Apr 9, 2021
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A clinical psychologist in London devised a trial in 1960 in which subjects were told a series of three numbers, 2-4-6. The subjects were then instructed to figure out the “rule” behind the sequence by offering other series of three numbers, to which the psychologist would say if the proposed sequences fit the original “rule” or not. The psychologist, Peter Cathcart Wason, found that people kept proposing sequences that fit their perception of what they thought the rule to be, such as only even numbers or numbers that increased by two.
This article originally appeared on the MIT Press Reader.
To say that facts are less important than feelings in shaping our beliefs about empirical matters seems new, at least in American politics. In the past we have faced serious challenges even to the notion of truth itself but never before have such challenges been so openly embraced as a strategy for the political subordination of reality, which is how I define post-truth. Here, post is meant to indicate not so much the idea that we are past truth in a temporal sense (as in postwar ) but in the sense that truth has been eclipsed by less important matters like ideology.
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