There is widespread acknowledgement that our culture faces an epistemological crisis. There is no longer a mainstream consensus about our most urgent political and social challenges—how seriously to treat the pandemic, what to do about the economy, how to address or prepare for climate change—to name just a few. Of course, there is nothing new about deep and stubborn political disagreement, but what distinguishes our so-called "post-truth" era is that we can no longer even agree about basic facts (let alone what to do about them).
I argue that anxiety about the ‘post-truth’ era is misguided. Of course, there is no going back to the ‘broadcast era’ in which media gatekeepers exercised tighter control over what made it into the public debate, but we should not want to, anyway. Not only is an insistence on that kind of consensus incompatible with our democratic and liberal ideals, it lacks any epistemological foundation.
On the contrary, our diminishing dependence on facts has the capacity to improve public discourse by making room for debate on other important questions. Far from incurring an ‘anything-goes’ relativism, we have a variety of different ways of challenging beliefs and arguments available to us: purported facts can be disputed on the basis of their inaccuracy; interpretations can be criticized when they lack explanatory power; and values can be rejected if they are bad. Often questions of hermeneutic appropriateness or the virtue of proposed values are more important, relevant, and persuasive than merely contesting factual claims.