One of the deeper, more troubling problems we’re facing as a society is that left and right can’t even agree on history, current events, and language. Epistemology is the philosophical analysis of how humans gather and justify information.
Examples of epistemological challenges are common:
Most scientists believe global average temperatures are increasing as a result of human activities, and that we must rapidly change society to decrease our use of fossil fuels . Significant minorities instead believe that climate change isn’t real, that it’s not caused by humans, or that international efforts to mitigate it instead benefit foreign countries at the expense of the US. Leaving aside the facts of the matter, one of the interesting points from an epistemological point of view is analyzing why people believe in climate change, in the need for mitigation strategies, or in one of the common excuses for inaction. Part of the epistemological challenge is that climate is changing on a scale that doesn’t resonate well with individual humans’ experience: Climate change is progressing over the course of a few centuries, different portions of the world have different results, and individual years may differ significant from what one expects from longer-term changes.
Similarly complex debates revolve around race relations, prosperous societies, gender, and police reform.
Various organizations are attempting to bridge the chasm of trust by focusing on community building and/or removing explicit politics and advertising from their activities. Fact-checkers, journalists, historians and scientists provide context, references and research so that people can make informed choices. Social media, opinion pieces, entertainers and politicians may instead be driven to overstate the evidence, or selectively filter their topics to increase interaction with and support from their audiences. While the individual talking heads driving misinformation campaigns often do (or should) know better, the majority of people consuming potentially biased information have a hard time distinguishing truth from fiction.
It is unreasonable to expect every person to do an independent, detailed research project on each of the major news organizations, politicians, and social influencers who may show up in their news feed. It is unrealistic to expect every person to be an expert on every topic of public interest. Instead people build webs of trust which include their friends, family, coworkers, preferred news sources and political parties. Engaging with those voters directly and honestly is necessary to sort out the truth of a public issue, but it’s not easy and not guaranteed to work in every case.