Post truth

What is the Post truth ???

" A lie has speed but

  truth has endurance"

Post-truth seems to have been first used in this meaning in a 1992 essay by the late Serbian-American playwright Steve Tesich in The Nation magazine. Reflecting on the Iran-Contra scandal and the Persian Gulf War, Tesich lamented that ‘we, as a free people, have freely decided that we want to live in some post-truth world’. There is evidence of the phrase ‘post-truth’ being used before Tesich’s article, but apparently with the transparent meaning ‘after the truth was known’, and not with the new implication that truth itself has become irrelevant.

The phenomenon of “post-truth” rocketed to public attention in November 2016, when the Oxford Dictionaries named it 2016’s word of the year. After seeing a 2,000 percent spike in usage over 2015, the choice seemed obvious. Among the other contenders on the shortlist were “alt-right” and “Brexiteer,” highlighting the political context of the year’s selection. As a catch-all phrase, “post-truth” seemed to capture the times. Given the obfuscation of facts, abandonment of evidential standards in reasoning, and outright lying that marked 2016’s Brexit vote and the US presidential election, many were aghast. If Donald Trump could claim—without evidence—that if he lost the election it would be because it was rigged against him.

After the election, things only got worse. Trump claimed—again with no facts to back him up—that he had actually won the popular vote (which Hillary Clinton had taken by nearly 3 million votes), if one deducted the millions of people who had voted illegally. And he doubled down on his claim that—despite the consensus of seventeen American intelligence agencies—the Russians had not hacked the American election.2 One of his handlers seemed to embrace the chaos by arguing that “there’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore as facts.”

Post-truth is a periodizing concept referring to a transnational, historically specific, empirically observable public anxiety about public truth claims and authority to be a legitimate public truth-teller.It also refers to the theories about the historically specific converging causes that have produced its communication forms and effects. The term garnered widespread popularity, in the form of post - truth politics , in the period around the 2016 United States presidential election  and the Brexit referendum. It was named word of the year in 2016 by the Oxford Dictionary where it is defined as "Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion  and personal belief".

After being sworn in as president on January 20, 2017, Trump offered a string of fresh falsehoods: that he had the biggest electoral victory since Reagan (he didn’t); that the crowd at his inauguration was the largest in US history (photographic evidence belies this and Washington, DC, Metro records show subway ridership down that day); that his speech at the CIA resulted in a standing ovation (he never asked the officers to sit). In early February, Trump claimed that the US murder rate was at a forty-seven-year high when in fact the Uniform Crime Report from the FBI showed it to be at a near-historic low

The Oxford Dictionaries define “post-truth” as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”

 In this, they underline that the prefix “post” is meant to indicate not so much the idea that we are “past” truth in a temporal sense (as in “postwar”) but in the sense that truth has been eclipsed—that it is irrelevant. These are fighting words to many philosophers, but it is worth noting that this is much more than an academic dispute. In 2005, Stephen Colbert coined the term “truthiness” defined as being persuaded by whether something feels true, even if it is not necessarily backed up by the facts in response to George W. Bush’s excesses in relying on his “gut” for big decisions—such as the nomination of Harriet Miers for the US Supreme Court or going to war in Iraq without adequate proof of weapons of mass destruction. When the term was coined, “truthiness” was treated as a big joke, but people aren’t laughing anymore.

Some scholars argue that post-truth has similarities with past moral, epistemic, and political debates about relativism, postmodernity, and mendacity in politics, including untruthfulness, lies, deception, and deliberate falsehood,[5] while others insist that post-truth refers to distinct historical, social, and political relations and forms especially associated with 21st century communication technologies and cultural practices.

Post-truth politics (also called post-factual politics and post-reality politics) is a political culture in which debate is framed largely by appeals to emotion disconnected from the details of policy , and by the repeated assertion of talking points  to which factual rebuttals are ignored.

So is post-truth just about lying, then? Is it mere political spin? Not precisely. As presented in current debate, the word “post-truth” is irreducibly normative. It is an expression of concern by those who care about the concept of truth and feel that it is under attack. But what about those who feel that they are merely trying to tell the “other side of the story” on controversial topics? That there really is a case to be made for alternative facts? The idea of a single objective truth has never been free from controversy. Is admitting this necessarily conservative? Or liberal? Or perhaps it is a fusion, whereby largely leftwing relativist and postmodernist attacks on the idea of truth from decades ago have now simply been co-opted by right-wing political operatives.

The concept of truth in philosophy goes all the way back to Plato who warned (through Socrates) of the dangers of false claims to knowledge. Ignorance, Socrates felt, was remediable; if one is ignorant, one can be taught. The greater threat comes from those who have the hubris to think that they already know the truth, for then one might be impetuous enough to act on a falsehood. It is important at this point to give at least a minimal definition of truth. 

Perhaps the most famous is that of 

Aristotle said:

 “to say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true.” 

Naturally, philosophers have fought for centuries over whether this sort of “correspondence” view is correct, where by we judge the truth of a statement only by how well it fits reality. Other prominent conceptions of truth (coherentist, pragmatist, semantic) reflect a diversity of opinion among philosophers about the proper theory of truth, even while—as a value—there seems little dispute that truth is important.

For now, however, the question at hand is not whether we have the proper theory of truth, but how to make sense of the different ways that people subvert truth. As a first step, it is important to acknowledge that we sometimes make mistakes and say things that are untrue without meaning to do so. In that case, one is uttering a “falsehood,” as opposed to a lie, for the mistake is not intentional.

 The next step beyond this is “willful ignorance,” which is when we do not really know whether something is true, but we say it anyway, without bothering to take the time to find out whether our information is correct. In this case, we might justifiably blame the speaker for his or her laziness, for if the facts are easily available, the person who states a falsehood seems at least partially responsible for any ignorance. Next comes lying, when we tell a falsehood with intent to deceive. This is an important milestone, for we have here crossed over into attempting to deceive another person, even though we know that what we are saying is untrue. By definition, every lie has an audience. We may not feel responsible for uttering a falsehood if no one is listening or if we are sure that no one will believe it, but when our intent is to manipulate someone into believing something that we know to be untrue, we have graduated from the mere “interpretation” of facts into their falsification. 

Post-truth politics is a subset of the broader term post-truth, which has historical roots prior to the recent focus on political events. Post-truth differs from traditional contesting and falsifying of facts by relegating facts and expert opinions to be of secondary importance relative to appeal to emotion. While this has been described as a contemporary problem, some observers have described it as a long-standing part of political life that was less notable before the advent of the Internet and related social changes.As of 2018, political commentators have identified post-truth politics as ascendant in many nations, notably Australia, Brazil, China, India, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, among others. 

Conclusion : 

We can say that “post-truth” is not simply the opposite of truth, however that is defined; it is more complicated. It is better described as an omnibus term, a word for communication comprising a salmagundi or assemblage of different but interconnected phenomena.It's troubling potency in public life flows from its hybrid qualities, its combination of different elements in ways that defy expectations and confuse its recipients.Post-truth has recombinant qualities. For a start, it is a type of communication that includes old-fashioned lying, where speakers say things about themselves and their world that are at odds with impressions and convictions that they harbour in their mind’s eye. Liars attempt alchemy: when someone tells lies they wilfully say things they “know” not to be true, for effect. An example is when Donald Trump claims there was never a drought in California, or that during his inauguration the weather cleared, when actually light rain fell throughout his address.

Words count : 1640

References : https://theconversation.com/post-truth-politics-and-why-the-antidote-isnt-simply-fact-checking-and-truth-87364

https://estsjournal.org/index.php/ests/article/view/268