Sophia Rosenfeld explainer - Truth and Consequences article

This video is for students in POT 4936: Democracy and Propaganda. You can find out more about the course including a list of assigned texts on the course homepage: https://barbhowe.com/pot-4936-democra...

During week 1 we ran out of time for me to explain one of the assigned readings so this video will walk you through Sophia Rosenfeld's article, Truth and Consequences.
00:00 Why I assigned this article and why this video will help you understand it
00:57 The statement of the problem (1st 3 pages)
01:50 What is public knowledge? A specific kind of truth (there are different kinds of truth)
02:30 What is meant by contingency or contingent truth?
03:50 Public knowledge is the knowledge we need in order to live together as a community
05:48 The concept of truth and the concept of democracy are closely related -main proposition
07:30 The truth discernment process then (under the ancien régime) and now (in modern democracy)
08:13 (parenthetical aside what is meant by the French term ancien regime?)
11:35 The founding fathers had very different ideas from the ancien regime about how to discover the truth
12:47 The refinements of falsehood section (starts out talking about how elites tend to hijack the truth discernment process and then talks about the rise of the expert class in technologically advanced societies)
17:35 Populists can exploit that reality (that there are now experts and expert knowledge) and that's a problem (she restates the problem we're facing today)
20:52 Should we just give up on democracy? She says no, it's worth the struggle to find ways to do the democratic process of truth discernment.