Nick Enfield, University of Sydney
This article is the first in a series from the Post-Truth Initiative, a Strategic Research Excellence Initiative at the University of Sydney.
The project brings together scholars of media and communications, government and international relations, physics, philosophy, linguistics, and medicine, and is affiliated with the Sydney Social Sciences and Humanities Advanced Research Centre (SSSHARC), the Sydney Environment Institute and the Sydney Democracy Network.
Lies, bullshit, propaganda and conspiracy theories show no signs of going away soon, yet post-truth discourse may be one of the most pressing problems of our time. Humans have the capacity to wield unprecedented forms of power, not just over other people, as in acts of law and war, but over other forms of life, and ultimately over the environment that affords our own stability and survival.
If we want to make good decisions, those decisions had better be based on reality, and not on delusion, fantasy, or falsehood. Weakening the link between evidence and decisions not only threatens the quality of policymaking, it threatens the entire enterprise of scientific research, whose business is to find out the facts such that we may make well-informed decisions.
What exactly is post-truth discourse? How and why is it happening? And what can or should we do about it?
Beneath simple labels like post-truth, alternative facts and fake news, there is a complex set of issues. Any debate about the post-truth problem needs some common co-ordinates. Following are seven key reference points.
1. When we talk about facts, we are talking about statements
A fact is something that can be communicated in the form of a statement, where that statement happens to be true. Before you raise deep philosophical questions of what is truth, just think of everyday cases that present little challenge to our intuitions.
Suppose you reach for a bottle of water to quench your thirst, and I warn you: “That’s vodka!” It should not be hard to find out if my statement is true: just sip it and see. Many other statements are straightforward in this way: for example, My house is number 9 on my street; I have two thumbs; ice melts in the summer sun.
Not all claims to fact are easy to verify (like whether a certain foreign leader possesses weapons of mass destruction), and some are probably impossible (like whether ours is the only planet with intelligent life). And facts must be distinguished from opinions, the truth of which cannot be settled independently (like whether chocolate tastes better than vanilla).
But when we talk about facts, we are talking about the statements that describe or assert those facts, and not always the facts themselves. This means that a lot of the time, when people talk about truth, they are focusing on the statements people have made, and not on the facts those statements might describe.
2. Statements are socially constructed
Because we access facts through statements, whi