1.1 The Context of Post-Truth: The Trumpian Age
George Orwell reminds us in Nineteen Eighty-Four that the regime of Big Brother and its use of doublethink âmeans the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in oneâs mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.â (1981/1949, 176) If logic was supposed to preserve some modicum of clarity and ascertain truth claims, under fascism and totalitarianism it loses its power. This is the case in Orwellâs dystopian novel because the party controls the historical record, erasing inconvenient facts and adding others, so that the distinction between truths and lies becomes blurred. As Orwell says, the âpast was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.â (ibid., 64) If official assertions are deemed truthful only because they are sanctioned by those who authored them, what is the point of quibbling over logical nuances and empirical evidence and testimonies? Any challenge in Orwellâs fictive world is bound to end in either dismissal or persecution, gulags established by the likes of Stalin and his henchmen or concentration camps set up by Hitler and the Gestapo. President Trump has relegated anything he fears or disagrees with as âfake newsâ to discredit it as unworthy of the traditional critical examination accorded to public claims and statements of fact, following the slippery slope that turns democracies into totalitarian regimes. Herein lies the concern of this book: it is not that the Trump Administration will ignore dissent and send dissenters to the gulags or concentration camps, but that it will empty public discourse of the richness of debate and deliberation, where conventional reference to evidence and truth telling are sacrosanct. In other words, without some basic agreement about the boundary conditions that inform communication as a starting point, agreements and disagreements are reduced to personal preferences and power moves.
Becoming popular with Brexit and continuing into the Trump era, âpost-truthâ was dubbed by the Oxford English Dictionary its word of the year in 2016. Post-truth must be taken seriously not only by journalists who cover current political development but also by philosophers. On one level, this term takes us back to the classical Socratic distinction between sophistry and philosophy, and on another, there is something more insidious and frightening akin to the dystopia envisioned by Orwell. The specter of truth haunts the contemporary political stage, relentlessly being dismissed while never quite leaving the stage, demanding, as it were, to remain at the center of every debate, whether about the scientific data informing the fight against coronavirus contagion or foreign relations with adversaries. On another level, this point of obfuscation about the truth and perhaps relativism run amok was an unintended consequence of the challenges to every scientific claim for its hold on truth and certainty. To speak of hypocrisy in the moral register requires speaking about truth telling and the conditions under which a statement is deemed true. Philosophers have traditionally played a central role in investigating the conditions that distinguish true statements from false ones, both on logical and empirical grounds. Their investigations established the ground rules for communication so that misrepresentations could be corrected rather than, in the Orwellian fictive world, become part of a fabricated historical record. In this sense, epistemological questions become moral questions as well: statements that cannot be critically examined and refuse rectification can turn into deliberate deceptions. The post-truth condition requires the kind of epistemological and moral vigilance that would undergird the engagement with the specter of hypocrisy. The community of science studies has traditionally scrutinized the privilege accorded the natural sciences as the explorers of knowledge and the guardians of its truth claims. This critical scrutiny linked epistemological concerns with social and moral ones as they apprise public policy.
As one of its leaders, Bruno Latour reminds the community of science studies writ large (sociologists, philosophers, and anthropologists who endorse some version of deconstruction, poststructuralism, or postmodernism) that it may be indirectly responsible for the current misunderstanding of how to deal with critical engagements, but not for the perniciousness of our post-truth predicament. To someone unfamiliar with the critiques of scientific certainty, these critiques may seem to legitimate the dismissal of empirical data, evidence-based statements, and the means by which scientific claims are deemed to be credible or true. Is this âgullible criticism,â indeed, âa case of radicalism gone madâ? (Latour 2004, 231) Latourâs lament suggests that the âquestion was never to get away from facts but closer to them, not fighting empiricism but, on the contrary, renewing empiricism.â (ibid.; italics in the original) There is a difference between bad critique contesting the facticity of scientific âfactsâ and good science studies wanting to âget closerâ to facts. For science studies scholars, the facticity of facts and the grounds on which they are established (epistemology) is only one part of the story; the other, even more crucial part is concerned with the horrors inflicted on people, animals, and the planet when facts are deliberately or accidentally misconstrued and are uncritically accepted (morality). In this rendering, an earlier concern with the âtwo dogmas of empiricism,â introduced two generations earlier by the philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine comes to mind. The first âdogmaâ or belief suggests that there is âsome fundamental cleavageâ between truths that are analytic (âgrounded in meanings independent of matters of factâ) and those that are synthetic (âgrounded in factâ). (1961, 20) The second dogma is reductionism: âthe belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience.â (ibid.) In questioning the validity of these two sets of belief, the one about the meanings that depend on facts and the other about the logical structure of language, Quine deliberately blurs the boundary between âspeculative metaphysics and natural science.â (ibid.) His own pragmatic approach argues for the inherent interpretive dimension of every statement about human experience and thereby problematizes the epistemological conditions under which a community of inquirers reaches an agreement about truth claims.
As Quine concedes, the âmyth of physical objects is epistemologically superiorâ to myths about gods and fairies that control nature because it has âproven more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience.â (ibid., 44) The efficacy in question here differs from an appeal to a direct and unencumbered perception and knowledge of facts; instead, it relies on the continuous interpretation and inscription of meaning to statements about matters of fact, allowing for the changing truth status of statements (given new evidence). Quineâs concession to degrees of truth about knowledge claims and Latourâs concern to get âcloserâ to facts in order to ascertain their truth-value are supposed to reassure the scientific community and the public that the truth about our knowledge claims is still worthy of pursuit. There are others, like Steve Fuller, who seem to have given up on the quest for truth altogether and give credence to the Orwellian nightmare we observe in the Trumpian age. As a leading British sociologist of science and advocate of social epistemology (all knowledge is socially constructed), Fuller offers academic legitimacy to a dismissive way of thinking about truth claims and the conditions under which they ought to be scrutinized. His promotion of post-truth circumvents the critical analysis of truth conditions in favor of a plurality of opinions that in turn need not defend themselves in any epistemological court. (2018, Chapter 1) This approach exploits Quineâs analysis of the dogmas of empiricism and Latourâs lament over losing touch with empirical facts and cynically presents itself as the guardian of populist common sense. With a Trump-like glee, the likes of Fuller present themselves as rebellious mavericks and iconoclasts fighting against the privileged elites whose insular scientific discourse is deployed by experts to pontificate over authoritative consensus claims.
At stake is no longer an internal debate among scientists and philosophers over knowledge claims and their truth-value, but the very possibility of coherent deliberations over public policies. Given that what has been taken for granted about public communication can no longer be relied on, it is worthwhile to revisit the classic philosophical concerns with ontology and epistemology. These concerns point to the danger of critical engagement deteriorating into skepticism and relativism. To avoid ending with outright cynicism about the possibility of knowing anything at all, it would behoove us to agree, however tentatively and by convention, that in order to pursue the truth about empirical data (for personal reasons or policy purposes) a community (of inquirers) must share a common ground or some ground rules of communication.
Revisiting the question of what counts as truth telling takes us back to Socratesâ ongoing battle with the sophists of his day. Some have argued that the line of demarcation between philosophy and sophistry is clear, almost sacrosanct. The standard argument goes like this: âphilosophyâ (ÏÎčλοÏÎżÏία filosofĂa) claims as its end the love of wisdom and therefore of knowledge and truth, while âsophistryâ (ÏÎżÏÎčÏÏΔία sofisteĂa) uses fallacious arguments and deceptive techniques to win debates. It is interesting that the Latin sophista (and sophists) refers to someone who makes use of fallacious arguments and to âa master of oneâs craft; a wise or prudent man, one clever in matters of daily life,â the first with negative and the second with positive connotations. The addition of âcleverâ in the second could have a negative connotation as well if it were meant to contrast with the âwiseâ of wisdom. In any case, sophistry becomes in Socratesâ hands a contemptuous and pejorative label to distinguish those clever (even if wise) craftsmen from the philosophers whose love of wisdom has no pecuniary rewards. (Century Dictionary) Socratesâ derisive comments about sophistry are usually presented as part of his unwavering commitment to the truth, the love of wisdom at all costs, and his famous claim that sophists are paid to twist meanings to suit their paying masters (Gorgias). Aristotle continues in this vein to define sophistry as âwisdom in appearance onlyâ (Metaphysics). In Socratesâ denunciation of sophistry in general and the sophists as his sworn enemies there is a subtle acknowledgment of the knotty relationship between the seeker of truth and wisdom and the one who claims to have gained it. During his trial, Socrates suggests he is the wisest man alive because he knows what he does not know, admitting to the limitations of his knowledge (Apology). The sophists, by contrast, are pretentious: they pretend to know what they, by definition, cannot know, that is, the truth. They may know something, as Socrates admits he does as well, but their knowledge consists of the tricks of the game of learning and the rhetorical skills with which to persuade their listeners. Philosophers and sophists alike use rhetorical devices and are therefore rhetoricians and orators, attempting to persuade their audiences. The difference between philosophers and the sophists, then, lies in their respective intentions: some seek truth, the others seek to win arguments. The rhetorical skills will not get one to the truth, though they will help win arguments. The lawyer as sophist thus seeks to argue the case as persuasively as possible, even when this results in exonerating the guilty and indicting the innocent.
My reading of Socrates detects a certain concern with hypocrisyâdeception and pretense, self-deception, and the deliberate manipulation of an audience (even of one)âconveniently leveled against sophists but exempting philosophers. (see some of this in Dupriez 1991) But is the charge of hypocrisy applicable in a case where sophists openly declare their intent to argue as powerfully as possible to win the hearts of their audience and win cases when paid to do so? In this sense, sophists are as honest about their trade as philosophers are, though their goals differ. Perhaps there is a confusion here between sophistry and rhetoric, a confusion that begins already with Socrates. As Edward Schiappa (1995) suggests (following Gorgias 465C), Socratesâ sense of the mixture of the two relies on his observations about the methods used by the sophists. In selling their credentials and their expertise, sophists used rhetorical devices and th...