How do we Know what we Know?

The Critical Importance of Considering Your Sources

A few years ago it would have been unnecessary to write this piece.   Misinformation circulated and many people subscribed to wild conspiracy theories.   Those often featured a cabal of powerful individuals who secretly sought to control our finances, our freedoms or our lives.   But conspiracy theories and their proponents could easily be dismissed.  They were amusing but existed only on the periphery of our society and did little harm.   Since the pandemic, however, my impression is that distrust of experts, traditional media and governments has become more widespread.  One has to wonder whether anarchic lines of thinking have reached a point that they may be more dangerous than amusing.  If the trend continues unchecked, possibly these views will begin to undermine the integrity of institutions that are fundamental to the operation of western liberal democracies, namely news media, the electoral process, our legal systems and courts, a free market economy and the integrity of government operations.

In this piece I outline the problem from an epistemological perspective.  I demonstrate (or reaffirm) why it is so important to understand and evaluate our sources for information.  This is particularly important when the information pertains to the vast range of topics for which we must rely on third parties to understand the universe in which we reside.

So I begin by considering how it is that we know what we know.  For my purposes there are two broad categories of knowledge.  First there are things we know because we have experienced them directly, such as where we live, what we do for a living, who belongs to our families and what the weather is like at this moment as you read these words.   About even these things there is no such thing as absolute certainty.   Everything we perceive is so distorted by our senses and our minds that to some extent we each live in our own distinct worlds of our own creation.   Some sects of Buddhism would say that the entire universe is a projection of our minds.  It is not possible to disprove that.   For practical purposes, however, it is sensible to assume that an objective universe exists.   That assumption is consistent with our day to day observations and with scientific theories that have evolved over the centuries and millennia.

The second kind of knowledge is the kind we accumulate by relying solely on third parties.   I have in mind knowledge we get from history books, information and news media, scientific sources, schools and universities, experts in their respective fields and so on.  From these sources we have a general idea of human culture and history, science, current events, and so on.

A great deal of the knowledge falls into this second category.  Therefore the relative quality of those sources becomes critically important.  I speculate that one of the reasons why oddball theories become fairly widespread is that apparently many people fail to distinguish between reliable sources of information and those that are not.

On virtually any given topic, it is possible to find sources of information that will disagree with one another.   Obviously the fact that there may be competing views does not mean that each should be given equal weight.   For example, most of us are familiar with the historical phenomenon known as the holocaust, the genocide of Jewish and other citizens in Europe under the German Nazi regime.  We learned this as students at school.  History books provide accounts of the circumstances under which the holocaust occurred.  We are confident in our knowledge because historians affirm that the holocaust occurred as reported. Historians are best qualified to ascertain the surviving data, witnesses and physical evidence.   Our views remain firm even though there will always be outliers who deny that the holocaust ever took place.

It is precisely the same with (a) whether climate change is occurring and what are its causes, (b)  whether the Covid virus was a hoax, (c) whether Mr Trump won the 2020 presidential election in the United States, (d) whether traditional news sources are merely biased (as they all must be) or participate in a conspiracy to tell us lies in order restrict our freedoms to benefit a cabal of powerful individuals or to achieve other nefarious goals.  In each case there is a highly credible (but still uncertain) view and there is a highly doubtful view.  It is usually a very simple to ascertain which is which but it has become fairly common for people to fail do manage that task.

Let’s look at this a bit more closely.  I say there is a highly credible “but still uncertain” view on each of these topics because nothing is absolutely certain, even (as I have said) when it comes to things we know from our direct experience.   Yet in each case it is usually possible to analyse sources of information and form a confident view one way or another.   Consider my example (c), the American election.  The last time I looked, over 65 courts had considered the many arguments that have been put forward to support a case that that there was voter fraud, lost ballots, rigged or faulty voting machines and so on.  These courts will have considered the strongest arguments available to show that the 2020 election was “stolen.”  But in all of these cases the courts have uniformly determined that no widespread or significant voter fraud or ballot miscounting occurred and that the voting machines worked as intended.  Courts are the most definitive source of information on this topic and we can safely accept that the 2020 official election results are correct.  Again this is so despite a fair number of sources, including the losing candidate (Donald Trump), that claim otherwise.

I could make a similar case for all of the other examples I have mentioned but there is no need to do that for present purposes.

The analysis thus far assumes that my sources of information about the US election are themselves reliable.  So let us turn to that.   I mainly rely on sources such as the New York Times, the Guardian, and even the (much maligned) Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.  All of these and similar sources are undoubtedly biased, because they are populated by human beings and we are by our nature biased in one way or another.  All of these and similar sources also make mistakes.  Yet they all work hard at least to get the facts straight.  And when they discover an error has been made they issue meticulous corrections.  They also indicate their sources of information, which usually include the most knowledgeable people on the topic at hand, namely experts.

Contrast this with sources that promote an alternative point of view on these topics.  They include:  (a) internet postings that do not cite their sources, (b) unattributed Facebook posts or unattributed email circulars, (c) numerous online videos promoting conspiracy theories about Covid and (d) alt-right news sources.    I have reviewed  countless sources of this kind and find that in nearly every case the analysis contains glaring internal logical inconsistencies or is based either on false information or on correct information that is misleading.   Even the most popular television news service in the United States, Fox News, is repeatedly guilty of presenting superficially correct information but giving an impression that is entirely misleading or unreliable.  (See my separate Substack piece on that topic.)   Alt-right news sources, including Breitbart, have been proven to promulgate information which they must know is false, for example to do with the absurd pizzagate conspiracy (https://chat.openai.com/share/e3e05cd2-5944-4e63-8856-64c2bc50c8d8).  Once a news source has been shown to promote and not retract information it must know to be false, surely it is best to avoid that source!

In my own experience, many people do not merely fail to assess the relative quality of the sources available to them.  They go much further than that.  They have become so cynical that shockingly they often instinctively and deliberately base their opinions on the opposite of whatever mainstream media sources may be saying and the opposite of whatever experts may say.   That is to say, they believe the opposite of whatever the most reliable sources tell us!   This is occasionally a winning strategy.  Galileo argued against conventional wisdom and insisted that the earth was not the centre of the universe and he was famously correct, although his heliocentric view was itself later overridden.  And certainly it is prudent to receive all information with a certain amount of scepticism.  However, I can easily predict what will happen if you consistently adopt viewpoints simply because they are the opposite of what mainstream media disclose or the opposite of what the most qualified people might say about subjects within their expertise.  I can predict that you will almost always be wrong!   

Economists, legal and medical experts, engineers, plumbers, electricians, and auto mechanics will undoubtedly err from time to time.   But when they express an opinion within their areas of expertise they are highly likely be correct, certainly more so than any layperson expressing views on the same topics.  I can hardly believe it is necessary to state this obvious fact but I encounter people regularly who fail to grasp it.

The universe is replete with mystery and that is both confounding and marvellous. To paraphrase Hamlet, there is more in heaven and earth that is dreamt of by humankind.  For all we know the universe will turn out to be a projection of our minds.  It is much safer and more practical, though, to assume objective reality exists.    Further we must work hard to assess the quality of sources on which we rely to learn the things we believe to be true about things beyond our own direct experience.

Nigel Howcroft

January 2024