Knowledge in Crisis

Knowledge is the ultimate human resource: without knowledge we cannot effectively manage the environment, our cities, healthcare, governments, education systems, science, culture and everything else. Knowledge is what makes our societies flourish and grow. But today we face a crisis of knowledge. Our claims to knowledge are being threatened by rapid and spectacular developments in technology, as well as by attacks on the very ideas of knowledge and truth themselves. The flood of information on the internet challenges our ability to tell truth from falsehood. Artificial Intelligence produces apparently plausible texts which have little connection to reality. Across many areas of inquiry, there is a widespread rejection of standards of evidence and expertise. Misinformation is spread as if it were information (for example, about democratic elections). There are conspiracy theories about the authority of science: for example, about climate change and vaccines. What explains this crisis, how should we understand it, and how should we deal with it? At the heart of the crisis of knowledge are philosophical problems about the relationship between knowledge, truth, science, ethics and politics; and ultimately our relationship to reality itself. Some of these questions are among the perennial questions of philosophy. For example: What is truth? What is knowledge? Who or what is a knower? Does science have any special authority in telling us what to believe? But some questions arise especially for us today. For example: how can we tell whether information on the internet is fake? Are there alternative facts? How can we allow a plurality of views and tolerate disagreement? How should scientific knowledge function in our democratic societies? What is democracy and how can it be defended? The Knowledge in Crisis project addresses these large philosophical questions by bringing together philosophers from four Austrian universities (CEU, the universities of Vienna, Graz and Salzburg). The Cluster starts from the assumption that in order to understand and tackle this crisis, we need a new approach which brings thinkers from many areas of philosophy together not just in the small part of philosophy which deals with questions about knowledge, but also in the fields of ethics, political philosophy, and the philosophies of science, mind, language and reality. These areas of philosophy normally pursue their questions independently, but Knowledge in Crisis will probe the deep connections between them, and therefore make possible a completely new understanding of todays crises of knowledge.

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