Post-truth is a term that refers to the 21st century widespread documentation of and concern about disputes over public truth claims. The term's academic development refers to the theories and research that explain the historically specific causes and the effects of the phenomenon. While the term was used academically and publicly before 2016 (

post-truth politics Post-truth politics (also called post-factual politics and post-reality politics) is a political culture where true/false, honesty/lying have become a focal concern of public life and are viewed by popular commentators and academic researchers a ...

Oxford Dictionaries Oxford dictionary may refer to any dictionary published by Oxford University Press, particularly: Historical dictionaries * ''Oxford English Dictionary'' (''OED'') * ''Shorter Oxford English Dictionary'', abridgement of the ''OED'' Single-volume d ...

popularly defined it as "relating to and denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than

appeals to emotion Appeal to emotion or ''argumentum ad passiones'' (meaning the same in Latin) is an informal fallacy characterized by the manipulation of the recipient's emotions in order to win an argument, especially in the absence of factual evidence. This kind ...

and personal belief." The term was named Oxford Dictionaries

Word of the Year The word(s) of the year, sometimes capitalized as "Word(s) of the Year" and abbreviated "WOTY" (or "WotY"), refers to any of various assessments as to the most important word(s) or expression(s) in the public sphere The public sphere (german: Ö ...

in 2016, after the term's proliferation in the

2016 United States presidential election The 2016 United States presidential election was the 58th quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 8, 2016. The Republican ticket of businessman Donald Trump and Indiana governor Mike Pence defeated the Democratic ticket ...

and the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom. Oxford dictionaries further notes that post-truth was often used as an adjective to signal a distinctive kind of politics –

. Some scholars argue that post-truth has similarities with past

moral A moral (from Latin ''morālis'') is a message that is conveyed or a lesson to be learned from a story or event. The moral may be left to the hearer, reader, or viewer to determine for themselves, or may be explicitly encapsulated in a maxim. A ...

, epistemic, and political debates about

relativism Relativism is a family of philosophical views which deny claims to objectivity within a particular domain and assert that valuations in that domain are relative to the perspective of an observer or the context in which they are assessed. Ther ...

postmodernity Postmodernity (post-modernity or the postmodern condition) is the economic or cultural state or condition of society which is said to exist ''after'' modernity. Some schools of thought hold that modernity ended in the late 20th century – in the ...

, and dishonesty in politics. Others insist that post-truth is specifically concerned with 21st century communication technologies and cultural practices.

Historical precedents in philosophy

Post-truth is about a historical problem regarding truth in everyday life, especially politics. But truth has long been one of the major preoccupations of philosophy. Truth is also one of the most complicated concepts in the history of philosophy, and much of the research and public debate about post-truth assumes a particular theory of truth, what philosophers call a correspondence theory of truth. The most prominent theory of truth, though with its share of critics, is correspondence theory, roughly, where words correspond to an accepted or mutually available reality to be examined and confirmed. Another major theory of truth is coherence theory, where truth is not just about one claim but a series of statements that cohere about the world. Several academic experts note that the emphasis on philosophical debates about truth have little to do with the concept of post-truth as it has historically emerged in popular politics (see

), not in philosophy. As the philosopher Julian Baggini explains:

The merits of these competing theories are of mainly academic concern. When people debate whether there were weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussain's Iraq, whether global warming is real and anthropogenic, or whether austerity is necessary, their disagreements are not the consequence of competing theories of truth. No witness need ask a judge which theory she has in mind when asked to promise to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Why then has truth become so problematic in the world outside academic philosophy? One reason is that there is major disagreement and uncertainty concerning what counts as a reliable ''source'' of truth. For most of human history, there was some stable combination of trust in religious texts and leaders, learned experts and the enduring folk wisdom called common sense. Now, it seems, virtually nothing is universally taken as an authority. This leaves us having to pick our own experts or simply to trust our guts.

It follows that according to experts who approach the concept of post-truth as something historically specific, as a contemporary sociological phenomenon, post-truth theory is only remotely related to traditional debates in philosophy about the nature of truth. In other words, post-truth as a contemporary phenomenon is not about asking "what is truth?" or "is X true?" but "why don't we agree that this or that is true?" A broad range of scholarship increasingly insists a breakdown in institutional authority for truth-telling (government, news media, especially) ushered by new media and communication technologies of user-generated-content, new media editing technologies (visual, audio-visual), and a saturating promotional culture has resulted in confusion and games of truth-telling, even truth markets. However, not all commentators treat post-truth as a historically specific phenomenon discussed through implicit correspondence, coherence, or pragmatist theories of truth. They discuss it within a philosophical tradition that asks what truth is. Friedrich Nietzsche is sometimes cited in this camp of post-truth commentators.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (; or ; 15 October 1844 – 25 August 1900) was a German philosopher, prose poet, cultural critic, philologist, and composer whose work has exerted a profound influence on contemporary philosophy. He began his ...

is sometimes invoked as a predecessor to theories of post-truth. He argues that humans create the concepts through which they define the good and the just, thereby replacing the concept of truth with the concept of value, and grounding reality in the human will and

will to power The will to power (german: der Wille zur Macht) is a concept in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. The will to power describes what Nietzsche may have believed to be the main driving force in humans. However, the concept was never systematic ...

. In his 1873 essay '' Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense,'' Nietzsche holds that humans create truth about the world through their use of

metaphor A metaphor is a figure of speech that, for rhetorical effect, directly refers to one thing by mentioning another. It may provide (or obscure) clarity or identify hidden similarities between two different ideas. Metaphors are often compared wit ...

myth Myth is a folklore genre consisting of Narrative, narratives that play a fundamental role in a society, such as foundational tales or Origin myth, origin myths. Since "myth" is widely used to imply that a story is not Objectivity (philosophy), ...

, and

poetry Poetry (derived from the Greek ''poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings i ...

. He writes,

"If someone hides an object behind a bush, then seeks and finds it there, that seeking and finding is not very laudable: but that is the way it is with the seeking and finding of "truth" within the rational sphere. If I define the mammal and then after examining a camel declare, "See, a mammal", a truth is brought to light, but it is of limited value. I mean, it is anthropomorphic through and through and contains not a single point that would be "true and universally valid, apart from man. The investigator into such truths is basically seeking just the metamorphosis of the world into man; he is struggling to understand the world as a human-like thing and acquires at best a feeling of assimilation."

Max Weber

In his essay ''

Science as a Vocation ''Science as a Vocation'' (German: ''Wissenschaft als Beruf'') is the text of a lecture given in 1917 at Munich University by German sociologist and political economist Max Weber. The original version was published in German, but at least two ...

'' (1917)

Max Weber Maximilian Karl Emil Weber (; ; 21 April 186414 June 1920) was a German sociologist, historian, jurist and political economist, who is regarded as among the most important theorists of the development of modern Western society. His ideas profo ...

draws a distinction between facts and values. He argues that facts can be determined through the methods of a value-free, objective social science, while values are derived through culture and religion, the truth of which cannot be known through science. He writes, "it is one thing to state facts, to determine mathematical or logical relations or the internal structure of cultural values, while it is another thing to answer questions of the value of culture and its individual contents and the question of how one should act in the cultural community and in political associations. These are quite heterogeneous problems." In his 1919 essay ''

Politics as a Vocation "Politics as a Vocation" (german: Politik als Beruf) is an essay by German economist and sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920). It originated in the second lecture of a series (the first was ''Science as a Vocation'') he gave in Munich to the "Free ...

'', he argues that facts, like actions, do not in themselves contain any intrinsic meaning or power: "any ethic in the world could establish substantially ''identical'' commandments applicable to all relationships."

Criticism

Philosopher

Leo Strauss Leo Strauss (, ; September 20, 1899 – October 18, 1973) was a German-American political philosopher who specialized in classical political philosophy. Born in Germany to Jewish parents, Strauss later emigrated from Germany to the United States. ...

criticizes Weber for attempting to isolate reason completely from opinion. Strauss acknowledges the philosophical trouble of deriving "ought" from "is", but argues that what Weber has done in his framing of this puzzle is in fact deny altogether that the "ought" is within reach of human reason. Strauss worries that if Weber is right, we are left with a world in which the knowable truth is a truth that cannot be evaluated according to ethical standards. This conflict between ethics and politics would mean that there can be no grounding for any valuation of the good, and without reference to values, facts lose their meaning.

Critical theory and continental philosophy

Some influential philosophers are skeptical of the division between facts and values. They argue that scientific facts are socially produced through relations of power.

Bruno Latour

The French philosopher

Bruno Latour Bruno Latour (; 22 June 1947 – 9 October 2022) was a French philosopher, anthropologist and sociologist.Wheeler, Will. ''Bruno Latour: Documenting Human and Nonhuman Associations'' Critical Theory for Library and Information Science. Libraries ...

has been criticized for contributing to the intellectual foundations for post-truth. In 2018, the ''

New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...

'' ran a profile on Bruno Latour and

. According to the article, "In a series of controversial books in the 1970s and 1980s, atourargued that scientific facts should instead be seen as a ''product'' of scientific inquiry. Facts, Latour said, were 'networked'; they stood or fell not on the strength of their inherent veracity but on the strength of the institutions and practices that produced them and made them intelligible." However, the article claims that it is a misinterpretation to claim that Latour doesn't believe in reality or that truth is relative: "Had they been among our circus that day, Latour's critics might have felt that there was something odd about the scene – the old adversary of science worshipers kneeling before the altar of science. But what they would have missed – what they have always missed – was that Latour never sought to deny the existence of gravity. He has been doing something much more unusual: trying to redescribe the conditions by which this knowledge comes to be known." In this sense, Latour (or Michel Foucault as well) draws attention to the institutional and practical contingencies for producing knowledge (which in science is always changing at slower and faster rates).

Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt has been cited as an important conceptual resource for post-truth theory in that she attempted to theorize something historically shifting, instead of meditating on the nature of truth itself. In her essay ''

Lying in Politics A lie is an assertion that is believed to be false, typically used with the purpose of deceiving or misleading someone. The practice of communicating lies is called lying. A person who communicates a lie may be termed a liar. Lies can be inter ...

'' (1972), Hannah Arendt describes what she terms ''defactualization,'' or the inability to discern fact from fiction – a concept very close to what we now understand by post-truth. The essay's central theme is the thoroughgoing political

deception Deception or falsehood is an act or statement that misleads, hides the truth, or promotes a belief, concept, or idea that is not true. It is often done for personal gain or advantage. Deception can involve dissimulation, propaganda and sleight o ...

that was unveiled with the leaking of the

Pentagon Papers The ''Pentagon Papers'', officially titled ''Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force'', is a United States Department of Defense history of the United States in the Vietnam War, United States' political and military ...

in 1971. Her main target of critique is the professional "problem-solvers" tasked with solving American foreign policy "problems" during the

Vietnam War The Vietnam War (also known by #Names, other names) was a conflict in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. It was the second of the Indochina Wars and was officially fought between North Vie ...

, and who comprised the group that authored the McNamara report. Arendt distinguishes defactualization from deliberate falsehood and from lying. She writes,

"The deliberate falsehood deals with ''contingent'' facts; that is, with matters that carry no inherent truth within themselves, no necessity to be as they are. Factual truths are never compellingly true. The historian knows how vulnerable is the whole texture of facts in which we spend our daily life; it is always in danger of being perforated by single lies or torn to shreds by the organized lying of groups, nations, or classes, or denied and distorted, often carefully covered up by reams of falsehoods or simply allowed to fall into oblivion."

She goes on,

"There always comes the point beyond which lying becomes counterproductive. This point is reached when the audience to which the lies are addressed is forced to disregard altogether the distinguishing line between truth and falsehood in order to be able to survive. Truth or falsehoodit does not matter which anymore, if your life depends on your acting as though you trusted; truth that can be relied on disappears entirely from public life, and with it the chief stabilizing factor in the ever-changing affairs of men."

Arendt faults the Vietnam era problem-solvers with being overly rational, "trained in translating all factual contents into the language of numbers and percentages", and out of touch with the facts of "given reality."Arendt 1972, p. 11. Contrary to contemporary definitions of post-truth that emphasize a reliance on emotion over facts and evidence, Arendt's notion of defactualization identifies ''hyper-rationality'' as the mechanism that blurs the line between "fact and fantasy": the problem-solvers "were indeed to a rather frightening degree above 'sentimentality' and in love with 'theory', the world of sheer mental effort. They were eager to find formulas, preferably expressed in a pseudo-mathematical language..." Arendt writes: "What these problem-solvers have in common with down-to-earth liars is the attempt to get rid of facts and the confidence that this should be possible because of the inherent contingency of facts." She explains that deception and even ''

self-deception Self-deception is a process of denying or rationalizing away the relevance, significance, or importance of opposing evidence and logical argument. Self-deception involves convincing oneself of a truth (or lack of truth) so that one does not rev ...

'' are rendered meaningless in a defactualized world, for both rely on preserving the distinction between truth and falsehood. On the other hand, in a defactualized environment, the individual "loses all contact with not only his audience, but also the real world, which will still catch up with him because he can remove his mind from it but not his body." Arendt specifically pointed to advertising (and what has recently been described as an all-encompassing "promotional culture") as having played a primary role in creating knowledge conditions of "ready to buy" that contemporary thinkers describe as characteristic of post-truth.

She spoke of a "recent variety" added to "the many genres in the art of lying developed in the past: the apparently innocuous one of the public-relations managers in government who learned their trade from the inventiveness of Madison Avenue." Arendt noted that their "origin ayin the consumer society" (p. 8). This importation from consumer society to politics was problematic, according to Hannah Arendt, for public relations "deals only in opinions and 'good will,' the readiness to buy, that is, in intangibles whose concrete reality is at a minimum."

Contemporary evaluation

Carl Sagan Carl Edward Sagan (; ; November 9, 1934December 20, 1996) was an American astronomer, planetary scientist, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, author, and science communicator. His best known scientific contribution is research on ext ...

, a famous

astronomer An astronomer is a scientist in the field of astronomy who focuses their studies on a specific question or field outside the scope of Earth. They observe astronomical objects such as stars, planets, natural satellite, moons, comets and galaxy, g ...

and

science communicator Science communication is the practice of informing, educating, raising awareness of science-related topics, and increasing the sense of wonder about scientific discoveries and arguments. Science communicators and audiences are ambiguously def ...

, argued in his work '' The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark'': Carl Sagan's words are thought to be a prediction of a "post-truth" or "

alternative facts "Alternative facts" was a phrase used by U.S. Counselor to the President, Kellyanne Conway, during a ''Meet the Press'' interview on January 22, 2017, in which she defended White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer's false statement about the a ...

" world. In the context of politics, post-truth has recently been applied to the 2016 and 2020 U.S. presidential elections, Brexit, the COVID-19 "infodemic", and the conditions that led to the storming of the US capital on January 6, 2021. The historian

Timothy Snyder Timothy David Snyder (born August 18, 1969) is an American historian specializing in the modern history of Central and Eastern Europe. He is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute f ...

wrote of post-truth and the 2021 storming of the United States Capitol: