Postmodernity, Political Communication and the Question of Truth: A Study on Post-Truth Condition and Its Intellectual Background

The concept of post-truth, which was chosen as the word of the year by the Oxford Dictionary in 2016, has been discussed in academic and popular literature since then. One of the important debates on the issue is the post-truth condition's relation to postmodernity. Particularly, whether postmodern discourses, especially sceptical postmodern position on science and truth, has affected post-truth phenomenon or not is seriously debated. Some authors, such as Ralp Keyes and Lee McIntyre, associate two historical situations to the extent that they argue postmodern discourses "lead to" and are responsible for post-truth, while others, Like Truman Chen and Kerstin Zohari consider this approach as reductionism and misinterpretation. In this article, the relation between post-truth and postmodernism will be examined based on studies conducted in the English-speaking world. The article tries to show that postmodernity as a historical situation, not postmodernism as a philosophical and artistic approach, has been effective about coming to post-truth condition. Thus, the intellectual background of the post-truth condition, which is claimed to be the basic descriptive concept of our age, will be revealed. In addition, it is aimed to provide literature information about the concept of post-truth and to come up with a new definition.