Stanley Fish came back! What took him so long? The world has become his candy store, and it now might be time to redigest some of the unpleasantries he has so impishly unleashed over the years. The candy is free, Stanley. All you want.
7
Wikipedia eventually had to move away from the free-flowing knowledge of the crowds towards an environment moderated by knowledgeable arbiters.
5
Fish makes a mishmash of concepts and hypotheticals, to demonstrate Fake News is the result of transparency and free speech. Nonsense! Doubletalk!
Fake News occurs in both open and restricted societies. In an open society, there is opportunity to dispute error, lies and distortion. In a restricted society, the opportunity is reduced or non-existent.
“Transparency” refers to government and other bodies that have the power to make decisions that impact citizens or members. Far more injustice and corruption has been accomplished because of lack of transparency, than is the case when such bodies observe rules of transparency.
“Fake News” can be intentional, to mislead public opinion. Fake News also may be mistakenly created. Thereafter, it can be circulated, unwittingly, by people who believe it, or wittingly, by people who want to circulate the false information.
We have always coped with Fake News. The increased ability of all to generate, receive and pass along information, means more Fake News, just as there are more facts, opinions and truth in circulation.
We must provide increased opportunity for people to learn how to filter truth from falsehood, how to write clearly, and how to effectively use tools available for those purposes.
Our schoolyard bully in chief’s attitude toward truth has not changed in decades. With less transparency in government and less information available to the public, the chief bully would likely ramp up his deceptions and abusive speech.
12
Trumpism need not be attributed to post-modernism, which as the oeuvre of academic philosophers is more silly than pernicious. It is not much different from the ravings of Father Coughlin, Senator Bilbo, or a mob with torches and pitchforks. Hatred, fear, and ignorance have always been with us.
4
Thought provoking for sure. But one thing to consider is the failure of experts/pundits in some very major and public ways recently: 9/11, the Great Recession, WMDs in Iraq, the election of Donald Trump, the predicted economic downturn with Trump's election, the Arab spring, the migrant crisis, ISIS, 'Peak Oil' etc...Experts dropped the ball on all of these. People's skepticism in institutions did not appear out of thin air. It seems reasonable some might go looking for info themselves. I am not saying that this is the best thing either. People can be easily swayed and data can be manipulated. But I get it.
Maybe the experts were wrong because they're in echo chambers. When you get to a certain level in any organization it is easier to just go with the flow. These days some ideas are wrong and it's easier not to challenge the status quo.
6
Stanley Fish doth protest too much.
Postmodern English and French professors have not caused Trump, but they have contributed to a loss of respect for truth, fact, and logic.
As an analytic philosopher steeped in logic, I could see it coming. Aristotle warned us long ago about sophism and rhetoric. But saying as much always earned the disdain of the rest of the humanities. In some places it led to the genuine schism between'continental' and analytic philosophy. The analytic school merged more comfortably with the sciences. It also led to bioethics. And it trained people like Bertrand Russell, Karl Popper, and George Soros.
8
I am an academic scientist, and the same thing is at work in the research world. Basically, the wealth of information on the internet has made people feel that they no longer need experts. This has produced a climate in which politicians feel their judgment is at least as valid as scientists’ when deciding what research is worth doing. Over the past decade, government support of research has given increasing weight to “societal impact”, which is shorthand for the ability of politicians and the general public to understand the worth of the research. (This is certainly true in Canada, but is also a global trend.) Research projects need to have a take-home message that sounds important to someone with essentially no training in the field. This is called accountability.
In a way, it is democracy; in a way it is a step backwards.
At some point the public is going to realize that the judgment of experts is important after all.
15
There is much to agree with here, but not the expansive definition of "free speech." What "free speech" means is that government -- only government -- may not prevent people from speaking their mind, and even that definition is qualified with exceptions. Free speech, thus understood, must absolutely be defended. Misleading speech is problematic, and solutions to the problem may even involve government, e.g., as a provider of education that includes critical thinking skills. But it can't involve government as an authority on which speech is or isn't worthwhile.
This doesn't mean that all speech is equally well founded and equally deserving of an audience. And I agree completely with the author's critique of the fantasy that open-access Internet platforms give everyone an equally loud voice. But "transparency," too, has a narrower definition that deserves support, namely that government -- only government -- business must not be conducted in the proverbial smoke-filled back room. (Again, there are exceptions, most notably discussions about whether to fire someone.)
In short, the author uses some good points about the nature of the Internet to obscure the meaning of two crucial terms in the struggle for civil liberties.
11
Provoking.
But I believe the main driver is not technology or pseudo philosophers of free speech.
It’s probably more likely to be driven by our old conundrums: laziness, cravings for instant gratification - the old shot of dopamine - with a big dollop of people-pleasing thrown in.
Thoughtful dialogue based on doing one’s homework? Peaceful tolerance of conflict of opinion? Willingness to admit a mistake? Adhering to process and waiting for results? Courage to stand alone in a crowd?
Puleeze! Waaay too much effort! More fun and faster to call someone names, get a cheap laugh, or provoke a puff of outrage.
Honestly, I don’t know what the solution to this is, except for regulations on hate speech. I do hope that we will start to consider hate speech as a form of verbal abuse, because it has no relation to freedom of speech, and only hurts its targets, which is exactly what it is intended to do.
19
As a former techno-utopian, I and many of my peers worked to put digital printing presses into everyone's hands. "Everyone a publisher," was our mantra. Information could be verified. The best ideas would bubble up. No more lies! Misleading soundbites and video clips could be traced back to their source.
What we didn't understand (and what marketers and Madison Avenue types have known forever) is that human beings largely make decisions based on the emotion and repetition. So whoever can get the most face time with the audience wins.
Donald Trump was on the air for 12, injecting himself weekly into the brains of his viewers. Then the press, finding his freakshow so profitable, covered him incessantly.
So here were are.
12
“By enabling people from diverse backgrounds to easily connect and share their ideas, we can decrease world conflict in the short and long run.”
This was the argument used to sell -- and I do mean sell -- our nation on the alleged virtues of 500-channel TV, as well as the abolition of the Fairness Doctrine. The internet is merely 500-channel TV on steroids.
Instead of increasing people's exposure to more experiences and points of view, the result was an environment embraced across the political spectrum, where 24/7 you could and did have whatever you already believed reinforced. There is now a readily available niche for everything, and you can spend your entire life snug and secure in an electronic womb certain you are right.
The argument has essentially been that editing content distribution is an anti-democratic process. True, but so is paying Major Leaguers more than Minor League players and paying a doctor rather than asking for my free advice if you have cancer. Of course hierarchies can be used to oppress, but that is merely a reminder to keep one's eyes open. Knowledge and ability are necessary to function, and expertise is necessary to improve our lives, both materially and in social relationships.
In any case, democracy is not the same thing as liberal values, (in the historically Western sense of the term). Putin, Xi, and Erdogan likely would currently win a democratic election, but in no sense are they promoters or even guardians of liberal values.
14
The mother of fake news is not transparency. Fake news has two parents: those with the money and power to deceive, and those with weak minds. Those with money and power want to expand their money and power by using well-established principles of advertising. For many years, new cars have been sold by associating a vehicle with a pretty lady, an idyllic country road, and excessive speed. The weak mind, seduced, buys the image with little consideration of the characteristics of the vehicle. The same principle has successfully sold soap, movies, jewelry, and politicians for generations. Fake news is simply a new type of product, made possible by new media, the internet and cable television. News was always a commodity, but the new media remove intelligent questioning of facts and diversity. Transparency is not the mother of fake news; it is a second cousin once removed. Transparent disclosure of government or corporate secrets can be a good thing or a bad thing, but it is not closely related to fake news. For a newly transparent phenomenon, it takes money and advertising talent to create fake news, and it takes a weak mind to buy the product. Liberal education, real balanced news, and political organization are the methods for combating fake news. Elimination of transparency would not put a dent in fake news.
36
What serves the common good better: An open meeting, as described, with comments edited while being spoken to keep from offending onlookers; or a closed meeting with frank and honest debate which is then chronicled and published?
As a member, in the past, of a Business Improvement District we had to operate under the first conditions which usually precluded anything from getting done. The BID broke up.
In debate clubs and class back in Middle Ages when I was in high school we always started the debates with a definition of terms; wherein we all agreed that certain facts meant certain things keeping us focused on the issue of actual debate.
Today we see the rise of corporate propaganda walking hand in hand with government propaganda convincing a huge minority of US that "corporations are people", "taxation is theft", individual rights to own weapons trumps other's right to "Life, Liberty, and the purfuit of Happiness", and that "government is the problem not the solution".
It's easy: Follow the money.
6
Too bad that professor Fish is unaware of the work of Jürgen Habermas, who has famously (within professional philosophy) advanced standards of communicative rationality since at least the early 1970s.
I want to discuss Fish’s good article in Habermasian terms, but the “Comments” box here isn’t apt. So, I’ve set up a placeholder blog point for Wednesday:
“thinking about transparency and ‘fake news’”
tinyurl.com/yb63zf86
I doubt that the Times permits links, but no doubt, articles in "The Stone" deserve to be entrance points into deeper thinking.
2
My regrets to the author. I am sure he is learned and thoughtful. He even gives us a humorous anecdote about "transparency".
However, understanding "fake news" is not all that complicated, nor worthy of scholarly comment. "Fake news" is nothing more and nothing less than that which offends your perspective on the world and which you are unwilling to consider as offering a legitimate difference to that which you choose to believe. It has been with us a lot longer than the internet or social media. These forums simply increase the din when someone shouts your thoughts do not matter.
5
Fake news has several origins. Various intelligence operations and governments throughout history have used it widely as propaganda, negatively or positively for a variety purposes, but mostly pecuniary.
Relatedly, the "authorities" have often been caught out in this disinformation or other subterfuge, thus creating serious distrust of what the "government" or the "authorities" say to be true.
Whether the way the CIA handled flying saucers or JFK, or the examples of Watergate or Iran Contra or a hundred other instances where the public was essentially lied to has set the stage for the Age of Fake News.
The chickens have truly come home to roost. It all started with Edward Bernays.
6
This is a far cry from the excellence that I witnessed personally from you at the Philadelphia, PA Law & Society meetings in the early 1990s when UCLAW's Rick Abel had you speak to a standing room only full house w/ Abel's UCLAW faculty colleague K Crenshaw, now present wrt women's rights & make up by way of a recent appearance in a lady's magazine, but present on the panel that Professor Abel convened only as a no show. Give us the sort of play that you gave us that was better than Derrida ever gave when you published 'Is there a Text In This Class?'! In other words, don't take the notion of what is 'free' or what is 'transparent' as lightly as you are here! What does free mean? That one does not have to pay? That something has a quality akin to that of liberty or does it mean that that thing has a structure, as you seem to opine, of a particle of post Newtonian and post Field Theory physics that defies even the best known notions of multi-planar geometries? Give us notions of freedom and of transparency that have us reaching beyond our current understanding of Set Theory; that is, get a Field Medal even at your now advanced age! Infinity and its place in set theory and the set of infinities or the set of infinity as a place holder. Is fake news hiding something or is it a place holder for something or both, 4 e.g.? I.e. wrt K Crenshaw's no show at the early 1990s conference, did she actually show up as abscence or was she not at all present and was her name just fake news?
1
Edward Bernay’s was the guy who got women to believe that smoking was sophisticated.
Thanks, Eddy, my mother died of lung cancer.
2
"Not speaking freely in front of everyone is a condition of speaking freely — without anxiety and mental reservation — on the way to exploring the complexities and difficulties of their charge."
What tortured, twisted reasoning. Stanley Fish maintains that one must remain guarded -- or mute -- in public, lest access to your candid reasoning and thoughts might illuminate something dark and horrible that should remain hidden.
It's precisely this fear and obsession with maintaining public image that brought us the zombie candidacy of Hillary Clinton, whom voters decided they could never know and wouldn't trust. Americans preferred the abject horror of Donald Trump, whom they believed was at least displaying genuine opinion without reservation.
Spare us your paranoid vision of society, Mr. Fish, and simply encourage people -- public and private -- to speak freely at all times. It's called "honesty."
8
" It is created by the undermining of trust in the traditional vehicles of authority and legitimation — major newspapers, professional associations, credentialed academics, standard encyclopedias, government bureaus, federal courts, prime-time nightly news anchors."
...of the Left. All this blathering only to say, we on the Left know the Truth.
2
In quoting Evgeny Morozov as follows, Stanley Fish nails on the head the argument used to sell -- and I mean sell -- our nation on the alleged virtues of 500-channel TV and the abolition of the Fairness Doctrine. The internet is merely 500-channel TV on steroids.“By enabling people from diverse backgrounds to easily connect and share their ideas, we can decrease world conflict in the short and long run.”
Instead of increasing people's exposure to more experiences and points of view, the result was an environment, largely embraced across the political spectrum, where 24/7 you could and did have whatever you already believed reinforced. There is now a readily available, niche medium for everything, and you can spend your entire life snug and secure in an electronic womb telling you that you are right.
The argument has essentially been that editing content distribution is an anti-democratic process. True, but so is paying Major Leaguers and not Little Leaguers and paying a doctor rather than asking for my free advice, when you have cancer. In any case, democracy is not the same thing as liberal values, (in the historically Western sense of the term). Putin, Xi, and Erdogan likely would currently win a democratic election, but in no sense are they promoters or even guardians of liberal values.
Of course priorities and hierarchies can be used to oppress, but that is merely a reminder to keep one's eyes open. Knowledge and ability are necessary to improve our lives.
3
Fish is trying to let himself off the hook. Transparency is a red herring. Although transparency is to the good in many situations, no one argues that lack of it is our major stumbling block. Also, unlike the biased Zuckerberg, few think that the babble of social media expression is a great democratic breakthrough. The trouble is the breakdown of social and political discourse, brought on partially by postmodernists like Fish. Fish laments the lack of sources of authority, a lack he and postmodernism brought on. Now he seems to realize that some discourse has to be done in private among people with real knowledge and traditions of civility, traditions that go back in western civilization to the Enlightenment and beyond to Judeo Christian practices. Is he trying to put the cat back into the bag?
3
Professor Fish - you have been deeply missed here on The Stone - brilliant piece of writing as usual.
If I may add my two-cents about Nietzsche's Perspectivism - it does not suggest that there is no absolute truth - what it says is that all of out individual truths will never allow any of us to access any "real" truth - even if existed - let alone recognize "real" truth - it is a brilliant extension of Plato's idea of Forms.
Can we put in a request for more Prof. Fish?
1
More Fish? Go Fish! This is a far cry from the excellence that I witnessed personally from you at the Philadelphia Law & Society meetings in the early 1990s when UCLAW's Rick Abel had you speak to a standing room only full house w/ Abel's UCLAW faculty colleague K Crenshaw, now present wrt women's rights & make up by way of a recent appearance in a lady's magazine, but present on the panel that Abel convened only as a no show. Give us the sort of play that you gave us that was better than Derrida ever gave when you published 'Is there a Text In This Class?'! Don't take the notion of what is 'free' or what is 'transparent' as lightly as you are here! What does free mean? That one does not have to pay? That something has a quality akin to that of liberty or does it mean that that thing has a structure, as you seem to opine, of a particle of post Newtonian and post Field Theory physics that defies even the best known notions of multi-planar geometries? Give us notions of freedom and of transparency that have us reaching beyond our current understanding of Set Theory; that is, get a Field Medal even at your now advanced age! Infinity and its place in set theory and the set of infinities or the set of infinity as a place holder. Is fake news hiding something or is it a place holder for something or both, 4 e.g.? I.e. wrt K Crenshaw's no show at the early 1990s conference, did she actually show up as abscence or was she not at all present and was her name just fake news?
As somebody once noted during the collapse of the Soviet Union, "if you allow people to believe what they want, you will find that they will believe anything".
6
Dear Professor Fish,
If transparency is the mother of fake news, then perhaps radical egalitarianism is the father, for just as you imply, this absolute unwillingness and/or inability to differentiate between reality and rubbish has gone exponential, a downward defining of deviant and deficient thinking if ever there was such, and it sometimes seems as if the escape from this socio-political sewer that is 2018 America is to simply opt out and take refuge in the great books by great minds that still manage to get published.
Cordially,
S.A. Traina
8
This argument touches ground at the interface between social media and professional news organizations. Anyone can say anything on social media, and that is a genuine cultural advance. But it is not progress to assume that it is all worth listening to. For many people it is legitimized when journalists take it up and treat it as a matter of import.
The biggest current difficulty is that the recognized media take too much of the social media uproar seriously and report its substance as though it matters. Even if it is obvious nonsense, as much of it clearly is, it is seen at least to be a snapshot of public opinion.
But it is not even that. Contributors to Twitter are not a random sample of the population; they select themselves and we generally do not know who or what they are. Events are reported breathlessly to have gone "viral" as though that has some significance. But the "viral" number is still minuscule by population standards.
So it is admirable that everyone now has a voice, but it is not productive for those voices to be amplified and projected to the world by the recognized media without due reflection and evaluation. Social media do not constitute the "voice of the people". While any concession to authority may antagonize some, particularly those who hold contrary views, ultimately someone must bring order out of chaos. We do need gatekeepers to the world who act like they are on duty.
2
Honestly, I don't think things are much different today than they have ever been. People have always heard what they want to hear. Throughout my life I've often marveled at the things people take away from what seems to me to be straightforward.
We view from our own bubble. The difference is we now have the internet so those who have really wacky bubbles can get together and threaten entire cities with their "special" cause.
6
Always the amusing contrarian, but missing the point. It's not category mistakes or sins of excess in speech, but the dissolution of an empire. The US has been the hegemonic presence of the West, and now we move into a world of radical diversity. Our epistemologies, our spiritualities, our ontologies, all diverge. Derrida did not cause this, but he knew that once Western orthodoxy was exceeded, we would have to move into the uncanny toward new benchmarks of "knowledge" without the traditional guarantees. Much more profound than the USA's version of Free Speech, we see the Word, Davar, unleashed to dialogue with the Tao and Dharma.
1
It is what it is.
Oh, good God.
I thought the NY Times had learned its lesson years ago, but here we are again subjected to the circuitous and frustrating rambling of the good Professor Fish. As always, here lurks the authoritarian's longing for a pliant mass who adheres to the better opinion of their betters, served up with generous dollops of blame for our sorry state of affairs foisted on post-modern liberal orthodoxy (the last paragraph notwithstanding.) As usual, all wrapped in protracted erudition designed to lull one into somnolent concurrence.
Please. I rejoiced when the Times ended this torture years ago. Do not make us read more of this.
9
A brilliant example that supports Dr. Fish's thesis. Opinionated fact free ideology unmoored from evidence. Please.
4
As sesquipedalian as Fish at his most perseverant. You both could use a bit of curation. Perhaps that is the best response to the present torrent of information: accept the need for curation, simultaneously being respectful and skeptical. Hard to do, but not all that hard to understand.
2
Transparency is too often confused with lack of impulse control. Sometimes fake news is a deliberate lie or manipulation of truth, and sometimes it is simple people being too transparent about their ignorance or biased logic.
Reality shows, and reality show Presidents, are a perfect example of situations in which we don't really need to know everything. Information overload buries important issues in nonsense.
Let's instead choose to be transparent about what matters.
Fake news is partially a result of a ratings-based decision process for picking news stories. It reminds me of the '80s anti-drug PSA, "I learned it from watching you!" The ratings game is an addiction that is hard to break whether it's "real" or "fake" news outlets.
2
Fish: "... the bizarre conclusion that an assertion of fact is more credible if it lacks an institutional source. In this way of thinking, a piece of news originating in a blog maintained by a teenager in a basement in Idaho would be more reliable than a piece of news announced by the anchor of a major network."
That depends on the "fact". The basement blogger knows more about the basement than the "anchor of a major network". Fish seems to be more interested in defending "postmodern guru[s]" than offering any practical advice on critical thinking.
3
Fake news did not come from a desire for transparency. It came from the decision to pick news stories based on ratings and catering to what people want to hear, not what they should hear. It came from a decision to see people as customers to be counted instead of customers to be served.
Look at politics and we'll find the same cause for the current state of polarization and abandonment of reason and prioritization of important issues for campaigns built almost entirely upon single issues like abortion, guns, or immigration.
Fake news and extreme politics are what happens when we dumb it all down and oversimplify a complex system. It's what happens when we to ignorance and the basest parts of people instead of speaking to their intelligence and their compassion.
The wolf you feed is the one that wins.
12
Free speech, as understood here, is related to free association, and transparency ends where privacy begins.
But I blame Feuerbach.
You are so right. Groups have to have a private, safe place to work out issues. Once everything is open to everybody, you might as well disband the group, because nothing (and I do mean NOTHING) will get done.
Transparency should be who is involved, what was discussed, what conclusions were reached, timeline of decision, justification, results etc. and all the above in accessible form.
I speak from experience.
1
Agreed, transparency can’t be absolute. Sometimes people must be free to discuss unorthodox ideas in private.
And people who misunderstand, lie or distort now have more ways to effectively communicate.
But it seems unlikely that apostles of free speech and transparency managed to undermine “trust in the traditional vehicles of authority and legitimation.” It seems much more likely to me that high profile institutional failures involving groupthink, cronyism, corruption, or heedlessness led to this distrust. The Vietnam War, Watergate, the Iraq War, mass incarceration, and the financial crisis in 2008 spring to mind.
So institutions must be worthy of public trust. My nonsense detector, more than my political reflexes, explains why I esteem Brown v. Board more than Citizens United. (I’m amused by considering corporate political candidacy. You’ll be in good hands with President Allstate! Have it your way with President Burger King!)
But political negotiations had better involve some truth telling. I’m not confident good policy is the resultant vector of a blizzard of spin.
And if postmodernists argue facts aren’t preexisting but result from argument and debate I must be missing some limiting context. That doesn’t seem to describe deriving the ideal gas law by measuring temperature, pressure, and volume.
2
"Transparency is a red hearing. The real issues surrounding "fake news" and "alternative facts" is whether they comport with reality, and how we judge that. Historically, we employed Enlightenment notions such as empiricism, formulation of hypotheses, testing of those hypotheses and -- when warranted -- establishment of theories. In short, we used observable facts and tested their veracity. The theories stood on their own merits, regardless of whether they were done in secret (as Kepler essentially did with much of his work) or out in the open.
The problem today is that these standards have been abandoned.
17
In science and many other epistemological disciplines, methods that operate effectively within the context of inherent uncertainty (the scientific method you outline above) are still employed to good effect.
People have always used misinformation, propaganda, magical thinking, and deception, most importantly including self-deception, to obscure some objective reality that is already obscured by uncertainty. Even post modernists, who claim there is no objective reality face the same conundrum, regardless of whether reality exists apart from our perceptions; do we throw our hands in the air in defeat or proceed towards some form of provisional knowledge.
Unfortunately, the saying "truth will out" is of little solace to those living through the dark ages. There have always been know-nothings and there always will be until "intelligent" life ceases to exist.
Transparency is the mother of exposing corruption. Read this from today's headlines.
https://nyti.ms/2HVVb9X
I don't see the connection blaming transparency of the internet with the spreading propaganda online. It all comes down to ethics and intentional use of information, not transparency. Transparency exposes the unethical, those with nefarious intentions. Transparency exposes information -- all of it, fact, fiction, lies, whatever -- so we may decide the truth. That is always good.
4
Why should a television headline-reader ("anchor") be trusted?
Mr. Fish seems to have forgotten that there are real facts. The mass of the Earth, the temperature outside my window right now...these have nothing to do with authoritative sources. But he's a philosopher, so we should not expect common sense from him.
4
Of course, there is a particular set of post-modernists who believed, once up a time, that gravity is a social construct. With that kind of "understanding" of "facts," it's true that many people just believe what they want to.
The author says "In the brave new world of the internet, where authority is evenly distributed to everyone with a voice or a podcast, no one believes anybody."
Not so. Most Americans believe that climate scientists are telling the truth about anthropogenic climate change. And I don't know anybody who thinks gravity is a social construct.
The author also says "members would be tempted to tailor what they said to the responses and criticisms of an imagined audience." But that's not necessarily the case; it just depends on whether or not the members have enough faith in themselves to make statements that they believe are true, and won't kowtow to some imaginary audience.
4
Right or wrong, many radical college students believe that postmodernism has justifiably discredited western modes of discourse, intellectual authority, and science. As a result, the exchange of viewpoints that Fish puts his faith in no longer works on campus or increasingly in the rest of society. Shout downs, ridicule, victim politics, journalistic bias, demagoguery , the absence of humility and good natured humor, make a mockery of political discussion. Fish refers to how Adam and Eve had to work through their tangled, recriminatory relationship after the Fall, but postmodernism (and modern feminism) would deride such a model. Within a deconstructed world we are in free fall. Each of us is her own authority and tweets, Facebook postings, and shouting down speakers are the way we engage. Take this to its logical conclusion where constitutional consensus is impossible and we end up in an authoritarian socialist state, the only way to organize an atomized society.
2
I really don't think that trump's method of propaganda is derived from post-modernism. Never the less, there is a claim made in this essay that returns to the fundamental flaw in the whole body of thought from Post-Structuralism to so called Post-Modernism. Writers in this tradition have a tendency to delight in paradox. What is unfortunate is that they end up making assertions they can't possibly believe. In 1940 22,000 Polish officers were executed and buried in mass graves in the Katyn forest. In the following years Soviets and Germans argued over who had committed the massacre. This argument continued into the post war period. Today it is the overwhelming consensus of historians that the Soviet's committed this act. Now look at Dr. Fish's claim "Arguments come first; when they are successful, facts follow" If by success Dr. fish isn't merely saying that an argument succeeds if it tracks the truth (which would swallow his point) but rather describes success as a social practice or language game than the Polish officers were killed by the Germans as the Soviet argument prevailed and then, with additional evidence, the Soviets killed them. Thus these officers were murdered twice over. If the event had been effectively concealed then we could say that they never died at all....but they did. Historical interpretations are always subject to re-framing and new analysis but the facts come first and the arguments follow.
12
The relationship between fake news, lies, propaganda, untruth and transparent and clear and accurate communication and thought historically and in present day?
Historically transparency, clarity, accuracy of thought and communication has been the province of the few, the painstaking, the blessed in some form or other of artistic or other method of communication. And these few have always had to battle the crowd. The larger the number of people the more it's reduced to lowest common denominator communication. Great leaps in communication have come from small groups not to mention individuals.
In the modern age, as over all history, society has been enshrouded in myth, generalization,--there has never been transparency/accuracy over the whole of society. Now, as in the past, transparency/accuracy is the province of the great writer or musician or scientific mind. Now as in the past average society is enshrouded in legal, business, bureaucratic jargon, easy and safe beliefs. Fake news, the trivial, lies, propaganda has been the norm.
There has never been a concerted attempt in any society to have the society as a whole open and clear and powerful in thought and communication. Today as in the past forward progress depends on the great capacity and integrity of the few, at best of rather small groups of people, and at worst dependent on brave and lone individuals here and there. Few are transparent in psychology, thought and action. Most people hide themselves in crowd.
2
Today is the first day of my university's final examination week. For the first time in 36 years, I no longer have to give -- and more importantly grade -- an exam. Mr. Fish's essay presents the heart of what increasingly disillusioned my academic career for the past decade: the perspective of many students that their views were sacrosanct because they held them steadfastly and because they could find support for them somewhere, and generally on the internet. It became increasingly difficult to distinguished between scrutinized, approved, authoritative sources and those hatched yesterday without any vetting.
This isn't the first time humans have encountered this kind of skeptical approach to knowledge. In the 14th century, Ockham asserted that while the Church's founding premise that Christ would not allow his Church to err was still valid, the truth might reside not in the pope or cardinals, but in the common ploughman out in the field. Yet for better or worse (often the latter), elite guardians of knowledge prevailed. Our question today is whether there are any capable institutions left that will succeed in the face of intellectual anarchy.
4
It should be noted that Fish's notion of "interpretive communities" with regard to probing literary texts is useful here. While some may read his opinion pice as a call for heavy-handed "authoritative mechanisms," what Fish and other postmodern thinkers tend to agreed on (and promote) is the idea that conversation drives us to give wider berth to ideas different than our own, leading to shared meaning-making. If literary interpretation requires some rules, such rules are at base the desire to forge meaning of things in the world. Sadly, social media and the proliferation of infotainment sites posing as news sources make processes for shared meaning very difficult. Time to get back to face to face conversations that reject truth "out there" and work (hard) to find "fact as achievement" coming forward from good ideas that can be tested in conversation and in practice. The authority of governments, religions, or dictatorship may be easier to follow, but who wants to have truth handed down by those in power?
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To a large degree when people use the term transparency today, they are talking about money, not speech. Be Transparent is used as a catch-all phrase, a form of protest, to speak truth to power so deceptive tactics around financing, spending, paying, investing, salaries don't snowball. Someone wanting to hold a private meeting so people may speak freely, limiting transparency, is a whole different topic than financial transparency. So, as I see it, when talking about transparency, we are not talking about censoring or not censoring free speech, limiting or not limiting open dialogue. We are talking about deceptive tactics used by those in power to hide money, game the system, cheat people. In short, the function of transparency lies on a spectrum. At times, lack of transparency is responsible; and, at times, lack of transparency is corrupt. More often than not, in today's context, transparency is a good thing, and lack of transparency is a bad thing when the aim is to cheat, game, hide and steal. Although the argument in the essay is sound, I think it's dangerous to give momentum in intellectual circles that transparency is a bad thing. Because I can just see the bank CEO use the essay to create "Fake News" that transparency is bad, because Stanley Fish said so in the NYT.
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Always enlightening to read your work. Gives us more, please.
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Hanson? Hoover Institute has real Scholars? Says who? Who ranked Hanson? Mike Pence? Kellyanne Conway? Ex-Duke Literature Professor Stanley Fish seems frustrated with the lower-ranked departments of Political Science and Religion today. I am surprised he did not add another paragraph or two, and mention the First Amendment and Constitutional Law. My advice, stay in the Literature Department. It is still higher ranked than Law and many other University departments.
As for postructuralism, Derrida and Foucault. Well, they aren't commenting themselves on their own writing, here, but, my interpretation of their work, has something to do with The Structure, and their opinions and struggles regarding The Structure. What is The Structure? The Structure is the 52 Grades in the School System. Did Derrida and Foucault ever complete the 52 Grades of School, thus finish School? Did they achieve the Top Score of Brilliant IQ? How high of a Ranking did each receive? There is an order. This order is hierarchical. There are Rankings. That is the Structure. You can complain all you want, but the School Dunces will never run The School.
Ex-Duke Professor Stanley Fish needs to stop paying attention to the Class Dunces, but, if he does, he needs to put them in their poorly educated, low intelligent place. Example: "This is what people who aren't promoted to the Top Levels of the BusinessWorld and Higher Education are talking about today." Sincerely, Duke Alum '87.
Dear Ms. Foster,
Victor Davis Hanson is a professor, a military historian, a classicist, and a gentleman farmer, and besides having written numerous scholarly texts, has translated The Peloponnessian War by Thucydides. He is a scholar of the highest order.
And it is precisely this deliberate unwillingness to acknowledge excellence to those with whom we disagree that illustrates the nature of the problem Professor Fish describes.
Cordially,
S.A. Traina
Cordially,
S.A. Traina
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S.A. Traina-- I am sorry that you are not informed of how professors, thus scholars are ranked in the formal 52 Grade School Structure. (World). Hanson is not known, is not at The Top Level. In fact, I may be the highest ranked person in the USA. And you are right, I do not acknowledge excellence, because brilliance is higher than excellence.
Well, then I humbly wish you continued success, and I will encourage Dr. Hanson to try harder.
Regards,
S.A. Traina
The legal scholar, Stanley Fish, is making the standard argument of science: "facts" - observations, theories, laws, etc. - are not facts until they are agreed upon by the community of scientists. Science is a community effort, not an individual matter. In the long run, science has proved successful - in that general prosperity and well-being has resulted from and depended upon it. The same cannot be said about politics or cultural taste. The current public emphasis on "fake facts" goes hand-in-hand with the public skepticism towards science. Neither will lead to a "good end".
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This excellent article by Prof. Fish nevertheless invites 2 corrective points. First, there is a strong branch of "French Theory-Postmodernism" which preaches a relativistic notion of "truth," namely, that all truth is socially constructed. Also, that social construction of Truth is not empirically based, but based on relationships of power. Power is not a synonym of "the mind" and 'empiricism', although there's a relationship between the 2. It does means "my power constructs my truth." Steven Bannon understood that as well as any leftist on campus, and helped put Trump in power.
Second, Fish ignores the worst example of anarchistic gate-keeping in history: Wikipedia, a so-called encyclopedia that has no named authorship and no named and credentialed editorial staff. Wikipedia is the birthplace of "the people's truth," which is what Trump and his boys rely on to stay in power.
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Wikipedia is quite reliable on technical matters. But don't trust it for an evaluation of a controversial politician.
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Intelligence is Power. The power you are referring to, really isn't power. Brilliance is power.
True enough. But-- if 'technical' means technique and hard science, that's verifiable and published as experimental results. So you can "check" those assertions. "Social science" including history is a range of research, from point-of-view essays to relatively reliable experiments. Therefore, the weight of an article's opinion in Wiki, for 'social truth' including history, can be manipulated.
I recall a very wise quote from the brilliant scholar, Vartan Gregorian: do not confuse information for knowledge.
Speaking "freely" must be grounded in knowledge.
Knowledge is the synthesis of data--raw information which must then be processed through critical, deep thinking.
One must earn the independent ability to speak freely and then
use critical thinking to take down the lies and distortions resulting from the "freely speaking" uneducated, brainwashed "citizenry." Transparency merely exposes the fake and allows the truly (Socratic) educated person to counteract with the truth.
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What a great comment.
To bad so many others don't have this useful perspective.
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You ignore at least 2 important factors: 1) Many people are busy and they prefer to have "news" distilled and explained for them. They turn to TV, in all too many cases, to have our increasingly complex world explained to them. 2) Others with lots of money and a conservative political agenda know this, and they exploit it. They create talking points and promote them in their cherry picked conservative venues such as Fox "news", Breitbart, and other right wing media outlets. They do the "thinking" for many. One need only see occasional clips from the Daily Show (Trevor Noah and back in the day, Jon Stewart), to see how the same nonsense, word-for-word "talking points" get repeated over and over on Fox and elsewhere. This is how a LOT of "fake news" gets propagated. And yes, folks on the right do this FAR more than folks on the left. Paul Krugman has made this point well on the NYT more than once. David Frum has made strong critiques of the system recently in The Atlantic. This is easy to understand if you merely "follow the money". The billionaires who control these sites (Murdoch, Mercer, Koch, etc) get the message they want because they can pay for it. Their "fake news" system risks ending democracy in the US, if it hasn't already happened.
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JinRavenna:
Right wing media obviously manufactures more fake news, but they may just be leading the way, You can't separate the Right's political success from their media's commercial success. Fear & anger sell better than knowledge & empowerment. Increasingly, the "mainstream" media may be reduced to the same tactics--not only to compete for the eyes & clicks, but because the Right is changing the nature of politics, turning government into a branch of media: Trump is a fake leader in the exactly the same way that Fox is fake news, pandering to the same emotions, dodging the same debates, concealing the same crimes. When we debate him, or them, on the merits we're talking to ourselves. I could be wrong, but it's what I fear, and what I sense happening now.
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And of course the usual propaganda about the sum total of all news and info sources is that whatever they indicate about the "public's" beliefs, it proves the existence of a "free" marketplace of ideas. As if. For as econ 101 fully explains, "effective" demand or supply is based upon income level and or dominance of supply in the market, which means that, no thereisnosuchathing as a "free" marketplace of ideas. And in any event, anyone presuming that the populace is "freely" able to obtain the info they need, is just another neoclassical economist pretending that presumptions that make political economy easy-peezy for modelling and applications, in complex mathematical forms, must be true of the real world...or their neat little castle in the sky is revealed as being...founded upon absurd assumptions about economics and people.
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I agree I broad strokes, but the transformation has not been due to television alone: the Internet in general, and social media in particular, act as catalysts to accelerate the damage wrought by manipulative TV programming. They feed off each other synergistically and symbiotically. The email chain (oh yeah they are still out there, especially among the Fox/Breitbart/InfoWars crowd) gets reinforced when the same whacky conspiracy theory is mentioned seriously on Fox. The Facebook post of some nonsense on Breitbart, et al, gets shared and immediately gains legitimacy as part of a ‘news feed’ which may consist of very little news, but once again will be reinforced when the same gibberish is spewed on Fox. Then one or all of the above are passed long via Twitter, the perfect vehicle for terse slogans and mindless clichés. They all feed and feed off of one another. The worst part, is that Fox comes across as the staid voice of reason in this circus; some people may doubt some of what Alex Jones might spout off about, but then Fox & Friends comes across as downright Walter Cronkite in comparison. Without Fox, the alt-right might not have flourished, but I contend without the unconstrained free and open Internet, neither would’ve Fox. They abuse the system horribly, because they can.
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Call it what you will. The term fake news is an absurdity
There is existence or the absence of same.
Interpretation demands existence.
A lie is a statement absent existence.
There can be no interpretation of that which does not exist.
I will make much the same comment I made yesterday to the article about the proliferation of robocalls: nothing is without cost, and increasingly we are discovering the latent costs of the free and open Internet. Don’t get me wrong, I am hardly a Luddite (my entire lengthy career in space and computer science/engineering), but as with all things, nothing is black and white, and the same is true of information technology. As a culture we seemingly don’t want to hear this message; it is far easier to indulge in the ‘freedoms’ offered by the technology, than to acknowledge it is anything but purely a godsend – to acknowledge reality. There are many great things which arise from the technology, but is becoming apparent the list of negatives my rival the positives in some very profound ways.
If addressed at all, this reality is usually swept aside with the thought-terminating cliché, “that’s just the price we must pay to keep the Internet free and open!” I will ask the same question I have repeatedly: *who* needs to pay this hypothetical price? It is becoming more and more obvious that the answer is the general public, and our democracy. Fake news? That’s just the price you need to pay! Robocallers and other telecommunications scammers? Ditto. Malicious trolls and cyber-bullies? Hackers and identity thieves? Foreign agents interfering in our internal affairs, and at the very least inciting chaos? Yeah… getting sick of ‘needing’ to be the one to pay the price yet? I am.
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Just as secret ballots are essential for free elections, private speech is essential for free speech.
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Well said, Carl.
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Forgive me, but I am having trouble distinguishing much difference, at least in effect, between Prof. Fish's description of postmodernism's relationship to fact ("Arguments come first...facts follow...") and what he is inveighing against.
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He's just saying that genuine facts are produced by the authoritative procedures of interpretive communities (e.g. scientific method, courtroom rules of evidence, historians' or journalists' protocols re sources and documents, etc.). He's inveighing against the idea that all we need is the full and free flow of information to have all the facts. That idea ignores the fact that facts have to be properly constructed to be/counts as facts. Saying accurately what's on my mind, or what I'm certain I see in front of me, doesn't establish its facticity, and so it only hurts the cause of truth to have as many of us doing that as possible with as big an audience as possible, even if we're all sincere (not that we are all sincere). And here we are.....
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How does this help, then, the inhabitants of small Southeast Asian towns, who, I have read, cannot get Facebook to stop the display of incendiary and life-threatening actions which have ramped up hatred in their locales? If people from Group A see an Internet picture of someone from Group B setting fire to and burning down a restaurant owned by a member of Group A, is this or is this not a fact? Then Group B retaliates, and there are pictures to show the carnage and the doers of the deeds. Fact?
These issues are causing war and genocide in some places. Or so I've heard, but then, how do I know this for a fact? Is there truth here?
Do we need Facebook to show the world these crimes? Does the evidence help to establish justice, humanity, a path to some solution? Compassion? Or can the evidence be twisted? Photoshopped to favor one or the other Group?
Are we all victims of a technology that is creating drama and also a world where everyone intent on killing their enemies?
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I don't know what the author means by "fake news" — and he doesn't bother to define it.
Most of the times that I encounter this phrase, it is used by someone who is criticizing legitimate reporting. So the phrase is typically used to refer to something nonexistent.
What does Stanley Fish mean by it?
He means the lies told to Facebook users and presented as legitimate news stories when they were clearly just random "information" sent out from web users who either know the information is false or simply do not care one way or the other, e.g. "Hillary Clinton runs a child sex operation out of a pizza parlor." Of course I use Facebook as an example. People believe what they want to believe and disregard the rest, Paul Simon said. If information is just "transparent" without any filters at all, we get "fake news." It is "Information" paraded out as news when it is anything but. It's Radio Ga ga. See, Freddie Mercury.
I enjoyed this essay, thanks.
I fear that you're setting up a straw man for "transparency." I think that the most transparent data would include useful metadata (author, source, relevant discussions pro and con) so that one could make an informed judgement about the quality of that data. Without this, I'd call the data opaque.
The most useful social media platforms or discussion boards I've seen generate metadata in real time by including at least some level of thumbs-up-thumbs-down voting and perhaps a link to that author's history. This NYT comment section adds a useful "Editor's Recommendation" that adds extra weight to any given comment.
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Yes, there are differences between "brute facts" (that Stanley Fish exists) and constructed facts (that Grant was a great president). And it is important to follow rules of evidence, logic, etc.
What we are left with in the end are judgment calls.
Fish suggests that robust debate and contesting of view, conclusions, relevance, etc. are important.
We are still left with the questions of how we determine which debaters are to be accepted, what is relevant, etc.
It used to be the academy, lawyers, news anchors, clergy, etc. were taken as the standard. We now know that there was plenty of selection, bias, and limitations found there. To be sure, women, people of color, minorities of all sorts needed to be heeded as well. Now we are challenged by some arguing that the ignorant, con artists, fake news perpetrators, etc. also need to be heeded.
Fish has not clarified where we stop and who makes such decisions. But at least he started a real discussion going.
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Fish's wonderfully written thesis is that, when anyone can construct whatever facts and arguments they like, then "what you don’t have is any mechanism that can stop or challenge the construction project or even assess it."
But _centralizing_ the construction of facts and arguments does not solve this problem. A centralized mechanism -- be it CBS news, Protestantism or the Castro regime -- can ensure consistency, but does not guarantee it. Centrally controlled information is not inherently better than 'free' information!
I assert that a mechanism IS available to challenge the constructions of fact: individual judgement. True, most of us cannot directly assess arguments about global warming or the Iran accords. But we can assess statements about simpler issues, and use those assessments to decide who to trust on the larger issues.
Key points: the more educated the citizenry, the more effective this distributed mechanism becomes. And by education, I mean not indoctrination with a particular dogma, but the ability to reason logically and to empathize with the less fortunate. Empathy is necessary. Citizens in dire straits who, thinking logically, recognize that the status quo works against them, will make choices that seem irrational to those supported by the status quo. A truly educated citizenry will take into account the needs of _all_ the people, not just themselves.
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It appears that Mr. Fish dosn't distinguish between "free" meaning "uncensored" and "not shut down by people more powerful" and "free" meaning "irresponsible let-it-all-hang-out."
Not to mention the difference between "lack of transparency" meaning " letting people discuss tactics and priorities privately" and "lack of transparency" meaning "hiding things from the people whose lives it will affect."
"Fake news" means lying. Accusations that something is "fake news" may be accurate or may be false; in any case, such accusations need to be evaluated on the basis of evidence.
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Transparency must be balanced with privacy; freedom of speech requires both.
The accusations of "fake news" come mostly from the powerful who have always promoted a false narrative themselves in support of their own power and wealth.
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I guess I am a little confused. What I think Professor Fish is arguing is that information coming out of a fire hydrant is not useful and recommends that we have the gate keepers we have always had. But the problem is not unfiltered data, but filtered data to support feelings instead of critical thinking to verify that the data reflects reality. Then, if you follow the argument (and maybe I didn't), we just need data filtered by the right mechanisms. Wouldn't that be critical thinking and the scientific method? How hard is that?
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Fish claims that postmodernists don't deny facts and then immediately goes on to deny facts, saying that "facts are the achievement of argument and debate." Unless Fish is equivocating on the meaning of "achievement," that's a denial of facts. Facts are states of the world independent of our arguments and debates – that's just the meaning of the word. Of course, whether or not we take an interest in any given fact, the nature of that interest, the value a fact has for us, the ways in which we describe or represent that fact as they vary with our interest in it, etc., are in part achievements of argument and debate (but also of observation, which Fish, tellingly, leaves off the list). But not the facts themselves.
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No, people have lied for as long as language has existed.
And, people have claimed that others have lied for about the same period of time.
This whole business is nothing new, at all.
It's human behavior.
The general rule: selfishness rules.
Four letters in the sentence just before this one show what to investigate, for the way through and out of this dilemma.
It is so nice to see an article that properly explains why postmodernism isn't responsible for the advent or creation of what today is referred to as 'fake news.'
Unfortunately, this will not get us any closer to understanding what Truth is.
In today's collapsing modern world, too many people have a vested interest in blaming postmodernism as the cause of all the troubles afflicting the Western world.
They refuse to let go of their blind faith and devotion to modern ideology. And they know, that it is the postmodern condition and its definition of Truth, that has the ability to dismantle these obsolete and monolithic systems of political organizing.
In many ways, 'fake news' and ideology are directly linked with one another. Each is founded upon a systemic structure that hides or refuses to acknowledge Truth. But, before postmodernism can take on the problem of ideology, the power and persuasiveness of 'fake news' must be dealt with.
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I am tempted to say, it all depends on what the meaning of "fact" is, factually... or was that ,"What is, is..." Anyway -
An excellent essay in (essentially, literary) criticism; it would get a high rating in any graduate seminar. If there are quibbles, they would lie in the areas of contextualization and, finally, "meaning". One can say that persons A, B, C, and D were all at one place at the same time in a "meeting" and that they all agree that matter X was discussed and matter Z was not. We may call that a "fact", then. But that "fact" is replete with unknowns - who said (or thought) what about matter X (or one another, for that matter)? Did they agree on a conclusion and is that borne out by future actions built on this "fact"? Is this a fact as solid as Euclidean geometry or calculus or chemistry? Do we give it the respect we do to the "fact" of gravity?
No, it is anecdotal and not subject to "proof", only interpretation - back to context and meaning! With all due respect to Derrida and Foucault (and toss in Barthes, and Levi-Strauss, even -why not- Heidegger), that some people met and discussed something is, in itself, meaningless.
Not enough room to explore the whole of this critique... but.. thank you for the article.
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Clear & well-argued essay. I suspect that the apostles of Silicon Valley believe in the market value of transparency, rather than its communicative or societal value. In fact, the 2 are in direct conflict.
Facts are tools, as helpful as the person using them. Fake news stories are often based entirely on facts, cherry-picked and assembled. One can deceive oneself as easily as others. The president seems to sincerely believe that there are no standards of truth except what an audience believes. It may now be so, but are these the standards we want?
In daily life, we talk to each other. Someone misinterprets us, we clarify, etc. We talk about our own experience, rather than what we've been told our experience means. We may disagree, but there is common ground, even if only a shared interest in staying on good terms.
In the context-free marketplace of the internet, facts are likely to serve the purposes of the loudest & most motivated voices. Those voices, like the advocates of "transparency," speak to us, not with us, telling us what we should believe, rather than what they intend. We become markets, instead of participants, our fears & impulses sold back to us as loyalties. Our common ground is defined not by our shared interests, but by the interests of the media in which we look for ourselves. The interest of the media lies increasingly in our division. Unless we alter the rules, it will only get worse.
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