WP4:
Science and Post-Truth
Our liberal democratic societies have been affected by the complex post-truth phenomenon and by a growing skepticism toward modern science. The digital revolution has disrupted how communication and information occur, allowing, on the one hand, unprecedented ease of access to opinions and facts from all over the world and, on the other hand, contributing to the fragmentation of sources, often undermining their reliability.
The post-truth attitude has obvious negative political consequences for the quality of public debate and for the fairness of electoral campaigns. Above all, post-truth inevitably clashes with the authority of modern science, on which liberal democracies rely to create a shared basis for public debates on the decisions we need to make as a political community (Bartlett 2018). Ignoring the authority of science, as opposed to displaying a healthy critical attitude, directly undermines the stability of liberal democratic societies that presuppose a citizenry not entirely victimized by propaganda.
With “post-truth” being chosen as word of the year in 2016, the phenomenon calls for three areas of philosophical and political science research:
(a) Epistemic Claims, Moral Conceptions, and Freedom of Speech in the Digital Age
We will investigate to what extent justice must rely on truth or whether it could be, as in the case of Rawls (2005), independent of the comprehensive but reasonable moral conceptions upheld by citizens. Can reasonableness be defined independently of truth?
This question has consequences for how we should handle the spread of conspiracy theories, blatantly false news, incendiary political campaigns, and destabilizing statements from political actors. It also impacts the huge theme of how one should redefine the limits of freedom of speech in the digital era (Williams 2002; Stanley 2016; Sunstein 2017, Pollicino and Bassini 2014).
(b) Populism and Science in Politics
We aim to investigate how populism changed the use of science for the sake of political narratives (Beaver and Stanley 2023). One question that intrigues us is whether a general idea of science as monolithic and free of divergent opinions is, despite appearances, functional to populism (Bessi 2015; Kaltwasser, et al. 2017; Cassam 2019; Perini-Santos 2020, Eslen-ziya, and Giorgi 2022).
(c) Unravelling Post-Truth:
Socio-Political Causes in Time of Disinformation and Polarization
It is necessary to evaluate from a normative point of view well-known phenomena such as echo chambers, anonymous communication, fake news, polarization of public spheres through the renewed mobilization of political sentiments and emotions. These well-known phenomena will be seen for the first time in conjunction with the progressive impoverishment of the middle class.
The question is whether the nefarious combination of these two sets of facts fuels the post-truth era as an anti-establishment and anti-elitist discourse (McIntyre 2018; Lehdonvirta 2023; Benson 2023; Di Cesare, D. 2023).