EPISTEMIC COERCION
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5840/eps202461337Keywords:
politics of science, expertise, Feyerabend, coercion, agnotology, democracyAbstract
Recent developments in social epistemology have applied a radically expansive notion of harm which encompasses beliefs and kinds of scientific knowledge. The implied or explicit implication of these notions is that these harms need to be suppressed. The notion of disinformation has turned this into institutional practice. The COVID pandemic saw the development and widespread use of actual means of knowledge suppression and epistemic engineering, both within science and with respect to expert claims, within nominally free societies. Paul Feyerabend’s Science in a Free Society addressed these issues by critiquing the erasure of coercion from the past history of science and the practice of ignoring the coercive elements of expertise. Here I take this seriously and turn the problem upside down by treating coercion and resistance to coercion as inherent parts of science and the public role and place in science and discourse generally. Regardless of one’s views on these questions, it is evident that the rise of digital technologies, such as social media, has created novel opportunities for control, distinctive forms of epistemic control, and a need for rethinking the possibility of resistance to the coercive powers of the new technologies. This is a preliminary formulation of some of the issues.
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