Authoritarianism, Language, and Knowing Things

The impeachment drama now playing out in the House of Representatives has done much more than expose corruption in a presidential administration. It has exposed profound corruption in the way that we use language and the way that we claim to know things. These corruptions, I fear, will have far greater implications for our society than our president’s foolish attempts to extort opposition research from foreign leaders.

The problem begins, but does not end, with a once-obscure philosophical concept called “epistemic closure.”

As ten-dollar phrases go, “epistemic closure” earns its pay. It describes a phenomenon that can be difficult to get a fix on without a label. The term itself comes from academic philosophy and means something like “a philosophical system that cannot be successfully challenged because it does not accept anything as true that is not part of itself.”

As a term for political discourse, the term dates back to 2010, when conservative blogger Julian Sanchez used it to describe the growing tendency of conservatives to accept claims of fact only from conservative sources. It was intended as a criticism from inside the conservative movement. An epistemically closed system cannot tolerate any internal criticism, he explains, because “anything that breaks down the tacit equivalence between ‘critic of…