Post-truth can be defined as an assertion of ideological supremacy by which to try to persuade someone about something no matter the available evidence (McIntyre, 2018; Frankfurt, 2006 and 2005). Knowing what the truth is may cause a rift in opinions, but it should not stop mattering. We, both individually and collectively, should care for and about truths and the search for them (Thoilliez, 2022). And when it comes to keeping up with University life, academic freedom becomes extremely relevant (Beaud, 2021): caring for the freedom academics need to fulfil our duty of seeking and communicating truths to the best of our abilities. 

In her book La faiblesse du vrai. Ce que la post-vérité fait à notre monde commun, Myriam Revault d’Allonnes (2018) offers a profound examination of the advent of the post-truth regime, from the urgency of gaining awareness of the nature and scope of the phenomenon in order to deflect its ethical and political effects. As Revault d’Allonnes (2018) notes, post-truth goes far beyond the deconstruction begun by the “masters of suspicion”: Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud. These three critical philosophers did not do away with the distinction between true and false; rather, they objected to the absolute and false nature of the truth understood as a universal norm. In contrast, post-truth refers to a grey area in which we no longer know if things are true or false. This is much more problematic than simlpy lying. In totalitarian systems, the combination of ideology and terror results in the systematic and consistent construction of a set of falsehoods that end up replacing reality. In contrast, in our democracies, the danger resides in the tendency toward the relativism of “anything goes”. Therefore, we can question fact-based truths, historical truths, events, what happened. Post-truth separates the facts from their objective reality in order to transform them into contingent opinions that anyone can hold as true. This situation undermines our ability to live together in a common world and makes education in our campuses extremely difficult to accomplish. 

The post-truth scenario and its impact on how states of opinion are generated have spread and increased exponentially through technologies that give us new, multiple, and simultaneous ways to communicate and share information. The possibilities of thinking with, of, and about that information diminish as loops of likes and unlikes, loves and unloves, follows and unfollows increase. As Patrick Troude-Chastenet (2018) notes, for the fake news business model to work, it takes large intermediary platforms such as search engines (Google), social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram), and advertising networks (Google Ads). To a great extent, this makes them “if not political accomplices, at least economic collaborators with the fake news industry, because in the end, they are its main beneficiaries” (p. 94). And either way, the proliferation of data made available from numerous sources has not brought about the promised land of a democracy made stronger by well informed publics and freer citizens. Instead, we have a progressive suspension of practices of thinking. As Seymour (2020) states, social networks have turned into a space that provides is with a continuous stream mixing news, opinions, and entertainment that informs our day-to-day life, opening us up to a recreation of the (problematic) public sphere, or perhaps shutting us up into it. 

This is a conceptual paper. The methodology followed has basically consisted of reading, thinking, and writing, sometimes in that order and sometimes in other combinations.

There is a progressive impermeable resistance to new ideas that represents a horrifying challenge for any attempt at educating in the University. Many people today live wrapped so tightly in their own beliefs that it becomes impossible to shed them. This applies to pur university students as well. Everyone has the right to express their opinion, but that should not give each person the acknowledged right to have his or her own facts. Nor should there be a right to deny proven facts. Even without it being possible to have a universally shared knowledge of things, “shifting the question for truth to the question for the value of truth does not mean that everything is equally valid” (Herreras and García-Granero, 2020, p. 167). Indeed, if everything is equally valid, then nothing has any worth. And university education precisely and essentially consists of initiating the new generations in what we deem to be a worthwhile search of truths. University education becomes impossible when students remain in a position of cognitive impermeability, undervaluing the truth and epistemic concepts that underpin educational action such as “objectivity, consistency, impartiality, sincerity, contrasting beliefs (hypotheses or theories), respect for evidence, precision, and accuracy” (Arrieta, 2020). A university student must absorb the values contained in these concepts, and anyone lecturing at University should perform that lecturing as an embodied practice of them, in a shared caring act towards academic freedom. This is, I believe, the better way to resist contemporary post-truth threats.

Arrieta, A.: La posverdad es más peligrosa que la mentira [Post-truth is more dangerous than lies]. The Consersation, 21/09/2020. https://theconversation.com/la-posverdad-es-mas-peligrosa-que-la-mentira-145978 (2020). Beaud, O.: Le savoir en danger. Menaces sur la liberté académique [Knowledge in danger. Threats to academic freedom]. PUF (2021). Frankfurt, H. G.: On Bullshit. Princeton University Press (2005). Frankfurt, H. G.: On Truth. Random House (2006). Herreras, E., & García-Granero, M.: Sobre verdad, mentira y posverdad. Elementos para una filosofía de la información [About truth, lies and post-truth. Elements for an information philosophy]. Bajo Palabra, II, 24, (2020). Koopman, C.: How We Became Our Data. A Genealogy of the Informational Person. The University of Chicago Press (2019). McIntyre, L.: Post-Truth. MIT (2018). Revault d’Allonnes, M.: La Faiblesse du vrai. Ce que la post-vérité fait à notre monde commun [The weakness of truth. What post-truth does to our common world]. Seuil (2018). Seymour, R.: The twittering machine (La máquina de trinar). Akal (Kindle edition) (2020). Soto Ivars, J.: Arden las redes: La postcensura y el nuevo mundo virtual [Networks burn: Post-censorship and the new virtual world]. Debate (2017). Thoilliez, B.: ‘Making Education Possible Again’: Pragmatist Experiments for a Troubled and Down-to-Earth Pedagogy. Educational Theory, 62:4, (2022). Troude-Chastenet, P.: Fake news et post-vérité. De l’extension de la propagande au Royaume-Uni, aux États-Unis et en France [Fake news and post-truth. On the extension of propaganda to the UK, the US and France]. Quaderni. Communication, technologies, pouvoir, 96, (2018).