Paul M. H. Buvarp

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

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title: “Aletheic crisis” order: 3 eyebrow: “Concept” gloss: “The failure of the shared procedures by which a society settles what is true.” definition: “Aletheic crisis is the failure of the shared procedures by which a society settles what is true — distinct from disagreement about the facts themselves.” description: “Aletheic crisis: the failure of shared procedures for settling truth-claims, and the case for friction as a democratic resource. A concept developed by Paul M. H. Buvarp.”

A polity can survive a great deal of disagreement about the facts. What it cannot survive is the loss of an agreed method for settling the disagreement. Aletheic crisis describes the second condition, and it is the more dangerous one, because it is invisible while the arguments continue in their usual form.

Dark reenchantment

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Max Weber described modernity as a disenchantment. The world ceased to be populated by forces that had to be placated and became, in principle, calculable: everything could at least be conceived as masterable by reckoning. This was not a matter of people growing wiser. It followed from a particular apparatus — the printing press, the bureaucracy, the archive, the reproducible method — which made causal chains followable by anyone willing to follow them.

Structural receptivity

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Almost all research on disinformation is supply-side. It counts posts, maps networks, attributes campaigns and measures reach. The implicit model is contamination: a hostile actor introduces a falsehood into a healthy information environment, and the falsehood spreads.

This gets the causality the wrong way round often enough to be a problem. A conspiracy theory finds purchase in a population that already has use for it. The claim answers a question the audience was carrying, resolves a dissonance, or supplies a villain for an injury that was real. Where none of that obtains, the same claim, pushed with the same resources, dies quietly.

Tertiary orality

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Walter Ong described a primary orality that preceded writing, and a literacy that displaced it. He added a secondary orality, carried by radio and television, which reproduced the intimacy of speech while remaining anchored in a literate order — its scripts were written, its speakers composed.

A third condition has now arrived, and it is not a variation on the second. Large language models emit utterances bearing every mark of composition: register, cadence, argumentative shape, the appearance of having been meant. Behind them stands no one who meant anything. The utterance has a form without having an origin.

The Gutenberg Parenthesis

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The proposition is that the five centuries between Gutenberg and the network were an interval rather than a destination. Fixity, authorship, originality, the bounded work, the archive, the correspondence theory of truth as an everyday working assumption — these look like permanent features of human knowledge, and they are better understood as artefacts of a particular technology for making words stay still.

Before the parenthesis opened, knowledge was performed, variable, composite and re-authored at every telling. As it closes, a good deal of that returns: text that flows rather than sits, works without stable editions, authorship distributed to the point of vanishing.