post-truth [English]

InterPARES Definition

n. ~ 1. Claims founded as much or more on opinion or emotion than on verifiable facts.
— adj. ~ 2. Relating to or based on such claims.

Other Definitions

  • Cambridge Dictionary 2017 (†883 ): Relating to a situation in which people are more likely to accept an argument based on their emotions and beliefs, rather than one based on facts
  • Wiktionary [2017] (†884 ): adj. ~ 1. (chiefly politics, media) Beyond or superseding the importance of truth; pertaining to an era or situation when truth is no longer significant or relevant; usually in a pejorative sense, uncaring of factual accuracy. – n. ~ 2. The fact or state of being post-truth; a time period or situation in which facts have become less important than emotional persuasion.

Citations

  • Calcutt 2016 (†786 ): The word itself can be traced back as far as 1992, but documented usage increased by 2,000 percent in 2016 compared to 2015. (†2007)
  • Calcutt 2016 (†786 ): The connotations embedded in "post-truth" commentary are normally as follows: "post-truth" is the product of populism; it is the bastard child of common-touch charlatans and a rabble ripe for arousal; it is often in blatant disregard of the actualité. . . . But this interpretation blatantly disregards the actual origins of "post-truth." These lie neither with those deemed under-educated nor with their new-found champions. Instead, the groundbreaking work on "post-truth" was performed by academics, with further contributions from an extensive roster of middle-class professionals. Left-leaning, self-confessed liberals, they sought freedom from state-sponsored truth; instead they built a new form of cognitive confinement—"post-truth." More than 30 years ago, academics started to discredit "truth" as one of the "grand narratives" which clever people could no longer bring themselves to believe in. Instead of "the truth," which was to be rejected as naïve and/or repressive, a new intellectual orthodoxy permitted only "truths" – always plural, frequently personalised, inevitably relativised. (†2008)
  • Calcutt 2016 (†885 ): The groundbreaking work on “post-truth” was performed by academics, with further contributions from an extensive roster of middle-class professionals. Left-leaning, self-confessed liberals, they sought freedom from state-sponsored truth; instead they built a new form of cognitive confinement—“post-truth”. ¶ More than 30 years ago, academics started to discredit “truth” as one of the “grand narratives” which clever people could no longer bring themselves to believe in. Instead of “the truth,” which was to be rejected as naïve and/or repressive, a new intellectual orthodoxy permitted only “truths”—always plural, frequently personalized, inevitably relativized. ¶ Under the terms of this outlook, all claims on truth are relative to the particular person making them; there is no position outside our own particulars from which to establish universal truth. This was one of the key tenets of postmodernism, a concept which first caught on in the 1980s after publication of Jean-Francois Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge in 1979. In this respect, for as long as we have been postmodern, we have been setting the scene for a “post-truth” era. (†2674)
  • Flood 2016 (†783 ): In the era of Donald Trump and Brexit, Oxford Dictionaries has declared “post-truth” to be its international word of the year. Defined by the dictionary as an adjective “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”, editors said that use of the term “post-truth” had increased by around 2,000% in 2016 compared to last year. The spike in usage, it said, is “in the context of the EU referendum in the United Kingdom and the presidential election in the United States”. (†2001)
  • Oxford Dictionaries 2016 (†784 ): The Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2016 is 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’. (†2002)
  • Oxford Dictionaries 2016 (†784 ): The compound word post-truth exemplifies an expansion in the meaning of the prefix post- that has become increasingly prominent in recent years. Rather than simply referring to the time after a specified situation or event – as in post-war or post-match – the prefix in post-truth has a meaning more like ‘belonging to a time in which the specified concept has become unimportant or irrelevant’. This nuance seems to have originated in the mid-20th century, in formations such as post-national (1945) and post-racial (1971). ¶ Post-truth seems to have been first used in this meaning in a 1992 essay by the late Serbian-American playwright Steve Tesich in The Nation magazine. Reflecting on the Iran-Contra scandal and the Persian Gulf War, Tesich lamented that ‘we, as a free people, have freely decided that we want to live in some post-truth world’. There is evidence of the phrase ‘post-truth’ being used before Tesich’s article, but apparently with the transparent meaning ‘after the truth was known’, and not with the new implication that truth itself has become irrelevant. (†2003)