Echo Chambers, Ignorance and Domination

ABSTRACT

My aim in this paper is to engage with C. Thi Nguyen’s characterization of the echo chamber and to propose two things. First, I argue that a proper reading of his concept of echo chamber should make use of the notion of ignorance in the form of a structural epistemic insensitivity. My main contention is that ignorance as a substantive structural practice accounts for the epistemically deleterious effects of echo chambers. Second, I propose that from the talk of ignorance we should be able to see echo chambers in terms of their more harmful impacts in our daily lives. To do that, I argue that we should think of echo chambers as tools to promote hermeneutical domination. If my representation of Nguyen’s concept is accurate, I believe we can see some important theoretical consequences stemming from the way Nguyen understands it.

KEYWORDS:

• Echo chamber
• ignorance
• epistemic injustice
• domination

Aknowledgements

This paper is a product of my research project on epistemic injustices and democracy funded by the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) under Grant number 426917/2018-9. I am grateful to those at CNPq who still believe in Brazilian researchers, science and democracy. I presented early versions of it at the 11th Principia International Symposium in Florianópolis, the XVIII Inter-American Congress of Philosophy in Bogotá and at the Workshop ‘Epistemic Injustice in the Aftermath of Collective Wrongdoing’ in Bern. I am grateful to these audiences for their helpful comments. I am particularly grateful to Melanie Altanian for organizing the workshop in Bern, where these ideas were debated with the best audience I could hope for. Thanks to Josh Kissel and Blaze Marpet for their comments and proofreading; to an anonymous reviewer for their excellent and thought-provoking comments; and finally, thanks to Nadja El Kassar for her extremely illuminating comments, questions and suggestions on two early drafts of this material.

Disclosure statement

No potential competing interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. From reading Nguyen, one gets the sense that it is always bad and counter-rational to be in an echo chamber. However, one could argue that there can be good echo chambers, in the form, for example, of self-isolation from irrational or bigoted epistemic behaviour – or even value-neutral echo chambers, whatever form these might take. I do not have the space here to try to adjudicate on the value of echo chambers. My point here is that, if we accept Nguyen’s notion of echo chambers, we should accept some conceptual consequences I draw. As it will be made clear later, if we accept echo chambers as social epistemic structures of discredit and exclusion, we must accept the underlying mechanisms that support such structures, even if, in the end, the echo chamber in question is one that has some positive practical, political or epistemic outcomes. I thank Jennifer Lackey and Sandy Goldberg for raising this problem for the account I develop here.

2. For an overview of some key conceptions of ignorance in the current literature, see El Kassar (2018, 2019).

3. For a longer taxonomy of the strands of social epistemologies of ignorance, see Sullivan and Tuana (2007). For a shorter taxonomy, see Alcoff (2007).

4. See, for example, Pohlhaus (2012) for an extended discussion on how ignorance affects the way dominantly situated knowers fail to acknowledge epistemic tools developed from the experienced world of those situated marginally.

5. See again Alcoff (2007) for a discussion on the contextual aspect of ignorance.

6. Supposing a minimal scenario where there are only two groups involved, those who accept climate change science and those who deny it.

7. Nguyen’s paper main motivation is to draw a distinction between echo chambers and epistemic bubbles, where the latter is characterised as ‘a social epistemic structure which has inadequate coverage through a process of exclusion by omission’ (2020, 143), where this exclusion is an accidental feature of the way we naturally form and engage with our informational networks (such as social networks).

8. For such an argument, see Marks et al. (2019).

9. He does (e.g. Nguyen 2020, 151).

10. Catala is concerned with a ‘simplified picture of the social ontology’. In that simplified picture, deliberations are also simplified as ‘for or against a certain practice’ (2015, 427).

11. See, for example, Philips, T. 2018. “Bolsonaro Business Backers Accused of Illegal Whatsapp Fake News Campaign.” The Guardian, October 18. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/18/brazil-jair-bolsonaro-whatsapp-fake-news-campaign

12. Ibid.

13. There is a great number of legislative proposals being advanced in Brazil that aim to criminalize the teaching of ‘gender ideology’.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) under Grant number [426917/2018-9].

Notes on contributors

Breno R. G. Santos

Breno Santos is a Professor and Head of the Philosophy Graduate Program at the Federal University of Mato Grosso – Brazil. His research centres mainly on topics such as epistemic injustices, ignorance, Marxist and Feminist epistemologies.