Perspectives on Post-Truth

ABSTRACT

This opening piece of the special issue ‘Perspectives on Post-Truth’ aims to accomplish three tasks. First, and foremost, it highlights the issue’s distinctive feature, namely its variegated approach to post-truth. The leading idea in assembling it has been to draw on different methodologies, theoretical approaches, and competences, in order to gain a fine-grained understanding of the post-truth condition and to develop an effective toolkit to address the most pressing challenges it poses to our societies. The underlying conviction is that a variegated approach is required by the multifaceted nature of the post-truth condition. The curious reader willing to venture through the issue will thus be exposed to different perspectives on post-truth: some pieces address it from a traditional epistemological perspective, others explore post-truth from the perspective of social epistemology, and still others adopt a semiotic perspective. In light of this multiplicity of perspectives, the second task of this piece has been to provide a brief thematic overview of the key issues and perspectives in order to illustrate the overall narrative of the project. The third and final task has been to give a detailed synopsis of each contribution so that the reader will know precisely what to expect from it.

KEYWORDS:

• Post-truth
• fake news
• conspiracy theories
• science denialism

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Putting aside the number of academic monographs on post-truth published in various languages, which has definitely risen since 2016 (e.g., Fuller 2018a, 2020; McIntyre 2018; Ferraris 2017; Lorusso 2018; Wikforss 2020; Ferrari and Moruzzi 2020), and the sheer number of articles on the topic, one can appreciate how much post-truth has attracted the interest of different academic disciplines by considering how many journals have dedicated a special issue to the topic. A quick survey limited to the academic journals’ special issues featuring ‘post-truth’ in the title shows that there have been at least sixteen special issues either published or planned since 2018 by journals of different disciplines, ranging from science education, through science politics, to philosophy: Biesecker (2018), Wolgemuth et al. (2018), Read and Ucan (2019), Temmerman, Coesemans, and Mast (2019), Ihlen et al. (2019), Aghasaleh (2019), Fasce (2020), Barzilai and Chinn (2020), Zotzmann and Vassilev (2020), Breitenwischer and Keiling (2020), Kozinets, Gershoff, and White (2020), Bonnet (2022), Carratalá, García, and Iranzo-Cabrera (2022), Tekobbe and Buck (2022), Koekoek and Zakin (2023), Belova (2023) – in addition, of course, to this very special issue!

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Filippo Ferrari

Filippo Ferrari is Assistant Professor in the Department of Arts, University of Bologna. Before joining the University of Bologna, Ferrari held positions at the Universities of Bonn, Padua, and Aberdeen. Ferrari has published extensively in high-ranked international journals on topics concerning epistemic normativity, disagreement, theories of truth and post-truth, and the philosophy of logic.

Anna Maria Lorusso

Anna Maria Lorusso is Associate Professor in the Department of Arts of Bologna University, where she teaches Semiotics, Semiotics of Culture and Analysis of Information. From 2017 until 2021 she was President of the Italian Association of Semiotics. She is on the board of several international journals: she is vice-director of the semiotic journal Versus: Quaderni di studi semiotici (VS) and on the editorial board of the international journals Nouveaux Actes Sémiotiques, Comunicaciòn y medios, and De signis. Her recent books in English include: MemoSur/MemoSouth: Memory, Commemoration and Trauma in Post-Dictatorship Argentina and Chile (editor, along with A. Sharman, M. Grass Kleiner and S. Savoini, London: Critical, Cultural and Communications Press, 2017), and Cultural Semiotics (London: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2016).

Sebastiano Moruzzi

Sebastiano Moruzzi is Associate Professor in the Department of Arts, University of Bologna. His research interests concern relativism, the nature of disagreement, ontological theories, theories of truth, theories of vagueness, and some core questions at the intersection between epistemology and the philosophy of logic. Moruzzi is also interested in didactic innovation and he is very active in doing philosophy with children.

Giorgio Volpe

Giorgio Volpe is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bologna. His research focuses on issues in epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of logic, particularly where those areas intersect. In addition to numerous journal articles, he has written two books on truth.