Post-Truth, Postmodernismand Alternative Facts

Anotace: Colin Wight gets our special section on Post-Truth off to a spirited – and provocative – start with a polemical essay against the rise of post-truth in academia, which he associates with standpoint epistemology and the ideology of lived experience as a condition for truth claiming. Academia, Wight argues, cannot function if it believes that the ideal of objective truth is simply a cipher for ideology. Wight sets out the case for philosophical realism, and explaining why we cannot live, let alone study, International Relations without some ontological sense of a “reality independent of human thought.” Wight traces post-truth politics back to its roots in academic debates: whilst the post-truth condition is obviously not just down to academics, he argues that we clearly have some responsibility in having set the conditions for post-truth and have a correlated responsibility to “say that some perspectives are better than others and explain why.”