This is an excerpt from my Paolo Bozzi Prize address, "Realism and Moralism in Political Thought," last week in Turin at the conference on "Post-Truth, New Realism, and Democracy"; I'll put the whole paper on-line before long, but perhaps this bit will be of interest to some readers:

            Most of what we think we know about the world is due to reliance on epistemic authorities, individuals or institutions that tell us what we ought to believe about Newtonian mechanics, evolution by natural selection, climate change, resurrection from the dead, or the Holocaust.   The most practically fruitful epistemic norm of modernity, empiricism, demands that knowledge be grounded in sensory experience, but almost no one who believes in evolution by natural selection or the reality of the Holocaust has any sensory evidence in support of those beliefs.   Instead, we rely on epistemic authorities—biologists and historians, for example.   The dependence on epistemic authority is not confined to ordinary persons—most engineers, for example, do not have sensory evidence in support of the laws of Newtownian mechanics as applied to ordinary physical objects, but they have been told by their basic physics teachers that this evidence exists and that it is true (even as they have been told by their advanced physics teachers that Newtonian mechanics is false at the quantum level).

               Epistemic authority cannot be sustained by empiricist criteria, for obvious reasons:  salient anecdotal evidence, the favorite tool of propagandists, appeals to ordinary faith in the senses, but is easily exploited given that most people understand neither the perils of induction nor the finer points of sampling and Bayesian inference.   Sustaining epistemic authority depends, crucially, on social institutions that inculcate reliable second-order norms about whom to believe about what.  The media of mass communication were crucial, in the age of mass democracy, with promulgating and sustaining such norms.   Consider the most important newspaper in my country, the New York Times, which has long been an ideological mouthpiece for the more-or-less prudent wing of the ruling class in America, a newspaper that supported, for example, the imperial war of aggression against Vietnam in the 1960s and supported the neoliberal Hillary Clinton against a social democratic challenger for the 2016 Democratic nomination for President.  Notwithstanding that, the New York Times has served as a fairly good mediator of epistemic authority with respect to many other topics:  it has provided a bulwark against those who deny the reality of climate change or the human contribution to it; it has debunked those who think vaccinations causes autism; it gives no comfort to creationists and other religious zealots; and it treats genuine epistemic authorities about the natural world—for example, members of the National Academy of Sciences in America--as epistemic authorities in its journalism.  Genuine epistemic authority cannot exist in a population absent epistemic mediators like the New York Times.

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