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Motivated Cognition, Conspiratorial Epistemology, and Bullshit: A Model of Post-factual Political Discourse

Marko Kovic (ZIPAR - Zurich Institute of Public Affairs Research)
Petra Kaya von Gerr (ZIPAR - Zurich Institute of Public Affairs Research)
Emre Akbulut (ZIPAR - Zurich Institute of Public Affairs Research)
Adrian Rauchfleisch (ZIPAR - Zurich Institute of Public Affairs Research)
Marc Sele (ZIPAR - Zurich Institute of Public Affairs Research)
Christian Caspar (ZIPAR - Zurich Institute of Public Affairs Research)

Keywords: Public opinion theory and/or methods

Abstract

Talk of a “post-factual age” or of “post-factual politics” is decades old. The concept of the post-factual has become popular in recent years, not least because of a proliferation of political online communication. But what, exactly, do we mean by calling some form of political discourse “post-factual”? The goal of this paper is to present a conceptual model of post-factual political discourse and to discuss the impact of post-factual political discourse on democratic politics.

Post-factual political discourse is a discursive attitude that consists of three components: Motivated cognition, conspiratorial epistemology, and bullshit.

Motivated cognition is a mode of biased inference-making whereby beliefs are not the result of inferences, but instead, pre-existing beliefs are accommodated with pseudo-inferences. In a general sense, motivated cognition takes the form of Pr(belief) = Pr(belief | evidence), where Pr(beliefs) stands for the probability that a belief is true absent evidence, and Pr(belief | evidence) for the probability that a belief is true given some evidence. From a logical point of view, the process of motivated cognition, the construction of pseudo-inferences that support one’s pre-existing beliefs, is an exercise in abductive guessing.

Conspiratorial epistemology is a type of defective epistemology that co-occurs with motivated cognition in post-factual political discourse. Within conspiratorial epistemology, evidence is not evaluated with regard to the evidence in an of itself, but rather with regard to its compatibility with one’s pre-existing beliefs. Evidence that does not fit with one’s beliefs is rejected on the grounds that some actors have fabricated said evidence. A typical outcome of conspiratorial epistemology is to label news media outlets as nefarious in some way (“corrupt”, “propaganda”, and so forth) and hence to ignore the actual content of the evidence in question.

Bullshit is an everyday expletive and as such, obviously, analytically void. However, bullshit as a philosophical concept describes a particular kind of perlocutionary speech act. When a person utters bullshit, she or he is insincere, but not in the sense of lying; the propositional content of the speech act might actually be true. When a person utters bullshit, she or he simply does not care about the propositional truth of the speech act - the only thing that matters is the strategic goal that is to be achieved by uttering the speech act. The strategic goal of bullshit in the context of post-factual political discourse is twofold: Affirming one’s own beliefs, and persuading others of those beliefs.

Post-factual political discourse represents a potentially far-reaching problem for democracy, since it chips away at democracy’s epistemic underpinning. Even though post-factual political discourse is not a new phenomenon, today’s manifold and fragmented online public sphere makes it easier than ever to avoid information that challenges one’s beliefs and to, instead, validate one’s existing beliefs in those pockets of the public sphere that fit best.