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Has Trump Stolen Philosophy's Critical Tools?

Williams, Casey
http://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/17/opinion/has-trump-stolen-philosophys-critical-tools.html

Publisher:  The New York Times
Date Written:  17/04/2017
Year Published:  2017  
Resource Type:  Article

Williams analyzes how U.S. President Trump is able to exploit the post-modernist view of the subjectivity of truth in order to wield power over how Americans perceive their own reality.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

We're used to this pattern by now: The president dresses up useful lies as "alternative facts" and decries uncomfortable realities as "fake news." Stoking conservative passion and liberal fury, Trump stirs up confusion about the veracity of settled knowledge and, through sheer assertion, elevates belief to the status of truth.

Trump's playbook should be familiar to any student of critical theory and philosophy. It often feels like Trump has stolen our ideas and weaponized them.

For decades, critical social scientists and humanists have chipped away at the idea of truth. We've deconstructed facts, insisted that knowledge is situated and denied the existence of objectivity. The bedrock claim of critical philosophy, going back to Kant, is simple: We can never have certain knowledge about the world in its entirety. Claiming to know the truth is therefore a kind of assertion of power.

These ideas animate the work of influential thinkers like Nietzsche, Foucault and Derrida, and they've become axiomatic for many scholars in literary studies, cultural anthropology and sociology.

From these premises, philosophers and theorists have derived a number of related insights. One is that facts are socially constructed. People who produce facts -- scientists, reporters, witnesses -- do so from a particular social position (maybe they're white, male and live in America) that influences how they perceive, interpret and judge the world. They rely on non-neutral methods (microscopes, cameras, eyeballs) and use non-neutral symbols (words, numbers, images) to communicate facts to people who receive, interpret and deploy them from their own social positions.

Call it what you want: relativism, constructivism, deconstruction, postmodernism, critique. The idea is the same: Truth is not found, but made, and making truth means exercising power.

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