Focus: Post-truth and Democracy
2021 (43) Issue 2
Editorial 
Editorial
The concept of ‘post-truth’ has existed for a while, but after the Oxford dictionary named it ‘word of the year’ in 2016, it has permeated public and academic debates. Since then, it has become synonymous with the populist threat to the liberal-democratic order. The concept points to the impression that we are entering an age of decay in which the achievements of modernity—objectivity, science, rationality, and democracy—are being gradually replaced by emotionality, agnotology, irrationality, and authoritarianism. Post-truth refers to the emergence of a political culture in which debates are primarily framed by affect instead of facts. Lying and disinformation are normalized, and expertise as well as rational deliberation are secondary to affectual campaigning. Furthermore, it highlights a social and political constellation characterized by the fact that verdicts about truth are no longer based on general and collectively shared epistemic criteria, but on personal beliefs and emotions. In conclusion, post-truth is seen by many as a threat not only to the ideal of deliberative democracy, but also to the identification and societal acceptance of solutions to urgent contemporary problems, such as climate change or the Covid-19 pandemic.
The value of popular concepts like ‘post-truth’ is that they condense complex empirical phenomena, enabling societal and political debate on an elevated, more reflective level. However, this elevated discourse does not always contribute to diagnostic objectivity, rather it allows a selective and biased view on a subject, which possibly blurs analytical rigour. This seems to apply to ‘post-truth’. The prefix ‘post’ suggests that we are currently leaving a golden age of democracy characterized by generally accepted criteria for truth and rationality. Such a nostalgic advocacy of the truth is itself not supported by the facts; lies and disinformation have always been part of political discourse in democracies. This does not mean, of course, that current phenomena like the diffusion of fake news in the digital sphere or the erosion of trust in the epistemic authority of science are not having a new impact, or that they are not posing a particular challenge to liberal democracy. However, philosophical and social-scientific analyses addressing these current post-truth phenomena would do well to examine either the general empirical and normative epistemic conditions for liberal democracy, or conversely, the democratic conditions for epistemic harmony. This focus of Analyse & Kritik is dedicated to this timely set of quandaries.
Sophia Rosenfeld takes a historical perspective to analyse the current posttruth situation and the challenges it poses. The starting point of her argument is a critical reconstruction of the historical ‘truth regime’ of liberal democracies. This regime postulates an open-ended and collaborative seeking of moral and empirical truths, which provide the foundation for democratic agonism. However, the ‘democratic truth process’ has always been in danger of being ‘hijacked’, both by experts and by populist voices, which, despite all differences in their underlying epistemologies, claim exclusive rights of definition. While at other times the democratic truth process was threatened primarily by ‘expertocracy’, at present the greatest danger comes from so-called populists. Rosenfeld sees the current post-truth problem as so fundamental that it cannot be solved by simple institutional means. Nor is history a good guide here. Instead, it might be necessary to look for new paradigms to readjust the relationship between democracy and truth.
Joseph Heath analyses the current post-truth political condition as the cumulative effect of political communication that has become increasingly strategic and has dissolved its commitment to essential norms of deliberation, like truth and rationality. He explains this erosion of norms as the result of structural changes in the media system, which political communicators learned to exploit for their interests. Heath is particularly critical of the loss of institutionalised gatekeepers in the context of the ongoing digitization of political communication. This is accompanied by a gap in quality control that cannot be filled by citizens, as they have no incentive to invest in the effort. Given the serious structural obstacles to deliberative democracy, the main task now would be to design institutions and norms for a post-deliberative age. Heath conjectures that in this age, questions of political participation play a lesser role than questions of state output, such as the quality of state services provided to citizens.
Bruce Kuklick sketches three historical developments in the US during the second half of the 20th century, two within academia and one within politics. First is the shift from the scientific positivism that dominated up until the Second World War towards an attitude called either ‘postmodernism’, ‘social constructivism’, or ‘anti-realism’. Second is the shift from a rigidly scientific meta-ethics towards the ever-growing weight of social justice within a debate increasingly open to normative partisanship. Third is the development of (mis)information strategies within and through governments, up to the invention of the notorious ‘alternative facts’ quip.
Regarding the first two developments, Kuklick contrasts the deflation of truth in the scientific field with the inflation of provability in the normative field (ethics and politics)—both standing strangely contrary to each other. Concerning the third development, he ponders the conspicuous parallel between truth-deflation among philosophers and the sloppiness towards truth within politics. While he remains sceptical of the deep-reaching liability of academics for the post-truth phenomena in public, he inclines towards the Deweyan argument for truth as a necessary ingredient in democratic procedures. This has to be read, perhaps, as a pragmatic and instrumental vote for realism, which also fits with the observation of moral attitudes overriding pro-scientific ones.
If Kuklick writes with a spirit of critical reluctance regarding this ‘funny’ development that is depriving our culture of formerly solid concepts like objectivity and truth, Sharon Rider and Steve Fuller are determined to take away something positive from the post-truth development. According to Rider, the ‘post-truth condition’ is not primarily a sociological phenomenon to be explained causally by the pathological state of a minority, but rather an overarching cultural development showing the European enlightenment coming into its own. Postmodernism is ‘enlightenment gone mad’, the consequence of everyone being his or her own reasoner and endemic self-directed critic. If in this perspective there is no longer a firm basis for objectivity and truth—something Rider underpins via the philosopher Donald Davidson’s coher-entism—some other barriers against limitless sense have to be identified. With ‘external truth’ no longer available, all answers have to come from within discourse. Rider sees help coming less from a renewed theory of science, or from any other philosophical discipline, but rather from a formalist analysis of poetry.
Similar to Rider, Steve Fuller views the post-truth condition as one of democracy fully realised. A whole series of conclusions accompany this diagnosis. Fuller sees the ‘agonistic’ view of democracy as the default status and considers ‘deliberative’ theories of democracy to be unrealistic labels masking the rule by experts in the real world. The epistemic approach to democracy then seems inherently ‘undemocratic’, as it gives voice to only a part of the citizenry, perhaps also representing its interests one-sidedly. If deliberative procedures are categorized like this from the beginning (as by Fuller), post-truth groups competing with scientific experts can be framed as democratic, as they are shaking an order of belief that is not giving everyone their due, something key to the core definition of democracy. Fuller elaborated on this position in recent publications, and here he reflects on the proper role of how the individual fits into his analysis of the post-truth condition.
William Lynch develops an extensive critique of Fuller’s approving attitude towards post-truth as a democratization of science. He argues that ‘Fuller’s epistemic populism’ ultimately ignores the democratic tolerance paradox and thus runs the risk of completely compromising democratic deliberation. Lynch, however, is less concerned with restoring the old authority of scientific institutions, and instead searches for social conditions of reliable knowledge production that can cope with current challenges, such as social media. In doing so, he draws on considerations from the 1930s and 1940s, which saw popular science education as a way of linking controversies about truth claims with the demands of democracy. In his response to Lynch, Fuller traces the long-time development of his present view of a democratic epistemology, which renounces any idea of scientific realism, with all socially relevant topics decided in the court of public opinion, even if people are contradicting themselves. In what he now calls ‘quantum epistemology’, rival groups in society determine their own views of social knowledge. Striving for a highly individualized democracy takes precedence over truth, and not the other way around.
The Editors
Table of Contents
Post-truth and Democracy
Title: Are we Really Past Truth? A Historian’s Perspective
Author: Sophia Rosenfeld
Page: 265-283
The prevalence of the term post-truth suggests that we have, in the last few years, moved from being members of societies dedicated to truth to being members of ones that cannot agree on truth’s parameters and, even worse, have given up trying. But is this really what has happened? The author argues that, under the sway of the Enlightenment, truth has actually been unstable and a source of contention in public life ever since the founding moment for modern democracies in the late eighteenth century; the ‘post’ in ‘post-truth’ elides this complex history even as it accurately describes some of the conditions of our moment. What that means, though, is that rather than attempt to turn the clock back to past models and practices for restoring the reign of truth, we should be looking for new, post-Enlightenment paradigms for how to define and locate truth in the context of democracy, as well as new mechanisms for making this possible.
Title: Post-deliberative Democracy
Author: Joseph Heath
Page: 285-308
Within any adversarial rule-governed system, it often takes time for strategically motivated agents to discover effective exploits. Once discovered, these strategies will soon be copied by all other participants. Unless it is possible to adjust the rules to preclude them, the result will be a degradation of the performance of the system. This is essentially what has happened to public political discourse in democratic states. Political actors have discovered, not just that the norm of truth can be violated in specific ways, but that many of the norms governing rational deliberation can also be violated, not just without penalty, but often for significant political gain. As a result, the level of noise (false or misleading communications) has come to drown out the signal (earnest attempts at deliberation). The post-truth political condition is the cumulative result of innovations developed by actors who adopt an essentially strategic orientation toward political communications.
Title: Something Funny Happened on the Way to the Twenty-First Century
Author: Bruce Kuklick
Page: 309-329
This essay first traces change in, roughly, the epistemology of the humanities from the 1950s to the 21st century. The second section looks at how the meaning and options in moral philosophy altered in more or less the same period. The last and easily most speculative section examines how these changes permeated American culture, and how professional philosophers responded to the challenges of the new political world they inhabited.
Title: Fitting and Fudging: On the Folly of Trying to Define Post-truth
Author: Sharon Rider
Page: 331-350
I propose that the ‘post-truth condition’, i.e., the vulnerability of our institutions for establishing and negotiating what is true and worth knowing, is not primarily a pathology, a susceptibility to external manipulation or coercion, as tends to be stressed in the literature, but has first and foremost to do with the unraveling of certain epistemic assumptions. In analogy with T.S. Eliot’s modernist notion that the attempt to capture and concretize an experience or a state of mind requires ‘objective correlatives’ which it conveys, I argue that the trope of post-truth to express the embattled status of expertise can be understood in terms of failed symbolization. In the second section, I spell out what this means in terms of Donald Davidson’s discussion of the problem of defining truth. In the last section, I propose a ‘poetics of political theory’ for understanding the post-truth condition.
Title: Democracy Naturalized: In Search of the Individual in the Post-truth Condition
Author: Steve Fuller
Page: 351-366
This article takes a ‘naturalistic’ look at the historically changing nature of the individual and its implications for the terms on which democracy might be realized, starting from classical Athens, moving through early debates in evolutionary theory, to contemporary moral and political thought. Generally speaking, liberal democracy sees individuality as the mark of an evolutionarily mature species, whereas socialist democracy sees it as the mark of an evolutionary immature species. Overall, the individual has been ‘de-naturalized’ over time, resulting in the indeterminate figure who thrives in the post-truth condition.
Title: Behind the Screens: Post-truth, Populism, and the Circulation of Elites
Author: William T. Lynch
Page: 367-393
The alleged emergence of a ‘post-truth’ regime links the rise of new forms of social media and the reemergence of political populism. Post-truth has theoretical roots in the interdisciplinary field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), with sociologists of science arguing that both true and false claims should be explained by the same kinds of social causes. Most STS theorists have sought to deflect blame for post-truth, while at the same time enacting a normative turn, looking to deconstruct truth claims and subject expertise to criticism. Steve Fuller has developed a positive case for post-truth in science, arguing that post-truth democratizes science. I criticize this argument and suggest an alternative approach that draws on the prehistory of the field in the 1930s and 1940s, when philosophers and sociologists sought to define the social conditions necessary for reliable knowledge production that might stem mass media irrationalism.
Title: Symmetry as a Guide to Post-truth Times: A Response to Lynch
Author: Steve Fuller
Page: 395-411
William Lynch has provided an informed and probing critique of my embrace of the post-truth condition, which he understands correctly as an extension of the normative project of social epistemology. This article roughly tracks the order of Lynch’s paper, beginning with the vexed role of the ‘normative’ in Science and Technology Studies, which originally triggered my version of social epistemology 35 years ago and has been guided by the field’s ‘symmetry principle’. Here the pejorative use of ‘populism’ to mean democracy is highlighted as a failure of symmetry. Finally, after rejecting Lynch’s appeal to a hybrid Marxian–Darwinism, Carl Schmitt and Thomas Hobbes are contrasted en route to what I have called ‘quantum epistemology’.
General Part
Title: Capital, Ideology, and the Liberal Order
Author: Nick Cowen* and Vincent Geloso
Page: 413-435
Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Ideology (2020) offers a powerful critique of ideological justifications for inequality in capitalist societies. Does this mean we should reject capitalist institutions altogether? This paper defends some aspects of capitalism by explaining the epistemic function of market economies and their ability to harness capital to meet the needs of the relatively disadvantaged. We support this classical liberal position with reference to empirical research on historical trends in inequality that challenges some of Piketty’s interpretations of the data. Then we discuss the implications of this position in terms of limits on the efficacy of participatory governance within firms and the capacity of the state to levy systematic taxes on wealth.