PostTruth, Lee McIntyre
PostTruth, Lee McIntyre
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Post-Truth

Author: Lee McIntyre

Narrator: Matthew Josdal

Unabridged: 4 hr 12 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Ascent Audio

Published: 05/01/2018


Synopsis

What, exactly, is post-truth? Is it wishful thinking, political spin, mass delusion, bold-faced lying? McIntyre analyzes recent examples—claims about inauguration crowd size, crime statistics, and the popular vote—and finds that post-truth is an assertion of ideological supremacy by which its practitioners try to compel someone to believe something regardless of the evidence. Yet post-truth didn't begin with the 2016 election; the denial of scientific facts about smoking, evolution, vaccines, and climate change offers a road map for more widespread fact denial. Add to this the wired-in cognitive biases that make us feel that our conclusions are based on good reasoning even when they are not, the decline of traditional media and the rise of social media, and the emergence of fake news as a political tool, and we have the ideal conditions for post-truth. McIntyre also argues provocatively that the right wing borrowed from postmodernism—specifically, the idea that there is no such thing as objective truth—in its attacks on science and facts.

McIntyre argues that we can fight post-truth, and that the first step in fighting post-truth is to understand it.

About Lee McIntyre

Lee McIntyre is a Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University and an Instructor in Ethics at Harvard Extension School. He is the author of Post-Truth and Dark Ages: The Case for a Science of Human Behavior.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Pavol on November 21, 2020

[Review published in Organon F 2019, 26(2): 311–316] Lee McIntyre’s book Post-Truth (2018), part of the MIT Press’ Essential Knowledge series, attempts the unenviable task of pinning down a vague, but very popular concept in our discourse. He settles on the understanding that post-truth denotes the n......more

Goodreads review by MJ on March 07, 2018

Those with a working internet connection or tangential link to the outside world will notice that we are spiralling into a new realm of inhuman misunderstanding that scholars and tweeters have labelled “post-truth”. This informative primer into this unpalatable phenomenon examines the culprits, from......more

Goodreads review by robin on January 23, 2025

Post-Truth And The Trump Presidency With the lying and disregard for truth shown in the presidential campaign and presidency of Donald Trump, many books have been examining what they fear is a "post-truth" culture and offer ways of reversing it. Among these books is "Post Truth" by Lee Mcintyre, Rese......more

Goodreads review by Burak on September 26, 2022

Kötü değil ama bana göre yetersiz bir kitap Hakikat-Sonrası. Beklentim daha çok "hakikat nedir ve farklı kişiler tarafından nasıl farklı algılanır, yorumlanır" üzerine bir beyin fırtınası okumakken McIntyre konuya tamamen pozitif bilimler odaklı bir noktadan yaklaşıp post-truth'u gerçeklere -yani fa......more

Goodreads review by Tomq on July 30, 2019

This is published by The MIT Press, which ought to be a guarantee of quality; but I was disappointed. To be sure, this book is easy to read and at times informative. However, it suffers from numerous departures from impartiality and academic rigour, which are especially difficult to forgive in a boo......more