Post-Truth: Is Truth Constructed Or Discovered?

Fake news is nothing new. Lies and rumours have always existed and have been used by different groups of people to pursue self-interest. But why has it suddenly dominated the public conversation?

BBC Radio Four’s sociology podcast Thinking Allowed looks into the link between fake news, post-truth, and post-modernism. Presenter Laurie Taylor, himself a sociologist, talks to philosopher Steve Fuller who takes us back to the long history of competition over who defines and establishes truth. Fuller, the author of Post Truth (2018), refers to Pareto, the early 20th century Italian economic and social thinker who used lions and foxes to explain the power games related to knowledge. Lions are those who establish the truth via authority, and foxes are those who disrupt that regime of truth through questioning its authority. 

Taylor also talks to Helen Pluckrose, Editor of Areo, a digital magazine focused on Enlightenment liberalism, and Andrew Chadwick, Professor of Political Communication at Loughborough University, about post-modernism and its relation to the current panic over established truth.