Truth and 'Fake News'

I watched Newsnight last night and, on it, was a report about Trump supporters in so-called 'red' states in the US, in the aftermath of the US election. As I write, Trump has still not conceded the election and is still contesting counts in Georgia, Wisconsin and elsewhere. What really hit home to me, in a way that it perhaps had not before, was the absolute fervour with which Trump supporters, in that news report, believe in the 'Stop the steal' discourse being peddled by Trump and some of those around him. More than that, though, it was particularly illustrative of the 'truth decay', a phrase based on the work of Jennifer Kavanagh and Michael Rich in their 2018 book of the same name. Truth decay has the following features:

• an increasing disagreement about facts and analytical interpretations of facts and data

• a blurring of the line between opinion and fact

• the increasing relative volume, and resulting influence, of opinion and personal experience over fact

• declining trust in formerly respected sources of factual information

Relating that to ideas around theories of truth in research, it feels as though the truth commitments made by some of those featured in the report have shifted rather than them not being interested in 'the truth'. A correspondence theory of truth says that we can trust things as being the truth if our theories about the world correspond with observable phenomena in the social world. We check that correspondence by scientific method. This is the natural science methodology that we're all quite used to. In the UK, we've continually heard from politicians that they are 'following the science' in relation to covid19 for example. However, the theory of truth that seems to be most compelling in the US election is the coherence theory of truth. This is where you can trust things if they seem plausible and consistent in terms of the overall narrative. It struck me quite forcibly that the most rabid and dogmatic interviewees in the report were relatively uninterested in the correspondence theory of truth and what could be proven with this sort of evidence and were only interested in noticing things that fitted with the dominant narrative they had chosen to commit to - in this case, America first following Trump's rhetoric. Coupled with a consensus theory of truth - which states that something must be true if there is sufficient consensus about the phenomena, these people seemed to be inside an echo chamber which played back to them the sound of their own narrative, through Facebook, Twitter and at the various political rallies that they attend. Hence, by focusing people's minds on incidents where errors were made in counting or a recount is underway, Trump is playing to a narrative that they have already committed to and internalised. Therefore, appealing to such people by showing them 'the facts', coming from a correspondence theory of truth position, is unlikely to work. Rather like religious zealots, they will argue that these 'facts' have been manufactured by non-believers and will prefer to believe the evidence of their own senses. 'How can Trump have lost?' they cry. 'Look at all these people here'. To them, they do not see any direct evidence of Biden support or victory - everyone around them is saying the same thing and they see this being amplified via social media. Evidence to contrary, broadcast by Fox News or CNN or other news outlets is dismissed as 'fake news' and part of a leftist conspiracy to alienate them from power and influence over their own lives. In summary, it is completely implausible to them that Biden has attracted 74+ million votes to Trump's 70 million. These figures are incommensurable with their narrative and therefore must not be true. Instead, what is much more plausible to them is that the examples of human error and computer malfunction must be indicators of the fore-mentioned conspiracy - in other words, this was a rigged election. However, for me, therein lies the beginning of answer to this conundrum. To point to a conspiracy on the scale being suggested - the rigging of an election across a number of states, faking the votes of millions of people, implies that there must be large numbers of people who are anti-Trump and pro-Biden. This is what the election results indicate! It will only be by inviting people to reflect on the plausibility of their own narratives and by asking them to articulate how they decide on what they trust and what they don't, that such divides can be overcome. Unfortunately, pointing out 'the truth' to people by assuming that the facts are self-evident flies in the face of what we know about the social world - people have deeply held convictions, based on their previous experiences of the world, which influence what they are able to see and not see.