Fact-Checking and Truth-Telling in an Age of Alternative Facts

Abstract

In an age of alternative facts, fact-checking has become almost second nature to critical thinkers who are concerned with the consequences of post-truth for the future of democracy. Drawing primarily on the work of Hannah Arendt and secondarily on that of Michel Foucault, this essay questions fact-checking as a democratic world-building practice and argues for forms of truth-telling that do not fall prey to Western philosophical conceptions of absolute truth and its hostility to plurality, opinion, and contingency.