What the philosophers said
Philosopher Hilary Lawson opens by saying that essentially yes, we're fighting over the mantle of truth but this is fundamentally an illusion. The idea of truth is appealing - we can use it to justify our actions, good and bad, but it's at best a valuable and powerful fantasy. Stories, he says, are not descriptions but tools. They enable us to hold the world in specific ways and ask different questions. For example, when you find a glass, you can ask different questions about it than if you view it as a collection of silicon atoms. This changes how we interact with the world. But, just as you can have a better or worse lawnmower, it isn't possible to have a "more true" lawnmower, and neither can you have language and analysis which is "more true" either.
Marxist and materialist Paul Mason agrees with the idea that language is a representation, not the truth of the world itself. He says that knowledge and cognition is an active process, not a passive record of what happens. He goes further by saying that we can't ever have fully accurate knowledge because reality itself is always in flux - no two glasses are ever the same. Truth is a quality of human thought, not reality. However, we can make accurate and testable measurements : objective reality is out there, it's us who have limitations.
Sociologist Ella McPherson, I'm afraid, did not seem to have all that much to contribute that I could even understand. She says that only certain people are suffering from the obsession with the truth, and that truth has always been defined by the majority. Anyone in a minority knows that there's no such thing as "the" truth.
The discussion moves to the idea of post-truth. Lawson is asked about whether he thinks, given his idea of representations, that the facts don't matter. He's asked about whether a birth certificate would be sufficient evidence to prove where Obama was born. He rambles off on one about "frameworks" and the need to engage with people on their own terms. A birth certificate, he says, does constitute contradictory evidence within the framework of a Birther, and therefore it should be taken to disprove their conspiracy theory.
Mason says he doesn't use the word post-truth. With the kind of Marxist attitude normally seen in Existential Comics, he says that the successes of capitalism have been based on the scientific method. That we are now seeing bouts of irrationality, he says, are symptoms that capitalism is in decline, underpinned by the hard right who are using this to their own ideological ends. We're not so much in a post-truth situation, in his view, in which we are one in which ideologues are trying to break the system apart. He says this is how totalitarianism works, that it's not just when people stop believing a particular truth, but when they stop believing things can even be verified*. He dodges the question of what comes after capitalism and totalitarianism, but says we should defend the scientific method and also mathematics. Mathematics is not just an abstraction, but actually a description of reality.
* I have to interject here that it isn't at all clear to me how this is in any way different to the idea of post-truth.
Lawson responds that we do have to defend empiricism and rationalism, but we do not have to accept that there's an underlying truth. He says the evidence of this is from the 10,000 years of civilisations all claiming that they've found "the" truth. He values the method, accepts that there's value to the fiction, but says we should keep the application of empiricism without needing to accept that we've got "the answer". We can keep the method but abolish the truth.
McPherson says that we are indeed in a post-truth world. She says it's a case of Western imperialism and arrogance. We've outsourced our verification to big institutions like the state and the media. We need to re-engage with decision making and verification for ourselves, and that ultimately this post-truth crisis will be good for us. Even when totalitarian regimes are controlling information, she says that there's a benefit in the ordinary people learning to circumvent their controls as this is how things change.
Finally we move to what post-truth means in today's world. Lawson is asked about climate change. Mason accepts that it's true than man causes climate change, while Lawson says there are "closures and narratives". He says truth is a theological notion, that we should abandon the concept, but double down on the scientific method of rationalism and empiricism. He thinks we're getting it exactly wrong when we do the opposite, clinging to the idea of truth but abandoning rationality.
Mason says that we don't need a new narrative, although he admits the right has a powerful emotive one. Narratives are hypotheses, and in a sense they are provisional truths. The problem, he says, is that we've come to see science as a social construct, that is has been abused by the right. The left, meanwhile, has "drunk the Kool Aid" on relativism, and the right is exploiting this for all it's worth.
What I say
Personally I think there's much value in emphasizing the method rather than the results : the findings of science are evidenced-based and provisional, after all. But do we have to go as far as saying that truth is a construct or non-existent ? That seems excessive. After all, to even have a discussion about truth requires that we acknowledge certain similar meanings, certain fundamental truths if you will, of language. If things can only be said to be better or worse, still we must ask : by what standard ? Is there a Platonic form for lawnmowers ?
Yes, history is replete with examples of civilisations claiming they found various socio-political truths that turned out to be nothing of the sort, but they also found out a great deal that has stood the test of time : things fall down, rocks are hard, liquids change shape, laws of motion, that sort of thing. All these things will be true for all eternity. It's perfectly reasonable to say that linguistic descriptions (or representations if you prefer) are not the same as the reality. That is unavoidable. But surely, "the map is not the territory" does not mean that some maps are not more accurate than others : maps, unlike lawnmowers, can indeed be said to be "more true". Surely our linguistic and mathematical descriptions are the same : the more true they are, the better they are (simplifications notwithstanding). Language is the way we express and describe a much deeper understanding of the world - we don't have to consciously deconstruct everything the whole time, we know what is meant by "glass" in different contexts. Our descriptions are not required or expected to be perfect.
Nor do I understand the point of this business about engaging in different frameworks whilst simultaneously insisting that empiricism is better. If a worldview insists on emotional-based reasoning and decries logic and reason, then working within that framework will get us nowhere - you will never find a contradiction to hold its believers to account. It feels hypocritical and paradoxical to say that empiricism is better but not more true.
When it comes to the media and fake news, I cannot agree that it's better to value empiricism over the results, and I certainly don't agree that post-truth is going to be somehow good for us. Much of the modern world depends on scientific findings that require extreme efforts to verify; too many falsehoods make people angry and vulnerable, not more skeptical or rational.
Precious little was said in the debate about facts or data. Yes, the mantle of truth can be abused. But reality is all too real, and doesn't much care if you believe in it or not. Cars can crash. Fires burn things. Climate change happens. Saying that these things are anything other than correct is wrong. The people who say such things do not have some kind of nobly different worldview, they're just trying to break things. In the end I have to fall back on Richard Dawkins : in a debate, it is possible for one side simply to be wrong. We are not beholden to think that this is always the case, for there are indeed vast areas in which the situation is infinitely more complex. But if we resort to saying that this is never true at all, I think we would be making a catastrophic mistake.
Tribal Truths and New Wisdoms
From populist demagogues to liberal elites, Fox News to the BBC, the warring tribes of our troubled world agree on few ideals and still fewer facts. Yet they all share the belief that they are right. Are we all suffering from the illusion that we can uncover the truth?Should we embrace a world of competing facts while still seeking a progressive and stable society?
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