Critical Thinking as Epistemic Infrastructure: From the Deficit Model to a Social Epistemology of Disinformation Resilience

The dominant approach to disinformation treats it as a problem of individual cognition: people lack critical thinking skills, fall for cognitive biases, or fail to evaluate sources properly. This paper argues that this framing is structurally limited. Drawing on social epistemology (Longino, Fricker, Medina), the cognitive science of reasoning (Mercier & Sperber, Trouche, Sander & Mercier), democratic theory (Anderson, Landemore), educational research on collaborative learning (Tedla & Chen, Xu et al.), empirical research on disinformation ecosystems (Bennett & Livingston, Benkler et al., Starbird), and the emerging practice of open-source intelligence (OSINT), we show that the reliability of critical thinking has always depended on institutional structures, not merely on individual capacity. Science does not produce reliable knowledge because individual scientists are brilliant reasoners; it does so because institutional structures (peer review, adversarial criticism, public standards, tempered equality) distribute the epistemic labour across communities. OSINT communities such as Bellingcat demonstrate this same principle outside the laboratory: their epistemic power derives not from individual genius but from distributed verification protocols, collaborative workflows, and institutional norms of transparency. The cognitive architecture of human reasoning itself is argumentative and inter-individual: when institutional conditions for argumentation collapse, individual training cannot fully compensate. We propose the concept of epistemic criticality, a threshold condition at which institutional structures generate transformative criticism that no individual member could produce alone, as the system-level property whose presence determines whether a community can resist disinformation. We argue that media literacy policy must shift from a deficit model of individual cognition to an infrastructure model of epistemic ecosystems, and that access to such infrastructure is a democratic imperative.