research
“Facts, Arte-facts, and Fabrications: The Crisis in Public Epistemic Authority,” Political Theory, 2025 (Pdf).
Amid increasing anxiety about the fate of truth in politics, Hannah Arendt is often invoked to gain purchase on the ways in which lies, propaganda, and conspiracy theories are overwhelming the public realm and paralyzing political discourse. This article reconstructs Arendt’s often misunderstood account of factual truth via a new interpretation of her seminal 1967 essay, “Truth and Politics.” While many theorists have charged Arendt with hostility to truth tout court, others defend her account of factual truth by way of her unfinished theory of judgment. I locate Arendt’s notion of “publicly known” facts within a different context: first, her understanding of knowledge as produced by work and anchored in the human artifice and, second, her account of authority and its modern crisis. By reinscribing “Truth and Politics” within this broader framework, my reading both clarifies its unique place in Arendt’s oeuvre and shows that the focus on judgment must be paired with a (re)turn to the neglected concept of authority. To that end, I propose an account of “public epistemic authority” as housed within inherited knowledge infrastructures and outline the new perspective this offers on the so-called “post-truth” crisis.
Common Knowledge: Public Epistemic Authority and Democratic Faith (book manuscript)
My book manuscript in progress, Common Knowledge: Public Epistemic Authority and Democratic Faith, is occasioned by the crisis of authoritative knowledge in democratic politics. This crisis encompasses not just scientific knowledge, but a whole infrastructure that supplies the public with politically salient information about our world: from rates of incarceration by race, to vaccine safety, or the outcome of a Presidential election. Engaging the thought of Hannah Arendt, debates in democratic theory, and interdisciplinary literature in science and technology studies, it asks how public knowledge is made and preserved, transformed and eroded, as well as how we might repair or reinvent what I call “public epistemic authority.”
Social scientists often attribute our “post-truth” predicament to a combination of cognitive vulnerabilities and political pathologies (like motivated reasoning and heightened partisanship), exacerbated by an emerging digital media ecosystem. One remedy is to strengthen, supplement, or even bypass citizens’ cognitive capacities by engineering our exposure to information. Accuracy priming, automated fact-checking, and platform redesign aim to do just this. Political theorists remind us to attend to citizens’ dispositions and urge a restoration of the virtues that support democracy’s truth tracking function. Such technocratic and educative responses treat symptoms but leave unanswered the question of how “publicly known facts” (and not just valid knowledge) came to exist in the first place. Everywhere the cri de cœur goes up, from pundits and scholars alike: “why do people fall for fake news?” Few have asked, “why wouldn’t they?”
Common Knowledge attempts to answer that question. It investigates the origins of public epistemic authority and gives an account of how it is made and circulated, contested and eroded today. It suggests, in a spirit of complementarity and critique, an alternative to the diagnosis outlined above, and asks how we might repair and rebuild inherited knowledge infrastructures that are under immense strain. There are two principal conceptions of public epistemic authority. One is a “right to be believed” patterned on political authority as the right to command. The other is a deliberative theory of epistemic authority as a voucher for discursive justification. Both of these formulations, I argue, are inadequate to the knowledge crisis facing democratic societies. Instead, I propose an “infrastructural” account of public authority, which is more consonant with democratic aspirations and how knowledge is produced and distributed today. Other accounts focus on the relationship between lay citizens and experts and ask how we can “get it right.” I ask how we might rebuild stable and durable knowledge infrastructures that serve democratic politics, rather than global capitalism and technocratic state power.
Infrastructure is an occasional metaphor and conceptual tool in critical theory, but I also draw on the history, sociology, and phenomenology of large sociotechnical systems like electrical grids and water distribution networks. Rethinking public authority through the lens of infrastructure offers a “realist” account of public authority as contingently (and imperfectly) constructed over time, rather than the legitimate exercise of power. It also recognizes that inherited knowledge infrastructures do not distribute affordances equally: they also exclude, marginalize, and lock in. Like their physical counterparts, the ubiquity, reliability and durability of knowledge infrastructures generate dependencies and the potential for chaos during episodes of breakdown. But their constant need for maintenance and repair is a feature, not a bug: knowledge infrastructures are always sites for democratic world-building. A capsule version of the argument, “Facts, Arte-facts, and Fabrications: The Crisis of Public Epistemic Authority,” is forthcoming in Political Theory.
The theoretical argument is illustrated via two cases. The first is a capsule history of peer review as a practice for authorizing knowledge that is both public and protected. From its origins in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, to the Sokal Hoax and Hypatia controversy, to the IPCC’s multi-stakeholder process, peer review illustrates how institutional technologies of authority emerge, adapt, consolidate and become contested. The second examines the discursive processes by which academia seeks to constitute itself as a locus of public epistemic authority and to articulate a vision of the service it can offer a democratic society. I focus on the practice of “position taking” by institutions, professional associations, and faculty in the form of statements, petitions, and open letters.
Work in Progress
Computer Modeling, Climate Prophecy, and Public Faith in Science
Arendt on Earth: Between the Given and the Technophere
Teaching as a Vocation: Political Theory Pedagogy
Enumeration as Political Representation
Votes, Polls, and Bots: Enumeration, Amplification and Democratic Equality (with Jennifer Forestal).
Invited Talks
2021. “Climate Prophecy, Computer Modeling and Public Faith in Science,” Colby College.
2021. “Model Affordances,” New Media and Culture Program, University of Oregon.
2020. “Arendt’s Genealogy of Nature,” Refashioning Worlds: Nature, Science, and the Human in the Thought of Hannah Arendt, University of Florida at Gainesville.
Conference Papers
2021. “Climate Prophecy, Computer Modeling and Public Faith in Science,” Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association (Seattle, October 1-3).
2020. “Votes, Polls, and Bots: Enumeration, Amplification and Democratic Equality,” Association for Political Theory (November 12-14).
2020. “Authority without Authenticity?” Beyond Disinformation: Authenticity and Trust in the Online World, Social Science Research Council & Digital Democracies Group (October 23-24).
2020. “Public Authority and Knowledge Infrastructures,” Themed Panel: Algorithmic Governance and the Politics of Data, American Political Science Association 2020 (September 10-13).
2019. “The Strangest of All Modern Societies: Hannah Arendt on Science and Scientists,” Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association (Washington DC, August 29-September 1).
2019. “Where do we begin? Between the Given and the Technosphere,” Arendt on Earth: Beginnings (Evanston, IL, May 3).
2018. “The Quintessence of the Human Condition: Earth in the thought of Hannah Arendt,” at Hannah Arendt: The Challenges of Plurality (Paderborn University, Germany, Dec 13-15).
2018. “Making Public Knowledge: Arendt and Herodotus’ historiēs apodexis,” Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association (Chicago, April 5-8).
2018. “The Politics of Scholarly Identity in the Hypatia Controversy,” Organized Panel: Experience and Expertise in the Making of Identity, Annual Meeting of the Western Political Science Association (San Francisco, March 29-31).
2017. “The Worldliness of Truth in Politics,” Themed Panel: Democracy, Distrust, and Digital Publics, Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association (San Francisco, August 31-September 3).
2017. “Life on Earth: From the Archimedean Point to the Anthropocene,” Annual Meeting of the Western Political Science Association (Vancouver, 13-15 April).
2017. “Worldly Facts: Truth in Public and Authority in Politics,” Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association (Chicago, April 6-9). Finalist, Review of Politics Prize 2018, for best paper in normative political theory presented in 2017.
2017. “Hannah Arendt on Science and Scientists,” University of Chicago Political Theory Workshop (March 6).
2014. “Contested Facts and Contentious Politics: Conspiracist Discourse in Revolutionary Egypt,” The Arab Spring, Human Rights & Democratic Transition: Between Hopes & Risks (Tunis, August 18-23).