Post-Truth and Vaccine Scepticism- A Husserlian Perspective

Following Oxford English Dictionary's statement of 'post-truth' as the word of the year 2016, many have claimed that the Western world has entered an era where truth or objective facts are being overlooked. However, the causes and implications of a post-truth situation remain under discussion. While some decry the diminishing of expert authority in public debates, others claim that the post-truth condition is only the result of many 'truths' competing against each other for supremacy. This second interpretation argues that postal truth is the result of a democratization of the intellectual practice of challenging authority that has inevitably led to questioning experts. Both interpretations focus on the denial of contemporary science as characteristic of the situation after the truth. My research focuses on the case of vaccine skepticism as a vantage point to provide a philosophical account of the emergence of the post-truth condition. I follow the phenomenological method of Edmund Husserl and his conception of the 'crisis' as put forward in his published and unpublished work to examine why scientific evidence or expertise is no longer convincing despite the enormous successes of the sciences and I hope to present a preliminary proposal to effectively deal with vaccine skepticism in particular, and the post-truth condition in general.