Fake or real?

816 words, 3 minute read.

How can I tell who is responsible for the outbreak of a war, what the origin and nature is of a pandemic, who has perpetrated war crimes, whose policies are for the greater good, who is a dictator and fascist and who a great benefactor of humanity and peacemaker, who is the swamp and who is draining it? Are “mainstream” media more trustworthy or should I listen to “whistleblowers” and “alternative” sources of information that claim to report the truth suppressed by others?

At the heart of these questions, which are ultimately about my capacity to know reality, or truth, lies an absolute impossibility: the epistemic inescapability of the self. What I read, hear, see, touch, feel, experience of the world around me appears to be precisely that – an experience of the world. However, all I have access to are my experiences, with their source inescapably mediated by my self.

Where does that leave me? Does it render all information equivalent? Does my epistemic solipsism mean that I can’t make judgments about the reliability of alternative sources of information? I don’t believe so. Its understanding simply forces me to bear in mind an ultimate limit on certainty, but being precluded from reaching it does not make striving for it or attaining it to different, albeit ultimately unknowable, degrees meritless.

Even on a self-limited basis, I can make judgments about how much weight to give different sources of information. Given conflicting views, I can ask myself how much credence to give each one of them, from rejecting them outright to adopting them fully, while remembering the elusiveness of certainty.

It is all very well to say the above, but how do I go about it in the absence of a fixed point, so ardently desired by Archimedes and so keenly lacking in the pursuit of reality.

I have no absolutes to offer here, but believe that the following have served me well as principles or questions to put into play when weighing up a new claim that purports to represents the world:

1. Reality is greater than ideas. Pope Francis’ lemma from Evangelii Gaudium warns against a primacy of ideas in the face of reality, which always exceeds its casting into language. The quest for an understanding of reality mustn’t become a holding on to ideas and a matching up of experiences, events, data to them or a mistaking of ideas for reality itself. This stance also resonates with Terry Eagleton’s advice to seek out direct experiences of the content of statements advocated by others or views held by myself. This, however, is only seldom possible, which makes those few opportunities the more important.
2. The medium informs the message. Slightly softening Marshall McLuhan points towards considering the source of truth statements. Do they come from a source that has credentials relevant to their content in terms of spatiotemporal vicinity and expertise? How has the source fared in previous cases in terms of contributing to a favourable judgment of veracity? Have they cried wolf before when none proceeded to devour sheep?
3. The inconvenience of reality. What is the case does not care about how it fits with this or that narrative and sooner or later reality will present itself as a Stolperstein or skandalon. How a source of information handles such cases is a particularly good litmus test for authenticity.
4. The continuity of reality. In some sense the opposite of the previous consideration is of use too. Is a new piece of information dramatically at odds with all past reports? Perhaps it merits greater scrutiny. There are no magic wands in the universe.
5. Follow the money. Who is to gain from the acceptance of a particular view of reality? Does it happen to be the source promoting it? Would such gains be at the expense of others? Would those others be weak, at the margins or “other”? A yes to any of these ought to ring alarm bells.
6. Seek out the counsel of those you trust. They are likely to have gone through scrutiny like yourself and understanding where it has led them is a valuable arrow to your bow.
7. Listen to those you don’t trust. They too are facing the one reality I am in and even if their motives are not good or their analysis is distorted a twisted reflection is still a reflection and may yield insights from previously inaccessible perspectives.

The above seems to me to be a good set of considerations to throw at a new candidate for insights about reality. They certainly aren’t a checklist or a set of pass/fail gates but I believe them to be useful in forming a probabilistic opinion, which by its very nature needs to remain open to revisiting and adjusting in the light of future events and reflection.

There is no need to walk in darkness when the landscape is littered with torches.