What is the epistemic crisis?

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What is the epistemic crisis?

Most commentators use the phrase “epistemic crisis” to describe a breakdown in the shared processes by which a society determines what is true. Symptoms include declining trust in government, news media, scientists, and other traditional arbiters of knowledge; the spread of mutually exclusive factual narratives; and rising doubts about the reliability of expert advice or scientific findings [4][6][7][15].

The crisis is not merely about misinformation or “fake news.” It is about the loss of a perceived system for adjudicating truth-claims—what RAND calls “Truth Decay,” the “diminishing role of facts and analysis in American public life” [4]. When citizens no longer agree on who or what counts as an authoritative source, collective decision-making and long-term institutional legitimacy suffer.

What is the cause of the epistemic crisis?

Different authors emphasize different drivers, but four broad themes recur:

Politicization of Expertise

  • Institutions that once presented themselves as neutral are increasingly perceived as partisan, especially when they take explicit political stands or are staffed by ideologically homogeneous elites [1][5][20].  
  • Experimental evidence shows that overt politicization reduces trust even among people who agree with the position being advocated [1].

Declining Reliability Signals

  • Large-scale efforts to replicate influential psychology papers found that only 36-47% replicate, fuelling public scepticism about “settled” science [2][13].  
  • High-profile retractions and methodological crises make it harder for laypeople to know which studies to take seriously.

Information Abundance & Fragmentation

  • Digital platforms have lowered entry costs for publishing, so elite outlets no longer monopolize attention. Competing narratives flourish, and confirmation-bias is amplified by algorithms [4][12][16].

Elite Failure & Eroding Trust

  • When expert predictions or policy decisions turn out badly, citizens update their priors about elite competence.  This “performance-based” scepticism accumulates across domains—finance, foreign policy, public health, education—and eventually generalises into a cross-domain trust collapse [6][8][9][15].

Authors disagree on relative weight: Kling sees institutional overconfidence as central [6]; Williams stresses ideological uniformity in newsrooms and universities [7]; Yglesias highlights elite misinformation as an “underrated” factor [15]; RAND assigns equal blame to media, education, and political incentives [4].

Examples of elite failures that fuelled the crisis

2008 Financial Crisis

 – Regulators, ratings agencies, and leading economists failed to foresee systemic risk, damaging confidence in economic expertise [4][9].

Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq (2003)

 – Intelligence community and major news outlets amplified faulty assessments, later acknowledged as error, reducing faith in both government and media [8][12].

Replication Crisis in Psychology (2015-present)

 – Landmark Science paper found fewer than half of 100 studies replicated [2]; follow-ups suggest up to 75 % of claims are false or exaggerated [13].

COVID-19 Messaging (2020-2023)

 – Shifting public-health guidance on masks, school closures, and vaccine transmission created perception of political rather than evidentiary decision-making [6][9][15].

Media Coverage Controversies

 – Internal critiques at NPR [19], The New York Times [18], and broader surveys show newsroom monoculture leading to groupthink and factual errors, inviting populist backlash [12][18][19].

Timeline of the public discourse

1958-1970s

Public trust in federal government consistently above 60 % [3].

1990s

Rise of cable news and early internet begins fragmenting audiences; trust starts to decline [4].

2003

Iraq WMD intelligence failure becomes a formative scepticism event [8][12].

2008-2009

Financial crisis leads to renewed questioning of expert competence in economics and regulation [4][9].

2015

“Replication crisis” enters mainstream after Science publishes reproducibility project [2].
RAND launches Truth Decay project [4].

2016-2018

“Fake news” becomes political rallying cry; Facebook and Twitter hearings in Congress [16].
Multiple think-pieces label the situation an “epistemic crisis” [6][7].

2020-2022

COVID-19 accelerates debate over politicization of science; Pew registers sharp fall in trust in scientists among Republicans and, later, Democrats [5].
Substack newsletters (Silver, Harris, Singal, Khan) provide alternative venues for evaluating expert failure narratives [9][11][17].

2023-2024

Continued drop in trust in government hits new lows (Pew: 16 %) [3].
Nate Silver argues the “expert class is failing,” tying institutional mistakes to electoral outcomes [9].
Surveys show media credibility at or near record lows [14][19].

Public discourse and fault lines

Consensus

Nearly all sources agree that trust in traditional institutions is falling and that politicization correlates with this decline [1][3][4][5].

Contested Points

Cause vs. symptom: Is elite failure driving distrust, or is polarization causing elites to appear less trustworthy?
Remedy: Some propose re-emphasising methodological transparency and viewpoint diversity [7][17]; others focus on demand-side media literacy and algorithmic reforms [4][16].

Sources

Politicization Undermines Trust in Institutions, Even Among the Ideologically Aligned Public – ResearchSquare pre-print (peer-review pending)
Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science – Science (peer-reviewed journal article)
Public Trust in Government: 1958-2024 – Pew Research Center trend survey
Truth Decay: An Initial Exploration of the Diminishing Role of Facts and Analysis in American Public Life – RAND Corporation research report
Americans’ Trust in Scientists, Positive Views of Science Continue to Decline – Pew Research Center survey report
An Epistemic Crisis? – Arnold Kling (opinion blog post)
America’s Epistemological Crisis – Dan Williams (opinion essay)
Elite Failures and Populist Backlash – Dan Williams (opinion essay)
The Expert Class Is Failing, and So Is Biden’s Presidency – Nate Silver (opinion newsletter)
It’s The Epistemology, Stupid – Sam Khan (opinion newsletter)
The Reckoning – Sam Harris (opinion newsletter)
Why The Media Moves in Unison – Yascha Mounk (opinion newsletter)
75% of Psychology Claims Are False – Lee Jussim (opinion newsletter summarizing peer-reviewed work)
The Hard Truth: Americans Don’t Trust the News Media – Washington Post opinion piece (Jeff Bezos)
Elite Misinformation Is an Underrated Problem – Matthew Yglesias (opinion newsletter)
The Fake News About Fake News – Boston Review (magazine feature)
How To Know Who To Trust, Potomac Plane Crash Edition – Jesse Singal (opinion newsletter)
When The New York Times Lost Its Way – The Economist (magazine feature)
I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust – The Free Press (first-person essay)
Should Scientific Organizations Endorse Political Candidates? – Steve Stewart-Williams (opinion newsletter)

Sources

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?