RAIL

Upon opening my e-mail this morning I found a forward of this article from the New York Times on the popular fact-checking website snopes.com. I found the article interesting for more than a few reasons.

What has always fascinated me about Snopes is how it evolved organically online out of a felt need for objectivity. Since the beginning the web has always been a fertile breeding ground for rumors, urban legends and half-truths, and people (who I think are more sophisticated than we often believe) know this.  They are well aware of the multiple, conflicting biases that color the information they find online.  They know that these biases can lead to slanting and distortion, and to some degree they expect it.  For those who are not simply looking for confirmation of their own viewpoints, this is a problem.  Simply knowing that bias abounds on the web, however, is not a sufficient defense.  People with this kind of interest don’t want just any story, they want the story.  They want to know what really happened.  The multiple, conflicting accounts available online don’t tell them that.  The result is that people who want to use the web for information gathering purposes have to have some way of sifting the facts out of the voluminous chaff of rumor, exaggeration, and partisan cheerleading in which they lay hidden.

Enter Snopes, which as the article explains, evolved into its role as a “fact-checking” site.  (It did not start out that way.)  Nevertheless, it is now regarded by many as an authority on which stories are and are not credible on the web.

To my mind two things stand out from the article. The first is this quote:

For the Mikkelsons, the site affirms what cultural critics have bemoaned for years: the rejection of nuance and facts that run contrary to one’s point of view.

“Especially in politics, most everything has infinite shades of gray to it, but people just want things to be true or false,” Mr. Mikkelson said. “In the larger sense, it’s people wanting confirmation of their world view.”

This quote underscores again for me the importance of taking seriously things like confirmation bias in a critical thinking context, but it also suggests the more important epistemic point that the truth is fine-grained, and hard to get at even when one has substantial information and the cognitive resources necessary for the job.  It takes a lot of discipline to sustain a search for the truth.  Apart from the discipline required to resist the temptations of confirmation bias, one also has to have the discipline required to resist the pull of extreme skepticism–something the administrators of Snopes also note in the article as pervasive. One hopes that good practices of recognizing and evaluating arguments for various claims, such as those one learns in a critical thinking class, are a step in the right direction.

The second thing that I think is interesting about Snopes is that the pronouncements of the Mikkelsons and their staff are widely regarded as authoritative–but their authority doesn’t really have any basis apart from the track record they have in “de-bunking” exaggerated claims that others have made.  One wants to ask: Is this enough? Should they be treated as authoritatively as they so clearly are by so many?  And if not, why not?

There’s actually to my mind a good case that we shouldn’t take Snopes as authoritative–at least not to the degree that we do.  There are no credentials for “de-bunking”, after all, and no real community of “de-bunkers” (outside of a couple other websites) against which their activities could be measured.   So there doesn’t seem to be a way to understand the Snopes de-bunkers as cognitive authorities on, say, Douglas Walton’s definition.  I suppose we might say their authority comes from “position to know” (i.e. they do the research necessary to find out whether a story is rumor or fact) but that seems kind of weak too. Rather, it seems to me that their authority is maybe of a moral sort. It seems to derive from their (self-appointed? community appointed?) status as something like one of Heinlein’s “Fair Witnesses” from Stranger in a Strange Land.  (Can Snopes claim that kind of authority? Can anyone?)

Wherever one comes down on the authority question, I think the value of Snopes doesn’t reside in any expertise they may or may not have.  The value of Snopes has a lot more to do with the ideal of objectivity that it represents and keeps alive.  That sites like Snopes exist and prosper reminds us that objectivity really does matter to people despite what the behavior of many in the media would suggest.  The website simply would not exist otherwise.  Snopes also reminds us that the objectivity–even of the nuanced, reserved, and epistemically humble sort–is a fragile and labor-intensive thing, and one that’s easily eclipsed by appeals that make us believe we are better thinkers than we really are, or by conjectures whose primary purpose is to entertain.

There’s a sliding scale, to be sure, between objectivity, intersubjectivity, and subjectivity.  It may well be that though we might aim our investigations and arguments, like archers, at establishing our conclusions in some objective sense, the closest we ever get is some or other sort of intersubjective sense.  The “target” of objectivity may simply be too far off for us to hit.  Even so, I think we still need it.  The alternatives are be an archer without a target (believe anything that pleases subjectively) or to give up altogether (extreme skepticism).  Neither one seems very wise, critical, or practical.  After all, the issues that provide grist for the rumors that the people at Snopes spend their time investigating are very consequential ones.  It matters a great deal, for example, that the H1N1 vaccine actually isn’t poison.  Someone, somewhere should be trying to “get it right” with respect to such claims no matter how hard that might be.

One doesn’t have to be a die-hard believer in absolute objectivity or Cartesian certainty to do this.  One need only want to avoid having false beliefs with harmful consequences.  This is harder than it sounds, since, as the Mikkelsons point out in the article,

“When you’re looking at truth versus gossip, truth doesn’t stand a chance.”