In complex, modern societies, the relationship between reality and our representations of reality—between what Lippmann called the “real environment” and the “pseudo-environments” that make up our mental models of the real environment—is heavily mediated by complex chains of trust, testimony, and interpretation.

The deep question of social epistemology—the genuine puzzle—is not why people hold false beliefs. It is why people sometimes form true beliefs.

Second, it should make us understand that lies, conspiracy theories, misinformation, bias, pseudo-science, superstition and so on are not alien perversions of the public sphere. They are the epistemic state of nature that society will revert to in the absence of fragile—and highly contingent—cultural and institutional achievements.

Part of this inheritance involves a profound normative change. One of the revolutionary ideas of the Enlightenment was that we should apply standards of evidence and reason to our beliefs, even when the beliefs concern the distant past or future, the broad cosmos, or the nature of social reality.

Many educated people in affluent, liberal societies... See more