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Стив Фуллер и его игра в знание в условиях постправды
Post-truth is a special negative characteristic of information, its production, transmission and reception. The remarkable feature of Steve Fuller’s book Post-Truth: Knowledge as a Power Game is that it attempts to formulate the socio-epistemological concept of post-truth within the framework of the academic trend. In this way, Fuller explains where the negative assessments of the post-truth phenomenon in the public sphere come from and shows where they lead science and society. The authors chose Chapter 2 for translation, because in it the author reveals the essence of the concept of post-truth, while the remaining chapters are devoted to the second question: where post-truth leads us. In Chapter 2, Fuller acts as a philosopher who expounds on his position. Fuller as a sociologist of science and a philosopher is a fashionable, popular, deep and shocking thinker. His vivid and argumentative speeches in support of the creationist concept of “Intelligent Design”, transhumanism and many other disputable ideas earned him the fame of a rebel thinker. In this role, he appears in the remaining chapters of his book–as a “crushing trust”, in his own words. Fuller overthrows traditions not only in science and philosophy, to which scientists, in general, are accustomed, but also in public life, including politics, where those political movements that are today stigmatized as populist, for example, Brexit, are in fact manifestations of post-truth. Fuller argues that post-truth is the reality of our life, whether we like it or not, it is a kind of democracy of knowledge of the post-information era, when the majority who receive power and with it the ability to set rules for others may not be scientists at all, not those who impersonate them and not even professionals in their field. Post-truth has negative correlations because it is a game with very high stakes. This is a game of knowledge, in which the reward is truth, and the goal is modal power, which true knowledge gives, provided that other players recognize the winner of the prize as the best user of true knowledge. The winner receives special power over the minds, if not the souls, of others, and this provokes the desire of the parties to wrap themselves in favor of the rule, the field of the game or its course, i.e., maximize the benefits of post-truth. This is where negative assessments are rooted, according to Fuller. In his book, he explicitly talks about two ways to play. One way is to directly play this game with other people, like sophists, and the second is to formulate the rules of the game for others, like Plato or other philosophers. Fuller describes both methods in detail and shows great players from different teams. Among them are Thomas Aquinas and Ignatius Loyola, Isaac Newton and Stephen Hawking, poets, playwrights, Hollywood directors, pop singers and editors of leading scientific journals.