The Inescapable Desire for Truth

Abstract

In the past few years, the proliferation of fake news and discourse surrounding it has brought the concept of ‘post-truth’ to the public’s attention. Oxford Dictionaries declared ‘post-truth’ their word of the year in 2016, defining it as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”. Sometimes the concept is deployed in service of the idea that growing numbers of people are indifferent regarding whether or not their beliefs are true. In fact, writer Steve Tesich—in the essay in which he coins ‘post-truth’—asserts that “we have acquired a spiritual mechanism that can denude truth of any significance”. The idea is that one indication that we have moved into a post-truth political era is that we increasingly care less and less about our beliefs being true. My contention is that, in whatever ways contemporary political discourse has moved in a post-truth direction, it cannot be the case that one aspect of that shift involves indifference regarding whether or not our beliefs are true. My argument looks to the nature of and interconnections between truth, belief, and desire, and defends the idea that it’s incoherent not to care about whether or not one’s beliefs are true. Insofar as we have beliefs about the world, we ipso facto have a concern for truth. Hence, we need to offer a competing analysis of the various phenomena that are leading commentators to see in contemporary political discourse an apparent lack of concern for the truth. There are all sorts of salient barriers at the moment to discovering the truth, but it would be a mistake to interpret them as revealing a growing indifference toward truth as such. The desire for truth is inescapable, even in epistemically troubling times.