A Robert De Niro Theory of Post-Truth: ‘Are you talking to me?’
Here is a good read: A Robert De Niro Theory of Post-Truth: ‘Are you talking to me?’
Have a look.
The notion that facts are always contestable is attributed to Thomas Kuhn, Michel Foucault, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Not so fast. Feyerabend, in whom I am well-pleased, was set to have Wittgenstein as his supervisor, just before Ludwig died. Feyerabend changed to Popper, and became the most radical critic of scientific method. But he - and I will find the essay if asked - did not think that Wittgenstein's language games were incommensurable. I think we can say the same for Kuhn's paradigms and Lakatos' research programs.
And I think this is where Davidson's On the very idea... comes in handy. There's a type of relativistic thing going on, such that folks can express the same view in different ways; one truth writ differently.
Have a look.
The notion that facts are always contestable is attributed to Thomas Kuhn, Michel Foucault, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Not so fast. Feyerabend, in whom I am well-pleased, was set to have Wittgenstein as his supervisor, just before Ludwig died. Feyerabend changed to Popper, and became the most radical critic of scientific method. But he - and I will find the essay if asked - did not think that Wittgenstein's language games were incommensurable. I think we can say the same for Kuhn's paradigms and Lakatos' research programs.
And I think this is where Davidson's On the very idea... comes in handy. There's a type of relativistic thing going on, such that folks can express the same view in different ways; one truth writ differently.
Comments (66)
This seems (to me) to leave us with an ongoing problem of ambiguous translation.
Thomas Kuhn, Michel Foucault, and Ludwig Wittgenstein are entitled to their own opinions; they are not entitled to their own facts. Per Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
Post-truth discourse can't have the undermining of incommensurable conceptual schemes by the mere possibility of translation of sentences into equivalence classes of truth conditions as its solution, as even if Davidson's account were true, post-truth discourse would still be an ongoing thing. A better analysis would be to attempt to account for the productive (cultural and political) forces which generate and maintain the condition of post truth.
Adam Curtis terms the mode of engagement between the people and their government which results in 'a radical destabilisation of perception' nonlinear warfare. He gives the example of the way the subprime-mortgage generated, giant speculative clusterfuck 2008 economic crisis had its perception managed in the UK. Quantitative easing was presented as a means of inserting extra money into the economy to make up for what the people lost, what actually happened was one the biggest [s]legalised theft[/s] redistribution of wealth in history. The top 5% of earners took almost all of the money. This wasn't reported by the mainstream media, but we still have the term 'banker bailouts' which contains a kernel of the truth.
People know the truth about it, but the truth isn't something which motivates people to political action. People who still believe in truth and recognize nonlinear-warfare for the bullshit pedaling it is rarely engage, instead we 'observe the downfall of civilisation with a cool detachment' (from here, a documentary on related themes).
What to do about it?
Not a clue. Only thought I've had is that people are still aware of the rhetorical power of truth, as apparently it, or the conviction in it, is precisely what separates the (allegedly) incommensurable conceptual schemes which divide us.
It's an important topic. As usual, I would argue that the notion of "objective truth" itself is a non-starter. We can't combat post-truth simply by saying there is reality that must be properly described, a world of facts that ultimately holds us speakers to account.
That absolutism can't work as speech acts are as much about the self as the world. Or semiotically, they are tokens of a self~world relation. They state the truth of that - the relation - rather than the truth of the world (or the self) in any direct sense.
But still, there is something very important about the Enlightenment project. There is something very dangerous in the relativism that has now slid all the way down to proto-fascist Trumpian alternative fact reality. There is a notion of truth communication to be defended.
So - in terms of socially engineering that happier outcome - I would argue that what we need to guard against is the stratification of social discourse. The control over discourse by the entrenched elites. Or now in a social media/reality TV world, the development of algorithmic bubbles. And this seems the reverse of that elitist control, in that now it is the over-democratisation of opinion that is the problem.
Trump does neatly represent this divide. He is a creature of the swamp, yet sells the social media response to the fact of being control by an entrenched elite. He played the Randian ideal of "the boss" in a reality show. He actually seems to love living in a fake world of gold living rooms and arcadian golf courses. He represents the greatest possible disconnect from reality we can imagine. And so he becomes the ideal candidate to lead a mob seeking nothing but comforting simplicities in a world quite deliberately made too complex for any but the elite to be advantaged.
So truth is currently under assault from two directions. There is the more traditional control over "the message" that is how an elite maintains its position within a stratified social hierarchy. And then there is the mob counter-response. Social media has really become the enabler of that.
The traditional media was often a tool of the elite. No denying. But the traditional media also did embody some level of Enlightenment commitment to a common notion of truth.
Again, no absolutism allowed. But the traditional media got that meanings are social. And so "the truth" ought to reflect some "whole of society" point of view. We would find truth in whatever, in the most universal way, cemented a human relation to a humanised world.
That is why a truth-telling society doesn't ignore its poor, its disadvantaged. That is why a truth-telling society is "realistic" about its relations to the wider ecological and material resources upon which it must depend. The traditional media did try to take this whole of society perspective of what counts as "the truth".
Now the post-truth assault is coming strongly from both directions. The elite have become increasingly happy to lie. The institutional constraints against the likes of Murdoch have become very eroded. Governments see spin as a necessity - because the population is no longer easily made compliant when moments of "national necessity", like another war or financial correction, arise.
And the mob mentality now has its own new vehicle. The early internet was very much built on democratic, enlightenment principles. Now it has evolved into a realm of post-truth bubbles.
So truth-telling relies on tying the widest sense of self to the widest sense of the world in an ongoing habit of interpretance or pragmatic communication. That is what has to translate across all the levels of discourse, all the bubbles of thinking. There must be a unity about the social point of view that functionally preserves the people we want to be - culturally, economically, environmentally.
Even scientific truth gets criticised from this point of view. It is great to have a really objective cosmic view of "the world". But in the end, it is going to come back to how we need to think in order to continue to flourish. The truth is about this relationship if we are being practical about our habits of truth-telling.
So the linked essay touches on a vital issue. Society needs to pay attention to the way it institutionalises the collective habit of truth-telling. The elite and the mob are evidence that we are long way from an ideal balance.
The corrective medicine would involve doing what it takes to bolster the collectivising view. The difficulty is knowing how to best do that.
For instance, Trump could be here and gone next week. The pendulum could swing. The US might institutionally embrace some kind of informational reform having had such a close brush with disaster.
Or we could wait for the next GFC to wash everything away in an act of creative destruction. The irreality has to have an end, even if it is amazing the show has been kept on the road up to now.
Do we need some dramatic intervention, or will the situation naturally take care of itself (the truth of the world being at least that recalcitrant).
In the meantime, if you look for it, there is plenty of truth-telling happening even on the internet. The new media is exposing plenty. There is a lot of positive to point to as well.
Anyway, from a philosophical viewpoint, post-truth is not about a lack of truthful objectivity about the world. It is about the social fragmentation of the story-telling. Speech acts are always about the self as much as the world. And it is the health of the collective self, the communal speaker, which is at the heart of these post-truth concerns.
Yep. But that's not a paradox.
What do you think of the suggestion that what has changed recently is not the existence of bullshit and lies, but the way they are received? Post-truth resides in the acceptance of bullshit and lies as just a part of the dialogue.
That seems to be in line with what you have written - which was very good. Thanks.
We appear to be obliged to be uncharitable to bullshiters.
I agree - I don't see that the juxtaposition of objective agains subjective can be maintained. There are just true statements and false statements.
Elsewhere I posited that a post-truth world must fail. Truth is what is still there despite what you believe, and if folk choose to believe falsities, truth will ultimately return to bite them on the bum.
Social fragmentation, identity politics, xenophobia all play their part.
There's more to truth than opinion, more to truth than just belief.
But are you agreeing there is more to truth than a world of real facts?
That was the important point I wanted to make. Yes, there is a reality out there ready to bite false belief on the bum. But what grounds truth just as much is the self that stands holding the other end of that truth-telling relation.
The socially constructed nature of truth has to be accepted to then make a distinction between the good and bad in our current habits of truth-telling.
That is the subtlety which I sense you may be skirting.
Quoting Banno
This is what I mean.
I can understand what it might mean for statements to be judged truthful. The relationship between some self and some world is being foregrounded. Truth is provisional on the functionality of a relation, not on the claimed brute state of either one or the other.
But to just call statements true or false feels ambiguous. Are they true because they conform to a state of the world or a state of belief?
No, they are true because they work in some long-run sense. They are true because a community of minds will arrive at such a judgement given sufficient time to inquire fully. They are true because a community of thinkers no longer doubt them in their heart.
Sure. The job of logic is to exclude ambiguity. But it can't simply assert that ambiguity doesn't exist.
And that seems a very central point in any battle against post-truth attitudes. We have to grant social constructionism if we are to insist on truth being properly constructed within society.
Sure, people can think what they like. But then there is still the social view with the most functional grasp of "the truth of the world".
This is just to say that it is statements - sentences that make an assertion - that are true or false.
Quoting apokrisis
That strikes me as a loaded question. Since:
Quoting apokrisis
it would be misguided to juxtapose conforming to a state of the world, to conforming to a state of belief.
A true statement obviously involves both.
We'd be arguing over a few things had it been you. It's a nice article, because it is exemplary, and not in a good way. There's a bit of irony in it. Part of the problem(perhaps most) has been academia. The article acknowledged that much, but the author doesn't seem to grasp the problem itself.
May have something to do with how truth is situated in relation to ethical and political matters.
How is better.
Hopefully a bit better than just the Enlightenment impulse this time around. Leave the mistakes, lest the same result...
The first claim in the last paragraph above calls skepticism that is grounded upon confusion "well-founded".
There is no such thing as "objective truth". It does not follow that the post-truth world is the result of discarding that impoverished notion. I would think that a well-founded skepticism of "objective truth" would involve showing the inadequacies of the "objective" part. I would further say that if we are to promote the Enlightenment, we ought not promote it's known shortcomings.
While a statement is true/false regardless of whether or not one believes it, that does not warrant saying that truth is objective, or that there is such a thing as "objective truth". It warrants concluding that belief's distinct from truth. Belief is not truth.
Bullshit.
A lie is a deliberate misrepresentation of one's own thoughts and beliefs. One cannot do that unknowingly. Truth has a central role in both sincere and insincere speech acts, but there is no need for "objective" truth. Truth is presupposed within thought and belief. If truth and the role that it plays within all thought and belief is misunderstood, then there are potentially horrendous consequences. However... talking about "objective truth" situates truth beyond and/or outside thought and belief, which itself reflects an impoverished understanding of the origen of truth and the role that it plays in all thought, belief, and statements thereof.
Edited for ease of understanding.
Banno I would've thought you would also want to discard the notion of "objective truth". I've seen you reject the dichotomy upon much the same grounds that I do.
Said as much a few posts back. I also want to take care not to discard truth.
Quoting creativesoul
And in bullshit? Truth does not enter into bullshit.
Of course.
Bullshit is thought in statement form. Bullshit is one manifestation of the ends justifying the means.
@Banno
I think 'the dialogue''s severance from truth has a self reinforcing character. Imagine trying to communicate political-managerial decisions to a populace who will buy anything because they think you're full of shit. That makes it so that you get to say loads of shit. If you don't say loads of shit, you appear unsophisticated and curmudgeonly - not part of the political class of disempowered managers -, I think this is part of what contributed to the perception of Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and Bernie Sanders in the US. Their rhetoric consisted in restoring and acknowledging political practice to change things for (what they thought was) the better - and both relied upon objective appraisals of societal systems. EG, Corbyn made so many criticisms of what privatising the railways in Britain did, and acknowledged the horrors that the British afflicted on the Irish prior to their independence. Sanders spent a lot of time criticizing the inefficiencies and unfairness of the American healthcare system. Both got accused of being 'poor candidates for leaders' and 'radical socialists' for insisting on the truth of their claims about failings in society and both generated cult like followings during the election.
But what was different about Trump? He also used the widespread discontent and belief that the political system was bullshit as part of his presidential campaign. In essence, he embodied the paradox of introducing 'speaking truth to power' in his campaign (see his insistence on the 'broken system' of American politics) as a means of attaining the criticized power. The widespread approval of a hypocrisy of this magnitude only makes sense on the background of a massive destabilisation of perception. It is only in those circumstances that he could appear more truthful than his competitors just by giving a name to the destabilised political mileau, and thus appeared transcendent of it. All the while being an embodiment of this destabilisation. I think the use of this by the political-managerial class is best summarised through the following:
[quote=Sun Tzu]Be extremely mysterious, even to the point of soundlessness. Thereby you can be the director of the opponent's fate.[/quote]
This blurring of truth and fiction in the narrative structures derived from politics has post-truth discourse as a symptom rather than as a cause. The operation of post-truth requires an intellectual isolation of individuals (suggested in phrases like 'everyone is entitled to their opinion' and 'my truth'), and an internalization of truth to belief. I think it's likely that the rising level of average education in most industrialized nations has contributed to this. Why? I think this is best demonstrated through this quote:
[quote=Aristotle, allegedly]It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it[/quote]
Instead of being interpreted as a capacity for educated people to suspend reality within their judgements, it takes on a strange inversion in modern ideology. We are obliged to suspend judgement of the veracity of ideas as necessary feature of ratiocination. Note that this is circumscribed to complex topics, we definitely act as if many things are true (eg. 'don't abuse children' as a maxim).
What was once identified with the ability to situate yourself within complex problems and use your reason to decide what to do and what to think is now a mechanism of intellectual paralysis. Increasing levels of education has lead us to see the complexity in everything, and ironically lead to widespread intellectual paralysis on the things that need the most thought to justify action - instead we have an interminable process of thought. Perhaps this also goes someway to explain the rise of racist-populist narratives in the US and Europe in recent politics - appearing as simple suggests that our intellectual paralysis mechanism need not be applied. Generating decontextualised victim narratives and oppressive scapegoats.
But, but ... Here's some radical claim: there can be no dialogue severed from truth, because there would be no connection between one speaker and the other. But dialogue is not what happens in academia, politics, in advertising, in the mass media, including the internet for the most part. And that is the root of the problem.
Rather than Orwell, Freire is the man with an analysis and a solution. It is because academia has fallen in love with the sound of its own voice, and no longer dialogues but pontificates, that its own voice has fragmented and folks only listen to whatever confirms their own pontification. There is, by and large, no dialogue in education, no mutuality, no learning together and from each other cooperatively, but rather a competitive shouting match, in which truth and learning and communication are no longer priorities.
That's mostly the reason I scarequoted dialogue, the relationship of people with each-other as political actors in a state such as this is either one of indifference, 'oh dear'ism and paralysis or fetishised placebo politics. The relationship of governments benefiting from the mass destabilisation of perception to their peoples is one of fetishised theater (like Trump's charming sexism), undemocratic opaqueness (like EU politicians having to sign a non-disclosure agreement to view the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership papers) and managerial dehumanisation (missed this appointment? no food for a month).
It is a kind of politics where politicians must be persuaded to act on behalf of their people, be informed on issues important to them,a state in which the problems of corporate power are defined as irrelevant and the social costs are offloaded onto the worst off with a knowing smile from their political representatives.
Academic engagement with the public is declining at the same time as academic engagement with relevant academics. Exterior to the academy it's a problem of outreach, reluctance to adopt a pedagogical style, and academics situated as experts to be believed rather than as guides for intellectual engagement. The latter mode of operation there can be seen on this forum, but such a change in perspective will not manifest in public discourse and politics solely through we 'enlightened ones'' intellectual assent.
Less of that 'we enlightened' if you please. :D
The enlightenment is a disease I refuse to catch; as a direction of travel, it is a fine and noble thing, but as a destination reached by the great and the good, to which they are dragging the rest of us, it stinks like an extermination camp, as your links illustrate..
Oh dear.
Davidson's triangulation - me, you and the truth. What you say might be the case in humanities, where what is the case is so much more dependent on social construction. Is it true of the hard sciences?
I've enjoyed your posts, Fire Drake. For the moment at least I am non-plussed. Think I might write a letter to my local member, though.
I'm just grateful my polemic did something for once. ;)
More so of the sciences than the humanities. There is no place in science for 'Believe me, I know because I'm a teacher/authority.' Prove it, demonstrate it, or be banished to Psychceramia. Unfortunately, the usual oppressive authoritarian regime generally prevails in most institutions despite the naturally principled democracy of science. Truth has authority over you and me.
This holds the false assumption that a "fact" is a disinterested thing about the universe that people chose to represent in their own way.
In fact, a fact is always subject to its relevance to the observer. Without people there are no facts at all.
You can say what you like about the universe, and these things might remain unchanged we you and I to die, but they would not be factual. It's meaningless to have an idea without a conceiver.
You mean judged by someone to be true or false about something. If a statement isn’t subject to an interpretation, it is just some trail of noise or some set of squiggles.
Quoting Banno
It's reassuring to see we remain far apart on the essential issue. You want to retreat to a framing where you are again speaking about the relata rather than the relation. The fact you talk about states of the world and states of belief shows you are still thinking of the situation in dualistic mind~world fashion.
This rather undermines the post-truth position you are gunning for - the right to declare some statements as obvious bullshit.
You can't simply assert such truth as what you believe - some view about some personal state of belief and some actual state of the world ... which somehow "conform" to "the truth" both separately and together in mysterious fashion.
If truth is only pragmatically a fact - a fact about a relation between believers and their worlds - then you have to get out of the recursive epistemic knot by reference to enduring communal habits of interpretance. And to pursue that honestly, the entrenched purposes of those communities become a key part of the truth equation.
To speak against post-truth relativism and even irrelealism, you have to do more than just declare bullshit when you don't like what you see. You have to show how it is bullshit from an integrated communal point of view, which also inevitably will embody some sense of purpose.
There is a reason to any "truth-telling". It has a function. And that is neither necessarily the analytic/scientific one of "telling the truth - the objective truth", nor the personal/relativistic one of "telling my truth - the subjective truth".
Pragmatism is about telling the communal truth - the one that best perpetuates the system generating the propositional claims.
This might sound alarming, but it is just the same semiotic principle that got us here. It is how animals know their worlds through their evolutionary fine-tuning. It is nature's way of knowing. And that should be a good enough epistemic grounding.
No, I don't. Statements can be true or false, regardless of someone's judgment. People believe things that are not true.
Quoting apokrisis Sure. And one can interpret a statement without judging it true or false.
I choose to treat belief and truth as distinct. I don't think I am the only one who does so.
Quoting apokrisis
If you say so. I think you are reading what you want to see into what I have written.
What is useful is not the very same as what is true. It seems that this is a distinction that you cannot make. It is presumably useful to believe what is useful - but that is a quite different point.
Feyerabend would disagree, suggesting that sometimes science might well progress because of such authoritarian stances.
Quoting unenlightened How could it not?
You can believe what you like about the universe. That does not make it true. Deny a shared world and you have no basis for interpreting the utterances of others.
The word "fact" is fraught with ambiguity. Better to leave it to one side.
Yep. You can conceive of no middle ground between absolutism and relativism. And so - forced to make your choice - you side with absolutism.
One can certainly say that Pragmatism takes the middle road in talking about the "usefulness" of beliefs. It is all about functionality in some sense. That is just Pragmatism recognising that all truth-telling is embedded in a self~world relation. There is a purpose to any assertion - despite all your attempts to maintain otherwise in a dry logistic fashion.
So Pragmatism admits that truth is rooted in some kind of purpose. But then it does go on from there to provide a rationale for what could count as optimised truthfulness in speech. It stresses the communal context which legitimises any habit of speaking.
That is the end-game you seem to want to recover via Wittgenstein, Davidson, et al. But you keep putting road blocks on your own path.
Do I? Thanks for letting me know. Yes, I am still stuck with the conclusion that the Great Theories of Truth - Correspondence, Coherence, Pragmatism - are all of them too much, and not enough. Too much, in that they seek to define something that does not need definition; not enough, in that they never capture the whole of truth in their limited definitions. It's not just pragmatism that 'recognising that all truth-telling is embedded in a self~world relation' - though others may phrase it more simply.
What's the absolutism I am stuck with?
This is not enough for Davidson, but I think it may be the best place to start. Local constellations, or domains, where we have a familiar basis for differentiating truth from falsity and thereby, perhaps enabling a discussion of the critical parts which, if they can be determined. can/ought be used to approach the whole.
Local knowledge starts with Trust and that is exactly what Google and Facebook are initiating.
Nice one. Truth neither needs a definition nor could one be defined. That will keep post-truth at bay.
(I declare ... bullshit! :) )
or then again I might just open another wine. Oh dear.
Quoting unenlightened
Read him as a student. Too long ago. Critical pedagogy had some influence in teaching Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander folk, but was apparently rejected as another imposition. More white outsiders telling the indigenous what they needed.
So maybe not such a good solution.
Maybe some fields of studies are immune to epistemic closure on a global scale; but, asserting that they don't and thus any attempt to arrive at some bedrock beliefs (to borrow the phrase from Wittgenstein) would be nonsensical and a non-sequitur. If you really analyze the whole article, the whole issue is a non-sequitur or an elaborate reductio ad absurdum, made by a cynical mind.
Then there's the no true Scotsman fallacy made of truth being relative and no final claim to true knowledge can be attained, which is obviously untrue.
Anyway, to address the issue would be to emphasize the importance of truth by making people or politicians, mostly, accountable for telling lies or falsehoods. To pick out the rather sad case of American politics and extend the case beyond the scope of American politics would be a gross overgeneralization.
Quoting Banno
Well in the sense that the authoritarian stance is so ubiquitous that even you seem to think it is a natural attribute of science, it is inevitably implicated in progress. Nevertheless, it simply is the case, historically, that the thrust of science from its birth was against the authority of church dogma, and sceptical of received wisdom.
But like most revolutions, the scientific revolution has opposed tyranny only in the end to replace it.
Quoting Banno
Not Freire, then. I don't know much about that, but given what currently passes for care, almost anything different or indeed nothing at all, would be a good solution.
Seems that Cava is heading in that direction as well...
The critical parts of being able to distinguish truth from falsity?
Perhaps like trust (as a needed part) being certified by a third 'neutral' party consensus as a regular part of what we receive from media. Decisions concerning the truth of the matter are then is up to you, and your interlocutors based on trusted sources. Of course 'neutral' is still problematic, but it at least, it always has been problematic. People will still disagree but, on something that really happened and not an invented story, or on what people actually said, and not false statements.
I'm not sure if this is a question or an assertion. Are you asserting that truth does not enter into bullshit, or asking if and/or how I think that it does? I'll answer because I think it important...
Truth is central because it's presupposed(somewhere along the line) within all thought and belief. One knows when one is lying because they know that they do not believe what they're saying. They're deliberately misrepresenting their own thought and belief on the matter. The reasons for this are many but they all involve the listener not knowing what the speaker actually thinks and believes about the matter.
Bullshit is made up of statements. Statements are statements of belief, unless the speaker is insincere, but even then truth is central as above. So, truth 'enters' into bullshit the same way it does into any and all other statements.
Truth police.
Who decides what's true and what's not? That is the question posed by both genuine skeptics and those who already know what's true but want to keep it secret.
On my view, trust in a source is as central to thought and belief and world-views as truth and meaning is. Trust is certainly crucial to a representative government, which is essentially what all or most 'democracies' are.
An informed and/or well educated electorate will stifle corrupt politicians. Being informed and/or well educated in the sense of being aware of what's relevant and true regarding government policy is crucial. A statement is true regardless of whether or not a trusted official believes it. If the electorate does not know what sorts of things can be true and what makes them so, then they cannot make that distinction.
Gaining the trust of the electorate is pivotal for a politician. If it is widely held to be the case that all politicians are liars and not to be trusted, then the ground is fertile for reinforcement of that view. If truth and belief are conflated in the thoughts of the same electorate, then they'll believe that all politicians are liars and will not be able to decipher if and when one isn't. If the same electorate doesn't know what makes a lie what it is, then they'll never be able to sort it out. If trust is lost in all politicians, then the electorate will not believe that their vote will matter. If the world seems to go on regardless, that sense of powerlessness will be much more acceptable, as long as the world goes on regardless.
I agree. When the ends justify the means.
Did Kuhn really say so? I remember reading Kuhn's work "The Structure of Scientific Paradigms" and actually it was quite conventional in the end. To understand that science is a collective social endeavour and scientists are part of their time doesn't make science totally different from the traditional attitude. I didn't recall him saying as above. The above sounds more like Paul Feyerabend or something...
Tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Under penalty of law, no less.
If we take that to mean something like... state everything that you believe relevant and nothing you believe is not, then we have serious issues(in America, at least) with so many politicians being dishonest/insincere. Politicians ought have more than just a modicum of sincerity. As an elected official, they ought be held to a higher standard than Joe Schmo. I find it quite shameful that that needs said, but it most certainly does.
Trump's " true hyperbole" ("Art of the Deal") argues for the productive effect of innocent exaggeration, as opposed to negative exaggerations and fabrications. The rhetorical effect is like that of the unreliable narrator. He is only concerned with his audience acceptance. He wants his audience to take him seriously, but not literally.
He speeches are almost impressionistic, bouncing around from topic to non-sequiturish topic. spiced with truths, exaggeration or all kinds, as well flat out fabrications. His audience does not care, they understand that if something he says does not appeal to them or make sense, he has a whole gaggle of other points that they can accept. His points are like free floating signifiers with indeterminate meanings, meanings that you are free to accept, connect or reject. It's all OK as long as you are entertained, because that's Trump's ultimate shtick.
He is not presenting his audience with logic, he is much more affective. Listen to his vocabulary which valuates with simple words like "nice", "so great", "loyalty", "beautiful", always expresses his "love" or "hates" of this or that. He does not approach a topic like a lawyer, with cool hard precision, rather his approach is on an emotional level connecting with his audience's hopes and fears.
So unlike Hillary, whose approach is coldly logical and dismissive of Trump's populism, she can never reach his level of connection. Trump said that Mexico is sending bad people into the US, "rapists", he at the same time he says he loves the Mexican people. Hillary never said she loves the Mexican people. Trump got 29% of the Hispanic vote, which was better than the 27% that Romney got when he ran against Obama.
Trump identifies with the working person, the poor, uneducated worker and he juxtaposes this population, his audience, against the academics, the lawyers and others, who cannot understand him because they assume a logic, a discursive basis for rhetoric.
Yes. Is that a good thing?
It is good only in so far as it suggests that truth is not the exclusive provenance of academics, lawyers and others whose supercilious views treat ordinary people like something to be swept under the rug. Like Hillary telling coal miners:
"We Are Going To Put A Lot Of Coal Miners & Coal Companies Out Of Business"