Lee McIntyre’s Post-Truth is a timely analysis of the status quo of contemporary political discourse which has obviously become increasingly unfettered from commitment to truth.  McIntyre acknowledges President Donald Trump as a poster child for post-truth, what with him having made more than 10,000 false or misleading claims during his first 827 days as a President (Kessler, Rizzo, and Kelly 2019).  However, McIntyre’s analysis shows how Trump is not a cause for this, but an effect of trends that have been laid out in decades before.  McIntyre uses ‘post-truth’ “to indicate not so much that we are ‘past’ truth in a temporal sense (as in ‘postwar) but in the sense that truth has been eclipsed—that it is irrelevant” (p.5). 

After outlining the present-day situation in chapter 1, McIntyre dedicates chapters 2 through 6 to the various elements that have contributed to post-truth.  The chapters presents condensed versions of the origins of science denialism, the effects of cognitive biases such as confirmation bias and backfire effect, emergence of media bias and false equivalence even regarding factual matters, the role of fake news in social media, and the contribution of post-modernism, respectively.  In chapter 7, McIntyre considers possible ways to respond to the situation. 

Chapter 2, titled “Science denialism as a road map for understanding post-truth” explores science denialism and its origins.  These are tracked down to 1950s tobacco industry.  Faced with growing scientific consensus that tobacco smoke causes cancer, the industry advocacy group—Tobacco Industry Research Committee—set to “convince public that there was ‘no proof’ that cigarette smoking caused cancer and that previous work purporting to show such a link was being questioned by ‘numerous scientists'” (p.23).  While McIntyre covers the story in a necessarily pared-down version, he acknowledges how these tactics developed by TIRC not only worked, but they came to be the standard employed by other advocacy groups, including the oil industry in its response to climate change.  McIntyre concludes the chapter with the dour acknowledgement that these tactics have paid off: while there is a virtual consensus among scientists that anthropogenic climate change is real, only 27 per cent of Americans think such a consensus exists (pp.29-30).  The denialist tactics have become so commonplace that there seems to be no need to employ them in secret: “The selective use of facts that prop up one’s position, and the complete rejection of facts that do not, seems part and parcel of creating the new post-truth reality” (p.34).  Lot of the chapter represents ground that has been traversed by others, though; an argument connecting the origins of science denialism to the tobacco industry has been made by Donald Prothero (2013), Ari Rabin-Hawt (2016), and others.  Still, as science denialism is part and parcel of post-truth, its inclusion here is warranted.

Chapter 3 turns to a detailed expose of one the roots of post-truth which is hardwired into us: cognitive biases.  “Psychologists for decades have been performing experiments that show that we are not quite as rational as we think.  Some of this work bears directly on how we react in the face of unexpected or uncomfortable truths” (p.35).  McIntyre gives a brief historical review of cognitive dissonance, social conformity, and confirmation bias.  But although these factors were revealed in research in the 1950s and 1960s, post-truth did not manifest itself until half a century later.  Since these discoveries, more evidence of cognitive biases has been amassed.  The earlier work on confirmation bias gave rise to discoveries on motivated reasoning, which is “the state of mind in which we find ourselves willing (perhaps at an unconscious level) to shade our beliefs in light of our opinions”; the mechanism with which we try to accomplish it is confirmation bias—”interpreting information that it confirms our existing beliefs” (p.45).  The phenomenon is readily seen in how sports fans from opposing teams view objective reality differently, and “the psychological mechanism behind it exists in all of us” (p.46).  Against this backdrop, McIntyre argues, the cognitive biases of the backfire effect and the Dunning-Kruger effect explain how our preexisting political beliefs “can affect our willingness to accept facts and evidence” (p.48).  The former is the effect that “when partisans were presented with evidence that one of their politically expedient beliefs was wrong, they would reject the evidence and ‘double down’ on their mistaken belief” (p.48).  The latter effect is the bias “that concerns how low-ability subjects are often unable to recognize their own ineptitude” (p.51).  When applied to political beliefs, the effect manifests itself in reluctance to admit being wrong in face of expert evidence to the contrary (pp.53-55).  As for their relation to post-truth, “these and other cognitive biases not only sometimes rob us of our ability to think clearly, but inhibit our realization of when we are not doing so” (p.55).  One way in which the cognitive biases could be overcome is through group interaction.  McIntyre notes how, when individuals subject their views to group scrutiny, they become more likely to see the error in their own beliefs.  However, the group interactions can also work against us.  As we tend to associate with groups whose beliefs align with ours, we may opt for group cohesion over critical thinking and our biases are amplified rather than ameliorated (pp.59-60).  In this chapter, McIntyre may be overplaying his hand when it comes to the backfire effect, though: more recent research has failed to replicate the original results, which has led some authors to question the significance of the effect, and to regard it as “so-called backfire effect” (Dombrowski 2018).

Chapter 4 segues with the conclusion of the previous chapter, where McIntyre briefly mentioned ‘news silos’: we have the luxury of selective interactions, and this entails the ability of selecting our sources of information.  But, McIntyre argues, the case with the news wasn’t always like this; the role of the traditional media has changed from its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s, when not-for-profit investigative reporting was of paramount importance.  When it comes to TV news, through a series of steps over the years, the public became accustomed to continuous news coverage (e.g., of the Iran hostage crisis), and they came to expect more of the same; as a result, the news channels heeded these calls.  Although the incipit attempts to provide continuous coverage were non-partisan, the partisan news coverage format turned out to be a financial success.  At the same time, the public’s trust of news channels deteriorated along predictable lines.  While conservatives identify Fox News as the most trusted news source (44 per cent), liberals consider the most trusted source to be network broadcast news (at 24 per cent) (p.73).  Curiously, McIntyre notes, many viewers regard The Daily Show with Jon Stewart—a comedy show—to be more trustworthy news source than many of the traditional outlets (p.73).  Next, McIntyre turns to focus on the decline in quality of news.  In their attempts to provide objective news coverage, the networks opted to give equal time to both sides of the story—even on factual matters (p.77).  Such an approach, combined with the techniques of the denialists, provided an open forum for the denialists to get their message out:

“All they have to do is to bully the media into believing that if ‘other research’ exists on scientific topics but they aren’t covering it, it must be because they are biased.  Journalists took the bait and started to cover both sides of ‘controversial’ issues like climate change and vaccines, even if the controversy had been generated only by those who had something financial or political at stake” (pp.77-79).

This approach led to confusion in the part of the public: “Was there a scientific controversy over climate change or not?  If not, why were the TV shows presenting it as if there were one?” (p.81).  As McIntyre presents it, the news organizations are facing a daunting predicament.  The partisan audience seems to prefer opinion-based content over truthful coverage, and they tend to be unable to tell the difference; if all news sources are seen as biased, then due to the psychological factors covered earlier, the audience tends to gravitate towards news sources that corroborate their own biases (pp.86-87).

The decline of the traditional media is just another part of the post-truth phenomenon.  But as the influence of the traditional media waned, the void was filled with content from social media, which “blurred the lines even further between news and opinion” (p.93).  The ground was fertile for fake news to take root—but as we have seen with the other factors of post-truth, fake news have been with us for a while already.  Objectivity was not a virtue of news sources until the 1840s, when editorial comments begun to fade from news reports.  Before that, news were expected to be partisan, and to promote a particular viewpoint (pp.97-100).  But what is fake news, after all?  McIntyre defines it as news that is not just false, but deliberately so; it’s news that has been “created for a purpose” (p.105).  The rest of chapter 5 focuses on the fake news in current events, especially in the 2016 elections.  The surge of fake news outlets in the run-up to the election is well-documented, even if the motives behind it remain murky. 

In chapter 6, McIntyre turns to explore whether postmodernism led to post-truth.  Given the near-ineffable nature of postmodernism (let alone the question whether there is such a thing as a common element to postmodern thought), McIntyre takes the works of Jacques Derrida and Jean-Francois Lyotard as representative of postmodernism.  In particular, he seizes on the idea of deconstruction of literature: “we cannot rely on the idea that an author knew what he or she ‘meant’ in a text so we must break it apart and examine it as a function of the political, social, historical, and cultural assumptions behind it” (p.124).  Add to this the sociological idea that everything could be interpreted as a ‘text’, and you end up in a situation where the notion that there is a right or wrong answer is brought to question (pp. 124-5).  McIntyre characterizes this as the first thesis of postmodernism: “there is no such thing as an objective truth” (p.126).  The second, according to McIntyre is that “any profession of truth is nothing more than a reflection of the political ideology of the person who is making it” (p.126).  McIntyre acknowledges that his thesis is controversial, but he dismisses the critiques by claiming to be sure that “postmodernists have contributed to this situation by retreating within the subtlety of their ideas, then being shocked when they are used for purposes outside what they would approve” (pp.126-7).  He further acknowledges how “right-wing folks who borrow from postmodernist thought” do not appreciate the subtlety of the ideas; “if they need a tool, they will use a boning knife as a hammer” (p.127).  As evidence, of this, McIntyre discusses a few select cases, including the writings of Phillip Johnson, who employed deconstructionist ideas in championing for Intelligent Design Creationism); Johnson explicitly endorses his interpretation of postmodernist thought and its application to Darwinism in order to wage war against the scientific consensus.  But even if the evidence shows that some authors coopted postmodern ideas for their cause, it is not clear that the evidence bears the weight of McIntyre’s more generalized claim, of how postmodernism as a whole is the godfather of post-truth.  For by this token, one would have to concede that Aristotle, too, is a forebear to post-truth, thanks to his work on rhetoric that has been coopted by science denialists and others of the same stripe.

Chapter 7, titled “Fighting post-truth” focuses on techniques that one could employ in resisting life in a post-truth society.  The first lesson is that one should constantly fight back against lies: “We should never assume that any claim is ‘too outrageous to be believed’.  A lie is told because the person telling it thinks there is a chance that someone will believe it” (p.155).  It may be impossible to convert the liar, McIntyre notes, but for every lie, there is an audience that may still be swayed away from the lie.  As for the question of whether this is enough, given the seemingly endless onslaught of misinformation and outright lies, McIntyre cites psychological studies which suggest that there is a tipping point; “it may not be easy to convince people with inconvenient facts, but it is apparently possible” (p.159).  Put more bluntly, one can deny reality for only so far. 

On the whole, McIntyre does a commendable job in bringing together various elements that appear to be contributing to post-truth.  Although some of his material has been covered elsewhere, McIntyre provides an extensive bibliography along with copious notes for each of the chapters.  Moreover, the other treatises on post-truth have been more limited in their scope, focusing on just one element at a time, whereas McIntyre’s book addresses them all.  But despite all of this, at the end it appears that something is still missing. 

As part of the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, the book promises to deliver “foundational knowledge that informs a principled understanding of the world”—and it is unfortunate that it does not meet this promise.  Although McIntyre presents a thorough overview of the elements that inform post-truth, a broader structure that would connect all of them together seems to be lacking.  In his conclusion, McIntyre focuses on the individual responsibility when it comes to post-truth: “It is our decision how we will react to a world in which someone is trying to pull the wool over our eyes” (p.172).  But the admonition aside, the book takes it for granted that avoiding post-truth is desirable, while offering no systematic justification, the brief remarks in the introductory chapter notwithstanding.  This void could easily have been filled, say, with a chapter on virtue epistemology, which regards individuals and communities as the main focus of epistemic evaluation.  Whereas traditional epistemology investigates beliefs, virtue epistemology investigates the agents (both individual and collective ones) who hold those beliefs.  Virtue epistemology focuses on intellectual virtues and vices and how these are made manifest in individuals and in groups.  Adding a chapter on this topic would have enriched the book by unifying the seemingly disparate themes.  Moreover, this would not likely have added substantially to the length of the book.  Interspersed in the chapters are poignant statements drawn from the text—like “Post-truth amounts to a form of ideological supremacy, whereby its practitioners are trying to compel someone to believe in something whether there is good evidence for it or not” (p.12).  In and of themselves, these statements—16 of them—add very little to the substance of the book; these (almost) twitter-length tidbits serve more as a distraction than anything, and nothing of value would be lost if they were excised and replaced with content.

Another missing element that would have improved the book is if it had taken bullshit more seriously.  Harry Frankfurt, who has written the book on this topic (2005), defines a bullshitter as someone who wants to persuade an audience to accept a claim with no regard to its truth or falsity.  It would have been interesting to see a more detailed comparison between bullshit and post-truth (Frankfurt is only briefly mentioned on p.9); as it stands, there seems to be very little daylight between bullshit and post-truth.  Moreover, as bullshit is regarded as a pertinent topic to social epistemology, this brings up the consideration that discussion on social epistemology and post-truth (another absent topic) would have benefited the book; Joshua Wakeham (2017) has extensive discussion on bullshit and social epistemology. 

          At this point, it does not really matter if the book gets augmented with a chapter on virtue epistemology.  What does matter is that the lack of this material diminishes the unity of the book.  Granted, McIntyre attempts to weave some of the elements together, but ultimately, the reader is left unclear as to what kind of unity he was striving for.  Because of this, it is unclear if post-truth requires all of the elements to be present, or if something counts as post-truth if just some of the elements are present.  Intuitively, the latter answer seems more likely.  As pervasive as social media is in our lives, not all post-truth is disseminated on social media.  Likewise, not all post-truth involve denialism.  And so on.  But if this appearance is accurate, it only raises a further question: if just a few of the elements are needed for something to count as post-truth, then what role do the other elements play?  The attempt to provide a unified account of post-truth seems to face a problem not unlike an attempt to define postmodernism—or games (see Aylesworth 2015 for discussion on the former, and Wittgenstein 2009 on the latter).  Maybe we are best left by saying (with due apologies to Ludwig Wittgenstein) that these elements—and elements similar to these—are what is called post-truth.

 

 

References:

Aylesworth, Gary.  2015.  “Postmodernism”.  In Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2015 edition), retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/postmodernism/ .

 

Dombrowski, Eileen.  2018.  “Facts matter after all: Rejecting the ‘backfire effect'”.  In Oxford Education Blog, March 12, retrieved from https://educationblog.oup.com/theory-of-knowledge/facts-matter-after-all-rejecting-the-backfire-effect .

 

Frankfurt, Harry.  2005.  On Bullshit.  Princeton University Press.

 

Kessler, Glen, Salvador Rizzo, and Meg Kelly.  2019.  “President Trump has made more than 10,000 false or misleading claims”.  In Washington Post, April 29, retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/04/29/president-trump-has-made-more-than-false-or-misleading-claims/ .

 

Prothero, Donald.  2013.  “The Holocaust Denier’s Playbook and the Tobacco Smokescreen”.  In Pigliucci & Boudry (ed.), Philosophy of Pseudo-science, 341-359.  University of Chicago Press. 

 

Rabin-Hawt, Ari.  2016.  Lies, Incorporated: The World of Post-Truth Politics.  Anchor Books.

 

Wakeham, Joshua.  2017.  “Bullshit as a Problem of Social Epistemology”.  In Sociological Theory 35 (1): 15-38.

 

Wittgenstein, Ludwig.  2009.  Philosophical Investigations, 4^th ed., edited by Hacker and Schulte.  Wiley-Blackwell.

 

 

 

© 2019 Tuomas W. Manninen

 

Tuomas W. Manninen is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies at Arizona State University.  He regularly teaches philosophy courses on critical thinking—and, of late, post-truth.