In political epistemology, there is a lot of criticism of the metaphor of the “marketplace of ideas,” the thought that people somehow “trade” in arguments or ideas and thereby arrive at true beliefs.* The longer you think about it, the less sense it makes. Ideas come in networks, not as separately tradeable items; “trading” suggests that you don’t have any deep connection to the ideas in question, and if people follow the profit motive, or look for entertainment, rather than search for truth, why expect that somehow, truth would mysteriously result from the process?
But what, then, would be a better metaphor for thinking about processes in which people change their minds, coming to accept new views or arguments? Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about the metaphor of moving – in the sense of changing residence, relocating. The verb functions most beautifully (of the languages I know) in Dutch, where verhuizen means something like “re-housing;” French is similar with déménager, where ménage is the household. In my native German, you us the same word, umziehen, as for changing clothes – strange enough once you start thinking about it…
The reason I like this metaphor is that it implies that systems of ideas, like buildings, remain in place (more or less, of course), while people move. And yet, you bring all your own stuff (including the un-unpacked boxes from the last move) with you and try to make the new building your home. You meet new people, make new connections. But it takes time until you really settle in and it all feels natural. Sometimes you realize, much later on, that there are features of the new house or the new neighborhood that you had not realize existed. And crucially, a lot depends on the new neighbors and how they welcome you.
All of that seems to fit quite well with what it means to adopt a new world view and making oneself feel at home in it. But there is also an element that doesn’t fit so well. Moving typically has to happen in one go – the movers pack up things in one place on Thursday and dump all the boxes in the new place on Friday. Changing views, in contrast, is often a long process, with all kinds of intermediate steps, hesitations, leaps forward, maybe also backward. A lot, I guess, depends on whether in the early stages there is a sense “yes, this could become my new home – I might not be there yet, but I can see myself belonging there, one day.”
Why think about these metaphors? In the last weeks, I’ve been conducting interviews for a project, and I tried to reach out to some people whose wider worldviews are, I guess, rather different from mine – different jobs, different life situations, different politics. While I interviewed them on a specific topic and we had good conversations on that, I could not help thinking about what it would take for them to move closer to my worldview on certain controversial issues, or for me to theirs. The idea that you’d somehow “trade ideas” and that’s it, deal done, is completely ridiculous in such contexts. Ideas are tied up with social relations, lifestyles, cultural habits, even the very spaces in which one moves. Of course, nothing is deterministic here, and yet, the purely cognitive approach suggested by the metaphor of a “marketplace of ideas” seems very, very wrong.
If, like me, you think that democracy has something to do with how citizens talk to each other, then it also matters how we think of these conversations. Maybe acknowledging that changing one’s views on fundamental issues is more like moving house than like trading things is a better way of acknowledging how emotionally taxing and arduous that can be. I’m not quite sure how much of a difference that makes in practice, but maybe it’s a better way of acknowledging that we expect something quite demanding when we expect someone to change their views. Maybe it could keep us back when we are tempted (really or metaphorically) to yell an impatient “Why don’t you buy that??” This, after all, would not even be a good move in a real market!
* My own take is in chapter 5 of this book, but there are also many other accounts, e.g. here.
{ 18 comments }
steven t johnson 01.07.26 at 5:08 pm
A marketplace of ideas? Don’t know if that’s a good metaphor, but a marketplace of excuses? That’s provocatively realistic.
Alex SL 01.07.26 at 8:58 pm
Although I agree that the metaphor of the marketplace of ideas does not make sense, I think the premise in the first paragraph is wrong. Liberal-minded people didn’t call it the marketplace of ideas because they thought of trade, they did because they thought of competition, a term that seems to be completely absent from the post:
Like good products and services allegedly (not really) win out over bad products and services in a free, unregulated market, so good ideas and correct beliefs are thought to win out over bad ideas and false beliefs in free, unregulated discourse. Like the market participant in the theoretical models of the economists has perfect access to all possible information about all possible products (and the education to judge that information, be it vitamin supplements, a computer, or the contract terms of a life insurance), complete freedom to switch suppliers at any second, and no emotional attachment to any product, the participant in the marketplace of ideas also has perfect access to all possible information about all possible claims and ideas (and the education to judge that information, be it trade policy, the existence of gods, or vaccine safety), complete freedom to switch beliefs at any second without alienating their spouse or friends, and no emotional attachment to any belief. That is all completely untrue, of course, but competition, not trade, is, to my understanding, the analogy.
Accordingly, a replacement analogy would also have to focus on which ideas win out and why in free, unregulated discourse instead of on how a single person changes their mind, and it would have to capture how beliefs win out because they are variously (a) soothing to people’s egos or identities, (b) useful for maintaining in-group coherence and loyalty, and/or (c) useful and appealing to the billionaires who control nearly all sources of news that people have to rely on and nearly all algorithm-driven social media networks. And I am not sure that works without having three analogies, unless one wanted to focus on only one of these three reasons.
Tm 01.08.26 at 8:10 am
This is an interesting thought. My impression is that most people don’t have coherent world views as suggested by the building metaphor. Intellectuals/academics who are used to think in such terms are not representative of the general public and, I suspect, have a hard time trying to understand how most people arrive at their views. That doesn’t mean that intellectuals always have coherent, reflected world views. Some do but certainly not all…
D. S. Battistoli 01.08.26 at 9:28 am
I quite love your relocation analogy; déménagement has always struck my overly etymological mind as merely the first half of verhuizing, while it says something rather specific about my age that the Britishism moving house is a phrase that will always evoke for me a particular scene in Michael Winterbottom’s The Claim.
The scale of the change, of course, is important (here and throughout the note, I intentionally avoid any citations I encountered in my too-brief skim of Citizen Knowledge). Move in the same building, and it’s a weekend’s inconvenience. Move across town, and you lose a fortnight. Move to another country, and every relationship you have with everyone you’ve ever known changes.
You bring up the difference between coherentist and correspondentist theories in a footnote that gestures toward the contextualist turn in the epistemology of science (because I have not read the article you cite in that footnote, I apologize again for the significant likelihood that I am repeating what you already know). Kuhn and others who focus on paradigmatic (in the metaphor’s terms, long-distance) change tend to highlight correspondentist tests (though Wray’s “epistemic niche” and Marcum’s Kuhnian “lexicon change” both relate to the “local,” coherentist level of change).
I don’t think AGM theory will work for you because of the purity of its coherentist approach, notwithstanding the fact that it seems to address itself particularly well to the scale of social change in which you are interested; it is wholly truth-agnostic, but perhaps a good cross-check for truth-dependent approaches.
I believe Henry has written a few years back on the utility of Lakatos’ concept of research programs and positive heuristics in pushing back against untrue, ideosyncratic belief held by the highly intelligent.
Even explicitly within Thagard’s explanatory coherence model, we see a range. Laudan’s research traditions are more flexible than Kuhn and more static than AGM; if you want to be scale-agnostic, his work might be a place to start. But do you? It seems, at least from a distance, to matter to you how far people move. You seem to care deeply about what’s at stake in mind-changing.
Vosniadu and Michelene Chi, starting from perhaps a roughly Thagardian beginning, both take highly correspondentist approaches, in part because of their research focus: how teachers help children construct or adopt their initial paradigms. This is closely related to your interest in the relationship between experts and publics, though also highly laden, since Vosniadu and Chi are explicitly interested in the verhuizers as an largely uninformed and unformed set of people whom we know a priori should change more than should their interlocutors.
Apologizing a third (and final) time, now for the length of this note, given your wonderful interest in feminist epistemologies, I might also suggest a look into some of the more serious Abrahamic philosophy of conversion, of which I myself am sadly underinformed. It is my understanding that Christians, who often disagree with one another about the formal instance of conversion, or paradigm shift, would likely have most to offer with regard to pre-shift “niche,” “lexicon,” “subsidiary-model,” or “positive heuristic” change. Islamic philosophy, again according to my understanding, tends to converge around a concrete formal definition of conversion that is highly independent of knowlege transfer and practically tends to precede it. As a result, it has a robust literature on the post-shift diachronic development of moral responsibility in a convert, after acceptance of a true paradigm.
(Though a lot of comparisons of religious epistemology and feminist epistemology can smart of the gotcha, for instance here, that is not my intent. It is my sense that significant strands of feminist epistemology, including the most starkly individualist, have for the last several decades had a particular historical focus on the removal of certain propositions from the realm of interrogation (was an event harassment; who is a woman; etc.); monotheistic philosophers have a convergent interest, if on a very different plane. And with truth being a potentially sticky idea embedded in the neighborhoods through which your idea-subscribers move, looking at the philosophy of conversion, which has several centuries of debate on which to draw, could be fruitful).
notGoodenough 01.08.26 at 10:33 am
For what it’s worth, I would say the power of a metaphor lies in the ability to describe a concept in terms of another, more familiar one to reduce cognitive load, frame perception, and draw on emotionally resonant experiences using vivid imagery. However, it is important not to mistake the map for the place – and it is easy for internal logic to override empirical accuracy, to oversimplify leading to distorted understanding, or to create the illusion of understanding without providing a precise, operational relation to the topic. Or, to put it simply if somewhat recursively, a metaphor is only useful to the extent it is useful!
As I understand it, the notion of “the marketplace of ideas” essentially was born of the school of liberal thought that framed free speech as foundational to ensuring “truth” emerges from discussion within an ideologically neutral system as opposed to being defined by an authority in advance; essentially, coming as it does from a rejection of “top-down” imposition of dogma (in the tradition of Holmes, Mills, and Milton). Within this narrow context, it can have value in making the point that it can be epistemically dangerous to privilege one speaker over another. Of course, as many critics (of which I am one) point out, markets do not guarantee truth, only popularity (nor do they account of distortions coming from power asymmetry, irrationality, or include any self-correction or mechanism for preventing resurrection of demonstrably failed ideas). So, I can certainly see value in the “moving house” metaphor with respect to framing the difficulty of changing positions (and in the “magnet metaphor” which I seem to recall being raised a few years ago). But it seems to me that none of this really gets us closer to resolving the tensions that underlie the questions of how to develop and ensure adoption of epistemically sound models of reality within a complex society.
While I am not unsympathetic to the concerns which have been raised repeatedly regarding the dangers of dogma and groupthink (which I believe have been foundational to the reflexive desire by some to open debate to all and maximise freedom of speech) it seems to me that there was little consideration given to the practicalities within the reality of society. This has been especially frustrating, as it seems to me that there was undue concern regarding “are (this collection of half-a-dozen) protesting undergraduates going too far?!”and not enough consideration regarding “are these half-a-dozen well-funded think-tanks with unparalleled access to the politico-media sphere of influence going too far?!” (YMMV on to what degree various people were sincere in this – I would say at least some, but not all), with the net result being what we have now.
The problem then, from my perspective, is not that I don’t appreciate how challenging it is to “move house” (I have spent quite a lot of time and energy trying to discuss various positions with people on Crooked Timber alone!), but rather that we live in a society where – metaphorically speaking – all the properties are already owned by about two or three mega-corps, and very few of us will have any say in what the rent is…
David Mitchell 01.08.26 at 3:10 pm
What about using as metaphors either the contest field of ideas or the battlefield of ideas. Often when folks are discussing the conflict of ideas, it is in a context where only one or a few ideas prevail and the other ideas are locked out. In cases with authoritarian or totalitarian environments other ideas are actively suppressed.
Trader Joe 01.09.26 at 11:43 am
I agree with Alex @2 that the “marketplace of ideas” concept has to do with the competition rather than the trade. Accordingly it is a metaphor for how ideas generate and then take hold on a more or less macro basis, which is to say across a broad group of interested persons whether that be in a society as a whole (i.e. climate change) or a specific discipline (say philosophy, economics etc.).
On an individual (or micro) basis, I’m not sure the concept of a metaphor really applies. I myself and you yourself may have ways of thinking about things and evolving our views that are completely different – I may leap to conclusions and shift my position as quickly as moving from one house to another while a different person might move slower than an iceberg as their personal experiences, evaluation of data and willingness to be persuaded by them (and other factors) slowly guides them to a new spot.
While both ‘moves’ and any others can be described using words and metaphors, none are automatically germaine to describing a change of view at large.
Thanks for a thoughtful post.
MisterMr 01.09.26 at 1:18 pm
The stock exchange of ideas: the more people buy in in an idea, the more it gains acceptance value, although sometimes (rarely) some ideas are deflated because their fundamentals (reality) are bad.
That said, I think that “marketplace” here means just “a place where you can see and chose from a lot of different stuff”, not that one actually buys and sells ideas.
J, not that one 01.09.26 at 2:48 pm
To add to Alex @ 1, the idea of the marketplace, to my mind, implies that theories are sometimes adopted for extrinsic reasons like path dependence or emotional appeals (advertising) that are external to the value of the theory in terms of logic, evidence, coherence, and so on. Though people who defend the marketplace as a metaphor often seem to have in mind a process that’s guaranteed to always produce the best theories available now, and to always permit progress to better ideas reasonably quickly after the better theory becomes available. Which a more sophisticated understanding of markets would show to be incorrect.
Thinking of ideas as something held by individual people rather than an amorphous social entity like a market (not sure whether a market is “social” in the usual sense though), as I think the OP suggests, is interesting.
J, not that one 01.09.26 at 2:59 pm
Sorry for the double post but reading the end of the OP a second time, it occurs to me that there’s a meta-worldview implied (I think) in which discussion is felt to be somewhat pointless if it doesn’t involve a fullscale conversion to my point of view. I’ve experienced this when people jump from “it’s great that we agree on this point now” to “I guess you only have irrational reasons for not agreeing with me on the meaning of life now.” The world needs people who can promote their own worldviews but it also needs a space for discussion where people aren’t constantly under threat of demands that they tear their mindsets down and start over again.
engels 01.09.26 at 3:27 pm
“Amazon Marketplace of ideas” might good metaphor for our public sphere today.
Lisa H 01.09.26 at 9:27 pm
Thanks for all the comments; a few points.
@Alex SL and Trader Joe: it’s true that in some of the historical sources the element of competition is strong, but then that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t also include the idea of trade (winning out in a competitive market, would be the point). Though in some sources, it seems to be more the idea of a sports tournament, not of trading. I agree that when people have different motives, one needs different metaphors, and it’s precisely one of the problems that the „marketplace of ideas“ gets thrown around without distinguishing contexts and motives.
If one wants to hold that the marketplace idea is all about competition, but not trading, then my question back to you would be: but what kind of picture is this, of competition that does not, in the end, also involve some processes of trading?
@Tm, I didn’t mean to say that sets of ideas are very coherent (and certainly not those of academics are more coherent than those of others). The buildings I was imagining would be not shiny modernist skyscrapers, but more like historical farm houses timmered together from all kind of material, with different historical layers coming together and not always fitting well to each other…
@D.S. Battistoli, I think I agree that distance matters. And the temporal dimension is also very interesting. I take Kuhn’s point to be (very roughly) that whole systems of thought only change very slowly (with certain generations retiring etc.). I’m not sure I would want to hold that the way it happens in the case of religious beliefs is the same as in other cases; I think of religion as capturing dimensions that one might not even want to call „belief“ and that makes me hesitate to draw a direct analogy. But I need to think more about it.
@notGoodenough: not sure I fully get the whole argument, but I think the point about mega-corps is well taken. That’s something that the „marketplace“ metaphor can also capture, by the way, by criticizing the absence of market competition when there is an oligopolistic structure.
@David Mitchell: battle field is what Milton uses, and there has been quite a bit of discussion about the “war” metaphor in argumentation theory. A standard criticism is that it is emphasizing too much the agressive and non-cooperative side of idea generation. In some environments, sadly, that’s not inappropriate.
@J, not that one: I definitely don’t think that discussions that don’t end up in fullscale conversion are pointless! My question wasn’t what kind of discussions are useful, but more how to think about the process when people do in fact end up changing their mind. And by acknowledging that the latter is a much more demanding process than is sometimes assumed, we might precisely opening up space for conversations in which people might just make one first step, or no step at all at the moment, but maybe in the future, instead of expecting (as the „please buy my argument“ attitude seems to) that this needs to be the immediate outcome.
Alex SL 01.10.26 at 5:09 am
Lisa H,
Not sure I understand the question, sorry. Analogies can be complex, but this is about what aspect of an analogy we think of to make an analogy. For example, if we are saying School of Hard Knocks or the University of Google (derogatory), we think of the acquiring new information aspect of schools or universities, not about the sitting in rows in a classroom aspect or the having a school nurse aspect. In this case, to my understanding at least, the people using the marketplace analogy think of inferior products being discontinued because too few people buy them and superior products proliferating and being copied and built upon because many people buy them.
I genuinely do not understand where trading comes in at all, because if the marketplace of ideas worked (it doesn’t, really, but let’s assume it does), and I read a book or listen to a podcast and think, you know what, the author makes a great argument and presents good evidence, I am now convinced that gods exist, or that the earth is flat, or that Canada doesn’t actually exist, what have we exchanged in that trade? What have I traded back to the author in exchange for the allegedly improved beliefs they have imparted on me? They likely do not even know I exist. Therefore, trade is not the salient part of the market analogy, just like schools being buildings is not the salient part of the school of hard knocks analogy.
(I may have bought the book, but that is not an idea flowing back to the author, and this is the marketplace of ideas, after all.)
engels 01.10.26 at 3:31 pm
I think the post conflates ideas and world views. The “marketplace” metaphor wasn’t really about the latter or, as others have said, trade per se (for one thing, because it overlooks payment/consideration on the part of buyers). It evokes a space where the public chooses between a diversity of offerings and the best wins out.
I used to dislike its smug proto-Friedmanism but over time have come to regard the metaphor as unintentionally revealing of the ways in which capitalism’s intellectual pathologies mirror its economic pathologies (monopoly, monoculture, preference manipulation…)
(Btw “buying” = “accepting a claim” is common, idiomatic English in US at least.)
John Q 01.12.26 at 4:44 am
There is also, a quite literal marketplace for ideas produced by thinktanks for their sponsors. As I said in Zombie Economics with respect to trickle-down economics
“an idea so appealing to people who can afford to reward its promulgators is unlikely to be killed by mere evidence of its falsehood.”
engels 01.12.26 at 8:21 pm
I suppose if one wanted to defend the trading aspect it would have to be loosely, and optimistically: in the public sphere we’re all buyers and sellers of ideas, albeit not always in the same transaction.
Wendy Russo 01.14.26 at 1:22 pm
This reminds me of how computer vision papers (one of my niche interests) talks about the different and varied edges, lines, textures and other descriptors that can be extracted from images using various methods. Papers i have read use the term “Feature Space” to describe a space where all possible features exist. The choice of descriptor matters and different descriptors will create different features and feature spaces. Similar features will be near each other, and different ones will be further apart. Therefore any operation that consists of searching for a feature is explained metaphorically trough the feature space, you can navigate it, explore it, reduce it, stretch it, reduce it, visualize it …
I guess the idea space (?) can be the big cube where all ideas exist, and what descriptors you use will define what and how ideas are connected, which ones are closer to your current ideas, which ones are within the “acceptable” range of ideas and which ones best match your research criteria, assuming you have one.
If someone wanted to move me to their worldview, they would have to either introduce new descriptors, remove or update existing ones, to show me a separate idea space where their world view (idea) matches my search criteria better than my current one. This re-framing of descriptors is necessary, because i am not willing to change my searching criteria for ideas, i know what i want, I’m just not sure where it is.
I think the idea of everyone having not only separate ideas but a separate idea space , created by different idea descriptors, informing what ideas they will believe, or consider, is at least an interesting one.
Fell free to tell me if this comment is an incoherent mess, i am thinking through this metaphor as i write it and english is my second language.
Nora 01.17.26 at 9:07 pm
I just so happened to have written a little polemic on the subject last year.
https://nicopap.ch/blogs/perso/the-workshop-of-ideas/
The rest of the comments are right to point out the competition aspect of the idea. That’s what it is about.
If there is a “marketplace of ideas” who are the supposed purchasers and sellers, and what is the currency being traded? What does it mean for an idea to win or to lose?
Maybe I’m turning this into a critic of Dawkin’s “meme”. But who is competing in this marketplace? It’s the ideas that are competing to win. Not people. The agency is moved to the ideas, and the people are passive recipients of the ideas that managed to win, we are just the ship on which ideas sail.
To make a proposal: When in a conversation with someone, your ideas and their ideas evolve, it’s not really an exchange, but the creation of new ideas. A synthesis of sort, as if you were creating something new. So what about “workshop of ideas”? Ideas are our tools, and discursive debate is our workshop. We partake in it, not as passive consumers, but as toolsmiths.
To bounce of @Wendy Russo’s comment: This is the human conditions. I think that’s what LH means when she says she’s talked to people she can’t picture “switching side”; or exposed herself to ideas she can’t picture adopting. Individual human psyches aren’t compatible by nature. “Ideas” as entities with a consistent identity can’t move from one brain to another without changing fundamentally to accommodate the new environment. To use the commerce metaphor: don’t try to plug Japanese appliance in your British home.
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