Why read The Constitution of Knowledge?

Book cover of The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth

Book description

Arming Americans to defend the truth from today's war on facts.

Disinformation. Trolling. Conspiracies. Social media pile-ons. Campus intolerance. On the surface, these recent additions to our daily vocabulary appear to have little in common. But together, they are driving an epistemic crisis: a multi-front challenge to America's ability to…

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Why read it?

2 authors picked The Constitution of Knowledge as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Tom Wheeler

Author

At a time when new technology has delivered us to a world of misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation, we have lost our shared understanding of just what facts and truth are.

Jonathan Rauch helps us recall the importance of facts and truth to the liberal democratic process. He challenges us to reinstate knowledge and truth.

From Tom's list on The best books on today’s roadmap to tomorrow.

Steven Pinker

Author

If humans are the rational animal, why does the world seem to be losing its mind? Why the fake news, the conspiracy theories, the post-truth rhetoric?

Rauch explains that truth is a precious commodity, which none of us is smart enough to discover on our own.We depend on institutions and norms – like science, with empirical testing, and journalism, with editing and fact-checking, and democracy, with checks and balances, and academia, with peer review and freedom of inquiry – to make us collectively smarter than any of us is individually.

This infrastructure of truth is constantly being corroded –…

From Steven's list on The best books on rationality and why it matters.