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.