My initial plan was to offer a brief response to what modern election campaigns have done to our understandings of truth and falsehood. That all went up in smoke when fake news and alternative facts became tactics for governing. Just last week, Time magazine’s feature article examined the effects of a president who openly acknowledges […]
In the last lesson, I suggested the crisis in language that has led to our present inability to separate what is true and false in public conversation might have first been observed in Orwell’s political newspeak and Ellul’s technological commonplaces. I think the crisis deepened with what Uwe Poerksen (1995) labeled “plastic words.” These are […]
Because we are confronted every blasted day with a new manipulation of truth, it might help to trace the development that has led to this perilous situation. Many believe it was first brought to our attention by George Orwell who introduced “newspeak” in his novel 1984 (1949). This is a fictional language created by the […]
Any lengthy discussion of truth probably contains a reference to Diogenes walking around Athens with a lamp to search for one honest man. Chances are that is about as far as it goes. Few realize the Greek thinker was a Cynic who thought truth involves how you live as well as what you say. He […]
We are just beginning to appreciate how much the huge databases modern technology makes available are affecting our thoughts about truth. Most of us are aware that merchants use them to sell their products. If we look for a pair of shoes online, ads for others pop up on our Facebook for several days. We […]
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