A Player's Guide to the Post-Truth Condition

Steve Fuller

Description

A hopeful light on our post-truth condition across a wide range of intellectual fields and public affairs, including Brexit, Trump and the COVID-19 pandemic

A Player’s Guide to the Post-Truth Condition: The Name of the Game presents sixteen short, readable chapters designed to leverage our post-truth condition’s deep historical and philosophical roots into opportunities for unprecedented innovation and change. Fuller offers a bracing, proactive and hopeful vision against the tendency to demonize post-truth as the realm of ‘fake news’ and ‘bullshit’. Where others see threats to the established order, Fuller sees opportunities to overturn it. This theme is pursued across many domains, including politics, religion, the economy, the law, public relations, journalism, the performing arts and academia, not least academic science. The red thread running through Fuller’s treatment is that these domains are games that cannot be easily won unless one can determine the terms of engagement, which is to say, the ‘name of the game’. This involves the exercise of ‘modal power’, which is the capacity to manipulate what people think is possible. Once the ‘necessarily’ true appears to be only ‘contingently’ so, then the future suddenly becomes a more open space for action. This was what frightened Plato about the alternative realities persuasively portrayed by playwrights in ancient Athens. Nevertheless, Fuller believes that it should be embraced by denizens of today’s post-truth condition.

A Word to the Reader; Acknowledgements; Introduction: How to Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Post-Truth Condition; Post-Truth Breaks Free of Reason’s Own Self-Imposed Chains; Post-Truth Is About Finding a Game One Can Win; The Fate of Truth, Reason and Reality in the Post-Truth Condition; Capitalism, Scientism and the Construction of Value in the Post-Truth Condition; Public Relations as Post-Truth Politics, or the Marketization of Everything; The New York Times Gets the Post-Truth Treatment; Science as the Offer That Can’t Be Refused in the Post-Truth Condition; Will Expertise Survive the Post-Truth Condition?; Will Universities Survive the Post-Truth Condition?; ‘Research Ethics’ as Post-Truth Playground; Why Ignorance – not Knowledge – Is the Key to Justice in the Post-Truth Condition; A Pandemic Seen through a Post-Truth Lens; Thinking in the Fourth Order: The Role of Metalepsis in the Post-Truth Condition; The Path from Francis Bacon: A Genealogy of the Post-Truth Condition; Conclusion: How to Put Yourself in the Post-Truth Frame of Mind; References; Index.

Sujets

• Philosophy of science
• Sciences et techniques

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 20 novembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785276064
• Langue: English

Extrait

A Player’s Guide to the Post-Truth Condition
KEY ISSUES IN MODERN SOCIOLOGY
The Sociology programme takes a fresh and challenging sociological look at the interactions between politics, society, history and culture. Titles transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries. This programme includes a variety of book series.
Key Issues in Modern Sociology publishes scholarly texts by leading social theorists that give an accessible exposition of the major structural changes in modern societies. These volumes address an academic audience through their relevance and scholarly quality, and connect sociological thought to public issues. The series covers both substantive and theoretical topics, as well as addressing the works of major modern sociologists. The series emphasis is on modern developments in sociology with relevance to contemporary issues such as globalization, warfare, citizenship, human rights, environmental crises, demographic change, religion, postsecularism and civil conflict.
Series Editor
Peter Kivisto – Augustana College, USA
Editorial Board
Harry F. Dahms – University of Tennessee at Knoxville, USA
Thomas Faist – Bielefeld University, Germany
Anne Rawls – Bentley University, USA
Giuseppe Sciortino – University of Trento, Italy
Sirpa Wrende – University of Helsinki, Finland
Richard York – University of Oregon, USA
A Player’s GUIDE TO THE POST-TRUTH CONDITION
The Name of the Game
STEVE FULLER
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com
This edition first published in UK and USA 2020
by ANTHEM PRESS
75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK
or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA
Copyright © Steve Fuller 2020
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-603-3 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78527-603-4 (Hbk)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-604-0 (Pbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78527-604-2 (Pbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.
CONTENTS
A Word to the Reader
Acknowledgements
Introduction: How to Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Post-Truth Condition
1. Post-Truth Breaks Free of Reason’s Own Self-Imposed Chains
2. Post-Truth Is about Finding a Game One Can Win
3. The Fate of Truth, Reason and Reality in the Post-Truth Condition
4. Capitalism, Scientism and the Construction of Value in the Post-Truth Condition
5. Public Relations as Post-Truth Politics, or the Marketisation of Everything
6. The New York Times Gets the Post-Truth Treatment
7. Science as the Offer That Can’t Be Refused in the Post-Truth Condition
8. Will Expertise Survive the Post-Truth Condition?
9. Will Universities Survive the Post-Truth Condition?
10. ‘Research Ethics’ as Post-Truth Playground
11. Why Ignorance – not Knowledge – Is the Key to Justice in the Post-Truth Condition
12. A Pandemic Seen through a Post-Truth Lens
13. Thinking in the Fourth Order: The Role of Metalepsis in the Post-Truth Condition
14. The Path from Francis Bacon: A Genealogy of the Post-Truth Condition
Conclusion: How to Put Yourself in the Post-Truth Frame of Mind
References
Index
A WORD TO THE READER
This book is designed to do what its title says, namely, to provide a guide to the post-truth condition for those who wish to feel at home and thrive in it – rather than simply avoid or attack it. It consists of a series of short chapters that are best read in the order presented but may also be read in a different order or simply in parts – as most books are normally read. The book ranges widely across philosophy, theology, science, politics, economics, psychology, and the arts – but hopefully in a way that allows readers to find their bearings, given the opportunities presented by the internet to follow up whatever might interest them in the text. Underlying this breadth of scope is a fundamental scepticism with ‘business as usual’ in the production and evaluation of knowledge claims. To be sure, the reader will see that post-truth extends many of the themes already found in what passes for ‘postmodernism’. However, at a deeper level, and in light of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the post-truth condition invites us to discover in a new key what it has always meant to be ‘modern’.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
In writing this book, I kept in mind three quite different people who had already embodied the post-truth condition in their beliefs and action early in my academic career nearly forty years ago: Deirdre McCloskey, Charles Arthur Willard and Steve Woolgar.
During this book’s composition, the following people offered insight, provocation and support of various sorts: Aleksandra Łukaszewicz Alcaraz, Thomas Basbøll, Anya Bernstein, Kean Birch, Yael Brahms, Sindi Breshani, Mattia Gallotti, Jane Gilbert, Zhengdong Hu, Petar Jandric, Ian Jarvie, David Johnson, Paul Jump, Ilya Kasavin, Josephine Lethbridge, David Levy, Veronika Lipinska, Luke Robert Mason, Linsey McGoey, Alfred Nordmann, Nathan Oseroff, Lea Peersman Pujol, Ljiljana Radenović, Sheldon Richmond, Sharon Rider, Raphael Sassower, Nico Stehr, Adam Tait, Gareth Thompson, Steven Umbrello and Cong Wang.
Finally, this book is dedicated to my mother, who died in New York City during the COVID-19 pandemic – but not of it. But that’s a story for another day ...
INTRODUCTION: HOW TO LEARN TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE POST-TRUTH CONDITION
The post-truth condition means many things to many people. Simply put and without prejudice, in the post-truth condition, what matters is not whether something is true or false but how the matter is decided . As we shall see in the following pages, there is a lot more to it than that. But that is the core meaning – and it is already enough to strike fear in the hearts of many. Opponents of the post-truth condition identify it with a credibility crisis in knowledge-based institutions that stems from some evil force intent on leading a gullible public to undo all the careful work that over the past five centuries has made ours an increasingly rational world in which people can operate freely to mutual benefit. These malign manipulators range from alternative newsfeeds such as Breitbart to big data firms such as Cambridge Analytica to the vague but looming presence of ‘Russian hackers’. I take a very different approach to the post-truth condition.
I welcome the post-truth condition as nothing more – and nothing less – than the logical next stage of the very same project of rationalisation that post-truth’s opponents claim to uphold. It should not be feared but embraced as a sign of this project’s genuine democratisation. Authority is finally being devolved from a vanguard class of ‘experts’ with a monopoly of moral and political force to some yet-to-be-defined organisation of independent self-legislating individuals. In the coming years we should expect that such modern ‘establishment’ institutions as the ‘state’ and the ‘university’ will be subject to the same shakedown that the ‘church’ has periodically undergone since the early modern period in parts of the world touched by Christianity. To be sure, the exact sort of ‘organisation’ that governs the post-truth condition is very much up for grabs, and may always be, which explains the subtitle of this book: The Name of the Game . The ultimate prize in the post-truth condition is to name the game you play, even if you turn out to be the loser. Put as a point of strategy, history can be written by the losers, if they manage to make the winners feel guilty about having won, thereby handicapping them in any subsequent game. Readers of Nietzsche will understand exactly what I mean.
What is most evident about the post-truth condition is that the difference between those who know and those who don’t has been reduced – but not quite as you might think. To be sure, we live in a time of unprecedented levels of literacy, schooling and access of information, notwithstanding what opponents of the post-truth condition sometimes seem to assume. Thus, lay people can increasingly catch up with what the experts know to the point of confidently challenging their judgement, even if they are rebuffed in the end. And no doubt this dynamic goes to the democratic heart of the post-truth condition. But the sort of ‘reduction’ I really have in mind is about the playing field of uncertainty becoming levelled.
In the past, experts have exercised a form of ‘cognitive authoritarianism’ (Fuller 1988 : ch. 12). They have enjoyed a monopoly licence to turn uncertainty to their advantage by dictating the name of the game that everyone else should be playing. This ‘monopoly licence’ has normally taken the form of state-certified academic credentials that grant experts the right to heroically simplify reality in the name of policy. Its signature contemporary practice is ‘modelling’, a mathematically inspired and technologically enhanced descendant of the esoteric art of the ‘microcosm’. Both involve a sophisticated way of extending from what one knows to what one doesn’t know in order to create a template for reality as a whole. In the European Renaissance th