Covid logbook: How gov't institutions get away with canceling dissenters
In Social Epistemology, political scientist Tim Hayward says authoritative institutions may defend their “official story” on an issue—regardless of the actual facts—by smearing other viewpoints as “conspiracy theories.” Hmm, doesn't that sound too familiar for Stanford prof Dr. Bhattacharya, canceled during Covid for stating the obvious (now widely backed) truth: lockdowns didn't work.
The general idea of ‘official stories’ appears to refer to a distinct social epistemological category, one which is invoked, particularly, to draw a contrast with – and often to propose a corrective to – ‘conspiracy theories’. It is therefore noteworthy that whereas ‘conspiracy theories’ are currently the object of considerable critical attention by academic researchers, the contrasting category – ‘official stories’ – has received little analysis.
1 Yet for the contrast to be meaningful and enlightening, and especially if we are expected to allow a presumption in favour of the reliability of official stories, then not only the question of what makes a story official but also what makes it epistemically authoritative is important to be clear on.
First, then, what does it mean for a story to be ‘official’? The relevant general concept of office and cognate terms have to do with the assigning of a place, role and function within some organisation, which can include the governing institutions of society. The meaning of the epithet ‘official’ is tantamount to ‘authoritative’ in that context, since a due degree of authority is bestowed on the office in order that it can fulfil its function in the organisation, which is why officials are also sometimes called functionaries. By ‘authority’ here is understood the legitimate source of definitive pronouncements as to status, rights and responsibilities that will be upheld by the organisation or institution. An ‘official story’, then, is a narrative about some aspect of the circumstances of society that is treated as authoritative by the institutions of that society.
There is no inherent reason why an official story should be presumed reliable, judged according to epistemological standards that might reasonably be applied. It should be borne in mind that institutions of various societies have maintained order by invoking all manner of mythological stories, ideological stories, or blatantly discriminatory stories. Sometimes this has meant denying, suppressing or persecuting people engaged in science or rigorous intellectual inquiry which, according to the official standards there prevailing, involves heresy. So we know that an official story might simply be the manifestation of a political authority imposing the orthodoxy of a worldview against the resistance, which may be more epistemologically rigorous, of sceptics or heretics.
Nevertheless, it is still possible for an official story to be epistemically reliable if the institutions of society that warrant it have a character that is conducive to ensuring this. Broadly speaking, this would mean the institutions are integrally respectful of the basic principles of honest inquiry. …
We don’t regard it as an ‘official story’ that to get a passport you need to submit an authenticated photograph of yourself; we don’t regard it as an ‘official story’ that in UK cars are to be driven on the left; and nor do we these days regard it as an ‘official story’ that smoking is bad for our health. By far the greater part of public pronouncements, like these, simply state how matters stand. When the distinctive term ‘official story’ occurs, it is invariably in contexts where a public pronouncement has met with scepticism. …
So, I believe we can say that it is in virtue of being contested that an ‘official story’ exists as a distinctly designated epistemic object. It is for this reason that there has to be particularly careful scrutiny of the suggestion that it is generally rational to defer to official stories. …
For Levy, an official story should be presumed reliable when the epistemic authority of the body presenting it is supported by other relevant institutions: ‘we ought to defer to those institutions who identify themselves as the institutions to defer to, when (and only when) the other institutions of civil society accept this claim’ (Levy 2022, 356). The reasonableness of this proposition is premised on an assumption that those supporting institutions operate with epistemic integrity. Unfortunately, the fact is that institutions can be captured by representatives of special interest groups and pressed into the service of their own agendas. This fact need not seriously undermine Levy’s proposition if such capture is a relatively isolated problem, but what if it is a problem that affects an appreciable number of the particular institutions appealed to in support of the official story?
This very suggestion might be deemed excessively suspicious. In fact, it is quite commonly argued by defenders of official stories that the challenges to them should not generally be regarded as presumptively credible because they involve conspiracy theories or claims whipped up by agents of disinformation. So, if a challenge starts to gain significant traction amongst the public, then the official story’s adherents will themselves suspect that this might be attributable to organised propaganda efforts on behalf of adversaries of the truth. In fact, there is currently a considerable and growing literature that depicts categories of dissenters from official stories –including those labelled conspiracy theorists, contrarians or populists as not simply inexpert but as dupes. They are claimed to be unwittingly repeating talking points that originate, directly or indirectly, from some other source, perhaps a foreign state or disruptive activist organisation. Accordingly, if their contrarian hypotheses are sometimes quite sophisticated, this can be attributed to the sophistication of the strategic communications deployed by the adversary. So it is that today we find a welter of studies of the problem of online ‘disinformation’ that trace webs of connection across cyberspace seeking to link influential dissenting accounts on social media with bots and trolls associated with malign actors (Hayward unpublished).
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