Alternative Facts Research Articles

‘He’s not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy!’ Radicalising hermeneutics with Kafka’s The Castle

This paper explores the politics of interpretation from the perspective of hermeneutic theory. It presents a reading of Kafka’s novel The Castle focused on critique of the business of interpretation, where suspicion unfolds in distorted, possibly fraudulent, sense-making between protagonist, narrator and reader. The protagonist’s mission is neither heroic nor a call to resistance to bureaucratic absurdity, but instead, the result of hubris, hoax, or even a slip of the pen, and it becomes impossible to unpick the perils of bureaucracy from the perils of interpretation, or to distinguish between error and insight. In mining discrepancies between justification, effort and reward of interpretation, Kafka punctures the mythology of understanding, rupturing the near-sacrosanct hermeneutic connection between interpretation and meaning. His work undermines both objective and subjective understandings, leaving us distrustful of both expert and experiential perspectives. In a post-truth era with its ‘alternative facts’, The Castle feels startlingly fresh and relevant.

Statistics and Probability Have Always Been Value-Laden: An Historical Ontology of Quantitative Research Methods

Quantitative researchers often discuss research ethics as if specific ethical problems can be reduced to abstract normative logics (e.g., virtue ethics, utilitarianism, deontology). Such approaches overlook how values are embedded in every aspect of quantitative methods, including ‘observations,’ ‘facts,’ and notions of ‘objectivity.’ We describe how quantitative research practices, concepts, discourses, and their objects/subjects of study have always been value-laden, from the invention of statistics and probability in the 1600s to their subsequent adoption as a logic made to appear as if it exists prior to, and separate from, ethics and values. This logic, which was embraced in the Academy of Management from the 1960s, casts management researchers as ethical agents who ought to know about a reality conceptualized as naturally existing in the image of statistics and probability (replete with ‘constructs’), while overlooking that S&P logic and practices, which researchers made for themselves, have an appreciable role in making the world appear this way. We introduce a different way to conceptualize reality and ethics, wherein the process of scientific inquiry itself requires an examination of its own practices and commitments. Instead of resorting to decontextualized notions of ‘rigor’ and its ‘best practices,’ quantitative researchers can adopt more purposeful ways to reason about the ethics and relevance of their methods and their science. We end by considering implications for addressing ‘post truth’ and ‘alternative facts’ problems as collective concerns, wherein it is actually the pluralistic nature of description that makes defending a collectively valuable version of reality so important and urgent.

All Roads Lead to the New Food Activism

First paragraph: The New Food Activism: Opposition, Cooperation, and Collective Action reminds us that understanding food activism in the world of alternative facts and post-truth politics requires breaking off with com­monly established norms, criticisms, and contro­versies. With an awareness that there are conno­tations associated with “food justice” and “neo­liberalism” that are quintessential in discussing food matters, Alison Hope Alkon and Julie Guthman propose that food activism is fertile ground for the growth of reflexive, innovative, and immersive food politics. Departing from the view that alter­native food systems have been described as apolitical and short-sighted, this edited volume suggests that food activism embodies politics and strategic action. This new sort of food activism seeks to build alliances and coalitions that go beyond the current notion of alternatives in describing transformative changes in food systems. The book is divided into three parts, each unpack­ing different possibilities for the role of activism in reshaping food systems. . . .

Alternative Facts and States of Fear: Reality and STS in an Age of Climate Fictions

In the decades since the Science Wars of the 1990s, climate science has become a crucible for the negotiation of claims about reality and expertise. This negotiation, which has drawn explicitly on the ideas and techniques of science and technology studies (STS), has taken place in genres of fiction as well as non-fiction, which intersect in surprising ways. In this case study, I focus on two interwoven strands of this history. One follows Michael Crichton’s best-selling 2004 novel, State of Fear and its reception by neo-conservatives as a commentary on the mis-uses of facts to stoke fear about anthropogenic climate change. The other considers Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway’s 2010 publishing success Merchants of Doubt as the inverse, a demonstration of the forms of disinformation that have been used to undermine scientific consensus around climate change. I show that both Crichton’s as well as Oreskes and Conway’s approaches were critiqued by academic STS even as their accounts constituted the most high-profile performances of its stakes and the politics of knowledge since the Science Wars. In highlighting the STS practices deployed by each, as well as how those practices were differently linked to accusations of fear-mongering and a perversion of the purity of STS, I demonstrate the need for a reflexive history of STS. Such an approach, I argue, can better consider the social life of STS ideas and practices amidst calls for more politically-engaged approaches to knowledge production.

Citizen Data and Trust in Official Statistics

Many, if not most, big data are connected to the lives of citizens: their movements, opinions, and relations. Arguably big data and citizens are inseparable: from smartphones, meters, fridges and cars to internet platforms, the data of digital technologies is the data of citizens. In addition to raising political and ethical issues of privacy, confidentiality and data protection, this calls for rethinking relations to citizens in the production of data for statistics if they are to be trusted by citizens. We outline an approach that involves co-producing data, where citizens are engaged in all stages of statistical production, from the design of a data production platform to the interpretation and analysis of data. While raising issues such as data quality and reliability, we argue co-production can potentially mitigate problems associated with the re-purposing of big data. We argue that in a time of ‘alternative facts’, what constitutes legitimate knowledge and expertise are major political sites of contention and struggle and require going beyond defending existing practices towards inventing new ones. In this context, we argue that the future of official statistics not only depends on inventing new data sources and methods but also mobilising the possibilities of digital technologies to establish new relations with citizens.

Knowledge politics and post-truth in climate denial: on the social construction of alternative facts

ABSTRACT This article examines the post-truth debate and questions the argument that post-modernism and social constructivism is responsible for post-truth and alternative facts, including in climate denial. The article argues that social constructivism is not the problem but rather an epistemological orientation that helps us better understand the rise of post-truth. Toward this end, the essay examines the way empirical findings are translated into political knowledge and the role of science in “truth regimes”. From this perspective, there is no amount of fact-checking alone that will resolve the post-truth problem. The argument is illustrated with the case of climate denial.

It Is All There: From Reason to Reasoning-in-the-World

ABSTRACT The emergence of narratives concerning post-truth, alternative facts, fake news, and the like underpins a felt sense of crisis about the possibility of debate, insofar as argument depends on truth norms. This essay argues that the post-truth narrative is regressive. It depends on Enlightenment-derived standards of truth that were from the beginning impoverished. I argue that rather than appeal nostalgically to the past, we should look to arguments interior to rhetorical history that point to truth norms that include worldly experience, or thereness. Using examples from Protagoras, Johann Georg Hamann, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I briefly expand on different ways of conceiving how to marry worldly involvements to our conceptions of knowledge. The world, inclusive of radical technological change, doesn't just shape but takes part in who we are and what we know, say, and do. In this sense, argument and debate are ambient phenomena.

Fighting Alternative Facts: Teaching Quantitative Reasoning with Social Issues

Mathematics has a unique and powerful role to play in the teaching of social justice issues. There is substantial quantitative evidence for social injustice, but many citizens lack the quantitative skills to understand that evidence. A course in quantitative literacy is a unique opportunity to provide this quantitative understanding to a wide range of students in a general education context. Quantitative literacy skills provide citizens with the tools they need to critically analyze misinformation and make good decisions about civic issues.

Facts and alternative facts: Ethically responding to offensive comments by patients

Facts and alternative facts: Ethically responding to offensive comments by patients

Truth by Repetition: Explanations and Implications

People believe repeated information more than novel information; they show a repetition-induced truth effect. In a world of “alternative facts,” “fake news,” and strategic information management, understanding this effect is highly important. We first review explanations of the effect based on frequency, recognition, familiarity, and coherent references. On the basis of the latter explanation, we discuss the relations of these explanations. We then discuss implications of truth by repetition for the maintenance of false beliefs and ways to change potentially harmful false beliefs (e.g., “Vaccination causes autism”), illustrating that the truth-by-repetition phenomenon not only is of theoretical interest but also has immediate practical relevance.

Keeping track of ‘alternative facts’: The neural correlates of processing misinformation corrections

Upon receiving a correction, initially presented misinformation often continues to influence people's judgment and reasoning. Whereas some researchers believe that this so-called continued influence effect of misinformation (CIEM) simply arises from the insufficient encoding and integration of corrective claims, others assume that it arises from a competition between the correct information and the initial misinformation in memory. To examine these possibilities, we conducted two functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies. In each study, participants were asked to (a) read a series of brief news reports that contained confirmations or corrections of prior information and (b) evaluate whether subsequently presented memory probes matched the reports' correct facts rather than the initial misinformation. Both studies revealed that following correction-containing news reports, participants struggled to refute mismatching memory probes, especially when they referred to initial misinformation (as opposed to mismatching probes with novel information). We found little evidence, however, that the encoding of confirmations and corrections produced systematic neural processing differences indicative of distinct encoding strategies. Instead, we discovered that following corrections, participants exhibited increased activity in the left angular gyrus and the bilateral precuneus in response to mismatching memory probes that contained prior misinformation, compared to novel mismatch probes. These findings favour the notion that people's susceptibility to the CIEM arises from the concurrent retention of both correct and incorrect information in memory.

Truth and Consequence: Alternative Facts and Discordant Realities

The following is an essay in applied psychoanalysis delivered to the International Association of Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in June 2018.* In this essay I attempt to apply what we know about the psychological sequelae of childhood abuse and what we know about the conditions necessary for secure attachment to our current political situation.

Alternative Facts and Fake News: Digital mediation and The Affective Spread of Hate in the Era of Trump

The role of negative affects such as fear and hate, their manifestation in atmospheres, manipulability, and mobilization as a response to threat perception play a pivotal role in the current political conjuncture. This essay traces the dissemination of fake news and the role of affective labor in its digital spread through the example of the recent Pizzagate phenomenon. This particular viral story and its real world fallout speak to the turn to a ‘post-truth’ politics, which has been embraced by President Trump and his surrogates, through the appropriation of the term ‘fake news’ and rhetoric of ‘alternative facts’, to describe all forms of dissent and justification for executive actions, respectively. By examining the circulation and coalescence of negative affects such as fear and hate, and their utility in a moment of political uncertainty defined by divisive populist rhetoric, it becomes clear that a reorientation to affective engagements with digital media and facticity is necessary and pressingly urgent.

Hipsters on networks: How a minority group of individuals can lead to an antiestablishment majority.

The spread of opinions, memes, diseases, and “alternative facts” in a population depends both on the details of the spreading process and on the structure of the social and communication networks on which they spread. One feature that can change spreading dynamics substantially is heterogeneous behavior among different types of individuals in a social network. In this paper, we explore how antiestablishment nodes (e.g., hipsters) influence the spreading dynamics of two competing products. We consider a model in which spreading follows a deterministic rule for updating node states (which indicate which product has been adopted) in which an adjustable probability of the nodes in a network are hipsters, who choose to adopt the product that they believe is the less popular of the two. The remaining nodes are conformists, who choose which product to adopt by considering which products their immediate neighbors have adopted. We simulate our model on both synthetic and real networks, and we show that the hipsters have a major effect on the final fraction of people who adopt each product: even when only one of the two products exists at the beginning of the simulations, a small fraction of hipsters in a network can still cause the other product to eventually become the more popular one. To account for this behavior, we construct an approximation for the steady-state adoption fractions of the products on -regular trees in the limit of few hipsters. Additionally, our simulations demonstrate that a time delay in the knowledge of the product distribution in a population, as compared to immediate knowledge of product adoption among nearest neighbors, can have a large effect on the final distribution of product adoptions. Using a local-tree approximation, we derive an analytical estimate of the spreading of products and obtain good agreement if a sufficiently small fraction of the population consists of hipsters. In all networks, we find that either of the two products can become the more popular one at steady state, depending on the fraction of hipsters in the network and on the amount of delay in the knowledge of the product distribution. Our simple model and analysis may help shed light on the road to success for antiestablishment choices in elections, as such success—and qualitative differences in final outcomes between competing products, political candidates, and so on—can arise rather generically in our model from a small number of antiestablishment individuals and ordinary processes of social influence on normal individuals.

This I Know to be True

Working within alternative belief communities, I frequently encounter a tension between what is felt to be authentic and the facts provided by external sources. Even a cursory glance at the news headlines and social media postings that saturate daily life with terms such as “fake news” and “alternative facts” reveals that this is not an isolated struggle. Focusing on the ways in which contemporary Canadian divination practitioners establish their own truth, this paper examines how these processes reflect and support folklore’s engagement with and ongoing relationship to the emergence of multiple authenticities defined by the experiential.

BEYOND SIGNAL AND NOISE: ACADEMICS GOES HOAX AND HOAXTIVISM

This article is a research report on the perception of hoax among the Indonesian academic community. Hoax is ancient, but in the present digital age, it sneaks into the center stage. Reflecting upon the global trends and shifting of international political landscape, it appears that hoax and its troops, e.g. “false news,” “alternative facts,” “disinformation,” etc. – immersed into the political language and practice. It may corroborate with the condition of “post-truth society” lamented by some scholars, in particular when it echoed in the present Indonesian political and religious landscape. The research focuses on hoax in general, and to introduce a term “hoaxtivism” in framing specific practice revolved in producing and consuming “hoax” as a signifier. We gauge the conversation on hoax within academic community, and locate it in the larger social process. The objective is to understand hoax and hoaxtivism beyond the moralistic evaluation and alarmist position, as overwhelmingly displayed in the public discussion.

Calling out ‘alternative facts’: curriculum to develop students’ capacity to engage critically with contradictory sources

ABSTRACTInformation discernment has become a much needed twenty-first century skill and an essential outcome for university education. Technology has enabled more organisations to gain access to effective mass media to disseminate both accurate information and disinformation. As information sources have proliferated, information users are confronted by a plethora of superficially credible, contradictory ‘facts’ and opinions. A curriculum redesign project at an Australian university provided an opportunity to embed information discernment into a first-year unit, and to strengthen students’ capacity to engage critically with contradictory sources and competing worldviews. The review found that: (1) it was necessary to explain the importance of information discernment, (2) a restriction of information sources was helpful to the initial development of discernment, (3) the purposes of (university) education required explicit discussion, (4) it was useful to discuss the relationship between research and personal experience, and (5) later modules must consolidate and extend information literacy learning.

Teaching and Learning in an Age of (In)credulity: Facts and “Alternative Facts” in the Classroom

Teaching and Learning in an Age of (In)credulity: Facts and “Alternative Facts” in the Classroom

Alternative Facts in Peer-to-Peer Loans? Borrower Misreporting Dynamics and Implications

Inaccuracy of borrower-provided information in marketplace loans for credit card debt repayment and consolidation contains information about credit risk. I identify inaccuracies based on three indicators: consistency of loan amount with outstanding credit balance, roundness of reported income, and roundness of chosen loan amount. An Inaccuracy Index constructed from these indicators has significant predictive power over the likelihood of default, and the additional default risk is not compensated by higher interest. Inaccurate information is more prevalent in areas with lower social capital, implying weaker social norms, among borrowers whose professions are considered less honest, and among borrowers with higher genuine income uncertainty.

Speaking Power to “Post-Truth”: Critical Political Ecology and the New Authoritarianism

Given a history in political ecology of challenging hegemonic “scientific” narratives concerning environmental problems, the current political moment presents a potent conundrum: how to (continue to) critically engage with narratives of environmental change while confronting the “populist” promotion of “alternative facts.” We ask how political ecologists might situate themselves vis-à-vis the presently growing power of contemporary authoritarian forms, highlighting how the latter operates through sociopolitical domains and beyond-human natures. We argue for a clear and conscious strategy of speaking power to post-truth, to enable two things. The first is to come to terms with an internal paradox of addressing those seeking to obfuscate or deny environmental degradation and social injustice, while retaining political ecology’s own historical critique of the privileged role of Western science and expert knowledge in determining dominant forms of environmental governance. This involves understanding post-truth, and its twin pillars of alternative facts and fake news, as operating politically by those regimes looking to shore up power, rather than as embodying a coherent mode of ontological reasoning regarding the nature of reality. Second, we differentiate post-truth from analyses affirming diversity in both knowledge and reality (i.e., epistemology and ontology, respectively) regarding the drivers of environmental change. This enables a critical confrontation of contemporary authoritarianism and still allows for a relevant and accessible political ecology that engages with marginalized populations likely to suffer most from the proliferation of post-truth politics. Key Words: authoritarianism, environmental policy, political ecology, post-truth, science.