The Philosopher Justice

  How much do we know?  And how do we know it is true? The things that we know about turn out to be the things we are most familiar with: the state of our bodies, our families, our living arrangements,  our friends,  our pastimes, our communities, and so on. It’s obvious that no one person knows everything. Since no one individual knows everything, every person depends on many others to get to know more than what they themselves are familiar with. In getting to know, we observe, practice, ask around, take classes, read books, consult Wikipedia, etc.  Every way we come to know outside our own observations and practice involves other people doing the learning or passing on the knowledge to others, who pass it on to others.  Knowledge, therefore, is like a continually developing awareness of reality that expands outward through human social networks. Perhaps the most important characteristic of human knowledge is that it is highly sharable. Nowadays the scale ...

 How do we know that what others tell us is true?  There can be times when it’s in another person’s interest to either conceal the truth or to lie, or, a person could simply be wrong about what they say.  The thing is, we do trust people, and we commonly assume that people are telling the truth unless we see that they have strong reasons not to.   Normal people don’t lie all the time.  Lying all the time is pathological.  Authoritarians like Hitler, Putin, and Trump seem to lie so easily that it creates a kind of fog of confusion and amorality surrounding them. But ordinarily we don’t assume that the representatives of institutions and government are lying to us unless we come to expect this sort of deception as a matter of course.  For much of the last thirty years Russian  propaganda and closely related right -wing propaganda from the United States has been quite effective in undermining many people’s respect for and trust in official authority....