University of Kwazulu-Natal

Post Truth As An Epistemic Crisis The Need For Rationality Autonomy

Bonisiwe Shabane
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post truth as an epistemic crisis the need for rationality autonomy

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit... The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from... To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. This article is a critique of the notion of post-truth. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, I argue that the epistemological crisis suggested by the notion of post-truth is epiphenomenal to a more general crisis of authority, a crisis that is poorly understood...

I also argue that revisiting Arendt’s account of authority can help us elucidate the vexed dynamics of authority in modern society, as well as the dynamics behind its current crisis. The post-truth situation is a loss of authority that is political before it presents as epistemological. Effectively addressing this situation, I conclude, is a much more challenging and complex proposition than what is suggested in the literature on post-truth. Keywords: Post-truth, Authority, Crisis, Hannah Arendt, Populism Whenever the prefix “post” insinuates itself into our thinking, there is good reason to think again. This ubiquitous latinism is conspicuously void of information.

“Post” simply suggests that something is following upon, and supposedly surpassing, something else, without telling us anything specific about the nature of what follows, or the nature of what it follows upon, or how... “Postmodernism” is a famous case in point (cf. Foucault, 1984: 39). A more recent case in point is the notion that these are “post-truth” or “post-factual” times (see, e.g., d’Ancona, 2017; Block, 2019; Hyvönen, 2018; Kalpokas, 2019; McIntyre, 2018; Newman, 2019; Sim, 2019). In the deluge of academic, journalistic, and hybrid writing that has brought this notion to the fore, it has been suggested that we are in the midst of a “new war on truth” (d’Ancona,... Among the notable casualties in the new war we find, in addition to “truth,” “facts,” and “reason,” also “the Enlightenment,” which is now, we are told, “really dead,” since the Enlightenment “displaced the primacy...

This article is a critique of the notion of post-truth, and a reconsideration of the situation to which this notion inadequately refers. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, I argue that the epistemological crisis suggested by the misnomer “post-truth” is epiphenomenal to a more general crisis of authority, the nature of which has so far... Revisiting Arendt’s account of authority can help us elucidate both the general dynamics of authority in a modern democracy and the specific dynamics behind its current crisis. My main errand in this piece is thus to change perspectives on post-truth, hopefully for the benefit of our understanding of what is ailing us. This amounts to a look at what I take to be the big picture from which the purported post-truth situation is a cut-out and a blow-up. What follows is a zooming-out from the epistemological notions that dominate the literature and a proposal to approach the post-truth situation differently, analytically as well as politically.

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer. To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to upgrade your browser. 2023, Post-Truth and the Epistemological Crisis The polarization and charges of "post-truth" that mark contemporary politics may have its source, ultimately, in a crisis of epistemology, which is characterized by a tension between different forms of naïve realism-the view that... Perhaps too schematically, those on the right tend to be first-person naïve realists in treating economic and social realities as accessible to the ordinary political participant by simple common sense, while those on the... In treating reality as transparent enough to be legible either to oneself or to a group of experts, both sides tend to treat disagreement as a motivational problem-a problem of bad faith, motivated reasoning,...

In obviating the possibility of genuine disagreement, the epistemological crisis is quite naturally transformed into a political crisis. The post-truth arguments about knowledge being clearly a product of history, power, and the central aspect of this era's ideological judgment are the masses' perspectives. Popularly associated with a disregard for the veracity of political disclosure. The truth is determined solely by the existing listeners' manifested beliefs and values that people hold dear, rather than by the evidence presented. This world of lies and deception is supported and enabled by assertions of one or the other truth. Each party's lies are based on claims that they are speaking the truth while their opponent is lying!

Thus, not only is there a cynical use of lying, but there is also a cynical use of truth to ground these liesthis is the contemporary condition, which has been caused to a large... Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 July 2021 Post-truth politics has been diagnosed as harmful to both knowledge and democracy. I argue that it can also fundamentally undermine epistemic autonomy in a way that is similar to the manipulative technique known as gaslighting. Using examples from contemporary politics, I identify three categories of post-truth rhetoric: the introduction of counternarratives, the discrediting of critics, and the denial of more or less plain facts. These strategies tend to isolate people epistemically, leaving them disoriented and unable to distinguish between reliable and unreliable sources.

Like gaslighting, post-truth politics aims to undermine epistemic autonomy by eroding someone's self-trust, in order to consolidate power. Shifting the focus to the effects on the victim allows for new insights into the specific harms of post-truth politics. Applying the concept of gaslighting to this domain may also help people recognize a pernicious dynamic that was invisible to them before, giving them an important tool to resist it. Ever since “post-truth” was elected as word of the year 2016, journalists, social scientists and philosophers have sought to understand the nature and dangers of the phenomenon this term refers to. Some have pointed to its negative effects on our knowledge (Levy Reference Levy2017), others have connected it to Frankfurtian bullshit (Davies Reference Davies2017), and still others have warned that post-truth rhetoric is detrimental to... Though it has been argued that the term “post-truth” is ambiguous and misleading (Habgood-Coote Reference Habgood-Coote2019), the factual existence of political discourses that exhibit a lack of concern for facts and expertise is undeniable...

Each of the above analyses captures important harms involved in that type of political discourse. However, I believe there is one more wrong involved which has not sufficiently been recognized yet. Post-truth politics does not just impair knowledge or democracy, it can also undermine our epistemic self-trust and thereby our epistemic autonomy. Because of this, and because of the techniques it employs to do so, I will argue it is remarkably similar to a form of manipulation known as gaslighting. Gaslighting aims at having the victim doubt their own judgment, perception, and sense of reality. The term is primarily used to describe a form of interpersonal manipulation, though there is growing journalistic use of the term to describe contemporary political tactics (Dowd Reference Dowd1995; Caldwell Reference Caldwell2016; Duca Reference...

This paper aims to develop a philosophically robust analysis of these ascriptions, that is, of describing “post-truth” politics as a form of gaslighting. In particular, it explores what gaslighting might look like in a political context, and in so doing, reveals important and overlooked dangers of post-truth politics. Importantly, I will argue these include harmful effects on epistemic autonomy. My view is not meant as a competing analysis of post-truth politics and its dangers, but as an extension of the existing analyses. Shifting the focus from democracy and knowledge to the effects on victims and their autonomy allows for new insights into some of the specific harms of post-truth politics, and the ways in which various... Often when speaking of post-truth, we think of the powerful and the arrogant – of those who have so much self-trust they feel they are above the facts.

But there is another, perhaps bigger group of people who instead feel confused, disoriented, and powerless. For them, knowledge of factual truth may instead seem beyond their reach. Crucially, the concept of gaslighting might help them recognize a pernicious dynamic that was invisible to them before. Knowing what gaslighting is enables us to identify it when it is happening in front of us. That recognition might be a crucial first step in empowering people to resist gaslighting. In the first section, I will give some background on the term post-truth and introduce three examples from contemporary politics.

Each example represents one of three categories of post-truth rhetoric I will distinguish, all of which obscure truth, albeit in a distinct way. The second section outlines what gaslighting is, how it works, and why it works. By impairing a person's self-trust through deceit, manipulation and isolation, gaslighters not only violate their epistemic autonomy, but actually systematically erode it. In the third section, I further explain the three categories of post-truth rhetoric and how they, too, threaten epistemic self-trust and epistemic autonomy. I demonstrate how counternarratives are introduced to distract and confuse, how critics are discredited to undermine the difference between reliable and unreliable sources, and how blatant fact-resistance in some may lead to self-doubt in... Each of these strategies might, under certain circumstances, get a victim to distrust at least some of their epistemic capacities.

In the fourth section I draw out the implications of these similarities. Acknowledging some superficial differences, I show how studying post-truth politics through the lens of collective gaslighting is a mutually informative exercise. Considering its analogy to gaslighting, I conclude by pointing to possible ways in which to prevent, resist or remedy post-truth political rhetoric.

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