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Abstract
Taking its inspiration from the name of the recent ‘#FeesMustFall’ movement on South African university campuses, this paper takes stock of the apparent disrepute into which truth, facts and also rationality have fallen in recent times. In the post-truth world, the blurring of borders between truth and deception, truthfulness and dishonesty, and non-fiction and fiction has become a habit – and also an educational challenge. I argue that truth matters, in education as elsewhere, and in ways not often acknowledged by constructivist, postmodernist and postcolonialist positions.
Keywords:
Acknowledgement
This paper was first presented in the Wednesday Seminar Series at the Institute of Education, London, in March 2017. I am grateful to all participants for their incisive questions and generative feedback. I am indebted, further, to David Bridges and to Harvey Siegel for continuing inspiration and encouragement.
Notes
1. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/word-of-the-year/word-of-the-year-2016 (accessed 13 February 2017).
2. http://www.richardcorbett.org.uk/long-list-leave-lies/ (accessed 21 February 2017). See also http://brexitlies.com/http://brexitlies.com/. Incidentally, this is not to imply that the ‘Stay’ campaign operated without resorting to lies and fabrications.
3. In January 2017, Trump delivered a largely self-referential speech that included an untruthful claim that his inauguration was better attended than those of Barack Obama. He also made the astounding claim so belied by the evidence – ‘I love honesty’. (Here, too, I do not mean to imply that Hilary Clinton’s campaign was completely devoid of untruths.)
4. http://www.politifact.com/personalities/donald-trump/ (accessed 23 February 2017). ‘Liar liar pants on fire’ is a phrase that children like to use when someone is suspected of lying.
5. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-claims/ (accessed 23 February 2017).
6. Alexander Gauland of the German right-wing party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) asserted recently that the German government is trying to replace the German people with migrants. It is difficult to prove or disprove this kind of statement. But this does not matter to AfD supporters and sympathizers: what matters is that Gauland has articulated what they are feeling – in this case, what they fear or dislike.
7. http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2015/11/fabulous-memory-donald-trump (accessed 10 May 2017).
8. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D68fvcCG44s (accessed 11 March 2017).
9. Canada was one of the countries to offer help US scientists protect climate change data (http://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-wednesday-edition-1.3896080/canadians-help-u-s-scientists-protect-climate-change-data-1.3896089 (accessed 11 March 2017).
10. In fact, Trump himself tweeted that climate change is a hoax created by the Chinese to make US manufacturing non-competitive.
11. This echoes the radical postmodern view that ‘knowledge can never be more than just a story’ (Pennock Citation2010, 762) and that ‘all narratives are equal and allows no special privilege to any truth claim over any other’ (773).
12. http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-barnett-nature-alternative-facts-20170210-story.html (accessed 11 March 2017).
13. http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/journal/past-issues/issue-3/post-truth-pluralism (accessed 23 February 2017).
14. https://ed.stanford.edu/news/stanford-researchers-find-students-have-trouble-judging-credibility-information-online (accessed 21 May 2017).
15. To take an important example, Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook clearly have a responsibility to filter out fake news, notwithstanding their invocation of the impossibility of such a task. After all, they have developed algorithms for crowdsourcing, eliminating pornographic content, and for tailoring feeds relating to users’ interests and attitudes.
16. http://l.email.newyorktimes.com/rts/go2.aspx?h=114,742&tp=i-H43-A3-3D5-MQQgg-1y-3ZiWe-1c-MLU9w-Y0TV&x=i-H43-A3-3D5-MQQgg-1y-3ZiWe-1c-MLU9w-Y0TV (accessed 27 February 2017).
17. According to Maffie, ‘philosophic reflection for the Mexica is first and foremost a practical endeavour concerned with creating a good life, not a theoretical endeavour concerned with discovering truth’ (Maffie Citation2014, 164). ‘Mexica philosophy speaks not of propositional belief (“belief that”) and knowledge (“knowledge that”) but of “ohtlatoca” (“following a path”) and “know how” respectively’ (166). ‘Right-path knowing (“tlamatiliztli”) … is understood in terms of skill, competence, and the ability to make things happen – and not in terms of the intellectual apprehension of truths or states of affairs’ (166, 167).
18. One of Vine Deloria Jr.’s chief targets in his book Red earth, white lies: Native Americans and the myth of scientific fact (Citation1995) is the theory, embraced by a vast majority of archaeologists, that America’s original, ‘indigenous’ inhabitants originally came from Asia across the Bering Strait more than 10,000 years ago. Dismissing this account as ‘scientific folklore’, Deloria presents a version of the popular creationist view that Native Americans have always lived in the Americas, after emerging onto the earth’s surface from a subterranean world of spirits. Deloria, similarly – employing arguments strongly reminiscent of those advanced by Christian fundamentalists, rejects the theory of evolution (like the Bering Strait hypothesis) as unsubstantiated dogma. ‘Science is the dominant religion’, he said in an interview. In attempting to salvage their own dogmatic accounts, he said, archaeologists ‘are fudging considerably so that their general interpretation does not give us much confidence, and some Indian accounts may be more accurate’ (reported in Johnson Citation1996, 2).