Epistemic Institutions and Capacities in the Age of Polycrisis

We live in the age of “polycrisis”, a general crisis that has multiple strands, including economic, political, geopolitical, social and ecological. The coming together of these strands is so disorienting that it challenges our ability to resolve them or “to point to a single cause and, by implication, a single fix” (Adam Tooze). Similarly, the polycrisis poses increasing challenges for existing epistemic institutions and epistemic capacities. Epistemic institutions refer to institutions that create and disseminate knowledge and political-ethical understandings, including universities and the media. Epistemic capacities, in turn, refer to social functions that support of the competence of citizens, their right to receive trustworthy information, and their ability to take part in political decision-making and production of socially relevant knowledge. In this presentation, I will examine the interlinkages between epistemic institutions and capacities in the Finnish context. I will first examine the historical formation of epistemic institutions in Finland. As Hannu Nieminen has pointed out, the period between the 1950s and the 1970s was crucial for the development of epistemic “commons” in Western Europe. It was characterized by a consensus concerning the universality of civic values, supported, for example, by free higher education, the strengthening of human and social sciences, and the improvement public service broadcasting. By contrast, since the 1980s and especially following the global financial crisis of 2008, epistemic institutions – and by extension, their ability to support epistemic capacities – have entered a crisis. It has four dimensions in the Finnish context. 1) Political: epistemic institutions face increasing pressures to come up with solutions to current problems (social, ecological, etc.), at the same time as their resource base has eroded; 2) Economic: epistemic institutions are required to be more supportive of economic competitiveness; 3) Cultural: in particular, the mounting critique against traditional Western epistemic ideals; 4) Techno-economic: the increasing power of privately owned digital platforms that produce and share data in ways that are not transparent, and which help to disseminate disinformation and other forms of “counterknowledge” that threatens established epistemic authorities. All of these dimensions have forced established epistemic institutions into a position, in which their capacity to fulfil their different democratic functions in a publicly legitimate way is more difficult than before. In the last part, I will offer a critical sociological explanation for why epistemic institutions in Finland have entered a crisis in the present historical conjuncture.