Stephen Turner writes in Epistemology & Philosophy of Science, 2024, vol. 61, no. 3:
“Words such as state, republic, society, class, as well as sovereignty, constitutional state, absolutism, dictatorship, economic planning, neutral or total state, and so on are incomprehensible if one does not exactly who is to be affected, combatted, refuted, or negated by such a term. Above all the polemical character determines the use of the word political regardless of whether the adversary is designated as non-political (in the sense of harmless), or vice versa if one wants to disqualify or denounce him as political in order to portray oneself as non-political (in the sense of the purely scientific, purely moral, purely aesthetic, purely economic, or on the basis of similar purities) and therefore superior.”
[Carl Schmitt, (1932) 1996, pp. 31–32].* …the regimes of science and expertise are ineradicably political and coercive. But if regimes of science and expertise are ineradicably political and coercive, what remains
is the problem of our choice of regimes, and how to accommodate them in a democratic order. We must come to a reckoning with the disillusion from the idea of the purity of science and the neutrality of expertise. We cannot simultaneously valorize “the science” as a real institutional fact and insist on “following the science,” and ignore the practical meaning of the imperfect institutional processes that make it up, and the value choices that are made within science, which may diverge from the values that derive from democratic processes.* …The Covid pandemic saw the development and widespread use of actual means of knowledge suppression and epistemic engineering, both within science and with respect to expert claims, within nominally free societies….The rationale for the use of these means was that malinformation, misinformation, and disinformation were sufficiently pervasive in the digital world that they produced harms that justified not merely correction or disagreement but intervention to alter the cognitive climate. The reasoning produced a novel concept, “cognitive security,” as well as a plethora of new jargon terms, many of which were designed to conceal the partisan nature of the technical interventions under such bland terms as “curation” and treating interventions as forms of cybersecurity.
* New revelations about the role of governments and drug companies in these interventions, and their extent, occur almost daily. And in each case they show that the interventions cross whatever line still exists between partisanship and scholarship, fact and value, and claims warranted by sufficient evidence as distinct from plausible assumptions that might warrant policy preferences, and any line between coercion and persuasion. And under Covid, in medicine, we have seen unambiguously direct coercion: taking the licenses of doctors for failing to abide by problematic guidelines, or censorship based on definitions of misinformation which were themselves based on policy agendas with little evidence behind them. What is especially important in the presence of novel technologies of persuasion is the question of whether these are novel instruments of epistemic control or coercion, and whether they require new forms of control, and new forms of resistance, in order to serve the purposes we expect discourse, either in science or the public sphere, to achieve.
* Power also comes in two basic forms: commands which are enforceable and hegemonic power which takes the form of pervasive conditions of constraint that are unconsciously internalized as normal and then serve as self-imposed limits on thought and behavior that are not even recognized as such.
* we can find examples of explicitly coerced personal experiences that generate largely inarticulable knowledge: a paradigm case would be Eisenhower’s decision at the end of the Second World War to force Germans to watch films of the concentration camps by making it a condition of getting stamps to obtain food.
* Most of our explicit knowledge comes from others. We judge what we are told by a combination of two variables: our assessment of their trustworthiness (and motives) and our assessment of their competence to speak and their access to the subject.
* The mechanisms of power in science are familiar: they include exclusion, article rejection, failure to endorse, to fund, to employ, to allocate scarce resources to, failure to attend to, and so forth. There are also many rewards for cognitive conformity and conforming to standards of achievement. All of these are forms of censorship, in the sense that they are, like overt censorship, means of controlling and manipulating the cognitive environment.
* Changing minds is difficult. Silencing and excluding is not. The easiest point of coercive entry into the epistemic environment is at the moment of transmission. Preventing publication, delegitimating the sources, threatening the speakers, are all common means of exercising this kind of coercion. They were lavishly employed during the Covid pandemic.
