STS 4780

Truth and Media: Searching for Epistemological Certainty

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2024-2025.

This course focuses on questions both timely—"How can news be fake?"—and timeless—"What counts as the truth?" Each of our four course units will present scenes in the history of technology that complicate the answers to these questions. How, for example, has Big Data revived the idea of theological omniscience that Nietzsche pronounced dead in 1882? How did atlases and encyclopedias inform the notion of "scientific objectivity" in the 19th century? How has photography and film complicated the truism, "I'll believe it when I see it"? Focusing on these and other moments of historical certainty and doubt, we will return to contemporary debates about the role of communication technology in presenting facts ("alternative" or otherwise) to an informed public. We will end our course by questioning what type of hope, confidence or resistance we can find in a world without a solid epistemological foundation for truth.

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