The modern fact is in crisis. The very existence of something called an 'alternative fact' is enough to make one's head spin, but it raises a number of serious problems. What do we do when the people we are engaging with, politically, medically, or even socially, are unable or unwilling to accept our facts as facts? And how on earth did we get here?

Epistemic Corruption is an early-stage research program that focuses on breakdowns in knowledge production, dissemination, and utilization among knowledge-industry professionals and their audiences. The project focuses on how narratives about facts, fact production and epistemic authority are received, manipulated, or resisted by their various publics in science, medicine and information technology.

We aim to develop an account of epistemic corruption, and the structures of its claims and counterclaims: (a) accusations that knowledge has been manipulated for political, career or monetary gain, (b) processes identified by interested parties through which particular pieces of knowledge or knowledge processes are said to be losing or failing to gain authority in certain groups, and (c) accusations that knowledge is being deployed with corrupt intent. Because corruption is an actor’s category, we treat claims of corruption as claims in the first instance, in order to study the important dynamics of the interactions between the various interested parties and to better identify strategies for mediating attendant harms.

We will take a case-based approach that starts with a number of interdisciplinary lines, building on the research of a team of brilliant collaborators. Among the roughly dozen initial cases will be a study of pharmaceutical fact-making and trust in the context of Covid, a study of scepticism in 19th-century European sciences of life, a study of effects of big philanthropy on knowledge in global health, a study of corporate influence on obesity policy in China, and a study of challenges to indigenous knowledge systems in India. In addition to the detailed cases, we will build a publicly available database of a broad range of other distinct and informative cases of epistemic corruption. Through ongoing interaction, we and our collaborators plan to develop and improve our approaches, analyses, and models, and expose them to both internal and external criticism.