How to Tackle Truth Decay

When then-President Donald Trump was briefed on the California wildfires in 2020, the scientific opinion he heard was that climate change was real and had contributed to the conflagrations that ended up consuming more than 4 million acres and killing 31 people. His response? “Science doesn’t know.”

Millions of Americans trusted Trump, a fact he leveraged to attack the trustworthiness of science itself. Trump’s actions are part of a larger pattern of assault on expertise. People need to trust that the experts will tell the truth, and they need to trust the connections between themselves and the experts. A division of labor that was necessary because of our complex social and technological world created the vulnerability of a possible cleavage between expert elites and a distrustful populace.

Our belief in things we cannot ourselves verify relies on trust networks. If the connections to the experts are broken, our understanding of reality becomes untethered. Society then begins a slide into doubt and denialism, and “truth decay,” as a RAND initiative has called it, starts to occur. If we want to reverse that process, we need to rebuild the networks of trust.

Half a century ago, the pioneering philosopher and mathematician Hilary, for example, is to describe something as red when you see red; the same goes for the word denoting an object, such as , or an action, such as . But with the emergence of science, in the West from the Renaissance onward, a new class of empirically grounded concepts entered our everyday vocabularies that relies on experts to discern meanings. Putnam us to consider gold: