Les extensions de la post-vérité, questions épistémologiques et politiques : entretien avec Philippe Huneman

Abstract

ObjectivesWhat is the logic of assent given to a conspiracy theory? Is the post-truth era to be understood as a quest for certainty, or on the contrary as the unleashing of doubt? Such questions deserve to be apprehended through a psychological approach to conspiracy, in order to clarify the meaning and equivocity of the terms belief, truth, assertive logic, and doubt. This conceptual clarification cannot take place without examining the use of these notions in the epistemology of knowledge and in the philosophy of science. MethodSarah Troubé and Olivier Douville interviewed the philosopher of science Philippe Huneman about his recent work on conspiracy theories and the conditions of the production and the diffusion of scientific knowledge. ResultsThe interview invites us to question the surface analogy between the rapid modes of construction of conspiracy theories and the process of the constitution of scientific knowledge. It should be taken into account that this outpouring of post-truths offers us the opportunity to question the criteria of rational doubt and justified belief. The difficulty of establishing a priori criteria that would make it possible to separate – from the sole examination of individual belief – the rational and irrational uses of doubt and belief leads us to examine the conditions of the social production of knowledge. DiscussionReducing adherence to conspiracy theories to an individual belief in the truth of these theories leads to a misunderstanding of the phenomenon under consideration. Acknowledging the epistemic equivocity of belief allows us to re-situate it in its social and interlocutory dimension of address to the other. The question of the social production of knowledge, and more particularly of scientific knowledge, invites us to question the processes that legitimize the assent of the public and researchers in the reliability of scientific knowledge. But it also allows us to identify, in the current social and economic conditions of research, the elements likely to engender a form of mistrust towards certain scientific productions. ConclusionThe impossibility of confining oneself to an examination of belief as an individual phenomenon, and of separating a priori the irrational from the rational in the conspiratorial phenomenon, leads to epistemological and political reflection. By introducing, in public debate, an indifference to any division between true and false, the proliferation of fake news not only attacks the very conditions of the constitution of shared knowledge, but also jeopardizes the springs of democratic deliberation. Contrary to any filiation between the post-truth era and post-modernist philosophies, the understanding of this indifference to true and false is to be placed in the context of an information market that creates the conditions for this lack of differentiation between true and false facts.