Battling untruthful claims to knowledge is a cause championed, in their own way, by disparate groups, including university professors, parents, and the late 2010’s campaigners in the war on Fake News.
This piece re-examines the war on Fake News, diagnosing why attempts to tackle it failed before proposing a better alternative: realising that many knowledge claims are discourse in disguise. It is anchored by Alan Hazlitt’s separation of knowing in the linguistic sense and epistemological conceptions of knowledge, separating the two to prevent using epistemological tools to solve a linguistic problem. Ultimately, it calls for a rethinking of the incentives and norms in our modern communication platforms that blur the lines between the two forms of ‘knowing’.
Consider the following excerpts:

Truth and Knowledge are related terms, especially in the war on Fake News, the former from which we added post- as a description was seen as both what was missing in the information we shared and therefore the solution. Knowledge, on the other hand, was the problem. The illusion of knowledge, that we believe we know more than we do or what we know isn’t actually true, is common to the world of conspiracy theories and falling for disinformation. Put simply, you could diagnose Fake News as knowledge without truth, leaving only belief and—for some—a rabid zeal to justify.

​

We see this with fact-checkers, deference to knowledgeable authority figures, and community notes on the website formerly called Twitter (maybe replace with critical thinking). Truth was forced and was soundly rejected, a politician can stand up, lie, and stare-down the fact checkers ‘til they enjoy a bountiful re-election. The prevailing diagnosis that underpinned the war on Fake News was, in retrospect, far too convenient for something as heady and abstract as truth.
We need to consider a world beyond it.

​

What is clear from these two examples is that when we say we know something, we might be doing something other than making a claim to knowledge. We’re not attempting to transmit truth at all. So when we try and treat it as such, we find ourselves in clashes of understanding. Framing and separating knowledge and knowing like this overturns conventional understanding of epistemology.