by Jerry Cayford
The topic today is misinformation and knowledge, conspiracy theory and evidence, not biblical exegesis. When Saint Paul tells the Corinthians, “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face” (1 Corinthians 13:12), he is contrasting partial, human knowing with the perfect knowing that will come when we reunite with God. He is not dissing human knowledge, and yet one detects an unmistakable yearning for that better sort of knowledge.
These two kinds of knowledge express two different philosophical theories of truth. When the Scientific Revolution came along some sixteen hundred years after Paul wrote, people had had enough of this “through a glass darkly” stuff and decided it was time to move on to seeing reality “face to face.” That moving on, though, never quite left the dark mirrors behind, and we are living today through an acute conflict between these theories.
Today, we are at another moment of historic transition, with the atomic bomb behind us and artificial intelligence ahead. In writing about our moment, I will do a bit of philosophy and some intellectual history—about as quick and dirty as you saw in the previous paragraph—through the lens of three pieces by New York Times columnists (you don’t need to read them). All three discuss conspiracy theories and how to confront them. We will find our two competing theories of truth between the lines. Seeing them in action can illuminate our moment, and maybe the path ahead.
The first column, by Farhad Manjoo, explains why it is pointless or even counterproductive to argue with conspiracy theorists like Robert Kennedy Jr. The rebuttal to Manjoo by Ross Douthat explains that the alternatives to arguing are far worse. The third, by Paul Krugman, explains how to argue. I think the three together are instructive about how we can know things, even when we never confront reality face to face but see everything through a glass, darkly.
The dispute between Manjoo and Douthat is, on its face, quite simple. Manjoo describes the frustrations of arguing with Kennedy: “You can come armed with all the facts in the world, but when you’re dealing with a conspiracist, there’s no real way to ‘win’ an argument”; “trying to fight misinformation with facts is a tricky business. One side is bound by clearly documented evidence; the other side is free to cherry pick factoids from anywhere.” In trying to correct all of Kennedy’s “exaggerations, omissions and leaps of logic,” Manjoo felt that he lost the audience: “I couldn’t help but sound like the boring, persnickety nerd stuck in the weeds.” All of this seems accurate enough as description and fair enough as complaint.
And yet, Douthat’s rebuttal is quite devastating: what is the alternative to arguing? It can only be some sort of frankly authoritarian exercise of power to silence those with whom you disagree: “a world where institutions would decline to platform” Kennedy; “the main alternative theory seems to be to enforce an intellectual quarantine, policed by media fact-checking and authoritative expert statements.” The correct lesson, concludes Douthat, is that you must argue better, because “if you don’t think he should be publicly debated, you need some other theory of how the curious can be persuaded away from his ideas”; “unless you’re willing to go all the way to a Ministry of Truth, there is no reasonable alternative.”
Before going any further into this debate, or into the events and disputes that occupy us these days, it will be useful to consider the large philosophies that inform the Manjoo–Douthat divergence. As I said, this will be a quick and dirty summary. Philosophers, avert your eyes.
Paul’s modest acceptance that seeing face to face is beyond the human condition may still be Church doctrine (I don’t know), but Thomas Aquinas (say, 1270) laid the foundations for the whole-hearted embrace of the “correspondence theory of truth” a few hundred years later. That theory says, basically: here’s a statement; here’s reality; we put them face to face and, if they correspond, then the statement is true. This is pretty much what society has taken for granted “truth” is throughout the “modern era” or “modernity,” conventionally starting from Galileo, Descartes, and Hobbes (say, 1640).
“I think, therefore I am” is modernity’s famously successful first foray into establishing indisputable truths from indisputable evidence; even if Descartes is dreaming or deceived by an evil demon, “I am” is still true. Buoyed by this success, we proceeded enthusiastically to set up scientific methods and societies to examine reality face to face. The best minds taking the greatest care under ideal conditions would uncover truths and tell the rest of us.
From the vantage point of the 21st century, we know how this story goes. The rest of us are not face to face with reality; rather, we are reading some journalist’s summary—adjusted by some business-minded editor—of some scientific society’s secretary’s dumbed-down version of what its funders want to hear their scientists have found. You’ll pardon the cynicism, but chain of custody (as I’ll call it) matters. Even a very short chain raises problems. Descartes only got out of his own mind (“I am”) and into the world (“holding this piece of paper”) with the dubious argument that a benevolent God would not give him defective sensory apparatus.
It is more than amusingly ironic that Descartes gets modernity’s supposedly face-to-face investigation of reality off the ground only by appealing to authority (God): implicitly, every truth claim endorses the authority of the chain that shows its correspondence to reality; since most links in the chain are social relations (someone tells someone), if not actual institutions, correspondence theory is latently authoritarian. Yet, since authority is finite (unless you buy the God argument), the theory is also vulnerable to a dogged skepticism that rejects all authority. (I’ll come back to both Douthat and conspiracists on the weakness of authority.) Modernity begins with an explosion of credentialing (Royal Society, Académie des Sciences, peer review), because correspondence truth is an economy trading in authority.
The project of modernity that Descartes initiated is called “foundationalism” (sometimes “formalism”) because it seeks rock solid truths from which can be derived (or on which can be built) a structure of knowledge as solid as those foundational truths. Manjoo is squarely in this modern tradition. He is all about facts, certified and authorized. He is incensed that Kennedy claims arguments about facts are “almost a side issue.” No, you “come armed with all the facts,” you “fight misinformation with facts,” using “documented evidence”; the thing to do with conspiracy theories is put them face to face with reality and see that they do not correspond. That’s his take, and it leaves him frustrated and somewhat helpless, because that is not how things work.
The point of a theory of truth is to explain how we know stuff. By that criterion, correspondence was never a good theory. Claiming that words and reality somehow “correspond” to each other seems obscure, at best, possibly circular, and in any case doesn’t explain much. All the action is in the chain of custody carrying the facts to us. Correspondence theory requires that those links have authority, but otherwise has little interest in them. Douthat points out the ethical failure of seeking that authority through ugly and coercive power manipulations rather than persuasion, but correspondence theory’s greater failure is its explanatory emptiness. By the early twentieth century, a superior “coherence theory of truth” is focusing on the links of the chain. (It is also reconceiving the physical metaphors away from chains or building blocks, which represent individual facts, and toward a vast net of interdependent beliefs.)
Coherence theory says, roughly, true beliefs are the ones that all hang together as a coherent system. Coherence does not require us to be able to see reality face to face; it measures a belief against the whole body of our other beliefs—a web of beliefs, a network—even if that body of beliefs has all come to us through a glass, darkly.
Krugman demonstrates the coherence theory by actually making the sort of argument Douthat advocates. Krugman addresses two particular conspiracy theories: that inflation is much higher than the government says, and that we are really in a recession the government is hiding. He is refreshingly direct: “let’s ask how we know that the recession truthers are wrong.” His argument is simple, but it illustrates important ideas.
Krugman assembles a network of reinforcing bits of evidence. “America’s statistical agencies…care a lot about their reputations for integrity.” The story those agencies tell is backed up by outside sources: “there are, in fact, many independent sources of evidence on the economic state of the nation.” He cites “the National Federation of Independent Business’s survey of small businesses,” “surveys of business managers,” “claims for unemployment insurance — data collected by states, not the federal government,” and “private surveys.” “And they all more or less confirm what the official data says.” The key words here are “many” and “independent.”
This network of evidence is more than a list because the reader already has a body of knowledge that integrates it into patterns. We all know civil servants can be overruled by political appointees, so Krugman points out, “We can be pretty sure that if political appointees were cooking the books we’d be hearing about it from multiple whistle-blowers.” This argument works only because we know various things: there is a media market for exposing cooked books; private companies will hire fired whistle-blowers; reputations affect pay and other self-interests; outside and academic experts have incentives to catch bad work by agencies; all those surveys, business groups, and state agencies have their own avenues of publication; and so on. That is, the argument appeals to the reader’s commonsense understanding that it is logistically impossible for nefarious forces to control the “many,” “multiple,” “independent” strands of a large and coherent web of evidence. That is the essence of a coherence theory of truth.
Most importantly, coherence does not depend on authority. Krugman is not claiming that any of those surveys or business organizations are authoritative, or even right. The argument rests entirely on the reader’s understanding of what the micro-level operations of ordinary life make plausible.
Getting back to the quick and dirty, sometime last century the movement that brought us coherence theory (Joachim’s canonical formulation: 1906) overwhelmed correspondence theory and the intellectual structure of modernity. Pinning down huge historical transitions is endlessly controversial (especially in the middle of them), so we can’t really say when modernity ended. Personally, I am partial to Virginia Woolf’s much quoted “on or about December 1910 human character changed.” I like the tongue-in-cheek specificity of the date for such an unspecifiable event.
Woolf’s date fits this larger movement in which everything changed as Western society realized that Descartes’s project of building certain knowledge on solid foundations is unworkable. Field after field discovered that its foundations are not solid, but shifting and context-dependent (in a word, “relative”): species (Darwin), rationality (Boas, and anthropology’s 1890s reaction to Frazer’s The Golden Bough), time (Einstein, 1905), Earth (Wegener’s continental drift theory, 1915), arithmetic (Gödel, 1931), science (Ludwik Fleck’s Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, 1935), and so much more. Wittgenstein’s work through the 1930s and 1940s sort of cuts across it all. Some of the debates and changes occurred outside the academy, but the movement probably only hit popular culture in a big way with Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
For lack of a more original name, we call the movement that swept away modernity “postmodernity.” Where modernity is foundationalist, postmodernity is relativist (or “anti-formalist”). That alone should tell you that a backlash would soon arrive once mass culture realized that intellectuals had all moved on from modernity’s simple, comforting, authoritarian correspondence theory of truth to some newfangled, shifty, coherence idea. The powers-that-be dug in, and here we stand today with our intellectual foot in the postmodern future and our mass culture foot in a bygone modernity. Everyone sort of knows coherence theory is how things work, and yet most people pay lip service to the zombie ideology of correspondence.
The games conspiracists play are instructive about the strength of coherence and the weakness of correspondence. We all—including conspiracists—intuitively understand how vital is logistical common sense (i.e. coherence). That’s why conspiracy theories look for (or invent) choke points where there are no multiple, reinforcing strands of evidence. Conspiracies congregate around issues where all the evidence is controlled by a source or two, especially a secretive one with classification powers (Roswell UFOs), or the evidence is far away in a foreign language (is Zelensky a neo-Nazi?), or occurred long ago (did the CIA assassinate the Kennedys?), or is unknowably hidden in someone’s head (what are Putin’s real motives? or Biden’s?).
When the networks are large, nearby, and public—climate change, the pandemic—conspiracists pretend that they hang on some small choke point: Fauci as the sole authority filtering everything the public heard about Covid; thousands of meteorologists kept in obedient lockstep by a few corporations funding their grants and departments. I recall a climate change denial story arguing that some satellite was a corrupt NSA asset, while strenuously implying that all the world’s temperature data came from that one satellite (implied but not stated, because it is ridiculous).
The best resource conspiracists have is, yes, correspondence theory, because its main weakness works to their advantage. The credibility of any claim’s correspondence to reality depends on the authority of the links between claim and reality. So, the conspiracist cites some alternative authority—one denied credentials by a corrupt mainstream—and few people are in a position to evaluate competing authorities. This strategy of authority versus authority is a form of skepticism, and correspondence has no answer. The lip service we pay correspondence makes us vulnerable to conspiracy.
What use, though, is this quick intellectual history of truth theories? Douthat offers an insight (if unintentionally). The strongest and weakest point he makes is his account of why the de-platforming, censorship, and other authoritarian solutions to misinformation won’t work. These measures are being implemented right now, provoking bitter opposition and damaging democratic and liberal norms. But they won’t work because, as Douthat says, such top-down controls require “a basic trust in institutions, a deference to credentials, a willingness to accept judgments from on high” that has gone from our society.
The weak point is that Douthat goes on to say this trust has evaporated “because institutions and experts have so often proved themselves to be untrustworthy and incompetent of late.” Really? A spate of elite incompetence “of late” is all there is to it? If that were so, then it suggests just getting our act together and being more competent would bring back trust and deference. I don’t think so (and I don’t really believe Douthat thinks so, either). The intellectual history above suggests a better account.
Let’s assume that incompetence and untrustworthiness are relatively constant, if not since the dawn of time at least for some centuries now. In that case, the loss of trust and deference to institutions suggests they have lost power. In modernity’s foundationalist project of building knowledge corresponding perfectly with reality, only rigorously controlled investigation by credentialed experts could reliably produce truth and convey it to the masses. Those controlling, credentialing, conveying institutions had a monopoly on truth itself. The choice people faced was between deference and chaos. Or so it would seem under a correspondence theory of truth. When postmodernity replaced correspondence with coherence, truth became something we sort out among ourselves, not because “judgments from on high” became less trustworthy but because “human character changed.” Still, we are having some challenges adjusting.
Not all of us are that good at sorting out the truth for ourselves. Demagogues, misinformation, and conspiracy theories are pretty much what you would expect as we find our feet in this new, postmodern era. Columns like Krugman’s are part of teaching each other how to sort truth out better. At the same time, weakened institutions deploy the latest technology in service of (let’s call it) nostalgia for their lost monopoly on truth; they create regimes of content moderation, message de-amplification, and anti-disinformation algorithms, like children building sandcastles to hold back the tide.
The dispute between Manjoo and Douthat, then, encapsulates our transitional moment in history when an intellectually defeated but still culturally powerful theory of truth as correspondence is slowly giving way to a better understanding of truth as coherence. This is a good thing, growing pains notwithstanding. We are rediscovering what Paul told the Corinthians two thousand years ago. We will never see reality face to face, not in this life. Seeing truth through a glass, darkly, is the human condition. But we can work it out.