So there’s this phrase being bandied about: “post-truth.” As in, we live in a “post-truth era.” Popular use of the phrase is over a decade old, but its recent ascendancy lead The Oxford English Dictionary to name it Word of the Year for 2016; here’s the OED definition: relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. I mean, we’re at the point where Trump supporters racists are literally saying that “there’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore of facts.” Armchair political scientists and ersatz media commentators are having a field day using post-truth politics to explain everything from contemporary political discourse to Brexit to identity politics to the rise of neo-Nazism to the presidential election and everything in between. “We’ve let sentimentality take precedence over facts and look where that got us!” seems to be the rallying cry.
As you’ve probably noticed, librarians are all over post-truth. Librarians are adamant that information literacy can help combat the post-truth world of fake news. School librarians have been singled out as key players in combating post-truth. School Library Journal is advocating for news literacy toolkits. The Annoyed Librarian wrote something or other. And the hot-takes on Twitter are all over the place. “The post-truth era needs information literacy and that means librarians need to step up!” seems to be the rallying cry.
There’s only one problem with that: information literacy has never been about truth.
Go ahead and search the ACRL Framework, search the ACRL Standards, search the AASL Standards, search the SCONUL Seven Pillars. Across all of the major statements of information literacy, the word ‘truth’ never appears a single time.1 The word ‘fact’ is used only once: in the AASL Standards where it is qualified as “superficial.” Information literacy is not about truth or facts. Go back and read the old ACRL Standards and you’ll see that the closest the Standards get to truth or fact is in vague mentions of evaluating reliability, validity, and accuracy in Standard 3.2.(a). These aren’t unpacked and it’s hard to say how we’re supposed to evaluate and what constitutes reliability, validity, or accuracy. So while the old Standards may not be consistent with post-truth, they don’t exactly provide any guidance on how to reach truth or fact. Of course, this isn’t the case with the Framework. The Framework not only fails to mention truth or fact, it seems to be perfectly consistent with post-truth: authority is constructed and should be met with skepticism; scholarship isn’t about truth, it’s about negotiating meaning; the world of information is a negotiated commodity where powerful forces are routinely marginalizing voices; and so on.
That the Framework is (superficially) consistent with the world of post-truth politics and fake news should come as no surprise. For the past decade there has been a healthy body of literature casting doubt on any connection between information literacy and truth. As Simmons (2005) argued in a widely cited paper, “As a profession, we cannot remain comfortably in a modernist paradigm of certainty and unified truth when our surroundings have shifted dramatically to a postmodern paradigm of ambiguity and multiple truths.” (emphasis added). A decade later, Tewell (2015) demonstrated how “critical information literacy” has encouraged librarians to argue that there are multiple ways of knowing, that students should construct their own knowledge, that all facts are contested, that knowledge production as an inherently political act, that information is a social construct, and so on. This critical turn is and has been an intentional pivot away from objective truth and fact and towards an increased awareness that so-called “facts” cannot be separated from the social processes that construct them.
But, I’m getting off-topic. I’m just trying to say that, to date, discussions about information literacy have tended to be ambivalent towards truth at best. The few times truth is invoked directly, it’s typically in theoretical contexts urging us to reject the very idea of “truth” as some sort of positivist bogeyman or relic of the Enlightenment. And yet, we still make implicit references to truth as we urge students to focus on external markers of credibility, like publication titles, author credentials, peer review, funding models, and whatever.
Here’s my overall point: if the world of post-truth and fake news is going to be a concern for librarians, then we have to frame information literacy in such a way that it puts truth front-and-center: information literacy cannot address post-truth until it has addressed truth itself. I’m not saying that we have to couch everything in terms of true and false; I’m not advocating for some folk, quasi-positivism here. No, we have to be judicious. Sometimes we need to question the truth or falsity of what we read. Sometimes we need to acknowledge that the rhetoric of “truth” is masking something unsavory. Sometimes we need to call-out falsity. Sometimes we need to reject prematurely naturalized truths. But at all times, if we’re going to address the post-truth world as librarians, we need to defend the idea of truth. I posted something the other day about conditional probability and information literacy and the need for a more robust treatment of how we reason about information. This post continues that project. Some things are true, some are false. Somethings we can know to be true with a high degree of probability. Some things not so much. But we always have to keep the idea of truth in mind. If we’re going to address post-truth, truthiness, fake news, misinformation, disinformation, or whatever else, we need to start talking about the role of truth and facts in information literacy. I think we, as librarians, have a sort of tacit agreement that truth is a part of information literacy, but at the moment that isn’t really reflected in our discourse and I’m hoping that can change. I just want to see librarians start to discuss the nature of truth or at least explicitly mention truth when they discuss information literacy. Is that too much to ask?
Simmons, M. H. (2005). Librarians as disciplinary discourse mediators: Using genre theory to move toward critical information literacy. portal: Libraries and the Academy, 5(3), 297-311.
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There is an element of ethics in information literacy, and in my humble opinion, deception is something less than ethical. Perhaps it is unfortunate that our profession has put so much emphasis on IP and academic integrity, and so little on actual integrity – honesty – and how information “may be wielded by powerful interests” in ways that are detrimental to society, but maybe that’s because we take the pursuit of truth for granted in education and academia.
I agree with Paul. I think we take the pursuit of truth for granted in education. Frankly, I’m not sure if a person is truly being educated if they are not somehow in the pursuit of truth. Who wants to pay for an education that only leads them to validate their own opinions? Can one do that without the tuition bill?
Reblogged this on Looking Forward and commented:
Reblogged from Sense and Reference.
[…] sure what that “something” is, but I think the conversation is now shifting, as evidenced by what Lane Wilkinson posted yesterday. I hope to write more in response to Lane soon, but in the meantime I appreciate his admission that […]
As educators, if we’re going to enter into these truth conversations with intentionality then we probably have to include psychological aspects such as cognitive biases as well as discuss conditions for productive dialog.
Agreed. There is so much background to cover. But I think we, as librarians, need to have these conversations so that we can develop a more effective teaching praxis.
I very much appreciate your continued writing on this topic, Lane.
Another helpful analysis was by Nancy Adams in CLR 2014 (doi:10.5860/crl12-417). She compared “evidence-based practice” teaching information literacy in nursing and some other fields with the usual approaches. The evidence-based practice is closer to a form of IL aimed at truth or knowledge.
When I started teaching information literacy a some years ago, I thought about the problem of truth and knowledge in IL. I adopted an approach that aligned with the reference to “reliability, validity, and accuracy” in Standard 3.2.(a), and the idea at 3.2 (b), that an information literate student “analyzes the structure and logic of supporting arguments or methods.”
Like anything else, reasoning must be learned by practice and applying models of good practice. So my course coached students through exercises in interpreting evidence, some using very elementary logic and statistics. Cognitive biases were another topic. I taught how to search for government information. Authority (such as in review articles) was a method for finding good evidence, not primarily a kind of evidence. “Nullius in verba” was one of my slogans.
All this meant that my approach to IL was different from my colleagues’. This got me in a lot of trouble. I no longer teach information literacy.
Because I’m no longer active in this field, I’m glad to see your efforts on this, Lane. I think the Bayesian approach to trustworthiness is a good idea.
[…] see, over the past few weeks I’ve been working on an article related to some things I wrote back in December on post-truth and librarianship, specifically as the concept of truth relates to […]
[…] to step up, shout louder, and strengthen its stance on facts, falsity and promoting reason. Lane Wilkinson takes it further and argues that: “If we’re going to address the post-truth world as […]
[…] I’d already read a few critiques from within the field and elsewhere that had me questioning the novelty of Fake News and post-truth and whether elements […]
I really like your post! Particulary your overall point, share your vision on it.
[…] or fact in the Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education. Put more succinctly, “information literacy has never been about truth.” Would it be worth teaching students how to discriminate between truth and lies in the […]