At the heart of Knowledge in Crisis is the phenomenon of knowledge itself. To understand our current predicament, we need an understanding of what knowledge is, how it is achieved, shared, and transmitted, and what undermines it. Answering such questions is crucially important for understanding and overcoming the crisis of knowledge that afflicts contemporary society. This requires, however, that we radically rethink many of our common assumptions about knowledge.

Any attempt to understand the epistemic crisis must investigate the subject of knowledge, the knowing mind itself. It must include a deeper understanding of the complex relationships between knowledge and mind: the manner in which unconscious psychological states affect our capacity to know, the intricate connection between knowledge and action, the question of what kind of knowledge is possessed and produced by artificial intelligence and social media, and the future-oriented task of how we can continue to generate knowledge and innovate at the individual and the societal level. The focus of this subproject is on developing an understanding of knowledge-producing mental structures— issues surrounding natural vs ‘artificial’ forms of knowledge and of our sense of being in control of ourselves.

At the heart of the present crisis of knowledge is the paradox generated on the one hand by the vital importance of scientific knowledge, and on the other hand a deep scepticism and suspicion in the mind of the general populate towards the knowledge generated by the sciences. Addressing the crisis requires a greater understanding not just of the interface between science and the rest of the society, but also of some foundational methodological issues internal to the sciences that may have played some role in sustaining, if not generating, the distrust. A principled investigation of the larger social causes of the misgivings and prejudices against scientific developments (including the fact that scientific experts can be fallible and vulnerable to human errors) must therefore by supplemented by an analysis of conceptual issues (arising out of the use of models, analogue experiments, and statistical techniques) in the production of scientific knowledge.

To address the crisis of knowledge it does not suffice merely to reflect upon questions of epistemology or the philosophy of science, for this crisis has a pronounced ethical dimension as well. On the one hand, the crisis concerns the knowledge of ethics, on the other, the ethics of knowledge. How can we have knowledge of ethics when a number of different ethical viewpoints coexist side by side one another? How can practical knowledge be preserved? And how ethical should science itself be?

Together with our fellow human beings we form not only epistemic communities of knowers, but also social and political communities whose shared life is structured by institutions, conventions, and social groupings. The way in which we understand and gain knowledge of the nature and functioning of our society, that is, our own common life within the polity, has thoroughgoing consequences for the way in which our institutions can function and shared goals are determined and achieved.

Knowledge is factive—one can believe, but one cannot know something that is false. In a world full of fake news, misinformation, conspiracy theories, and alternative histories it has become difficult to practically ascertain what is true, if something can be considered true at all. And to that extent, it has become difficult to know. The crisis of knowledge is thus intimately linked to a concomitant crisis of truth—a crisis created and sustained, at least in part, by developments within the Humanities e.g., the longstanding relativism concerning truth dating back at least to the Greek Sophists, and the more recent postmodernist critiques of the idea of truth. This sub-project addresses some difficult questions concerning truth and the language that is used to express truths.