press, free trade, and accurate and trustworthy
information.
In a wide-ranging conversation for my Science
Salon podcast, I asked Mercier directly, “are we liv-
ing in a post-truth era?” His answer was clear:
In many ways it’s better than it’s ever been,
in that people are more informed than they
used to be, and because of that they tend to
be more consistent in their points of view.
Fake news, for example, is a very marginal-
ized phenomenon. Only a few percent of
Twitter or Facebook users actually saw or
spread fake news, and it doesn’t appear to
effect those who see it. But everyone has
heard of fake news, so on the whole I think
the information environment is improving,
slowly and perhaps not as much as we would
like it to be, but I think things are better
than they used to be. People still want accu-
rate opinions and they care about the truth.
Even people who support Trump—studies
show when you show them that something
about Trump is fake news they accept that,
even while maintaining their support for
Trump.
In one of my final Scientific Americancolumns
I coined my own neologism in the Colbert tradi-
tion: Factiness, or the quality of something seem-
ing to be factual when it is not.^23 But how do we
know when something is factual and not facti-
ness? We employ science and reason! There is
progress in science and culture, and some ideas
really are better than others. The post-Enlighten-
ment ideal that beliefs should be tested in the
laboratory and marketplace of ideas with the goal
of generating objective and disinterested knowl-
edge may seem Sisyphean, in that we are always
in danger of backsliding into truthiness and
factiness in which propaganda, superstition, and
self-serving sophistry can slow our progress in
pushing the boulder of knowledge up the moun-
tain of ignorance, but that is precisely what
we’ve been doing for millennia.
Per aspera ad astra—with difficulty to the stars.
P O S T - T R U T H D E B AT E
volume 25 number 1 2020 W W W. S K E P T I C. C O M 4 7
- On August 21,2007: https://on.
cc.com/36i0Mzg And on July 11,
2011: https://on.cc.com/2Q
BjrQ6
- Colbert, Stephen. 2005. “The
Word—Truthiness.” The Col-
ber t Repor t, https://on.cc
com/1KS28h6
- Interview with Kellyanne Con-
way. January 22, 2017. NBC
Meet the Press. https://nbc-
news.to/2wjC7bB
- Definition of “fake news.”
Collins Dictionar y. https://
bit.ly/2V7Ff7Q
- Pinker, Steven. 2019. “Why We
Are Not Living in a Post-Truth
Era.” Skeptic, Vol. 24, No. 3.
- Pinker, Steven. 2018. Enlight-
enment Now: The Case for
Reason, Science, Humanism,
and Progress. New York:
Viking, 375.
- McIntyre, Lee. 2018. Post-
Truth. Cambridge: MIT Press.
- Stanley, Jason. 2015. How
Propaganda Works. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
- Snyder, Timothy. 2017. On
Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from
the Twentieth Centur y. New
York: Tim Duggan Books/Pen-
guin Random House, 71.
- Arendt, Hannah. 1951/1994.
The Origins of Totalitarianism.
New York: Harcourt, 474.
- Quoted in: McIntyre, ibid., 3-4.
- Orwell, George. 1946. “Politics
and the English Language.”
Horizon, April.
https://bit.ly/18z9Ikb
- Burke, Edmund. 1790/1967.
Reflections on the Revolution
in France. London: J.M. Dent
& Sons.
- Gross, Paul and Norman
Levitt. 1996. Higher Supersti-
tion: The Academic Left and
its Quarrels with Science. Bal-
timore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press.
- Levitt, Norman. 1996. “More
Higher Superstitions: Knowl-
edge, Knowingness, and Real-
ity.” Skeptic, Vol. 4, No. 4, 79.
- Editors. 2016. “’Post-truth’ de-
clared word of the year by Ox-
ford Dictionaries. BBC News.
November 16. https://bbc.
in/2Vh36lt
- Pelley, Scott. 2019. Interview.
Reliable Sources. CNN. De-
cember 31. https://cnn.it/
36fu2qz
- For one example among hun-
dreds see his tweet of October
3, 2018 at 4:53 a.m.: “The
Failing New York Times did
something I have never seen
done before...”
- Associated Press. 2019. “New
York Timessubscriber numbers
are skyrocketing in the Trump
age.” MarketWatch. February 6.
https://on.mktw.net/37Z19PS
- Quoted in: Glaisyer, Tom.
2016. “Cranking up the Truth-
O-Meter: Giving a Boost to
Truth in Politics.” Democracy
Fund. January 13. https://
bit.ly/2M8p7yK
- Mercier, Hugo. 2020. Not
Born Yesterday: The Science
of Who We Trust and What We
Believe. Princeton, NJ: Prince-
ton University Press, 257,
270-271. Quotes from Bren-
nan are in: Brennan, Jason.
2019. Against Democracy.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 8.
- Kershaw, Ian. 1983. “How Ef-
fective was Nazi Propaganda?”
In D. Welch (Ed.), Nazi Propa-
ganda: The Power and the Limi-
tations(180-205). London:
Croom Helm, 199.
- Shermer, Michael. 2018.
“Factiness: Are we living in a
post-truth world?” Scientific
American, March.
https://bit.ly/2pHCzC5
R E F E R E N C E S
