Michael Lynch

Michael Lynch is Provost Professor of the Humanities and Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut. He is one of today’s leading philosophers examining the fragile relationship between truth, democracy, and technology.

Lynch’s scholarship is widely read not only in academia, but also by policymakers, journalists, technologists, and civic leaders grappling with misinformation, polarisation, and the social impact of AI. His latest book On Truth in Politics (2023) makes a timely and forceful case that while truth and politics often appear incompatible, democracy depends on truth as a core value. Drawing on the American pragmatist tradition, Lynch argues that political beliefs can be true or false but without shared standards of evidence, democracies risk collapsing into pure contests of power.

His award-winning book Know-It-All Society (2019), diagnoses a culture of intellectual overconfidence fuelled by social media, tribal politics, and outrage-driven platforms. Rather than blaming technology alone, Michael Lynch shows how human tendencies toward arrogance and certainty are amplified online and why humility, dialogue, and openness are democratic virtues, not weaknesses.

The Internet of Us (2017), was also praised for bringing philosophical depth to debates often dominated by technical or economic thinking. Beyond his books, Lynch is a prominent public intellectual. He has delivered a widely viewed TED talk on how to rebuild a shared sense of reality and has spoken at venues ranging from SXSW and Chautauqua to the US Mint and the Collège de France.

At the University of Connecticut, Michael Lynch directs the Humanities Institute and is the Principal Investigator of Humility & Conviction in Public Life, a $7 million interdisciplinary project funded by the John Templeton Foundation, dedicated to improving the quality of public discourse. His work has informed public policy, including an amicus curiae brief filed on behalf of the ACLU in its federal caseals against the NSA.

Lynch is currently working on a new book, Democracy as a Way of Life, while also examining how artificial intelligence may potentially reshape human understanding and democratic agency.