Trust in Polarized Democracies

• In Event: Civic Learning on Campus: Bringing Political Science In Mini-Conference III: The Trouble with Facts: Reimagining the Role of Information in Democracy

Abstract

Laden’s paper starts by drawing a distinction between facts and information: whereas what counts as a fact is not dependent on an agent, what she counts as information is. A person counts as information material that derives from a source that she regards as reliable and uses it as information with which to think when she trusts that source. It then argues that democratic deliberation falters when citizens trust different sources of information, and especially when they disagree about the grounds for regarding sources as trustworthy. This isolates people on cognitive islands and makes them unable to genuinely talk to one another. Since the ground of this difficulty lies in what and how various citizens come to trust sources of information, the solution lies in working out grounds of trust that can bridge the gaps between cognitive islands. The paper argues that an informational trust network that rests on an ideology of open-mindedness can serve this purpose in a way that a network that rests on a broadly scientific ideology cannot. While both can regard the products of science done well as trustworthy, the former does not succumb to the temptation to believe that the problem is merely that other people do not believe in facts or science and so need to be ignored or converted.

Author

• Anthony Simon Laden