Brandon:

I’m Brandon Baker with Penn Today, a publication of the University of Pennsylvania. And you’re listening to Understand This. Episode one, Understanding Facts. Our modern world begs for multifaceted approaches to problems, for second and third looks through lenses that have otherwise been shelved or in need of a dusting off. In business, we consider health psychology and behaviors influence decision making. In medicine doctors increasingly examine how storytelling shapes their interactions with patients. In law language is a tool for informed cross-cultural communication and policymaking.

Brandon:

Here through this podcast, we unite disciplinary expertise with interdisciplinary dialogue to tackle big questions, all towards the goal of cross discipline, understanding and you bet, problem-solving.

Brandon:

The first problem we’ll tackle in this podcast series, which brings together Penn faculty from different departments and schools, is more on the meta side. What is a fact and more importantly, how do we again agree on shared facts in the age of fake news and hyper partisanship. To address this, we engage with Sigal Ben-Porath, a professor of education, philosophy and political science in the Graduate School of Education, and the author of Free Speech on Campus. As well as Sophie Rosenfeld, the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History and author of Democracy and Truth: A Short History. Stick around after the conversation to find out how you can get involved and understand this.

Brandon:

Welcome to the first episode of Understand This. Could you both just speak your name so that everybody knows who you are?

Sophie:

Sure. I’m Sophie Rosenfeld.

Sigal:

I’m Sigal Ben-Porath.

Brandon:

Great. So in the spirit of this podcast, we’re joining together different disciplines to work through problems that we’re facing in society. And I couldn’t think of a better way to kick this off than to talk about the glue of our problem solving which is facts and truth. So let’s see if we can work through this particular problem of, how do we get people in our society to agree on what is a fact and what is not. And I say that thinking about several things, climate change denial, fake news, so called fake news, a lack of media literacy, and a struggle to communicate effectively or just listen to one another, on campus or otherwise.

Brandon:

So I’ll start high level and just ask you both what comes to mind immediately when you think about the problem of a society or a democracy not working with shared facts and its discourse.

Sophie:

All right. Well, I’ll start simply by saying there are a lot of kinds of truth and facts are just one kind of truth. And even what they are is a little hard to describe of course, because for a lot of history, facts are not an important form of truth actually. They’re pretty late developments. Some people think they come out of early modern science. Some people think they come out of early modern English common law, but they’re very particular kind of truth because they have to do with something that’s been witnessed generally by more than one person. And that comes out of their for some kind of human testimony. And they describe something very particular generally.

Sophie:

So when we talk about facts, we don’t agree and we’re not usually talking about logical facts like 2+2=4, we’re usually talking about facts that have to do with something that’s happened or description of the world as it is.

Sigal:

So I would say facts are a finicky thing. In a way, you feel you know what they are, but when you try to pin them down they always escape, right? So it’s very hard to agree on a definition of what qualifies as a fact, right? When I was studying philosophy of science, one of my teachers love to the story about being a witness to a car accident. Where in court, he was asked what color was the offending car and he said it was blue at least on one side.

Sophie:

Oh, yeah.

Sigal:

So, you would assume that you can agree on something as general as that, but he was trying to be more specific, because one of his areas of study was the question of what qualifies, especially scientifically, as a fact. What he observed with his own eyes was one side of the blue car, right? Or one blue side of a car.

Brandon:

Right.

Sigal:

So, can you extrapolate from that? You and I would, but he was very specific about what you may and may not do with the facts that you have on hand. Philosophically speaking, right? And in line with the history that Sophie was talking about, I think we oftentimes assume that we refer to the same thing when we’re talking about facts. But oftentimes we don’t. And that of course becomes worse when you have a lot of incentives to think differently from others. When you have motivated thinking, when you have lack of trust in those who convey truth or are seen as arbiters of truth, as I think you were alluding to Brandon in your opening remarks.

Sophie:

Right. So the problem with a fact is that first of all, it’s very hard to agree what one even is, as Sigal is saying. Then any fact, even the most basic, even one side of that car is blue, well it’s a linguistic construction already. We have to have agreed what blue is, right? And that’s a really basic one. As soon as they get a little more complicated, it’s hard to even be sure we’re agreeing to the same thing. And then the implications of what it means to say the car was blue. we’ve only established something very basic there, but we haven’t established anything about how it got that way. Whether it has always been that way. There are a lot of what are the implications are always up in the air.

Sophie:

It sounds like an easy thing to say, “Well, why don’t we just agree on the facts, climate change.” We should all at least agree, the world is getting warmer. Because we can do that with numbers, measured temperatures, and then we could just agree, basically, that’s a human development. But that’s already a messy set of suppositions. Not everybody has the same measurements. The temperature, is it warmer everywhere all the time? Do we have definitive evidence that it’s human actions that have caused the temperature to rise?

Sophie:

We have to basically accept this is a fact because the overwhelming scientific consensus is that this is a fact. But I can’t tell you if in this case, from my own witnessing that I know this. I can tell you that there’s not a lot of snow in Philadelphia this winter, but doesn’t tell you anything about what’s happening all over the rest of the world. Could be just warmer here from my own personal knowledge. And I don’t know what has caused that either, it could be a fluke. I have to basically accept that this has become a fact because enough careful people have said it appears to be blue. Right?

Brandon:

Right. So what happens when... At what point is a fact do you think actionable? When is there enough factual information to do something with it? So there might be with climate change a whole mess of data that we could put to it, but at what point do we take the big bold actions or? Someone I had chatted with before I came here was talking about vape pens, for example. Obviously, we don’t want people smoking these pens because of these incidents that have been reported. But how much information do we need to make that bold decision to make it actionable?

Sigal:

Right. So there are two things that need to happen for a fact or a set of facts to become actionable. And one thing that I think Sophie was alluding to is, I have to trust. For instance in your example about climate change, or also Brandon, in your example, about the vape pens, I have to trust the scientific or medical communities conclusions that they are bringing to me, or the recommendations that they are bringing to me, or to the citizenry. Whether it’s in the context of public health, or whether it’s in the context of action related to climate, that I trust them. That they are neutral, that they are honest, that they are professional, that they have integrity that I can respect them, right?

Sigal:

So I have to have a set of attitudes towards them. Which I have, but somebody else may not have. So, I believe them because I understand the process that how they studied to become scientists or doctors. I understand something about that, and then how they come to a shared understanding. I understand something about this process, so I can respect it, but maybe somebody else has qualms about this. And so, the first thing that we have to establish is our attitude towards the arbiters of truth, right? In this case, the scientific community or the medical community.

Sigal:

But also, and this I think actually makes it even more complicated in your question Brandon. The move from an agreement, in philosophical terms, an epistemological agreement, right? An agreement about reality, how we understand reality, which is already hard as we’ve been discussing from this moving to what we would like to see happen. And these are two separate steps right? So, you can say that there is broad agreement that specific human actions are causing climate change, right? Or the or the current climate crisis, right? And because we would all like to avoid some of the catastrophic consequences, we need to for instance, divest from fossil fuels or we need to take certain actions to move to more sustainable energy consumption pattern et cetera.

Sigal:

What we think should happen is really much more complicated, right? Because you run into agreement not about facts only, but also about the political outlook. Right? What is more important? Your claim regarding the possible future or even our understanding of the current reality or somebody else’s understanding about the job that they might lose because of the move away from the gas and oil industries or fracking, et cetera. I have my answer to that, right? Same as I have my answer to the question about vaping which I agree is unhealthy, right?

Sigal:

I read and I understand what that means and so I wouldn’t do it. But if somebody has a different political, social personnel outlook on these actions, we have to reach an agreement, that’s where it becomes political rather than epistemological, right? where it becomes a matter of where we want to go rather than what we understand that there is.

Sophie:

The thing is that when we approach facts, holding a lot of values in mind, and those values may be quite different ones, some person might prize economic growth where somebody else prizes the health objectives over economic growth. Ideally, those two people can agree on a very low level baseline agreement, like vaping is not a healthy activity. Okay. But then what to do about it should be subject to substantial disagreement, because that’s what politics is when you begin with different values and try to come to some agreement what balances those values in response to those facts. But it’s very hard to make that distinction, to put the facts in one basket and the policy recommendations and the values in another place. They flow on top of each other all the time.

Sophie:

And I would also say another thing, which is that while part of what we’re educated to do, in this democracy and in all other democracies I think, is to recognize the best version of truth that we have in a different moment. Say, what counts as scientific consensus as the closest we’re going to do to getting an accurate accounting of things for the moment. We’re also taught in democracies to be skeptical, which is to say to also question assumptions. To think of truth as always something that can be revisable that’s never certain 100% that is, and that’s always object to contestation. That’s whether it’s a historical fact, a scientific fact, even a legal fact. We assume that it’s good, that they’re second chances.

Sophie:

So we both want to establish facts because we need them. We can’t create policies without them. But we do want people to be always questioning veracities too. Not to the extent that everybody is a conspiracy theorist and thinks that you know, everything is something other than what it looks like. But not to be so gullible to take absolutely everything that they receive as simply the letter of the law.

Brandon:

So what switch flipped that so many people now perceive things as fake news?

Sophie:

Right. I trust, so Sigal pointed out the critical thing here which is trust, trust in certain kinds of institutions, certain kinds of expertise is way down. And that’s partly, it’s a chicken and egg thing. But partly that’s because of our partisan political environment that people that might have ones been trusted to tell us at least as close to what might be accurate as we can get at the moment, again subject to revise ability. But whether that’s a news anchor or a scientist, the front page of the New York Times, and there are a lot of different... Would have been pretty close to authoritative. For many people we seem to be living in a moment in which trust in institutions, including the news, including universities, including research institutes, think tanks, etc is way down.

Sophie:

There’s some good reasons for that. They’re not always right. But when there’s a really steep decline in trust in those institutions, it makes it that much harder, of course, to get to any agreement about even just describing what happened yesterday.

Brandon:

Wow! Yeah. So I guess the question is, how do you fix that? I imagine social media surely-

Sophie:

I give this one to Sigal.

Brandon:

Social media is surely part of the problem, but I wonder if it could maybe also be part of the solution.

Sigal:

Well, I don’t know. I think rebuilding trust in institutions, in our institutions of government, in the media, in research and teaching institutions like universities, in the judiciary, right? There are various paths to accomplishing that. We have to recognize that some of the disintegration of trust is motivated by interested parties. So there are people in groups who benefit from the decline of trust and who intentionally feed it. And so understanding this process I think is one part of the solution.

Brandon:

Who would you identify as those people?

Sigal:

Well, I think you have people with for instance, financial interest in maintaining status quo around the energy industry, right? So they would like for you to not be sure that climate change or the climate crisis is related to anything that people do. So they would have a vested interest in either providing you with a counterfactual information or creating a sense of uncertainty around scientific facts so that people are unsure anymore what’s true and what not what’s not true in regards to climate.

Sigal:

Similarly, businesses who profit from activities that are seen as unhealthy, right? They have a good reason to make you question whether actually what they are doing or what they are selling you is unhealthy, right? So this would be one easy type to point it. I would say that this thing requires better levels of literacy. So that’s I guess why Sophie is handing me this easy question to deal with.

Sigal:

But also I would say that because a lot of this requires shared conventions and acceptance of both the limitations but also the uses of having a shared understanding. So may be accepting, “Look, we can’t know for sure everything. The extent of our certainty might be limited, but there is a benefit in trying to say, ‘Look, this is where I will stop questioning and I will start taking action.” This is the thing that requires civic commitment and civic action rather than a continued search for additional proof or stronger and more robust factual basis.

Sigal:

At some point, you need to say, “You know what, I heard enough. I know enough. I know it’s not everything, but I think we need to do something.” And so this moves you from a question a fact to a question of action, as you said. And it requires solidarity, right? It requires a commitment to share action. And if it’s not going to be based in institutions like, “Okay, I decide to trust whatever the scientific community, the judicial structure, et cetera. At least it’s going to be I’m deciding to trust my fellow citizens to act together to improve whichever subject that we’re focusing on.”

Sophie:

I agree entirely. Although I will say that I think it’s what’s partly hard right now is trying to imagine a lot of citizen agreement on things. Because I think our experiences have become so unshared in a way. You can blame a lot of this on very specific recent factors. You can blame social media and the way it’s organized. You can blame, you brought up the term fake news, a president who uses that term to continually to at least muddy the waters. Not necessarily that everybody always believes him, but it leaves everybody guessing what’s true and what’s not true.

Sophie:

So you can point to very specific things like that. But you might also be able to say that we don’t see the world in a common way at the moment. In part, because our experiences have become so different in a world of vast economic inequality. We don’t share educational foundation, this is back to something Sigal knows much more about than I do. But we’re not all being educated the same way. or not all. That we’re not all joining the military.

Sophie:

There are very few institutions that we, as a culture, participate in collectively. And I’m speaking here about the United States, there are other places in the world where that’s less the case. And the heterogeneity of the United States is one of its remarkable and great things and also one of its terrible things. Because it makes it very hard for there to be almost anything that vast numbers of people can agree upon, because they’ve had so little shared formation, and that’s a political problem that’s bigger than simply say, the Trump years.

Brandon:

And now, a quote break. Says Irish poet and playwright Oscar Wilde, who was also once a journalist and sometimes a critic of it. “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.” He wrote this in his play The Importance of Being Earnest, a comedy in part about that tricky little matter of truth.

Brandon:

So I mentioned civic engagement and like the actionable portion of after the fact finding. And I wonder that people seem to take to social media for a lot of that civic engagement, if that’s maybe perpetuating the problem, because it’s like they’re taking that action to the same platform where these problems exist.

Sophie:

I do think social media is a big part of the problem. It’s not the only part and pardon, Americans have been very partisan and disagreed about what counts as truth forever. But social media has certainly exacerbated the problem, and for lots of different reasons. But the most obvious and basic one is that unlike traditional media platforms, there’s no vetting of any kind. There are no gatekeepers, there’s no editorial service. So I can say absolutely anything and it’s very hard for anybody else to know where I got my information or how... I could say vaccines kill you, I can say vaccines save your life. These are all ideas that circulate on the web. And unless you’re a very savvy consumer of information, it’s really hard to see what’s more valid than anything else.

Brandon:

What do you think platforms can do to help regulate that?

Sophie:

Well, I believe there should be more regulation in the United States in particular. There is more in Europe already have. That the large social media companies are not just what they say, which is like a piece of paper. They’re just something you ride on. In fact, they play a role in our culture that goes well beyond that and they should be more liable, to my mind, for things that when they circulate information that causes physical harm, they can identify where ideas are coming from, they can force ads, for instance, to have indications as to who’s paid for it. They can vet their own information in different ways. And I don’t believe this is impossible. It probably takes a combination of human and artificial intelligence in different kinds of actors doing this. They want to have it always, in my mind.

Sigal:

And I would add, and I completely agree with that. So you’re not getting too much counterpoint out of us if you intended that. I agree with that. And I would add that I think platforms also can serve some of the more productive roles that the news media serves once they recognize that this is in fact their social role. Even if they would want, they prefer for regulatory or business reasons to describe themselves as a pipeline rather than as a producer of content.

Sigal:

I think one of the more desirable aspects of reading the paper in paper form is the serendipity dimension, right? So you open the paper and maybe you like the sports section but as you flip through you bump into this or that that you wouldn’t have seen otherwise, and wouldn’t have known otherwise. And right now, because you get to be your own editor, then you basically lose the serendipity aspect and you don’t bump into things that you didn’t intentionally vet for yourself.. And so your opportunity to expand your horizons in these ways that have civic importance and have epistemic write or fact base importance, really shrink in our personal lives. And therefore, they don’t allow for us to grow on the personal and communal level in these ways.

Sigal:

I think the news media serve this role. And particularly, even before when you asked about how do we renew trust in institutions like the news media and others, one of the most basic ways that it used to happen and really is reduced for business reasons, is the local news.The local news, in particular the local newspapers which of course are in huge crisis and are closing down everywhere. They were easily seen as trustworthy and reliable sources, because you knew it happened. You saw it in the paper, but before that, your neighbor was there at the commissioners meeting and she saw the huge big fight that happened and she told you about that and now you’re reading all about it in the paper. You know that it actually happened. You cannot trust anyone or you cannot believe a person who is telling you, “Oh, newspapers are all fake and don’t believe them.” “No, I know it’s true.”

Sigal:

So the local connection was really important for trust in the news media as a source. And when you lose the local connection, and all they tell you about is like, what happens in Washington or whatever, things that are far away from most people’s lives, then it’s easy to discount it as either irrelevant or untrue. So just going back to this point about platforms, platforms are not organic. They are not something that happens in the world. We construct them. We feed into them, we give them our attention, which is their main source of revenue. So As a community, we can decide what makes sense for them to provide us with. Do we want them to continue the existing processes of polarization or do we want them to really provide us with a more significant common ground, which they can do.

Sophie:

But I don’t think we can wait for them to do it, that’s the thing.

Sigal:

No.

Sophie:

In the sense of I’m agreeing with you that it’s... They’ll say, “We’ll self regulate.” But that’s their businesses, they have no incentive to do that without a little push. But this thing about local news that Sigal described is so interesting because it’s absolutely right. In the 1990s, early 2000s, everyone imagined that once all news was global, that we could get any information from anywhere, truth would prevail and error would sort of go away because we just have this, “All knowledge would be available. I could read the media from anywhere in the world and it would be a utopia.” Exactly the Opposite really happened, which is, though it’s easier to read a foreign newspaper now than it was before. Basically, we’re flooded with this information that comes from all places and we can’t even tell where it’s coming from. And what we’ve lost is where we might have agreed about what’s happening at home.

Sophie:

Local news has disappeared under all this journalism of that kindness. And it’s a huge loss because most of us wander in an endless sea of potential information. We have no way to figure out what to read first, there’s too much of it, no one could read it all. And it’s too much of a good thing. So you end up with more disinformation than actual information.

Brandon:

Is it possible to reintroduce serendipity, do you think? Or maybe not getting it immediate we can get it in other places like university?

Sigal:

Well look, the university is built to try and provide that. Even the requirements for... Oh, I forget what they’re called. The-

Sophie:

Sectors, that sought of thing or what?

Sigal:

The buckets that you have to fulfill or taking courses outside of your main area of focus or major or even your school. So the different requirements for courses, Penn does it. One way different universities do it in different ways. And the goal for them really is to tell you, “Look, expand your horizons some way.” you know that you love art or engineering or whatever it might be. Check out what’s happening in the School of Design or in sociology or something. Just learn something new.

Sigal:

And so universities definitely do it in this way, which I think is productive. And they also do it in their extra curricular offerings. So you bump into people who have other ideas and other interests and other preferences. I also still think that social media platforms can do it, it’s really a matter of the algorithm. We have to demand it. It’s not going to happen by itself. But this is something that can be occasioned by, you’re flipping through or scrolling through social media, you can still be encouraged to do that and it can have its own benefits. Okay, and there are other ways that we can do that. But I think these definitely are two that would be accessible to many.

Sophie:

In some ways a university education is successful. If what Sigal just described is what happens, which is that somebody, it’s not just changing their mind like an opinion, but they’re exposed to a set of ideas that in some ways rock their world. That you came in thinking this and you left seeing something completely differently, then you know a class or maybe the education as a whole has been a success. If you leave and you’ve learned a lot of things but you see the world just the same way as when you entered at 18 or if you’re a graduate student later, something didn’t quite go right.

Sophie:

You hope that we’re in the business of expanding minds, introducing unexpected thoughts. I teach a course on the History of Truth, just started to last year. And the students were, I couldn’t get them to stop talking because we rarely got back to what we were supposed to be talking about. Because they were in a sense, so eager to talk about what they knew and what they thought they knew and what they might know and what they didn’t know. It was just what students want to be thinking about now. I found it really fun because it reminded me in a way, the way they’re so open, especially young to questioning what they think they know about everything.

Brandon:

So students do seem engaged?

Sophie:

They were super engaged in this class. Open students are good. So they’re always engaged. But they were particularly--

Brandon:

Those are the ones that are willing to step outside of the box [crosstalk 00:33:10]

Sophie:

They were particularly engaged in this context. And I think it was on all of their minds. And it touched on both the political issues at the moment, but also their own educational formation in some ways. How they come to know anything, why do they trust what they trust? Why are they reading authorities on things? How do you know things? The course was half about the history of knowledge in part and half about philosophy or epistemology. So it was the right moment in some ways for that conversation. I think students are really open to the idea that we are in a worrisome moment for truth. And how do you put that together with the fact that they are learning a combination of facts, the things that get tested on, and processes, how to find knowledge themselves.

Brandon:

Yeah, it’s one thing when... The students obviously know we’re in a worry some moment and they want to be actionable in solving this problem. But what do you do when you have that population? Of people who just might recognize that a fact is not a fact and they just don’t care? What do you do with that?

Sophie:

That’s the problem at the moment.

Sigal:

Yeah, right. You do need to work through shared contexts. So whether these are schools, which I hesitate to put too much on. They have a lot on their plates. And we don’t always support our teachers to do the right thing even to the extent that they are committed to their students into their craft. We expect a lot of them. But I do think that they are one of these contexts where you can learn to care about facts. You can learn to care about asking questions about what you know and how you might know it. Universities, Sophie’s course or similar contexts are a great place to do that. But not many people have access to that. Even if you take into account everybody who attends a college or a university, it’s still less than half of the cohort.

Sigal:

So, a lot of people never get access to this learning at whichever particular context or level. So we do have to count more on other and more broadly shared and accessible context. And I think other than the DMV, the institution that we really all have to interact with is the school. So, this is one place where we can try to support the development of a critical understanding of what a fact is, of how you can discern whether a piece of information that you encountered is motivated, is distorted, is trying to communicate something that’s accurate or helpful or relevant or actionable.

Sigal:

And so, these are all questions that are actually currently on the curriculum for the most general ways of learning English language arts or a science curriculum, right? A lot of people have access to that. And I think if you cultivate that, and if you center that within the curriculum then you can support, “Look, you can’t fix everything.” Right? Definitely not through the schools, not through any one institution. But if as a community we’re developing a stronger commitment to asking these questions, raising them and listening to each other...

Brandon:

Doing it early on. Right? That’s cool.

Sigal:

Right. Doing it early on, but also not giving up on people. Like you were saying Brandon, some people may not care whether things are factual or not. And I’m thinking, okay you mentioned before, Sophie mentioned before the anti vaccine movement Right? And I think there are definitely some bad faith actors within the anti vaccine movement. But a lot of people, and obviously I’m not on board with any of the claims. But there are a lot of people who are trying to do their best and are worried about their children’s health, and they just don’t know how to discern what’s true and what’s not true.

Sigal:

And so they just decide, “Oh, well, maybe I best just not do it.” And I think they are wrong. And it’s important to communicate to them that they are wrong, but it’s important to do it in a way that doesn’t question their motives. So we have to differentiate the effort to develop a shared understanding. For example, vaccines are actually good for your health and good for the public’s health from saying, “Oh, you don’t care about the truth or you don’t understand anything or you have bad motivations.” Most people don’t even when they are wrong about the facts. And so this is again a part of trying, rather than be exacerbating the mistrust and the polarization around facts, trying to create some opportunities for a shared understanding even across factual devides, not only just across ideological divides.

Sophie:

It’s interesting, your example made me think yesterday I had jury duty.

Sigal:

I’m so jealous. I know it’s not popular.

Sophie:

I wasn’t picked up but I was with a judge and the judge gave us all instructions. And it was a difficult case. I won’t say what it was about, but I will say that I was struck whereby there were 60 people from all walks of life, ages, races, religions, et cetera. Sitting in a room in Philadelphia. And we were given very clear instructions by a very good judge who explained why we’d be judging facts and he would be judging the application of the law and what that difference is, and that’s what juries do, is determine the facts. And I was thinking actually that-

Brandon:

How timely.

Sophie:

It was a very nice, but it was it was so different from our political system. And here we are all participating in almost the only other civic thing we all do. We have very little civic life, right? The two things you tend to do are vote and serve on juries, ones required and ones not. In some countries voting is required but it’s not in the US. Jury Duty is obviously. And yet here we were all participating this civic ritual about facts in a way in which there was immediate solidarity among the people in the room.

Sophie:

Now we hadn’t started deliberating I wasn’t picked for the jury. But we took on this enterprise as a group and it was really interesting what happens in that civic engagement. Really different than the animosity where the facts are already being contested that we’re encountering in this political season.

Brandon:

Yeah, I wanted to close by asking, what makes you hopeful that we will find a better path here? It sounds like that’s in that direction.
Sophie:

Oh, good. If you just asked me out of the blue, I might have had trouble answering that one. That might be the clip, that struck me a little bit. But the reason I brought it up is Sigal’s comment about, I think very rightly and generously so not starting from the premise, that everybody who disagrees with you is ill intentioned, but is operating perhaps on different sets of assumptions, sets of knowledge. It’s not easy to figure out solutions at the moment. IA lot of fact checking isn’t going to change people’s minds. It’s an important thing to do, but I don’t think it’s the hope of the future. But I will leave it with the jury example as at least offering the possibility that we don’t have to think of ourselves in all contexts as being epistemic enemies as well as political ones.

Sigal:

I’m hopeful because, well, maybe it’s just my personality, but also because I think if you look at youth civic engagement, it’s rising rapidly in the last few years. When you look at young people doing all sorts of things that are civic, so voting for sure, registering to vote even more than voting, and also engaging in other types of civic and political action such as joining organizations and groups, joining protests of various types and with different goals. Trying to consume news in a more intentional way.

Sigal:

So when you look at surveys of young people, it’s very fashionable to speak ill of the youth, kids these days. I actually find that kids these days, both here at Penn and also just more broadly around the country, give me a lot of hope because they care about our shared future. They care about each other in ways that sometimes make us all stumble, right?

Sigal:

Like for example, they would like for us to be able to say less or fewer things because they want to avoid hurtful expression. I think they are wrong on that on the whole, but I think they are right. I think they are right in terms of their motivation. They are looking for a shared society where people can feel welcome and included and where our institutions can serve us. And even if sometimes I or other people might disagree with some of the particular acts that are taken or some of the specific mechanisms that young people are utilizing, maybe I’m wrong and they are right, at least in some cases, but for sure the effort that I see among students and other young people to engage. And their optimism even when they are worried about the future, their optimism about changing it is very hopeful to me.

Sigal:

Thanks for listening to the first episode of Understand This, a production of The Office of University Communications at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. We hope you learned something and especially we’re challenged to consider truth through a new lens, or lenses. Stick with us on this journey through truth and other subjects as we continue to pose and attempt to solve problems with the help of Penn scholars. Once get involved, do us a favor and share what you’re itching to understand. Let us know and we’ll find the interdisciplinary mix of experts for that. Notice suggestion and feedback can be sent to bkbaker@upenn.edu. And of course, don’t forget to follow us on Apple Music to be notified of new episodes.