Galen on Fake News

Posted by Ken Parry

Galen (second century CE) On ‘Fake News’.

“It has indeed happened that some of my friends, hearing from someone else that such-and such a person had returned from travel abroad, have actually announced his arrival to us – and then after been refuted as liars. When I criticized such behaviour, they do not resolve to be surer of their ground next time; far from it. They actually get annoyed with me, saying that they are not responsible for the false information; they believed so-and-so’s account, and the error was his alone. They refuse to accept the blame for attaching themselves to every rash assent. If they had framed their statement as I do habitually, and said that so-and-so had told them such-and-such about such-and-such a person, they would not have been guilty of telling a lie. As things stood, their mistake in trusting the giver of that information led to them displaying the mendacity, not only of that person but simultaneously also of themselves – whereas it was perfectly possible for them to say that they had heard from someone that that person had arrived back from abroad, rather than themselves making a declaration on the matter. When, then, people do not refrain from rash assents to facts of this order, which refute them as liars a short time later, what must one think will happen to them in cases where the facts are non-evident, and are therefore more difficult to grasp?”

From: The Diagnosis and Treatment of the Affections and Errors Peculiar to Each Person’s Soul, trans. P. N. Singer, in Galen: Psychological Writings, ed. P. N. Singer (Cambridge University Press, 2013), 310.

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