This book illustrates a very clear figure of the post-truth phenomenon with details interpreting the difference between lies and bullshit, idea of fake news, and how someone uses language strategies to manipulate others emotion etc.
Now we are living in the circumstances that objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. and post-truth signifies a state in which language lacks any reference to facts, truths, and realities. When language has no reference to facts, truths, or realities, it becomes a purely strategic medium. In a post-truth communication landscape, people (especially politicians) say whatever might work in a given situation, whatever might generate the desired result, without any regard to the truth value or facticity of statements.
Many times, we can not blame people who are using exaggerated verbal presentation and well-planned speech to achieve their goal, since they do not tell the falsehood to the audience, actually what they do is to articulate their notions in the means of highlighting parts of reality or not having presumed truth.
Theoretically, the difference between bullshit and other sorts of untruths is that all falsehood is opposite and against the reality, but bullshit is something that has no association with the truth.
In this book, the author heavily refers to Frankfurt’s discussion of bullshit. the latter disassociates bullshit from the epistemological continuum, thus relieving it of any reference to reality or responsibility to truth, and declares that bullshit is “unconnected to a concern with the truth”; it “is not germane to the enterprise of describing reality”; and it proceeds “without any regard for how things really are” (Frankfurt 2005, 30).
This is why Frankfurt says that bullshit “cannot be regarded as lying,” because bullshitters do not “presume” to “know the truth” and thus cannot be accused of promoting a false position or describing a false reality (33).6 Frankfurt writes, “The liar is inescapably concerned with truth-values” (51), while the bull- shitter is not. According to Frankfurt, it is “this indifference to how things really are” that is “the essence of bullshit” (34). The bullshitter “does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose”. Also bullshit is rather the audacious rejection of truth as a standard by which we all must be judged”.
Throughout the whole book, the word - epistemological continuum is repeatedly mentioned as a standard platform, on which, everything except the bullshit has a connection to the truth or deception. at the meantime, the writer announces:
Rhetors must know the facts in order to mislead through lies; they must recognize the truth in order to deceive through fallacies, and they must understand reality in order to manipulate through doublespeak. But what happens when facts, realities, and truths become overrated and disappear from the epistemological continuum? Without facts and realities as a reference or truths as a standard, then their opposites (lies, fallacies, and doublespeak)also disappear from the continuum. In this post-truth world (without truth or lies), language becomes purely strategic, without reference to anything other than itself