epistemics
truth is not the default
epistemics
... See moreIn medieval communities…Fama was the mark of authority and reliability that attaches to a piece of information, new, gossip, and to the teller, to the subject, and to those who spread it. Fama represented reputation. It was the best means anyone had to judge truth and truth tellers apart from falsity and fantasy, from gossip and liars. It is to
On judging others reputations for reliability and diligently protecting ones own. Who do you trust and why? For what kinds of information? On what basis?
The internet drastically increases the ease of finding and fulfilling one’s preferred phenomenological feedback loop, whether that be righteous anger, a sense of shared victimhood, or any other appealing gradient.
Everyone’s Existential Crisis
The worlds we now inhabit are digitized realms incapable by their nature and design of generating a broadly shared experience of reality.
L. M. Sacasas • From Common Sense to Bespoke Realities
It is a hard task to tend directly to our interpersonal reality without the mediating narrative framework. The epistemology we live in demands that we treat the intersubjective as objective—that is to say, we expect and are expected to treat social knowledge as factual reality, without regard for our personal epistemic distance from the content.... See more
Everyone’s Existential Crisis
The concept of a plausibility structure, drawn from the sociology of religion, is meant to describe social contexts, structures, or conditions that make it easier to hold certain beliefs.5 Apart from such structures, a belief may become implausible or untenable.
L. M. Sacasas • Re-Sourcing the Mind
The deep question of social epistemology—the genuine puzzle—is not why people hold false beliefs. It is why people sometimes form true beliefs.
Dan Williams • Why do people believe true things?
our deep-seated human desire to make sense of a complex universe through tidy, airtight explanations.