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The strange search for knowledge in the age of post-truth | Steve Fuller
00:28:55
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- [00:01]
Steve Fuller
This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with a name your price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try it@progressive.com, progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Price and coverage match, limited by state law, not available in all states. But if you actually go back to the Greeks and look at what they thought they were doing, it's quite different from what we're doing.
- [00:28]
Ed
Hello and welcome to Philosophy for Our Times, bringing you the world's leading thinkers on today's biggest ideas. It's just Ed here today and I'm introducing the episode the Strange Search for Knowledge in the Age of Post Truth. So this is an interview with Steve Fuller, who's a professor of sociology at the University of Warwick and also a founding figure in the field of social epistemology. So in this talk, he challenges the notion that knowledge is produced by experts through established institutions and, and also that it progresses over time towards a single truth. And instead, Steve argues that our contemporary Post Truth order correctly recognizes that the pursuit of knowledge is actually a socially dependent process which is kind of shaped by the communities that produce it.
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Interviewer
Hello, Steve Fuller. Welcome to How they look at him.
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Steve Fuller
Thank you. Thank you for having me.
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Interviewer
So you are a philosopher known for your work across a variety of topics, from transhumanism to the philosophy of science. You also helped spearhead the discipline of social epistemology. Could you tell us what that is and why it's important, in your opinion?
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Steve Fuller
Well, social epistemology is basically at the most basic level, the social foundations of knowledge. And that can be understood in a couple of ways. One way is to understand how knowledge is actually produced socially, but also how we ought to produce knowledge socially. And so in that sense, it combines a lot of the empirical and historical disciplines which have studied how knowledge has been produced with philosophy, economics, these more kind of normative disciplines, you might say, that are concerned with how knowledge ought to be produced. And I founded the journal called social epistemology in 1987, wrote the first book called Social Epistemology the following year, basically with that kind of idea in mind. And it's obviously a kind of interdisciplinary project because none of the specific disciplines, whether we're talking about philosophy or the humanities or the social sciences, actually deals directly with this matter. And Social Epistemology is meant to sort of put them all together into this project of trying to figure out not only what the nature of knowledge is, but how we should be producing knowledge in the future.
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Interviewer
Okay, let's break this down. What is knowledge?
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Steve Fuller
Well, this is an interesting question. I mean, I think the, you know, in a sense, the easiest way to talk about it is kind of what gets recognized as knowledge. And that is clearly sociological because there's a sense in which if you and I have certain ideas and we say certain things, that by itself doesn't make it knowledge, right? You need some kind of audience, some kind of reception for it. And then the question becomes, well, what's a good and bad reception, right? Because we also understand ideas like people will say things that a lot of people believe but which turn out to be false or unfounded, and it's just catering to what the people already believe, etcetera, Et cetera, or it might be based on misleading premises and stuff like that. So there's a sense in which you need a certain kind of social process, right? Not just any old social process, right? So it's not just automatic consensus, it's not just a popularity contest what knowledge is. So the question then becomes, what is the form of organization by which you kind of combine opinions and test opinions to then determine that something is knowledge? And that's what the scientific method in the modern period has been mainly about. And that's why it still provides to this day, you know, we're Talking about maybe 400 years later, the gold standard for what counts as knowledge in society. So experimentation, the ability to test things, right? To be able to rationally argue them publicly where all sorts of people can disagree, right? And then in some sense coming up to at least a temporary agreement, but one that's not seen as completely there forever. That's basically, you know, in a general kind of way, what the social epistemology is and what social epistemology of knowledge is about.
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Interviewer
So there's almost like a methodological component which is a scientific method and a political component almost.
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Steve Fuller
That's right, because you have to think about how do you organize people to actually get to that point. And this is why, I mean, the west has a very distinctive kind of history with regard to the production of knowledge, which, you know, you might argue is part of what actually made the west kind of the supreme global power afterwards. But what you start to get in the 17th century is a kind of autonomous production of knowledge that in a way is not dependent on what established authorities already thought, but rather allowed to go their own way and then feed back into the established authorities. And so, you know, if you're thinking about the English speaking world, right, the Royal Society of London when it was established in 1660, that would be kind of an important moment, right? Because what you had are the people who recognized each other as, you know, knowledge producers and inquirers and so forth. They gathered together and they decided to come up with an institution that would just pursue, you know, ideas and hypotheses wherever they may go, independent of the external authorities. But then when they actually came up with something, they made it available publicly, which then the external authorities could use. And I think that kind of model of the role of science in society, at least until now, has been kind of the dominant one. And it has been responsible for. For knowledge production being expedited and progressed in the way it has over the past almost 400 years.
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Interviewer
Okay, let's put this on a timeline. Does the history of knowledge begin in the 17th century, or was there knowledge before then?
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Steve Fuller
No, no, of course there was knowledge before then. But I think the idea. So if you go back to the ancient Greeks, Plato, Aristotle, all those guys, right? Obviously their ideas are very important for the production of knowledge in the sense that they provide inspiration. But if you actually go back to the Greeks and look at what they were, you know, when they produced the ideas, they did what they thought they were doing. It's quite different from what we. We're doing because they didn't think of. Of knowledge or science as an intergenerational task. They thought of it as something that, in a sense, you could acquire in your lifetime, right? So in that sense, if you look at guys like Plato and even Aristotle, who's a much more practical guy than Plato, you have something, actually, I think there that's closer to the Eastern religions with regard to your understanding of science as something that, you know, knowledge is something you can get in your lifetime if you put yourself in the right frame of mind, right? But the whole point of. Of science in the modern era is something different because in a sense, it kind of, in a way forces you to think that you might not actually get knowledge in your lifetime, right? That you might get part of the puzzle, you might get some of the way, but there's always something more which the future generations are going to pursue. And I think that's sort of what I would call historicity to knowledge, right? The fact that that knowledge is not something that can be entirely acquired in one's lifetime, but actually requires several lifetimes and who knows how many lifetimes. That is a very distinctive modern conception that begins in the 17th century. And I think that's the driving force of science today, right? And that's why people today, even when they see all the problems that there are in the world and they recognize that science, in a sense, is responsible for a lot of them. You think about the wars, the world wars, right? The nuclear stuff, all. All the stuff. Environmental crisis, in the sense science is implicated in all these things. But they also believe that science is part of the solution, right? Because they believe that the quest goes on. Now, you see, that whole way of thinking about the production of knowledge would be completely alien to the ancients in the Western tradition, who were much more like the Eastern tradition in that regard, where they say, in a sense, the knowledge you want is the knowledge for your lifetime, the. The knowledge you can live with. And in a sense, the next generation will have to figure this out for themselves.
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Interviewer
Do you think in the contemporary age, this modern process towards knowledge has been interrupted in any way?
- [09:34]
Steve Fuller
Well, yes, I think a lot of people have doubts about it. I mean, I think that's the basic issue, right? I mean, I think, in a sense, you know, so in my. When I was a student, the late 1970s, right, everybody believed in progress. That was kind of an unquestioned turn. But then very shortly afterwards, it started to be questioned very severely, right? So, in a sense, when I became, you know, went into my professional life as an academic, we began the postmodern period. And people were wondering, you know, is there one truth? You know? And so even if we are telling narratives about how we've been progressing over all these centuries, whether there's just one to be told or are there many to be told, especially since if one looks at the evidence of the 20th century, I mean, and the 20th century, I think, is quite important here because it's the century where you see science and technology making the most difference to people's lives ever, both positively and negatively, right? So, for example, you can look at stuff like artificial fertilizer, which is responsible for the possibility that the world has as many people as they are and they're able to sustain themselves. But if you just change a couple of atoms in the molecules that are responsible for artificial fertilizer, you get poison gas, and you get the poison gas that gassed millions of people in Auschwitz, okay? It's the same molecule being turned around. And so after World War II, and this, of course, persisted in the Cold War, people began to wonder, well, you know, is this where we really want to go? You know, we have this kind of knowledge, yes. We're producing it, and it is giving us more power, but the power can take us in Many different directions. And maybe it's kind of a mistake to just allow it to go on in the hope that it'll be, you know, on balance, for the good rather than the bad. And I think that's kind of where we are now. And that's why, for example, we've got this so called post truth condition is because all of this doubt reflecting on, let's say, the last hundred years that are leading people to wonder, well, are we going in the right direction?
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Interviewer
Why is it post truth and not post knowledge, for instance?
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Steve Fuller
Well, I think the idea, see, the reason why it gets called post truth is because truth suggests that there's kind of one goal, right. And that there's one form of knowledge. And I think part of what happened when we moved into postmodernism in the, in the late 20th century was that people began to wonder whether that's really the case. Right. In other words, that it's not like we all are heading in the same direction actually. Right. And I think if you look at the kind of critiques of Western knowledge from a post colonial perspective and, you know, other kind of non mainstream perspectives, it becomes very clear that not everybody is talking about, not everybody is assuming that we're heading in the same direction, we're heading in different directions. And then the, the issue becomes managing the difference. And that's always what postmodernism was about, right? Was the recognition of difference and then somehow managing it. But that's very different from, you know, what I had been talking about before, where we're talking about knowledge progressing and carrying on indefinitely and, you know, and even if bad stuff happens, the good stuff outweighs it.
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Interviewer
So is post truth a net positive in a sense, that we are allowing multiple perspectives and directions?
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Steve Fuller
I think so. And I think the bottom line is we're going to have to live with it. Right. So, so regardless of whether you like the flavor of post truth, what, you know, because I think the way you see post truth, to be honest, right. Is if you look at social media and you look at the different sort of standards of truth that people are kind of presuming and the kinds of things they're saying and the sorts of things are presenting as evidence. Right. And, and then, and, and people have become quite savvy and critical about the way in which stuff gets presented on social media. So, so in terms of videos and stuff, as soon as somebody presents something that seems completely convincing, somebody else says, no, this is a fraud. We get community notes on Twitter, something like that. Right. Now, I think that's actually positive. All that I think, is positive in the sense that people are sharp, they're kind of wising up, they're sharpening up. But the thing that I think disturbs a lot of establishment people is that in a sense, people are taking the validation process into their own hands. Right? So in other words, and I don't think there's a problem with that per se, because we are living in a world where we have the most educated people ever. So in other words, if we're imagining that education is supposed to emancipate people's minds, which is, of course, the classical progressive view of education, it's why we want everyone to have education, then in a sense, if part of what that emancipation involves is being able to take an independent judgment, then you shouldn't be surprised that people will start questioning a lot of things that other people have been taking for granted for a long time. And this is what we see all the time happening on social media. We just don't have a good way of kind of regulating it or moderating it or something like that. But the sheer phenomena of the disagreement is not itself a problem.
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Interviewer
You said that social epistemology also concerns a kind of how we should approach knowledge, not just how we are. How should we. In this, is education still the emancipatory force?
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Steve Fuller
I'm a big believer in education, and in fact, I would say that very early on, kids should learn about this medium, this, you know, Internet, social media, all the rest of it. They should learn programming, in a sense, right? And, and, you know, not, not necessarily very deprogramming, but programming enough to be able to understand how the things they are, that they are witnessing, that they're exposed to, have been produced. And I think we're, you know, in a sense, this is not as hard as it sounds, because one of the consequences of social media and one of the reasons why social media is so powerful is because for the first time, you actually have, you know, relatively ordinary people being able to take control of the means of production of the media. It's no longer a broadcasting function. Right? Broadcasting presupposes that there's, you know, like a few channels or a few, you know, you know, vehicles by which all of media is produced, and everybody has to receive it in some way, right? It's, you know, it's like the signal from the radio tower, right? There's only a few of them, and everybody receives it. But social media democratizes the process of production. And so what, what, what kids need to learn is how that works exactly, not just at the level of, of the user friendly apps that they have in their smartphones that enable them to access stuff, but also what goes into the programming. And that could be something that could be introduced as a part of basic literacy. And I think a lot of people in fact acquire this over time and it gets easier and easier to acquire actually. So, so I don't think this is a big stretch, to be perfectly honest. And I think, you know, so, so in other words, you could have people saying all kinds of things on social media, but if you have a receivership that is sufficiently savvy about how this stuff is done, they won't be taken in or they'll be able at least to respond in kind. And I think that's kind of where we're going.
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Interviewer
Doesn't it concern you that social media is run by tech billionaires?
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Steve Fuller
Yeah, yeah, no, obviously that's a problem in one sense. But it's also very interesting the extent to which, you know, anonymous hackers and people like that who in a sense have a lot of the basic skills, can really run, you know, run rampant in this kind of system. Right. So there's a sense in which that problem is not a problem of competence, but it's rather about a problem of the concentration of capital. It's a different kind of problem. It's not a competence problem. It's not like the guys in Google and Microsoft and all the rest of them know more than the hackers do. No, it's just they have more power than they do. So that's a different problem. That's a problem of political economy. And so a lot of the issues about monopoly and antitrust and all that that we know about, that's where you settle that problem. But in terms of the competence, the competence is pretty evenly distributed.
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Interviewer
You've written about transhumanism, as I said. Would you call yourself a techno optimist in general?
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Steve Fuller
Yes. I mean, and if you look at the people in the Enlightenment back in the late 18th century, right. We, you usually see this period as kind of the golden age of progressive thinking, which then gets unleashed into the rest of the world. If you look at those guys, including even guys like Voltaire, you know, they always had a kind of mixed attitude. They thought it was going to be, you know, better in the long term, but there'll be a lot of problems in between. And, and, and, and that's kind of my view, My view is that things are going to get better, but, but, you know, blood will be spilled Damage will be done. But. But I do think. Yeah, I do think things will get better.
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Interviewer
What is the relationship between technology and knowledge? Because, for instance, Heidegger might say that technology is an epistemology itself.
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Steve Fuller
Yes. Okay, well, look, I think in terms of what we call knowledge, in terms of something that we can actually adjudicate and say what's true and false and so forth, it requires a privileged medium of communication. And this is where writing, writing as a technology becomes very important in the whole idea that we can actually nail stuff down and we can say this is true, this is false. Because the problem with speaking. So imagine you have oral cultures, right? Oral cultures primarily maintain themselves because people kind of, in a sense, they. They hear the same things, they like the same things, right? They're not checking the details. They're not checking whether it conforms to something that took place at a certain point in time. Right, right. But. But the point is they like the mood music, right? I mean, the oral cultures are all about mood music. But when you get to written culture, right, you have to get the notes, right? You have to be able to, you know, you need to know the music theory, as it were, right? And. And I think that's where the truth issue comes in. It comes in actually with that medium, with. With the written medium. And I think the way you have to understand technology is as enhancements of this medium, right? And then the. And, and of course, one of the things that we know from the history of literacy is that originally only a few people knew how to write. And, you know, you know, and. And this is why, if you look at the Plato, Plato's dialogues, Socrates has a very mixed view about writing, right? To a certain extent, he thinks writing falsifies speech and speech is a more spontaneous way of proceeding and so forth. But he also kind of respects the authority that writing has because once it's there in the pyramid or, you know, cuneiform and Hammurabi's laws and all that, you know, that it has a kind of solidity to it. Right. And that's certainly the way in which we sort of think about texts, right? Authoritative texts have that kind of character, and it's by virtue of the technology of writing. And so now we're in a period of social media where in a sense, the sort of authoritativeness of writing is becoming very radically democratized.
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Interviewer
Well, I have to ask you about ChatGPT and AI. Isn't that undoing a lot of knowledge creation?
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Steve Fuller
Well, I think my view about this. Okay, that's interesting because I I get asked a lot about this. I think what it's, what it's doing, it's undoing the mystique of creativity, you know, that in some sense you have to have a certain kind of mind to be able to produce original stuff. Because chat GPT and, and generative AI generally is about combining words in certain probable patterns that will then produce a certain kind of effect. That's really what it's about and it's drawing on the database of all the stuff that's already been published. Right. Now the interesting. Now what I would say about that, which I think is perfectly fine, is that human beings themselves, who are the producers of all These texts that ChatGPT feeds on, they have not fully exploited all the possibilities in those texts. And I've made this point several times before that in fact, when we're talking about all the. Let's just think about academia, which is very codified and we have a lot of, you know, the data trail, you know, the paper trail is very strong. We find that 80% of the stuff that's actually published academically is not cited. Right. Okay. Only 20% is cited to any considerable extent now. Now what, what was the point of that 80% that's not cited now you might say, oh, they were wrong. No, no one's checking. Nobody's reading. ChatGPT reads it. This is the point. ChatGPT is fed with all of the journals, you know, without the prejudice. This is the thing. The reason why we have the 80, 20 split in terms of, you know, academic publications is because academics are taught only to pay attention to certain things of all the stuff that that's written, because those are the things that they think are in the cutting edge. But that then ignores a lot of other stuff that in fact could be quite useful and could involve in, in fact solve lots of problems. ChatGPT does not have those biases, does not have those prejudices. It can access that stuff and, and in fact then come up with more novel combinations and more novel forms of knowledge.
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Interviewer
Aren't the biases inbuilt in the technology if we are the ones who created it?
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Steve Fuller
Yeah, but the problem is they haven't all, they haven't all been exploited. Okay? Right, right. Because when we think about the biases in technology, we normally think about the biases of the programmer, right? We think about, you know, there'll be sexist, racist, whatever, and sometimes there's evidence to that effect. But I'm talking about the biases, in a sense, on the default readership of the people who would have previously had access to the database, in other words, the humans who would have previously accessed the database before ChatGPT came on the scene would have been incredibly biased. Whereas ChatGPT is not biased in that respect because it doesn't know about the development of disciplines and stuff like that. It just knows kind of all the stuff all together. It treats every article equally, it treats every book equally, and then it starts to make the combinations, you know, textually.
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Interviewer
Isn't that, though, one of the key pieces of epistemology since Aristotle, just making distinctions? And if ChatGPT doesn't do that, is that a positive?
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Steve Fuller
Well, the issue is what kinds of distinctions do you want to make? Right? And I think the kinds of distinctions that we're currently making in the academic world, because, as you say, we're already making distinctions, I think are actually quite biased. I mean, in a sense, if you were a Martian coming down to Earth and looking at the way in which academic knowledge production occurs, you'd say 80% of the people working in this business are wasting their time. You just need to figure out who they are, right? And just tell them, do something else. Right? I mean, because they're not being ready. They're writing this stuff. They're not being read. But that doesn't mean that what they. Just because nobody reads what they write doesn't mean what they write isn't valuable. It's just you need some other source to read it, and that might be CHAT GPT. CHAT GPT might be able to redeem a lot of stuff that's been ignored.
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Interviewer
Can I ask you what you will work on next?
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Steve Fuller
Well, so I have a book coming out later this year called Media and the Power of Knowledge with Bloomsbury. And this book, in a way, partly addresses this issue that we've just been talking about, because I think the way you have to understand the production of knowledge is through the medium through which is produced. And so we've been talking about writing and we've been talking about ChatGPT, and, you know, all the effects that has. And it has a major, major effect, much more so than the content of the knowledge, I would say, because in a sense, the content of knowledge is kind of always being reproduced, but unless you have the right medium to access it and to explore it, it'll be ignored, right? So content isn't really the problem. The problem is the medium and what the medium allows you to say and not say. And so this is where crafting the medium becomes very important. And I think one of the Things that social media has done is it's forced academics and other so called professional knowledge producers to, to really reconsider, you know, what it is they want to get across and how they get, get it across so that the full extent of the knowledge that they in fact are producing will be made publicly available.
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Interviewer
Is social media the right medium then? Is that what you're saying?
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Steve Fuller
Social media? Look, social media is a lot of things at this point, right? I mean, I mean, so, so I don't have anything against the term social media. I mean, you know, if we think about Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and TikTok and all these things, they're all doing somewhat different things. Right. They're all in a way conveying often a lot of the same content in different ways because some are, you might say, some are more biased toward textual, some are more biased toward video. Right. But, but nevertheless, the content that they're drawing on is pretty much the same content. And, and you see the kinds of effects that they have in their audiences. And I think what academics need to do is to study this whole array very carefully and with an eye to, in a way, maximizing the content that's already available by finding the medium that is best suited for conveying it.
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Interviewer
Okay. And that will depend case by case.
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Steve Fuller
Yeah, And I think we need to be. But the point is you need to be open to that. Right. I think at the moment, as academics, we are too text focused in a way.
- [28:49]
Interviewer
Well, thank you, Steve.
- [28:50]
Steve Fuller
Well, thank you everybody. Yeah.
- [28:53]
Ed
All right, thank you very much for listening to Philosophy for our times. Hope you enjoyed the episode and if you did, our emails in the show notes so you can let us know how much you liked it or if you didn't, you can send us hate mail. We love to read through the hate mail, but otherwise, don't forget to like, subscribe, subscribe, share and yeah, we will see you in the next one. All right, have a good day. Bye guys.
- [29:17]
Steve Fuller
With VRBoCare, help is always ready before, during and after your stay. We've planned for the plot twists, so support is always available because a great
- [29:29]
Interviewer
trip starts with peace of mind.