For the better part of a decade, scholars and writers across the globe have lamented the growing prevalence of misinformation, conspiracism, ideology, mistrust of experts, epistemic bubbles and echo chambers. These scourges make it much harder to solve any problem of politics, climate, culture or public health, because they frustrate the search for a widely recognised truth. We know there is something wrong with the way we know.
Accounts of this crisis of knowledge, however, overlook how its differing elements arise from a common source. Our problem concerns not just the way we generate knowledge but our attitude toward knowledge, how we present ourselves to each other as knowers. Beneath the epistemological crisis is a deeper psychological one: the problem of knowingness. Knowingness, as the philosopher and psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear defines it in Open Minded (1998), is a posture of always ‘already knowing’, of purporting to know the answers even before the question arises. When new facts come to light, the knowing person is unperturbed. You may be shocked, but they knew all along.
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