Government efforts to confront complex crises, such as climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic, have elicited populist antipathy toward scientific and technical input in policymaking. These affronts to expertise and knowledge institutions have congealed into a ‘post-truth’ rhetoric that reflects deep political rifts concerning state-society relations. In his book Truth and Post-Truth in Public Policy: Interpreting the Arguments, Frank Fischer (2021) brings interpretive policy analysis to bear on the post-truth phenomenon and its manifestation in crisis denialism. According to Fischer, this interpretive analytical perspective “focuses attention on the processes of social explanation and argumentation which mediate the understandings of facts in public discourse” (p. 23). As existential crises befall society during this acutely partisan era, the complexities and consequences of post-truth politics – or dismissal of fact in policy discourse – call for fresh scholarly reflection. Fischer delivers convincingly in his engaging tour of the political and epistemological aspects of post-truth.

https://journals.openedition.org/irpp/3044

Hartley, Kris. (2023). Book review: “Frank Fischer, Truth and Post-Truth in Public Policy: Interpreting the Arguments.” International Review of Public Policy, 4(3).