Democracy Is Not a Truth Machine

Abstract

In a democracy people are free to express their opinions and question those of others. This is an important personal freedom, and also essential to the very idea of government by discussion. But it has also been held to be instrumentally important because in open public debate true ideas will conquer false ones by their merit, and the people will see the truth for themselves. In other words, democracy has an epistemic function as a kind of truth machine. From this it follows that in a democracy there should be no dogma: no knowledge protected from public challenge and debate. Yet this whole argument is founded on embarrassing misconceptions of the nature of truth and of the working of democracy.

The unedited public sphere

“…Wells (2013) draws the key distinction with the observation that “democracy is not a truth machine” in his essay by that title. No marketplace of ideas operating at the scale of a public can exert the same force on differentiating between truth and falsehood as it can exert on the expression and refinement of opinion.…”

“…Whether a marketplace of ideas resting on expansive free-speech and free-press guarantees is functional with respect to commerce between true and false claims is more salient now than in the mass media era, when news businesses exerted much stronger gatekeeping and validation functions over the content of information reaching publics. Wells (2013) draws the key distinction with the observation that "democracy is not a truth machine" in his essay by that title. No marketplace of ideas operating at the scale of a public can exert the same force on differentiating between truth and falsehood as it can exert on the expression and refinement of opinion.…”

“…After illustrating the affordance approach, we then turn to a problem that is connected: the status of the “marketplace of ideas” as a self-correcting mechanism for falsehoods that might circulate via these affordances (Vraga and Bode, 2018). The crux of our argument in this second part of the essay addresses cognitive limitations that restrict citizens’ abilities to deal with falsehoods in contention with truth; comparable limitations do not attend to citizens’ capacity in the aggregate to engage with contending ideas, values, or interests (Wells, 2013). This brings us back, in the age of social media and computation, to the Fourth Estate as the remedy for the problems of social media.…”