A Theory of Opinion · Certainty in an Uncertain World: A Philosophy of Opinion

Certainty in an Uncertain World: A Philosophy of Opinion

Amid the 2020 U.S. presidential elections and the popularization of conspiracy theories around Covid-19, we are living in a moment when terms such as ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’ circulate freely within the popular lexicon, with the latter named as the 2016 word of the year by Oxford Dictionary and ‘postfaktisch’ by the Gesellschaft für Deutsche Sprache. It is an environment where objective facts have “become less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief” (OED). In these circumstances, it is vital that scholars seek to understand not just the constituent elements of public opinion and its relationship to the public sphere, but also the philosophical grounding of subjective opinion itself as a historically specific epistemological structure of social communication. This project will show that we have to return to the philosophical idea of public opinion to better understand the current structural transformations of the public sphere and its critical challenges for Europe’s political and discursive culture. The project proposes to re-investigate the critical philosophical tradition from G.W.F. Hegel to Jürgen Habermas and Theodor Adorno, where it is argued that there is a self-contradiction inherent in the very idea of public opinion. In a word, this Hegelian and post-Hegelian tradition provides a theory about the social function and epistemological mechanisms of public opinion that can help elucidate the current crisis of the public sphere, which seems to be overwhelmed with opinions and falsehoods and without priority for the emergence of truth through deliberation. Returning to the philosophical idea of public opinion helps us understand that current developments are not accidental, but actually rooted in essential tensions within the very idea of a modern ‘public opinion.’ According to this tradition, the social function of public opinion is to mediate between the particular individual members of civil society and the state. In order to do so, the public realm needs to bracket prejudgments about what is good and right, as well as the influence of external authority, and open up a free realm for the expression of subjective viewpoints, even accepting the publication of falsehoods. The sphere of public opinion assumes that publicly confronting these viewpoints and letting the falsehoods “devour each other”, as Hegel puts it, will let truth ultimately emerge while educating participants in the process. Through this account, the current crisis does not befall the realm of public opinion from without, but is connected to its inherent tendency to give room to opinions actively bracketing any prejudgment of their truth. If it works in the way intended, the public sphere would thereby suspend dominating external authorities, expand the freedom of subjective expression and yield a deeper form of shared legitimacy and truth. In its current state, however, it fails in all three regards: it does not allow for a truly subjective expression but merely for the display of “pseudo-individuality” (Adorno); it does not manage to let truth emerge from falsehood but remains stuck in the realm of mere opinion; and it does not manage to actually bracket external authorities. Rather, it stands under the implicit power structures of contemporary digital platforms of communication, which tend to privilege certain opinions over others. These features present problems to a public sphere that, through subjective deliberative communication and debate, ought to educate the public and produce a deeper sense of truth. As a social philosophy of opinion, the research will proceed in three methodological steps: (i) analyse the very idea of a realm of public opinion and develop a socio-epistemological theory of its historical transformation by drawing on Hegel’s and Habermas’ theories of the bourgeois public sphere; (ii) analyse a first fundamental crisis of the public sphere in late-capitalist culture with particular attention towards Adorno’s critique of industrial culture and mass media; (iii) analyse the current crisis of the public sphere at the beginning of the twenty-first century with the proliferation of digital technologies of mass communication. The project will examine broad sociological and historical contours and determinations of public opinion as involving inherent tensions that have given rise to structural transformations and crises of the public sphere. The investigation is distinguished by the fact that it aims to integrate at once a socio-historic and an epistemological perspective: it aims to understand the social function and historical trajectory of the sphere of public opinion on the one hand, and, on the other, attempts to capture the very structure of knowing, believing and holding a point of view, produced by various contemporary iterations of the public sphere, specifically those of digital media and communication. Since current debates on this crisis have suffered from a disconnect between socio-political and the epistemological perspective, the project argues that we can only understand the significance of this crisis by integrating these two perspectives. In sum, the research will develop a social and philosophical reconstruction of ‘opinion’ characteristic of social communication today, and aims to provide vital new insight into how and why a distinctive epistemological structure of thought has become ever more pervasive in our ‘post-truth’ society.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз