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<p>The diagnosis of a&#xa0;post-truth crisis was initially closely associated with political events, especially with the 2016 election of Donald Trump as president of the US. However, with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and accompanying debates about science scepticism and science communication, the crisis changed its character and its quality. The article focuses on this second phase. In the first part, a&#xa0;quantitative semantic analysis is used to analyze the development of the post-truth terminology. The reconstruction of conceptual trends in the scientific literature indicates a&#xa0;tendency to adopt binary interpretation schemes. As a&#xa0;result, there is a&#xa0;risk for the academic discourse of drifting into a&#xa0;friend/foe distinction, analogous to political and public debates. Against this background, the second part of the article aims at a&#xa0;more differentiated heuristic for interpreting and evaluating post-truth communication. Based on established concepts from philosophy and sociology of science, four registers are distinguished that can be used as instruments of critique. The first register refers to the traditional demarcation problem, the second register to the uncertainty of scientific knowledge, the third register to the problem of value-ladeness, and the fourth register to the plurality of inner-scientific perspectives. The conclusion discusses how this heuristic contributes to the further development of criteria for ‘good’ science communication and how it helps to understand why there is also ‘bad’ science communication.</p>

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Die Krise der Faktizität, revisited: Wissenschaftsskepsis und Wissenschaftskommunikation im Kontext der COVID-19-Pandemie

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  • 出版模式：

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  • 发表日期：

    2025年5月26日

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  • David Kaldewey

摘要

The diagnosis of a post-truth crisis was initially closely associated with political events, especially with the 2016 election of Donald Trump as president of the US. However, with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and accompanying debates about science scepticism and science communication, the crisis changed its character and its quality. The article focuses on this second phase. In the first part, a quantitative semantic analysis is used to analyze the development of the post-truth terminology. The reconstruction of conceptual trends in the scientific literature indicates a tendency to adopt binary interpretation schemes. As a result, there is a risk for the academic discourse of drifting into a friend/foe distinction, analogous to political and public debates. Against this background, the second part of the article aims at a more differentiated heuristic for interpreting and evaluating post-truth communication. Based on established concepts from philosophy and sociology of science, four registers are distinguished that can be used as instruments of critique. The first register refers to the traditional demarcation problem, the second register to the uncertainty of scientific knowledge, the third register to the problem of value-ladeness, and the fourth register to the plurality of inner-scientific perspectives. The conclusion discusses how this heuristic contributes to the further development of criteria for ‘good’ science communication and how it helps to understand why there is also ‘bad’ science communication.