https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2342-8555
![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
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.
Notes
1. The bullshitter also lacks the virtue of accuracy, “indifferent to how things really are” (Frankfurt Citation2005, 34). The bullshitter may occasionally (i.e., accidentally) speak the truth, but to be accurate and to have the virtue of accuracy are not the same thing for only the latter involves having the dispositions that reliably lead one toward truth.
2. Alternatively, one might argue that we should find ways to make citizens more informed about the issues facing their society. I find this route less plausible because the challenges facing modern societies are too complex for ordinary citizens to have informed opinions about more than a few of them (see Lippmann Citation1922; Friedman Citation2019). I will discuss this at greater length below.
3. Cassam Citation2021 also argues, albeit for different reasons, that “bullshit” is not a useful tool of politico-epistemological analysis.
5. These two additional hypotheses seem implausible. In the case of unconscious post-factualism, it is unclear why longstanding psychological biases (e.g., confirmation bias) would explain the recent emergence of post-truth politics. In the case of motivational post-factualism, people are unlikely to care enough about politics to participate if they did not care about the truth of political issues, especially when they believe there are such truths. If voters did not care about the empirical dimensions of political questions, they would not oppose—as they do—politicians whose empirical claims they regard as untrustworthy.
6. Psychologists of motivated reasoning get around this by positing an unconscious level where a sort of homunculus “knows” that the opinion is untrue but spares the conscious self this knowledge—because if one knew an opinion were untrue, one could not hold it. For doubts about the plausibility of this common idea, see Friedman Citation2019, 243-6.
7. Some people may think that political judgments are evaluative claims and that evaluative judgments lack truth values. But truth is still important even for evaluative judgments because whether we endorse these judgments will depend on statements that have truth values. For example, we may endorse an evaluative judgment such as “Hillary Clinton is a crooked politician” on the basis of statements describing her behavior. As Erik Olsson (Citation2008, 95) remarks, “Generally, we take things to be good or bad because of certain beliefs we have about those things. Thus, we may hold one thing to be good because we believe it will increase our wealth or make us happier. If, upon closer examination, those beliefs turn out to be false, we tend to withdraw our initial positive sentiment toward the thing in question.”
8. In 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Yuval Noah Harari says, “humans have always lived in the age of post-truth.” Likewise, Simon Blackburn (Citation2018) says, “There’s nothing new about post-truth politics.” I am largely sympathetic to the view that there has been no profound epistemological shift in our collective relationship to the value of truthfulness in politics. However, to proclaim there is “nothing new” about post-truth is deeply unsatisfying even if true, for it leaves unexplained why so many people think we’ve entered into a new era of politics.
9. It is what Alex Worsnip (Citation2017, 4) calls a “cryptonormative judgment,” viz., “a judgment that is presented by the agent who makes it as non-normative, but that is in fact normative.” These judgments can be non-transparent to its bearer. So those who use post-truth rhetoric need not take themselves to be making normative judgments.
10. Along similar lines, Joshua Habgood-Coote (Citation2019) argues there are political problems with the term “post-truth.” He suggests we stop using the term because it has propagandistic uses and risks smuggling bad ideology into conversations.
11. To be clear, this argument does not show that Amy’s normative concerns are relevant to her own assessment of the truth (or likelihood) of technical descriptive claims. This view is more radical, less plausible, and invites the charge of epistemological relativism. That one cares more about joblessness than environmental damage does not influence the likelihood that anthropogenic climate change is occurring, nor does it affect the truth of the claim “anthropogenic climate change is occurring.”
12. As I’ve argued elsewhere, those who are better educated, more reflective, and more politically knowledgeable are at least as susceptible to bias, dogmatism, and groupthink as those with less education, less knowledge, and who display less cognitive reflection (see Hannon Citation2021b).
13. Timothy Snyder says that “post-truth is pre-fascism” (Illing Citation2017).
14. Defenders of epistocracy are willing to accept this conclusion. I find the objections to epistocracy sufficiently compelling, so I will set this view aside. In any case, the proponents of the post-truth thesis pay lip service to the value of democracy (they want to defend democracy against post-truth), so they are unable to accept these anti-democratic consequences.
15. These are not the only measures of affective polarization. For a review, see Druckman and Levendusky (Citation2019).
16. Many other factors likely contribute to affective polarization, including partisan media (Levendusky Citation2013) and a decline in cross-cutting social identities between parties (Mason Citation2018). For a review, see Iyengar et al. Citation2019.