There was never a golden age of objectivity, and today’s epistemological problems result from competing visions of reality, not a conflict over the value of truth.
Technically, a ‘conspiracy theory’ does not violate any of the laws of logic (including the criterion of soundness, which falls under the law of non-contradiction), it is just another theory, and insofar as it is only a theory it does not purport to be a fact but only a possible fact, whereas a flat denial of a conspiracy theory as misinformation, without a valid argument, does violate the laws of sense (non-contradiction). On the other hand, the phrase “post-truth” is already a performative contradiction; i mean, it does purport to be “true” while simultaneously denying that “truth” is still normative.
Nice point. That's the second time I've come across the term "performative contradiction" this morning, and I don't even work in the philosophy department!
In a nutshell, Habermas and Apel argued that any use of language implies that you want to be understood, that you invite another person to come to understanding with you, but if the intent of your speech is to confuse, misguide or manipulate, then you contradict the sense of language, hence your act of speaking contradicts your motives.
I suppose that's a more specific application of the sense in which I knew the term, which is any statement whose utterance contradicts its content (e.g.," I am currently unconscious").
Dan, basically all your writing on this, to me, boils down to “there never was a time when people were just magically smarter, there were just trusted establishment institutions that set the truth and enough societal coherence that most people just went along with them, and for a while that created what felt like a golden age of information.”
I fully agree with this!
The problem is: the internet made the cost of publishing zero, the reach billions. It took European culture 200 years to adapt to the _printing press_; we are only at the beginning of the implications of total frictionless global information diffusion. (It’s not 100% positive so far to say the least!) It started with AM radio and cable, but the internet was 100x more impactful. To me what’s happening is almost a deterministic product of the existence of the internet (and enhanced-virality social media, etc. that is built on top of it). We ain’t going back without concerted government restrictions on communication — which ain’t gonna happen. Too illiberal, and in the US, unconstitutional.
This isn’t even to mention the role that the elite truth-mediating institutions had in their own demise of trust when they decided that certain inequalities in society needed to be eradicated, regardless of their cause. Others in this comment section are writing about that.
But even if the “anti-woke” achieve total victory, the Internet remains. How do you ever get a consensus elite-mediated truth back with this technology loose in the world? Do we even want it back?
Very much enjoy your writing, and this piece in particular. My wife and I, and our circle of friends, find ourselves in this exact position - we just can't understand how someone on the other side of the political divide can believe the things that are being said. Your explanations are a big help.
I do have to quibble with your juxtaposing a statement that seems to have no support from the real world, and a statement that you can nuance into being false. I went back and watched the "fine people" news conference a couple of times. I've lived in Mississippi, and all the points he made here are the points I heard from white supremecists who know that wearing their white hood is no longer socially acceptable. I think there is a very strong arguement based on social context and history that Trump was calling white supremecists and neo-Nazis "nice people". I don't think the argument that Haitians were eating people's cats has anywhere near that sort of support. I'm not saying there aren't liberal lies as stark as the Haitian lie, I can't think of any at the moment, but the example you used seems a real "both-sides" stretch to try and make a point.
Do I understand you correctly? Donald Trump reiterated points you've only ever heard from white supremacists, and that proves his statement "you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides" must be referring to them.
But ~10 seconds later, he said "I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally. But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists, okay?" How do you explain that?
You could say he was just covering his ass, because he was aware that praising neo-Nazis was beyond the pale, but an alternative explanation is that are people outside your bubble - people that aren't white nationalists - who make those points too.
Wherever you come down on the question, collapsing these considerations into "Donald Trump called neo-Nazi's 'fine people'" is "truthy" in exactly the same way that the appalling "Haitians are eating pets" story is "truthy". Vance and company would say something like "maybe they don't really eat pets, but Haitians have a dramatically different culture, including very different food taboos, so good enough." If you're convinced Donald Trump is sympathetic to white nationalists, I'm going to sound unreasonably fussy, but that's exactly how you sound to the cat meme people - scrupulous about things you care about and permissive about stuff you don't.
I see a very distinct difference. There is no evidence that Hatians actually ate cats in Springfield or anywhere else. Nor dogs or anything that normal white in Ohio keep as pets. This is simply a lie made up out of whole cloth.
Your point, saying "Hatians are different and icky so we can make up lies about them" is "truthy", actually a good example of MY point. These are the kinds of things that white supremecists and neo-nazis invent and spread. This othering has repeated examples over history, "they are insane", "they bring disease", "their genes will degrade ours", and so on - all things that Trump and other Republican leaders have said publicly for years.
Take this history, and then reconsider Trump's 3 minute public defense of the white nationalists who had pulled the permit for the protest (he states this explicitly). There is an off hand statement at the end about neo-nazis being bad which sounds very much to me as a CYA routine that's another often used ruse when white nationalists are talking in public - "not all blacks", "I have black friends", "I can find a black person who also says this"... etc.
Now, ymmv. I can understand someone without my experience not hearing white nationalism when Trump speaks. Are there accounts of Hatians eating cats over the years? If that's something that people are brought up believing, that people have commonly said over time then I would accept that there is similarity in the two statements. Had you heard that Hatians ate cats a couple of years ago, is there context or a history of this? I can't find any prior reference in my bubble - do you have an example from yours?
I wasn't clear enough: I agree that there's no evidence that Haitian immigrants have eaten cats and I think the implication is disgraceful. My problem is that you treat that as prima facia evidence of white nationalism, evidently because it pattern-matches to people in your local bubble.
"I can understand someone without my experience not hearing white nationalism when Trump speaks."
I don't know why you think exposure to poisonous extremists gives you an advantage here: by now, I think most every American understands what neo-Nazis and white supremacists are like. We have either read their words, watched videos of them, or spoken to them in person (or all three). By contrast, your account of Trump's speech indicates one of two things:
1) You have never met or spoken to people who, in good faith, object to removal of statues of confederate luminaries and slave owners for [reasons].
or
2) You think that merely *objecting to the removal* makes someone a white supremacist.
Or both. If it's something else, I'm interested in hearing it.
Even then, reducing Trump's speech to "he called neo-Nazis 'fine people'" is, at a minimum, grossly misleading. It omits the fact that he denounced neo-Nazis three times in the space of about a minute. Three times! Not, as you wrote "an off-hand statement at the end", but prior to the "nice people" remark and twice after that. Say what you will about covering his ass (which, incidentally, I predicted in my original comment): what a shitty ally! Who would take comfort from that kind of support?
I loathe Trump and think slavery is a grotesque stain on our history. But that soundbite erodes confidence in our media institutions and arguing that it represents accurate reporting destroys your credibility with a huge proportion of Americans who are not, by the common understanding of the words, neo-Nazis or white supremacists.
I think there's a problem of different definitions in this controversy.
For a conservative, "white supremacist" is a relatively narrow category, meaning KKK member or literal Nazi. If you're not waving a swastika, or wearing a white hood, you're good.
For a liberal, "white supremacist", well, the tongue in cheek definition is being a conservative, but it really is a much broader category. Certainly anyone who displays a Confederate flag, or demonstrates in support of Confederate monuments, would absolutely qualify.
What Trump was saying was "Very fine people can strongly support Confederate monuments, that does not make such people like KKK members or literal Nazis".
Note he was apparently factually wrong about who was at the rally in specific, but the above idea was what he was conveying.
However, from the liberal perspective, that concept itself is wrong, and offensively wrong, by definition. But again, conservatives don't see it that way.
And I think we see that difference played out in this exchange.
I agree this gets us closer to understanding the controversy.
I think most Americans have a different definition than the "liberal" and conservative positions you outlined (I'd say "progressive" or "left" instead of "liberal"): that a "white supremacist" is someone that has specific, large scale goals about how the country should be organized. They don't have to literally belong to the KKK, but they do have to think the country would be a better place if it formally and explicitly guaranteed privileges to people of European descent over other ethnic groups.
Prior to Trump's election, mainstream media used this definition in almost all circumstances. When describing people, they would err on the side of the narrower definition, only labelling self-avowed white supremacists and neo-Nazis as such.
So, an honest reporter that shared the progressive view might have written "anyone that supports maintaining confederate monuments is a white supremacist in my book, so by definition Donald Trump was praising white supremacists, even though he denounced them." More likely, the reporter would launder the sentiment through certified intellectual authorities, but she would at least present the argument, because the reporter would be aware that her definition was not commonplace, *even if she thought it was accurate and superior*.
Mainstream media coverage of Charlottesville didn't do that, and the fact that most mainstream reporters are not Kendian consequentialists just makes it worse: they don't even subscribe to the view that might make their reporting ethical. They just omitted Trump's other statements to make him look bad and (ideally) disqualify him.
That lacks basic respect for their audience and erodes their credibility - and that's without asking what Trump even knew about the protests (I agree with you that the most likely interpretation of his speech is that he was simply factually wrong about who was at the rally).
By contrast, if a writer for the Southern Poverty Law Center tells me "Trump said neo-Nazi's are very fine people", I would not be surprised or outraged. The SPLC is an aggressively activist organization that doesn't even try to communicate across different models of the world (which is why there's no future in which the majority of Americans take them seriously - likewise, InfoWars and other low-quality right-wing "news" outlets).
Broadcast news and mainstream print media operate on different premises, which entail signaling when they use terms in unconventional ways. They only do otherwise when they are trying to deceive their audience.
Judging someone's actions by the information in one's bubble is really the only way, that I can see. As soon as some new information comes in, this conversation for example, my bubble expands. David Neiwart, ACLU, Southern Poverty Law Center. Tah-Nehisi Coates, various other authors and journalists, these are the folks that inform my understanding of white nationalism, what they say and how they say it. I'm always open to new sources if you have some favorites.
Trump was talking about a "Unite the Right" rally (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unite_the_Right_rally). This, from Wikipedia : "The organizers' stated goals included the unification of the American white nationalist movement and opposing the proposed removal of the statue of General Robert E. Lee from Charlottesville's former Lee Park". Couple that mission statement with with the list of participating organizations and I am comfortable saying that anyone attending that rally in support, even peacefully, was a white nationalist. I think the burden of proof would have to be on the person claiming that someone attending a rally promoting the unification of American white nationalist movement somehow WASN'T supporting white nationalism. Trump offers no such proof, and given his past support of white nationalist speakers and his own white nationalist rhetoric, I think it's clear he's calling white nationalists "very fine people".
It was Lee Atwater himself who explained how racists tailor their message to the times and the audience. So here we have someone I believe strongly is a white nationalist supporting other white nationalists, but remembering that on a national stage he needs a disclaimer. Again, ymmv, but if the clip above is what we're talking about, then we might have to agree to disagree and blame our bubbles.
BTW - this is exactly the kind of support white nationalists feed on (see David Neiwart's writing). They are aware Atwater was talking about/to them.
I get that lazily playing the race card is a problem - but I don't feel I'm doing that here. I feel I brought the receipts.
As I am of a certain age, I grin when I see Lee "Just keep stirring the pot, you never know what will come up." Atwater occasionally resurrected.
Your case is buttressed by Republicans espousing anti-diversity in general. Not only derogating immigrants, but also their lengthy and continuing history of championing anti-LGBT+ sentiment and laws. A lot of fingers sitting together in those gloves.
You say "establishment institutions, they—. . . that is, modern science, public health, professional journalism, and so on—provide the only way of securing knowledge about the world in complex, modern societies. Rejecting such institutions wholesale and “doing one’s own research” does not liberate one from error; it almost guarantees error." Surely this is an overstatement.
For example, I teach intellectual property law and I am an expert in patent law. If a controversial IP issue arises, I will certainly get better knowledge by doing my own research than by reading the news. Friends interested in the issue will probably get better knowledge by asking me (which often happens) than by reading the news. Conversely, I have a friend who is an academic biologist doing a very large controlled study (I believe the world’s largest) on the effect of spraying glyphosate on forests. If I want to know about that, I am better off asking him than listening to the news. By extension, there are often cases where I will get better information by asking people I trust than by reading the news. The origin of Covid is a good example. I initially believed the market origin hypothesis from reading the news, which uniformly pushed it strongly. I became aware of the lab leak hypothesis from listing to Razib interview Alina Chan. Even if you don’t believe the lab leak theory, the news stories at the time, including in Nature, were clearly factually wrong about the certainty of the market origin hypothesis, and many people could and did do better by doing their own research.
Yes, I agree it’s an overstatement. (It has to be a concise opening speech). I would say: except on a narrow range of areas where one has specific expertise, one is typically better deferring to consensus judgements of experts within elite epistemic institutions. However, these institutions have lots of problems, which means they are often biased and wrong. That means we need to improve the institutions, rather than encouraging people to “do their own research”, which overwhelmingly (although not in every single case) leads people to form inaccurate beliefs.
Whether it is true that a person is typically better off deferring to elite institutions depends both on the knowledge the individual and the trustworthiness of the institution. Even your less categorical argument turns on the implicit assumption that the institutions you mention are generally quite trustworthy. That is not clear. Some elite institutions are trustworthy, some are not. Would you say the average American is better off deferring to the judgment of Fox News - which is, after all, professional journalism - than doing their own research? Should we trust our own common sense or WPATH on youth transitioning? Personally, I am inclined to trust the Cass Review, but that is specific to the particular institution? How does one decide which elite institution to trust, except by doing your own research.
The underlying problem is that most elite institutions are politicized. Take the NYT as the gold standard for professional journalism. While I trust that they would not knowingly publish factual falsehoods, I absolutely do not trust them to give a complete and balanced picture of hot button issues. Scientific American was once a good source of accessible science reporting, but today it is not remotely trustworthy on controversial issues. I might have agreed with your thesis 30 years ago, when most elite institutions professed a commitment to truth seeking. (Of course, people are political creatures and politics has always shaded ‘objective’ inquiry to some extent.) But now, many elite institutions explicitly prioritize activism, and I know, either personally or from people directly involved, that many others do so implicitly. I have to infer that even many others are similarly compromised. I don’t see a basis for generalized trust in elite institutions. And once we move away from generalized trust, what alternative is there to relying one’s own research, at least to the extent of deciding which institutions to (prima facie) trust?
OK, I know I should stop, but as a recent example, CBS news deliberately lied for political reasons in editing the Kamala Harris interview.
I agree "Do your own research", is, in general, a bad way of ascertaining the truth. Unfortunately, the trustworthiness of elite institutions had reached the point where "Do your own research" is nonetheless arguably better.
I should add that I entirely agree with your last three paragraphs. I say 'almost' because I would edit it to say "people distrust establishment institutions. . .because they *correctly* do not view such institutions as reliable sources of truth." Basically, elite institutions built up reputational capital over decades by pursuing truth. Many of them then decided to spend that reputational capital in pursuit of political goals. The reputational capital is now spent. It will be a long road to build it up again, if they even want to try.
This will be made more difficult because there is an externality problem - the very deserved distrust of specific institutions has created a generalized distrust of all elite institutions. This generalization is not entirely unwarranted. The underlying force is a general shift in the educated elite towards activism. (I have my theories as to why, but that's a different matter). I would like to live in a world where trusting institutions is better than me doing my own research, but so far as I can tell, that is not the world we live in.
Well, if you'd done a bit more research on the Harris statement, you'd find she said BOTH sentences in the initial interview. They really said the same thing, the first more inartfully than the second. The first was not "word salad" in the sense we have come to know it with trump's sputterings. For Trump to assert it was involves contemplating kettles, pots, and the color black.
In editing the 45 minute interview down to the 20 minute time slot, they chose to show the second. There is no "lie" about what she said. She said what they showed.
I and a growing bazillion other Americans are not happy with the admiration's stance on the Middle East. Harris knows this. What she said was anodyne in both instances. But it certainly wasn't a lie by CBS to choose the less wordy of two anodyne statements when it had to leave 25 minutes of the whole interview out.
I do know that I would be way LESS happy with any approach at all trump might take to the Middle East.
I think this is the crux of it. On boring topics no one cares about, trust the experts. If it has anything to do with race or sex or other politicized topics... You need at least some background in the relevant fields to be able to wade through it all... I have an MA in psych, and have read quite a bit about the science of sex differences, IQ etc--including peer reviewed articles, not just YouTube videos and blog posts--so I'm pretty confident in my decisions on which experts to trust, and can say categorically without a doubt that the pronouncements made on these topics by "established institutions" are often 100% BS if not the complete opposite of the truth.
If you don't have the background and/or aptitude and/or time to investigate the evidence in depth, as most don't... I would say it's generally safe to assume the truth is close to the oppose of what elite institutions claim. You'd be better off listening to you grandmother, or depending on your age, great-grandmother. Failing that...you're better off consulting a magic 8-ball or pulling random words out of a bag than trusting elite institutions.
Not sure that being paid makes Fox News folks "professional" journalism?
On issues where the overall research is unsettled, like youth transitioning, the issue really isn't who we "should" trust, with or without our own research. The question is whether we should support LAWS based on one side of the research that force that side on the actual actions of others. On things like the "market vs lab leak" theory (actually hypothesis) it seems perfectly acceptable to say "the jury is out," but it doesn't much matter--the ship has sailed. Both keeping an eye on the encroachment of people into the wild AND being sure that lab protocols are met more stringently are things we can do in aid of preventing another outbreak of something new.
Setting aside the cohort of true subject matter experts it may be an uncomfortable truth but truth it is that of people are to be encouraged, in any context, to "do their own research" there is huge variation in the competence people have to do any research.
High ability may be correlated with experience in seriously researching any topic as some skills are likely highly transferrable - literature search, distillation, thesis refinement... Low ability is likely correlated with no such experience. People skilled in research may still get things wrong and the untrained may stumble on a conclusion later shown to be valid. But let's not pretend there is no expertise in research that is to say least some degree transferrable.
If it can be accomplished concisely, perhaps consider highlighting that "doing one's own research" is typically swapping one institutional source for an often less transparent, reviewable, or redressable source.
I feel like an offhanded remark about the insufficiency of alternatives serves more to highlight reasons to distrust sources more generally, since lack of alternatives, fed through motivational filters, is likely to erode rigor over time.
An element that I feel is missing, though perhaps not the place it, is that effort, in excess of or despite motivational and social pressures, may be required to afford the perception of trustworthiness, regardless of how trustworthy you make any given institution.
I'm pretty sure "doing one's own research" has simply become a catchphrase for searching out things that support what one already wants to believe and is guided by emotion, rather than thought. I'm a retired surety lawyer and during the controversy about trump's appeal bond and the surety he used, the media, from mainstream to niche, got the whole concept of surety wrong over and over. There is no reason to trust "the news" simply because it is "establishment." But the mistrust shouldn't be based on simply "feeling" that something is not right, and research to look into what it is one mistrusts shouldn't be solely looking into things that reinforce your feeling, ignoring things that argue against that feeling.
I tend to agree with everything you write, but I’d like to add to the part about truth-making. Much of our social world and the truths we have inherited are based on what the majority has agreed on earlier, internalised into facts and a perceived objective reality. To count something as true has thus required that others in the community or society have reached the same conclusion. Contradicting truths and narratives are instinctively seen as anomalies or threats to those old truths.
I’m writing about the Crisis of Truth myself but to illustrate this briefly: Imagine a ten-year-old boy bullying another boy in school. The teacher, school principal, and the parents agree that the boy clearly lacks moral sense and need to be punished in some way to learn a lesson. Consensus about the boy’s behaviour is established. Now let’s invite more voices and perspectives on this incident. A friend to the family might say, you have neglected the boy completely by being absorbed by career and job, this was a call for attention and love. Another might say the boy is doing really well in school but has no friends or hobbies and this was an unfortunate expression of loneliness. Yet another explains that the parents are going through a nasty divorce and nobody has been checking with the boy and his wellbeing, and so on.
Truth becomes more complex because there are now multiple ways of describing and understanding his behaviour.
And that’s what has happened in our time now. The Internet allows competing and contradicting voices and perspectives, which lead to the disintegration of old unitary narratives and truths. And many of them established in an age that is vastly different from ours. So, in a way we do live in post-truth, just not for the reason that is usually proclaimed in the media and in the context of misinformation.
I like the quote by Geuss. Otto Rank took it slightly further, ”The neurotic ... is not the voluntary happy seeker of truth, but the forced, unhappy finder of it."
A couple of other philosophers in the department and someone in the politics department at my uni. It's fair to say I dissented the most. Not sure I persuaded anyone!
I know you didn’t mean to reply to me but flat earthers used to be a very large and powerful movement before the scientific revolution. If the existence of a moribund movement today makes us a post truth society was there ever a time when we were not?
While I agree with what you write, I think am important issue is missing. We now live in an age where anyone can broadcast their opinion. This has a dual effect of marginalizing expertise and aiding in belief shopping. Social media has transformed flatearthers from the rare nutjob into movement.
re: "people distrust establishment institutions not because they have abandoned the value of truth but because they do not view such institutions as reliable sources of truth. "
This sentence is ambiguous. Do you mean that "people distrust ... not because they (the people) have abandoned ..." or that "people distrust not because they (the institutions) have abandoned".
I think that a great many people really do disbelieve the institutions because they think that the institutions have abandoned the value of truth.
There was a time when, with Richard Feynman we could all believe that "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts". http://www.feynman.com/science/what-is-science/ Truth is what you find out with scientific experimentation, and every new bit of truth you wiggle out of the universe shows the prior ignorance of those that went before. These days, many scientists substitute consensus for experimentation and call those who question their beliefs 'science-deniers'. These people are not trying to find out the truth -- like Humpty Dumpty they are asserting that the truth is whatever they say it is.
Thus what we need is a wholesale Scientific Reformation, akin to the Protestant Reformation in religion, for Scientific Institutions. Out with the dogma, and the priesthood, and the sale of indulgences, and back to that which we can discover through experimentation -- and replicate, too. This is actually an easier process than reforming, say, our political institutions, though if we are to trust them again they will need similar reformation too.
FWIW, I automatically read it as "the people" not "the institutions," because to me any intuitive appeal of a "post-truth" concept rests in the notion of all of us as a society abandoning truth on the demand side, including the possibility of trusting sources; not simply the establishment abusing truth on the supply side.
"that which we can discover through experimentation -- and replicate, too"
Vaccines replicate very well (pun intended). I don't think experimentation and replication are proof against massive lying campaigns, otherwise we wouldn't have so much nonsense about opposing mRNA vaccines. And nobody in the anti-vaccine movement cared that the autism stuff didn't replicate, was even retracted. No, clearly, something else is going on.
I agree that it is not helpful to talk about "post-truth" but I think that our current tools of information distribution, namely social media platforms, are uniquely able to promote inbred ingroup beliefs and shield people from exposure from conflicting information, which on the whole harms the public discourse to a point where it becomes questionable if such a discourse is even possible, because people have decamped from the conflicts of the common center to the fringes. The breakdown of public discourse is a dangerous threat to society, because it hollows out the foundations of trust on which it is ultimately built.
I understand that this talk can only be a short introduction, but it's still dissatisfying to end with the suggestion of a solution - trust in institutions - but no concrete ideas, how this trust can be created in such a polarized information environment.
Fair enough! I'm not yet convinced that the real culprit when it comes to those problems is social media, but it's a difficult question to answer conclusively.
I cannot offer conclusive evidence either, but the algorithmic recommendation engines of social media platforms have a self-reinforcing behavior, which is understandable: They offer you more of what you already seem to like.
Since time is necessarily a zero-sum game, more time spent in front of screens means less time and opportunity to engage with people in real life, where the probability of interacting with someone who has a different point of view and opinion is much, much higher.
When views are not regularly challenged, they have a tendency to ossify, which I believe is happening now.
In my opinion it was the time of the Covid-19 pandemic when this shift really took hold, because it forced people apart in real life while driving them towards digital information spaces, where they had ample opportunity to descend into more radical niches. I believe that many people have remained in these information environments after the C-19 restrictions ended and that there is, for example, a clear through-line from Covid scepticism to affinity towards anti-western viewpoints concerning the war in Ukraine.
Technically as you say, "post-truth" is sweeping and incoherent as a term. But it does effectively capture five common sentiments (encapsulated in the first statement below), which are up for debate:
1) There is something qualitatively different, and worse, about our current epistemic challenges and ability to communicate well as a society, compared to pre-internet and pre-social media.
2) It is easier than ever to get away with blatant lying, even when this occurs in plain daylight and does serious damage.
3) It is easier than ever for ridiculous beliefs to gain traction and influence, even when this occurs in plain daylight and does serious damage.
4) There is more information and ready access to it than ever, and our information ecology is more interconnected than ever. Therefore, we are more vulnerable than ever to corrupted information.
5) The far right and other powerful interests, in particular, are exploiting 1-4 in unprecedented ways,.
Perhaps a better term than "post-truth" for what many are feeling would be "post-manageable."
Yes, "post-manageable" is a great term. And you're right that disambiguating "post-truth" into those distinct five claims helps to clarify things a lot. I think I'd disagree with all five although these issues are complex!
And yet many perceive that the above problems are on a whole different level than they have been in the past, to the point of being qualitatively different. So the challenge would be to show why you believe this is an illusion.
I hope at some point you engage with the work of people in communication like Kate Starbird and Joe Bak-Coleman from U-Washington Center for An Informed Public - curious how much you agree or disagree
That's part of what I was getting at with #4 (information ecology and interconnectedness) but yes, you're right of course. Even if my sense is that the "post-truth" moniker became popular originally for how it nods specifically to the lying-without-consequences part (outright ignoring and abuse of truth). Which is similarly enabled by the complexity you speak of. But in the end all of these start to blur together; maybe that's the real problem.
Another thoughtful and thought-provoking post. I am, however, interested in a further elaboration of your final point. That is the rub, isn’t it? But how do make our institutions (government, media, academy etc) more credible and trustworthy? To the extent that they are not, then it is almost impossible for a reasonable person to know (or decide) what constitutes truth or, for that matter, BS in the current undifferentiated information environment.
Most public discourse centers on trade-offs, where no singular "truth" exists—only competing rationalizations and justifications for conflicting values and priorities. I'm not convinced that "truth" is even the right frame of reference for social sciences.
The author's suggestion that 'misinformation' is an insufficient concept to describe what is happening is I think sound, as is yours that 'post-truth' doesn't really describe anything useful (it always sounded to me like merely the lament of naive journalists for a more stable past). That said, I do think the suggestion that there is nothing substantively different between what we are experiencing now in terms of mass public delusion from the past, certainly in terms of the extent and severity of it, seems hard to sustain.
I largely agree with your main points. We often exaggerate how truthful people and institutions were in the past.
Regarding your conclusion: “ To solve it, we must build trust in institutions—most importantly, by making them more trustworthy.”
I think the fundamental problem with our institutions is that the upper and middle ranks of those institutions are more concerned about managing perceptions rather than solving problems within their domain of expertise. This goes for individuals who are trying to climb the institutional ladder as well as organizations adopting (or at least pretending to) Leftist policies regarding race, climate change, gender, sexual identity, etc.
Every institution has a mission and the more the focus on other issues, the worse they will get at accomplishing the very reasons why the institution was created in the first place. This makes all institutions less competent and less truthful.
If all non-political institutions were overtly non-political, it would solve a lot of problems. But so many of them want to focus on PR that will make their customers and employees feel good.
For what it is worth, you focus too much on the definitional granularity of simple memes VS how they are used. You did that with "mind virus", you are doing it with "post-truth". It is impossible for memes to be short and catchy but also precise. If that's true, then the focus is on what they actually mean by people using them - that's of course an empirical question to answer but we can speculate.
Speculating then:
"Post truth" is lamenting a trifecta combination of:
-Poor epistemology: Truth does not exist objectively, it is being imposed on us by those in power who have ulterior motives; we should ignore it and pursue our own truths that are better informed after we do our own research and listen to people we trust outside the "system"
-Poor social media design: Social media is a key channel of opinion forming, it selects for attention/clicks and its algorithms/bots promote fear and anxiety (or at the minimum novelty). Fictions can achieve that way better than truth.
-Truth/Lie evidence asymmetry: Truth is difficult to maintain as one has to prove all the counterfactuals which is impossible. Lies/bullshit have no requirement for such standard - they can range from "No evidence/just asking questions" to "Coincidental evidence + my own judgment / I have an alternative explanation". Lies/bullshit are easy to maintain.
The 3 legs reinforce one another. I cant trust the system, I go to social media, I look at the most watched stuff, they sound like a plausible alternative to what the system tells me, what else does the system lie to me about, I further dig into social media, I find many alternatives to the system narrative, definitely cant trust the system.
I don't know how you get out of this other by reforming social media to kill the virulent reinforcement of alternative theories by bots.
I am sceptical about the idea of rebuilding trust in institutions as telling us the truth given how easy it is poke holes in it. That can only be done in parallel with sanitising social media.
There was never a time where we were not fed bullshit constantly. We've been subject to propaganda and rumor since the beginning of time. The only dofference is that theres a lot more of it, and it spreads faster today. But people tend to stay in their individual information lane. Whatever feeds their biases.
We need to teach critical thinking and cognitive bias in HS.
The holy men were upset when the printing press was invented. They no longer controlled the information.
The government has been somewhat successful at controlling social media information. We know this for a fact from the Twitter files. Im really surprised that they havent passed regulation to take total control over it. However, if they do that, millions will drop off of those platforms and create other ways to share info.
The institutions are grasping at straws to keep the status quo, but the internet is democratizing everything.
Please forgive my spelling/formatting errors. This mobile app needs a lot of help.
Technically, a ‘conspiracy theory’ does not violate any of the laws of logic (including the criterion of soundness, which falls under the law of non-contradiction), it is just another theory, and insofar as it is only a theory it does not purport to be a fact but only a possible fact, whereas a flat denial of a conspiracy theory as misinformation, without a valid argument, does violate the laws of sense (non-contradiction). On the other hand, the phrase “post-truth” is already a performative contradiction; i mean, it does purport to be “true” while simultaneously denying that “truth” is still normative.
Nice point. That's the second time I've come across the term "performative contradiction" this morning, and I don't even work in the philosophy department!
The term originated in Discourse Ethics via Juergen Habermas and Karl Otto Apel
Habermas Is one of those authors I feel embarrassed at not having read.
In a nutshell, Habermas and Apel argued that any use of language implies that you want to be understood, that you invite another person to come to understanding with you, but if the intent of your speech is to confuse, misguide or manipulate, then you contradict the sense of language, hence your act of speaking contradicts your motives.
I suppose that's a more specific application of the sense in which I knew the term, which is any statement whose utterance contradicts its content (e.g.," I am currently unconscious").
Well put.
Dan, basically all your writing on this, to me, boils down to “there never was a time when people were just magically smarter, there were just trusted establishment institutions that set the truth and enough societal coherence that most people just went along with them, and for a while that created what felt like a golden age of information.”
I fully agree with this!
The problem is: the internet made the cost of publishing zero, the reach billions. It took European culture 200 years to adapt to the _printing press_; we are only at the beginning of the implications of total frictionless global information diffusion. (It’s not 100% positive so far to say the least!) It started with AM radio and cable, but the internet was 100x more impactful. To me what’s happening is almost a deterministic product of the existence of the internet (and enhanced-virality social media, etc. that is built on top of it). We ain’t going back without concerted government restrictions on communication — which ain’t gonna happen. Too illiberal, and in the US, unconstitutional.
This isn’t even to mention the role that the elite truth-mediating institutions had in their own demise of trust when they decided that certain inequalities in society needed to be eradicated, regardless of their cause. Others in this comment section are writing about that.
But even if the “anti-woke” achieve total victory, the Internet remains. How do you ever get a consensus elite-mediated truth back with this technology loose in the world? Do we even want it back?
Thanks. Fair points and good questions. I'm less pessimistic about the effects of the internet, I think, but agree there are real challenges.
Very much enjoy your writing, and this piece in particular. My wife and I, and our circle of friends, find ourselves in this exact position - we just can't understand how someone on the other side of the political divide can believe the things that are being said. Your explanations are a big help.
I do have to quibble with your juxtaposing a statement that seems to have no support from the real world, and a statement that you can nuance into being false. I went back and watched the "fine people" news conference a couple of times. I've lived in Mississippi, and all the points he made here are the points I heard from white supremecists who know that wearing their white hood is no longer socially acceptable. I think there is a very strong arguement based on social context and history that Trump was calling white supremecists and neo-Nazis "nice people". I don't think the argument that Haitians were eating people's cats has anywhere near that sort of support. I'm not saying there aren't liberal lies as stark as the Haitian lie, I can't think of any at the moment, but the example you used seems a real "both-sides" stretch to try and make a point.
Do I understand you correctly? Donald Trump reiterated points you've only ever heard from white supremacists, and that proves his statement "you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides" must be referring to them.
But ~10 seconds later, he said "I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally. But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists, okay?" How do you explain that?
You could say he was just covering his ass, because he was aware that praising neo-Nazis was beyond the pale, but an alternative explanation is that are people outside your bubble - people that aren't white nationalists - who make those points too.
Wherever you come down on the question, collapsing these considerations into "Donald Trump called neo-Nazi's 'fine people'" is "truthy" in exactly the same way that the appalling "Haitians are eating pets" story is "truthy". Vance and company would say something like "maybe they don't really eat pets, but Haitians have a dramatically different culture, including very different food taboos, so good enough." If you're convinced Donald Trump is sympathetic to white nationalists, I'm going to sound unreasonably fussy, but that's exactly how you sound to the cat meme people - scrupulous about things you care about and permissive about stuff you don't.
(All quotes from https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-very-fine-people/)
I see a very distinct difference. There is no evidence that Hatians actually ate cats in Springfield or anywhere else. Nor dogs or anything that normal white in Ohio keep as pets. This is simply a lie made up out of whole cloth.
Your point, saying "Hatians are different and icky so we can make up lies about them" is "truthy", actually a good example of MY point. These are the kinds of things that white supremecists and neo-nazis invent and spread. This othering has repeated examples over history, "they are insane", "they bring disease", "their genes will degrade ours", and so on - all things that Trump and other Republican leaders have said publicly for years.
Take this history, and then reconsider Trump's 3 minute public defense of the white nationalists who had pulled the permit for the protest (he states this explicitly). There is an off hand statement at the end about neo-nazis being bad which sounds very much to me as a CYA routine that's another often used ruse when white nationalists are talking in public - "not all blacks", "I have black friends", "I can find a black person who also says this"... etc.
Now, ymmv. I can understand someone without my experience not hearing white nationalism when Trump speaks. Are there accounts of Hatians eating cats over the years? If that's something that people are brought up believing, that people have commonly said over time then I would accept that there is similarity in the two statements. Had you heard that Hatians ate cats a couple of years ago, is there context or a history of this? I can't find any prior reference in my bubble - do you have an example from yours?
I wasn't clear enough: I agree that there's no evidence that Haitian immigrants have eaten cats and I think the implication is disgraceful. My problem is that you treat that as prima facia evidence of white nationalism, evidently because it pattern-matches to people in your local bubble.
"I can understand someone without my experience not hearing white nationalism when Trump speaks."
I don't know why you think exposure to poisonous extremists gives you an advantage here: by now, I think most every American understands what neo-Nazis and white supremacists are like. We have either read their words, watched videos of them, or spoken to them in person (or all three). By contrast, your account of Trump's speech indicates one of two things:
1) You have never met or spoken to people who, in good faith, object to removal of statues of confederate luminaries and slave owners for [reasons].
or
2) You think that merely *objecting to the removal* makes someone a white supremacist.
Or both. If it's something else, I'm interested in hearing it.
Even then, reducing Trump's speech to "he called neo-Nazis 'fine people'" is, at a minimum, grossly misleading. It omits the fact that he denounced neo-Nazis three times in the space of about a minute. Three times! Not, as you wrote "an off-hand statement at the end", but prior to the "nice people" remark and twice after that. Say what you will about covering his ass (which, incidentally, I predicted in my original comment): what a shitty ally! Who would take comfort from that kind of support?
I loathe Trump and think slavery is a grotesque stain on our history. But that soundbite erodes confidence in our media institutions and arguing that it represents accurate reporting destroys your credibility with a huge proportion of Americans who are not, by the common understanding of the words, neo-Nazis or white supremacists.
I think there's a problem of different definitions in this controversy.
For a conservative, "white supremacist" is a relatively narrow category, meaning KKK member or literal Nazi. If you're not waving a swastika, or wearing a white hood, you're good.
For a liberal, "white supremacist", well, the tongue in cheek definition is being a conservative, but it really is a much broader category. Certainly anyone who displays a Confederate flag, or demonstrates in support of Confederate monuments, would absolutely qualify.
What Trump was saying was "Very fine people can strongly support Confederate monuments, that does not make such people like KKK members or literal Nazis".
Note he was apparently factually wrong about who was at the rally in specific, but the above idea was what he was conveying.
However, from the liberal perspective, that concept itself is wrong, and offensively wrong, by definition. But again, conservatives don't see it that way.
And I think we see that difference played out in this exchange.
I agree this gets us closer to understanding the controversy.
I think most Americans have a different definition than the "liberal" and conservative positions you outlined (I'd say "progressive" or "left" instead of "liberal"): that a "white supremacist" is someone that has specific, large scale goals about how the country should be organized. They don't have to literally belong to the KKK, but they do have to think the country would be a better place if it formally and explicitly guaranteed privileges to people of European descent over other ethnic groups.
Prior to Trump's election, mainstream media used this definition in almost all circumstances. When describing people, they would err on the side of the narrower definition, only labelling self-avowed white supremacists and neo-Nazis as such.
So, an honest reporter that shared the progressive view might have written "anyone that supports maintaining confederate monuments is a white supremacist in my book, so by definition Donald Trump was praising white supremacists, even though he denounced them." More likely, the reporter would launder the sentiment through certified intellectual authorities, but she would at least present the argument, because the reporter would be aware that her definition was not commonplace, *even if she thought it was accurate and superior*.
Mainstream media coverage of Charlottesville didn't do that, and the fact that most mainstream reporters are not Kendian consequentialists just makes it worse: they don't even subscribe to the view that might make their reporting ethical. They just omitted Trump's other statements to make him look bad and (ideally) disqualify him.
That lacks basic respect for their audience and erodes their credibility - and that's without asking what Trump even knew about the protests (I agree with you that the most likely interpretation of his speech is that he was simply factually wrong about who was at the rally).
By contrast, if a writer for the Southern Poverty Law Center tells me "Trump said neo-Nazi's are very fine people", I would not be surprised or outraged. The SPLC is an aggressively activist organization that doesn't even try to communicate across different models of the world (which is why there's no future in which the majority of Americans take them seriously - likewise, InfoWars and other low-quality right-wing "news" outlets).
Broadcast news and mainstream print media operate on different premises, which entail signaling when they use terms in unconventional ways. They only do otherwise when they are trying to deceive their audience.
Thanks for the reasoned debate, it's often not the case on the intertubes :).
Here's the clip of Trump's "very fine people" I've been using - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmaZR8E12bs. Let me know if there 's a better one.
Judging someone's actions by the information in one's bubble is really the only way, that I can see. As soon as some new information comes in, this conversation for example, my bubble expands. David Neiwart, ACLU, Southern Poverty Law Center. Tah-Nehisi Coates, various other authors and journalists, these are the folks that inform my understanding of white nationalism, what they say and how they say it. I'm always open to new sources if you have some favorites.
Trump was talking about a "Unite the Right" rally (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unite_the_Right_rally). This, from Wikipedia : "The organizers' stated goals included the unification of the American white nationalist movement and opposing the proposed removal of the statue of General Robert E. Lee from Charlottesville's former Lee Park". Couple that mission statement with with the list of participating organizations and I am comfortable saying that anyone attending that rally in support, even peacefully, was a white nationalist. I think the burden of proof would have to be on the person claiming that someone attending a rally promoting the unification of American white nationalist movement somehow WASN'T supporting white nationalism. Trump offers no such proof, and given his past support of white nationalist speakers and his own white nationalist rhetoric, I think it's clear he's calling white nationalists "very fine people".
It was Lee Atwater himself who explained how racists tailor their message to the times and the audience. So here we have someone I believe strongly is a white nationalist supporting other white nationalists, but remembering that on a national stage he needs a disclaimer. Again, ymmv, but if the clip above is what we're talking about, then we might have to agree to disagree and blame our bubbles.
BTW - this is exactly the kind of support white nationalists feed on (see David Neiwart's writing). They are aware Atwater was talking about/to them.
I get that lazily playing the race card is a problem - but I don't feel I'm doing that here. I feel I brought the receipts.
Cheers
As I am of a certain age, I grin when I see Lee "Just keep stirring the pot, you never know what will come up." Atwater occasionally resurrected.
Your case is buttressed by Republicans espousing anti-diversity in general. Not only derogating immigrants, but also their lengthy and continuing history of championing anti-LGBT+ sentiment and laws. A lot of fingers sitting together in those gloves.
More than a stretch if you ask me.
One side of the aisle legitimately admits it is making shit up for politics.
But don’t call it post truth for some reason
https://www.dailydot.com/debug/jd-vance-haitian-cat-memes/
You say "establishment institutions, they—. . . that is, modern science, public health, professional journalism, and so on—provide the only way of securing knowledge about the world in complex, modern societies. Rejecting such institutions wholesale and “doing one’s own research” does not liberate one from error; it almost guarantees error." Surely this is an overstatement.
For example, I teach intellectual property law and I am an expert in patent law. If a controversial IP issue arises, I will certainly get better knowledge by doing my own research than by reading the news. Friends interested in the issue will probably get better knowledge by asking me (which often happens) than by reading the news. Conversely, I have a friend who is an academic biologist doing a very large controlled study (I believe the world’s largest) on the effect of spraying glyphosate on forests. If I want to know about that, I am better off asking him than listening to the news. By extension, there are often cases where I will get better information by asking people I trust than by reading the news. The origin of Covid is a good example. I initially believed the market origin hypothesis from reading the news, which uniformly pushed it strongly. I became aware of the lab leak hypothesis from listing to Razib interview Alina Chan. Even if you don’t believe the lab leak theory, the news stories at the time, including in Nature, were clearly factually wrong about the certainty of the market origin hypothesis, and many people could and did do better by doing their own research.
Yes, I agree it’s an overstatement. (It has to be a concise opening speech). I would say: except on a narrow range of areas where one has specific expertise, one is typically better deferring to consensus judgements of experts within elite epistemic institutions. However, these institutions have lots of problems, which means they are often biased and wrong. That means we need to improve the institutions, rather than encouraging people to “do their own research”, which overwhelmingly (although not in every single case) leads people to form inaccurate beliefs.
Whether it is true that a person is typically better off deferring to elite institutions depends both on the knowledge the individual and the trustworthiness of the institution. Even your less categorical argument turns on the implicit assumption that the institutions you mention are generally quite trustworthy. That is not clear. Some elite institutions are trustworthy, some are not. Would you say the average American is better off deferring to the judgment of Fox News - which is, after all, professional journalism - than doing their own research? Should we trust our own common sense or WPATH on youth transitioning? Personally, I am inclined to trust the Cass Review, but that is specific to the particular institution? How does one decide which elite institution to trust, except by doing your own research.
The underlying problem is that most elite institutions are politicized. Take the NYT as the gold standard for professional journalism. While I trust that they would not knowingly publish factual falsehoods, I absolutely do not trust them to give a complete and balanced picture of hot button issues. Scientific American was once a good source of accessible science reporting, but today it is not remotely trustworthy on controversial issues. I might have agreed with your thesis 30 years ago, when most elite institutions professed a commitment to truth seeking. (Of course, people are political creatures and politics has always shaded ‘objective’ inquiry to some extent.) But now, many elite institutions explicitly prioritize activism, and I know, either personally or from people directly involved, that many others do so implicitly. I have to infer that even many others are similarly compromised. I don’t see a basis for generalized trust in elite institutions. And once we move away from generalized trust, what alternative is there to relying one’s own research, at least to the extent of deciding which institutions to (prima facie) trust?
OK, I know I should stop, but as a recent example, CBS news deliberately lied for political reasons in editing the Kamala Harris interview.
I agree "Do your own research", is, in general, a bad way of ascertaining the truth. Unfortunately, the trustworthiness of elite institutions had reached the point where "Do your own research" is nonetheless arguably better.
I should add that I entirely agree with your last three paragraphs. I say 'almost' because I would edit it to say "people distrust establishment institutions. . .because they *correctly* do not view such institutions as reliable sources of truth." Basically, elite institutions built up reputational capital over decades by pursuing truth. Many of them then decided to spend that reputational capital in pursuit of political goals. The reputational capital is now spent. It will be a long road to build it up again, if they even want to try.
This will be made more difficult because there is an externality problem - the very deserved distrust of specific institutions has created a generalized distrust of all elite institutions. This generalization is not entirely unwarranted. The underlying force is a general shift in the educated elite towards activism. (I have my theories as to why, but that's a different matter). I would like to live in a world where trusting institutions is better than me doing my own research, but so far as I can tell, that is not the world we live in.
Well, if you'd done a bit more research on the Harris statement, you'd find she said BOTH sentences in the initial interview. They really said the same thing, the first more inartfully than the second. The first was not "word salad" in the sense we have come to know it with trump's sputterings. For Trump to assert it was involves contemplating kettles, pots, and the color black.
In editing the 45 minute interview down to the 20 minute time slot, they chose to show the second. There is no "lie" about what she said. She said what they showed.
I and a growing bazillion other Americans are not happy with the admiration's stance on the Middle East. Harris knows this. What she said was anodyne in both instances. But it certainly wasn't a lie by CBS to choose the less wordy of two anodyne statements when it had to leave 25 minutes of the whole interview out.
I do know that I would be way LESS happy with any approach at all trump might take to the Middle East.
I think this is the crux of it. On boring topics no one cares about, trust the experts. If it has anything to do with race or sex or other politicized topics... You need at least some background in the relevant fields to be able to wade through it all... I have an MA in psych, and have read quite a bit about the science of sex differences, IQ etc--including peer reviewed articles, not just YouTube videos and blog posts--so I'm pretty confident in my decisions on which experts to trust, and can say categorically without a doubt that the pronouncements made on these topics by "established institutions" are often 100% BS if not the complete opposite of the truth.
If you don't have the background and/or aptitude and/or time to investigate the evidence in depth, as most don't... I would say it's generally safe to assume the truth is close to the oppose of what elite institutions claim. You'd be better off listening to you grandmother, or depending on your age, great-grandmother. Failing that...you're better off consulting a magic 8-ball or pulling random words out of a bag than trusting elite institutions.
Not sure that being paid makes Fox News folks "professional" journalism?
On issues where the overall research is unsettled, like youth transitioning, the issue really isn't who we "should" trust, with or without our own research. The question is whether we should support LAWS based on one side of the research that force that side on the actual actions of others. On things like the "market vs lab leak" theory (actually hypothesis) it seems perfectly acceptable to say "the jury is out," but it doesn't much matter--the ship has sailed. Both keeping an eye on the encroachment of people into the wild AND being sure that lab protocols are met more stringently are things we can do in aid of preventing another outbreak of something new.
Setting aside the cohort of true subject matter experts it may be an uncomfortable truth but truth it is that of people are to be encouraged, in any context, to "do their own research" there is huge variation in the competence people have to do any research.
High ability may be correlated with experience in seriously researching any topic as some skills are likely highly transferrable - literature search, distillation, thesis refinement... Low ability is likely correlated with no such experience. People skilled in research may still get things wrong and the untrained may stumble on a conclusion later shown to be valid. But let's not pretend there is no expertise in research that is to say least some degree transferrable.
If it can be accomplished concisely, perhaps consider highlighting that "doing one's own research" is typically swapping one institutional source for an often less transparent, reviewable, or redressable source.
I feel like an offhanded remark about the insufficiency of alternatives serves more to highlight reasons to distrust sources more generally, since lack of alternatives, fed through motivational filters, is likely to erode rigor over time.
An element that I feel is missing, though perhaps not the place it, is that effort, in excess of or despite motivational and social pressures, may be required to afford the perception of trustworthiness, regardless of how trustworthy you make any given institution.
Great speech, Dan.
Cheers!
Interesting point - and thanks!
I'm pretty sure "doing one's own research" has simply become a catchphrase for searching out things that support what one already wants to believe and is guided by emotion, rather than thought. I'm a retired surety lawyer and during the controversy about trump's appeal bond and the surety he used, the media, from mainstream to niche, got the whole concept of surety wrong over and over. There is no reason to trust "the news" simply because it is "establishment." But the mistrust shouldn't be based on simply "feeling" that something is not right, and research to look into what it is one mistrusts shouldn't be solely looking into things that reinforce your feeling, ignoring things that argue against that feeling.
We still live in a pre-truth society. Enlightenment values never really stuck.
Yes, I'm much more comfortable with "pre-truth" than "post-truth".
I tend to agree with everything you write, but I’d like to add to the part about truth-making. Much of our social world and the truths we have inherited are based on what the majority has agreed on earlier, internalised into facts and a perceived objective reality. To count something as true has thus required that others in the community or society have reached the same conclusion. Contradicting truths and narratives are instinctively seen as anomalies or threats to those old truths.
I’m writing about the Crisis of Truth myself but to illustrate this briefly: Imagine a ten-year-old boy bullying another boy in school. The teacher, school principal, and the parents agree that the boy clearly lacks moral sense and need to be punished in some way to learn a lesson. Consensus about the boy’s behaviour is established. Now let’s invite more voices and perspectives on this incident. A friend to the family might say, you have neglected the boy completely by being absorbed by career and job, this was a call for attention and love. Another might say the boy is doing really well in school but has no friends or hobbies and this was an unfortunate expression of loneliness. Yet another explains that the parents are going through a nasty divorce and nobody has been checking with the boy and his wellbeing, and so on.
Truth becomes more complex because there are now multiple ways of describing and understanding his behaviour.
And that’s what has happened in our time now. The Internet allows competing and contradicting voices and perspectives, which lead to the disintegration of old unitary narratives and truths. And many of them established in an age that is vastly different from ours. So, in a way we do live in post-truth, just not for the reason that is usually proclaimed in the media and in the context of misinformation.
I like the quote by Geuss. Otto Rank took it slightly further, ”The neurotic ... is not the voluntary happy seeker of truth, but the forced, unhappy finder of it."
I appreciate the Rank quote.
Dead philosophers are wiser than almost all of the living.
I’d be curious to know who the other panelists are and whether you’re the only dissenter.
A couple of other philosophers in the department and someone in the politics department at my uni. It's fair to say I dissented the most. Not sure I persuaded anyone!
If you didn’t persuade them then they’re the ones living in post truth! Ha!
I know you didn’t mean to reply to me but flat earthers used to be a very large and powerful movement before the scientific revolution. If the existence of a moribund movement today makes us a post truth society was there ever a time when we were not?
While I agree with what you write, I think am important issue is missing. We now live in an age where anyone can broadcast their opinion. This has a dual effect of marginalizing expertise and aiding in belief shopping. Social media has transformed flatearthers from the rare nutjob into movement.
re: "people distrust establishment institutions not because they have abandoned the value of truth but because they do not view such institutions as reliable sources of truth. "
This sentence is ambiguous. Do you mean that "people distrust ... not because they (the people) have abandoned ..." or that "people distrust not because they (the institutions) have abandoned".
I think that a great many people really do disbelieve the institutions because they think that the institutions have abandoned the value of truth.
There was a time when, with Richard Feynman we could all believe that "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts". http://www.feynman.com/science/what-is-science/ Truth is what you find out with scientific experimentation, and every new bit of truth you wiggle out of the universe shows the prior ignorance of those that went before. These days, many scientists substitute consensus for experimentation and call those who question their beliefs 'science-deniers'. These people are not trying to find out the truth -- like Humpty Dumpty they are asserting that the truth is whatever they say it is.
Thus what we need is a wholesale Scientific Reformation, akin to the Protestant Reformation in religion, for Scientific Institutions. Out with the dogma, and the priesthood, and the sale of indulgences, and back to that which we can discover through experimentation -- and replicate, too. This is actually an easier process than reforming, say, our political institutions, though if we are to trust them again they will need similar reformation too.
I meant they distrust them not because they (the people) have abandoned any concern with truth.
Ah! I took it the other way ... :)
FWIW, I automatically read it as "the people" not "the institutions," because to me any intuitive appeal of a "post-truth" concept rests in the notion of all of us as a society abandoning truth on the demand side, including the possibility of trusting sources; not simply the establishment abusing truth on the supply side.
"that which we can discover through experimentation -- and replicate, too"
Vaccines replicate very well (pun intended). I don't think experimentation and replication are proof against massive lying campaigns, otherwise we wouldn't have so much nonsense about opposing mRNA vaccines. And nobody in the anti-vaccine movement cared that the autism stuff didn't replicate, was even retracted. No, clearly, something else is going on.
I agree that it is not helpful to talk about "post-truth" but I think that our current tools of information distribution, namely social media platforms, are uniquely able to promote inbred ingroup beliefs and shield people from exposure from conflicting information, which on the whole harms the public discourse to a point where it becomes questionable if such a discourse is even possible, because people have decamped from the conflicts of the common center to the fringes. The breakdown of public discourse is a dangerous threat to society, because it hollows out the foundations of trust on which it is ultimately built.
I understand that this talk can only be a short introduction, but it's still dissatisfying to end with the suggestion of a solution - trust in institutions - but no concrete ideas, how this trust can be created in such a polarized information environment.
Fair enough! I'm not yet convinced that the real culprit when it comes to those problems is social media, but it's a difficult question to answer conclusively.
I cannot offer conclusive evidence either, but the algorithmic recommendation engines of social media platforms have a self-reinforcing behavior, which is understandable: They offer you more of what you already seem to like.
Since time is necessarily a zero-sum game, more time spent in front of screens means less time and opportunity to engage with people in real life, where the probability of interacting with someone who has a different point of view and opinion is much, much higher.
When views are not regularly challenged, they have a tendency to ossify, which I believe is happening now.
In my opinion it was the time of the Covid-19 pandemic when this shift really took hold, because it forced people apart in real life while driving them towards digital information spaces, where they had ample opportunity to descend into more radical niches. I believe that many people have remained in these information environments after the C-19 restrictions ended and that there is, for example, a clear through-line from Covid scepticism to affinity towards anti-western viewpoints concerning the war in Ukraine.
Technically as you say, "post-truth" is sweeping and incoherent as a term. But it does effectively capture five common sentiments (encapsulated in the first statement below), which are up for debate:
1) There is something qualitatively different, and worse, about our current epistemic challenges and ability to communicate well as a society, compared to pre-internet and pre-social media.
2) It is easier than ever to get away with blatant lying, even when this occurs in plain daylight and does serious damage.
3) It is easier than ever for ridiculous beliefs to gain traction and influence, even when this occurs in plain daylight and does serious damage.
4) There is more information and ready access to it than ever, and our information ecology is more interconnected than ever. Therefore, we are more vulnerable than ever to corrupted information.
5) The far right and other powerful interests, in particular, are exploiting 1-4 in unprecedented ways,.
Perhaps a better term than "post-truth" for what many are feeling would be "post-manageable."
Yes, "post-manageable" is a great term. And you're right that disambiguating "post-truth" into those distinct five claims helps to clarify things a lot. I think I'd disagree with all five although these issues are complex!
And yet many perceive that the above problems are on a whole different level than they have been in the past, to the point of being qualitatively different. So the challenge would be to show why you believe this is an illusion.
I hope at some point you engage with the work of people in communication like Kate Starbird and Joe Bak-Coleman from U-Washington Center for An Informed Public - curious how much you agree or disagree
Perhaps #6: the complexity of today's world makes it much easier to misguide people without outright lying to them.
That's part of what I was getting at with #4 (information ecology and interconnectedness) but yes, you're right of course. Even if my sense is that the "post-truth" moniker became popular originally for how it nods specifically to the lying-without-consequences part (outright ignoring and abuse of truth). Which is similarly enabled by the complexity you speak of. But in the end all of these start to blur together; maybe that's the real problem.
Another thoughtful and thought-provoking post. I am, however, interested in a further elaboration of your final point. That is the rub, isn’t it? But how do make our institutions (government, media, academy etc) more credible and trustworthy? To the extent that they are not, then it is almost impossible for a reasonable person to know (or decide) what constitutes truth or, for that matter, BS in the current undifferentiated information environment.
Most public discourse centers on trade-offs, where no singular "truth" exists—only competing rationalizations and justifications for conflicting values and priorities. I'm not convinced that "truth" is even the right frame of reference for social sciences.
What is your take on this?: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/10/hurricane-milton-conspiracies-misinformation/680221/
The author's suggestion that 'misinformation' is an insufficient concept to describe what is happening is I think sound, as is yours that 'post-truth' doesn't really describe anything useful (it always sounded to me like merely the lament of naive journalists for a more stable past). That said, I do think the suggestion that there is nothing substantively different between what we are experiencing now in terms of mass public delusion from the past, certainly in terms of the extent and severity of it, seems hard to sustain.
What past? How would you precisely characterize the substantive difference?
I largely agree with your main points. We often exaggerate how truthful people and institutions were in the past.
Regarding your conclusion: “ To solve it, we must build trust in institutions—most importantly, by making them more trustworthy.”
I think the fundamental problem with our institutions is that the upper and middle ranks of those institutions are more concerned about managing perceptions rather than solving problems within their domain of expertise. This goes for individuals who are trying to climb the institutional ladder as well as organizations adopting (or at least pretending to) Leftist policies regarding race, climate change, gender, sexual identity, etc.
Every institution has a mission and the more the focus on other issues, the worse they will get at accomplishing the very reasons why the institution was created in the first place. This makes all institutions less competent and less truthful.
If all non-political institutions were overtly non-political, it would solve a lot of problems. But so many of them want to focus on PR that will make their customers and employees feel good.
For what it is worth, you focus too much on the definitional granularity of simple memes VS how they are used. You did that with "mind virus", you are doing it with "post-truth". It is impossible for memes to be short and catchy but also precise. If that's true, then the focus is on what they actually mean by people using them - that's of course an empirical question to answer but we can speculate.
Speculating then:
"Post truth" is lamenting a trifecta combination of:
-Poor epistemology: Truth does not exist objectively, it is being imposed on us by those in power who have ulterior motives; we should ignore it and pursue our own truths that are better informed after we do our own research and listen to people we trust outside the "system"
-Poor social media design: Social media is a key channel of opinion forming, it selects for attention/clicks and its algorithms/bots promote fear and anxiety (or at the minimum novelty). Fictions can achieve that way better than truth.
-Truth/Lie evidence asymmetry: Truth is difficult to maintain as one has to prove all the counterfactuals which is impossible. Lies/bullshit have no requirement for such standard - they can range from "No evidence/just asking questions" to "Coincidental evidence + my own judgment / I have an alternative explanation". Lies/bullshit are easy to maintain.
The 3 legs reinforce one another. I cant trust the system, I go to social media, I look at the most watched stuff, they sound like a plausible alternative to what the system tells me, what else does the system lie to me about, I further dig into social media, I find many alternatives to the system narrative, definitely cant trust the system.
I don't know how you get out of this other by reforming social media to kill the virulent reinforcement of alternative theories by bots.
I am sceptical about the idea of rebuilding trust in institutions as telling us the truth given how easy it is poke holes in it. That can only be done in parallel with sanitising social media.
There was never a time where we were not fed bullshit constantly. We've been subject to propaganda and rumor since the beginning of time. The only dofference is that theres a lot more of it, and it spreads faster today. But people tend to stay in their individual information lane. Whatever feeds their biases.
We need to teach critical thinking and cognitive bias in HS.
The holy men were upset when the printing press was invented. They no longer controlled the information.
The government has been somewhat successful at controlling social media information. We know this for a fact from the Twitter files. Im really surprised that they havent passed regulation to take total control over it. However, if they do that, millions will drop off of those platforms and create other ways to share info.
The institutions are grasping at straws to keep the status quo, but the internet is democratizing everything.
Please forgive my spelling/formatting errors. This mobile app needs a lot of help.