Post-Truth is Misplaced Distrust in Testimony,Not Indifference to Facts: Implications for Deliberative Remedies

Abstract

How should we deliberate with citizens who entertain post-truth beliefs in democratic societies? This is a central question for those interested in wielding the epistemic potential of democratic deliberation against post-truth. Yet, the strength of proposed deliberative solutions depends on the accuracy with which post-truth is diagnosed. Taking seriously the connection between epistemic diagnosis and deliberative remedy, this paper looks at the motivations provided by non-vaccinating parents for their beliefs and argues for an understanding of post-truth as misplaced distrust in testimony, as against a standard view of post-truth as indifference to fact. Second, the paper argues this new diagnosis of post-truth renders ineffective deliberative strategies aiming to harness the power of impersonal reason and accuracy, of the kind recently defended by Simone Chambers. Instead, combating post-truth as the paper defines it is effectively accomplished through employing bridging rhetoric.

Introduction

In ‘The Will to Believe’ William James ([1896] 2010) contrasts (impersonal) facts to (subjective) beliefs using poetic imagery:

When one turns to the magnificent edifice of the physical sciences, and sees . . . what patience and postponement, what choking down of preference, what submission to the icy laws of outer fact are wrought into its very stones and mortar; how absolutely impersonal it stands in its vast augustness – then how besotted and contemptible seems every little sentimentalist who comes blowing his voluntary smoke-wreaths, and pretending to decide things from out of his private dream!

The quote paints an opposition between impersonal knowledge of true facts and subjective false belief, which we can trace all the way back to the line analogy in Plato’s Republic (509d-511e). On the one side, ‘the icy laws of outer fact’ are wrought together with the abnegation required to follow truth where it leads, not where we might wish for it to take us. On the other side stands subjective ‘sentimentalism’, erroneously pursuing ‘voluntary’ desire for some things to be true even when they are not, and pitifully attempting to subject reality to one’s ‘private dream’. The opposition between the self-discipline required for accuracy on the one hand, and wishful subjectivism on the other is also adopted by Bernard Williams, who claims exercising the virtue of accuracy is needed to track truth by defending ‘belief against wish, and against one of the products of wish, self-deception’ (Williams, 2002: 125).

Who would want to follow the ‘contemptible’ subjectivist in their wishful thinking instead of joining the venerable edifice of science? Many people, as it turns out. A term used increasingly to describe lack of concern for truth and pursuit of what one would like to be true instead of what is true is the word ‘post-truth’ – which, as the literature mentions without fail, was the Oxford Dictionaries 2016 word of the year, defined as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’. Examples include false claims proliferated during political campaigns such as the Brexit referendum in the UK or Trump’s election in the US (Fuller, 2018: 2; McIntyre, 2018: 1–2), as well as false claims about scientific discoveries. A particularly worrying and well-documented type of post-truth beliefs are those of parents who refuse the immunisation of their children. Like other believers in post-truth, non-vaccinating parents (hereafter NVPs) are swayed by conspiratorial thinking into accepting statements that were widely disproven by mainstream medical science, such as that vaccines cause autism, contain dangerous chemicals and their negative side-effects are covered up for the sake of profit or a public health agenda (Goldberg and Richey, 2020; Hyzen and van den Bulck, 2020). Unlike other post-truth believers which cannot change, for example, flight patterns due to their beliefs the earth is flat, NVPs’ beliefs jeopardise progress made in eradicating preventable diseases, which has led the World Health Organization to list them among the ‘Ten threats to global health in 2019’ (WHO 2019).

Post-truth beliefs are often framed using the intuitive dichotomy between objective facts and subjective opinion mentioned above. Post-truth believers, it is said, are indifferent to factual truth and guided by emotions instead of objective standards. In this paper, I refer to this understanding of the problem as the standard model of post-truth, given how seemingly widespread it is. This model informs our views on how democratic societies ought to deliberate with citizens who entertain post-truth beliefs. Specifically, the tenets of the standard model ground a compelling deliberative remedy to post-truth that employs the Habermasian notion that democracy tracks truth by harnessing the power of impersonal reason, which has been articulated by Simone Chambers (2021: 153–159).

This paper draws on NVPs’ narratives to show the main tenets of the standard model do not capture their motivations (section ‘The Standard Model and Its Discontents’). Instead, I will diagnose post-truth in terms of misplaced distrust in testimony (section ‘Post-Truth and Trust in Testimony’). Section ‘Truth and Deliberation: A Rhetorical Strategy’ explores a deliberative approach to post-truth inspired by John Dryzek’s notion of bridging rhetoric. I derive recommendations for healthcare professionals and communicators which run counter to a Habermasian model proposed by deliberative democrats, as well as recommendations for NVPs stemming from duties to listen rather than duties of accuracy, which go against Chambers’ recommendations.

This paper contributes to the quest for a remedy to post-truth within democratic theory by engaging with the prior, epistemic question of how the problem of post-truth should be diagnosed. I aim to accomplish two goals: first, of arguing for an alternative understanding of post-truth as misplaced distrust in the testimony of mainstream authorities, drawing both on motivations cited by NVPs and the literature on trust. Second, the paper explores a previously overlooked deliberative solution to the problem of post-truth grounded in the notion of bridging rhetoric, and showcases the richness of available resources for tackling post-truth within democratic deliberation. Accomplishing these two goals requires engaging with different literatures, from empirical work into the motivations provided by NVPs, to post-truth, trust in testimony and democratic deliberation. An additional contribution of the paper is therefore providing an interdisciplinary approach to the task of identifying a deliberative remedy to post-truth beliefs.

The Standard Model and Its Discontents

When thinking about how to approach people who believe in QAnon, or that the earth is flat, or that vaccines cause autism, engaging in reasoned dialogue seems a natural starting point. There is something immediately compelling about approaching post-truth beliefs (and believers) through a framework centred on exchanging compelling reasons across different worldviews on matters of common concern. What tools from the deliberative arsenal are suitable for the task? A powerful suggestion is to take a Habermasian approach to democracy’s truth tracking potential. For example, Chambers has recently diagnosed the problem of post-truth as being a decline in the importance of truth and verification of facts, such that ‘people do not really care that much about the truth or they care about other things (partisan causes) more than the truth’ (Chambers, 2021: 148). Consequently, cultivating virtues of accuracy and bolstering objective verification emerges as a desirable solution to pursue within democratic institutions that provide ‘the conditions needed to test truth claims’ (Chambers, 2021: 153–154), and require citizens to ‘make the effort to correct our beliefs, check our facts, or put truth before interest’ (Chambers, 2021: 159).

The characteristics of post-truth assumed by this deliberative remedy are shared by the standard model on which post-truth is characterised primarily by indifference to fact and verification (Ball, 2017; D’Ancona, 2017; Davis, 2017; Hopkin and Rosamond, 2018; Kalpokas, 2019; McIntyre, 2018). Post-truth believers ‘are trying to compel someone to believe in something whether there is good evidence for it or not’ (McIntyre, 2018: 12). Truth-claims are detached ‘from verifiable facts’ and ‘criteria other than verifiability’ become essential in assessing truth (Kalpokas, 2019: 5). Taking cue from Harry Frankfurt’s notion of bullshit, such approaches point out that post-truth is different from simple lying in that whereas liars place some weight on knowing what the facts are (even if for the purpose of denying them), ‘the truth-value of [a bullshitter’s] statements are simply of no central interest to him’ (Frankfurt, 1988: 130). Post-truth theorists often state that post-truth is not an entirely new phenomenon, but something which can be traced back to pioneers such as Orwell’s lament during the Spanish civil war that ‘If Franco remains in power his nominees will write the history books, and . . . that Russian army which never existed will become historical fact . . . So for all practical purposes the lie will have become truth’ (Orwell, 1942 in D’Ancona, 2017: 4). Post-truth as a large-scale contemporary phenomenon is hence characterised not by a new dynamic but by the fact that ‘more people and more powerful people . . . have decided that telling the truth simply does not matter’ (Ball, 2017: 303). Indifference to fact and verification is hence a first characteristic of post-truth according to the standard model.

In addition to indifference, post-truth believers are, according to the standard model, guided by emotion rather than reason. When societies are under the sway of post-truth, ‘objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’ (McIntyre, 2018: 5). This makes post-truth believers complacent in their being duped since, as Steve Tesich put it when originally coining the term post-truth, ‘[i]n a very fundamental way we, as a free people, have freely decided that we want to live in some post-truth world’ (Tesich, 1992). Post-truth believers are hence guilty of not being guided by facts, but by unwarranted opinions over what or who to believe. As in the initial Platonic dichotomy espoused by James or Williams, post-truth is characterised by believers wrongly pursuing their subjective, ‘voluntary’ opinions instead of dutifully submitting themselves to the ‘icy laws of outer fact’.

The above characterisation of post-truth in terms of (1) indifference to facts and (2) being guided by emotion supports remedies centred on (1) factual verification and (2) getting believers to exercise reason, in line with Habermasian remedies supported by democratic theorists like Chambers. For the case of NVP, the diagnosis supports introducing more fact-checking websites to combat post-truth (e.g. Ball, 2017, Ch 12), and setting up more pro-vaccine websites to combat information deficits (Grant et al., 2015; Wiley et al., 2017). Bolstering critical thinking is likewise a favoured strategy as NVPs are cautioned to pursue facts instead of letting themselves be led by personal choice. Existing approaches to NVPs hence implicitly agree with the two main tenets of the standard model in diagnosing their epistemic predicament.

Yet the justifications provided by NVPs contradict this diagnosis. In what follows I refer to these justifications as documented in the medical literature on vaccine-hesitancy as narratives. I use the concept of narratives to highlight the fact that the individual justifications frequently overlap in widely shared factual beliefs, attitudes and assumptions. While numerous such narratives can be identified, I focus on some of the most prevalent ones: first, that doctors are pursuing a public health agenda instead of focusing on the wellbeing of individual children (Cassam, 2021: 5–6; Reich, 2018: 2–3). Second, the importance of doing one’s own research and a ‘quest for the real truth’ (Helps et al., 2019: 7–9; Leach and Fairhead, 2007: 65). And third, that vaccines are harmful (Lander and Ragusa, 2021: 96–100; Reich, 2018: 11–12). As I show below, these (often overlapping) post-truth narratives contradict the main tenets of the standard model of post-truth.

The first narrative, that doctors are pursuing a public health agenda instead of focusing on the wellbeing of individual children, is incompatible with the first tenet regarding post-truthers’ indifference to fact. To begin with, since inoculation decisions concern the health and well-being of their own children, it is not clear how parents could be indifferent to determining whether inoculation is safe or not. Instead, NVPs often emphasise the immense responsibility for potentially adopting a risky course of action for their children, a responsibility they feel doctors might take lightly. Far from being indifferent, NVPs mention being motivated by a ‘pronounced sense of personal responsibility and assumption of personal blame for any harm that might come to a child either through disease or through vaccination adverse effects’ (Leach and Fairhead, 2007: 69). As one NVP put it, ‘we are the ones who will be inherently responsible for the rest of the life of that child’ (Helps et al., 2019: 7). Indeed, as the narrative that doctors pursue a public health agenda to the detriment of the wellbeing of individual children has it, doctors are the ones who have incentives to disregard facts about the adverse effects of vaccination in pursuit of a population-level public health approach, which is seen by NVPs as potentially jeopardising the health of individual children (Helps et al., 2019: 6). This is, moreover, not a matter that can be decided factually since the question of how vaccines will affect an individual child ‘cannot be settled by quoting population-level figures’ (Cassam, 2021: 9)

The second narrative, that NVPs should do their own research, also contradicts the first tenet of the standard model. Among NVPs, encouragement to do one’s own research and make up one’s own mind is ‘a pervasive theme . . . in parents’ narratives about the process of deciding’ (Leach and Fairhead, 2007: 65). Some authors identified an ‘ethos that parents should conduct their own research rather than rely on the advice of their paediatricians or the pre-packaged advice from public health agencies’ which parents adopt in hopes of ‘ensuring the best outcomes for their children’ (Reich, 2018: 74). NVPs frequently circulate ‘peer reviewed journal articles from the disciplines of science, medicine, microbiology, epidemiology, law, ethics and public health’ (Helps et al., 2019: 8), proving their sense of duty for establishing the facts. Moreover, the quest for discovering the ‘real’ truth has led NVPs’ societies such as the National Vaccine Information Centre to launch fundraisers for a comparative study on the effects of vaccines contrasting autism rates in vaccinated and unvaccinated children, with over 100.000$ raised (Reich, 2018: 143). Thus, similar to other post-truth believers such as flat earthers funding private missions to go to space (Bell, 2017), NVPs expend more rather than less effort than pro-vaccination peers into verifying claims regarding vaccine safety.

The third set of narratives entertained by NVPs, that vaccines are harmful to children, challenges the second tenet of the standard model, which paints post-truth believers as being driven by what they would like to be true instead of what is actually the case. For NVPs, pro-vaccination persons are the ones too quick to accept a comforting narrative that fits with their preconceptions. Trusting that vaccines are safe without questioning the ingredients, or without examining the impact of vested interests when declaring vaccines safe, is behaving as if what one wants to be true really is true. NVPs regard this attitude as uncritical, and can point to cases where their scepticism regarding safety proved warranted. For example, the vaccine excipient thimerosal was widely used until vaccine sceptics drew attention to its high concentration of mercury, which led to it being reduced or eliminated from vaccines in the United States (Reich, 2018: 126–128). Moreover, NVPs subject their views on the harm of vaccines to continuous scrutiny, continuing ‘to spend time engaging with the official view’ and to devote ‘considerable time and energy to the task of justifying their refusal to accept the official view’ (Cassam, 2021: 8). For example, even after declaring the vaccine excipient formaldehyde dangerous, NVPs continued to engage with those claiming the substance is in fact safe, retorting that, for example, artificially produced formaldehyde may be different from the natural substance found in food, or that the fact that we typically eat food with formaldehyde is not an argument it is safe for infants, since only older children and adults ingest formaldehyde (Reich, 2018: 122). Second, in entertaining the narrative that vaccines are harmful to children, NVPs exercise critical judgement in questioning whether entities led primarily by economic interests, such as pharmaceutical companies, are the best guarantors of unbiased reporting on the safety of their own products (vaccines). NVPs are wary of the impact the conflict of interest may have on the veracity of results and warn that ‘[t]he government should have no part in promoting a business any more than it should promote a religion’ (Lander and Ragusa, 2021: 100). For pro-vaccinating parents, on the other hand, the (economic) interests of the pharmaceutical companies selling vaccines are not subject to scrutiny. Far from choosing what to believe as it suits them, NVPs seem to exhibit a level of critical engagement higher than that of vaccinating parents.

This analysis of some of the prevalent narratives among NVPs hence paints the opposite image of why people hold post-truth beliefs from the one conjured up by the standard model of post-truth. Instead of not caring about facts, NVPs seem to care too much. Instead of rejecting the importance of verification, NVPs demand greater care in collecting data. And instead of self-interested choices of what to believe, NVPs employ a higher degree of critical judgement than parents who vaccinate their children. This does not mean NVPs do not entertain post-truth beliefs, but that we need a new diagnosis of what that means. How, then, can we define post-truth in a way that is compatible with the narratives entertained by those who fall prey to it?

Post-Truth and Trust in Testimony

The standard model of post-truth is not the only available account of the phenomenon. An alternative approach focuses on aspects of truth that go beyond the direct relation between the individual knower and outside reality (Block, 2019; Enroth, 2021; Hyvönen, 2018; Newman, 2019; Zerilli, 2019). While the standard model adopts a strict epistemological view which assumes post-truth consists in a flawed ‘relationship between “mind and world”’ (Zerilli, 2019: 153), these alternative theories focus on societal, political, or cultural factors that mediate this relationship.

A theory that is particularly suitable for the case of NVPs defines post-truth in terms of the testimony of third parties in transmitting knowledge. Taking inspiration from Arendt’s claim that truth ‘does not reach those who, not having been witnesses, have to rely on the testimony of others, whom one may or may not believe’ (Arendt, 1978: 59, my emphasis), we can approach post-truth in terms of the way knowers position themselves towards the testimony of third parties they depend on for obtaining knowledge. According to Henrik Enroth, post-truth is ‘not about disbelief in facts and the decline of truth per se [but] about generalised and intensified disbelief in the others on whom we all inevitably rely on testimony’ (Enroth, 2021: 10 my emphasis). The post-truth era is characterised not by widespread indifference to fact, but by widespread ‘disbelief in the others on whose testimony we rely for the truth of phenomena such as anthropogenic climate change, the corona virus pandemic, and the benefits of vaccines’ (Enroth, 2021: 13). The effects of distrust in testimony are amplified when areas where we rely on others’ testimony proliferate, as is often the case in our increasingly complex societies. This makes post-truth as a particular effect of distrust in testimony a more prevalent phenomenon now than in the past.

Before explaining how NVPs’ motivations support this interpretation, I will examine the interpretation of post-truth as disbelief in testimony. Testimony refers to a connection between a state of affairs and a hearer’s coming to believe the state obtains that is not direct (as in the case of someone looking outside to see if it is raining) but mediated by other persons. These persons – speakers – play a crucial part in how or whether hearers come to form the belief a certain state of affairs they are unable to assess directly themselves actually obtains. Trust in testimony is a means for hearers to obtain knowledge of states of affairs that go beyond a knower’s directly observable experience. Having to rely on trust in testimony is a common epistemic situation to be in, since much of our knowledge is taken on trust in the word of others (Hume, 2007: X.iV in Benson, 2019: 90; Searle, 1969). Nobody has direct access to the facts stated in history books, is able to visit every place charted in atlases, or (with the exception of astronauts) can observe the curvature of the earth with the naked eye. By far most of us come to believe the facts of history, geography, or astronomy through trusting the testimony of historians (who in turn take the word of those who drafted the relevant documents), cartographers (who in turn trust the testimony of those who developed their instruments) and astronomers (who accept the existence of galaxies they have not personally observed). Most of us come to know these things through trusting reputable history books, taking cartographers at their word and believing models of the planetary system are not made purely for profit.

The distinct epistemological feature of knowledge acquisition through testimony is that trust in the speaker factors into the justification for whether the knowledge transmitted is true or false. ¹ As John O’Neill puts it, the reasons for coming to justifiably hold a belief acquired through testimony ‘attend to persons, not propositions’ (O’Neill, 2002: 256). Elizabeth Fricker formulates this problem as ‘showing how it can be the case that a hearer on a particular occasion has the epistemic right to believe what she is told – to believe a particular speaker’s assertion’ (Fricker, 1994: 137). In order to be justified in holding the belief communicated to her, the hearer needs to factor in the features pertaining to the speaker – in particular, the speaker’s competence as a knower and reliability as a communicator of knowledge. The task of justification then becomes a task of ‘construct[ing] enough of a theory of the speaker, and relevant portions of her past and present environment, to explain her utterance: to render it comprehensible why she made that assertion, on that occasion’ and of determining ‘[w]hether the speaker’s assertion is to be trusted’ (Fricker, 1994: 149 my emphasis). Relevant information includes the degree of competence and goodwill demonstrated by the speaker (Baier, 1986: 234; Goldman, 2001: 104; Ryan, 2021: 609–610), whether speakers’ statements are clear and consistent (Benson, 2019: 88), and characterological evidence derived from partisanship (Rini, 2017: 53).

On this understanding, post-truth concerns the way trust in the testimony of others is (mis)placed. Since true belief depends in most instances on the nature of communication between the epistemic agent and the person mediating their relation with facts, the problem of post-truth resides not in a flawed direct relation between the believers and verifiable facts, but in a flawed relation of mediation between the knower and outside reality. Specifically, speakers whose knowledge and expertise should be relied upon by audiences to obtain information about realities not easily accessible to them are no longer recognised as trustworthy sources. What is specific to post-truth is not how individuals appraise directly observable facts, but how they appraise the trustworthiness of persons mediating their relations to facts they do not have immediate access to. The ‘post’ in post-truth is best understood as meaning that audiences have moved beyond simple trust in established authorities and experts whose testimony acted as a guarantor of truth.

This diagnosis of post-truth has been defended by some democratic theorists engaging with the problem of fake news, whose transmission is ‘a bent form of testimony’ (Rini, 2017: 46). It is also in line with diagnoses of post-truth as a matter of mistrust in authoritative ‘experts’ put forward in the media (Drezner, 2016; Popescu, 2018), as well as analyses of fake news, whose dissemination has been attributed to ‘a deficit or absence of trust in media sources to report on newsworthy items’ (Ryan, 2021: 607). The mistrust in authoritative testimony interpretation is further espoused by other outlets such as the House of Lords 2002 Science and Society Report, which marked a ‘shift in the identification of the key problem of scientific communication: from a lack of public knowledge about science and its methods to a crisis of trust in science’ (Pieckza and Escobar, 2013: 115, my emphasis).

The above-mentioned model of post-truth offers a better understanding of the case of NVPs. In their case, medical practitioners, publishers, government and pharmaceutical agencies act as speakers who give testimony to parents regarding the safety of their vaccines. Few individuals have direct empirical access to evidence that can confirm or disconfirm claims regarding vaccine safety. For the most part, laypersons as well as medical professionals have to rely on the testimony of speakers reporting relevant data, summarising the findings in medical textbooks, designing public health policies and so on. Indeed, deciding when to trust a doctor is one of the oldest examples of trust in philosophy, discussed as early as Plato’s Charmides (170d-e). The case is a paradigmatic one since trust arises within (1) asymmetrical relations between a more vulnerable truster – parents – and a more powerful trustee – doctors – and in which (2) the truster relies on the trustee’s ‘competence and willingness to look after, rather than harm things one cares about which are entrusted to their care’ (Baier, 1986: 240–244) – that is, their children.

The narratives employed by NVPs also support the post-truth model mentioned above. The narrative that doctors are pursuing a public health agenda instead of focusing on the wellbeing of individual children is underpinned by the particular theory of the speaker NVPs develop with regards to medical professionals and communicators. Whenever doctors formulate opinions about what is in the best interest of a child, they are advancing claims about a person they have little or no direct knowledge of. Those of us who accept the claims made by medical practitioners, government agencies, or authors of medical textbooks, trust the testimony of persons pertaining to the medical establishment – to the point where vaccine advocates self-identify as ‘trusters of research’ (Reich, 2018: 144). Similarly, parents accepting that medical professionals know better than themselves what is in the best interest of their own children defer to the former’s epistemic authority. Following the recommendations of someone who has never met one’s child is an achievement resting on trust in the doctors themselves, the numerous medical institutions involved in vetting them and the ‘magnificent edifice’ of medical science. NVPs show what happens when parents refuse to defer to the testimony of doctors regarding their children – and that this trust is no small feat. Suspicions that, for example, doctors pursue public health rather than the welfare of individual children rely on ‘information bearing on an expert’s interests’ (Goldman, 2001: 105). When NVPs form beliefs that doctors are ‘being pro’ (instead of sincere) when selling the advantages of vaccines (Helps et al., 2019: 6), they factor in doctors’ professional incentives alongside all the other information regarding their knowledge and expertise.

Second, distrust in the testimony of healthcare professionals is what further prompts the NVPs’ narrative about the importance of doing one’s own research. NVPs seem to have lost trust in a system designed to ‘prevent them from finding the truth about vaccination’ (Helps et al., 2019: 10), and tend to ‘distrust the process that creates scientific knowledge about health, illness, and immunisation’ (Reich, 2018: 134). Ultimately, as epistemic agents NVPs ‘do not take what doctors tell them on trust’ (Cassam, 2021: 7). Fundraisers for developing unbiased tests for vaccine safety are evidence of this. Instead of trusting the accuracy of medical experiments, fidelity in reporting and goodwill in scrutinising safety guidelines by mainstream medical authorities, NVPs do their own research. Similar to flat earthers accusing those who trust in the roundness of the earth of ‘indoctrination’, ² NVPs view acceptance on trust as a failure of due diligence. What distinguishes NVPs from vaccine advocates, then, is that they question facts that pro-vaccinating peers take for granted.

The third narrative of vaccines being harmful is further proof that NVPs’ false beliefs result from mistrust in testimony. Behind NVPs’ belief that vaccines are harmful lies a deep distrust in the mainstream medical establishment. By contrast, sources which are seen as disreputable by most of us are regarded by NVPs as among the few authorities who have the courage to speak against the establishment – and hence, as trustworthy for this reason. Unlike mainstream institutions who might have ulterior motives in promoting vaccine safety (e.g. ‘big pharma’), scientists who endorse the harm narrative are regarded by NVPs as trustworthy because they ‘do not appear to have a motive other than the care of their children’ (Reich, 2018: 144). Narratives about harmful vaccines frame anti-vaccination enquiries as struggles for truth against establishment-sponsored disinformation by heroic scientists like Andrew Wakefield – who received the 2000 ‘Courage in Science’ award from the anti-vaccine National Vaccine Information Centre (Reich, 2018: 119). This narrative leads NVPs to distrust that vaccine components such as formaldehyde are safe, despite assurances provided by the medical establishment. Distrust in the safety of ingredients is the result of a more systemic distrust that runs through and through, branching into multiple aspects regarding how vaccines and knowledge about them are produced and disseminated. As Jennifer Reich puts it, ‘For some people . . . formaldehyde is always formaldehyde. For others, toxicity depends on the mode of production, the path of consumption, and the social context in which it is encountered. In these ways, beliefs about toxicity are deeply engrained in distrust’ (Reich, 2018: 122). The harm narrative is fundamentally a narrative about why mainstream views about vaccine ingredients should be distrusted.

The above narratives which shape NVPs’ (dis)belief show the post-truth predicament is not a cessation of evidence-seeking, but a pathology of evidence-seeking. Against viewing post-truth as a matter of taking a motivated (‘voluntary’) approach to facts, the case of NVPs reveals the relevant dichotomy between post-truth believers and others is between having a personal or impersonal attitude towards the sources of evidence. This is pathological both because characterological evidence can be easily manipulated by ‘report[ing] only negative information, deliberately excluding redeeming characteristics’ about the speakers’ characters (Rini, 2017: 53), and because treating characterological evidence as able to trump factual evidence flattens knowledge hierarchies. Instead of having experts (and/or the institutions vetting for them) at the top, relying on characterological evidence opens free-flowing structures in which everyone can act as guarantors of veracity through information about the interests or rationales of mainstream authorities. This feature can be encountered in cases ranging from mild and localised forms of scepticism that only vaguely qualify as post-truth (e.g. Covid-19 vaccine sceptics fearing economic interests overpowered safety concerns) to phenomena like QAnon, where sources claiming to hold Q clearance accuse politicians of organised paedophilia (Gander, 2018). An implication of over-reliance on characterological evidence is that well-integrated systems of knowledge production are more (not less) prone to sowing distrust against mainstream epistemic authorities. The better integrated medical schools, pharmaceutical companies and healthcare services are, the more medical advice can be dismissed as manipulation by ‘big pharma’ companies by those who view a coincidence between professional and material interest as untrustworthy.

Second, against the indifference to fact account of post-truth, the case of NVPs reveals the post-truth predicament consists not in verification efforts stopping altogether, but in their being thwarted in directions that often preclude rather than further verification. Indeed, many post-truth believers are more zealous than the rest in gathering evidence others take for granted, as illustrated by phenomena from NVPs funding their own research, or flat-earth fundraisers to launch ‘rockoons’ proving Earth is a disc (Burdick, 2018), to Edgar Welch’s attempt to ‘self-investigate’ Clinton’s alleged child trafficking pizzeria (Rini, 2017: 48). Their zeal might sometimes be obscured by the fact that verification efforts are ill-directed. If we return to Orwell’s story about (re)writing history during the Spanish Civil War, we notice that what is really disturbing for Orwell is not the history writer’s indifference to verifiable fact, but the absence of an observable basis on which to establish historical fact independent of the history writers’ testimony. Because the historical record will come to depend entirely on testimony as witnesses pass away, the recorded testimony will have to pass for what is the fact of the matter, seemingly indifferent to actual facts. There is, thus, a continuity between the melting away of possibilities for contrary evidence decried by Orwell, and QAnon believers finding confirmation for their theories in Trump’s sipping a glass of water (Le Miere, 2017). In both cases, internal narratives weigh more than externally observable facts, and verification efforts are rendered impotent by the structure of misconception.

A defender of the standard model of post-truth might reply that indifference is nonetheless central to post-truth, since the sources of false claims are usually indifferent to their truth-value and more focused on other ends. However, focusing on the indifference to fact of the speakers loses sight of the defining role played by listeners of post-truth claims. While fake news or other forms of disinformation may also be produced for a ‘complexity of motives’ from financial reasons to intentions to deceive (Rini, 2017: 45), they are usually shared by audiences out of inattention or laziness (idem). By contrast, paradigmatic post-truth phenomena are accompanied by more systematic and self-aware configurations of fears, discontents and mistrust, by carefully curated echo chambers which offer promise to shelter adherents from them, or by polarisation in online and offline communities that fuels them. The structural configuration of these political and politicising channels through which testimony travels are indeed what distinguishes one type of post-truth phenomenon from another. It is not the sheer fact of refusing vaccines that marks one out as NVP. The sources that are trusted, channels for seeking confirmation, or general distrust in medical professionals are defining for whether a case pertains to the NVP variety of post-truth or to e.g. narratives that vaccines are dangerous spewed by Trump. When a piece of false information is mainly shared due to inattention, we are dealing either with a mild case of post-truth, or perhaps a different form of misinformation. The more clustered the audience is into communities that form discernible patterns of knowledge (re)production, the more deep-seated, severe and paradigmatic of post-truth the phenomenon is.

The above diagnosis paints post-truth believers as being closed to the mainstream systems of testimony on which evidence flows rather than being closed to facts per se. Yet saying the problem is not willingness to engage with facts is not good news for efforts to combat post-truth as a pathology of evidence-seeking. Once an epistemic authority is deemed untrustworthy, facts that might correct a false belief but depend on trusting the testimony of the suspect authority will not be accepted. Indeed, confronting audiences with such facts might deepen partisanship (Kahan et al., 2012, 2017). This renders commonly proposed remedies such as nudges or fact checking of limited use. Such remedies can have a valuable pre-emptive effect against systemic corrosion by eliciting audiences’ deliberative capacities (Pennycook et al., 2021). But by the time we can speak of post-truth narratives proper rather than simple error or localised scepticism, the problem is no longer the simpler one of repairing misguided acceptance of facts, but the more daunting one of remedying networks of weaponised distrust. The underlying problem makes post-truth more of an existential threat to truth-seeking activities as a system than the fact-checking approach assumes. Given this diagnosis, what can be done?

Truth and Deliberation: A Rhetorical Strategy

A closer look at NVPs’ motivations reveals a concern for deliberation. Instances where medical personnel violate key norms of deliberation such as equal respect, mutual justifiability, and inclusivity are often quoted as a motivation for parents to decline vaccinating their children. NVPs sometimes describe instances of having their concerns dismissed and being met with one-way talk as validating their decision. For example, a parent who approached doctors after reading Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) approved literature on vaccination describes being offered a brochure with cartoon like pictures of children getting happily vaccinated instead of an answer to her question (Helps et al., 2019: 7). This dismissal of NVPs’ considerations violates mutual justifiability in the sense of having participants (and especially those in positions of superior authority) recognise the arguments and concerns of others in their responses (Mansbridge, 2015: 35). This can aggravate post-truth beliefs because parents who experienced ‘dismissing or hindering encounters with health professionals seemed especially likely to look to alternative sources’ among an ‘alternative community of knowers’ (Helps et al., 2019: 7). Moreover, doctors’ insistence on focusing solely on relevant data instead of engaging with the considerations raised by parents can be viewed as a violation of the deliberative ideal of inclusivity, since doctors are putting themselves in the position to unilaterally decide which considerations are relevant for vaccination decisions. By restring discussion to purely medical facts, medical staff engaged in conversation with NVPs fail to answer the (non-medical) concerns parents do have, including how trustworthy the various institutions involved in vaccination are. Thus, deliberating with NVPs instead of shunning them seems like a promising strategy for combating post-truth.

But which tools and strategies from the deliberative arsenal are effective in combating post-truth? The question is meaningful since some approaches are ruled out by the diagnosis previously proposed. Crucially, the Habermasian approach of wielding the strength of impersonal reason as defended by Chambers (2021) for example is of limited use against misplaced distrust. Exchanging ‘reasons that could convince anyone irrespective of time and space’ (Habermas, 1994: 52) in an ideal speech situation will prove ineffective against post-truth understood as stemming from a flawed relation between audiences and speakers. Responding to the problem construed as misplaced distrust in testimony will require providing compelling reasons pertinent to evaluating credibility and exchanging ‘reasons which attend to speakers, not just speech acts’ (Benson, 2019: 89). They will have to refer to aspects of speakers, not the intrinsic accuracy of speakers’ claims. This renders deliberative strategies rooted in impersonal reason and accuracy ineffective.

A deliberative approach that can overcoming the above issues is that of using rhetoric. The previous diagnosis has emphasised a self-reinforcing logic of post-truth whereby debunking attempts can lead to entrenching erroneous beliefs, rendering factual evidence ineffective. A rhetorical approach seems promising since it ‘may be necessary to penetrate the misconceptions of those who are systematically deceived, capable of reaching the latter when reasoned argument is blocked by the very structure of misconception’ (Bohman, 1996: 205). Rhetorical approaches acknowledge the audience is situated, which makes them sensitive to standards of deliberation that are ‘endogenous to society’ rather than imposing normative standards of ideal deliberation (Walter, 2017: 300).

In particular, the situation of NVPs lends itself to bridging rhetoric, which is aimed at persuading those who do not share the speaker’s perspective’ (Dryzek and Lo, 2015: 15; see also Dryzek, 2010). Bridging rhetoric recommends looking for areas of overlap between opposing sides in getting an intended audience to agree with one’s preferred side. In this, bridging rhetoric takes seriously ‘the outlooks (ideally, the discursive psychology) of an intended audience that is different in key respects from the speaker’, as exemplified, by Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech addressing white members of the public by making emotional appeals – whereas rational argumentation could have fallen on deaf ears (Dryzek, 2010: 328).

Bridging rhetoric seems suitable for combating post-truth beliefs among NVPs since it has been employed in other cases of science scepticism such as climate change denialism, either through employing useful metaphors (Dryzek, 2010: 326) or in deliberative forums (Dryzek and Lo, 2015). Moreover, bridging rhetoric is particularly recommended when divisions between entities are well-defined, problematic and persistent (since otherwise what starts as bridging may become bonding rhetoric as a common identity encompassing the two sides is forged (Dryzek, 2010: 330–331). The current relation between NVPs and vaccine advocates instantiates this typology, since (1) the groups in question are clearly delineated; (2) the alienation of NVPs is problematic for epistemic, democratic and practical reasons regarding public health; and (3) the divide is persistent enough for the groups to be widely viewed as antagonistic. Hence, bridging rhetoric seems particularly attuned to the case of NVPs.

The main mechanism that makes bridging rhetoric effective is that of ‘represent[ing] a discourse on one’s own side that has some compatibility with a discourse on the other side’ (Dryzek, 2010: 328). Identifying areas of overlap between opposing discourses is particularly appropriate for the case of NVPs, where we can trace areas of overlap between the main narratives and concerns medical practitioners share regarding children’s health, pursuing truth and ensuring safety. Regarding the first narrative of doctors pursuing a public health agenda instead of prioritising the wellbeing of individual children, employing bridging rhetoric requires insisting on a shared interest in securing the best outcomes. Although NVPs accuse doctors of sacrificing the health of individual children for public health, while medical practitioners think NVPs are taking irresponsible risks with the health of their own children, the structure of these antagonistic discourses reveals a common concern for children’s health. Medical advisors and practitioners seeking to bring NVPs to vaccinate their children should therefore aim to reassure parents that they also have the best interest of the child at heart. This recommendation is supported by findings that presenting parents with information on the benefits of vaccination ‘directly to the child’ or to ‘both the child and society’ increase vaccination intentions, whereas emphasising benefits only to society did not increase them (Hendrix et al., 2014). Medical practitioners might, moreover, appeal to their ethos re-assuring NVPs of their professional and personal commitment to children’s health. This strategy is recommended not just by the diagnosis of a crisis of trust this paper proposes, but also by the nature of contemporary knowledge sharing, where the complexity of current issues forces lay audiences to judge expertise on the basis of ethos (O’Neill, 2002).

Second, the narrative of doing one’s own research reveals NVPs and medical practitioners agree on the importance of independent verification. NVPs often accuse vaccine advocates of not being sufficiently informed, while vaccine advocates consider themselves the purveyors of facts, and pin down vaccine hesitancy on not following the facts where they lead. Bridging rhetoric can reach beyond this seemingly irreconcilable divide, emphasising a shared appreciation for being informed. Reaching across this epistemic rift can be achieved by adopting a discourse that actively promotes parents becoming informed, and praising this attitude when exhibited by NVPs even while challenging their specific conclusions. This is borne out by findings that NVPs have a positive attitude towards doctors who state the importance of ‘check[ing] in with the research’ behind their recommendations (Helps et al., 2019: 7).

Finally, the harm narrative shows a common concern for safety among medical practitioners and NVPs. Whereas the fact-based approach would recommend bringing in even more facts about e.g. the safety of formaldehyde, bridging rhetoric recommends emphasising how medical authorities share a concern for scrutinising safety standards. Bridging rhetoric requires engaging with claims about how safety is continually monitored as a result of doing one’s due diligence, instead of repeating isolated facts about vaccines being safe. Doctors might even share information on how authorities pertaining to the medical establishment have engaged and continue to engage with the hypothesis that vaccines might not be safe, and how the effects of monetary incentives are being monitored. This recommendation to emphasise scepticism instead of listing facts regarding safety validates calls to refrain from ‘myth vs fact’ approaches to combating false information (Ecker et al., 2011).

These recommendations pertain to democratic deliberation since they require treating NVPs as citizens, not just patients. Respectful dialogue which responds to the actual concerns and discourses prevalent among NVPs can correct the corrosive tendencies of post-truth understood as misplaced distrust. These recommendations are supported by empirical findings that understanding the viewpoints of NVPs is important since ‘[w]ithout such prior understanding, a clinician may . . . [find] it more difficult to maintain effective engagement’ (Helps et al., 2019: 2). Responding to the actual concerns of citizens differs from solutions seeking to elicit the power of ideal, impersonal reason, even when rhetoric is regarded as a legitimate means to bolstering rational capacities. One such type of rhetoric is condoned by Chambers herself in her earlier work on deliberative rhetoric, which uses emotion to get audiences to care about matters that require complex reasoning. ³ This form of rhetoric is legitimate since ‘reasoning itself takes its cue from what we care about, and care about deeply’ (Chambers, 2009: 336; 228–229), so by making people feel passionately about the truth, the indifference that clouds judgement can be dissipated. But the realisation that post-truth believers already care deeply about the truth limits the efficiency of the emotion-eliciting role of (deliberative) rhetoric. Instead, bridging rhetoric proposes listening to what people already care about and the main types of narrative prevalent in the intended audience. This is not to say such awareness is always effective or even desirable, as some cases might be beyond salvaging and some discourses beyond the scope of acceptability. But it is to say that responding to actual concerns even in extreme cases provides a better chance for (re)conversion to a common world, and this (re)conversion might work even in unexpected cases – as happened when a shared concern for verifying Q’s identity has led QAnon believers to accept evidence from a mainstream fact-checking organisation (Turton, 2020).

Being open to the narratives of the other party is required not just for agents combating post-truth, but also for post-truth believers. On deliberative approaches inspired by the standard model of post-truth, accuracy might be seen as a remedy even for misplaced (dis)trust in testimony. This is a possibility Chambers considers in her earlier work when worrying that characterological evidence might hijack democratic deliberation. To prevent this, she recommends multiplying ‘citizen-citizen encounters’ to help citizens ‘hone the skills necessary to be able to critically evaluate orators’ (Chambers, 2009: 340). Yet the diagnosis of post-truth defended in this paper shows the very possibility of citizen-citizen encounters that promote (rather than further pathologise) capacities to accurately evaluate speakers is an achievement. (Re)establishing this connection requires asking post-truth believers to listen to epistemic authorities despite the latter’s flawed or self-interested motives, regardless of how accurately these interests are identified. Unlike accuracy, listening is a more directly deliberative value involving openness (Bickford, 1996: 146), asking questions (Forester, 1989: 11) and reciprocity (Dobson, 2012: 849). Some deliberative democrats view listening as a crucial albeit overlooked duty of deliberation (Curato, 2019 Chapter 1; Dobson, 2012). Its importance is further highlighted by the post-truth predicament on the Arendtian understanding that ‘truth-telling can never solely involve the single individual as correct reasoner [but depends] on the ability and willingness of citizens to listen and hear the truth that is told’ (Zerilli, 2020: 15, my emphasis). Listening acts as a corrective to the pre-eminence of characterological evidence in gatekeeping relevant information by asking NVPs and other post-truth believers to be open to the possibility that facts shared by mainstream authorities might be true and consider verifying those facts instead of dismissing them outright because of their source.

A final set of deliberative implications of the above diagnosis regards improving collective trust through deliberation. Although we often think of trust as a two-person relation, a person’s trust towards another in a given trust relationship ‘is constrained by all the other trust and distrust relationships in which she is involved’ (Baier, 1986: 256). For example, NVPs do not only speak about vaccination with health professionals, but ‘interact with a much wider social world’ (Leach and Fairhead, 2007: 61). The importance of such interactions is also acknowledged by other democratic theorists writing on post-truth, such as Rini’s suggestion to develop an ‘infrastructure for tracking the testimonial reputation of individual users’ (Rini, 2017: 57). Nevertheless, interactions that keep sources in check are only useful if the agents doing the ranking are themselves trusted. When mistrust runs deep enough, authorities or fact-checking algorithms that systematically downgrade members of one’s trusted community might be seen as biased. Instead, the diagnosis of post-truth defended above recommends broadening trusted sources and interactions in society. This can be done by identifying common ground on seemingly unrelated matters which (re)establish a common world. Even fostering agreement on unrelated facts helps restore the sense of a shared reality, which Arendt considered central to truth. Furthermore, laypersons can bolster trust through identifying a shared concern for screening out untrustworthy sources. For example, citizens can bring evidence of ‘online’ experts employed by multi-million-dollar organisations (Ahmed, 2021: 366), with entire businesses aimed at generating fake news for clicks (Silverman and Alexander, 2016). A surprising resource for combating NVPs’ narratives are pro-vaccinating parents who nonetheless distrust medical authorities. They are uniquely positioned as they share NVPs’ distrust, yet support immunisation, perhaps on different grounds which they can share. This could potentially lead to a situation like the one described by John Dryzek and Alex Lo, whereby a combination of shared general distrust and localised trust in the transparency and/or certainty of particular tax policies generated agreement on policy outcomes (Dryzek and Lo, 2015: 6–8, 12).

In this section, we saw that bridging rhetoric combats post-truth not by wielding the power of impersonal reason, but by seeking to persuade audiences of the trustworthiness of established authorities. Some might object that employing rhetoric in this way violates audiences’ autonomy, since it deviates from the Kantian ideal of complete and pure engagement with the audience’s reasons. In light of her earlier work on rhetoric, Chambers might accuse bridging rhetoric of ‘pandering’ to audiences – of aiming to ‘identify the words, arguments and symbols that are most likely to be effective in . . . ‘winning’ public support’ through social-psychological research (Chambers, 2009: 339). Indeed, an example of plebiscitary rhetoric Chambers opposes, of ‘using “hope” to defend military involvement in Afghanistan’ in the Canadian context (Chambers, 2009: 339) is similar to Dryzek’s endorsement of using the metaphor of a hole in the ozone layer to rally support for climate policies. Bridging rhetoric could strike Chambers as an instance of illegitimate plebiscitary rhetoric which, by attempting to persuade rather than prove, would push NVPs further away from enabling them to discover the truth – desirable as having more NVPs vaccinating their children may be.

Such a concern for autonomy regards bridging rhetoric as a distorting interference with an allegedly ‘pure’ relation between a knower and the reality coming to be known; this tampering is what reduces the knower’s autonomy. But for the case of knowledge through testimony, there is no such thing as an undistorted relation between the knower and the facts coming to their attention. By definition, this relation is mediated by the speaker. The ideal of ensuring autonomy through complete absence of interference is therefore incompatible with the type of knowledge acquisition we are aiming to improve. What we can aim for instead is maximising the autonomy of the knower given the centrality of the testifier, by ensuring the relation of mediation is as faithful as possible. But this is exactly the aim of bridging rhetoric. Bridging rhetoric does not seek to merely get audiences to act in certain ways through means that might as well have been replaced by ‘a magic spell’ (Garsten, 2011: 172). It seeks to clear away the misconceptions that prevented audiences from seeing the truth – misconceptions due to misinformation by untrustworthy testifiers on the one-hand, and our limited capacities on the other. When employed to ensure a more faithful mediation between facts and audiences, bridging rhetoric ensures that audiences enjoy greater autonomy within the relational context of knowledge provision. This is not opposed to deliberative rhetoric, but a different understanding of it.

Conclusion

As post-truth in general and NVPs in particular remain a threat to the healthy functioning of democratic institutions, how we approach this threat remains topical. Yet widespread strategies for combating post-truth through fact-checking have proved ineffective. This paper questions the received view that post-truth consists in indifference to fact and proposes viewing the problem as misplaced (mis)trust in the testimony of epistemic authorities. Consequently, the paper strengthens existing deliberative democratic approaches to post-truth by showing such approaches are recommended for not just politically manipulated untruths, like those analysed by Rini (2017), but also for varieties of post-truth where partisanship does not seem to play a direct role, like science denialism. The paper recommends rhetorical approaches aimed at (re)establishing trust rather than simply restating facts, in line with other efforts to move away from ‘a technocratic view of society’ drawing a sharp contrast between scientists and the general public, in favour of ‘a vision of the world in which . . . the place of engagement is that of democratic citizenship and egalitarian pluralism’ through dialogue (House of Lords, 2000: Ch 5 in Pieckza and Escobar, 2013: 117).

The paper also goes beyond existing deliberative approaches in several ways. First, it raises the challenge of exploring the place in democratic deliberation of true statements endorsed for subjective reasons, which goes against the standard dichotomy between true knowledge endorsed for objective reasons, and unsupported statements endorsed for subjective reasons. This possibility raises questions about what duties other than truthfulness speakers have as citizens in a common truth-seeking enterprise. Second, the paper highlights the importance of structural aspects regarding the way testimony travels or is blocked for how we address the problem of post-truth in democratic deliberation. How people are wrong matters.

Finally, this paper highlights the need for an interdisciplinary approach in diagnosing and remedying post-truth by democratic theorists. While the framework of democratic deliberation is undoubtedly relevant to combating post-truth in contemporary democracies, how we employ this framework, and which of its instruments are most relevant for the task, is something that cannot be settled by the framework alone. As the paper demonstrates, identifying appropriate remedies to post-truth from among those democratic deliberation affords, requires engaging with insights from epistemology and the sociology of knowledge. Effective remedies depend on an accurate charting of our epistemic predicament, and making a dent in the very structure of misconception.