The Crooked Structure of the Post-Truth non Sequitur: A Path Toward Epistemological Depth

Abstract

In our shared academic climate, accentuated by moving beyond Modern (and post-Modern) perspectives, we
(as Authors) have come across the idea that we (as people) are living now in a “post-truth world.” While
the term gained cultural currency as a descriptor of specific political phenomena, its uncritical adoption in
scholarly discourse merits philosophical examination. Our core discussion revolves around unravelling, i.e.
“making sense of ” truth paradigms and “teasing apart” the relationship epistemological shallowness has to posttruth.
We argue that post-truth represents a quintessential non sequitur—a conclusion that cannot be derived
from its premises—that incorrectly leaps from legitimate critiques of truth’s limitations to the abandonment
of both Taylorian articulation and the Malpasian call to retrieve truth lost in Modernity. By unravelling the
fallacious nature of post-truth through three argumentative threads: (i) etymological considerations, (ii) a
historical contextualisation across Modern and post-Modern thought that enables the crookedness of truth
into its distortion of post-truth, and (iii) an envelopmental approach to truth that overcomes bivalence and
epistemological flattening, we demonstrate how spiritual knowing and epistemological depth offer a path
between rigid rationalism and nonrigid sentimentality. We conclude that by extending the epistemological
topography to include hierarchical and heterarchical dimensions, a more robust conception of truth—one that
preserves spiritual knowing—can be recovered amidst the post-truth condition.