Disinformation is widespread and harmful, epistemically and practically. We are currently facing a global information crisis that the Secretary-General of the World Health Organization (WHO) has declared an ‘infodemic’.1 Furthermore, crucially, there are two key facets to this crisis (i.e. two ways in which disinformation spreads societal ignorance): one concerns the widespread sharing of disinformation (e.g. fake cures, health superstitions, conspiracy theories, political propaganda, etc.), especially online and via social media, which contributes to dangerous and risky political and social behaviour. Separately, though at least as critical in the wider infodemic we face, is the prevalence of resistance to evidence: even when the relevant information available is reliably sourced and accurate, many information consumers fail to take it on board or otherwise resist or discredit it due to the rising lack of trust and scepticism generated by the polluted epistemic environment (i.e. by the ubiquity of disinformation). What we need, then, is an understanding of how to help build and sustain more resilient trust networks in the face of disinformation. To this effect, we need a better understanding of the nature and mechanisms of disinformation and of the triggers of evidence resistance.

The view of evidence, defeat, and suspension put forth here delivers the result that paradigmatic scepticism about knowledge and justification is an instance of resistance to evidence. This chapter argues that this result is correct. In order to do that, I look at extant neo-Moorean responses to purported instances of failure of knowledge closure (Pryor 2004, Williamson 2007) and warrant transmission and argue that they are either too weak – in that they concede too much to the sceptic – or too strong – in that they cannot accommodate the intuition of reasonableness surrounding sceptical arguments. I propose a novel neo-Moorean explanation of the data, relying on my preferred account of defeat and permissible suspension, on which the sceptic is in impermissible suspension but in fulfilment of their contrary-to-duty epistemic obligations.

This chapter puts forth and defends a novel view of defeat, and it shows that it is superior to its competition in that it can account for the epistemic impermissibility of defeat resistance cases and normative defeat cases, as well as for the effect ignored defeat has on doxastic justification. On this account, defeaters are ignorance indicators1: facts that one is in a position to know and that reduce one’s evidential probability that p. Furthermore, I also put forth a novel account of the normativity at work in cases of normative defeat and negligent inquiry and evidence gathering.

This chapter develops an account of permissible suspension that builds on the views of justification, evidence, and defeat defended in the previous chapters. The view is superior to extant competitors in that it successfully predicts epistemic normative failure in cases of suspension generated by evidence and defeat resistance. On this view, doxastically justified suspension is suspension generated by properly functioning knowledge-generating processes. In turn, properly functioning knowledge-generating processes uptake knowledge and ignorance indicators.

This chapter considers one popular way to account for cases of resistance as cases of evidence one should have had, where the normative failure at stake is taken to be either (1) a breach of social normativity (Goldberg 2018) or (2) a breach of moral normativity (Feldman 2004). I argue that the social normative option is too weak, in that it allows problematic social norms to encroach on epistemic normativity, and that the appeal to moral oughts fails both on theoretical grounds – in that it cannot accommodate widely accepted epistemic conditions on moral blame – and on extensional adequacy.

This chapter dwells at the intersection of the social psychology of knowledge resistance and epistemic normativity to offer the first full taxonomy of resistance to evidence. It first individuates the phenomenon via paradigmatic instances, and then it taxonomises it according to two parameters: (1) paradigmatic triggering conditions and (2) epistemic normative status. I argue that the phenomenon of resistance to evidence is epistemologically narrower but psychologically broader than is assumed in the extant literature in social psychology. This, in turn, gives us reason to believe that addressing this phenomenon in policy and practice will be a much more complex endeavour than is currently assumed. In the remainder of the book, I examine the extant literature on evidence, defeat, justification, permissible suspension, and epistemic responsibility in search of the normative resources required to fully accommodate the psychological breadth and epistemic normative status of the phenomenon of resistance to evidence.

The following chapters examine the theoretical upshots of the positive epistemological view proposed in this book. The account developed so far delivers the result that epistemic justifiers constitute epistemic oughts. In this chapter, I discuss the worry that such accounts threaten to give rise to widely spread epistemic dilemmas between paradigmatic epistemic norms. I argue for a modest scepticism about epistemic dilemmas. In order to do that, I first point out that not all normative conflicts constitute dilemmas: more needs to be the case. Second, I look into the moral dilemmas literature and identify a set of conditions that need to be at work for a mere normative conflict to be a genuine normative dilemma. Last, I argue that while our epistemic life is peppered with epistemic normative conflict, epistemic dilemmas are much harder to find than we thought.

This chapter surveys recent accounts of the epistemic permissibility of suspended judgement in an attempt to thereby identify the normative resources required for explaining the epistemically problematic nature of evidence resistance. Since paradigmatic cases of evidence resistance involve belief suspension on propositions that are well supported by evidence, such as vaccine safety and climate change, the literature on permissible suspension seems to be a straightforward starting point for my investigation: after all, any plausible view of permissible suspension will have to predict epistemic impermissibility in these paradigmatic resistance cases. I look at three extant accounts of permissible suspension – a simple knowledge-based account, a virtue-based account, and a respect-based account – and argue that they fail to provide the needed resources for this project. Further on, the chapter identifies the source of the said difficulties and gestures towards a better way forward.

Ideally, we want to resist mis/disinformation but not evidence. If this is so, we need accounts of misinformation and disinformation to match the epistemic normative picture developed so far. This chapter develops a full account of the nature of disinformation. The view, if correct, carries high-stakes upshots, both theoretically and practically. First, it challenges several widely spread theoretical assumptions about disinformation – such as that it is a species of information, a species of misinformation, essentially false or misleading, or essentially intended/aimed/having the function of generating false beliefs in/misleading hearers. Second, it shows that the challenges faced by disinformation tracking in practice go well beyond mere fact checking. I begin with an interdisciplinary scoping of the literature in information science, communication studies, computer science, and philosophy of information to identify several claims constituting disinformation orthodoxy. I then present counterexamples to these claims and motivate my alternative account. Finally, I put forth and develop my account: disinformation as ignorance-generating content.

This part of the book develops a full positive epistemology: an account of the epistemic normativity of evidence resistance, in conjunction with novel accounts of epistemic oughts, evidence, defeat, and permissible suspension. This first chapter argues that resistance to evidence is an instance of epistemic malfunction. It first puts forth a normative picture according to which the epistemic function of our cognitive systems is generating knowledge, and epistemic norms drop right out of this function. Second, it shows how this picture accommodates epistemic obligations, which, in turn, explain the normative failure instantiated in cases of resistance to evidence. According to this view, cognitive systems that fail to take up easily available evidence and defeat instantiate input-level malfunctioning. Input-level malfunctioning is a common phenomenon in traits the proper functioning of which is input dependent, such as our respiratory systems. Since our cognitive systems, I argue, are systems the proper functioning of which is input dependent, we should expect the failure at stake in resistance cases.

The chapter argues that the main extant views of the nature of evidence one has lack the resources to account for the impermissibility of cases of resistance to evidence. I first examine classic internalist, seemings-based evidentialism and argue that it fails to account for evidence resistance. This, I argue, is an in-principle problem: internalist evidentialism cannot recover from this because it is internalist.