Social-Epistemic Rhetoric: Why the Post-Truth Paradox Fails Rhetorically
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Berlin’s sense of social-epistemic rhetoric offers a means for framing how the post-truth paradox ultimately fails, why post-truth rhetoric is effective, and why bridging the gap between polarized political spheres is necessary for combating fallacious post-truth. While the post-truth paradox can be said to elucidate how post-truth rhetoric doesn’t defeat but simply ignores fact structurally, through irony, using contradiction to reveal rather than conceal, social-epistemic rhetoric reveals the way in which knowledge is created discursively, and, consequently, the importance of audience, or the “discourse community,” which can be representative of the culture at large or a specific audience. This discourse happens through the mediator of language, which paradox reveals actively shapes how we think about, interpret, and convey meaning, but is deeply connected to context in a way that the post-truth paradox doesn’t immediately make aware. Furthermore, social-epistemic rhetoric deconstructs ethos in a way that makes knowledge creation relatively democratic without becoming ignorant of the ways in which culture shapes who gets to have a voice, and how that voice can be expressed. What social-epistemic rhetoric reveals about why post-truth rhetoric is ultimately effective is that post-truth rhetoric renders the discursive creation of knowledge nearly impossible because the grounds by which such knowledge creation could happen have been rendered increasingly inexistent through political and intellectual polarization, which is exemplified in Twitter and the development of fake news. In the same way that there has to be an agreed upon understanding of how language symbolizes reality in order for there to be affective communication through language (Falzer), there has to be common ground by which knowledge can be created, collectively, through discourse.
Ultimately, the post-truth paradox’s nuanced break down of post-truth rhetoric’s problematic nature, by reflecting its structure to reveal, instead of conceal, meaning, and therefore to reach the opposite of post-truth rhetoric’s end, fails to change minds because of what social-epistemic rhetoric reveals about the role interpretation plays in knowledge construction.