Fake News and the Loss of Kantian “Common Sense”

There are no greater seeming proponents today of intellectual autonomy and the Enlightenment’s call to “think for yourself” than purveyors of fake news. The success of their efforts relies on exploiting generally well-functioning human reasoning—that is, once they’ve divorced it from what their “propaganda of unreality” seeks to destroy: common sense, or Kant’s sensus communis. This paper will contextualize aspects of Kant’s aesthetic works, Anthropology, logical writings, and remarks on pedagogy and taste with more recent strands of Kantian socio-political (Arendt, Makkreel, Zerilli, and Tinguely) and neuroscientific (Friston and Clark) thought to argue that fake news consumption is not, or not only, a failure of individuals to reason well about the legitimacy of competing claims, but part of a logical activity of sense-making in the absence of the shared feelings of value (sensus communis) Kant suggests are necessary for successful reflective judgment. While it’s widely acknowledged that fake news purveyors seek to undermine the normative authority of institutions and expert testimony (the sources of information citizens need to make wise political decisions), Kant lets us see how people, particularly those whose sensus communis may be weak or undeveloped (due to poor education, for example), might easily lose their attunement to such norms once they’re forced to orient themselves in an infosphere flooded with false, deliberately contradictory information with only their “logical private sense (sensus privatus)” to guide them. Left to their own devices and unable to rest in uncertainty in a world in which all information has become equally meaningful and meaningless, “whatever seems right to them is right,” to paraphrase Robert Brandom paraphrasing Wittgenstein. Taking the vaccination controversy in the United States as an example, this paper looks to Kant’s pedagogy to consider ways we might strengthen sensus communis and encourage a “taste” for better information.