Seventeenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

In 2016, the Oxford English Dictionary Word of the Year was post-truth, an adjective defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” One of the factors that has contributed to the devaluation of facts is the expansion of an exclusivist populism that promotes an ideology which “pits a virtuous and homogeneous people against … dangerous ‘others’ who are … depicted as depriving (or attempting to deprive) the sovereign people of their rights, values, prosperity, identity, and voice.” (Albertazzi and McDonnell 2008). Donald J. Trump, the NBC reality-television star turned politician, rode the swell of post-truth populism through his unlikely candidacy to become the president of the United States of America. Although Trump is not the cause of the elevation of personal bias or popular opinion over (and against) facts, his brash style of ad-hominem politics is deepening the fissure. The depth of the difference between popular opinion and reality has recently been documented by Hans Rosling in Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. While attention to verifiable data is a necessary response to a post-truth culture, it is insufficient for the humanities which are rooted in an epistemology that is not reducible to facts. This paper recommends the adoption of a virtue-epistemology (Zagzebski 1996) as a way for the humanities to respond to a post-truth world.