History in a Post-Truth World

History in a Post-Truth World
Author: Marius Gudonis
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2020-10-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000198227

History in a Post-Truth World: Theory and Praxis explores one of the most significant paradigm shifts in public discourse. A post-truth environment that appeals primarily to emotion, elevates personal belief, and devalues expert opinion has important implications far beyond Brexit or the election of Donald Trump, and has a profound impact on how history is produced and consumed. Post-truth history is not merely a synonym for lies. This book argues that indifference to historicity by both the purveyor and the recipient, contempt for expert opinion that contradicts it, and ideological motivation are its key characteristics. Taking a multidisciplinary approach, this work explores some of the following questions: What exactly is post-truth history? Does it represent a new phenomenon? Does the historian have a special role to play in preserving public memory from ‘alternative facts’? Do academics more generally have an obligation to combat fake news and fake history both in universities and on social media? How has a ‘post-truth culture’ impacted professional and popular historical discourse? Looking at theoretical dimensions and case studies from around the world, this book explores the violent potential of post-truth history and calls on readers to resist.

Public History for a Post-Truth Era

Public History for a Post-Truth Era
Author: Liz Sevcenko
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2022-07-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000607739

Public History for a Post-Truth Era explores how to combat historical denial when faith in facts is at an all-time low. Moving beyond memorial museums or documentaries, the book shares on-the-ground stories of participatory public memory movements that brought people together to grapple with the deep roots and current truths of human rights abuses. It gives an inside look at "Sites of Conscience" around the world, and the memory activists unearthing their hidden histories, from the Soviet Gulag to the slave trade in Senegal. It then follows hundreds of people joining forces across dozens of US cities to fight denial of Guantánamo, mass incarceration, and climate change. As reparations proposals proliferate in the US, the book is a resource for anyone seeking to confront historical injustices and redress their harms. Written in accessible, non-academic language, it will appeal to students, educators, or supportive citizens interested in public history, museums, or movement organizing.

Post-Truth

Post-Truth
Author: Lee McIntyre
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2018-02-16
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0262345986

How we arrived in a post-truth era, when “alternative facts” replace actual facts, and feelings have more weight than evidence. Are we living in a post-truth world, where “alternative facts” replace actual facts and feelings have more weight than evidence? How did we get here? In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Lee McIntyre traces the development of the post-truth phenomenon from science denial through the rise of “fake news,” from our psychological blind spots to the public's retreat into “information silos.” What, exactly, is post-truth? Is it wishful thinking, political spin, mass delusion, bold-faced lying? McIntyre analyzes recent examples—claims about inauguration crowd size, crime statistics, and the popular vote—and finds that post-truth is an assertion of ideological supremacy by which its practitioners try to compel someone to believe something regardless of the evidence. Yet post-truth didn't begin with the 2016 election; the denial of scientific facts about smoking, evolution, vaccines, and climate change offers a road map for more widespread fact denial. Add to this the wired-in cognitive biases that make us feel that our conclusions are based on good reasoning even when they are not, the decline of traditional media and the rise of social media, and the emergence of fake news as a political tool, and we have the ideal conditions for post-truth. McIntyre also argues provocatively that the right wing borrowed from postmodernism—specifically, the idea that there is no such thing as objective truth—in its attacks on science and facts. McIntyre argues that we can fight post-truth, and that the first step in fighting post-truth is to understand it.

A Short History of Truth

A Short History of Truth
Author: Julian Baggini
Publisher: Quercus
Total Pages: 69
Release: 2017-09-21
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1786488906

How did we find ourselves in a "post-truth" world of "alternative facts"? And can we get out of it? A Short History of Truth sets out to answer these questions by looking at the complex history of truth and falsehood. It identifies ten types of supposed truth and explains how easily each can become the midwife of falsehood. There is no species of truth that we can rely on unquestioningly, but that does not mean the truth can never be established. Attaining truth is an achievement we need to work for, and each chapter will end up with a truth we can have some confidence in. This history builds into a comprehensive and clear explanation of why truth is now so disputed by exploring 10 kinds of truth: 1. Eternal truths. 2. Authoritative truths. 3. Esoteric truths. 4. Reasoned truths. 5. Evidence-based truths. 6. Creative truths. 7. Relative truths. 8. Powerful truths 9. Moral truths. 10. Holistic truths. Baggini provides us with all we need to restore faith in the value and possibility of truth as a social enterprise. Truth-seekers need to be sceptical not cynical, autonomous not atomistic, provisional not dogmatic, open not empty, demanding not unreasonable.

Post-Truth

Post-Truth
Author: Steve Fuller
Publisher: Anthem Press
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2018-05-25
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1783086955

‘Post-truth’ was Oxford Dictionaries 2016 word of the year. While the term was coined by its disparagers in the light of the Brexit and US presidential campaigns, the roots of post-truth lie deep in the history of Western social and political theory. Post-Truth reaches back to Plato, ranging across theology and philosophy, to focus on the Machiavellian tradition in classical sociology, as exemplified by Vilfredo Pareto, who offered the original modern account of post-truth in terms of the ‘circulation of elites’. The defining feature of ‘post-truth’ is a strong distinction between appearance and reality which is never quite resolved and so the strongest appearance ends up passing for reality. The only question is whether more is gained by rapid changes in appearance or by stabilizing one such appearance. Post-Truth plays out what this means for both politics and science.

Trump and a Post-Truth World

Trump and a Post-Truth World
Author: Ken Wilber
Publisher: Shambhala Publications
Total Pages: 161
Release: 2017-08-08
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1611805619

A provocative and balanced examination of our social and political situation in the wake of the Trump presidency—by a cutting-edge philosopher of our times The world is in turmoil. As populist waves roil in the UK, Europe, Turkey, Russia, Asia—and most visibly, the U.S., with the election of Donald Trump—nationalist and extremist political forces threaten the progress made over many decades. Democracies are reeling in the face of nihilism and narcissism. How did we get here? And how, with so much antagonism, cynicism, and discord, can we mend the ruptures in our societies? In this provocative work, philosopher Ken Wilber applies his Integral approach to explain how we arrived where we are and why there is cause for hope. He lays much of the blame on a failure at the progressive, leading edge of society. This leading edge is characterized by the desire to be as just and inclusive as possible, and to it we owe the thrust toward women’s rights, the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, and the concern for oppression in all its forms. This is all evolutionarily healthy. But what is unhealthy is a creeping postmodernism that is elitist, “politically correct,” insistent on an egalitarianism that is itself paradoxically hierarchical, and that looks down on “deplorables.” Combine this with the techno-economic demise of many traditional ways of making a living, and you get an explosive mixture. As Wilber says, for some Trump voters: “Everywhere you are told that you are fully equal and deserve immediate and complete empowerment, yet everywhere you are denied the means to actually achieve it. You suffocate, you suffer, and you get very, very mad.” It is only when members of society’s leading edge can heal themselves that a new, Integral evolutionary force can emerge to move us beyond the social and political turmoil of our current time to offer genuine leadership toward greater wholeness.

Truth Telling in a Post-Truth World

Truth Telling in a Post-Truth World
Author: D. Stephen Long
Publisher: Wesley's Foundery Books
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2019-08-26
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9781945935503

Where would we be without the truth telling of Moses, Jesus, Martin Luther King Jr.- and you? The choice is clear: truth, justice, and freedom, or lies, injustice, and bondage? The good life and a just society depend on truth telling- but are we more comfortable with lies and fake news?

The Post-Truth Era

The Post-Truth Era
Author: Ralph Keyes
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2004-10-03
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780312306489

Politicians aren't the only ones who lie. The bestselling author of "Is There Life After High School?" explains America's unusually high tolerance for deceit.

Saving Truth

Saving Truth
Author: Abdu Murray
Publisher: Zondervan
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2018-05-08
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0310562058

How can Christians defend truth and clarity to a world that rejects both? Increasingly, Western culture embraces confusion as a virtue and decries certainty as a sin. Those who are confused about sexuality and identity are viewed as heroes. Those who are confused about morality are progressive pioneers. Those who are confused about spirituality are praised as tolerant. Conversely, those who express certainty about any of these issues are seen as bigoted, oppressive, arrogant, or intolerant. This cultural phenomenon led the compilers of the Oxford English Dictionary to name "post-truth" their word of the year in 2016. It's popularity and relevance has only increased since then. By accurately describing the Culture of Confusion and how it has affected our society, author Abdu Murray seeks to awaken Westerners to the plight we find ourselves in. He also challenges Christians to consider how they have played a part in fostering the Culture of Confusion through bad arguments, unwise labeling, and emotional attacks. Ultimately, Saving Truth provides arguments from a Christian perspective for the foundations of truth and how those foundations impart clarity to the biggest topics of human existence: Freedom. Human dignity. Sexuality, Gender, and Identity. Science and Faith. Religious pluralism and Morality. For those enmeshed in the culture of confusion, Saving Truth offers a way to untangle oneself and find hope in the clarity that Christ offers.

Post-Truth Rhetoric and Composition

Post-Truth Rhetoric and Composition
Author: Bruce Mccomiskey
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Total Pages: 59
Release: 2017-11-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1607327457

Post-Truth Rhetoric and Composition is a timely exploration of the increasingly widespread and disturbing effect of “post-truth” on public discourse in the United States. Bruce McComiskey analyzes the instances of bullshit, fake news, feigned ethos, hyperbole, and other forms of post-truth rhetoric employed in recent political discourse. The book frames “post-truth” within rhetorical theory, referring to the classic triad of logos, ethos, and pathos. McComiskey shows that it is the loss of grounding in logos that exposes us to the dangers of post-truth. As logos is the realm of fact, logic, truth, and valid reasoning, Western society faces increased risks—including violence, unchecked libel, and tainted elections—when the value of reason is diminished and audiences allow themselves to be swayed by pathos and ethos. Evaluations of truth are deferred or avoided, and mendacity convincingly masquerades as a valid form of argument. In a post-truth world, where neither truth nor falsehood has reliable meaning, language becomes purely strategic, without reference to anything other than itself. This scenario has serious consequences not only for our public discourse but also for the study of composition.