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Wittgenstein’s Revenge
We need a new “epistemic currency,” common to everyone. Fortunately, one already exists, and it’s more fundamental than facts: Trust.
Mike Elias • Epistemic Reserve Notes
Facts are facts. It’s a fact that polio vaccine is effective and it’s a fact that Cancer the constellation has nothing to do with tumors. But the idea that the house of knowledge is built on a foundation of facts is not itself a fact. It’s an idea with a history that is now taking a sharp turn.
David Weinberger • Too Big to Know
For the first time there are facts and (in Kellyanne Conway’s notorious phrase) ‘alternative facts’. As facts become fluid they become contestable; the truth becomes (once again) something you assert, not something you prove. It used to be a peculiar characteristic of totalitarian regimes that they made the facts fit their purposes; now it seems th... See more