The Demarcation Problem

"Demarcation" is the fancy term used by philosophers of science for making the distinction between science and basically every other kind of belief or kind of statement. Since science claims to be about distinguishing what is true, it also comes down to what is basically another word for epistemology, the branch of philosophy which deals with how we decide what is true. But by reframing epistemology as the effort to define science, philosophers have essentially made the word "science" a synonym for epistemological validity.

 

I'm going to be very careful not to get too deep into the weeds here. Philosophers pulp whole forests to inscribe their multi-page wranglings with the smallest of points. What matters is that people with scientific training in accredited universities have come to a very strong consensus about a vast body of knowledge in innumerable categories, and also agree on a very large body of methods for determining truth. They are also very well aware of their vast areas of ignorance and uncertainty. After all, it is their job to do research and generate new knowledge and understanding, so it is what we don't know that fuels science, not what we do know. 

However, "science," as a profession practiced by people with fancy degrees, mostly in universities, is obviously not the only example of people seeking truth. Journalists are supposed to do that also, so the demarcation problem is analogous, or even equivalent, to the problem of distinguishing real from fake news. And of course each one of us has to decide what to believe.*

 I don't need to tell you that something like half of Americans (I haven't checked the latest polling) do not believe that the earth is 4 1/2 billion years old and that life evolved over billions of years from ancient simple forms to produce the diversity we see today. They do not believe that we, Homo sapiens, are descended from earlier kinds of creatures from which chimpanzees and gorillas are also descended, and that if you go back far enough we're descended from fish. And there are people who have doctorates in biology who don't believe that either, although they are exceedingly rare and 99.99% of biologists think the are nuts. 

 

Except for the very specific problem of what we ought to be teaching schoolchildren, the preceding case doesn't have much direct political relevance. But of course climate change denial does, as did denial that smoking tobacco and eating too much sugar are bad for your health. These were disinformation campaigns funded by multi-billion dollar industries, so we have an explanation for why false beliefs prevailed for a time. Climate change denial is still pretty strong though fading as the reality becomes inescapably obvious. But the fake news problem is worse than ever.

 I know that Joe Biden won the election and that there was no significant voter fraud. (Actually such fraud as there was favored the Resident.) How do I know that? If I had to, I would rely on what I consider to be credible journalistic sources, such as ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and many others. In this case I don't have to because I can observe that the responsible Republican officials in Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Arizona agree and the plausibility of the claim that they've all been somehow corrupted by the late Hugo Chavez just doesn't rise to the level of laughable. 

However, tens of millions of people don't believe that, and the sole reason for their disbelief is that they surrender all authority to a lunatic who lies every time his lips move. Many of them also believe that a global conspiracy of prominent Democratic political figures and Hollywood actors worships Satan, kidnaps and rapes children en masse and then murders them and extracts a hormone from them that gives them extended longevity. Also their adored lunatic was put in office to arrest them all and put them on trial, although for some mysterious reason he hasn't gotten around to it. 

So this is a problem. Tens of millions of Americans live in a different universe than I do. I can't respect their beliefs or try to reason with them, because they are insane. And nobody seems to know what to do about it.

 *Please note that the word "belief" has multiple meanings that sometimes cause semantic confusion. Moral beliefs are not the same as factual beliefs, and neither scientists nor journalists have any particular authority to tell anybody else what is morally right. Nevertheless we use the words "right" or "wrong" to apply to both moral beliefs and to factual assertions. It would be desirable if we had more precise vocabulary, but that's how English works. So keep it straight. Also, there are cases of uncertainty, of probability. We can disagree about whether we "believe" that the Patriots will win the game, but we don't know who's right until it's over. I'm not talking about any of that, I'm talking about facts.