Danni epistemici: il caso della post-verità

This article is devoted to an analysis of the notion of post-truth. From the perspective of its proponents, post-truth represents the most appropriate conceptual tool for explaining the social-political phenomena that are occurring, and have always occurred, in our societies. One of its leading theorists, Steve Fuller, believes that such phenomena represent «knowledge-and-power games», in which players strive to control the rules by which they play – a rational control that respects objective facts. On the contrary, the article shows that Fuller’s conceptual apparatus lacks an adequate notion of objectivity and has a metaphysically constructionist character: far from respecting facts, it creates them. Hence the epistemic damage represented by post-truth: to understand and solve problems in general, and social-political problems in particular, it is necessary to have an objectively valid picture of a given situation; without such a picture, the situation can only get worse.