What is the epistemic crisis?

Written by AI. Help improve this answer by adding to the sources section. When the sources section is updated this article will regenerate.

The epistemic crisis refers to a deep, society-wide breakdown in the systems that create, vet, and distribute reliable knowledge. It is marked by falling trust in traditional authorities, growing doubts about what is true, and a proliferation of mutually incompatible “realities.”

What is the epistemic crisis?

Decline in shared facts. RAND researchers describe a “diminishing role of facts and analysis in American public life,” a condition they label Truth Decay [4].

Erosion of institutional trust. Confidence in government has fallen from roughly 75 % in 1960 to about 16 % in 2024 [3]. Trust in scientists, once exceptionally high, has also slipped steadily since 2019 [5].

Internal uncertainty within the knowledge-producing community. A large collaborative effort found that only 36 % of high-profile psychology findings could be replicated [2], suggesting that even peer-reviewed claims may be unreliable.

Commentators summarise the situation as an “epistemic crisis” [6][7][10], a phrase that has migrated from academic journals to mainstream commentary during the past decade.

What is causing the crisis?

Multiple, overlapping forces are identified in the literature and commentary:

Politicisation of expertise

  A controlled study shows that when scientific findings are explicitly tied to partisan rhetoric, trust declines even among people ideologically aligned with the source [1].  Critics argue that professional bodies endorsing candidates or policy positions accelerate this slide [20].

Information supply shocks

  Social media and 24-hour news produce an “information overload,” while algorithms reward novelty and outrage over accuracy [4][12].

Elite failure and reputational self-damage

  Repeated high-profile errors—whether in scholarship, media, or governance—create a negative feedback loop: each new mistake makes the next fact-check less credible [9][15].

Replication and methodological crises inside academia

  The observed 36 % replication rate in psychology [2] and subsequent estimates that “about 75 % of psychology claims are false” [13] undermine public faith in science more broadly.

Perceived ideological homogeneity among gatekeepers

  Analyses of newsroom and university cultures describe an increasingly uniform set of political priors, which can blind organisations to their own errors and alienate outsiders [12][18][19].

Examples of elite failures that fuelled the crisis

The replication crisis in psychology (2015-present). High-profile findings, including social-priming effects, failed to reproduce, casting doubt on a generation of research [2][13].

COVID-19 communication missteps. Although not universally acknowledged as “failure,” commentators such as Yglesias argue that changing guidelines and premature certainty damaged trust in public-health authorities [15].

Politicised science statements. Professional societies publicly endorsing partisan positions (e.g., in U.S. presidential elections) were criticised for blurring lines between evidence and advocacy [20].

Media groupthink and retractions. Cases ranging from misreported campus incidents to early coverage of the “lab-leak” hypothesis illustrate what Mounk calls the tendency of major outlets to “move in unison” [12][18]. An NPR senior editor recounts internal pressures that, in his view, caused the network to lose the trust of half the country [19].

Intelligence and policy failures (e.g., Iraq WMD). While not detailed in the provided sources, RAND notes such events as emblematic episodes where institutional certainty later proved unfounded, reinforcing cynicism [4].

Timeline of the public discourse

1958-1970s High post-war trust in government and traditional media [3].

1990s Early internet expands information sources; ideological media niches begin to form (background to Truth Decay [4]).

2012-2015 “Replication crisis” label enters academic and popular press after failed replications in psychology; Science publishes large-scale reproducibility project [2].

2016 The term “post-truth” is Oxford’s Word of the Year; commentators like Arnold Kling frame events as an “epistemic crisis” [6].

2018 RAND publishes Truth Decay report [4]; discourse around elite failure intensifies after the 2016 election and social-media scandals.

2020-2022 Pandemic amplifies scrutiny of scientific and media institutions; Pew registers first sustained decline in trust in scientists [5].

2023 Opinion pieces analyse “elite failures and populist backlash” [8] and lament “when the New York Times lost its way” [18].

2024 Pew shows record-low trust in government [3]; Nate Silver declares that “the expert class is failing” [9]; commentary on institutional credibility dominates Substack and mainstream outlets.

Summary of disagreements in the sources

Degree of crisis. Some analysts see a systemic breakdown (Kling [6], Williams [7]), while others emphasise correctable policy and communication errors (Yglesias [15]).

Primary culprit. Academic authors stress structural forces like information overload [4], whereas journalists focus on elite errors and ideological bias [12][18][19].

Solutions. Proposals range from depoliticising science [20] to building alternative trust networks outside legacy institutions [11][17].

Together, the evidence suggests that the epistemic crisis is real, multi-causal, and likely to persist until institutions rebuild both accuracy and perceived impartiality.

Sources

Peer-reviewed Science: . Study: Politicization Undermines Trust in Institutions, Even Among the Ideologically Aligned Public

2. Study: Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science

Data-driven Analysis:

3. Public Trust in Government: 1958-2024 - Pew Research

4. Truth Decay: An Initial Exploration of the Diminishing Role of Facts and Analysis in American Public Life - RAND Corporation 5. Americans’ Trust in Scientists, Positive Views of Science Continue to Decline - Pew Research

Investigative Journalism & Commentary:

Question

What is the epistemic crisis? What is the cause of the epistemic crisis? What are some examples of elite failure the caused the epistemic crisis?