"We are living in the post-truth"
This implies there was a truth era. When was that?
This implies there was a truth era. When was that?
The people who dislike it the most tend to be either those who've been effectively manipulated by power interests, or those who find reckoning with the difficulty of finding the truth inconvenient.
Down the nihilistic rabbit hole we go!
That's this layman's understanding of where postmodernism almost invariably ends up.
No one will be able to tell if we’re serious, trolling ourselves, trolling each other, or trolling the audience.
The essence of postmodernism is actually plausible deniability.
Excellent way to avoid engaging with an idea you might find disagreeable, a tip of a straw hat to you
Which is fine for "claims to truth", but it's not fine when people think this entails that there is no such thing as truth, or sometimes that all claims to truth are equally valid.
The big idea in 20th century science, philosophy of science, and mathematics was that the truth is fundamentally unreachable. We got quantum mechanics as the foundation of reality. We got the idea that experiments can only rule out explanations but not establish the truth. We got used to probabilistic estimates based on data. We got all those uncomfortable results about the incompleteness and undecidability of formal systems.
Science became a social construct. We got evidence instead of facts; we got explanations, predictions, and interpretations instead of the truth. Science became a system of best practices for building and updating consensus based on empirical evidence.
I am not an experimental scientist or philosopher, but I am a mathematician, and I thoroughly reject the claim that the big idea of 20th-century mathematics is that the truth is fundamentally unreachable. To be sure, we found that one can speak meaningfully, and rigorously, of the limits of decidability; but only an algorithmic view of mathematics will lead one to conclude that this makes the truth unreachable. Perhaps one could advance the claim that certain truths are unreachable (I do not, and find the claim woolly), but that is quite different from saying that truth itself is unreachable.
What I mean is that some theories have been corroborated to the point that they can be regarded as "truth" for all intents and purposes, and despite known limitations in some cases. Examples might include electromagnetism, quantum mechanics, gravitation, and biological evolution.
Regarding those theories, we can still say that we accept them on a tentative basis, but it would not be irrational to assign a vanishingly low likelihood that any of them will be radically overturned.
But, that was a period of material scarcity. Only a relatively small wealthy upper class had access to that kind of education. That was a period of time still rife with superstition... literal witch-hunts.
P.S. - Bravo for volunteering a reply.
What is the utility of empirical evidence to building consensus if it does not reflect some underlying truth?
I disagree with your characterization of science and math of the 20th century. To start, quantum mechanics does not entail lack of realism. The 20th century also saw two deterministic interpretations of QM emerge (many worlds and Bohmian mechanics).
The fact that experiments can only rule out explanations can be used to establish a process that provably converges on truth (Solomonoff Induction).
Incompleteness and undecidability are provably true propositions. Cold, hard truth.
In other words, there are counterparts to all of your points that supposedly undermine the concept of truth.
There is no epistemic value to empirical evidence if the empirical evidence were not proxy to some truth.
> When you say something is the truth, you are saying no evidence can change your mind
No, "truth" is the proposition that will agree with all conceivable robust evidence.
> Maybe there is some underlying truth, but it seems to be out of our reach.
I disagree, and I already mentioned Solomonoff Induction that I think disproves this.
> The utility does not come from some metaphysical ponderings but from models that can explain phenomena and make reliable predictions.
I disagree as well. Plenty of empirical evidence is useful without a model. For instance, taxonomy in biology was very useful before we knew of genes or even evolution.
The actual utility here is clearly truth, whether that be individual facts or whole theories.
The experiment could simply be measuring photon counts at a pre-agreed location after a pre-agreed duration, where the elapsed time is measured by a local clock. (Probably it is reasonable to argue that this is not a "reasonable" experiment, but it's beyond me to make rigorous the sense in which it should be excluded.)
For example, someone could never logically claim the photons they perceived indicted someone wasn't in front of their gun when they pulled the trigger, while everyone else in the vicinity states they clearly saw the person in front of the gun. There is not enough uncertainty around the behavior of photons for us to consider their explanation as truth.
Modernism was a shakeup and rejection of "realism"; post-modernism took it a step further by rejecting the notion of a universal truth entirely; the replacement idea is that what is true can only be discerned based on an individual's experience as we can only gain knowledge through imperfect means.
"an era of increased skepticism towards the idea of objective truth" is the idea.
Postmodernists believe that it is more important to have the "right" political impact than to be correct.