"Dishonesty inspires more euphemisms than copulation or defecation. This helps desensitize us to its implications. In the post-truth era we don't just have truth and lies but a third category of ambiguous statements that are not exactly the truth but fall just short of a lie. Enhanced truth it might be called. Neo-truth . Soft truth . Faux truth . Truth lite ." Deception has become the modern way of life. Where (...) once the boundary line between truth and lies was clear and distinct, it is no longer so. In the post-truth era, deceiving others has become a challenge, a game, a habit. High-profile dissemblers compete for news coverage, from journalists like Jayson Blair and professors like Joseph Ellis to politicians (of all stripes), executives, and "creative" accountants. Research suggests that the average American tells multiple lies on a daily basis, often for no good reason. Not a finger-wagging scolding, The Post-Truth Era is a combination of Ralph Keyes's investigative journalism and solid science. The result is a spirited exploration of why we lie about practically everything and the consequences such casual dishonesty has on society. American society has become permeated from top to bottom by deception. Its consequences for the nature of public discourse, media, business, literature, academia, and politics are profound. With dry humor, passionate fervor, and deep understanding, Ralph Keyes takes us on a tour of a world where truth and honesty are no longer absolutes but mutable, fluid concepts. (shrink)

We are facing a crisis of trust in expertise today. Fewer and fewer people trust experts, and more and more politicians openly ignore expert consensus. 'Democracy in the Post-Truth Era' asks what might happen to democracy if we reject the fundamental liberal assumption that people are capable of making informed choices. The book explores the potential impact on society if people, including politicians, never appreciate the relevance of expert opinions. What if people cannot choose between supporters and opponents (...) of key issues such as the causes of climate change, effectiveness of vaccines and ways of combating economic and social crises? Applying social epistemology to these questions, the book considers whether democracy can be defended in the post-truth era. (shrink)

Volume 19, Issue 7, July 2019, Page W1-W3.

Education has a responsibility to respond to the threat of deteriorating democracies. The post-truth era is marked by an erosion of trust in public institutions and extreme polarisation. This paper begins with an examination of the ways by which current literacy and media literacy education is not simply outmoded, but also limited by a grounding in neoliberal conceptions of rationality and individualism. Offering a counterpoint to the status quo, and foregrounding the significance of affect, I work with Levinas’s (...) conception of ethics to illustrate the tensions between affective reactionism and non-intentional affectivity, enjoyment and its disruption as a premise for intersubjectivity, and contrasting manifestations of anger. I conclude the paper with a proposal for literacy education that comprises intentional focus on relationality, responsibility, and affect. (shrink)

Academic medical ethics must be a bulwark against a disturbing trend toward post-truth cultures. Activism of course has its place in massive cultural debates like abortion. The fact that so many people care so deeply about these debates is part of what makes them so important. But especially when coming from clinicians, academics, and others to whom we entrust the care of our public discourse, interventions into the debates must be disciplined by a thoroughgoing commitment to engage with (...) the available data to back up the central claims even when those claims seem like common sense—perhaps especially when they seem like common sense. (shrink)

A recent target article in the American Journal of Bioethics (AJOB) considered the right of transgender (trans) children to access pubertal suppression (Priest 2019). We were concerned by publicati...

In the early 20th century, the most numerous and well-funded institutions in the United States—corporations—used public relations to make a widespread and fundamental change in the way they constitute and regulate their relations of knowledge with the public. Today, we can see this change reflected in a variety of areas such as journalism, political outreach, social media, and in the ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’ administration of Donald J. Trump. This article traces practices of corporate truth-telling and knowledge (...) production across three periods I will call the personal, the legal, and public relations, which are roughly coincident with the antebellum period, the Gilded Age, and the 20th century, respectively. In sum, what can be found in public relations and now broadly across society, is that relations of knowledge have come to be refigured as relations of power, subordinating traditional epistemological concerns like justification and belief in favor of government and control. (shrink)

Employability has developed into a key component of the policies of higher education institutions worldwide, whereby students convert into consumers and knowledge morphs into a marketable co...

The post-truth regime is a regime in which certain central categories of modernity seem to be inadequate: that of truth as correspondence, that of truth as verification, and that of truth as sincerity. This reflection aims at proposing a shift from the category of truth to the category of legitimacy, in order to rethink those of correctness, objectivity, adequacy. The advantage potentially offered by the concept of legitimacy, with regards to that of truth, (...) has to do with the reference to a given context, with an element of social recognition and a processual dimension, which makes the management of discourses more flexible, without abdicating to their deregulation. (shrink)

According to Alain Badiou, truth’s existence is not dependent upon philosophy because philosophy itself is not a creator of truth. Badiouan thought submits philosophy to the universe of truth through the mediation of truth procedures. Badiou names these procedures love, politics, art and science. In contrast, the instinctual reason of democratic materialism, which Badiou defines as the partnership between parliamentary democracy and neo-liberal pragmatism, replaces love with physical beauty, politics with technical power, art with a marketable (...) talent and science with a competitive genius. These replacements also correspond to post-truth. This article contrasts the concept of “disinterested interest” in Badiou’s truth procedures with “self-interest” reigning over democratic materialism’s reality procedures. Following Badiou, I explain how “self-interested interest” reproduces the human-animal’s instinctual reason, which triggers post-truth politics. Commitment to truth in a post-truth era therefore cannot be sustained by appealing to democratic materialism’s manipulated knowledge but must be guided by disinterested interest. The article argues that knowledge cannot be an antidote to post-truth because democratic materialism often uses knowledge as an instrument or sometimes as a control mechanism, to strengthen the position of post-truth in many circumstances. (shrink)

The post-truth world threatens our collective commitment to rationality but must not become the norm. Synthesis of the scholarship on anti-intellectualism and personal attributes informs educational practices to promote development of student's rational mind-set and rationalist identity necessary to combat anti-rationalism and the post-truth world.

The belief that we are living in a post-truth age raises a number of complex, paradoxical questions. Does it suggest, for example, that truth no longer matters? Or, that the idea of truth no longer exists? The university, of course, has long been associated with the interests of truth – not only in searching for truth, but in telling the truth. This is made evident in its emphasis on logic, rationality, deliberation, debate, reason, (...) contemplation, reflection and academic freedom. Truth, and its ensuing perspectives, perceptions, agreements and conflicts, are what makes a university what it is. As such, the university is as enmeshed in versions of truth, as it is in versions of power – which serves only to confirm the necessity for a continuous interrogation of these truths, and hence, power. In principle, academic freedom infers that both members of staff and students at universities have the right to engage in intellectual engagement and debate, without fear of censorship. In practice, however, when we take stock of academic freedom in spaces of higher education, we see growing patterns of shutting down, and closing off, rather than opening up. The interest of this article, therefore, is to consider how the university can remain discursively open to that which is new, unfamiliar and unpopular, while simultaneously, doing no harm – either to itself or its students. (shrink)

The increased visibility of feminism in mainstream culture has recently been noted, with the presence of both online and offline campaigns embedding feminist claims in a variety of everyday spaces. By granting recognition to women’s experiences, these campaigns continue the feminist practice of generating critical knowledge on the basis of gendered experience. In the post-truth era, however, the norms governing claims-making are being significantly reconstructed, with significant consequences for critiques of gender inequality. It is argued here that these (...) norms are linked directly to a wider context of anti-feminism in which dismissing women’s claims is consistent with the goal that opponents of gender equality have of seeking and consolidating epistemic power in the face of what is perceived as systemic male disadvantage and victimhood. Returning to earlier debates within feminism, it is argued that the kinds of post-truth rhetoric used to dismiss women’s experience provide a challenge that feminism must confront. This rhetoric is often grounded in the authenticity of individual experience; however, experience cannot provide unmediated access to truth and, therefore, cannot provide the foundation for feminist claims. On the other hand, experience cannot merely offer one of many contested versions of ‘reality’. The excesses of both foundationalist and anti-foundationalist epistemology are countered with the argument that cognition is a human practice mediated by theoretical propositions which illuminate the question of what can be known. This is the role played by feminist theory in defending the role of experience. (shrink)

Since the turn of the millennium, a new phenomenon has arisen on the global stage, as girls have increasingly begun to raise their voices. In an effort to achieve new philosophical understandings of contemporary childhoods in a post-truth era, the present article examines this Girl Rising movement from an existential perspective. In doing so, the article aims to problematise children’s right to be heard and listened to, as enshrined in Article 12 of the Convention on the Rights of (...) the Child. More specifically, the article explores children as rights-holders and their rights-subject position and how these positions are supported (or not) by adults in different ways. Throughout the analysis, Greta Thunberg is used as a case study to illustrate the phenomenon under study. This new movement highlights children’s right to be heard as a valuable right. The defence of this view relies on the claim that at the heart of adult’s acknowledgement lies the uniqueness of each child and the implications of this uniqueness. Taking into consideration the realisation of children’s rights, powerful stakeholders who seek to silence children’s voices are also identified, as are worldwide adult acknowledgements intended to empower girls to exist ‘in’ and ‘with’ the world in a ‘grown-up’ way. (shrink)

In this paper, Sarah Stitzlein considers the consequences of honesty on our democracy, especially for citizens' ability to engage in civic inquiry together as they face shared problems. Honesty is a key component of a well-functioning democracy; it develops trust and fosters the sorts of relationships among citizens that enable civic dialogue and reasoning. Post-truth attitudes and truth decay pose serious obstacles to good civic reasoning as citizens struggle to draw clear distinctions between fact and opinion, weigh (...) personal beliefs and emotions over facts, and increasingly distrust traditionally respected sources of information. Stitzlein employs a Deweyan pragmatist account of truth and a distinctly social account of democracy to build a case for foregrounding honesty in the development of citizens. She describes how schools can employ communities of inquiry to cultivate habits of honesty within citizenship education. She explains how a better democracy — one grounded in a wider understanding of social life and relationships — might head off the temptation to be dishonest for self-serving reasons, focusing on how dishonesty jeopardizes our relationships to each other as citizens and our ability to engage in civic reasoning together to fulfill shared goals. (shrink)

This article deals with the question about the conditions for someone to call something ‘fake news’. It examines cases in which something is called fake news and analyses these cases from an ordinary language point of view as speech acts. Doing so, the analysis explains fake news as the expression of a dissent. The analysis avoids problems of recent attempts to provide a definition of fake news and argues against the view that fake news belong to a so-called post- (...) class='Hi'>truth era. The conclusion of the article is that it is not possible to call something fake news without having unyielding convictions about the truth. (shrink)

I suggest that shaping knowers of facts implies the teaching of intellectual virtues. To justify this claim, I do not appeal to the intrinsic value of epistemic goods such as truth or knowledge. Instead, I suggest that we have political reasons to teach intellectual virtues to high school and college students. The current epistemic environment – especially that found on social media – is not conducive to good democratic decision-making, but acquiring intellectual virtues can prepare students to make good (...) political decisions and increase the epistemic potential of democracy. For this reason, we should envision intellectual virtues as civic virtues, that is, excellencies that relate to the democratic process and that can help individuals become good citizens. (shrink)

With increasing influence of illiberalism, freedom should not be considered or interpreted lightly. Post-truth contexts provide grounds for alt-right movements to capture and pervert notions of freedom of speech, making universities battlefields of politicised emotions and expressions. In societies facing these pressures around the world, academic freedom has never been challenged as much as it is today. As Peters and colleagues note, conceptualisations of ‘facts’ and ‘evidences’ are politically, socially, and epistemically reconstructed in post-truth contexts. At (...) the same time, with intelligence commodified, reified or marginalised, freedom of speech and of mobility can entail fights for entitlements, or escapes from local responsibilities. The decline and corruptions of democratic free speech and academic freedom, or the absence of forces to defend them, are thus serious challenges. These challenges grow as the competition of ideas, sometimes under the rubric of academic freedom, often implies the power struggle and questioning of statuses in the so-called ‘marketplace of ideas’. Competition as a value invoked in some conceptualisations of freedom, becomes more important than human dignity, which was originally supposed to expand and strengthen under democratic conceptions of freedom in higher education. What had been happening to freedoms, of speech, teaching, and learning, across different subject positions and cultures of higher education, remains largely underexplored, as alt-right movements, neoliberalism and illiberalism, and post-truthism values and orientations expand. (shrink)

The claim that we live in a post-truth era has led to a significant body of work across different disciplines exploring the phenomenon. Many have sought to investigate the role of fake news in bringing about the post-truth era. While this work is important, the narrow focus on this issue runs the risk of giving the impression that it is mainly new forms of media that are to blame for the post-truth phenomenon. In this (...) paper, we call attention to the ways in which journalistic practices in traditional forms of media also play an important role in contributing to a post-truth environment. We will do so by focusing on one particular practice common in news journalism. False balance involves presenting two sides of a debate as more equal than is justified by the evidence. We will argue that although false balance does not constitute fake news, it does contribute to an environment in which truth is devalued. By obscuring what counts as evidence and who qualifies as an authority, false balance legitimizes post-truth attitudes. We finish by outlining the virtues that journalists should develop in order to guard against false balance. While fake news is made more likely when journalists possess the vices of dishonesty, prejudice or corruption, we argue that focusing too much on guarding against these vices may actually make false balance more likely. In order to be responsible gatekeepers and to avoid false balance, journalists must also develop the virtues of wisdom, vigilance, courage, care and justice. (shrink)

It's raining bad data, half-truths, and fake news out there - and some of this nonsense is having devastation consequences. Daniel J. Levitin shows how corporate and government reports, statistics, and news stories can mislead, and reveals the way lying weasels use them. What makes lies dangerous is the certainty with which people are prone to believe them. Here is how to fix that."--Page [4] of cover.

The present crisis of truth, the "post-truth" crisis, puts the philosophy of truth in a new light. It calls for a reexamination of the tasks of the philosophy of truth and sets a new adequacy condition on this philosophy. One of the central roles of the philosophy of truth is to explain the importance of truth for human life and civilization. Among other things, it has to explain what is, or will be, lost (...) in a post-truth era. Clearly, the deflationist answer that the role of truth is to serve as a tool of generalization and oblique endorsement will not do. My account of truth in this paper addresses this task. Truth, I argue, is first and foremost a human value. Its importance to our life/civilization lies, not exclusively, but principally, in the centrality of this value to our humanity. I investigate the ramifications of this answer to the issues discussed in the contemporary philosophy of truth, and I end with a comparison of the substantivist and deflationist approaches to truth in light of this new perspective. (shrink)

This study explores the importance of critical information competence and its relationship with ethics in contemporary society. Initially, the relevance of ethics is highlighted in determining the sciences to be studied and in the formation of critical and ethical citizens. The main objective of the work is to discuss how critical information competence can contribute to the development of Information Science professionals prepared for the challenges of the information age. The methodology adopted in the research consisted of a conceptual analysis, (...) based on theories of ethics, information science and education. Authors such as Aristotle, Ramonet, Elmborg and others were consulted to support the reflections presented in the article. The results point to the need to expand studies and practices related to critical information competence, aiming to train citizens capable of acting consciously in the information society. It is concluded that critical information competence is essential for the construction of a society fairer, more equitable and democratic, highlighting the importance of developing Information Science professionals committed to ethical and social values. (shrink)

Volume 51, Issue 13, December 2019, Page 1293-1303.

Welcome to the Post-Truth era-- a time in which the art of the lie is shaking the very foundations of democracy and the world as we know it. The Brexit vote; Donald Trump's victory; the rejection of climate change science; the vilification of immigrants; all have been based on the power to evoke feelings and not facts. So what does it all mean and how can we champion truth in in a time of lies and 'alternative facts'? (...) In this eye-opening and timely book, Post-Truth is distinguished from a long tradition of political lies, exaggeration and spin. What is new is not the mendacity of politicians but the public's response to it and the ability of new technologies and social media to manipulate, polarise and entrench opinion. Where trust has evaporated, conspiracy theories thrive, the authority of the media wilt and emotions matter more than facts. Now, one of the UK's most respected political journalists, Matthew d'Ancona investigates how we got here, why quiet resignation is not an option and how we can and must fight back. (shrink)

This paper looks at the situation first described by Dreyfus :369–378, 2002) in his seminal paper, in order to find out whether and, if so, to what extent the use of Internet in education is still characterized by anonymity and commitment in today’s social media and ‘post-truth’ era. Current form of web technology provides an occasion for us to rethink what the Press and the Public, two main Kierkegaardian themes, actually consist in. The very ease and rapidity of (...) how information is shared and the blurring of the line between journalists and consumers have made it very difficult to find where the Public actually is so that one can conform one’s own thoughts and beliefs to it. In addition, an effect of social media is that the Public does not seem to be monolithic, but has splintered into many smaller groups, each one overlapping with one another in a highly complex way. In Kierkegaard’s time the Press consisted of nothing more than a rather small number of newspapers, but now we have countless number of sources of information, so much so that it is almost impossible to see where the Press actually is. This situation has a way of diluting Kierkegaard’s contention that it is the Press that anonymized the people, rending them faceless and eliminating their individuality. Furthermore, the effect of Facebook is such that, not only does one still retain much of one’s commitment, but the commitment can be very passionate. As Petrik et al. have pointed out, it is possible for someone to be passionately committed to something while remaining very active on the Internet. This shows that the direction can go both ways. On the one hand, fragmenting the Public can go along with lack of commitment and other ills that Kierkegaard mentioned. On the other hand, fragmenting the Public, thereby creating many smaller groups existing in the online world can also bring about specific and well-directed commitments than would be possible if the Public remained a single monolithic entity. Furthermore, Kierkegaard’s insistence on lack of commitment by the Public seems to foretell the current malaise of what is known as ‘post-truth’. For Dreyfus the Internet is ultimately responsible for this. Indeed, however, both lack of commitment and too much commitment seem to be both responsible. A way out of this is proposed where a commitment to rational and critical thought is needed. (shrink)

Education in the post-truth era: Reflections on the role of learning in sustainability and democracy This paper revisits the field of (Higher) Education for Sustainable Development in a post-truth era. It reflects on the current debate regarding the role of education in sustainability from a Deweyan perspective. This approach leads towards a renewed interpretation of individual sustainability competences in societal context influenced by post-truth characteristics and super wicked problems. The Deweyan perspective with focus on (...) personal flourishing and the role of education in democracy, provides guiding principles to frame individual sustainability competences in the current post-truth context, thereby highlighting the importance of critical inquiry. The paper recommends to revisit the connection between education and sustainability from a personal and societal perspective, thereby taking into account the current context of higher education, influenced by neoliberalism, economic efficiency and managerialism. (shrink)

Continuing William Mitchell's investigations of how we understand, reason about, anduse images, The Reconfigured Eye provides the first systematic, critical analysis of the digitalimaging revolution.

After explaining why, after dealing with post‐modernist confusions about truth in various books and articles from the mid‐1990s to, most recently, 2014 (§1), Haack returns to the topic of truth. She begins (§2) with some thoughts about the claim that concern for truth is on the decline, and perhaps at a new low; a claim that, sadly, may well be true. Then (§3) she looks at some of the many forms that carelessness with the truth (...) may take, and shows that, so far from revealing that the concept of truth is seriously problematic or that there is no such thing as objective truth, it simply makes no sense to say that lies, half‐truths, etc., are ubiquitous unless there is such a thing as truth, and a legitimate truth‐concept. After that, (§4) she argues that, of course, there is such a thing as objective truth, and a robust truth‐concept. And finally, (§5) she suggests some ways to fight against the rising tide of unconcern for truth—and gives her answer to the (trick) question in her subtitle. (shrink)

A prevalent political narrative is that we are facing an epistemological crisis, where many citizens no longer care about truth and facts. Yet the view that we are living in a post-truth era relies on some implicit questionable empirical and normative assumptions. The post-truth rhetoric converts epistemic issues into motivational issues, treating people with whom we disagree as if they no longer believe in or care about truth. This narrative is also dubious on epistemic, (...) moral, and political grounds. It is epistemically dubious in being largely insensitive to the problem of complexity in politics; it is morally dubious because “post-truth” is often a derogatory label for individuals or groups that are deemed stupid, irrational, or morally compromised; and it is a politically toxic neologism because it purports to use the language of ‘truth’ as a weapon against power, yet these truth-claims are often themselves attempts to exert power over others by delegitimizing their perspectives. While it may seem as if truth and democracy are on especially bad terms lately, politics and truth have long had a vexed relationship, and moral panics about the value of truthfulness in politics are as old as politics itself. (shrink)

‘Post-truth’ is a failed concept, both epistemically and politically because its simplification of the relationship between truth and politics cripples our understanding and encourages authoritarianism. This makes the diagnosis of our ‘post-truth era’ as dangerous to democratic politics as relativism with its premature disregard for truth. In order to take the step beyond relativism and ‘post-truth’, we must conceptualise the relationship between truth and politics differently by starting from a ‘non-sovereign’ understanding (...) of truth. (shrink)

Human actions and decisions are most of the times not only grounded on emotional reactions, they are irrationally debasing. While such emotions and heuristics were perhaps suitable for dealing with life in the Stone Age, they are woefully inadequate in the Silicon Age. The substitution of traditional news agencies and communication platforms in Nigeria with social media networks has not only increased human capacities, it has aided the common good and further eased communication and increased the human knowledge base. For (...) instance, the Silicon Valley in the state of California in the United State of America has proved the extent to which human ingenuity can be exerted in beneficial ways. Here in, the top of the multibillion-dollar communication companies like Apple, eBay, Cisco, Lockheed, Hewlett Packard (HP), Google, Netflix, Facebook, Oracle, Tesla, etc. whose yearly budgets far exceed the entire yearly budget of Nigeria, has proved that, ICT remains the building blocks of contemporary communities. The state of California for instance prides herself as the 6th largest economy of the world after France and Brazil. This romantic picture of ICT is but only one chapter of the ICT divide. In today’s world, the scale and speed of the highly partisan news and falsehoods that circulate in the human environment is deafening. In politics and governance for instance, the populist have exploited the ICT effectively and without restraints, to access power and authority. Today, we are in the era of post-truth, an era in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. An era that harbours corruption of intellectual integrity and damage to the whole fabric of democracy. The battle to protect information integrity and expose fake news becomes sine qua non. We shall in this paper explore the dark side of the age of information, a side that has been exploited by the media mavens, political hacks, and ideological propagandists who promote lies, illusion, confusion, and other forms of demented or manipulated imagination. In doing this, we shall proceed as follows: i. Historicize the concept of ‘fake news’ here referred to as post-truth. ii. Interrogate the concept of ‘information’ and its goal in human affairs iii. Evaluate the nexus between ‘truth’ values in ‘information’, ‘Misinformation’ and ‘dis-information’ iv. Situate the role of Philosophy in the era of post-truth. (shrink)

How should we share the truth about the environmental crisis? At a moment when even the most basic facts about ecology and the climate face contestation and contempt, environmental advocates are at an impasse. Many have turned to social media and digital technologies to shift the tide-but what if their strategy is not only flawed, but dangerous? The Truth about Nature follows environmental actors as they turn to the internet to save nature. It documents how conservation efforts are (...) transformed through the political economy of platforms and the algorithmic feeds that have been instrumental to the rise of post-truth politics. Developing a novel account of post-truth as an expression of power under platform capitalism, Bram Büscher shows how environmental actors attempt to mediate between structural forms of platform power and the contingent histories and contexts of particular environmental issues. Bringing efforts at wildlife protection in Southern Africa into dialogue with a sweeping analysis of truth and power in the twenty-first century, Büscher makes the case for a new environmental politics: one that radically reignites the art of speaking truth to power. (shrink)

Socratic dialogue is nowadays often invoked as a model in education, and several educational approaches explicitly claim to be inspired by it (Naccari, 2003; Shah, 2008; Delić & Bećirović, 2016). However, contemporary versions depart profoundly from its original form as expressed in the Platonic dialogues, reinterpreting the role of the teacher in the dialogical exchange and referring to different epistemological criteria (cf. Shields, 1953; Reich, 1998; Dinkins, & Cangelosi, 2019; Marshall, 2019). The aim of this paper is to highlight, on (...) the one hand, how such a distortion of the classical model results in the renunciation of the heuristic and transformative functions of Socratic dialogue, and on the other hand, to propose an alternative model of dialogic teaching that restores these functions while maintaining its practicability in contemporary school contexts. Specifically, the role of epistemological relativism and the facilitator in constructivist education are identified as the critical issues in the construction of effective dialogical confrontation in the post-truth era. (shrink)

One of the most significant difficulties that we encounter today in the post-truth era is in constructing a reality in the gap between deceptive pre-given facts and how we experience them in our lives. This gap is mostly caused by our incapacity to see reality beyond the given frames and this very characteristic of post-truth enforces us to examine the meaning of seeing more extensively. Two particular reasons make seeing things and people even more difficult: first, (...) the claim of transparency in politics is essentially deceptive; it suggests us a way of seeing, but what it does, is rather to determine what or whom to see and from which aspect we are allowed to see them. As a result, for politics, transparency turns into a means to a desired end. Second, instrumentalization in politics works effectively only when its administrators and its subjects become invisible ‘nobodies’ who can only act and see in the pregiven limits of reality. For an alternative political approach, this article turns to a phenomenological understanding of reality which emphasizes that reality can only be constituted in the plurality of aspects. For a reconstitution of reality and politics, first, this study offers an analysis of the strong need for such a plurality that requires the inclusion of the invisibles at all levels; second, in order to develop a genuine sense of embodied plurality, it proposes a new political category, here termed ‘the politics of the invisible’. (shrink)

Post-truth politics comes forward as a challenge to the credibility of science through its association with skepticism and denialism about scientific approaches and findings. While debates over the nature of facts and the social character of scientific knowledge have mainly taken place in an academic setting, the current concerns about science skepticism have connected them to wider social issues. This chapter will examine this question with the focus on biomedical and physiological sciences and cast doubt on the claim (...) that particular strands of research from the ‘science wars’ period have enabled post-truth politics. Exploring the backdrop of controversies over the objectivity of science and relativism, I will show that the causes of the erosion of trust in science are better traced to socio-economic conditions that feed into legitimate distrust in science alongside other institutions. I will further argue that, quite paradoxically for the critics of relativism, construing science as social and sketching out ways of producing knowledge relevant to those who have good reasons for skepticism and distrust can help counter post-truth politics. (shrink)

Since 2016, the rise of post-truth politics has created a situation of democratic discontent in the west. While many scholars tend to regard post-truth politics as a threat to democratic order, I would like to propose that what we have been witnessing in this form of politics has been the transformation of the democratic ethos. By turning to Michel Foucault’s lecture on the true life of Diogenes of Sinope, delivered at College De France in 1984, I (...) ascertain the framework for demonstrating how we can approach a new shape of democratic ethos in our era of post-truth politics. I argue that in Diogenes’s true life, Foucault saw the concrete life, which could liberate each individual from the constraints of their conventional lives by emphasizing the material conditions of all human bodies. Diogenes’s life could then be a form of self-emancipation since it not only showed how untrue the conventional life was but also released each individual from any conventions estranged from them. Relying on this point, I propose the notion of untruth as the new ground of our democratic lives. Though post-truth politics destroys the objective form of truth, the untruth—as its main element—can play a leading role in grounding our democratic ethos to the extent that it asserts our capability of self-emancipation. (shrink)

In recent years, prevalent global societal issues related to fake news, fakery, misinformation, and disinformation were brought to the fore, leading to the construction of descriptive labels such as “post-truth” to refer to the supposedly new emerging era. Thereby, the (mis-)use of technologies such as AI and VR has been argued to potentially fuel this new loss of “ground-truth”, for instance, via the ethically relevant deepfakes phenomena and the creation of realistic fake worlds, presumably undermining experiential veracity. (...) Indeed, _unethical_ and malicious actors could harness tools at the intersection of AI and VR (AIVR) to craft what we call _immersive falsehood_, fake immersive reality landscapes deliberately constructed for malicious ends. This short paper analyzes the ethically relevant nature of the background against which such malicious designs in AIVR could exacerbate the intentional proliferation of deceptions and falsities. We offer a reappraisal expounding that while immersive falsehood could manipulate and severely jeopardize the inherently affective constructions of social reality and considerably complicate falsification processes, humans may neither inhabit a post-truth nor a post-falsification age. Finally, we provide incentives for future AIVR safety work, ideally contributing to a future era of _technology-augmented critical thinking_. (shrink)

In 1988, my book Morality After Auschwitz: The Radical Challenge of the Nazi Ethic first appeared. The book generated a variety of responses, some positive and enthusiastic and some quite negative. The reason for these responses, of course, was that in the book I staked out a discomforting, and so controversial, position. The overarching conviction which led to the writing of the book was that, like in so many other areas, the process of thinking about ethics and doing moral philosophy (...) in the post-Shoah world simply could not continue in the same way as it had up to that point. That is, for me, the events of the Holocaust represent, if I can borrow a concept from Emil Fackenheim, a kind of revelation, a radical challenge to the way we in the West must face and try to understand the human condition.Beginning from this perspective, I came to the conclusion, in brief, that one of the most disturbing implications of the Holocaust for moral theory is that we can no longer assume that there is a universal moral truth to which all normal people have access and to which all normal people will naturally respond. In other words, the optimistic assumption of Western modernity that human beings can know and act on the true and the right, can no longer be taken for granted. This, of course, seriously undermines the very basis for the modern enterprise of moral philosophy.As one engaged in the teaching of Western moral philosophy, I of course did not come to this position easily, nor am I fully comfortable with it. But that uncomfortableness is in the end also part of the point. I am the child of survivors and I live and work in a post-Shoah world, and that world is simply not a comfortable one to inhabit. It is not the optimistic world of Enlightenment thinking. For me, the implications of the Holocaust for what I am doing as a professor of religion and as a scholar of ethics must be taken seriously enough to radically affect the way I, and others, go about our business.Before moving forward, I should give a little bit of the intellectual background that led me to write the book in the way I did. I came to the study of the Holocaust rather late. In fact I only really entered into a systematic study of the Holocaust when I began teaching in 1980, that is after my university education and even after my graduate work. I came to the Holocaust then as a young scholar with little formal background in the field, but with the need to develop and teach a course to American undergraduates.Looking back, I think that coming to the study of the Holocaust relatively late in my professional development was actually a positive situation: I was not, after all, invested in the field, I did not have prior commitments to one view or the other, I did not feel I had a particular set of scholars to defend or uphold. When I began to teach the Holocaust, the only items on my agenda were to understand the events as best as I could and then devise a way of presenting them to the students in the clearest possible way. (shrink)

This edited volume looks at whether it is possible to be more transparent about uncertainty in scientific evidence without undermining public understanding and trust. With contributions from leading experts in the field, this book explores the communication of risk and decision-making in an increasingly post-truth world. Drawing on case studies from climate change to genetic testing, the authors argue for better quality evidence synthesis to cut through the noise and highlight the need for more structured public dialogue. For (...) uncertainty in scientific evidence to be communicated effectively, they conclude that trustworthiness is vital: the data and methods underlying statistics must be transparent, valid, and sound, and the numbers need to demonstrate practical utility and add social value to people's lives. Presenting a conceptual framework to help navigate the reader through the key social and scientific challenges of a post-truth era, this book will be of great relevance to students, scholars and policy makers with an interest in risk analysis and communication. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Music Education in an Age of Virtuality and Post-Truth by Paul WoodfordPanagiotis A. KanellopoulosPaul Woodford, Music Education in an Age of Virtuality and Post-Truth (New York, Routledge, 2018)This book is provocative. And challenging. It is written with passion, aiming to induce controversy. And with good reason. For we live in times when populism professes an illusionary sense of community, invoking a seemingly 'anti-systemic' but (...) highly hypocritical, racist, and sexist discourse;1 in times where "bullshitting"2 has advanced to the highest governmental levels in many countries; in times where "authoritarian neoliberal statism"3 becomes the new status quo, inducing a scandalous increase of economic inequalities, forcing large populations to live precarious lives; in times where privatization of educational services in the context of market-oriented practices impose restrictive and ultimately unjust politics of accountability and performativity;4 in times where instrumentalization of educational ends has taken the lead, assisted by a systematic co-option and misappropriation of notions such as excellence and creativity;5 in times, finally, where spaces that allow for "the sharing (out) of the incalculable,"6 forging unknown potentialities in education, life, and thought, are being destroyed. In such times, Paul Woodford has stepped in, reclaiming his right to speak uncompromisingly.Hannah Arendt has written that "[w]hen men [sic] are deprived of the public space--which is constituted by acting together and then fills of its own accord [End Page 108] with the events and stories that develop into history--they retreat into their freedom of thought."7 Woodford refuses to retreat. He writes as a public intellectual of the highest order, committed to upset and not please those in power. A great service that his latest book performs is that it speaks daringly, stirring a debate that helps us all to do away with fear. For as Bertrand Russell has aptly said quite a long time ago, "[I]f thought is to become the possession of many, not the privilege of the few, we must have done with fear. It is fear that holds men [sic] back."8Resisting the "melancholy of inner exile,"9 but not immune to possible accusations of left melancholy, understood as "a refusal to come to terms with the particular character of the present,"10 the author wrote a book that provokes music educators to actively think beyond their sealed and safe world of convictions that is based on ideology-free conceptions of music teaching. Estelle Jorgensen has long ago brought to our attention the urgency of this task: "in an era in which the mindset and political reality have changed dramatically, … there is an urgent need to revisit the political character of music education and the ways in which it needs to address the cultural issues of our day."11Along this pathway, Woodford's book encourages music educators to live and teach as public intellectuals, forging "a democratic purpose for music education"12 that acts against the "anachronistic and formalist conception of music that reduces music education to supply-side economics as children are conceived as either future professional musicians or consumers and not as citizens to be prepared in schools to participate intelligently in the political life of society."13 Woodford articulates a vision of music education "as preparation for adulthood and democratic and global citizenship."14 He strongly advocates an approach that balances performance and creativity-based experiences with a socio-historical study of the social, ideological, and cultural workings of different musics in a wide variety of contexts. He encourages music educators to teach "how music's structural properties and qualities contribute to the shaping of people's perceptions and understandings of themselves and their world,"15 "asking the who, what, when, where, how, to, with, or for whom, and, most importantly of all, why of music."16 He envisions a music classroom that exercises social criticism "directly and self-consciously"17 both through "learning how to make music"18 and through thinking about music. He sees this approach as a tool for raising students' consciousness. Woodford's ultimate vision of music education is one that casts it as a means for cultivating "a justice-oriented" approach... (shrink)

This article reflects on the problem of false belief produced by the integrated psychological and algorithmic landscape humans now inhabit. Following the work of scholars such as Lee McIntyre (Post-Truth, MIT Press, 2018) or Cailin O’Connor and James Weatherall (The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread, Yale University Press, 2019) it combines recent discussions of fake news, post-truth, and science denialism across the disciplines of political science, computer science, sociology, psychology, and the history and philosophy of (...) science that variously address the ineffectiveness, in a digital era, of countering individual falsehoods with facts. Truth and falsehood, it argues, rather than being seen as properties or conditions attached to individual instances of content, should now be seen as collective, performative, and above all persuasive phenomena. They should be practically evaluated as networked systems and mechanisms of sharing in which individually targeted actions are combining with structural tendencies (both human and mechanical) in unprecedented ways. For example, the persuasive agency of apparent consensus (clicks, likes, bots, trolls) is newly important in a fractured environment that only appears to be, but is no longer ‘public’; the control of narratives, labels, and associations is a live, time-sensitive issue, a continuous contest, or ongoing cusp. Taking a social approach to truth yields observations of new relevance; from how current strategies of negative cohesion, blame, and enemy-creation depend crucially on binary ways of constructing the world, to how the offer of identity/community powerfully cooperates with the structural tendencies of algorithm-driven advertiser platforms towards polarisation. Remedies for these machine-learned and psychological tendencies lie in end-user education. So the Arts and Humanities, whether via comparisons with previous historical periods, or via principles of critical thinking and active reading, offer crucial resources to help counter what since 1997 silicon valley executives and scholars have called ‘persuasive technology’ (Fogg in Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What we Think and Do, Morgan Kaufmann, 2003; Hamari et al. (eds) in Persuasive Technology, Springer International Publishing, 2014; Harris in How a Handful of Tech Companies Control Billions of Minds Every Day, 2017; Lanier in Who Owns the Future? Simon & Schuster, 2014 and Ten Arguments for Deleting your Social Media Accounts Right Now, Picador, 2019). The article proposes a paradigm shift in public understandings of this new social environment: from a culture of discovery, where what matters is what exists or is in fact the case, to a culture of iteration, where what matters is what gets repeated. (shrink)