Abstract
Misinformation does not exist. And yet it spreads far and wide through social media in forms as varied as conspiracies, satire, junk news, and deep fakes. Some users reject information that does not conform to the scientific consensus, others accept it. And while we argue, the opposite might turn out to be ‘true’, accurate, or coherent, as new evidence comes to light. Navigating the insatiable mass of (mis)information online makes epistemic questions immediate and existential: can we know? Waves of paradigmatic perspectives have historically provided methodological and evaluative models to transcend individual ‘truth’ towards collective ‘facticity’. But whatever answers we defend to the question of what and how we come to know, the paradox sits at the threshold of our chosen view, and from there continuously threatens our certainties. A familiar term to baptize oxymorons in scientific inquiry, paradoxes are efficient and self-contained contradictions that can upend axiomatic elements of a philosophical argument or mathematical proof. While some are rhetorically elegant but void of argumentative strength, others spark scientific revolutions. I discuss its meta-epistemic function in a pragmatic philosophy of science, which necessarily integrates the validity of multiple paradigmatic stances, even when these stand in paradoxical opposition to one another. I explore these contradictions by way of the conceptual metaphor, identify its discrete but continuous presence throughout the history of philosophy as a tradition of feminist philosophy, from Diotima’s ‘ladder’ to modern iterations in Dervin’s ‘gap’ or Malabou’s ‘plasticity’, to discuss its implications for our understanding of misinformation.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2024 Special Focus—Traveling Concepts: The Transfer and Translation of Ideas in the Humanities
KEYWORDS
Misinformation, Paradox, Epistemology, Feminist Philosophy
