The term post-truth refers to circumstances in which objective facts exert less influence on public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. While not new, this phenomenon has intensified with the rapid speed that misinformation and conspiracy theories can spread online, compounded by rising political polarization. This book draws on leading research in psychology and other social sciences to explain how post-truth claims emerge, why they persist despite contrary evidence, and how we might respond to their challenges. My analysis integrates three distinct approaches to human reasoning: Bayesian models, dual-process theories, and social argumentation. I introduce the term wise deliberative spaces to describe forums that pursue truth and the common good through discourse practices that foster deliberative dialogue. These spaces have declined in recent decades due to reduced face-to-face community engagement, shifts in the media landscape, declining trust in knowledge-producing institutions, and deepening political divides. The chapter concludes by summarizing the book’s organization.

A hallmark of wise deliberative spaces is their commitment to truth-seeking, in contrast to “post-truth” contexts where emotional appeals and personal beliefs are more important than objective facts. Chapter 5 explores how post-truth thinking has been fueled by cognitive elites across the political spectrum and traces its roots to postmodernist ideas. The chapter reviews philosophical definitions of truth, contrasting idealist and coherentist views with realist theories, specifically correspondence, semantic, and pragmatic approaches. It draws on Hilary Putnam’s concept of natural realism to argue that objective truths do exist – depending on the domain of inquiry – but only if we distinguish between what is true and what is merely believed to be true. Postpositivism supports this by recognizing an external reality while acknowledging that our knowledge is fallible and evolving. Biases, though inevitable, can be countered through reflexive and communal inquiry. Ultimately, the chapter argues that wisdom lies in understanding the nature of different kinds of inquiry – scientific, moral, or otherwise – without falling into the trap of relativism.

Chapter 9 synthesizes the book’s core themes on the waning of wisdom, human rationality, and wise deliberative spaces. Since the 1960s, wise spaces have declined due to eroding social capital, weakening trust in social institutions, shrinking civics education, diminished investigative journalism, media fragmentation, social media’s addictive design, and a revival of relativistic notions of truth. Rationality is compromised by cognitive biases, poorly adapted heuristics, digital misinformation, and insufficient search of evidence and hypothesis spaces. Groups can overcome these limits when deliberations follow wise discourse practices. The chapter offers cautious optimism. Human reasoning is guided by a reflective metasystem – pursuing accuracy or directional goals – and by intuitive subsystems, some quasi-Bayesian. This core capacity for rational thought is often obscured by biased views of outgroups, which wise deliberative spaces can counter by fostering understanding and finding common ground. Moreover, new face-to-face and online forums are being designed to strengthen civic discourse and bridge divides. A growing public appetite for such solutions signals potential for renewal.

This chapter provides a commentary on the studies published in this volume. It identifies a range of common themes across the different chapters, including the importance of context in shaping strategies of persuasion, the role of indirectness and implicature in persuasion and manipulation, and the importance of the affective and interpersonal dimensions of persuasion. At the same time, the commentary also points out some of the limitations of traditional tools of discourse analysis for understanding how persuasion and manipulation work in the complex networked context of digital media. To address these shortcomings, an ecological approach to manipulation, influence, and deception is proposed, drawing on recent work in sociology, media studies, science and technology studies, and ‘ecological pragmatics’. Three aspects of online discourse are discussed in light of this ecological perspective, namely: inter(con)textuality, iterability, and metadiscursivity. The chapter ends with a discussion of the implications of an ecological approach to persuasion, manipulation, and deception for teaching critical literacies.

This final chapter brings together the major themes of the book, connecting them to wider social and political trends. The establishment of agencies like the UKSA in Britain and ASP in France have been heralded as ways to make it more difficult for politicians to manipulate statistics and statisticians. However, it is recognised that a similar agency is unlikely to be established in the USA. There is little established culture of national agencies and individual states wish to preserve their freedom from state control. We discuss whether the growing distrust of politicians represents a post-truth era. We stress that statistical agencies do not want to establish fixed statistical truths but they are like practical Popperians: seeking to eliminate error, judging better from worse statistical estimates and warning against absolute judgements. In the course of the book, especially in the biographical chapters, heroes and villains inevitably arise. The villains are often populist politicians with mega-personalities and a low sense of truthfulness. The heroes are ‘grey’ backroom statisticians, standing in the way of powerful politicians. It is time to recognise the value of heroic non-celebrities.

The Introduction is a chapter-length outline of the of the book which does more than simply summarise. Though not exhaustive, it includes both explanation and discussion of the historical context of Brexit and Brexitspeak, combined with a description of the linguistic tools of analysis. The starting point is that without language politics could not happen, so it is essential to understand how language works in general and how it is strategically deployed by politicians. In this chapter populism is discussed as an unwritten ideology best characterised by its demagogic appeal to an idea of ‘the people’ within a nationalist notion of ‘the British people’, at the same time promoting a friend-foe antithesis, stirring up emotion and avoiding reasoned argument. Demagoguery is a little used term in political science but highly relevant to the present state of democracy. Indeed, demagoguery exploits and undermines democracy. It is both an effect and a cause of post-truth politics, where truthfulness and facts are overridden. The final section takes a closer look at the fundamentals of language and language use that are at issue in examining the discourse of Brexit.

This chapter deals with the issue of epistemology or the oftentimes implicit theories of knowledge that guide research and methodological choices. The chapter starts with a brief discussion of what it means to live in a society in which the factual basis of truth can be easily questioned – the post-truth climate. It then outlines several popular conceptions and misconceptions about epistemology and maps out some of the main epistemological positions that inspired if not research then certainly philosophical debate. The second part of the chapter argues for pragmatism as an epistemology that can help us deal with the complexities of doing empirical research in a post-truth context by transcending the old realist–relativist divide and fostering methodological pluralism.

Since the advent of COVID-19, the widespread dissemination of misleading health information has impeded efforts to control the pandemic. The COVID-19 “infodemic,” as the World Health Organization has termed it, is a symptom of the larger “post-truth” phenomenon, which has its roots in deepening partisan divides, the rise of social media, the politicization of the news, the uncovering of research fraud, and the perceived impotence of government. But our inquiry centers on the role that law, especially health law, has played by unwittingly eroding trust in expertise regarding matters of health. We look particularly at the role of the evolving commercial speech doctrine, which has significantly limited government’s capacity to regulate potentially confusing or harmful commercial speech related to health. We also consider how generally salutary protections for autonomy, including those within the law of informed consent, may have left patients with the (mis)impression that all judgments about medical interventions are of equal weight. Blind reliance on expertise has its own problems, as shameful examples of the disregard for the well-being of vulnerable populations (as in the case of the Tuskegee study) suggest, Nevertheless, the public health consequences of the infodemic, from reduced compliance with mask wearing to distrust of potential vaccines, loom large. We conclude that re-assessing how health law can help rebuild trust in science is crucial if we wish to prepare for the inevitable pandemics ahead.

This chapter considers some of the legal and professional implications of social media use. These are discussed from two perspectives: firstly, how the law is changing to help ensure harmful and false information is not distributed, and secondly how professionals should responsibly use social media. To illustrate each of these, the chapter focuses on proposed reforms to the UK law and the UK General Medical Council’s (GMC) guidance for doctors. The principles discussed will apply to other jurisdictions and professional groups, but individual professionals should ensure they are familiar with the frameworks within which they practise.

The introduction argues that Cavell’s democratic perfectionism is uniquely situated to respond to the democratic crisis of post-truth politics. It argues that post-truth politics is a political response to the epistemological problem of skepticism. As a first step in exploring democratic perfectionism, the introduction offers a brief overview of Cavell’s interpretation of skepticism and its salience for politics. Section 2 provides a preliminary sketch of skepticism. Section 3 expands what Cavell means by responsiveness. Section 4 discusses how these two concepts shape democratic perfectionism. Section 5 asks, where is the politics in Cavell’s writings? While Cavell never wrote a text that was explicitly about political philosophy, his thoughts on politics are scattered throughout his writings. An initial obstacle to interpreting his democratic perfectionism is identifying where in his thought to look for those ideas. Section 6 explains how these themes are analyzed throughout the remainder of the book.

There are different generations of information warfare that evolve with technological, (geo)political and economic changes occuring in society. They are a ’convenient’ means of covert and indirect engagement with another actor in international relations while exposing oneself to the minimum of risk and accountability. It is linked to the popularized international relations concept of hybrid warfare.

Judicial law-making has frequently been likened to arts and crafts of various sorts, from minting coins to writing novels. While considering these analogies and how they demonstrate the reality of the law’s fabricating processes, the deeper aim of this chapter is to challenge the assumption that facts and truths established in law courts are ‘found’ and ‘discovered’. It is only by acknowledging that legal facts and legal truths are made by judicial crafts that we will come to appreciate the merits of those crafts and to discern the attributes of truth-making in courts that set the standard by which to judge the quality of truth claims in other contexts.

This chapter discusses the ways in which Rushdie and his work can be understood in the context of the aesthetics and ideologies of postmodernism. Rushdie’s novels deploy postmodern fictional devices, such as intertextuality and metafictional interruptions, to explore questions of politics, epistemology, and ontology. In his early work, Rushdie provides an instance of both the potential for postmodern techniques to craft original political perspectives commensurate with the aims of postcolonialism, and the limitations of a western theoretical perspective sceptical of those grand narratives of history and subjectivity over which postcolonial subjects were only now gaining purchase. His status as literary spokesperson for immigrant communities in Britain was revised after the Satanic Verses affair, and subsequent novels are sometimes found to lack the radical critique offered by the early work. This chapter argues that the development of Rushdie’s writing – particularly in recent volumes – shows evidence of a move away from the deconstructive application of postmodern strategies in particular postcolonial contexts to challenge political master-narratives, and towards a more general exploration of classical humanist themes such as love, good and evil, life and death. This chapter ends with illustrative readings of two recent Rushdie novels, The Golden House and Quichotte.

The epistemic community research programme, which in the last generation helped frame International Relations understandings of the relationship between knowledge and power, rested on the influence of scientists and experts on policymaking through framing, persuasion, and socialization. In this chapter, we argue that while pioneering, the epistemic-community research programme was incomplete, since it neglected the relationship between knowledge, power, and practice. Because practices are at the core of what epistemic communities are, do, and aim to achieve, we suggest a pragmatist practice-based approach, according to which knowing requires active participation in social communities and knowledge is not a product but is bound with action. We, therefore, explain the political adoption of knowledge-generated practices by the very nature of practicing and joining communities of practice. With this purpose in mind, we propose understanding epistemic communities as epistemic communities of practice. By identifying epistemic communities as a special and heuristically important case of communities of practice, we will open new and exciting avenues of theory-making and empirical research. We illustrate our approach by examining the establishment of nuclear arms control verification practices during the Cold War and the recent spread of a populist ‘post-truth’ epistemic community of practice.

Focusing on the historical and contemporary dilemmas posed by the “refugee crisis,” this essay investigates the potential for international progress in acknowledging our common humanity. I examine the utility of Emanuel Adler’s theory of cognitive evolution as a lens through which to assess the extent of that potential. I employ the theory to explore how certain practices dealing with forced migration became prevalent, while others lay dormant. I also examine how competing communities of practice battle to shape our understanding of forced migration in the current “post-truth” environment. I argue that cognitive evolution offers a potent conceptual framework for understanding both the extent to which the suffering of migrants has and has not been alleviated – a powerful indicator of the degree to which the world community has acknowledge their humanity. This holds for the social order of refugee protection, even in the current period as tribalism threatens to erode epistemological security, as normlessness threatens to replace a competition among norms, and as these threats weaken our shared reality.