How to Disagree With Anti-Vaxxers

Resolving Our Differences

“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” — S.G. Tallentyre, The Friends of Voltaire

Photo by Tarik Haiga on Unsplash

We all know that in the age of misinformation, it’s hard to come by truthful claims about the world. This has even received philosophical analysis in the essay “On Bullshit” by Harry G. Frankfurt.

But it’s not an entirely new phenomenon.

When Johannes Gutenberg’s Printing Press took over Europe, the writings of Shakespeare, Milton, Cervantes, Descartes, Bacon, and others, became widely accessible.

Along with this distribution of knowledge, came an increase in propaganda, conspiracy theories, pornography, and alternative journalism that may have confused the public of the ‘truth’ of any given political event.

In the fifty years following the invention of Gutenberg’s Printing Press, some estimates suggest that the number of books printed rivaled that of the thousand years beforehand.

That is why many academics in the 17 century were beginning to become anxious. The French scholar Adrien Baillet, for example, wrote in 1685:

“We have reason to fear that the…