, about the context—which includes not only other facts, but hierarchies of values and goals, “common sense,” likely outcomes, morality, ways of life, and aesthetics. “Misinformation” does not directly cause this divergence in context. According to Dan, misinformation is a symptom of societal pathologies: “institutional distrust, political polarization, and anti-establishment worldviews.” I would point out that the relationship between misinformation and epistemology is probably better conceived of as a large, complicated feedback loop.3 Audience demand drives content, which influences the audience, which demands more content. Despite assertions to the contrary, people are routinely persuaded of things, by both good and bad arguments. Rational arguments can usually be made for two (or more!) opposed positions. This is the basis of our legal system, which has long roots extending back through English history to Roman law and Greek oratory. If rational arguments can be made for contradictory positions, “reason” itself cannot reliably lead us to truth. There’s no reason to think that “the best argument will win out in the end” unless we define the “best argument” as the one that ultimately wins. Arguments “win” through persuasion. So how does persuasion actually work then?

The Facticity of Facts

Both proponents and critics of “the science of misinformation” end up talking a lot about facts and reason. If arguments are to persuade us to believe true things, they should be well-reasoned, and they should appeal to facts. Cognitive bias is the spectre haunting this space of reasons. Biases are the irrational underbelly of discourse, motivating and influencing arguments that are largely conducted by offering reasons for believing this or that. Rationalization is the process of attributing reasons to a belief, and is often pejorative, because it is most often used to describe the process of attributing a reason for something post hoc. There is also good evidence that many, if not most reasons are derived post hoc. But the greatest thing about reason, and its cognate, rationality, is that a well-reasoned argument is “true” regardless of who made it or when it is made, and we can recursively apply reason to rational arguments to find out whether they are indeed well-reasoned. Today, marshaling facts and data is the most valorized form of argumentation. Experts in every field claim to cut through the bullshit with facts, figures, datasets, and regressions. Potential liabilities to this approach are well-known, but our previously unimaginable capacity for data collection, analysis, and presentation has inundated us with facts ready for use.

The ubiquity of data in today’s mediasphere perhaps blinds us to how unusual this situation is in the grand sweep of history, particularly when it comes to what kinds of arguments are being made, by whom, and for whom. Thousands and thousands of papers about covid-19, purportedly analyzing data, were posted on the internet every month in early 2020. We have several hours of video of an obscure data nerd who has synthesized vast quantities of information debating the origins of covid. Every week the NYT includes creative infographics that are intended to help its readers process torrents of information concerning the background and reporting of its headline stories. Conspiracy theories proliferate on social media platforms, with cranks pulling together video footage, timelines, and ominous-seeming numerical coincidences. People pore over legal briefings filled with dates and times and possibly criminal acts to make arguments about January 6th. True crime content pulls in psychologists to make scientific arguments about criminal pathologies. Graham Hancock gets a Netflix deal to turn his specious books into a spectacular bricolage that pieces together shots from exotic locations, real archaelogical research, and wild speculation.

The point is not that facts are good or that facts are bad. It is merely to point out that fact-driven arguments are what I would call the dominant form of argumentation today. This is especially true because facts lend a veneer of expertise. As a factual matter, it is also true that many, many arguments are made that do not even pretend to rely on facts. Middlebrow, mainstream magazines routinely feature essays that appeal to its readers’ sensibilities and forget to make a well-reasoned argument along the way. Social media like Twitter/X spawn arguments all the time that are no more than name-calling. Most people reading this would probably point to right-wing media arguments as driven more by emotion, than facts. We might say that this is a consequence of the right-wing’s anti-establishment culture that is suspicious of institutions, the “deep state,” intellectuals, and expertise. Gilding an argument with facts is still often useful for Tucker Carlson, but getting too bogged down in the facts can be suspicious, unless the facts explicitly claim to be against the mainstream consensus.

Facts, of course, do not make claims on their own, but conflating the mere assertion of a fact with the prosecution of an argument is commonplace. In saying that fact-driven arguments are the dominant form of argumentation today, I mean that fact-driven arguments are the form or style of communication around which other arguments tend to position themselves. The proponents of “misinformation science” see them as the gold standard. The mainstream institutions often differentiate themselves from their opponents in the culture wars through them. And the anti-establishment, conspiratorial, “do your own research” crowd, both left and right, insist on a distinction between good facts and bad facts, “alternative (true) facts” and factitious facts for sheeple.

Saying that data-driven factual argument is the dominant form today also implies that this has not always been the case. Not too long ago, dialectical thinking was a very influential form of argument. In medieval Europe, scholasticism dominated, blending theologically inflected thinking with Aristotelianism. Ancient Rome highly valued rhetorical skills that were initially developed several hundred years earlier, and the Hellenistic empires spread Platonic thought and a somewhat different dialectical thinking in the form of Socratic dialogue. At the dawn of agriculture, arithmetical accounting and astrological reasoning were prominent. All of these forms of thinking involve facts to some degree, even the super-category of the “theological.”

In distinguishing today’s data-driven form of argumentation I am pointing to a quantitative difference that leads to a qualitative difference in kind, and which evolved out of Enlightenment-era scientific norms and practices. “Enlightenment” is a fraught term, carrying a lot of baggage. For the purposes of the following argument, I am not referring to an “objective” periodization of history, nor am I comfortable with assuming any kind of uncomplicated “progressive” narrative of history. I am instead gesturing at a widespread self-conception that we, modern people, are living on the other side of a momentous breaking point in history separating us from those ancients who lived in the past. Life is different now.

Yet, despite how obvious it is that life is different now, we have never really been modern, or at least not in the ways that would seem to matter for those worried about misinformation. The rapidly changing science during the early days of the covid pandemic presented a host of challenges to the nascent science of misinformation as yesterday’s fact became today’s fiction. This problem is only exacerbated when thinking on longer timelines. Is there even a way to coherently think about “misinformation” before modernity? Are pre-modern maps “misleading”?

*The Hereford Mappa Mundi*, about 1300, Hereford Cathedral, England

Conceptions of the solar system? Theories of medicine? Or are “misinformation science” and its truths historically contingent? Is this a science that makes no claims beyond the present? Bruno Latour says that what defines modernity is not “the invention of humanism, with the emergence of the sciences, with the secularization of society, or with the mechanization of the world.”4 The “Constitution” of modernity, the thing that governs its production of knowledge and knowledge-as-power, is a set of paradoxes about the simultaneous immanence and transcendence of nature, society, and an absent god. Drawing on Shapin and Schaffer’s work on the conflict between Thomas Hobbes and Robert Boyle, Latour argues that this modern “Constitution” became the dominant set of assumptions governing arguments over truth.

As Shapin and Schaffer argue, we cannot import our own conception of “science” as an independent source of truth, separate from the pronouncements of royal and religious authority, back into the latter 17th c. debates between Boyle and Hobbes, because at the time there simply was no such thing as “science” as we conceive of it today. Boyle’s experiments with the vacuum pump overturned older theories about an invisible aether and suggested new insights into the behavior of gases. For Hobbes, however, the ability to appeal to any authority higher than the sovereign State would threaten the unity of society. For him, the only scientific results that could compel assent were logical truths arrived at through deduction, like the truths of geometry. Scientists in their laboratories were essentially appealing to “immaterial spirits” as authorities separate from sovereign power that might provide a basis for rebellion and civil war.

That Hobbes would take issue with these experiments at all might be confusing to modern readers. How could one dispute the results of the experiments? Aren’t they self-evident? But as Latour emphasizes, Boyle himself conceived of scientific practices as within the realm of politics. His vacuum pump gave testimony, in analogy to evidentiary practices of the English courtroom, acting like non-human witnesses. What he was doing in his laboratory was not so different from accepted state mechanisms, and the facts spoke for themselves. Hobbes’s objections are not so ridiculous, as they might appear, however. Boyle’s facts were fabricated through a complicated machine of technological ingenuity in the artificial environment of the laboratory. Mute laboratory phenomena must be represented in court by the scientist, who mediates and translates for them.

In a sense the real problem is how to interpret the local facts of the laboratory in light of the bigger picture. In what sense are the facts of the laboratory universal facts that apply everywhere and always? Are they facts about a transcendent nature or they are contingent facts like witness testimony in a courtroom? Latour draws a parallel to Hobbes’s political theory. Hobbes’s State Leviathan is explicitly predicated on the immanence of an implied human contract between free subjects who submit to a sovereign out of rational self interest. But to what extent is the society he theorizes also predicated on Hobbes’s materialist philosophy, with bodies colliding into bodies according to the transcendent laws of an external Nature? Latour claims that the modern Constitution is built on the dual paradoxes of a Nature that is both immanently constructed in the laboratory and infinitely surpasses us in its transcendence; and a Society that we are immanently free to construct but which infinitely surpasses us in its transcendence. Further, Nature and Society are to “remain absolutely distinct,” facts about nature and its laws are universal, exceeding the bounds of laboratories and courtrooms, while facts about society are predicated on contingent human action. There is an unbridgeable divide between subjects and objects.

The important point for Latour is that the construction or “discovery” of knowledge under this modern Constitution depends on the work of translation and mediation by the representatives of humans (in politics) and nonhuman objects (in science). This work of translation and mediation leads to the proliferation of “hybrids,” mixed entities of society and nature: laboratories, universities, government bureaus, economists, and other institutions that can mobilize transcendent laws for immanent ends while using immanent means to discover transcendent laws. Yet these hybrids are rendered invisible and unthinkable by a modern Constitution that demands nature and society remain entirely separate realms, and they can remain invisible because the Constitution allows a shuttling back and forth between the two ends, immanence and transcendence, of its constitutive paradoxes. On the one hand this unleashes the productive forces of science and technology to transform society, suggesting a definitive break between the “moderns” and the “ancients.” On the other hand this leads to a complete disintegration of traditional ontologies, and the emergence of a modern temporality with an asymmetry between an eternal, unchanging Nature and a contingent Social history of change.

So why is it that Latour says “we have never been modern”? One way of approaching this would be to say that the “linguistic turn” in the humanities, from Wittgenstein to Quine to Derrida to Foucault and the French theorists, was really about noticing the work of translation and mediation that undergirds knowledge production in the modern regime. Suddenly it became impossible for anyone paying attention to ignore Latour’s monstrous “hybrids.” To recognize this is to recognize that we have never really been modern in the sense that we have never really achieved the total separation of Nature and Society. It is an acknowledgement that this was always an impossible thing to do. If “modernity” is a frame of mind, then it requires a self-blindness to the work of mediation by hybrids that sustains the illusion of separation. Latour’s position is therefore a bit counterintuitive, relying upon a retrospective vantage point from which we can see that despite claiming to have separated subjects and objects, society and nature, the so-called moderns ended up thoroughly intertwining science and its products with society and its laws. His position almost sidesteps the fierce battle over the status of “postmodernism,” or what comes after “modernism.”

The Incoherence of the Anti-Postmodern

Claiming to be a postmodernist, today, often signals the end of anything like common sense. To appeal to the lay reader it is usually advantageous to explicitly deny being a postmodernist. One common definition of postmodernism originates with Jean-François Lyotard, who described it as a “rejection of meta- or master narratives.” Fred Jameson’s influential Marxist definition links it to the cultural system under “late capitalism.” Positioned against “modernism” as an artistic movement, “postmodernism” is characterized in aesthetic terms by a “waning of affect” and the devolution of artistic production into ahistorical pastiche. It is also associated, though in a highly contested way, with such things as the “linguistic turn” and “deconstruction” and “critical theory.” But in many online arguments “postmodernism” is a bogeyman that involves denying science, or denying that there is such a thing as “reality.” I think that actually much of the debate about postmodernism, science and scientism, so-called “Enlightenment values,” critical theory, feminism, and the rest of the concepts roped into the culture wars hinges precisely on this question of reality and its existence. People very much fear a slide into nihilistic relativism. But the same people who point to “Enlightenment values” and rationality as grounding their belief that “facts speak for themselves” usually fail to take seriously the various critiques of rationality that are often lumped together under postmodernism. It would take a much longer detour to explore the full implications of this, but suffice to say that even a hack like Stephen Hicks is not entirely wrong when he points to Kantian thought as already undermining, in the 18th century, the supposed foundations of a naive “Enlightenment reason,” which, in many people’s minds, guarantees an objective reality “out there” that we can make definitively true statements about.

The argument I am trying to make here is that we have never been modern, and we have always been postmodern. To be postmodern is to be premodern. Modernity is an illusion. The “science of misinformation” is, and will always be, impossible, at least until it becomes disillusioned with its pretenses to be a “modern” science. Fact-checking with a narrower aim, that restricts its focus to the “testimony” of nonhuman objects without issuing a court ruling on what those facts mean is admirable and good. Fact-checking that wants to rule on what is “misleading” and what is not—essentially issuing a ruling from the bench on what facts mean—is a fool’s errand, conflating “context” with the bare assertion of ever more mute facts. Fact-checking that wants to police not just facts but meaning-making misunderstands what context really is. Context is not just on the side of the communicator. The audience brings its own context to interpret new information in light of their preexisting understanding of reality. Or as Tyler Cowen says, “context is that which is scarce.”

Another way to frame what is at issue here is to say that modernism is obsessed with facts and postmodernism is obsessed with the form that facts take. I am aware that this can be a somewhat controversial thing to say.5 But when I say that modernism is obsessed with facts, and postmodernism is obsessed with form, I am kind of playing off of a dualist, colloquial understanding of a “scientific,” “reality-based” discourse on the one hand, and a skeptical discourse influenced by poststructuralism and postmodernism that privileges who says things and how they say them, on the other. Both sides of this dichotomy can be weaponized as straw men, and both sides are often wielded rather clumsily as a cudgel by people who are inarticulate, ignorant, arguing in bad faith, or all of the above.

If fact-driven arguments are the dominant mode of argumentation today, there is also an increasing awareness of its limits. As Ezra Klein, and others indicate, Walter Lippman and Marshall McLuhan are experiencing a bit of a resurgence, and they’ve been right all along. People live in constructed realities, and the medium really is the message. Are Lippman and McLuhan postmodernists? Well, that depends on how we define postmodernism. But like Kant, they both pay tremendous attention to how content is mediated through form and vice versa. They also have a keen interest in how persuasion works and the role it plays in constructing people’s mental image of the world. Both care about rhetoric. So what do critics of “misinformation science” get wrong, if anything? I think something gets lost in trying to turn rhetoric into a pure, “modern,” data-driven science.

Let’s take Dan Williams, a sophisticated critic, or as he sometimes says, a critic of the critics, as an example. He is fully aware that people construct “bespoke” realities. He argues that anyone thinking that true ideas will necessarily win out in a “marketplace of ideas” because they are true is naive. Discourse is better thought of as a “marketplace of rationalizations.” In ordinary life people make decisions, and are sometimes asked to provide rationalizations for making those decisions. They then bear the consequences of those decisions, and everyone impacted can judge whether or not the rationalizations are any good. People also value rationalizations for stitching together their beliefs into coherent wholes, and so there is a demand for rationalizations that explain, bolster, and argue for beliefs that aren’t tied in any direct way to decisions that offer consequences as feedback. Commentators, pundits, wonks, and influencers can gain money and status by satisfying the demand for rationalizations. Both sides win, but because there is no clear, direct feedback—no skin in the game—there is no incentive to provide rationalizations that are, in the relevant sense, true. Instead, many, if not most people seek out content that preaches to the choir. Dan explains all of this carefully and thoroughly, laying out the psychological research on cognitive biases, citing to evidence from studies on whether people are persuaded by rational arguments, and leveraging insights from sociology. Despite believing that the ideals of an open, liberal society are good, he is not afraid to show how pessimistic he is that we, as a society, might actually be too laden with cognitive biases to make the good decisions we need to in order to flourish in the complex world we have created. At times he seems to fault those who think that rational people might disagree about the truth of something for failing to realize that we might just be too benighted to ever develop “responsible, rational, accurate beliefs about reality.”

Dan makes the counter-intuitive claim that rather than wondering why people can believe such obviously false things we should be wondering how anyone can have any true beliefs. For Dan, “the truth is not the default.” Everything is so mediated, everything filters through so many fallible links in the chain of knowledge, and error creeps in at every step. His standard for “responsible, rational, and accurate” knowledge seems very high. Does Dan really think that premodern people had hardly any knowledge that met that standard? Have we moderns, the “beneficiaries of the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, and centuries of cultural and institutional development designed to overcome the many sources of ignorance and misperception in human judgment,” been able to produce so much more knowledge than the ancients that we now take knowledge for granted? Many of Dan’s arguments are quite persuasive. And as I suggested above, many of them are fact-driven arguments intelligently prosecuted by reference to empirical data. But one also gets the sense that Dan is preaching to the choir.6 His fact-driven arguments are often about how fact-driven arguments are equivocal at best. Good arguers, like lawyers, can make persuasive, rational arguments for either side of an issue. Even meta-arguments about the limits of rational argument rely on reason in order to persuade. But Dan presumably believes that his arguments are true, or at least more true than the alternatives.

The question then, is if Dan believes that he believes true things, how does he justify that belief? I am by no means an expert in epistemology, but I do not think that analytic arguments about justified true beliefs and Gettier problems and the like help us much with this question. The problem, as I see it, is that fact-driven arguments, both the sophisticated ones Dan makes, and the less sophisticated ones out there, tend to invoke an objective reality comprising facts that speak for themselves. They are, in other words, a “modernist” mode of argument in the terms I set out above. Content, in other words, speaks for itself, while the form is more or less implicitly considered to be irrelevant. I do not mean to imply that good arguers making fact-driven arguments do not care at all about things like clarity, concision, and arrangement. But their arguments are often presented in the American Strunk and White style of writing that minimizes style in order to bring forward the content. The key point is that by assuming an objective reality, the speaker/writer can proceed by way of deduction to arrive at ironclad conclusions. Deduction is a coercive form of argumentation. A correctly reasoned deductive argument can only be disputed by questioning the premises. The problem arises when a reader, looking for rationalizations in the marketplace of ideas, follows a chain of reasoning that started from what looked like an unobjectionable set of factual premises to arrive at a conclusion they disagree with. This happens all the time because people have different images of reality. So when a researcher or pollster asks the reader if they changed their mind in response to this well-reasoned, rational argument, and the reader says no, people start worrying about a (mis)information environment that could cause readers to ignore deductive logic and believe irrational things.

People start worrying about fake news and relativistic conceptions of the truth because they are immersed in discourse where the dominant mode of argumentation is fact- and data-driven, and arguments proceed by deductive logic, but every communication assumes a different version of truth in its premises, because truth is necessarily indexed to one’s picture of reality. The fact-driven mode of argumentation has a strong tendency to obscure this by taking a shared reality for granted. The thing about persuasion is that it is not in any direct sense a choice. We cannot really choose to believe something. We either believe or we don’t, or we assign a probabilistic credence value to it, and we do all this in response to how persuasive we find evidence and arguments registered by our senses and offered by human or nonhuman entities. We seek out rationalizations for our beliefs because there is a strong drive to have our reality cohere and hang together without provoking a lot of cognitive dissonance. Rationalizations that cannot be readily integrated into this picture of reality might just be peremptorily rejected. Moreover, fact-driven arguments tend to assume an egalitarianism of facts. Facts just are, and they are all equally true. People see things differently.

We might call someone’s picture of reality an Umwelt after Jackob von Uexküll’s term for the life-world of animals. Thinking about the more obvious case of animals lets us analogize to the human animal. Uexküll emphasizes the mediatedness of our environment, and how that depends on our biology. Each Umwelt is constituted by a series of “carriers of significance” or “marks” which are the only things that interest an animal. The cacophonous environment is distilled into a few key indicators that capture an animal’s attention and drive its behavior. Giorgio Agamben describes Uexküll’s theory like this:

Too often, he affirms, we imagine that the relations a certain animal subject has to the things in its environment take place in the same space and in the same time as those which bind us to the objects in our human world. This illusion rests on the belief in a single world in which all livings beings are situated. Uexküll shows that such a unitary world does not exist, just as a space and a time that are equal for all living things do not exist. The fly, the dragonfly, and the bee that we observe flying next to us on a sunny day do not move in the same world as the one in which we observe them, nor do they share with us—or with each other—the same time and the same space

Uexküll says that every environment-world is a closed unity in itself, and likens an animal’s stimulus-response loop to a musical unity, like notes from the “keyboard on which nature performs the supratemporal and extraspatial symphony of signification.” Like the dragonfly or the tick, our neighbors also have their own individual Umwelt, each one more or less similar to ours depending on the vagaries of chance and choice. For each person, some facts are more relevant and some less, for each fact is not encountered as an isolated instance of truth, but as one piece in a much larger structure defined not only by its content but by the morphological structure of its interconnections.

If this is all starting to sound a little too postmodern, I should point out that fact-driven arguments are neither good nor bad. They are often quite persuasive. They are indispensable for sorting truth from falsehood. While I wouldn’t claim to be a rationalist, I think I am more rationalist than most other people I know, and that they would say the same thing. Nonetheless, I think that the Achilles heel of fact-driven arguments, as a mode, is that they are incapable of persuading those who occupy an Umwelt sufficiently different from the reified objective reality assumed by the arguer. Further, I think it is oftentimes counterproductive to adopt a “modernist” framework that insists on a transcendent objective reality that we can unambiguously refer to in order to deductively coerce consent to our conclusions. It probably isn’t better to adopt a self-consciously “postmodernist” framework either, whatever that might mean. What am I suggesting instead is to discard the illusion that we were ever modern to begin with. This can be hard to give up, especially because “objective” authority is so useful in appeals to authority, and appeals to authority are simply unavoidable in a world as complex as ours. What would we get in return?

In return, I think, we get an answer to Dan’s question about why people believe anything true at all. Rather than think that ancient people had nothing worthy of being called knowledge we can assert that actually, they might have known a lot of useful things. It also reopens the door to other modes of argumentation, including modes that might be more effective in certain situations for persuading others to adopt true beliefs—i.e. those beliefs that we think are true because we have good reasons to believe them, reasons that are based in evidence, and which add up to a satisfying, coherent worldview, about which we can make some limited predictions that we are highly confident in. We can, in other words, learn about contemporary discourse and its limits by taking a longer historical view. In particular, I want to reinject the liberal art of rhetoric into the discussion about “misinformation.”

In part 2, I will look at Plato’s Gorgias. Going back to the Gorgias is interesting because it lets us take a look at what was and wasn’t persuasive more than two thousand years ago, and compare it to today. How does the argument work at the level of content? What about at the level of form? How do various interpretations change what the Gorgias means? What counts as knowledge? Ultimately, I think the dialogue offers a compelling account of what Plato thinks “truth” really is and how he thinks we can be persuaded by it.

Metaconcepts

Discussion about this post