Reviewing Steve Fuller’s book, Post-Truth: Knowledge as a Power Game, from the Greek island of Zakynthos, in the middle of a global pandemic is a surreal experience…. [please read below the rest of the article]. Article Citation: Hewitt, Des. 2020…. Read More ›
In “Fake News, Conspiracy, and Intellectual Vice” Marco Meyer (2019) presents findings from an investigation of the role of intellectual vices—intellectual arrogance, intellectual vanity, boredom, and intellectual fragility—in the uptake of conspiracy theories and fake news. Using online survey tools,… Read More ›
In their introduction to this special issue, Alfano and Klein (2019) pose two neatly contrasting questions for social epistemologists who want to take our epistemic networks seriously. First, what sort of individual epistemic properties should we cultivate, given the social… Read More ›
It is tempting to accept the studies de Ridder (2019) cites in support of my position that the fake news scare has been “overhyped”. However, since I have argued there is no fake news problem at all, I cannot accept… Read More ›
David Coady (2019), in his contribution to this issue, joins a small but growing number of people expressing misgivings about the current hype surrounding fake news, alternative facts, and other post-truthy phenomena in society and academia (cf. also Habgood-Coote 2019)…. Read More ›
There is a growing body of literature, both popular and academic—including Alfano and Klein and Meyer’s contributions to this special issue—that holds that the world (or at least the Western World) is facing a new and growing problem that goes… Read More ›
The average Australian spends almost 10 hours a week on social media; a majority report that checking Facebook is one of the first things they do in the morning (Sensis 2017). Recent revelations about fake news and extremist sentiments spread… Read More ›
Fake news and conspiracy theories spreading over the internet are a major challenge to public debate. How can we address this challenge? I focus on the dispositions of individuals, as there is some evidence that there are strong individual differences… Read More ›
One of the first things that comes to mind when we think of the special issue’s theme, “Trust in a Social and Digital World” is the epidemic of ‘fake news’ and a cluster of trust-relevant vices we commonly associate with… Read More ›
Wagner-Egger et al. (2019) continue to defend a project of pathologizing and “curing” the public of doubts about the reliability of government, media and corporate statements and actions. They envision a mass psychological engineering project to curtail rational social epistemology, one particularly, but not limited to, targeting children in public schools. The… Read More ›