| s-1
| Epistemic pollution |
| s-2
| Agents can rationally choose between experts only if the criteria that distinguish genuine experts from charlatans are common sense or widely known: |
| s-3
| if agents are to satisfy the epistemic conditions on responsibility, they must know what kinds of knowledge they must utilize to guide their selection of sources (on pain of infinite regress). |
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| In fact, many, if not all, the markers of expertise identified by philosophers enjoy widespread recognition. |
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| The fact that these criteria are widely known, however, offers an opportunity to those who would use them for deception, witting or unwitting. |
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| Since expertise must be assessed through indirect markers, to mimic the markers of expertise is to mimic expertise [17]. |
| s-7
| We live in an epistemic environment that is heavily and deliberately polluted by agents who use mimicry and other methods as a means of inflating their pretense to expertise. |
| s-8
| This fact, together with the fact that such deception is widely known to occur, reduces ordinary people’s trust in expert authority and diminishes their capacity to distinguish reliable from unreliable sources. |
| s-9
| For instance, those with an interest in deceiving the general public may set up parallel institutions that ostensibly guarantee expertise, taking advantage of the ways in which these parallel institutions mimic legitimate institutions to ensure that people are taken in. |
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| There are some egregious examples of this practice in the field of health care. |
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| For example, a small number of doctors set up the American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds) to advocate socially conservative viewpoints related to child health care. |
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| Such an organization is surely permissible, but it has had the unfortunate (and likely intended) effect of muddying debates in the public forum by misleading people into thinking that the college speaks for the pediatric profession at large. |
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| Thus, when ACPeds issued a statement condemning gender reassignment surgery in 2016 [21], many people mistook the organization’s political beliefs for the consensus view among United States pediatricians — although the peak body for pediatric workers, the American Academy of Pediatrics, has a much more positive view of gender dysphoria [22]. |
| s-14
| Insofar as the larger organization, with a broader membership base, can be expected to reflect a wider range of expert opinions and a higher degree of expertise, it is reasonable to give its views greater weight than those of the smaller organization. |
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| When ACPeds allows or encourages the impression that it speaks for the profession, it introduces an epistemic pollutant. |
| s-16
| A yet more egregious example of such pollution involved collaborative efforts by pharmaceutical companies and the publishing giant Elsevier to produce publications mimicking peer-reviewed journals in the interest of promoting the companies’ commercial products [23]. |
| s-17
| The companies hoped to leverage the prestige of Elsevier with these fake journals to endow their promotional “research” with an air of reliability. |
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| When the deceit was uncovered, however, the effect was just the opposite: |
| s-19
| the legitimacy of the published findings was not enhanced through their publication by Elsevier, but rather the legitimacy of Elsevier’s publications — and, by extension, all academic journals — was diminished through their dissemination of deceptive and commercially interested research. |
| s-20
| More recently, institutions of academic expertise have been subject to a large and growing outbreak of so-called predatory journals — journals that will publish almost anything for a fee. |
| s-21
| Once again, this phenomenon has the effect of making peer-reviewed journals appear less legitimate. |
| s-22
| At times, even those who work in academia may be unsure of a particular journal’s legitimacy, and there are genuine borderline cases. |
| s-23
| For example, the Frontiers contingent of journals appears legitimate — at least to me — despite the fact that authors are expected to pay a publication fee. 8 |
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| Yet some Frontiers journals appear to have engaged in bad behavior, whether for profit or for some other motive. |
| s-25
| Frontiers in Public Health controversially published articles linking vaccines and autism [24] and questioning the link between HIV and AIDS [25]. |
| s-26
| Whether due to this behavior or not, Jeffrey Beall decided to add the publisher to his influential (but now sadly unavailable) list of questionable journals [26]. |
| s-27
| The controversy surrounding Beall’s decision indicates how difficult it is to make such judgments — even for professionals. |
| s-28
| If academics with expertise in relevant fields have difficulty assessing whether particular journals or particular publishers are legitimate, one cannot reasonably expect ordinary people to make such judgments. |
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| If their confidence in scientific findings is lowered across the board as the result of such epistemic pollution, one can hardly blame them. |
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| Since conflicts of interest are a reason to discount expertise, it is incumbent on me to note that I have published in Frontiers journals on several occasions. |
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| Epistemic pollution may stem not only from counterfeit institutions of knowledge production but also from bad behavior by legitimate institutions. 9 |
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| For example, pollution may result from attempts to game the systems put in place to track expertise. |
| s-33
| Consider institutions with a credentialing function, such as universities, bar associations, or peer review bodies. |
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| These institutions do not exist solely to credential experts. |
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| They have other functions, and these functions may come into conflict, creating pressures to inflate credentials. |
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| For example, universities have a financial incentive to inflate the expertise of their academic staff, thereby increasing their rankings, bringing in grant money, and attracting students. |
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| Systems that assess expertise can be manipulated, and many cases of such manipulation exist — take the recent example by the University of Malaysia, which attempted to boost metrics by urging its faculty to cite one another [28]. |
| s-38
| For this reason, institutions may also be slow to investigate accusations of fraud, and they may try to keep their discoveries in-house to protect their reputations. |