The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread

by Cailin O'Connor

Philosophers of science, such as Larry Laudan and P. Kyle Stanford, have argued that these past failures of science should make us very cautious in accepting current scientific theories as true. Their argument is sometimes called the “pessimistic meta-induction”: a careful look at the long history of scientific error should make us confident that current theories are also erroneous.19 Does this mean that industry critics of the scientific consensus on CFCs and ozone had a point? Scientists did not (could not) have enough evidence to be certain—and science has had such a dismal track record of discovering lasting truths that we can hardly take the scientists’ word if they say they have gotten it right this time. Surely caution about accepting new scientific findings is always in order. Not quite. Perhaps we can never be certain about anything, but that does not mean we cannot be more or less confident—or that we cannot gather evidence and use it to make informed decisions. We might, for instance, become very, very confident that CFCs are creating a hole in our ozone layer. With the right sorts of evidence we might become so confident that the line between this sort of evidentially grounded belief and absolute certainty is, for our purposes, meaningless. Ultimately, we care about truth (at least scientific truth) inasmuch as true beliefs allow us to act successfully in the world. We care about knowledge because of the role that what we know—or at least, what we strongly beli...