Kant, Misinformation, and the Public Sphere

In this talk, I show that Kant provides a strategy to address central epistemic shortcomings of the public sphere, such as the prevalence of mis- and disinformation as well as testimonial injustice. I draw from Kant’s often neglected lectures on logic to show that he argues that inclination aligns with intellectual virtue once certain technological and political preconditions are met. On the one hand, he claims that it is in the speakers’ own interest to publicly assert the truth in an exact and complete way in order to maintain their ‘honor’ [Ehre] (V-Lo/Blomberg 24:245, V-Mo/Powalski 27:231). This argument, however, presupposes the existence of ‘modern’ communication technology (to which Kant specifically counts the postal service as well as newspapers) and the relative absence of political censorship (V-Lo/Vienna 24:899, V-Lo/Pölitz 24:563). On the other hand, Kant maintains that it is in the hearers’ own interest in the public sphere to form opinions on the basis of the speakers’ ‘honor.’ Again, this method can only be expected to yield success if hearers have access to modern communication technology that allows them to keep track of past speech acts accurately (V-Lo/Vienna 24:899, V-Lo/Dohna 24:750). For these reasons, once the aforementioned technological and political preconditions are met, the public sphere can be expected gradually to approximate a state that is no longer plagued by mis- and disinformation or testimonial injustice. Thus, Kant not only offers a surprisingly rich strategy to address the epistemic shortcomings of the public sphere, but also treats the contested topic of lying in a far less moralistic way than is commonly assumed. While Kant’s argument has some systematic merit, I argue that it ultimately remains unconvincing because it underestimates the problem of information overload. As the public sphere becomes saturated with ever more speakers and speech acts, assessing a speaker’s ‘honor’ becomes increasingly difficult, since processing the relevant past speech acts is an extremely time-consuming task. Finally, I show that Kant anticipates the problem of information overload (e.g., Refl 1998, 16:189), but is unable to find a satisfactory solution.