如果我们没有能力区分什么是真的,什么是假的,那么根据定义,思想的市场就不起作用。根据定义,我们的民主也就不起作用了。我们正在进入一个认识论的危机。
我认为奥巴马对认识论危机的看法是正确的。但我认为它比他所建议的更深入。这个问题不仅仅是能够辨别真假的问题。问题是能够辨别谁在试图呈现真相,即使他们并不总是成功。问题不在于'真相在哪里',而在于。'谁在说真话?
一项声明的真实性可以通过经验来检验:这就是事实核查员的作用。各个媒体组织根据声明的真实性对其进行排名。在美国,《华盛顿邮报》的 "事实核查员 "项目给政治家的说法打了一个从1到4的皮诺曹分数;波因特研究所的PolitiFact有一个从 "真实 "到 "着火 "的六级真理表。
但真实性更难评估,因为它要求我们知道说话者知道什么--窥视他们的头脑。那是一个谎言,还是一个诚实的错误?判断的方法之一是一个人对其主张是错误的证据的反应。如果他们不管不顾地继续重复,那么他们显然不是在说实话。一个在周一犯的诚实的错误,在周二得到纠正后,如果在周三重复,就会变成一个谎言。
正如伯纳德-威廉姆斯(Bernard Williams)在他有先见之明的最后一本书《真相与真实》(Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy (2002), 写道。
如果一个人相信的东西被证明是错误的,并不意味着他不应该相信它。真正的原因是,如果一个人认识到了错误,他就不会继续拥有这个信念......。
真理是经验性的,但真实性是伦理性的。真理是最终产品,而真实性是其生产中的一个重要因素。认识论的危机被归咎于民粹主义的政客、技术平台和追求利益的名人巨头。这些都很重要。但真正的问题是美德的丧失,特别是真实性的美德。认识论的危机是一种道德危机;并且需要道德的解决方案。
做出更多努力往往意味着转向比你的Facebook feed更高质量的新闻来源
我们在这一努力中的守护神可能是拿但业,他出现在《约翰福音》中,有资格成为真实性的守护神。当被告知耶稣时,他嘲笑道:'拿撒勒人还能出什么好东西吗?但基督知道他这样说,就赞叹道:'看哪,真是个以色列人,在他里面没有欺骗!' 基督显然不是为拿但业的真实性鼓掌,而是为他愿意说出自己的想法--为他的真实性。
威廉姆斯认为,真实性建立在两个基本美德上:准确和真诚。准确的美德要求 "你尽你所能获得真实的信念"。这并不意味着我们都需要努力成为绝对一切的世界专家。正如威廉姆斯所说,有一个必要的'认识论的分工'。我们通常相信别人知道如何确保我们的饮用水是安全的,或者如何切除我们的阑尾。关键是要在我们的知识和能力范围内,尽我们所能,特别是在更重要的问题上。
威廉姆斯补充说,"准确是一种美德,它鼓励人们花比他们可能做的更多的努力去寻找真相,而不是仅仅接受他们头脑中出现的任何信仰形状的东西。我的朋友在检查我关于诺克斯维尔的说法时,就是在展示这种美德。一个人如果阅读关于戴口罩或打疫苗的公共卫生文献,而不是简单地相信邻居告诉他的东西,也是在做同样的事情。做出更多的努力往往意味着无非是转向一个比你的Facebook feed更高质量的新闻来源,例如选举新闻或Covid报道。
在努力获得准确的信息后,我们应该充分和诚实地分享它。这就是真诚的美德,正如威廉姆斯所说,它要求 "你所说的表明你所相信的"。这听起来可能很容易。但在某些情况下,我们可能会被诱惑去隐藏我们的信仰,或者至少是其中的一部分,因此需要一些勇气来这样做。也许你已经相信,教会里的每个人在礼拜时戴上面具是很重要的,但你的大多数同胞认为戴面具是政治上正确的废话。当这个话题出现时,至少从社会的角度来看,保持沉默可能会更容易。但真诚意味着要大声说话。如果说有时需要说话者的勇气,那么就要求听话者的信任。威廉姆斯再次说:"真实是一种值得信赖的形式,它以一种特殊的方式与说话有关。
当然,在某些情况下,从道德上讲,更加谨慎是合理的,正如埃德蒙-伯克所主张的那样。他在1796年《关于与弑君者的和平建议的两封信》中写道:"在任何情况下都不允许有虚假和欺骗,"。但是,就像行使所有的美德一样,对真理要有节制。
伯克强调,"节约真相 "只有在特殊情况下才是合理的。这些情况可能包括为了不造成不必要的冒犯而隐瞒一个微不足道的真相;在政治或国际谈判期间;或者在隐瞒真相将拯救生命的情况下。作为一般原则,真诚意味着不对听众有所隐瞒。这就是为什么要求证人发誓不仅要说出真相,而且要说出全部真相(至少要说出与当前问题相关的全部真相)。
这两种真实性的美德--准确和真诚--在那些占据研究、教学和交流机构的人中最为珍贵。正如威廉姆斯所指出的,学术界的权威源于他们在这两方面的真实性:"他们很谨慎,他们不撒谎。记者和法官也可以(或至少应该)这么说。
问题的关键不在于反驳一种说法和证明另一种说法。而是要对所有的说法产生怀疑
这些职业是作家Jonathan Rauch所描述的 "知识的构成 "的核心所在。这种构成是根据某些规则运作的,特别是假设的自由和接受审查和检查的责任。正如Rauch所写的。
遵循这些规则的社区是由它的价值观和实践来定义的,而不是由它的边界来定义的,而且它决不局限于学者和科学家。它还包括新闻界、法院、执法部门和情报界--所有基于证据的职业都需要对竞争性假设进行测试和论证。它的成员要求自己和对方为他们的错误负责。
与这一宪法相对抗的是罗奇所称的 "巨魔认识论 "的力量。巨魔寻求的不是真理,而是摧毁一个敌人,无论是意识形态还是个人。巨魔不仅没有表现出真诚和准确的美德,他们的工作方向恰恰相反,故意根据偷梁换柱的信息,提供扭曲的现实愿景。2020年的美国大选是一个巨魔认识论的大师班。特朗普、他的律师和支持者大军利用微小的、孤立的错误事件,甚至少数真正的欺诈案件来描绘 "被盗选举 "的整体画面。特朗普自己也对投票机产生了怀疑,他引用了密歇根州安特里姆县的一次误计。事实证明,确实出现了错误--但这是一个官员在设置制表设备时犯下的错误,很快得到了纠正,与投票机无关。
当涉及到对公共政策的评估时,学者的真实性尤其重要。以产生积极结果的方式构建评估研究是非常容易的。这是可以理解的。很少有资助者,无论是公共还是慈善机构,在得知他们价值10亿美元的计划没有实现任何目标时感到兴奋。因此,即使是在进行良好的研究时,压力也总是突出任何积极的发现,而淡化那些令人失望的发现。与其说是基于证据的政策制定,不如说是基于政策的证据制定。
在所有这些情况下,都需要机构和个人承担责任。媒体公司、大学、智囊团和政党都必须更加努力地工作,以保持公开性、易错性和交流的规范,从而促进知识的生产和传播。但我们不能只是把责任推给机构。这也是我们自己的个人道德问题,也是我们对以真实的方式生活和行动的承诺。
作为一个骨子里的自由主义者,威廉斯对伴随着启蒙运动的理性主义革命而来的危险高度敏感,首先是任何围绕着关于正义或人性的、有科学依据的 "真理 "来安排社会的企图。那就是暴政。但启蒙自由主义的伟大礼物是个人和集体努力学习,了解更多关于我们自己、彼此和世界的事情。他写道:"我们对启蒙运动关于真理的进步和应用的方案有一些担心,但对其对真理的关注有很多值得珍惜的地方。
我们的认识论危机被归咎于政治家、学者和记者,以及他们所居住的组织。而且有很多的责备。但如果威廉姆斯是对的,我认为他是对的,那么我们问题的根源在于伦理。解决方案是我们要做得更好,做得更好。当然,讲真话是一项艰巨的任务。但如果没有它,自由社会就无法运作。而且没有人说自由是容易的。
Our crisis of public knowledge is an ethical crisis. Rewarding ‘truthfulness’ above ‘truth’ is a step towards a solution
The other day, I told a friend that Knoxville is the capital of Tennessee. Five seconds and a blur of fingers later, he said: ‘No, it’s Nashville.’
My statement was obviously not true. But since I sincerely believed in the accuracy of what I was saying, I was nonetheless beingtruthful. I was mistaken, not mendacious. This distinction between truth and truthfulness is vital, but in danger of being lost in debates over ‘post-truth’ politics and ‘fake news’.
Most of us probably inadvertently share trivial untruths quite frequently. Nowadays, there’s almost always somebody, smartphone in hand, ready to set us straight. If it really matters, we’ll likely take the trouble to check our facts.
The stakes of getting it wrong are much higher for the institutions of media, academia or government. So they try hard – or at leastshouldtry hard – to get things right. My Knoxville mistake wouldn’t have made it intoTheNew York Times, unless several factcheckers and copy-editors in the editorial process were negligent.
But even honest journalists and careful scholars will sometimes get things wrong. Honest mistakes are made. Once flagged, these errors will be immediately corrected and acknowledged; there might be some hard questions asked about process failures, too. But there’s a very big difference between an error and a lie – and between ‘fake news’ and ‘false news’. A fake is always false, and was intended to be. But a falsehood is not always a fake; it could simply be a mistake.
Political partisans try to blur this critical distinction. In 2018, the then US president Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee handed out 11 ‘Fake News Awards’ to various media outlets. But most of the news items had been noted and immediately corrected and/or retracted with full explanations. They were false statements, but they were not fake.
When it comes to public health information, the stakes are higher still. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, we all wanted instant, accurate advice on what to do and what not to do. But the virus was, as the interim name given to it reminds us, novel. Scientists were scrambling to figure out what it was, how it spread, and how to defeat it. The honest answer to many of our most urgent questions was: ‘We don’t know yet.’ Guidance had to be given with incomplete information. Many errors were made. Some of the early advice was wrong – it turned out thatmasks were even more important than handwashing, and that outside was very different to indoors, and so on. Many pieces of official advice were false, but not fake. The most important question for citizens is not whether public health advice is always right, it’s whether public health officials are consistentlytryingto get it right – and communicating what the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci called the ‘the full painful truth’, honestly and clearly. Trust is built on truthfulness rather than truth.
Faced with an urgent need for information, we just want the truth. In response to the question ‘Which way to the emergency room?’, all that really matters is the accuracy of the response. But much of the time, it’s more important that a person is speaking truthfully than that they’re speaking the truth, especially when the answers are not yet clear. Most of us feel very differently towards the friend who makes an honest mistake, perhaps based on inadequate information, and the one who tells a deliberate lie. And we also know that nobody can be 100 per cent right about everything 100 per cent of the time, and forgive inadvertent errors made along the way. The same should hold for our institutions.
At the end of 2020, the former US president Barack Obama toldThe Atlantic:
If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work. And by definition our democracy doesn’t work. We are entering into an epistemological crisis.
I think Obama is right about the epistemological crisis. But I think it goes deeper than he suggests. The problem is not simply one of being able to discern true from false. The problem is being able to discern who is evenattemptingto present the truth, even if they don’t always succeed. The question is not ‘Where is the truth?’ It is: ‘Who is being truthful?’
The truth of a statement can be empirically tested: that’s what factcheckers are for. Various media organisations rank claims in terms of their veracity. In the US, theWashington Postproject ‘The Fact Checker’ gives the claims of politicians a Pinocchio score from one to four; and the Poynter Institute’s PolitiFact has a six-scale Truth-o-meter that goes from ‘True’ to ‘Pants on Fire’.
But truthfulness is harder to assess, since it requires us to know what the speaker knows – to peer into their heads. Was it a lie, or an honest mistake? One way to tell is how a person reacts to evidence that their claim is false. If they continue to repeat it regardless, they’re clearly not being truthful. An honest mistake made on Monday and corrected on Tuesday becomes a lie if repeated on Wednesday.
As Bernard Williams, in his prescient finalbook,Truth and Truthfulness:An Essay in Genealogy(2002), wrote:
if what one believed turns out to be false, it does not follow that one ought not to have believed it. What does follow is that if one recognises the falsehood, one does not carry on having the belief …
Truth is empirical, but truthfulness is ethical. Truth is the end product; truthfulness a vital element in its production. The epistemological crisis has been blamed on populist politicians, and on technological platforms, and on profit-seeking celebrity trolls. These are all important. But the real problem is a loss of virtue, specifically the virtue of truthfulness. The epistemic crisis is an ethical crisis; and will require ethical solutions.
Making more effort often means turning to a higher-quality news source than your Facebook feed
Our patron saint in this effort could be Nathanael, who appears in the Gospel of John, and has a good claim to be the patron saint of truthfulness. When told about Jesus, he scoffed: ‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth?’ But Christ, knowing he had said this, exclaimed: ‘Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom is no deceit!’ Christ was clearly not applauding Nathanael for the truth of his statement, but for his willingness to speak his mind – for his truthfulness.
Williams argued that truthfulness rests on two basic virtues: accuracy and sincerity. The virtue of accuracy requires that ‘you do the best you can to acquire true beliefs’. This doesn’t mean that we all need to try to become world experts in absolutely everything. There is, as Williams puts it, a necessary ‘epistemic division of labour’. We usually trust others to know how to ensure that our drinking water is safe or how to remove our appendix. The point is to do what we can, especially with regard to more important matters, within the limits of our knowledge and competence.
Accuracy is, Williams adds, ‘the virtue that encourages people to spend more effort than they might have done in trying to find the truth, and not just to accept any belief-shaped thing that comes into their head.’ My friend was demonstrating this virtue when he checked my claim about Knoxville. A person who reads the public health literature on wearing a mask or taking a vaccine, rather than simply believing what their neighbour tells them, is doing the same. Making more effort can often mean nothing more than turning to a higher-quality news source than your Facebook feed for, say, election news or Covid coverage.
Having tried to get accurate information, we should then share it fully and honestly. This is the virtue of sincerity, which demands, as Williams puts it, that ‘what you say reveals what you believe’. This might sound easy. But there could be circumstances in which we’re tempted to hide our beliefs, or at least some portion of them, and when it will therefore take some courage to do so. Perhaps you have come to believe that it’s important for everyone in your church to wear a mask during services, but most of your fellow congregants think that mask-wearing is politically correct nonsense. When the subject comes up, it might be easier, at least from a social point of view, to remain silent. But to be sincere means to speak up. If courage is sometimes required of the speaker, trust is asked of the hearer. Williams again: ‘Truthfulness is a form of trustworthiness, that which relates in a particular way to speech.’
There can, of course, be occasions when it is morally justified to be more sparing, as Edmund Burke argued. ‘Falsehood and delusion are allowed in no case whatever,’ he wrote inTwo Letters on the Proposals for Peace with the Regicide Directoryin 1796. ‘But, as in the exercise of all the virtues, there is an economy of truth.’
Burke stressed that ‘being economical with the truth’ is justified only in special circumstances. These might include the withholding of a trivial truth in order not to cause unnecessary offence; during political or international negotiations; or in cases where withholding the truth will save lives. As a general principle, being sincere means not holding out on the listener. This is why witnesses are required to swear to tell not just the truth, but thewholetruth (at least the whole truth as relevant to the question at hand).
These two virtues of truthfulness – accuracy and sincerity – are most precious among those who occupy the institutions of research, teaching and communication. As Williams notes, the authority of academics is rooted in their truthfulness in both these respects: ‘they take care, and they do not lie.’ The same can (or at least should) be said of journalists and judges.
The point is not to disprove one claim and prove another. It is to cast doubt over all claims
These professions lie at the heart of what the writer Jonathan Rauchdescribes as the ‘constitution of knowledge’. This constitution operates according to certain rules, in particular, the freedom to hypothesise and the responsibility to undergo review and scrutiny. As Rauch writes:
The community that follows these rules is defined by its values and practices, not by its borders, and it is by no means limited to scholars and scientists. It also includes journalism, the courts, law enforcement and the intelligence community — all evidence-based professions that require competing hypotheses to be tested and justified. Its members hold themselves and each other accountable for their errors.
Working against this constitution are the forces of what Rauch labels ‘troll epistemology’. Trolls seek not the truth, but the destruction of an enemy, ideological or personal. Trolls not only fail to display the virtues of sincerity and accuracy, they work in precisely the opposite direction, deliberately offering up distorted visions of reality, based on cherrypicked information. The 2020 US election was a masterclass in troll epistemology. Trump, his lawyers and army of supporters took tiny, isolated incidents of errors or even a few cases of genuine fraud to paint an overall picture of a ‘stolen election’. Trump himself cast doubt on voting machines, citing a miscount in Antrim County, Michigan. It turned out that there had, in fact, been an error – but it was an official’s mistake made when setting up tabulation equipment, quickly corrected, and nothing to do with the voting machines.
Trump and his acolytes hyped up similar stories about dead people voting, or people voting twice, or votes being ‘found’, of poll-watchers being barred, and so on. In each case, there might have been just a microscopic germ of truth, then wildly exaggerated, and hence all counter-evidence was systematically ignored. It might seem odd to point to several different ways in which the election was stolen, rather than actually manage to prove a single one, but that’s to miss the point. The point is not to disprove one claim and prove another. It is to cast doubt over all claims, to make the idea of truth itself unstable, by, as Steve Bannon put it, ‘flood[ing] the zone with shit’.
There has been a catastrophic corrosion in the virtue of truthfulness, and of course many of the populist leaders and movements of recent years must take much of the blame. But there are other forces at work, many of which helped fuel populism in the first place.
Social media platforms have acted as accelerators and amplifiers of untruths, creating frictionless environments for information,misinformation anddisinformation to spread rapidly. Rather than encouraging more engagement with reliable sources, organisations such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and others have facilitated the creation of epistemic bubbles, filled with people who mutually confirm their existing prejudices.
Social media companies are wrestling with this dilemma, since customers want clickbait (we’re only human after all), which drives revenue (so providers want this even more than customers). Right now, sincerity and accuracy seem to make for unappealing bait, and so can go unclicked. The business models of these companies rely on engagement, and the kind of content that maximises engagement is of the truth-diluting rather than truth-enhancing kind, as Tufekci and others have argued. These firms are now more aggressively flagging and downgrading false or misleading content, and policing hate speech more tightly. But the problem is structural. Should they try to make money or try to make truth? They can’t do both.
The virtues of truthfulness are also under pressure in university departments, think-tanks and newsrooms, perhaps in less dramatic ways but, in the long term, equally dangerous ones. Political polarisation incentivises even good people not only to pick a side, but to start cherrypicking their data to support it.
Scholars with ideological agendas can easily present data in a way that confirms their priors, even if that form of presentation isn’t the most robust – or at least, is only one of many ways in which it could be presented. Let me give a concrete example. The economic condition of the middle class in the US is an important question. So, what happened to the US median income between, say, 1979 and 2014? Well, it increased by 51 per cent. Or possibly 37 per cent, 33 per cent, 30 per cent, or 7 per cent. Or maybe it fell by 8 per cent. All of these answers arecorrect. It just depends on which study you read, and which methodologies the various scholars chose to use.
The world is a complex place, and the search for simplicity is very often what gets us into trouble
Say you have done as Bernard Williams urges and invested some of your own precious time on this question, only to come up with all these competing answers. Frustrating, perhaps. You might well ask: ‘Well, which is it?’ The point is that none of them are wrong, in the sense of being false. They are simply arrived at by different methodologies.
The danger is that Left-wing scholars adopt approaches to produce a particular result, and Right-wing scholars do the opposite, and each present their findings as ‘facts’. A partisan media can then amplify one of these ‘facts’ to suit their priors. Before you know it, people have starkly different views on the matter, and their views are based on perfectly solid research. The point here is not that we can’t know anything, it’s simply that the world is a complex place, and that the search for simplicity is very often what gets us into trouble. For scholars, the most important thing is to strive to present their work in a way that’s as objective as possible (accuracy), and to present a range of reasonable results wherever possible, giving the fullest possible picture (sincerity).
Scholarly truthfulness is especially important when it comes to assessments of public policy. It’s all too easy to construct evaluation studies in ways that produce positive results. This is understandable. Few funders, public or philanthropic, are thrilled to learn that their billion-dollar initiative failed to achieve any of its goals. The pressure then, even when it comes to well-conducted studies, is always to highlight any positive findings and downplay the disappointing ones. Rather than evidence-based policymaking, we end up with policy-based evidence-making.
In all of these cases, there’s a need both for institutional and individual responsibility. Media companies, universities, think-tanks and political parties will all have to work much harder to maintain the norms of openness, fallibility and exchange that facilitate the production and dissemination of knowledge. But we can’t just abdicate responsibility to institutions. This is a question of our own personal ethics too, and of our commitment to living and acting in a truthful manner.
A liberal to his bones, Williams was highly sensitive to the dangers that had accompanied the rationalist revolution of the Enlightenment, above all any attempt to order society around a scientifically grounded ‘truth’ about justice or human nature. That way lies tyranny. But the great gift of Enlightenment liberalism is the individual and collective striving to learn, to know more, about ourselves, each other, and the world. ‘We have something to fear from Enlightenment programmes for the advance and application of truth, but a lot to cherish in its concern for truthfulness,’ he wrote.
The blame for our epistemic crisis has been laid at the door of politicians, scholars and journalists, and the organisations they inhabit. And there’s plenty of blame to go around. But if Williams is right, and I think he is, then the root of our problem is ethical. The solution is for us to do better, tobebetter. Certainly, being truthful is a hard task. But without it, free societies cannot function. And nobody said freedom was easy.