What happened on November 26, 2025 at the National Conference cannot be presented as just another act within democratic pluralism. There was no debate, no contrasting arguments, and no presentation of evidence. There was an explicit suspension of the criteria that allow for the evaluation of statements in public places.
deputy Carolina Piparo Enable event presented as “certificate“From statements that did not meet any methodological criterion, the legislative sphere – which should protect the minimum level of rationality necessary for deliberation – served as a platform for legitimizing speeches that could not be evaluated as knowledge.
The central staging was the supposed demonstration of Post-vaccine magnetization. Metal objects stuck to a volunteer’s skin were presented as evidence of a physiological effect. There was no control of variables, there was no experimental design, and no hypothesis was formulated that would allow setting conditions for refutation.
Authoritarians don’t like this
The practice of professional and critical journalism is an essential pillar of democracy. This is why it bothers those who believe they are the bearers of the truth.
The statement as stated is irrefutable. A statement that cannot be refuted cannot be considered part of general knowledge. What was offered was not an experience, but an appearance. This appearance was treated as evidence inside the building, where evidence must be the minimum requirement for entry.
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While I was following the developments of the event, what worried me was not the falsity of the statements. This can be corrected. What worries me is the deterioration of the standards that allow for its correction. To describe this decline, Miranda Fricker’s concept of epistemic injustice is useful.
Fricker asserts that epistemic injustice exists when a person—or a community—is harmed in their ability to know. This harm can emerge when certain topics are excluded from knowledge-sharing practices, but also when the social conditions that allow information to be transmitted and evaluated are distorted.
Of course, what was damaged here was not the individual, but rather the common standards that allow us to determine what can be considered evidence. The anti-vaccine demonstration spread misinformation. Yes. But not only that, it directly interferes with the cognitive infrastructure we rely on to orient ourselves on health and public policy issues. A scenario has been enabled in which credibility, rather than being determined by cognitive merit, is determined by ideological affinity. Unsupported certificates have received institutional verification.
The scientific word was presented as suspect. This displacement, far from being accidental, was the result of abandoning the epistemological norms that should regulate discourse within the democratic institution. Fricker warns that when credibility is distributed without rational standards, cognitive contamination occurs. Be careful here: the word pollution is not a metaphor. This means that the mechanisms through which citizens decide what information is reliable have changed. When these mechanisms are changed, the collective ability to think about public issues deteriorates. What should be a process of distinguishing between evidence and appearance becomes a space in which both blend indiscriminately. This combination is the real harm.
“When the criteria that allow us to distinguish between testimonial evidence disappear, collective decisions are subject to arbitrariness and manipulation.”
At this point an inevitable paradox emerges. We have recently heard that “social justice” must end. Now it seems that the new goal will be to promote another kind of justice: cognitive justice. If material equality was first called into question, now Cognitive equality. This epistemic equality is more fundamental: it consists in the possibility that everyone, without exception, can participate in a public space where data are evaluated according to common criteria.
When Congress abandons these standards, in addition to making debate fraught, it makes the very structure that makes it possible to talk about truth and error unstable.
What happened made clear that the damage could not be repaired in this way. Because what has deteriorated is the cognitive framework that allows for analysis of data, conflicting arguments, and supporting policies supported by evidence. Democracy depends on this framework because it decides which statements can be evaluated and which statements can be relegated to the level of opinion. A country suffering from a resurgence of measles, a disease that has been eradicated thanks to vaccines.
“What happened showed that the institution can undermine the public rationality it should protect.”
When the criteria that allow us to distinguish between evidence and testimony disappear, public dialogue loses coherence and collective decisions are subject to arbitrariness and abuse. deal with. This is the crux of the problem.
It is not a matter of discussing whether a statement is true or false, but of maintaining the procedure that allows it to be determined. By legitimizing unfounded, verifiable rhetoric, Congress directly interfered with this action. What happened showed that any institution is capable of weakening the public rationality that it should protect. The problem is health and political, but above all cognitive.
What remains at risk is the possibility of distinguishing between justified allegations and unfounded allegations. When this distinction is weakened, the collective ability to guide ourselves rationally becomes fragile. A society with fragile epistemological standards is always available for any story that succeeds in filling the void.