Preposterous Fake News, the Breach of Democratic Trust, and Intellectual Humility

Abstract

What normative relationship should citizens and political representatives establish with people voicing preposterous fake news, defying basic epistemic rules? To answer this pressing matter, we defend the view that the spread of preposterous fake information is best accounted for by an expressivist explanation, according to which agents have practical reasons, rather than genuinely epistemic, to share preposterous fake news, as expressive of their commitment toward a specific narrative about social reality. Then, we investigate the worrying effects of these dynamics on the democratic fabric and on mutual trust among citizens. The pars construens of our argument consists in a strategy for mending the breach of democratic trust based on the virtue of reasonableness. We argue that to restore minimal trust between citizens and government, reasonable citizens ought to embrace intellectual humility, therefore approaching disagreement showing respect for others, dispensing with a superior and dismissive attitude toward agents holding unreasonable beliefs