This chapter introduces the themes of the book and provides an overview of key arguments and of the chapters in the book. Among other things, the chapter discusses the problem of knowledge resistance, outlines the purpose of the book, and provides a broad framework toward understanding knowledge resistance and its antecedents. This framework includes the transition from low- to high-choice media environments, an increase in the prevalence of mis- and disinformation, biased information processing, and factual belief polarization, and the linkage between misperceptions and knowledge resistance. Finally, it briefly introduces and discusses each of the chapters in the book.

This book offers a truly interdisciplinary exploration of our patterns of engagement with politics, news, and information in current high-choice information environments. Putting forth the notion that high-choice information environments may contribute to increasing misperceptions and knowledge resistance rather than greater public knowledge, the book offers insights into the processes that influence the supply of misinformation and factors influencing how and why people expose themselves to and process information that may support or contradict their beliefs and attitudes.

A team of authors from across a range of disciplines address the phenomena of knowledge resistance and its causes and consequences at the macro- as well as the micro-level. The chapters take a philosophical look at the notion of knowledge resistance, before moving on to discuss issues such as misinformation and fake news, psychological mechanisms such as motivated reasoning in processes of selective exposure and attention, how people respond to evidence and fact-checking, the role of political partisanship, political polarization over factual beliefs, and how knowledge resistance might be counteracted.

This book will have a broad appeal to scholars and students interested in knowledge resistance, primarily within philosophy, psychology, media and communication, and political science, as well as journalists and policymakers.

We provide a characterization of knowledge resistance in terms of resistance to available evidence and a philosophical guide to the concepts central to empirically investigating it: knowledge, evidence, and rationality. Knowledge requires true, justified belief, so we emphasize the importance of focusing on factual judgements the truth of which can be investigated by empirical methods. We understand evidence in terms of probabilification, and discuss its content and its testimonial nature in the central cases. We propose that knowledge resistance always involves epistemic irrationality. An important psychological mechanism resulting in such irrationality is motivated reasoning, and politically motivated reasoning has been proposed as the main explanation of fact polarization. We discuss challenges to the detection of motivated reasoning, stressing the rationalizing role of prior belief. When priors line up with motivations, these two factors are difficult to disentangle. But even where polarization results from differences in prior belief, there might be irrationality, for instance in the form of unjustified beliefs about which sources of evidence are trustworthy. Therefore, we propose to not only investigate knowledge resistance in a narrow sense, involving a direct, epistemically irrational response to evidence subjects have, but also in a wider sense, resulting for instance from selective exposure.

In the book Gibbard proposes, first, that statements about meaning are normative statements and, second, that they can be given an expressivist treatment, along the lines of Gibbard's preferred metaethics. In my paper, I examine the first step: The claim that meaning statements are to be construed as being normative, as involving oughts'. Gibbard distinguishes two versions of the normativity of meaning thesis - a weak version, according to which every means implies an ought, and a strong version, according to which for every means, there is an ought that implies it. I argue that neither thesis withstands scrutiny. The weak thesis depends on assumptions about the notion of semantic correctness that the anti-normativist rejects, and the strong thesis does not solve the problems Gibbard wants it to solve: the problems of indeterminacy and meaning skepticism. I conclude that semantics does not need normativity.

The article examines the role of natural kinds in semantic theorizing, which has largely been conducted in isolation from relevant work in science, metaphysics, and philosophy of science. We argue that the Kripke–Putnam account of natural kind terms, despite recent claims to the contrary, depends on a certain metaphysics of natural kinds; that the metaphysics usually assumed—micro-essentialism—is untenable even in a ‘placeholder’ version; and that the currently popular homeostatic property cluster theory of natural kinds is correct only to an extent that fails to vindicate the Kripke–Putnam account. This undermines the metasemantics required for anti-descriptivist semantics.

In this chapter, we critically examine the most important extant ways of understanding and motivating the idea that reasons for belief are normative. First, we examine the proposal that the distinction between explanatory and so-called normative reasons that is commonly drawn in moral philosophy can be rather straightforwardly applied to reasons for belief, and that reasons for belief are essentially normative precisely when they are normative reasons. In the course of this investigation, we explore the very nature of the reasons-for-belief relation, as well as the ontology of such reasons. Second, we examine the idea that the normativity derives from the internal connection between reasons for belief and epistemic justification, distinguishing between two distinct normativist accounts of justification, a weaker and a stronger one. We argue that neither line of argument is compelling. Pending further arguments, we conclude that normativism about reasons for belief is not supported.