Just finished Jonathan Rauch’s 2021 book The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth, which argues that the government and science have evolved analogous mechanisms to steadily close in on objective truth, with self-correcting mechanisms, and that modern political forces are at work (as always) to undermine them for their own ends. Will discuss the book in detail soon.
Here’s another example of a force working to undermine objectivity. It’s not even that they’re doing so consciously, necessarily…. it’s that, as Jonathan Haidt has described, humans are instinctive lawyers, working to justify conclusions reached on emotional grounds, or which benefit themselves. As Upton Sinclair (an early 20th-century novelist), or maybe others, said: It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It. There are variations.
Salon, Paul Rosenberg, 29 Oct 2023: Lies, damned lies and “corporate bulls**t”: A consumer’s guide to bad-faith arguments, subtitled “Co-author Donald Cohen on the research into generations of false claims that led to ‘Corporate Bulls**t'”
