The Constitution of Knowledge A Defense of Truth

Jonathan Rauch

eBook - 2021

Arming Americans to defend the truth from today's war on facts“In what could be the timeliest book of the year, Rauch aims to arm his readers to engage with reason in an age of illiberalism.”—NewsweekA New York Times Book Review Editors' ChoiceDisinformation. 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 2016 Russian trolls and bots nearly drowned the truth in a flood of fake news and conspiracy theories, and Donald Trump and h...is troll armies continued to do the same. Social media companies struggled to keep up with a flood of falsehoods, and too often didn't even seem to try. Experts and some public officials began... more