Viral Modernity in Education: From Postmodernism to Post-Truth?

• In Event: 28.066 - Viral Modernity in Education: Deconstructing Post-Truth

Abstract

An age dominated by playfulness, hybridity, relativism, and the fragmentary self has given way to something else -- ‘post-truth’. McHale (2015) describes the life cycle of post-modernism in terms its peak years 1973–1989; uncertainty and reorientation in the 1990s; and the aftermath and beyond after 2001. But what happened in the intervening period? ‘Post-modernism as a condition of despair caused by the belief that it is impossible to know truth’ or right from wrong (Watts, 2000). Educational theory became seriously flawed by postmodernists attack on the concept of truth which is the root cause of the condition that we have come to call post-truth. It is Foucault rather than Trump who is responsible, as argued by many (e.g, Dennett, 2016). I argue that Foucault (or Derrida, or Rorty) is responsible for the post-truth condition is false, and fatuously so. These claims themselves fit neatly into the post-truth format of oversimplification, falsification and appeal to visceral reactions rather than reason and deliberation. But the history of truth beginning with the ‘verificationism’ of the Vienna Circle through to the development of analytic philosophy in the late twentieth century reveals there is no universally accepted account of the historical development toward a generally recognized concept of truth. Nor does Foucault attack truth. Rather he is interested in a history of truth-telling (parrhesia) rather than a notion of conceptual or factual truth. Indeed, he draws the distinction between an analytic account of truth and a history of truth-telling (Foucault 2001): “My intention was not to deal with the problem of truth, but with the problem of truth-teller or truth-telling as an activity” (p. 169). What his genealogical investigations show is that while Greek philosophy raises the question of truth from the point of view of the criteria for true statements and sound reasoning, “this same Greek philosophy has also raised the problem of truth from the point of view of truth-telling as an activity” (Foucault 2001, p. 169). He was not “post-truth” in the sense that he was denying or making assertions about truth or truth conditions; he was not part of that discussion at all. We need to note that the misleading notion that poststructuralist, or postmodern, hermeneutic, phenomenological, pragmatic, or Wittgenstein-inspired philosophers deny any sense to the idea of truth, to criteria for the application of the term, and so forth, is an old canard. In the best cases, some effort is put into building an argument based on the antipathy toward the kind of philosophizing that falls roughly under the heading of “continental”, even if they normally make assumptions that undermine the relevance of the arguments they want bring to bear. But in the worst cases, examples of which were enumerated earlier, the attacks have the form of Trumpian innuendo, dismissive hand-waving, bullying and character assassination. The first lesson for educational theory is to recognise this picture of ‘postmodernist philosophy’ is both a false picture of the history of contemporary philosophy and a fictionalized portrayal of a dangerous ‘post.’

Author

• Michael Peters, Beijing Normal University