Description
Book SynopsisAt the end of 2019, Americans were living in an era of post-truth characterized by fake news, weaponized lies, alternative facts, conspiracy theories, magical thinking, and irrationalism. Science and scientific knowledge were under attack. While many complex interconnected factors were at work, post-truth in the United States was partly the culmination of a cadre of anthropologists and other academics in American universities and colleges during the 1980’s and 1990’s. In Science and Anthropology in a Post-Truth World, H. Sidky examines how their untoward dalliance with problematic and dangerous ideas by Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Bruno Latour, and Jean Baudrillard informed and empowered a forceful assault on science and truth in the following decades by corporate organizations, politicians, religious extremists, and right-wing populists.
Table of ContentsChapter 1: The War on Science and Reason and the Way to Post-Truth
Chapter 2: De-legitimizing Science in the Academy: Ideological Underpinnings
Chapter 3: Science Studies and the Anthropology of Science: How Postmodernists Sought to Demystify Truth
Chapter 4: The Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, Incomprehensibility, and the Sokal Hoax
Chapter 5: American Intellectual Contributions to Science Delegitimation: Kuhn and Feyerabend
Chapter 6: Epistemic Relativism: Is the World Truly Unknowable?
Chapter 7: Epistemology: How Do We Know What We Know?
Chapter 8: The Problem of Pseudoscience in Post-Truth America
Chapter 9: Postmodern Anthropology: Epistemic Relativism and Incoherence as an Experimental Moment?
Chapter 10: Paranormal and Theistic Anthropology: From Postmodernism to Post-Truth Supernaturalism
Chapter 11: From Postmodernism to Post-Truth United States
