A way forward for a world where truth has died

A framework for a Post-Truth World

As the prophets of certainty wage their wars in our fractured age, a radical new approach from philosopher Manuel Delaflor shows us how to dance with the uncertain.

 

Consider a curious phenomenon: When passionate fans discuss their favourite shows online, they rarely debate what happened in a scene. For example, in online forums dedicated to Game of Thrones, viewers spent countless hours dissecting a brief moment where Cersei Lannister lingered near a dimly lit archway during a crucial negotiation scene, debating whether the shadows implied secret motives, inner turmoil, or a looming betrayal. Through this collective endeavour, fans weave intricate webs of interpretation that reflect their values, their beliefs, and even their shadows. The very meaning of what they see on screen becomes a mirror, reflecting not just the content itself, but the deeper patterns of how humans create understanding from their personal experiences.

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For millennia, truth served as humanity's foundation - a way to end arguments, establish facts, and build knowledge. It stood as a beacon of certainty in an uncertain world, promising that through divine foretelling, or later with proper methods and careful reasoning, we could arrive at unshakeable conclusions about the world, our lives, and our place in the universe. This faith in truth shaped our institutions, our education systems, and our very way of thinking. It provided the bedrock upon which we built our understanding of ourselves and the cosmos.

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What's remarkable isn't just the rejection or dismissal of traditional ways of establishing shared understanding, but the incredible refusal to even accept sets of facts.

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From time to time, a handful of dissenting thinkers queried truth, from the Pyrrhonian skeptics of Ancient Greece to figures like David Hume, who questioned the reliability of causation and empirical certainty, and Immanuel Kant, who argued that our understanding of the world is mediated by the structures of human cognition. Then we have Nietzsche's rejection of absolute truth in the 19th century that further shook these foundations. Then, in the 20th century, a particular kind of thinker started to dig deeper, geniuses like Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze delivered what might have been the final blow: truth itself, they argued, was nothing more than a construct shaped by power and language. The certainties upon which our institutions rest began to crumble, and as a result, we've been entering a kind of second dark age. Nonetheless, a lay belief in truth by the countess masses prevailed.

What constitutes evidence, what a fact is, or used to be, has lately taken completely unexpected twists. We are witnessing a profound shift: the rejection of established frameworks has become widespread, fuelled not just by past institutional failures, but by a deepening social distrust of expertise itself. What's remarkable isn't just the rejection or dismissal of traditional ways of establishing shared understanding, but the incredible refusal to even accept sets of facts. For instance, debates over whether the Earth's curvature can be observed directly or whether atmospheric distortion explains such observations highlight how even well-established scientific principles can be dismissed to fit alternative narratives in a blink of an eye.

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