The Challenge of Steve Fuller’s Social Epistemology 

Reviewed by Dr Matiur Rahman
In an age when Brexit, Donald Trump’s re-election, COVID-19 misinformation and the rise of artificial intelligence have all been blamed for eroding public trust in facts, it has become fashionable to diagnose our times as suffering from an “epistemic crisis,” a collective abandonment of reason in favour of emotion. Francis Remedios’s new book refuses this easy diagnosis. Instead, it offers a dense but rewarding tour through the thought of the British sociologist and philosopher Steve Fuller, who has spent nearly four decades arguing that what we call "post-truth" is not a symptom of irrationality at all, but a predictable outcome of who gets to control the rules by which knowledge is legitimised.
 
Remedios, a Canada-based scholar who has now written three books tracking Fuller's intellectual career, structures this slim monograph as both an introduction and a defence. The book opens by cataloguing four competing ways scholars have tried to explain the post-truth phenomenon: as an epistemic crisis in which feeling has displaced fact; as a legitimation crisis in the cognitive authority of science; as a consequence of the internet and social media democratising who counts as a knower; and, most originally, as a consequence of artificial intelligence redrawing the very boundaries of what it means to know something. Fuller, Remedios argues, is unusual in taking the second, third and fourth explanations seriously, while dismissing the first as intellectually lazy nostalgia for a golden age of expert consensus that, on close inspection, never quite existed.
The heart of the book lies in its account of Fuller’s central metaphor: knowledge production as a contest between what the Italian sociologist Vilfredo Pareto called Lions and Foxes. Lions are the entrenched establishment, be they scientific academies, universities or mainstream newspapers, who hold cognitive authority and defend it. Foxes are outsiders, dissenters and challengers who use whatever rhetorical and institutional means are available to unseat the Lions and seize authority for themselves. Crucially, Fuller insists on a “symmetry principle”: the analyst should not presume in advance that the Lions are right and the Foxes are wrong, or vice versa. Brexit voters, climate sceptics and intelligent-design theorists are, in this framework, simply Foxes attempting to prise open a closed epistemic game. Once they win, as Brexit’s champions and Trump did, they become the new Lions, defending their own claims against fresh challengers.
Readers in Bangladesh and South Asia more broadly will find much here that resonates uncomfortably. The book's chapters on the university’s declining authority, on the crisis of expertise triggered by economists' failures during the 2008 financial meltdown, and on how social media has fractured the “broadcast model” through which newspapers and television once manufactured shared consensus, describe dynamics that are hardly confined to the West. In societies where public trust in institutions, be they election commissions, central banks or public health authorities, is already fragile, Fuller’s insistence that authority is manufactured and political rather than earned through truth-telling is a provocative lens through which to examine one’s own newsrooms, universities and regulatory bodies.
That said, this is not an easy or a neutral book, and readers should approach it with that caveat firmly in mind. Fuller himself writes the foreword, and his fingerprints are visible throughout; Remedios’s tone is consistently sympathetic, at times admiring, rather than critical. Fuller's well-known defence of intelligent design as an “epistemically fungible” alternative to Darwinian evolution, discussed at length in the concluding chapter, will strike many working scientists as its own kind of post-truth manoeuvre rather than a genuine corrective to scientific overreach. Remedios does note that critics have accused Fuller of a right-wing bias, of aligning implicitly with Brexit and Trump by according their claims the same epistemic standing as those of mainstream science, but the rebuttals offered on Fuller's behalf, that neutrality is itself a virtue and that yesterday's Foxes become tomorrow’s Lions regardless of ideology, feel more asserted than demonstrated. A reader hoping for a robust, independent adjudication between Fuller’s framework and its critics will instead find an extended act of exposition and advocacy.
Published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2026, this 152-page volume features a foreword by renowned sociologist Steve Fuller. The foreword provides an authoritative introduction, placing the book’s themes and contributions within broader contemporary scholarly debates.
The reviewer is a researcher and development professional