ABSTRACT
The pragmatic-principle once again captures that human cognition evolved to serve the organism, as opposed to an abstract epistemic ideal, but in a way different from the reality-principle. The modularity-principle is a concept drawn from evolutionary psychology, where the degree of the human brain’s modularity is a contentious issue. A society allows free opinion formation, we theorize, as long as public life is grounded in the belief that the epistemic chain is unbroken, that rational discussion and evidence-based debate will expose dubious arguments as dubious. The new quality in information influence operations is not only that they exploit technological, regulatory and economic vulnerabilities in Western media systems but that they systematically exploit the lag between what becomes technologically possible and what is grasped by society. Information influence mimics legitimate forms of public debate and copies established forms of media and engagement to leverage the existing system, and the trust people bestow upon it.
