170. Modern politics and the philosophical concept of truth

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The 1930s Vienna School, including its best known member, Karl Popper, concerned itself with the concept of objective truth (he also has very interesting thoughts on tolerance, as relevant today as they were in the 30s, which I will post on separately). Popper comes to mind because of the strategic attack on objective truth orchestrated by many modern governments (UK and US amongst others, such as Russia, China or Brazil, less surprising and disappointing). The strategy is based on continuous repetition of ideas and opinions, which are equated to fact, and on the simultaneous systematic devaluation of actual facts by alternative pseudofacts which are invented to counterweigh them and, when disproven with great effort, replaced immediately by a new alternative. The objective is the exhaustion of the critical mind through volume of statements to disprove, so that objective truth, reachable only by rational elimination of all alternatives, remains elusive to all but most committed critics 

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Location: 07029 Tempio Pausania, Province of Sassari, Italy

Comments

Matt B said…
Excellent post Santi.
A sad reflection of the times/perfect storm we find ourselves in.
I always presumed that the difficulty in directly sharing good objective information in the 30s was in part at the root of good people doing nothing.
(Traditional media channels were the only broadcast media.)
However nowadays we all have the ability to share and broadcast information through multiple platforms - it should be a force for good - but has actually become the problem in propagating pseudofacts and alternative truths.
September 23, 2020 at 4:05 AM
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