Irrational Rationality: Informational and Knowledge-Based Alienation

This session debates the alienating and alienated aspects of epistemic sources. These may involve educational policies, social engineering, public opinion, media studies, social media, as well as cultural analyses. The issues we wish to investigate include whether our powers of knowledge prevent us from being misinformed, along with the character of relations between individuals and knowledge and between collectivities and information. Rationalists and educationalists have long advocated the emancipating effects of knowledge-building, arguing that critical thinking within a favorable epistemological context raises awareness of the social imaginary. Numerous actors nevertheless condition the distribution of knowledge and information across society, claiming that they wish to shield society from the misinformation that negatively impacts politics and social organization, threatens the common good, and ushers in a post-truth era. Certain aspects of knowledge distribution also possess cultural and historical origins whereby they escape the full control of individuals and groups. This raises the question concerning what leads people to alienate themselves from critical reasoning. In addition, the relationship between society and information—which may be either systemically or constructively structured and comprise a philosophical approach or an analytical method—has been central to ideological and cultural conflicts. Against this background, this discussion welcomes the participation of those who wish to help identify how we may overcome infobesity and bias in informational and knowledge distributive networks. The overarching question is How are knowledge, information, and understanding in fact related to each other in societies today?