This is a continuation of last week’s post about the criteria we can use to evaluate claims.  A claim that meets all of those conditions is likely to be epistemically justified, though if a claim meets most of these conditions but not all of them, then it will still probably be reasonable to believe it in many situations.  The following hypothetical examples demonstrate the importance of each condition in its own right:

Example 1: Imagine someone who reads a certain scientific claim about the human hand relating to the internal neurological configuration that is common to human hands.  This claim is found in a science book that is written by a neuroscientist with a PhD in this field and is employed by an accredited university.  This scientist has a good track record because he has written academic papers in the past that contained claims relating to neurology that have been verified.  The claim currently being evaluated is coherent with the known laws of nature and obviously does not at all rely on any kind of supernatural assertions.  The one evaluating the claim also understands that neuroscientists do studies on test subjects and have certain instruments through which they can examine human neurology quite closely and come to reasonable conclusions, so it makes sense that the source of the claim could be epistemically justified to make this claim.

In this example, the claim being evaluated meets all of the conditions and is epistemically justified.  One should then have a high degree of confidence that this claim applies to their own hand, although there is still reason to be slightly less than utterly certain of this belief as they can from simply observing the basic properties of a hand (number of fingers, the simple fact that it has skin) with the naked eye or common glasses.  This is because one does not see the specific neurological details clearly and unambiguously from simply looking at a hand and therefore one could reasonably harbor some doubt regarding the accuracy of this claim.  Conclusion: All conditions are met and the claim is justified.

Example 2: Imagine a situation similar to Example 1 except that this scientist has a bad track record.  The scientist who wrote the book has credentials and the claims are naturalizable and easily coherent with existing knowledge, but some other claims that this person made were shown to be false by independent tests and investigations.  Due to this, the claims made by this scientist no longer have sufficient credibility for them to be epistemically justified.  Although if all of the other conditions are met besides the track record condition, then one can probably not be faulted for presuming that the claims made by this scientist are true.  The same can be said for any situation where most, but not all, of the conditions are met.  In such situations, it might make sense for one to presume that the claim is true despite it not being epistemically justified.  Conclusion: Most conditions are met, but the claimant lacks credibility so the claim is not justified.

Example 3: Imagine a situation similar to Example 1 except that this scientist, despite having a good track record, is not credentialed by any respected academic institution.  In this situation, the scientist has made nothing but accurate claims in the past and independent tests have verified this.  Despite this fact, this scientist does not have much respect among other scientists who specialize in the same field.  Perhaps this is because the scientist has legitimately come to his conclusions but has done so from some brand new procedures or methods that are not yet well understood or accepted by the scientific community.  If this is the case, then this scientist’s work will probably be accepted by other scientists eventually and this should earn the scientist respect as well.  Until this happens though, claims made by this scientist are not epistemically justified.  The scientist might well be justified to believe in the claims he or she makes because such claims might come from the scientist making reasonable conclusions that come from a certain set of evidence.  But those who simply hear these claims and are aware of the circumstances surrounding the claims, including the lack of credentials, are not justified to believe in them.  Conclusion: Most conditions are met, but the claimant lacks credentials so the claim is not justified.

Example 4: Imagine someone who closely observes people’s hands and uses this information to make claims about their overall health, most of which involve the functioning of internal organs and complex bodily systems.  This person has a practice where she does this for a living and has actually made accurate predictions in the past, according to independent investigations.  She is also highly respected among her palm reading peers, each of whom also have good track records for providing accurate information.  The claims this palm reader makes are naturalizable because they only involve the health of certain parts of the body.  There are natural laws for how the body functions, and this person is just making a claim about the health of some part of the body.  And these claims are easily coherent with all epistemically justified beliefs because they are in line with a basic understanding of human anatomy and the functioning of internal organs.  The problem with this scenario is that there does not appear to be a way in which this palm reader could herself be justified to make the claims she does.  So it is not the content of the claims she makes, but the manner in which she comes to her conclusions on which the claims are based.  Wishful thinking aside, it is obvious that one cannot gain an understanding of the functioning of one’s internal organs merely by observing the palm of their hand.  Because of this, the claims made by the palm reader are not epistemically justified.  Conclusion: Most conditions are met, but the claimant does not appear to be justified to have the belief that her claim comes from, so the claim is not justified either.

Example 5: Imagine a news report about an event happening in Portugal.  The news organization that produced this report has a long history of providing detailed and accurate information.  The one evaluating the claim can personally attest to the veracity of several of the stories that this organization has put out in the past, and there are no known instances where this organization made false claims.  The one evaluating the claim has talked to people from around the world who can personally corroborate several stories as well and none of them claim that the news organization has put out misinformation at any point in the past.  This organization is also highly respected among competing news organizations.  The news report coming from Portugal is from a reporter who claims to have seen firsthand that the Virgin Mary appeared.  Now, assuming that this claim can be made coherent with all existing epistemically justified beliefs, there is only one condition that it fails to meet.  It is inconceivable how something like this event could have happened through a natural law, so therefore this claim is not naturalizable and thus it is not epistemically justified.  For a reporter to make a claim such as this would certainly tarnish the reputation of even the most respected news organization.  Conclusion: Most conditions are met, but the claim is not naturalizable, even if one tries to postulate previously unknown laws of nature, so the claim is not justified.

Example 6: Imagine a situation similar to Example 4 except that the reporter makes the claim that the sun came significantly closer to the earth rather than claiming that the Virgin Mary appeared.  This claim can be naturalizable if one assumes that the earth’s orbit suddenly changed due to laws of physics that scientists simply did not know about but that always existed.  One would also have to assume that the sun suddenly cooled down so that it did not melt the earth, and again this could have been caused by natural laws that always existed but were just not understood by scientists.  So it is possible to naturalize a claim like this, but it does seem to directly contradict the known laws of nature.  There is simply no way of making this claim coherent with existing epistemically justified beliefs.  It would be conceivable for a claim like this to supersede existing beliefs, but one would need much, much more evidence.  Therefore, this claim fails to meet all of the conditions and is not epistemically justified.  Conclusion: Most conditions are met, but the claim is not coherent with the known laws of nature, so the claim is not justified.

Example 7: Imagine hearing someone recount a story that she says her grandparents had told to her decades earlier, and this story is related to the aforementioned events that occurred in Portugal in 1917, where crowds were gathered to see these supposed miracles.  The story involves a newspaper reporter who supposedly told this woman’s grandparents that he had fabricated and published a report of a false miracle in order to sell newspapers.  In this case, the claim that is being evaluated was recounted by the woman about what her grandparents had told her decades earlier, which in turn are a propagation of an earlier claim that this reporter supposedly made.  In this scenario, we can say that the claimant is justified to make this claim and that the claim is easily naturalizable and that it is a coherent claim and that the claimant is also credentialed.  If this confession by the reporter were true, then the fact that he made a false claim about a miracle in the first place does hurt his credibility, but it improves his credibility that he later came clean about this, even if this was only in private company.  The one thing about this scenario that makes this claim not epistemically justified is that it is worse than secondhand information on the part of the claimant.  This claim was propagated too many times in order for us to consider it factual.  We do not have the firsthand accounts of the reporter in this situation.  If the reporter were still around to come clean and set the record straight regarding the false report of the miracle, that would be one thing.  That would be ideal, but this claim might still have minimal credibility if we at least had the grandparents to relate their own secondhand information on this matter.  In this case, we don’t even have that.  It does make sense that the actual reports of miracles, which were printed in newspapers close to the time that they purportedly occurred, were made up in order to sell newspapers, but in this hypothetical scenario, we don’t have enough evidence to make this conclusion.  Conclusion: Some of the conditions were met and some were not, most significantly the fact that the claim was propagated too many times from its original source to be credible.  For this reason, the claim is not justified.

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We know that we are being bombarded with information and that it is important to try to discern fact from fiction and honesty from lies.  We know that even well-meaning people can inadvertently introduce their own distortions and erroneous judgments into our information space.  We need to be able to form a more accurate picture of reality that is as free as possible from outright falsehoods and half-truths and not-quite-truths and is as fact-based and detailed as possible.

How can we reasonably conclude that any of the information that is being thrown at us is true?  This has to hinge on the evaluation of the evidence for and against any given claim.  A person is epistemically justified to believe in a claim if they evaluate all available evidence and this leads them to reasonably conclude that it is in fact true.  Put another way, if the one evaluating the claim can reasonably conclude that the events or states of affairs that the claim is about actually happened, then it makes sense to believe in it.  At a more detailed level, we can say that if one reads or hears a claim being made by another person or a machine and they can reasonably conclude that the explanation for this is that the claimant was somehow caused to honestly communicate details of some event that they directly observed, then they are justified to believe that this claim is true.  It might be that there was a chain of people and/or machines propagating some claim from one to another, but ultimately every true justified claim has to have started with someone or something who actually observed the phenomenon firsthand.

Evaluating claims is quite difficult, but there are guidelines that one can follow to make this process easier.  There is always contextual information that comes with any claim and this can be used to help with evaluation.  For any claim, one can take note of a few related factors and these should allow them to judge whether the claim makes sense and how accurate it seems to be, often in relation to existing knowledge.  A claim probably has to meet all or most of the following conditions, which can be gathered by understanding details related to the content of the claim and the immediate source of the claim (ranked in order of importance):

• Observed firsthand by the original claimant: The claim was ultimately observed firsthand by the original claimant. This condition is met when the one evaluating the claim has a certain understanding of the process through which the original claimant came to believe in the idea behind this claim, and this process is plausible because it only involves the use of senses and mental facilities that the claimant is known to have.  Any claim that comes from a person must come from an idea in someone’s mind, and this person needs to have evidence for this idea in order for a claim based on it to be epistemically justified.  For example, if the source is an archaeologist and they are making a claim about the shape of prehistoric bones, then it is implied that the archaeologist came to believe the idea behind this claim from digging for bones and carefully observing them with the eyes and the hands and then coming to a reasonable conclusion.  If this is the case then the archaeologist has evidence for the idea behind their claim and it is understood that this evidence came through senses that most of us have, namely seeing and feeling.  If the one evaluating the archaeologist’s claim realizes this fact, then this condition is met for this claim.  A contrary example would be if a religious priest makes a claim that involves something divine that he says he came to believe from a special sixth sense he has, but where this sense cannot be independently verified to exist.  In this situation, the priest’s claim fails to meet this condition. To clarify, it is conceivable that a sixth sense could exist and for multiple people to agree that one can gain knowledge through such a sense.  If a religious priest were to make a claim that supposedly came to him from a sixth sense that his congregants mostly believe exists because of their own experience of having this same sense, then these kinds of claims might be justified.  We can extend this category to machines as well if we consider that many machines have ways of reading and measuring certain conditions in the natural world and storing this information and reporting on it.  A machine would only be justified to report on conditions that it has the ability to actually measure.  For example, a machine that is only capable of reading the temperature would not have any justification to be reporting on air pressure or wind speed.  Another factor is that in all cases, including those involving people and machines, the claimant is only justified to report on something that they observed if they were present at that time and place.
• Naturalizable claim: The content of the claim can be understood as resulting from natural laws. This can actually include natural laws that are known to exist and also those that could be assumed to exist in order to naturalize the claim within one’s mind.  This factor plays into evaluation because some claims postulate the existence of something supernatural, while others rely solely on natural events and causes.  Natural events are those that causally occur with perfect uniformity based on pre-existing factors.  The laws of nature are those that govern how things are caused to change through time.  If things always happen with uniformity based on some set of laws, then this is “natural” by definition.  This includes the modern updated versions of the law of gravity, Newton’s laws of motion, etc.  A claim that can take the form of a natural law can be considered naturalizable.  If a claim is made that cannot be conceived as the functioning of natural laws then this is considered either non-natural or supernatural.  For example, a claim that says that water was turned into wine is supernatural, assuming that there is no natural law through which water can in certain special circumstances suddenly turn into wine.  The only way that it can be reasonable to believe in a supernatural event is if it is personally experienced.  Also, belief in supernatural events that are not personally experienced must largely rely on blind faith.  It is important to understand that although the word “supernatural” has magical and mystical connotations, for the sake of philosophy this can be misleading.  Although we are far more accustomed to observing natural occurrences, this does not necessarily mean that it is inconceivable that some supernatural event could occur.  Such an event would plainly and simply be one that is not subject to the natural laws.  There need not be anything otherworldly or paranormal going on.  But while this is conceivable, it does seem highly unlikely and it does not make sense to believe in any such thing on the basis of secondhand information.
• Minimally propagated: The claim has been propagated a minimal number of times from the original claimant, who observed it firsthand. The one evaluating claims can receive some such claims reported directly by the one who supposedly observed it firsthand, but it is more often that claims are propagated through some sort of media before they get to the information consumer, who then has to figure out if the information is credible.  We know that a lot of claims are not made by firsthand observers, but any true and justified claim must ultimately have started from a firsthand source.  If a claim was propagated from the original source, then this decreases its credibility at least to some extent (all other factors being equal) because it is already secondhand information by the time it gets to the evaluator.  If a claim was propagated multiple times by people who cannot personally verify the information from firsthand observation, then this further decreases the credibility.  In most cases, the condition of minimal propagation is only met if a claim was propagated no more than once from its original source, which means that it would be the claimant’s firsthand information.  For example, if a journalist interviews a witness to a murder and then reports on this, then this is the journalist’s secondhand information, but this claim can still be credible if the other conditions are met.  If this journalists had personally witnessed the murder, then the report would be firsthand information, but most journalists are not in a position to personally witness all matters of public interest, and so we often have to make due with secondhand information, which can nonetheless be credible when each of the other conditions are met.  We can compare this to a journalist who hears a rumor that has been circulating among many people in a community regarding who committed a murder, where none of the people interviewed actually witnessed the crime.  In this case, the journalist could not have even been justified to believe these claims in the first place because these claims were no better than secondhand information.  If the journalist were to report on this then it would be thirdhand information and thus would not be credible from the audience’s point of view, even if other conditions are met.
• Coherent claim: The content of the claim is coherent with all of one’s existing knowledge, which must ultimately be coherent with personally observed facts about how nature works. What this means is that if a claim directly contradicts some clearly known fact then this new claim fails to meet this condition.  This would be the case whether the existing knowledge came from direct personal observation or from another claim, although personal observation is stronger.  But there is a scenario in which it makes sense to accept a claim that contradicts existing beliefs, which happens when that which was previously assumed to be true also came from a claim rather than a personal observation and the new claim meets every other condition in this criteria to an equal or greater degree than the older claim.  In situations such as this, the new claim can be accepted in place of the old one, which can then be assumed false.  For example, we can imagine a murder trial in which the man accused has confessed to the crime, and he says that he acted alone in this crime and that he shot the victim and that nobody saw it.  Since this confession meets all of the other criteria for evaluating claims, we can be justified to believe that he is the murderer.  But then video footage is found that clearly shows someone else committing the murder and the first person is not shown in the video at all.  We can consider this video to essentially be another claim that contradicts the first man’s confession.  Since the video is more credible than a verbal confession, we have to accept it as true and consider the first man’s confession to be false.
• Credible claimant: The sources of the claim, including the original source who supposedly observed it firsthand and all media that propagated it, have earned credibility in the subject area that the claim relates to because they have a good track records. The credibility of a claim is stronger or weaker based on the track record of any source that provided or helped propagate the claim, all other factors being equal.  The credibility of a claim is stronger if it comes from a source that has a history of providing accurate information and of not providing disinformation, which is a claim shown to be false due to the prevalence of counterevidence.  Conversely, if a claim comes from a source that does not have a history of providing accurate claims and instead has a history of providing disinformation, then the credibility of this claim is weaker.  For example, we can hypothetically say that the claimant is a meteorologist who has in the past made accurate weather predictions.  If this person were to make a prediction for tomorrow’s weather then this claim is highly credible.  Also, if there is an information source, perhaps even one that purports to be “news”, that has a history of propagating false information a large percent of the time, where one can even debunk some of the claims that this source propagated on the basis of personal observation, then the information coming from this source can automatically be considered highly suspect.  On the other hand, news sources that propagate information that can be verified as mostly accurate a very large percent of the time would have to be considered credible sources, even though it is still possible that any information that they report could later prove to be inaccurate.  It is the overall percent of the propagated claims that are accurate versus those that are false that determines the credibility of an information source.
• Credentialed claimant: The source of the claim is trusted by other sources that also have good track records in the subject area that the claim relates to. A good way to identify this is through official credentials or membership in a professional organization that has its own credibility.  For example, if a self-proclaimed meteorologist makes a claim about the weather, but this person is not trusted by other meteorologists who have good track records, or is lacking in professional credentials, then the claims made by this untrusted meteorologist fails to meet this condition.  This condition is often met by people and organizations who have professional credentials such as higher education degrees or certifications or membership in professional organizations.  It can also be met when people or organizations have a reputation of trustworthiness among their peers, even if they lack official credentials.

These categories are all qualitatively different factors that one can take into account when evaluating a claim.  These criteria points represent how one can classify the relevant evidence that might or might not exist in relation to the claim being evaluated.  Any evidence, aside from direct personal observation, would probably fall into one or more of these categories.  Though it is always conceivable for any claim to be true or false, if a claim meets all of these conditions then it is quite unlikely for this claim to be completely false, and thus we can say that a claim meeting all of these conditions is epistemically justified.  Of course, even if all of these conditions are met, there is always more evidence that one could gather, but any such evidence would have to fall into one of these categories.  In some cases, a claim can be justified without meeting all of these conditions.  Whether indeed one is epistemically justified to believe in a claim ultimately hinges on whether the overall evidence is sufficient to be conclusive.  This evaluation relies on a complex interplay of deductive and inductive reasoning and it is extremely difficult to pin down exactly what are the necessary conditions for this to be conclusive.  Even though inductive reasoning will always be fallible, there is nonetheless a difference (in many cases) between the most reasonable conjecture one can come to given certain evidence and having sufficient evidence to come to a reasonable conclusion.

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In the Twenty First Century, the news media landscape has become overwhelming.  There is 24 hour continuous coverage that often features obsessive real-time analysis of minute details and also immediate spin and posturing from people who would like to capitalize politically on every event.  Things have changed greatly since the last years of the Twentieth Century when there were relatively few media organizations that served as gatekeepers for the dissemination of news.  Our so-called information age has made it far easier and cheaper for anyone to spread their messages, reports, and ideas to millions of people in mere minutes.  Some legacy media organizations have declined in audience and importance, but there are others that still enjoy enormous influence.

We should keep in mind that the word “media” is a plural noun.  There are multiple media organizations that operate largely independently of each other and are competing with each other to provide detailed and accurate reporting.  To some extent, this competition creates a dynamic that puts pressure on them to be honest and objective, although this dynamic generally only applied to the information that they present as news and not as opinion.  This pressure does exist, although there are other factors that can compromise the objectivity of news reporting.  Certainly, the quest for ratings and money often get in the way of their objectivity, but those who criticize “the media” the most are quite often the ones who find the objective evidence-based reporting to be inconvenient to their political ideology.  We sometimes hear people criticize “the media”, but since it is not a monolith, this sort of broad-based criticism is fallacious and inaccurate.  It is ironic that this criticism often occurs through some major media organization’s broadcast, and thus what they are saying would have to be a part of the media.  What they really mean, therefore, is that they want their audience to only trust media organizations whose reporting is highly slanted toward their preferred political ideology.

It is unfortunate that some highly influential media organizations seem to have as their main purpose the relentless service of some political ideology or party.  We need to be able to discern which organizations are operating with journalistic integrity, which dictates that they ought not spin nor distort the facts and that their reports should not be slanted one way or another.  Instead, they should be as even-handed as possible.  We need to be able to assess the newsgathering processes and methods of organizations and journalists.  If we can get the impression that they are genuinely following trails of evidence and digging and investigating to uncover details and doing detective work to connect the dots, then the product of their work should be more credible to us.  When there are multiple corroborating sources that are known to independently verify information, this gives pretty solid credibility.  There isn’t a single one that by itself is assured to be an authoritative source.

Although we need media organizations to be as objective and unbiased as possible, there is also a purpose that is served by those that are coming from a certain ideological perspective.  If there are diverse viewpoints in the news across the political spectrum, this can allow us to get out of our ideological bubble and begin to imagine how people from other walks of life see things.  There is a limit to how much of this that we should tolerate, however.  If a media organization reports blatantly false information in a way that incites violence, then this is a threat to free and fair society.  This can be difficult to assess, however, because people can be fed a huge amount of false information that does not include anything that, by itself, incites anyone to violence against anyone.  But if a media organization presents a completely false and highly sensationalized alternate reality for its audience in a way that unfairly demonizes certain people, then this can spur some people to violent acts.  Therefore, we should realize that organizations that engage in this vile weaponization of news are a threat to peace in our global society.

It is really easy to make things up, and we have seen that it is even not that difficult for people to construct elaborate alternate universes that are largely self-consistent and are, in some ways, anchored into things that we can personally verify.  These are overarching conspiracy theories.  A conspiracy is where multiple people plot in secret to gain an advantage over a third party without their knowledge.  By that broad definition, there undoubtedly are lots of conspiracies going on in the world.  We know that there are people in power who engage in conspiracies and we should be concerned about that.  But there are lots of conspiracy theories that are outlandish and are obviously not true by objectively verifiable information.

Despite their internal coherence and their relation to things we can personally verify, the most outlandish conspiracy theories are built on extreme levels of absurdity, paranoia, and physical impossibilities.  They defy scientific data, they assume that all experts in most fields are systematically lying, and they depend on logical fallacies and very inconsistent usage of verification principles.  Their lines of reasoning are always ad-hoc to justify their narrative, which is predominantly to show that certain people and certain power factions are evil and are in the process of destroying the world.

This is why fact-checking is a very important part of news reporting.  Fact-checking organizations and websites are out there, but it is important to be careful because the words “fact” and “truth” are overused so much.  At the most basic level, fact checking offers more claims, accounts, and narratives in an effort to support factual claims and to debunk false claims that were made by public figures and by other media organizations.  It is up to us to discern legitimate fact checking from those who are pushing an agenda and trying to deceive us by creating a superficial illusion of fact checking, when they are actually only working to propagate more disinformation.

False claims can be presented in a way that makes them seem more plausible, and even in some cases some people would find them to be undeniably factual.  We have seen that it is easy to get some people to believe in a claim by simply creating other false claims that refer to the first false claim or perhaps by giving a narrative for how the false information was “discovered” or by giving other false information that is coherent with it and thus creating a false model of reality that seems internally consistent.  For example, false narratives can be constructed around certain public figures and politicians to make it appear that they committed heinous crimes or stole public money.  Certainly, some public figures in the past have been known to commit egregious crimes, but we need to keep in mind how easy it is to make up these stories and we should be careful not to believe such merely on the basis of baseless allegations.  The people who spin these stories have clever ways of making their creations seem more plausible.  The presented narrative might include supporting details including people who say certain things and who, according to the reports, did the responsible and painstaking discovery work and are now blowing the whistle.  We have seen that elaborate narratives of this sort can be constructed out of whole cloth so as to give the illusion of genuine journalism.

We know that there are those who are trying to deceive us.  We know that there are people who propagate false information without knowing it.  There are sometimes false narratives and false motives that are concocted to deceive us.  We know that there is enormous power and wealth on the line if a faction can succeed in convincing enough citizens that some public figures are rotten and also by getting enough of them to believe in the pure virtues of certain other people.  The public figures who are presented as having pure virtues might well have committed far more crimes than anyone else.  In such cases, it would seem that the false reports that smear that person’s opponent were likely contrived in an effort to divert attention away from those crimes, which actually happened, and to get people to focus on imaginary crimes that were supposedly committed by a rival of the real criminal.

We have seen that those with enough skill in creating false narratives and alternate realities can use these tactics to essentially brainwash a sufficiently large segment of the population so as to put in power their preferred leaders.  It might be very difficult this day and age, but for the preservation of a free and fair society, we need to be able to see through this wholesale propaganda.  As we scrutinize certain narratives that are being peddled by certain sources and certain factions, we should be very careful not to believe in alternative narratives that are lacking in verifiable facts and also lacking in sober, evidence-based analysis.

How do we debunk these false narratives and mendaciously constructed and concocted alternate realities?  We need to rely on intuitive consilience with our own experience, which means that new claims, accounts, and narratives need to fit into a puzzle within our minds.  Fortunately, we should often be able to do some of our own fact checking in order to assess the credibility of those who claim to be fact checking.  Also, if we get the impression that the fact-checkers are genuinely reviewing source documents and records and trying to authenticate them and trying to ascertain the provenance of some claims with due diligence, then this gives credence to the fact-checking efforts.   When we are able to personally verify certain things and we know that certain things fall into place in some cases and in other cases just don’t make sense and don’t add up, this allows us to assess to what extent these organizations are indeed checking facts.  If we use these methods, false narratives can be debunked, and we can help other people who might fall prey to them.
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Any legitimate scientific research, whether it is conducted within academia or governmental agencies or private corporations or professional societies, should include certain self-correcting processes such as documentation, reproducibility, and peer review.  Science is essentially conducted as a multilateral social engagement, both within institutions that conduct research and between them.  When different scientists and different institutions compete with each other in their research, this can produce a dynamic wherein the theories with the best evidence and the best explanatory power and those that are the most reproducible and that stand up to scrutiny the best end up having the greatest propagation power.  Thus, there is a certain sociocultural evolution that favors the most evidence-based, reasonable, and parsimonious theories.

This is how the system is supposed to work, but it has started to break down recently because of the aforementioned crisis of sensemaking.  We are witnessing implausible and disproven ideas being propagated far and wide and enjoying widespread support in the general population.  We should be concerned about essentially nonscientific information being promoted as scientific.  We should equally be concerned that a significant percent of the population does not accept scientific knowledge, since it happens quite often that people reject conclusions that enjoy widespread and near unanimous support within the broader scientific community.  The root of the problem is that these people don’t seem to understand the self-correcting process through which bad science would be expected to be exposed and debunked and through which good science tends to rise to the top.  The scientific consensus is usually not wholly wrong because different scientists scrutinize and review each other’s work.  We don’t believe the world is flat because of abundance of evidence that it is round, but the intellectual tools upon which our modern world was built are now being rejected by large segments of the population, even into the Twenty First Century.  Lots of people don’t believe in even well-attested and generally accepted science, and we see huge social, environmental, and humanitarian crises being caused by this level of widespread ignorance and delusion.

As philosopher Michael Shermer has explained, most of us don’t understand the technical aspects of particular sciences such as epidemiology or climate science.  When people say that they believe in science, what they are doing is signaling that they accept science as a viable method of gaining reliable knowledge and therefore they trust science.  This does not rely on faith, but on a reasonable trust and confidence that science has self-correcting mechanisms.  These people are acknowledging that most of the time, science works.  Then there are people who express skepticism of science.  This sentiment is somewhat understandable since, in general, most people don’t understand the complex ins and outs of science very well.  At least with those who accept consensus scientific conclusions, they are going with a reasonable trust.

The science skeptics, on the other hand, seem more often to be motivated by political commitments rather than any legitimate intellectual reason.  If the consensus among climate scientists is that human activity is causing the planet to gradually warm and to threaten ecosystems and the future of human life, then those who find this sort of conclusion to be inconvenient for their political ideology will often be driven to reject the science and to dress up their skepticism in faux scientific language.

There is a very difficult dilemma for common people who aren’t professional scientists regarding what scientific theories to belief.  How do we decide who to trust?  Which sources?  In the modern age, we have so many.  In this information age, we have almost infinite sources, so we have to do some filtering.  Therefore the idea of scientific consensus needs to be more properly understood.  It is not based on majority opinion.  It is not a democracy.  It is not based on hierarchical authority.  When we accept science, we are acknowledging that the scientific claims have already been vetted.  This is what Karl Popper described as conjecture and refutation as the scientific method.  These conjectures have already been refuted or attempted to be refuted by professionals in their respective field.

By the time that this information is summarized for us in some mainstream publication, it has already been filtered.  In such situations, one can believe that what is being printed is probably true, not based on faith or authority but because they know that the people who are making those claims have already been tested and debated and disputed and that attempts to refute their work have already been made.  One who understands this process can have confidence that the system of scientific research works.

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Most educated and open minded people understand that claims found in science books, history books, and credible news reports are mostly worth believing and that claims involving sensationalized propaganda or strange superstitions are not, but they might not be able to easily explain why they have made this distinction.  Indeed, what some people see as credible news reports, others see as propaganda and “fake news”.  Likewise, what some people accept as legitimate evidence-based science, others see as baseless claims that were fabricated as a part of a conspiracy.

Some people will say that we should question everything that anyone might try to say to us and to not accept anything at face value, but if we are rational then we do not question everything equally.  We have some well-known facts that we don’t need to question and some things we know pretty well, and these are the basis for further evaluation.  There are some people, some media organizations, and some institutions that we largely trust and empathize with and others of which we are suspicious and that we are unlikely to trust.  But how do we know who to trust?  How do we know what type of information to accept or to reject?  While it is necessary to accept some claims that one comes across, it is often quite difficult to figure out what claims to believe in or not to believe in.  There has to be a process through which one can judge whether a given claim is epistemically justified, but what should be the criteria for this?  Any reasonable evaluation process would need to take into account not only the content of the information that is being conveyed, but also the social structures that produced and propagated the information.

We can develop increasingly accurate conceptions of reality through mental processes, methods, and frameworks.  This is something that one can do partially within their own mind, but this also depends to some extent on one being cognizant of and working within certain social structures.  We need to be connected and associated somehow with social structures, such as those of scientists, journalists, and historians.  We consume the products of their work, and we also use our minds and mental processes to scrutinize it.  These organizations can also in some cases learn from our own work.  Thus, we defeat both skepticism and hubris through our own mental capabilities and through social structures.

We can call this process the information ecology because it has certain similarities to the natural ecology wherein different species and organisms both compete with each other and strategically cooperate to achieve their goals.  A healthy and vibrant natural ecosystem has many organisms sharing resources and none of them is using their power advantage to monopolize access to resources, since this would threaten the ecosystem as a whole and would threaten the existence of the powerful and powerless alike.

The key to developing and maintaining a healthy and vibrant information ecosystem is in the type and form of social structures that exist within it, including governmental agencies, media organizations, knowledge-based institutions, and privately owned business entities.  We need to be cognizant of how any such entities are structured internally and how they are interrelated within the greater information ecosystem.

Some social structures can amplify individual intelligence, if they are organized scientifically using principles of peer review, adherence to certain norms and rules, and a high degree of independence.  Some types of social structures have the effect of hampering individual intelligence, such as those that are hierarchically structured and where certain overarching assumptions are not challengeable and where there is a charismatic leader, either living or dead, who is assumed to be inherently great by the rank and file membership.  It is necessary to avoid social structures that are too loose and anarchic and those that are overly rigid and strict.  In our quest for a fuller and deeper understanding of the facts, both extremes are undesirable because they usually end up hindering these efforts.

We can probably say that everyone needs to believe in something beyond their own self or else they will lose their purpose in life and end up becoming extremely skeptical, cynical, nihilistic, and depressed.  Each of us needs foundational beliefs in order to live happy and healthy lives.  For most of us, that would be our foundational belief in our close family and in romantic loves.  Of course, we should believe most strongly in the people that we know well and also in the things that we directly experience, but we also need a certain reasonable trust in institutions as well, even though we do not personally know the people who work within them.

It simply does not make sense for us to have broad skepticism of all governmental, media, and professional scientific organizations.  They are all certainly fallible, but if we give them due scrutiny and develop some understanding of how these institutions work and how the people who work for them do their jobs, then we can retain a sufficient degree of belief in many or most of the claims that are put out or propagated by these institutions, as appropriate given the contextual factors.  Sometimes we have to trust experts.  Sometimes we have to offload some of our sensemaking to external organizations whose purpose is to be well informed on certain matters, such as current events, science, and complex rational decision making for economic well-being and social stability.  But each of us can and should have a certain rough methodology for scrutinizing the credibility of these institutions and judging their trustworthiness.

There is no person who is in a position to understand the truth better than everyone else.  We all have blind spots.  Of course, some people are better informed and better educated than others in certain regards, but no one person is just in the single best position to understand the full and unadulterated truth.  Many people act as if they are that person, unfortunately.  Even experts in certain fields rely on other people for knowledge outside of their area of expertise.  The smartest, most accurate, most rational, best informed things are not individual and independently operating persons.  We can recognize that this honor can be bestowed upon some organizations that are structured optimally so that their internal functioning encourages accurate information to be uncovered, scrutinized, critiqued, tested.  In addition, this honor would only go to organizations that only promote and propagate information after it has gone through all of those phases and had stood up to such challenges.  Individual persons indeed are the ones who work for such organizations, but it is their relation to each other within this organizational structure that makes the entire thing so smart and so accurate at understanding the truth.

Some scientific and journalistic institutions are structured this way.  Unfortunately, they are often not believed by large swaths of the population.  That is a huge problem in our society.  We need to shed light on how these organizations operate.  We need to educate people on how this works.  Then they might come to trust science and journalism a little more.  The point would not be to encourage blind faith in such organizations, but certainly we need to counteract this broad skepticism and cynicism and nihilism.  It is very bad for society.  Rather than thinking that we each have the ability to independently tell fact from fiction, we should admit that sensemaking is an individual and a social process. 

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