Post-Truth and Post-Verisimilitude: Strengths and Weaknesses of Conversationalism Facing the Decline of Public Opinion

FEDERICO PENELAS

Oslo

Workshop; Conference "Truth versus the Rhetoric of Truth: Authority, Realism, and Power"; 2019

Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Arts an Ideas; Faculty of Humanities; University of Oslo

The notion of "post-truth" hasbeen proposed as a new discursive device in order to warn about the variousdistortions that affect the circulation of information in Western democracies.Even when the term remains vague, it could begin to be literalized as pointingto a dialogic ethos that tends to generate ?redundant audiences?, that is, blocksof opinion that remain more or less consciously closed to adverse informationto the set of beliefs held by the block. I am interested in highlighting that thephenomenon of post-truth does not rest, as is usually simplified, in theprevalence of emotive aspects over rational ones (as if, in addition, thedifferentiation between them was not controversial), but rather that it can beclearly presented as emerging from the implementation of distorted versionsvirtuous principles which are virtous from the epistemic point of view.