Part I: Foundations of Information and Epistemology

Introduction

Every discipline has a bedrock — a set of foundational concepts that give meaning and structure to everything built upon them. For a textbook about misinformation, media literacy, and critical thinking, that bedrock is epistemology: the philosophical study of knowledge itself. Before we can meaningfully discuss what makes a news story false, what makes a conspiracy theory seductive, or what makes a fact-checking methodology effective, we need to grapple with harder and more fundamental questions. What does it mean to know something? How do human minds acquire, evaluate, and retain beliefs? Why do intelligent, educated people believe things that are demonstrably untrue? And why has the problem of misinformation, though ancient, become so acute in our present moment?

Part I answers these foundational questions. Across five chapters, it builds the intellectual scaffolding that will support everything else in this book. Students who work carefully through this section will emerge with a vocabulary for discussing truth and belief, a historical perspective on misinformation that deflates the myth of a uniquely modern crisis, a detailed understanding of the cognitive architecture that makes human minds simultaneously remarkable and vulnerable, and a grasp of the social forces that shape what groups believe and why.

How This Part Fits the Larger Story

This textbook moves from foundations to applications in a deliberate sequence. Part I establishes what knowledge is and how humans process information. Part II examines the contemporary infrastructure through which information flows. Parts III and IV analyze specific forms of misinformation and the methods used to detect them. Parts V through VII equip students with practical skills and describe institutional responses. Parts VIII and IX push into emerging territory and synthesis.

If you skip Part I and jump to the more immediately engaging material — say, a chapter on deepfakes or election interference — you will lack the conceptual tools to evaluate what you read. You might understand that deepfakes are dangerous without understanding why human visual cognition is so susceptible to them. You might learn to identify logical fallacies without understanding why fallacies are persuasive. The foundations matter not because they are abstract, but because they make the concrete material comprehensible.

Skills and Knowledge Students Will Gain

By the end of Part I, students will be able to:

  • Distinguish between different theories of truth (correspondence, coherence, pragmatic, consensus) and explain their implications for evaluating claims
  • Describe the major epistemological challenges posed by the digital information environment
  • Trace the history of organized misinformation campaigns from antiquity through the twentieth century, identifying recurring patterns
  • Explain the dual-process model of cognition and its implications for belief formation and susceptibility to misinformation
  • Identify and explain at least fifteen cognitive biases that influence how people evaluate information
  • Apply the concepts of social proof, identity-protective cognition, and moral foundations theory to explain why groups hold divergent factual beliefs
  • Articulate why belief correction is difficult and what research suggests about effective versus counterproductive correction strategies

Chapter Previews

Chapter 1: What Is Truth? Epistemology for the Information Age opens the textbook by confronting a question that students may think they can answer quickly — and discovering they cannot. The chapter surveys major philosophical accounts of truth and knowledge, from classical correspondence theory to pragmatist and constructivist alternatives. It examines the concept of epistemic justification: what makes a belief not just true but warranted? And it applies these abstract concepts to the practical question of how we evaluate claims we encounter online. The chapter introduces the notion of epistemic humility — the recognition that our own knowledge is always incomplete and potentially wrong — as both an intellectual virtue and a practical defense against manipulation. It closes by framing the textbook's central challenge: in a world of abundant, low-cost, high-speed information, the old scarcity-based model of epistemic authority has broken down, and we need new tools for navigating the resulting complexity.

Chapter 2: A History of Misinformation provides the historical perspective that prevents us from falling into the trap of believing that misinformation is uniquely modern. The chapter surveys organized misinformation campaigns from ancient Rome — where Octavian waged a remarkable social media-like campaign of slogans and slanders against Mark Antony — through the printing press era, yellow journalism, wartime propaganda, Cold War disinformation operations, and the tabloid revolution of the late twentieth century. Each historical case illuminates recurring structural features: misinformation tends to flourish during periods of social disruption and technological change; it exploits pre-existing anxieties and group loyalties; it is often produced by actors with identifiable political or economic interests; and it tends to be more emotionally resonant than corrections. Understanding this history does not diminish the novelty of today's digital misinformation ecosystem, but it equips students to recognize familiar patterns within it.

Chapter 3: How the Mind Processes Information provides the cognitive science foundation for the rest of the book. Drawing on decades of research in psychology and cognitive neuroscience, this chapter explains the dual-process model of thinking — the distinction between fast, automatic, heuristic-driven System 1 processes and slower, deliberate, analytical System 2 processes. It explores how the brain manages information overload through selective attention, pattern recognition, and predictive processing. Crucially, it explains why these cognitive efficiencies, which are adaptive in most environments, create systematic vulnerabilities in information-rich digital environments. The chapter explains fluency effects (we trust things that are easy to process), mere exposure effects (familiarity breeds credibility), and the role of emotion in overriding analytical evaluation.

Chapter 4: Cognitive Biases and Their Role in Misinformation extends the cognitive analysis into a systematic survey of the biases most relevant to misinformation susceptibility. Students will encounter confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, the Dunning-Kruger effect, anchoring, availability heuristics, illusory truth effects, and more than a dozen other documented cognitive tendencies. For each bias, the chapter explains the underlying mechanism, illustrates it with real-world examples from the misinformation landscape, and reviews what research suggests about whether and how the bias can be mitigated. The chapter takes care to avoid two common errors: understating the power of biases (not everyone is equally susceptible, and analytical thinking genuinely helps) and overstating it (the existence of biases does not mean that truth is unknowable or that all beliefs are equally valid).

Chapter 5: Social Psychology of Belief shifts the unit of analysis from the individual mind to the social group. Humans are deeply social creatures, and beliefs are not formed in isolation. This chapter examines how social identity, group belonging, and interpersonal trust shape what people believe. It introduces the concept of identity-protective cognition: the finding that when factual beliefs become identity markers, people evaluate evidence not to reach accurate conclusions but to protect their group identity. It applies Jonathan Haidt's moral foundations theory to explain why politically polarized groups often interpret the same facts so differently. It explores the dynamics of echo chambers and social cascades, and it examines the empirical literature on belief correction — including the controversial "backfire effect" and more recent research suggesting that corrections are often more effective than previously believed, under the right conditions.

Part I is intellectually demanding because it requires students to think carefully about the nature of their own thinking — a recursive exercise that can be disorienting. Embrace that disorientation. The feeling of uncertainty about things you thought you understood is not a sign of confusion; it is a sign that genuine learning is occurring. The goal of these five chapters is not to leave you paralyzed by skepticism but to equip you with a more sophisticated and resilient relationship to knowledge — one that serves you well in everything that follows.

Chapters in This Part