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Interview
The Post-Truth Kerfuffle
Susan Haack, who is Distinguished Professor in the Humanities, Cooper Senior Scholar in Arts & Sciences, Professor of Philosophy, and Professor of Law, at the University of Miami, talks with Angela Tan about how and when we know.
Professor Haack, you’ve argued that the proliferation of falsehoods and half-truths fosters a “deep-seated mistrust of everything others tell us.” How do you see this erosion of trust affecting how people engage with truth claims in everyday life? And in contexts where skepticism is both necessary and potentially corrosive, how can we encourage more careful discernment of truth without undermining meaningful communication?
I’m glad to see you understand that the ‘post-truth’ claim is both a claim about the proliferation of lies, half-truths, and so on, and a claim about the disillusionment with the concept of truth that this has engendered in some people. Sad to say, some in mainstream neo-analytic philosophy have used the post-truth idea as an excuse to argue and re-argue their old disputes about which kind of theory of truth is preferable, the minimalist or the substantialist. But this is not the key issue. There certainly are many, many outright lies, half-truths, evasions, etc, in the news media, in academia, and, indeed, everywhere these days. And, yes, it’s all too easy to just decide to believe nothing that you read or hear. But that would cut you off from the useful information that’s out there among the garbage. So what I think we have to do is to decide what topics or questions are most important for us or to us, and concentrate our attention on sifting the good stuff from the bad in communications on those topics.
It’s also wise to cultivate the habit of curiosity, when, for example, headlines strike you as puzzling. For instance, on the front page of a recent Wall Street Journal, I read two headlines: ‘Rate of Inflation Slows’, and, in the next column, ‘Hiring Slows’. This seemed to make no sense. After all, if inflation were going down, wouldn’t one expect that hiring would be looking up somewhat? It took me a while to figure out why these headlines seemed to be at odds. It was because the claim about inflation was that the rate at which inflation was increasing had slowed somewhat, not that inflation itself was falling. The claim about hiring, however, was that there was less hiring than there had been in the previous month. This provided a good lesson: that it’s very useful to have the habit of making sense of things contextually, and not just going with the headlines.
In other contexts, often the best thing to do is to maintain a position of agnosticism: to say “I just don’t know”, and mean it. There is no shame in having no opinion on a topic if you haven’t adequate evidence or haven’t had the time or the patience to sift through such evidence as is available. In fact, it’s much worse to claim to know when you’re not entitled to.
In an essay called ‘Post ‘Post-Truth’: Are We There Yet?’ (Theoria85, 2019), you argue that our concepts of lies and partial truths presuppose objective truth. How can we encourage people to reaffirm the value of truth when in today’s pervasively cynical discourse it is often seen as a tool for manipulation?
Certainly some people use affirmations of the objectivity of truth as a tool to advance some agenda of their own. This is unfortunate, but of course it doesn’t follow that there is no objective truth, only that insisting that there is objective truth is not sufficient in itself to show any particular claim to be objectively true.
You’ve criticized what you call the ‘monoculture of political correctness’, and you’ve emphasized the need for courage in challenging poorly founded claims. How do you balance intellectual courage with the humility to listen, especially when dissent can risk being dismissed as reactionary or contrarian?
One thing that I have found useful is to keep up a wide correspondence with people of very different cultures and very different views, and to listen to what they have to say with care. In many instances, it turns out that two people who seem to disagree radically in fact disagree less than it appears. For example, among my correspondents are a senior academic in Hungary and a younger professor in the US. I asked both of them a couple of years ago what they thought about the then recently-launched AI writing and editing tools, and about the transgender phenomenon we recently began to hear so much about. My Hungarian friend replied that he found the AI tools helpful and not very problematic, but, he continued, “This transgender business makes me sick.” The younger US professor explained at length the problems he was encountering with student work that was not really their own but AI-generated; but then added that he had had numerous transgender students, and that he found it completely unproblematic. I have considerable respect for both these people, and trying to think through what each of them might have had in mind has been helpful as a way of sorting out my own thoughts on the matter: for now, that the AI tools, though potentially useful, have to be handled with extreme care; and that the transgender phenomenon, while new to me, is something that requires respectful thought and acceptance, without risking encouraging someone to make irreversible decisions when they’re still young and may not be clear about the implications.
I’m now a little uncomfortable with my phrase ‘monoculture of political correctness’, which sounds a little prefabricated. I’m thinking of the brouhaha when Larry Summers, then-President of Harvard, was forced to resign after saying publicly that we didn’t yet know whether the relatively small number of senior women scientists was in part the result of women having less scientific ability than men. Of course, the real problem here is that the explanation of why there are relatively few senior women scientists is almost certainly multidimensional, yet Summers’ remark suggests, most unfortunately, that the only explanations are either lack of inherent ability, discrimination against women, or undervaluation of their work. How much better it would have been had he listed some of the many, many factors that would likely be involved, and acknowledged how little we knew about how they interact, or, indeed, what other factors there may be which we haven’t even thought of yet.
In your memoir article, ‘Not One of the Boys: Memoir of an Academic Misfit’ (Cosmos + Taxis8, 2020), you describe the costs of intellectual independence – isolation, alienation, and sometimes real resentment. How have you navigated the complex dynamics of academia while maintaining your commitment to rigorous inquiry? What advice would you offer to others who struggle with the loneliness of challenging intellectual tides?
I suspect that there are many people out there who would like to be as independent as I am, but find the social pressure against it just too much to cope with. It’s understandable if they resent the freedom I have worked so hard to find for myself, but that’s just another of the costs of independence for the independent thinker.
In the same article, you described feeling “hostility on the part of some who are unwilling, or not in a position, to pay the price such freedom requires.” How do you sustain your commitment to doing what you believe is right, even when it isolates you?
It’s not easy. My whole life, I’ve found myself swimming against the tide, so in a way I’m used to a kind of isolation. But I’m pleasantly surprised by how many people there are out there who understand what I’m trying to do, and why. So I communicate with them to keep myself more balanced emotionally.
Your work spans science, epistemology, and law, all of which center on the pursuit of truth. What unifying thread connects these diverse fields, and how has your interdisciplinary approach shaped your understanding of the challenges posed by the post-truth era?
Let me start by talking about my work in law. One issue that has concerned me is that every legal system will have specific rules governing the preparation, presentation, and evaluation of evidence. As an epistemologist, and as someone who is a customer of the legal system (as in a certain sense we all are), I try to understand to what extent those legal rules help us to arrive at verdicts which are, as far as is possible, true. This, however, is extremely difficult, and made more so because, in an adversarial legal system – like the systems of the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, and so on – each party to a case has an obligation to present the evidence favoring their side as strongly as possible without contravening legal ethics. One result is that many people involved in the legal system have come to think that there are, as the saying goes, ‘two sides to every question’. But of course, sometimes there simply aren’t two sides of equal weight or probability.
In science, too, we need to watch out for the many, many complexities involved, including for the way issues could look different at different times. I’m thinking of that truly terrible paper by Andrew Wakefield – now retracted – claiming to have found a connection between the MMR vaccine and autism. To call the evidence on which this paper was based ‘flawed’ would be putting it mildly: the whole thing was a complete disgrace. However, many intelligent and thoughtful parents noticed that around the time when the MMR vaccine became compulsory the rate of diagnoses of autism went up significantly, and some of them thought this might be a good reason for not having their child vaccinated. They may not have been aware, however, that in the same period, the medical profession had changed its definition of ‘autism’, and had begun to speak of an ‘autism spectrum’, ranging from the extremely seriously incapacitated, through the moderate, to the high-functioning autistic person who might be extremely talented in various ways. This change in definition would itself naturally increase the rate of autism diagnosis. Nor, of course, did we know then – nor do we know now – everything about what bad side effects some vaccinations may have. We do know, however, that the outbreaks of measles which began to appear in the wake of the MMR-vaccine scare and subsequent lower take-up of the vaccination have had extremely serious consequences. Measles is not always a mild infection, but can have very bad effects. Incidentally, it was as a result of my contracting measles that I became extremely short-sighted and had to wear thick glasses or, later, contact lenses to correct my very poor vision.
Let me give you another example of a slightly different kind. There was a big scare about the possible terrible side effects of silicone breast implants. This scare was initiated in part by the fact that these implants had been approved for manufacture and sale before the scope of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was extended to cover medical devices as well as drugs. By the time the scope of the FDA was extended, the implant manufacturers had not yet supplied the evidence of safety that the FDA now required. At this point all we knew was that we didn’t know whether these implants had bad side effects. But matters got more complicated when a very young attorney in a firm for the implant manufacturers discovered a memo from one of the manufacturers to its salespeople explaining that they should go wash these implants and dry them off carefully before showing them to the doctors to whom they were recommending them. This disclosure encouraged a huge wave of litigation, and even the formation of something called the National Science Panel of scientists in the relevant fields appointed by federal judge Samuel Pointer, to whom thousands of these cases had been sent. After years of sifting through enormous boxes of documents, the panel concluded that there was no evidence of any damage caused by these implants. However, that there was no evidence of such damage is not the same as there being evidence that there was no such damage. Nor was the possibility ever seriously considered that leakage from these implants might prompt a serious reaction in some patients. Sadly, after years of litigation and millions of dollars spent on all this, we still really don’t know the truth.
The leading US case on the admissibility of expert testimony is Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals (1993). It set the current standard by which US judges assess whether proffered expert testimony is good enough for a jury to hear. The drug at issue in this case was Bendectin, prescribed for morning sickness. The plaintiffs believed that this drug caused limb-reduction birth defects; the manufacturers denied this. Merrell had already withdrawn the drug from the US market in 1984 – not admitting that it was in any way damaging, but citing the costs of litigation as making it no longer worth selling in the US. Dr Done, expert witness for the plaintiffs, maintained that there was evidence that Bendectin caused birth defects. The manufacturers strenuously denied this, and stressed that they had no fewer than thirty studies published in peer-reviewed journals that showed no such link. The Supreme Court found that there wasn’t the evidence to show the plaintiffs’ case good enough for their expert to be heard by a jury. Moreover, they made ‘peer review and publication’ one indication that expert evidence is ‘scientific knowledge’, and therefore good enough to be admitted – a criterion still used.
Subsequent discussion raised questions about the independence of some of the ‘peer-reviewed publications’ cited in the case. In his final ruling in Daubert, Judge Kozinski argued that peer-reviewed publication is as good an indication of scientific reliability as we can hope for. However, I believe this underestimates the complexity of peer review in fields affected by litigation or commercial interests.
Dr Brent, expert witness for the manufacturers, insisted that if Bendectin were teratogenic (defect-forming), then after it was taken off the US market the rate of birth defects would have been higher in Canada, where it remained available, than in the US – and this wasn’t seen. However, obstetricians had long realized that you could mimic the effects of Bendectin by taking a vitamin B6 pill and half a Unisom tablet. If Bendectin was harmful, then this widely-used substitute which mimicked the drug’s effects could potentially have masked such a difference between the two countries, raising doubts about this line of reasoning.
To my surprise, in 2013 the drug returned to the US market, now made by a Canadian company under the name Diclegis. The FDA had never withdrawn its approval for Bendectin, so the company had only to prove that the drug was effective. I checked: how had they done this? They had studied the effects of the drug on a very small sample of around two hundred women, for whom it was being prescribed only for ‘mild to moderate morning sickness’. In my opinion it’s depressing to think that after all those years and all that litigation, expense, and distress, we still can’t be entirely sure that Bendectin is not harmful.
In 2014 there was another surprise. A European company claimed that by using what it called ‘deep computing’ it could distinguish tiny differences in the DNA of identical twins. When I say ‘tiny’, I mean of the order of differences in thirteen base pairs among billions of base pairs. This, they claimed, would enable investigators to distinguish DNA from one versus another of a pair of monozygotic twins. Some prosecutors in the US thought this might be a really useful tool when they knew that one of a pair of identical twins was the perpetrator of a crime but they had no fingerprints from the crime scene, and so there would be reasonable doubt with respect to which twin. Unfortunately, prosecutors soon learned that it would cost in the order of $60,000 to do such a test, so the idea of using it in criminal prosecutions was dropped. I, meanwhile, was wondering how likely it was that the differences the firm claimed to have found were real, or merely apparent, the result of a glitch in the computing process. My first thought was to read the article in question. It turned out, however, to be completely unintelligible to a layperson – not because of biological complications, but because it was written in computer jargon, almost all of it acronyms. I did try asking a former student, professionally a computer scientist, what he thought the likelihood was that this result was robust – to which he replied that it would take simply years of running the program against different samples to decide this.
In short, never forget there is no shame in saying, and meaning, “I really don’t know.” Indeed, there is no shame in saying, and meaning, “None of us really knows.”
• Angela Tan is a student at York House School, Canada.
• Some of Professor Susan Haack’s best-known books include: Evidence and Inquiry: Towards Reconstruction in Epistemology (1993); Defending Science – Within Reason: Between Scientism and Cynicism (2003) and Evidence Matters: Science, Proof and Truth in the Law (2014).