What is Real in the Post-truth World?

From Plato’s exalted claims that “truth is the goal of human life”, through Hegelian idealism and late 20th century pragmatism, we reached the post-truth era. Theoretically labeled as deflationary, truth as a concept today is stripped from significance in philosophical reflection, and as such, serves no much purpose. The idea of truth in our everyday world of social and mass media, increasingly appears to be vague, empty and utterly useless. How did this happen, and what are the consequences?

Today, we walk through three distinct stages in history of truth: correspondence, relativity, and insignificance.

Stage 1: Truth is what Corresponds with Reality

According to classical correspondence theory, truth is a given, unmediated knowledge. “Truth is the agreement between intellect and object”, says Thomas Aquinas.

For Descartes the truth represents a notion so “transcendentally clear” that it cannot escape direct apprehension. Truth is obvious and empirical fact.

The last great thinker of correspondence theory, the Austrian-born philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein suggested sentences should be treated as “pictures”. The proposition is true only if words used to depict the world correspond to the elements of the “picture”. Anything that cannot be defined or pictured in the real world is false.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Stage 2: Truth is Relative

Critics of classical theory of truth consider it to be narrow. While it might be applicable to some domains of discourse, it fails in the case of others, for example morality: are there obvious moral facts? 

At the dawn of the first industrial revolution, Hegel went as far as to claim that correspondence theories are logically absurd. There is no such thing as a “given” truth. Mind cannot comprehend anything without the mediation concepts. And as such, it is impossible to compare beliefs with reality, because the experience of reality is always mediated by beliefs. Systems of belief thus play the most important role in coherent theory of truth. The fact does not exist alone, but it’s significance lies in relation to the system, and it is true only if contributes to overall coherency of the system.

During the second industrial revolution, and in order to bring philosophy to speed with empirical sciences, American pragmatism was devised. Truth has a ‘cash-value’ to the extent it is practical and useful for solving problems. “Handsome is what handsome does. By their fruits shall ye know them”, claims John Dewey.

At the same time, European understanding of truth developed to be more political in nature, revolving primarily around how it relates to, and contributes to power. Michel Foucault considers truth to be historically conditioned as it serves the political function of controlling people rather than any purely cognitive function. 

Stage 3: Truth is Insignificant

Following the rise of formal logic and interest in formal systems, Anglo-American pragmatists attempted to define truth in logically or scientifically acceptable terms. This lead to creation of Alfred Tarski’s formula for defining truth for a formal or mathematical language. Using his system, the conditions in which a given sentence is true would be assigned to each sentence without using the term “truth” in that language. Mathematician Frank Ramsey soon declared that the notion of truth is completely redundant. To say that something is true might express agreement but it has no useful information apart from the sentence it serves to emphasize. 

As for the European side of disciplinary divide, the truth has been equally undermined. Observing our lives lived through media, representations, simulation, French sociologist Jean Baudrillard concluded that distinction between statements and facts is lost.

By crossing into a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor that of truth, the era of simulation is inaugurated by the liquidation of all referentials.

Jean Baudrillard

Veritas vos Liberabit

Taken together, both continental and Anglo-American analytical thought indicate that truth is either ubiquitous force imposed by the ruling elites, or that is nothing at all. In either way, seems like a waste of time to even think about it. 

But, people still need the truth. Beyond historical and doctrinal dimensions, the truth never ceased to exist as confrontation with reality and all-embracing commitment to what is real. Truth gives one’s life direction and meaning.

Every soldier understands the importance of truth-based intelligence on the battlefield: you act on lie – you die. As simple as that. 

The more we seek to diminish the truth, the more powerful the truth becomes.