On the virtues of truth : generativity and the demands of democracy

In one form or another, the seemingly hostile relationship between truth and politics has for many centuries been a matter of uninterrupted debate. In recent years, this hostility appears to have generated new phenomena – with the ubiquitous label of “post-truth politics” – prompting further attempts to rethink this ancient tension. Operating within a broadly Arendtian perspective, this thesis responds to the challenge posed by these recent developments by reflecting specifically on the truth-related moral demands representative democracy places on its members (representatives and citizens). In so doing, it draws on a number of traditions in political and democratic theory, while also borrowing variously from sociology, developmental psychology and Science and Technology Studies. The thesis puts forward two parallel and mutually supportive arguments. Central to the first argument is what I refer to as an “extended notion of factual truth”, a notion which stretches the temporal scope of conventional understandings of factual truth. Focussing on the etymological roots of the word “fact” as something that is done or made, an extended notion of factual truth adds to the common past-regarding concern for the facts that have already happened, a future-regarding concern for the facts yet to come. Based on this future-oriented view, I argue that in addition to the long-recognized virtues of sincerity and accuracy, democracy in fact demands from its members a third virtue of truth – one that I term “generativity”. Defined as the disposition and the ability to turn what one knows to be true into something politically significant, I suggest that generativity – a virtue displayed in the activities of imagining, performing and negotiating the truth with others – is a crucial element of what we can understand as a specifically democratic notion of truthfulness. The second argument concerns the status of representation in democracy. It points to the importance of representation as an irreplaceable experience, transformative of the civic character of whoever engages with it. Here I introduce a distinctive epistemological perspective, which I call “the representative standpoint”. Looked at from this perspective, representation matters less as the experience of being represented by others than as the practice and the experience of representing others. I argue in particular that, understood as the experience of representing others, democratic representation constitutes an essential training in the virtue of generativity and that, for this reason, it should be valued as an indispensable feature of contemporary democracy. Building on these theoretical arguments, I am able to reframe the current democratic predicament not as one of “post-truth politics”, but rather one of “post-politics truth” – an era of generalized inability to turn what is known to be true it into something politically significant and a condition that democracies can heal by reinterpreting, reviving and popularizing the experience of representing others