The Constitution of Knowledge Can Advance Human Dwelling

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A great example of this is raceism. Racism is as deeply imbedded in human thinking, as ancient as anything you can imagine. It goes away when people making these races pronouncements are subjected to a system of critical scrutiny. Same with homosexuality, h same with women being unequal. So what i'm maintaining here is that we can use the constitution of knowledge for almost any kind of question where we agree to subject ourselves to the disciplines of checking and of impersonal rules and institutions.

Disinformation. Trolling. Conspiracies. Social media pile-ons. Campus intolerance. On the surface, these recent additions to our daily vocabulary appear to have little in common. But together, they are driving an epistemic crisis: a multi-front challenge to America’s ability to distinguish fact from fiction and elevate truth above falsehood.

In episode 190, Michael Shermer speaks with Jonathan Rauch as he reaches back to the parallel eighteenth-century developments of liberal democracy and science to explain what he calls the “Constitution of Knowledge” — our social system for turning disagreement into truth. His book is a sweeping and readable description of how every American can help defend objective truth and free inquiry from threats as far away as Russia and as close as the cellphone.