What to Do with Post-Truth

Abstract

Recent political developments have made the notion of 'post-truth' ubiquitous. Along with associated terms such as 'fake news' and 'alternative facts', it appears with regularity in coverage of and commentary on Donald Trump, the Brexit vote, and the role – relative to these phenomena – of a half-despised, half-feared creature known as 'the public'. It has become commonplace to assert that we now inhabit, or are entering, a post-truth world. 
 In this paper, I issue a sceptical challenge against the distinctiveness and utility of the notion of post-truth. I argue, first, that the term fails to capture anything that is both real and novel. Moreover, post-truth discourse often has a not-fully-explicit political force and function: to ‘irrationalise’ political disaffection and to signal loyalty to a ‘pre-post-truth’ political status quo. The central insight of the speech act theory of J. L. Austin and others – that saying is always also doing – is as indispensable for understanding the significance of much of what is labelled ‘post-truth’, I’ll argue, as it is for understanding the significance of that very act of labelling.
 Keywords: post-truth, speech acts, Trump, brexit, Austin

Certainty in an Uncertain World: Toward A Critical Theory of Opinion

“…Other, more popular titles by journalists have been published in recent years characterizing the 21st century as a 'post-truth era' (Ball, 2017;McIntyre, 2018), one for which 'bullshit', for example, has emerged as 'a greater enemy of the truth than lies' (Davis, 2017;Frankfurt, 2005), while some authors dispute whether there is anything novel (Bufacchi, 2021;Vogelmann, 2018) or illuminative about the category of 'post-truth' itself (Finlayson, 2019), or that it is partly residual of the postmodernism of the 1980s (Haack, 2019).…”

“…For this, the analytic tradition of contemporary epistemology has responded with the virtue of precision and has actively produced a number of important debates on the so-called 'post-truth' condition. Here, where the very idea of truth seems to be in crisis, emphasis has been placed on questions of epistemic norms, ideals, and beliefs (Bernecker, Flowerree, and Grundmann, 2021;Cassam, 2019), rhetoric (Fuller, 2017), trust and the philosophy of science (Marmot, 2017;Oreskes, 2019), issues of realism (Asay, 2020), relativism (Baghramian and Coliva, 2020), and speech act theory (Finlayson, 2019), as well as modes of counterfactual or fictional reasoning (Williamson, 2021) and in the fields of the philosophy of language (Marques, 2020) and metaethics more generally (Brown, 2019).…”

Post-truth Politics and Collective Gaslighting

“…Each of the above three examples could be and has in fact been described as an instance of post-truth politics (Berkowitz 2016;Pool 2018;Apps 2019). Post-truth has been connected to fake news (Levy 2017), Frankfurtian bullshit (Davies 2017), echo chambers (Nguyen 2020), tribal epistemologies (Rini 2017), rampant use of pathos in political rhetoric (Laybats and Tredinnick 2016), declining trust in traditional epistemic authorities (Ylä-Anttila 2018), and finally to a lack of belief in truth (Finlayson 2019). What these phenomena each have in common is a problematic relationship to truth.…”

Más allá de los márgenes: sobre el potencial ético-político del “fuera de campo” para repensar la narrativa periodística audiovisual

“…La apelación constante a las emociones de la audiencia en ámbitos como las redes sociales refuerzan sesgos cognitivos vinculados al denominado "efecto cámara de eco" (echo chamber effect) o a la polarización política, ambos fenómenos que deterioran el pensamiento crítico y el compromiso moral para con aquellos que no formen parte de nuestro grupo de pertenencia (p. ej., Finlayson, 2019;Kelkar, 2019). De hecho, actualmente numerosos investigadores sostienen que para lograr abarcar las múltiples dimensiones del énfasis posverídico en las emociones es necesario migrar hacia un enfoque que permita contemplar su correlación a nivel psicológico (p.…”