Bogoslovska smotra, Vol. 93 No. 1, 2023.
Review article
https://doi.org/10.53745/bs.93.1.5
The Genesis of Post-Truth: Politics and Science
Pavle Mijović
orcid.org/0000-0001-6399-7694
; Catholic Faculty of Theology, University of Sarajevo, Sarajevo, Bosna and Herzegovina
Abstract
The article titled The Genesis of Post-Truth. Politics and science aims to analyse the concept and the phenomenon of post-truth and offer a possible definition thereof. Our methodology is based on three interconnected moments that have had a favourable impact on the emergence of such a planetary phenomenon; specifically the political, the scientific and the philosophical moment. The first part of the artcile provides a general definition of the phenomenon of post-truth, firstly based on linguistic insights that help explore deeper the very essence of the phenomenon. The political context, a privileged place of the public sphere, shows the problematic relationship between the truth and politics, which are often in an antithetical relationship. The first part of the article answers the question on the origin of the phrase post-truth itself, conditioned by the socio-political context. In the second part of the article, we go a step further and point out the fact that the post-truth era is inspired by scepticism in the socially privileged form of knowledge, the scientific one. Through several contemporary examples of skepticism in modern science (vaccines, climate change, flat-earth theses), we demonstrate how those anti-scientific positions have had a favourable effect on generating a view of the post-truth world. It is not just an epistemic doubt, but a comprehensive moment of scepticism that is both psychologically based and transposed into the wider public sphere. The concluding considerations summarize in a synthetic form, the knowledge we have reached related to the genesis of post-truth.
Keywords
post-truth; politics; science; scepticism; epistemic doubt; psychological doubt.
Hrčak ID:
305893
URI
Publication date:
12.7.2023.
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