The Lexico-Semantic Field of Post-Truth in Socio-Political Discourse

The purpose of the review article is to identify conceptualizations of the post-truth era in the English-language socio-political communication, based on the key vocabulary of a number of reviews and sources representing the component post-truth in the media. The object of the analysis is lexical representation of the component post-truth in the media. The subject matter of the analysis is conceptual interpretation of the post-truth component in such relevant phrases as post-truth era (or politics, world of politics, politicians, society, age, knowledge and power, condition, campaign, etc.) in various authorial sources. The Russian equivalents of truth in the item post-truth are reliability (достоверность), accuracy (точность), credibility (доверие); in the media the phrase post-truth comes to mean ‘to abandon or neglect the principles of objectivity and reliability’. It has been shown that in the USA and UK socio-political field expert assessments and interpretations of the claim itself are contradictory and are often marked with skepticism. It is clear, however, that it cannot be taken literally and that in science and education discourse, with the exception of history, it manifests itself differently: in close relation to scientific rational truths or facts, but not to daily factual truths described by H. Arendt. Also, specific sets of key words are used to describe manifestations of post-truth in the media and science. “Fake news” and election campaigns don’t seem to be the major features of the post-truther media. Instead, the concepts bullshit by H. Frankfurt and post-truth game by S. Fuller are competing for this role; however, they can’t be regarded as elaborated formal rhetorical schema either. Yu.Shatin alone made a pertinent and significant attempt to describe the new post-truther rhetoric. The specialist literature review shows that the media post-truth discourse is actually a manifestation of a deep crisis in the ‘canonical’ democracy, a reflection of its agonal state in the American-British vocabulary and narratives. The paper emphasizes that this kind of discourse has not only a home dimension, but also a foreign policy one and, consequently, internal and external addressing. Its reception in Russia is distorted due to remoteness of observers, which does not allow them to see how fakes and the new post-truth vocabulary are actually interpreted by the agents in the process of intra- or intercultural confrontation.

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