Blogpost by: Kim Hajek, Paul Trauttmansdorf, Sabina Leonelli

This well-attended event, held on 9 December 2024 at Munich’s Hansa House, saw EDI Director and TUM chair of Philosophy and History of Science and Technology, Sabina Leonelli, in conversation with her international co-authors of a book in preparation on understanding misinformation: Maya Goldenberg, University of Guelph, Canada, and Marcel Boumans, Utrecht University, The Netherlands. Misinformation, both around scientific topics and in the political domain, is well recognised as a major issue in today’s society, one which has already attracted major investments and its own dedicated research domain of ‘misinformation science’.

Leonelli, Goldenberg, and Boumans, all philosophers and historians of science, called on those engaged with addressing misinformation to take a step back, however, to consider different approaches to the issue. They proposed a distinction, which constitutes the key thread of their forthcoming book, between a ‘normative’ approach to misinformation and its ‘situational’ counterpart. The normative approach, which is prevalent in misinformation science, holds that it is possible to distinguish ‘true’ information from its erroneous or ‘fake’ counterpart. Combating misinformation then becomes a matter of identifying those distinguishing characteristics, often by technological or automated means, to eradicate misinformation from various platforms and educate users in what to look out for.

A situational approach to misinformation, in contrast, stresses that information is not meaningful in isolation from context, and that people make sense of information through processes involving many localised, social, and experiential factors. Under this approach, misinformation should be studied and dealt with on a case-by-case basis, with respectful attention to the forms of sense-making involved and their implications under the circumstances at hand. Goldenberg drew analogies between such an approach and her previous work exploring vaccine hesitancy, while Boumans acknowledged the much greater time commitment involved in the situational approach, as compared with potentially automated technocratic measures that emerge from a normative approach.

Speakers concluded that the two approaches are complementary, each more appropriate under certain circumstances. It is simply not feasible to adopt only a situational approach given the widespread nature of misinformation and the skills, time and resources required to examine such cases in depth. At the same time, general-purpose tools to identify and eradicate misinformation need to be evaluated regularly in relation to their effectiveness for specific settings and goals. Commentators Silke Beck (TUM chair of Sociology of Science), Paul Trauttmansdorf, and Kim Hajek (the latter both TUM and EDI senior researchers), reflected on these two approaches from the perspective of their particular expertise, including engagement with science policy and institutions, STS scholarship, and the history of efforts to demarcate science from other forms of knowledge. A consensus emerged that historians, philosophers, and social scholars of science need to do more than unpacking how controversial institutions (e.g. the IPCC), or science itself (including past efforts sometimes labelled ‘pseudoscience’), function. Rather, to build trust in scientific practices, scholars should also make a constructive contribution, for example by sketching paths by which science might progress in the future. Alternatives are needed to the unhelpful ‘positivistic’ view of information as isolated data, and science as straightforward testing of hypotheses.

The event concluded with a broader discussion between speakers, commentators, and the audience around issues such as the complexity of context and implications for policies of public goods. Yet discussions continued during a drinks reception and as TUM Masters students in the audience analysed the issues as part of their science studies degrees.

Further reading:

Boumans, Marcel J. and Ferwerda, Joras and Goldenberg, Maya J. and Leonelli, Sabina and Russo, Federica and Traag, Vincent A. and Wardekker, Arjan, Fostering Trustworthy Information. Countering Disinformation When There Are No Bare Facts (September 04, 2024). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4953170 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4953170