Post-Trust, Not Post-Truth

ABSTRACT

The neologism post-truth is commonly used to characterize a polity in which false and biased beliefs have corrupted public opinion and policymaking. Simplifying and broadening our use of the adjective beyond its current narrow meaning could make post-truth a useful addition to the lexicons of history, politics, and philosophy. Its current use, however, is unhelpful and distracting (at best), and experienced as demeaning and humiliating (at worst). Contemporary polities are better characterized as post-trust. A polity becames post-trust when testimony from either a community of knowledge workers or a social group of complainants—such as women who give testimony of sexual assault—loses influence upon public opinion and policymaking.

Keywords:

• Blaise Pascal
• bias
• deliberative democracy
• epistemic bubble
• history of rape
• political epistemology
• post-truth
• public reason
• sexual assault
• testimony

Notes

1 Numerous philosophers have defended a conception of group belief. See, for example, Anderson 2021, which I discuss below.

2 Compare Anderson 2021, which I discuss below.

3 Tom Baldwin tentatively suggests that Moore and Wittgenstein addressed this problem in a succession of meetings of the Moral Sciences Club at Cambridge University in 1944 (see Moore [1944] 1993, 211 note 1).

4 She may well be right, although I have yet to meet a philosopher (including myself) who admits to loving it.

5 For a more detailed treatment of conversion in the Pensées, see Jones 1998.

6 King James Version, emph. added.

7 On the notion of confabulation in this context, see Schulz 2010, 77ff.

8 I have omitted three sets of bracketed examples which Anderson inserts after “citizens,” “foreign,” and “domestic,” retaining only those she provides of the “corrupt elite.”

9 Compare Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960).