History in a Post-Truth World: Theory and Praxis
Este artigo propõe uma análise sobre o Painel Coronavírus, canal oficial de informações sobre a situação COVID-19 no Brasil, com objetivo de investigar se este refletiu a postura negacionista e pseudocientífica corroborada pelas autoridades entre 2020 e 2022. Foram revisadas as noções de desinformação, negacionismo e pseudociência, além da análise pelo método arqueológico foucaultiano. Concluímos que o Painel apresenta desinformações que tiveram impacto social durante o governo de Jair Bolsonaro.
The new and disturbing phenomenon of “Post-Truth” is discussed with particular attention given to the power of the ‘big-tech- giants and the role of search engines and social media. The use made of these facilities is reviewed with particular regard to their manipulation and exploitation to spread fake news and disinformation. The fight against post-truth is discussed, led by journalists, academia and, with particular emphasis, by the information professions. The role of government and the big-tech companies is also mentioned. The fight includes raising awareness, promotion of information literacy and fact checking. Web-based fact checking sites and advances in automated fact checking are reviewed.
While the historical impact of rumours and fabricated content has been well documented, efforts to better understand today’s challenge of information pollution on a global scale are only just beginning. Concern about the implications of dis-information campaigns designed specifically to sow mistrust and confusion and to sharpen existing sociocultural divisions using nationalistic, ethnic, racial and religious tensions is growing. The Council of Europe report on “Information Disorder: Toward an interdisciplinary framework for research and policy making” is an attempt to comprehensively examine information disorder and to outline ways to address it.
In this clear, forceful, and inspiring book, Paul A. Roth sets for himself an audacious task: the revival of philosophy of history and a recalibration of how to understand and account for historical explanation. Roth succeeds and with surgical precision offers a new account of narrative historical explanation that holds its own distinct epistemological and metaphysical factors and yet also aligns with other forms of scientific knowledge. It is an erudite and original work that is essential reading for all scholars invested in understanding our relation to the past and the ways that the histories we write come to impact our present and future."-Ethan Kleinberg, author of Haunting History: For a Deconstructive Approach to the Past In The Philosophical Structure of Historical Explanation, Paul A. Roth develops an argument that resolves disputes persisting since the nineteenth century about the scientific status of history. He does this by showing why historical explanations must take the form of a narrative, making their logic explicit, and revealing how the rational evaluation of narrative explanation becomes possible. The book also develops a nonrealist (irrealist) metaphysics and epistemology of history-that is, it argues that there exists no one fixed past, but many pasts. It includes a novel reading of Thomas S. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, displaying how Kuhn offers a narrative explanation of theory change in science. And it situates narrative explanations within a naturalistic framework. The first four chapters defuse methodological and metaphysical objections to narrative explanations. The final three chapters explore how narrative explanations relate to other sciences. This book will be of interest to researchers in historiography, philosophy of history, philosophy of science, philosophy of social science, and epistemology.
After explaining why, after dealing with post‐modernist confusions about truth in various books and articles from the mid‐1990s to, most recently, 2014 (§1), Haack returns to the topic of truth. She begins (§2) with some thoughts about the claim that concern for truth is on the decline, and perhaps at a new low; a claim that, sadly, may well be true. Then (§3) she looks at some of the many forms that carelessness with the truth may take, and shows that, so far from revealing that the concept of truth is seriously problematic or that there is no such thing as objective truth, it simply makes no sense to say that lies, half‐truths, etc., are ubiquitous unless there is such a thing as truth, and a legitimate truth‐concept. After that, (§4) she argues that, of course, there is such a thing as objective truth, and a robust truth‐concept. And finally, (§5) she suggests some ways to fight against the rising tide of unconcern for truth—and gives her answer to the (trick) question in her subtitle.
How can we disagree so profoundly concerning matters of fact? I call the disposition to dismiss evidence and facts when they conflict with one’s moral or political perspective, or accept groundless claims when they reaffirm said perspective, the ‘post-truth temperament’. This temperament seems to be one of the key causes of the political polarization currently experienced in democracies around the globe. What makes some people more likely to fall into post-truth behavior than others? What are the psychological roots of the post-truth temperament?
The cognitive and behavioral sciences offer some plausible answers. One of them is the partisan account: some evidence suggests that conservatives tend to be particularly sensitive to certain moral motivations (like loyalty to their group or respect for authority figures), and prone to have certain cognitive traits (like needing more epistemic closure and less openness to experience) that lead them to disregard evidence when making up their minds, more so than liberals. There is also a cognitive account: post-truth people are more susceptible to cognitive biases, and tend to be more intuitive than reflective (i.e. go with their initial gut feeling rather than critically examine the issues). Do any of these views capture the core of the post-truth phenomenon?
This essay reviews the available evidence, assesses the best current account of the roots of post-truthfulness, and argues that curiosity—the love of learning for learning’s sake—is the best antidote we have found to post-truth thinking.
One of the most publicized and commonly embraced political conspiracies has been the birther movement. The conspiracy, which gained traction amid the 2008 Presidential election, alleged that Barack Obama was ineligible for the Presidency on grounds he was not born in the United States. Though the movement was continuously debunked by a myriad of people, birthers remarkably managed to keep the conspiracy alive and relevant, due in large part to Donald Trump. Analysis of birther rhetoric, and specifically Donald Trumps use of it to continually undermine Barack Obama, provides a particularly robust understanding of the rhetorical forms that facilitate the resiliency of conspiracy. In this essay, we combine Richard Hofstadters concept of the paranoid style with generic approaches to conspiracy to unpack the ways birther rhetoric functionsboth formally and stylisticallyto advance a rhetoric of white supremacy. Furthermore, we analyze Donald Trumps role as conspiracy advocate and the specific rhetorical strategies he employs to use the birther controversy for his political advantage. Keywords: Barack Obama, birther movement, white supremacy, hate speech
Myanmar has consolidated its impunity, making its crimes a fait accompli. To do so, it first destabilized the legitimacy of the Rohingya as a group …
This essay, and the speical issue it introduces, seeks to explore leadership in a post-truth age, focusing in particular on the types of narratives and counter-narratives that characterize it and at times dominate it. We first examine the factors that are often held responsible for the rise of post-truth in politics, including the rise of relativist and postmodernist ideas, dishonest leaders and bullshit artists, the digital revolution and social media, the 2008 economic crisis and collapse of public trust. We develop the idea that different historical periods are characterized by specific narrative ecologies, which, by analogy to natural ecologies, can be viewed as spaces where different types of narrative and counter-narrative emerge, interact, compete, adapt, develop and die. We single out some of the dominant narrative types that characterize post-truth narrative ecologies and highlight the ability of language to ‘do things with words’ that support both the production of ‘fake news’ and a type of narcissistic leadership that thrive in these narrative ecologies. We then examine more widely leadership in post-truth politics focusing on the resurgence of populist and demagogical types along with the narratives that have made these types highly effective in our times. These include nostalgic narratives idealizing a fictional past and conspiracy theories aimed at arousing fears about a dangerous future.
‘Academic rentiership’ is an economistic way of thinking about the familiar tendency for academic knowledge to consolidate into forms of expertise that exercise authority over the entire society. The feature that ‘rentiership’ highlights is control over what can be accepted as a plausible knowledge claim, which I call ‘modal power’. This amounts to how the flow of information is channelled in society, with academic training and peer-reviewed research being the main institutional drivers. This paper begins by contextualizing rentiership in the deeper issues surrounding ‘cognitive economy’ that lie at the heart of the Western philosophical tradition. The psychological phenomenon of the ‘Gestalt shift’ is used to illustrate various ways in which the flow of information can be channelled to enable or disable certain possible ways of regarding the world. Against this background, such familiar concepts from academic practice as ‘quality control’ and ‘plagiarism’ acquire a new look. Quality control aims to maintain rentiership, whereas plagiarism aims to undermine it. The second half of the paper is largely concerned with the historical swings back and forth between rentiership and anti-rentiership in academia. Rentiership’s decline is associated with corruption of its quality control processes, which reveals academia’s reliance on equally corrupt power elites in society. In addition, the introduction of new communication media over which academia cannot exert proprietary control also serves to open up the sphere of plausible knowledge claims. The ongoing Internet revolution is likely to permanently alter the terms on which academic rentiership will be possible in the future.
This paper posits four possible reasons there may exist a fundamental, non-incidental connection between populism and the rhetoric of bullshit, as defined by Frankfurt as speech whose truth value its speaker is indifferent towards: 1) “Bullshit as Sincerity”: Populists’ claim to authentically represent “the people” and their “folk” values, combined with their wholesale rejection of the intellectual class and their values, makes them value sincerity over accuracy, leading them to construct statements with little regard for their veracity; 2) “Bullshit as Symbolism”: populist communication is frequently primarily meant to convey symbolic, unarticulated messages, leading literal meaning to be overlooked; 3) “Bullshit as Partisanship”: populists’ audiences are likely to assess their claims as true regardless of content, giving populists incentive to be construct statements without regard for the truth; 4) “Bullshit as Unfalsifiability”: Populists regard as unfalsifiable a central claim – the exclusivity of their claim to popular representation - and will thus tend to bullshit whenever contradicting evidence arises. Based on these connections, possible strategies for combatting bullshit propagated by populists is discussed.
This article critically reviews key interdisciplinary research on populism, focusing specifically on its various conceptualisations and the debates occurring within scholarship on its complex relationship with communication, democracy, and truth. These issues have been prone to haphazard analysis, with calls for a more nuanced treatment of the democratic implications of populism. The burgeoning interest in populism, inspired by recent populist success in Europe and North America, has increased focus on the communicative dimensions of populism. Despite this, the paradoxical fact remains that although central to the rise and success of populist actors, research on populist communication has been relatively scarce. It is argued here that populism must be studied from an interdisciplinary perspective and research must privilege its affective, communicative, and performative dimensions. Communication research as a result should not be treated as peripheral, but rather core to understanding populism.
Thomas Nagel is widely recognized as one of the top American philosophers working today. Reflecting the diversity of his many philosophical preoccupations, this volume is a collection of his most recent critical essays and reviews. The first section, Public and Private, focuses on the notion of privacy in the context of social and political issues, such as the impeachment of President Clinton. The second section, Right and Wrong, discusses moral, political and legal theory, and includes pieces on John Rawls, G.A. Cohen, and T.M. Scanlon, among others. The final section, Mind and Reality, features discussions of Richard Rorty, Donald Davidson, and the Sokal hoax, and closes with a substantial new essay on the mind-body problem. Written with characteristic rigor, these pieces reveal the intellectual passion underlying the incisive analysis for which Nagel is known.
Where do myths come from? What is their function and what do they mean? Myth: A Very Short Introduction introduces a wide array of approaches to understanding myth from disciplines as varied as anthropology, sociology, psychology, literary criticism, philosophy, science, and religious studies. It uses the famous ancient myth of Adonis to analyse the ideas and individual approaches and theories of theorists such as Sigmund Freud, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Albert Camus, and Roland Barthes. This new edition considers the interactions of myth theory with cognitive science, the implications of the myth of Gaia, and the differences between story-telling and myth, as well as the future study of myth.
In this chapter I explore District One and District Six, two inner-city areas in Cape Town, South Africa, by means of a series of images gathered from its ruins. As a point of departure I quote Neville Lister. Lister is the first-person narrator of Ivan Vladislavić’s novel Double Negative (2011). He is a white middle-class young man from Johannesburg whose life overlaps with the city’s post-apartheid transformation. Vladislavić’s story, in which Lister becomes a photographer, was inspired by a volume of photographs of Johannesburg taken by renowned South African photographer David Goldblatt (Goldblatt 2010). As his protagonist finds himself in the post-apartheid city, Vladislavić highlights the complexities of attempts at representing a coherent visual narrative regarding South Africa’s disjunctive urban history. Over the course of the last decade or so I have visited Cape Town many times. My personal life converged with the city’s transformation as a result of fortuitous encounters I had first as a student, then as a tourist, and finally as a researcher. The six photographs discussed as part of this chapter are the product of collaborations in 2013 and 2014. Recalling the epigraph of Bettina Malcomess and Dorothee Kreutzfeldt’s book about Johannesburg, Not No Place (2013), I suggest the impressions conveyed by the images include, at best, ‘fragments of spaces and times’ representing post-apartheid Cape Town. Referring to Walter Benjamin and Thomas More, Malcomess and Kreutzfeldt describe the capture of the ‘double negative’ of the utopia (translated as ‘no place’), the materialization of ‘impossibility and always deferred potential’ (Malcomess and Kreutzfeldt 2013: 12). Like these critics, I focus on the difficulty of capturing the complex transformation undergone by Cape Town’s District One and District Six (see also Penrose, Chapter 8, for issues in capturing complex, capitalist transitions). Cape Town appeared as number one on the New York Times list ‘52 places to go to in 2014’. Journalist Sarah Khan wrote, ‘Cape Town is reinventing itself, and the world is invited to its renaissance’ (Khan 2014). It is a story about boutique shops, property values, gentrification, self-stylization, and the self-conscious craft of hipster appeal.
Defining lies as statements that are intended to deceive, this book considers the contexts in which people tell lies, how they are detected and sometimes exposed, and the consequences for the liars themselves, their dupes, and the wider society. The author provides examples from a number of cultures with distinctive religious and ethical traditions, and delineates domains where lying is the norm, domains that are ambiguous and the one domain (science) that requires truthtelling. He refers to experimental studies on children that show how, at an early age, they acquire the capactiy to lie and learn when it is appropriate to do so. He reviews how lying has been evaluated by moralists, examines why we do not regard novels as lies and relates the human capacity to lie to deceit among other animal species. He concludes that although there are, in all societies, good pragmatic reasons for not lying all the time, there are also strong reasons for lying some of the time.
This book is designed as a timely analysis of the rise of post-modern conservatism in many Western countries across the globe. It provides a theoretical overview of post-modernism, why post-modern conservatism emerged, what distinguishes it from other variants of conservatism and differing political doctrines, and how post-modern conservatism governs in practice. First developing a unique genealogy of conservative thought, arguing that the historicist and irrationalist strains of conservatism were ripe for mutation into post-modern form under the right social and cultural conditions, then providing a new unique theoretical framework to describe the conditions for the emergence of post-modern conservatism, The Rise of Post-modern Conservatism applies its theoretical framework to a concrete analysis of the politics of the day. Ultimately, it aims to help us understand the emergence and rise of identity oriented alt right movements and their “populist” spokesmen particularly in the United States, the United Kingdom, Hungary, Poland, and now Italy.
States often use forms of denial to suppress the pain and suffering of minority groups. In 2015, the international community celebrated the electoral success of the National League for Democracy in Myanmar. Yet through legislative reform, the Rohingya were disenfranchised prior to the election. This is an example of legal denial, that is, the use of law and legal institutions to enact denial. The article traces three uses of legal denial against the Rohingya. One act of legal denial is constitutional reform through the creation of Rakhine State in 1974 and the making of the Rohingya as a minority within Rakhine State. Another act of legal denial is legislative reform through the removal of the right to vote and run for office in 2015. A further means of legal denial occurs through judicial decision-making and the use of political trials related to the conflict in Rakhine State. As the global community struggles with how to respond to the violence, displacement and humanitarian crisis, it is suggested that there is a need to understand the acts of legal denial – constitutional, legislative and judicial – that led to this crisis and how these acts of denial are employed to deny suffering and violence.
Applying a feminist approach to research on ending violence against women and girls (VAWG) is critical because gender inequality is an underlying driver of VAWG, and feminist research aims to empower women and girls, as well as challenge prevailing inequalities through the research process itself. However, feminist research approaches have not historically been applied in the international development sector, although statistical evidence on what works to end VAWG is in high demand from governments and donors. In this article, we explore how researchers could practically reconcile an explicitly feminist undertaking, like ending VAWG, when accepted research practices within this field employ methods that are historically not informed by feminist praxis. We argue that quantitative research and feminist research approaches are not mutually exclusive, rather, they can (and do) overlap. Drawing on five decades of combined experience conducting quantitative studies on VAWG in low- and middle-income countries around the world, we highlight the challenges and opportunities for incorporating feminist research principles throughout the research process – from design, community engagement, data collection, analysis, dissemination, and policy influence. We draw on practical examples from research conducted in countries as diverse as Timor-Leste, Kiribati, and Sri Lanka, among others, illustrating that it is not only possible to apply feminist research principles to large-scale, quantitative survey research on VAWG, but that this should become a priority for good development practice.
This Handbook provides a systematic and analytical approach to the various dimensions of international, ethnic and domestic conflict over the uses of national history in education since the end of the Cold War. With an upsurge in political, social and cultural upheaval, particularly since the fall of state socialism in Europe, the importance of history textbooks and curricula as tools for influencing the outlooks of entire generations is thrown into sharp relief. Using case studies from 58 countries, this book explores how history education has had the potential to shape political allegiances and collective identities. The contributors highlight the key issues over which conflict has emerged – including the legacies of socialism and communism, war, dictatorships and genocide – issues which frequently point to tensions between adhering to and challenging the idea of a cohesive national identity and historical narrative.
Global in scope, the Handbook will appeal to a diverse academic audience, including historians, political scientists, educationists, psychologists, sociologists and scholars working in the field of cultural and media studies.
For Leave voters the Brexit referendum of 23 June 2016 was invested with hopes and dreams, of refound sovereignty and control, freedom and liberty, subjectivity and agency. Brexit was an opportunity for both new beginnings and a reclamation of British essences. Winning, however, has not provided the closure promised, and today Leave supporters often appear decidedly anxious and angry. Bringing together literature on ontological security with Lacanian understandings of the (always incomplete) nature of subjectivity, this paper provides an explanation of how it is that ’Brexit’ became invested with such high hopes of fulfilment, but also why the populist ’fantasies’ underpinning Brexit have inevitably fallen short. However, while closure around ontological security and subjectivity is impossible, the paper shows how the promise of fulfilment (and its inevitable failure) can be politically seductive and mobilizing, is a central strategy of populist politics, but as such is also one that is only likely to exacerbate the ontological anxieties and insecurities upon which populist politics preys.
This article, based on event history and a narrative analysis of reports produced by human rights groups, reveals that the genocide of Rohingyas of the Rakhine state of Myanmar is the result of the Myanmar military government’s deliberate policies and unpremeditated consequences that have led to the higher level of conflict among groups in Myanmar. It examines the processes by which the Myanmar government has constructed the collective identity of Rohingya as illegal immigrants. It focuses on the role of the sustained historical and conflictual relationships among the Myanmar government, Rohingyas, and the Rakhine Buddhists that contributed to the Rohingya genocide.
This paper examines recent discourse around gender violence in social media protests in Mexico and a short story collection that anthologizes representations of gender violence in short stories by Mexican women authors as part of a greater genre of anti-feminicide cultural production. I focus my analysis on the hashtag campaigns #MiPrimerAcoso and #SiMeMatan and the microcuento collection ¡Basta! 100 mujeres en contra la violencia de género (Edición mexicana 2014) as ghostly discourses that create a space for breaking the silence of sexual and gendered violence. In these hashtags and micro short stories, I find spectral moments that allow for one to read the stories of gender violence that have been silenced through the discounting of women’s voices and of the recounting of violence against perpetrated against them. The ghostly discourse reveals many representations of gendered violence that resist patriarchal and stereotypical depictions and the haunting presence of those who have gone missing or been murdered for those who remain. These texts uncover the institutional and societal refusal to recognize victims as well as the impunity surrounding gender violence and feminicide. My analysis reveals how the effects of violence are depicted on female bodies in texts that are especially provocative from the perspective of ghostly discourse of gendered violence.
An innovative account of truth, tackling some of the central questions of philosophy. Defends the importance of truth as a key concept for philosophical analysis. Explores the relevance of the issues to thinking about the social world. Clearly and accessibly written.