ABSTRACT

Though fake news have been with us since the beginning of history, nowadays they spread more rapidly and vastly thanks to the web; that form of communication is also responsible for almost total lack of control on entrance. Moreover, post-hoc checking by experts is not as effective as it could be, due to a general crisis of deference. People tend to reject expert advice, not so much because experts—or some of them—have been shown to be unreliable or because expert opinion tends to clash with what people would like to believe (as Plato claimed), but because experts are identified with the establishment, either as part of it or as corrupted by it. Against deference to experts, epistemic democracy is brandished, i.e., the view that all citizens are epistemic equals. Though such a view is obviously untenable, it has been defended by philosophers like Gianni Vattimo, who argued that the very notion of truth is dangerous for democracy, and that public choices should be based on consensus alone rather than entrusted to “a dictatorship of Nobel prizes”.