Post-truth is a term that refers to the widespread documentation of, and concern about, disputes over public truth claims in the 21st century. The term's academic development refers to the theories and research that seek to explain the specific causes historically, and the effects of the phenomenon. Oxford Dictionaries popularly defines it as "relating to and denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief."Metaliterate Learning for the Post-Truth World, Thomas P. Mackey, Neal-Schuman Publishers, 2019,
While the term was used in phrases like "post-truth politics" academically and publicly before 2016, in 2016 the term was named Word of the Year by Oxford Dictionaries after the term's proliferation in the first election of President Trump in the United States and the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom; Donald Trump has been characterized as engaging in a "war on truth". Oxford Dictionaries further notes that post-truth was often used as an adjective to signal a distinctive kind of politics.
Some scholars argue that post-truth has similarities with past moral, epistemic, and political debates about relativism, postmodernity, and dishonesty in politics. Others insist that post-truth is specifically concerned with 21st century communication technologies and cultural practices.
Historical precedents in philosophy Post-truth is about a historical problem regarding truth in everyday life, especially politics. But truth has long been one of the major preoccupations of philosophy. Truth is also one of the most complicated concepts in the history of philosophy, and much of the research and public debate about post-truth assumes a particular theory of truth, what philosophers call a correspondence theory of truth. The latter might be considered the most prominent theory of truth, though with its share of critics, whereby words correspond to an accepted or mutually available reality to be examined and confirmed. Another major theory of truth is coherence theory, where truth is not just about one claim but a series of statements that cohere about the world.
Several academic experts note that the emphasis on philosophical debates about truth have little to do with the concept of post-truth as it has historically emerged in popular politics (see post-truth politics), not in philosophy. As the philosopher Julian Baggini explains:
The merits of these competing theories are of mainly academic concern. When people debate whether there were weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussain's Iraq, whether global warming is real and anthropogenic, or whether austerity is necessary, their disagreements are not the consequence of competing theories of truth. No witness need ask a judge which theory she has in mind when asked to promise to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Why then has truth become so problematic in the world outside academic philosophy? One reason is that there is major disagreement and uncertainty concerning what counts as a reliable source of truth. For most of human history, there was some stable combination of trust in religious texts and leaders, learned experts and the enduring folk wisdom called common sense. Now, it seems, virtually nothing is universally taken as an authority. This leaves us having to pick our own experts or simply to trust our guts.
It follows that according to experts who approach the concept of post-truth as something historically specific, as a contemporary sociological phenomenon, post-truth theory is only remotely related to traditional debates in philosophy about the nature of truth. In other words, post-truth as a contemporary phenomenon is not about asking "what is truth?" or "is X true?" but "why don't we agree that this or that is true?" A broad range of scholarship increasingly insists a breakdown in institutional authority for truth-telling (government, news media, especially) ushered by new media and communication technologies of user-generated content, new media editing technologies (visual, audio-visual), and a saturating promotional culture has resulted in confusion and "games of truth"-telling,Educational research: 'games of truth' and the ethics of subjectivity. even truth markets.
Friedrich Nietzsche Not all commentators, however, treat post-truth as a historically specific phenomenon discussed through implicit correspondence, coherence, or pragmatist theories of truth. They discuss it within a philosophical tradition that asks what truth is. Friedrich Nietzsche, a 19th-century German philosopher, is sometimes cited in this camp of post-truth commentators.
Friedrich Nietzsche is sometimes invoked as a predecessor to theories of post-truth. He argues that humans create the concepts through which they define the good and the just, thereby replacing the concept of truth with the concept of value, and grounding reality in the human will and will to power.
In his 1873 essay Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense, Nietzsche holds that humans create truth about the world through their use of metaphor, myth, and poetry. He writes,If someone hides an object behind a bush, then seeks and finds it there, that seeking and finding is not very laudable: but that is the way it is with the seeking and finding of "truth" within the rational sphere. If I define the mammal and then after examining a camel declare, "See, a mammal", a truth is brought to light, but it is of limited value. I mean, it is anthropomorphic through and through and contains not a single point that would be "true in itself" or really and universally valid, apart from man. The investigator into such truths is basically seeking just the metamorphosis of the world into man; he is struggling to understand the world as a human-like thing and acquires at best a feeling of assimilation.
According to Nietzsche, all insights and ideas arise from a particular perspective. This means that there are many possible perspectives in which a truth or value judgment can be made. This amounts to declaring that there is no "true" way of seeing the world, but it does not necessarily mean that all perspectives are equally valid. Nietzschean perspectivism denies that a metaphysical objectivism is anything possible and asserts that there are no objective evaluations capable of transcending any cultural formation or subjective designations. This means that there are no objective facts and that understanding or knowledge of a thing in itself is not possible:
Therefore, the truth (and above all the belief in it) is an error, but it is an error necessary for life: "Truth is a kind of error without which a certain kind of living creature would not be able to live". (The Will to Power, KGW VII, 34 .)
Max Weber In his essay Science as a Vocation (1917) Max Weber draws a distinction between facts and values. He argues that facts can be determined through the methods of a value-free, objective social science, while values are derived through culture and religion, the truth of which cannot be known through science. He writes, "it is one thing to state facts, to determine mathematical or logical relations or the internal structure of cultural values, while it is another thing to answer questions of the value of culture and its individual contents and the question of how one should act in the cultural community and in political associations. These are quite heterogeneous problems." In his 1919 essay Politics as a Vocation, he argues that facts, like actions, do not in themselves contain any intrinsic meaning or power: "any ethic in the world could establish substantially identical commandments applicable to all relationships."Weber 1958, p. 357.
Critical theory and continental philosophy
Some influential philosophers are skeptical of the division between facts and values. They argue that scientific facts are socially produced through relations of power.
Bruno Latour The French philosopher Bruno Latour has been criticized for contributing to the intellectual foundations for post-truth. In 2018, the New York Times ran a profile on Bruno Latour and post-truth politics. According to the article, However, the article claims that it is a misinterpretation to claim that Latour doesn't believe in reality or that truth is relative: Had they been among our circus that day, Latour's critics might have felt that there was something odd about the scene – the old adversary of science worshipers kneeling before the altar of science. But what they would have missed – what they have always missed – was that Latour never sought to deny the existence of gravity. He has been doing something much more unusual: trying to redescribe the conditions by which this knowledge comes to be known.
The disputable reputation of Latour as a "fact-denier", stemmed from his article in La Recherche (1998), a French monthly magazine. Here Latour discusses the discovery in 1976, by French scientists working on the mummy of the pharaoh Ramses II, that his death was due to tuberculosis. In the 1990s, Jean Bricmont and Alan Sokal wrote of Latour:
In this sense, Latour (or Michel Foucault as well) draws attention to the institutional and practical contingencies for producing knowledge (which in science is always changing at slower and faster rates).
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt has been cited as an important conceptual resource for post-truth theory in that she attempted to theorize something historically shifting, instead of meditating on the nature of truth itself. In her essay Lying in Politics (1972), Hannah Arendt describes what she terms defactualization, or the inability to discern fact from fictionArendt 1972, p. 20. – a concept very close to what we now understand by post-truth. The essay's central theme is the thoroughgoing political deception that was unveiled with the leaking of the Pentagon Papers in 1971. Her main target of critique is the professional "problem-solvers" tasked with solving American foreign policy "problems" during the Vietnam War, and who comprised the group that authored the McNamara report.Arendt 1972, p. 9.