Epistemic Pollution
The chapter continues the argument for thinking that individual cognition is highly unreliable. It argues that we live in an epistemically polluted environment: deliberately and inadvertently, other agents shape our environments in ways that leave individual cognition even worse off than it might have been. This chapter sketches some of the pollutants and how they work to undermine virtuous cognition. It argues we live in an environment in which the cues we rely on for assessing the expertise of individuals and the reliability of information are deliberately mimicked by people who seek to deceive us. Because we’re unable to assess a great many claims on our own, we’re reliant on these cues; their pollution ensures that individual cognition is even worse off than it might have been. The chapter finishes with some tentative suggestions for cleaning up the epistemic environment.
