#1065 Daniel Williams: Is the Science of Misinformation Reliable?

Hello, everyone. Welcome to a new episode of The Decenter. I'm your host, as always, Ricardo Lopes, and today I'm joined by a return guest, Dr. Daniel Williams. He's a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Sussex. And today we're going to talk about the science of misinformation specifically. We're going to talk about some criticisms that d that Doctor Williams has of the science of misinformation and how it's conducted based on some of his sub stack posts. So, Doctor Williams, welcome back to the show. It's always a pleasure to have you one. Thanks for the invitation. So perhaps let's start with a definition just for people to understand what we're talking about here. So Um when you tackle the science of misinformation, what are you referring to exactly? What uh what is the science of misinformation?

It's difficult to be too exact, is what I'd say. Um of course, if you understand misinformation extremely broadly as Any factors responsible for distorting human judgment or leading individuals to form misperceptions? And if you understand science extremely broadly as Any systematic investigation of a phenomenon, you could say misinformation studies goes back thousands of years. You can think of Plato and Aristotle as engaged in a certain kind of research into misinformation. You can also think of all of the great sort of social theorists, so Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and so on. as interested in the science of misinformation in some sense.

And of course the emergence of social psychology in the twentieth century. the the the mid twentieth century research on things like stereotypes, on prejudice, on the way that social identification bias is judgment, et cetera, et cetera. All of these projects in some way are concerned with understanding misinformation in a sort of systematic manner. But when I'm focusing on misinformation studies in most of my writings on this topic.

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