It’s all relative? Post-truth rhetoric, relativism, and teaching on “Authority as Constructed and Contextual”

Abstract

Within the current climate of political polarization and discussions about “post-truth” rhetoric, many academic librarians are debating how the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education1 does or does not address “post-truth” thinking and rhetoric. Most of these discussions have centered on the Authority Is Constructed frame, which describes source authority as determined largely in communities and within specific contexts, rather than as anything absolute or universal. The concept of constructed authority can potentially be understood as an affirmation that authority is purely a matter of opinion or subjective evaluation, or that there are no consistent or objective indicators of credibility. On the other hand, the notion of authority as entirely objective misrepresents the social nature of knowledge creation and renders invisible the sociocultural structures and systems that powerfully share what is considered knowledge.

Libraries and Fake News: What’s the Problem? What’s the Plan?

“…13, NO. 1, 2019 Other ills of which fake news is a symptom include the loss of trust in expertise (Gibson & Jacobson, 2018;Lor, 2018) or the media (Alvarez, 2016;Rochlin, 2017); the relativism of our supposedly post-truth era (Baer, 2018;Batchelor, 2017;Becker, 2016;Bluemle, 2018;Cooke, 2017;Johnson, 2017;Lor, 2018;Rochlin, 2017); and deepening political polarization (Gibson & Jacobson, 2018;Loertscher 2017). Perhaps underlying all of these are the "preexisting beliefs, attitudes, and biases" (Baer, 2018, p. 75) to which we are susceptible.…”

“…Others discuss distinguishing ads, opinions, and reported news (Jacobson, 2017), or facts and conspiracies (Alvarez, 2016). Another important skill is the ability to recognize bias, whether in a source or within oneself (Baer, 2018;Burkhardt, 2017;Cheby, 2018;Gibson & Jacobson, 2018;Jacobson, 2017). As noted, there is sometimes a tendency here to oversimplify and dichotomize the information landscape, characterizing it as either true or false, verified or biased, and so on.…”

“…Other goals of critical information consumption are less skills than dispositions. These include adopting a critical stance toward information (Becker, 2016;Cooke, 2017;Rose-Wiles, 2018), reading and questioning sources before sharing (Burkhardt, 2017;Jeffries et al, 2017), and being open to new perspectives (Baer, 2018;Becker, 2016). To these Farkas (2018) adds the ability to "spend" one's trust strategically.…”

“…Adopting a skeptical stance toward information is thought to be necessary for rejecting fake news or assessing content (Baer, 2018;Burkhardt, 2017;El Rayess et al, 2018;Gibson & Jacobson, 2018;Jacobson, 2017). How, then, to encourage such healthy or "informed skepticism" (Baer, 2018;Bluemle, 2018) while avoiding the self-serving skepticism (Batchelor, 2017), or skepticism as an end in itself (Becker, 2016), thought to be part of the problem? Jeffries et al (2017) have already encountered this problem in a fake news-inspired course, after which one participant claimed that "he no longer trusted anything he saw online" (p. 545).…”

The Context of Authority and Sociological Knowledge: An Experiential Learning Project

“…AiCC, however, suggests that educators should be helping students to go beyond that type of yes/no source evaluation, making clear that one central goal is for students to understand that the authority of sources is contextual: that is, the appropriate authority is dependent on the information needed. In other words, authority is relative, but not purely subjective (Baer, 2018).…”