Post Truth

What is Post Truth?

Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.

WHAT IS TRUTH?

Post-Truth can only be described empirically, not philosophically, at least in a way that most people can believe in.

Truth is a, empirically, statements one or more people agree on. Nothing more, nothing less.

You can say something simple and observable (ie ‘one line is longer than another’) but repeated studies show that a LARGE percentage of humans will deny the ‘objective’ reality for the social reality.

POST TRUTH?

It used to be that truth was more ‘standardized’. With fewer information sources, each source had a greater ‘authority.’

When you have 2 newspapers (or only 1), it becomes harder to have a viewpoint other than one of those.

This is because other viewpoints are either unfamiliar or socially unacceptable. Both require extremely costly effort to overcome.

Today, anybody can post any viewpoint. The ‘liberation’ of information has led to a ‘diffusal’ of authority.

This fact is what I believe we refer to when we speak of post truth.

POST TRUTH POLITICS?

In politics, all this means is that different groups can have different motivations for believing different narratives. Given the prevalence of the confirmation bias, once you start with a story you want to believe, finding or even inventing confirmatory evidence is much easier than confronting contradictory evidence or admitting you’ve been wrong.

When confronted with logical or empirical holes in your argument, you are more likely to dig in than give up.

This is what has happened in today’s society.