A Player's Guide to the Post-Truth Condition: The Name of the Game

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A Players Guide to the Post-Truth Condition: The Name of the Game presents sixteen short, readable chapters designed to leverage our post-truth conditions deep historical and philosophical roots into opportunities for unprecedented innovation and change. Fuller offers a bracing, proactive and hopeful vision against the tendency to demonize post-truth as the realm of fake news and bullshit. Where others see threats to the established order, Fuller sees opportunities to overturn it. This theme is pursued across many domains, including politics, religion, the economy, the law, public relations, journalism, the performing arts and academia, not least academic science. The red thread running through Fullers treatment is that these domains are games that cannot be easily won unless one can determine the terms of engagement, which is to say, the name of the game. This involves the exercise of modal power, which is the capacity to manipulate what people think is possible. Once the necessarily true appears to be only contingently so, then the future suddenly becomes a more open space for action. This was what frightened Plato about the alternative realities persuasively portrayed by playwrights in ancient Athens. Nevertheless, Fuller believes that it should be embraced by denizens of todays post-truth condition.

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Steve Fuller uses the concept of gaming to understand the nature of post-truth and asserts that one outcome of the post-truth condition is the gamification of reality. He offers an original, wide-ranging and precise analysis of current post truth conditions, which enables the marketization of everything and replaces politics with performance and public relations.Gareth Thompson, London College of Communication, University of the Arts London; Author of Post-Truth Public Relations: Communication in an Era of Digital Disinformation

Steve Fullers Post Truth: Knowledge as a Power Game presented a serious challenge to current conceptions of objectivity, the autonomy of science, and the role of higher education. In A Players Guide to the Post-Truth Condition, he raises the ante. Bringing his ideas about Protscience to bear on social justice movements, Covid-19 and Breitbart through a meditation on facts and values from Plato to Popper and beyond, the reader is confronted with inevitable existential decisions about what she values most.Sharon Rider, Professor of Logic and Metaphysics, University of Uppsala, Sweden

Fullers breadth of scope is stunning and his authenticity as a player unquestionable. Hes nailed the post-truth anti-regime as having a democratic heart at odds with monopoly licenses that experts granted themselves and does so in full awareness that new fields of play must be duly constituted.Fred DAgostino, Professor Emeritus of Humanities, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Queensland, Australia

Fuller undertakes a fresh positive critique of the post-truth condition in the Hegelian sense of grasping the rational grain of the post-truth as a reality worthy of explanation not a pure obstacle that has to be denied, overcome or ignored. The post-truth questions both the one way and the many ways to truth. The whole book serves as a guide for an advanced user, i.e. an instruction for those who resist using any instructions and choose the game of their own. Ilya Kasavin, Chair, Department of Social Epistemology, Institute of Philosophy, Russian Academy of Sciences

Author Bio

Steve Fuller is Auguste Comte Professor of Social Epistemology at the University of Warwick, UK.