Risposta ai commenti

In this reply, we respond to our commentators. We kick off by addressing Giulia Bistagnino’s concerns. To begin with, Bistagnino worries that our epistemic account of fake news may easily motivate a contemporary variant of Plato’s argument against democracy. Her second concern is that our analysis, in particular the part of it alleging group dynamics to be responsible for the proliferation of disinformation, misconstrues the value for democracy represented by group thinking and dogmatism. In response to the first worry, we make explicit that the argument leading to an epistocratic conclusion includes hidden premises that we either stay neutral about or straightforwardly reject. In response to the second, we grant that group-thinking and dogmatism may be beneficial insofar as they lead to the production and the dissemination of situated knowledge, but we deny that they may be beneficial insofar as they provide hospitable ground to fake news and disinformation. Then, we address Maria Borrello’s point about the link between our analysis and the notion of post-truth. We motivate the choice of avoiding reference to this term by appealing to a methodological concern, namely that the term has an unstable meaning, as well as empirical considerations, which dispute the claim that we live in an age of distrust (in experts).