Knowledge in Crisis

If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false’ Barack Obama said in 2020, ‘then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work. And by definition our democracy doesn’t work. We are entering into an epistemological crisis’.
We believe Obama is right. Knowledge is the ultimate human resource: without knowledge we can do nothing. We cannot effectively manage the environment, our cities, healthcare, governments, education systems, science or culture without knowledge. Knowledge is what makes our societies flourish and grow.
But we face a crisis in knowledge today. The crisis comes from various sources — from the endless supply of information from the internet, from radically new uses of knowledge and data (e.g. in AI), from the rejection of standards of knowledge and expertise — even in democracies — from the phenomenon of ‘fake news’ and misinformation, from conspiracy theories about the authority of science (e.g. about the COVID vaccine), from the various replication crises in science, to the challenges from philosophy and the human sciences to the ideas like a single, objective, universal or absolute truth, or even to the idea of truth as such. Our collective grasp of the role of knowledge in our lives is being seriously challenged. And yet, to solve the large problems that we face today, we need scientific knowledge more than ever.