Mich "Post-Truth Politics and the Rise of Bullshit"

Mardi intime de la Chaire Hoover par Adrian Blau (King's College London)

Many writers have claimed that we live in an era of post-truth politics. I argue that ‘post-truth’ politics is better understood in terms of irrationality. I expand Habermas’s account of communicative rationality, showing that there are six components of rational speech: not only subjective, empirical and normative (Habermas’s categories) but also conceptual, ontological and inferential. I relate each type of communicative irrationality to a type of ‘bullshit’, by refining and expanding the conceptions of bullshit offered by Harry Frankfurt (who treats bullshit as phoniness, indifference to truth) and G.A. Cohen (who treats bullshit as unclarifiable unclarity). These are, in essence, subjective and conceptual bullshit, to which I add categories of empirical, normative, ontological and inferential bullshit. This gives us six types of irrationality, six types of bullshit, and six types of post-truth politics.