Promoting the need for truthful information to foster a democracy built on trust.
Recent philosophical and sociological literature detects the advent of an era of “post-truth” characterized by lies, conspiracy theories and “bullshit”. It determines the technical, political and philosophical sources and suggests some ways to escape this crisis of factuality. This paper examines and discusses its various findings and proposals. It highlights the educational issues, especially for schools, where sincerity and respect for facts are the normative principles, now updated by the scheme of inquiry. It proposes a number of epistemological benchmarks for education in uncertainty, the development of critical thinking and the regulation of conflicts of truths such as those between creationism and evolutionism and Holocaust denial and Holocaust history.
