Truth and Post-Truth in Public Policy

• Preface; 1. Introduction: Policy science, facts and the post-truth challenge; 2. Post-truth defined; 3. Post-truth: Ignorance and “anything goes”; 4. The political rise of the post-truth culture; 5. Emotion and post-truth: living with falsehoods; 6. Social media and disinformation; 7. Beyond the critique: rescuing interpretive social science; 8. The interpretive policy-analytic approach: social meanings and alternative realities; 9. Social Meaning in Interpretive Policy Analysis; 10. Interpretive social science and the scientific community: The “hard” sciences; 11. Citizens confront the experts: Context and emotion in ordinary reason; 12. Political and policy knowledge as ordinary practical knowledge; 13. Climate policy and denialism: A political illustration; 14. Climate Policy and politics: the social translation of evidence into political knowledge; 15. Climate research: Uncertain knowledge and falsification; 16. COVID-19 denialism: Interpreting narrative arguments; 17. Narrative arguments and the policy-analytic challenge: Interpreting COVID-19 statistics in social context; 18. Rejecting COVID-19 lockdown: Interpreting political-economic and ideological arguments; 19. Deliberating with post-truth deniers: Concluding remarks; References.

'With 'Truth and Post-Truth in Public Policy - interpreting the arguments', Frank Fischer offers us a powerful framework of critical analysis to unravel the complex thread that has brought us to the current and extreme situation of strong social confrontation … It is a book that not only feeds the debate, but our hopes.' Rosana Boullosa, Critical Policy Studies