Introduction

2This reading of communication entered a crisis phase with the social network culture born from 2.0 web revolution (2004). As much as liberation from schemas of truth and the cage of reality was a democratic, progressive move, it was restricted to a small number of intellectual elites and mainstream mass media, and at the beginning this process of liberation could be controlled, but the advent of the social network culture allowed anyone to apply the relativistic strategies of the mass media. The two most important political events of 2016 – Brexit and the election of President Trump – both opposed by most traditional mass media, showed how easily communication via social networks could be manipulated and that the possibility of doing so was available to everyone. Even worse, social and political entities like the terrorist group ISIS demonstrated the extreme dangers of this kind of anarchic communication. The supposedly liberating effects of the postmodernist-constructivist culture were out of control (Maddalena & Gili 2020: 73-88).

3The reaction could not have been other than an attempt to return to a connection between reality, truth, and communication. However, the searing critiques of this connection advanced in the last century are blocking an easy road back. A simple return to the correspondentist view of truth and to the view that communication reflects physical and social reality is now difficult both theoretically and practically. What kind of realism is possible now? How can practitioners of communication who cannot wait for the long run of scholarly research return to realism?

4This paper first presents two solutions – a new form of positivism, applied above all to journalism, and improvements in critical thinking, especially insofar as they relate to the history of journalism; and critically examines their flaws and risks. It then concludes by presenting a pragmatist version of metaphysical realism à la Peirce as a plausible road to a rethinking of the relationship between reality, truth, and communication.

1. First Strategy. A New Positivism?

5The concept of truth dies hard and continuously resurfaces in social discourse and interactions. All of the scepticism and disillusionment expressed since the era of the Greek philosophers notwithstanding, the human need for truth persistently remains. In everyday life, people frequently ask one another: “Are you telling the truth?” or “Is that really what’s going on?” It is worth noting that Grice’s conversational maxims, which attempt to define the fundamental requirements for communicative cooperation, include “do not say what you believe to be false” and “do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence” (Grice 1975: 46). Grice knows as well as we do that there are an infinite number of ways to contravene the teaching of these maxims, and that their intentional or unintentional violation is the norm rather than the exception. They are nonetheless points of reference without which communication could not exist. Moreover, credibility, which depends on interlocutors “telling the truth,” is the necessary condition of every communicative relationship. No relationship is possible unless we trust the other to speak sensibly and tell the truth. The quest for credibility applies not only to everyday relationships; for example, the credibility of journalism and the media is tied to their telling the truth and conducting the research necessary to do so. The credibility of a politician is also based largely on whether he or she tells the truth. A significant portion of political rhetoric, both positive and negative, appeals to the trustworthiness of the speaker and to the related notion of “sincerity,” which is the subjective dimension of credibility, the attitude others perceive in a person who “wants” the truth (Gili & Panarari 2020).

7This view goes hand in hand with support for a “scientistic” version of scientific and technological research – the only philosophical construct able to deliver secure knowledge about what is real and thereby provide predictive capacity based on “big data.” A characteristic expression of this view in the field of communication is the new “scientific journalism.”

8This scientific journalism 2.0 has been advocated by Julian Assange in defense of the WikiLeaks enterprise. Speaking from a Popperian background, Assange stated in the “writers’ kit” on the WikiLeaks website that contributors to the website should treat the documents they upload as “forensically” as possible, asking themselves whether the documents were verifiable or falsifiable. Lisa Lynch summarizes Assange’s view of scientific journalism in the following way: “Journalists serve as intermediaries presenting analyses to the public, but they must also provide the public with the means to recreate their analyses” (Lynch 2012: 50). In scientific journalism 2.0, anyone can check the data according to a scientific method and, therefore, making the reader the ultimate scientist conferring meaning on data.

9Assange’s idea is that transparency and a scientific attitude must be the kernel of a new version of “objectivity” and that the credibility of the news must be related to these characteristics. This claim updates an older version of the same appeal to “science” in what Lynch calls scientific journalism 1.0, which was advocated by authors like Philip Meyer in the 1970s and Walter Lippmann in the 1920s.

10Philip Meyer, a pioneer of data journalism, wrote a book in 1973 with the significant title Precision Journalism. The book has been so successful that it has been reprinted and updated several times, with important additions concerning the new possibilities offered by data collection and analyses of the significant developments in information technology (Meyer 2002). By clearly distancing himself from “new journalism,” in which journalists become storytellers, making extensive use of the literary tools of fiction to offer journalistic products that are enjoyable to read, Meyer proposes an ideal of “scientific journalism,” placing himself explicitly in the camp of Walter Lippmann, one of the fathers of American journalism and a strenuous defender of the value of objectivity, but with the explicit intention of overcoming the traditional meaning of “objectivity.” While new journalism pushes journalism towards the arts, Meyer’s proposal is that journalism should move towards science, “incorporating both the powerful data-gathering and analysis tools of science and its disciplined search for verifiable truth” (ibid.: 4). This means “treating journalism as if it were a science, adopting scientific method, scientific objectivity, and scientific ideals for the entire process of mass communication” (ibid.: 5). Meyer acutely grasps an important problem when he observes that the ideal of journalism’s objectivity often involves being satisfied with “cross-checking by consulting different authorities with different view-points and different interests” (ibid.: 10). He notes that this attempt to be objective actually “forces [journalists] into a relativistic stance that demands the unlikely assumption that all voices have an equal claim to the truth” (ibid.). Meyer believes instead that “precision journalism,” based on the collection and scientific analysis of large masses of data concerning the most diverse phenomena, can escape this trap by providing for “aggressive reality testing.” Consistent with these assumptions, Meyer also makes it clear that the attitude of the journalist, similarly to that of the scientist, must be based on certain indispensable pillars: skepticism (distrust any statement – even “if your mother says she loves you, check it out” – and always consider the truth to be provisional), openness (the results of every investigation must be replicable: “a good investigative reporter documents his or her search for truth, making a paper trail that other investigators can follow to reach the same conclusions”), an instinct for operationalization (the confirmation of a theory lies in its power to predict the results of an operational measurement), a sense of the tentativeness of truth (the truths that science and scientific journalism discover are welcomed when they improve our understanding, but with the recognition that they might be replaced by stronger truths in the future) and parsimony (“given a choice between rival theories, we generally prefer the simpler one [because] the best theory explains the most with the least”) (ibid.: 10-1).

11Even without accepting Assange’s radical views as the only heir to the positions of Lippmann and Meyer, it is certain that a new data journalism has become one of the leading schools of journalism, relying on the same positivist philosophical background. Paul Bradshaw, a leading figure in today’s data journalism, fleshes out this attitude:

[…] we live in a digital world now, a world in which almost anything can be (and almost everything is) described with numbers. Your career history, 300.000 confidential documents, everyone in your circle of friends; these can all be (and are) described with just two numbers: zeroes and ones. Photos, video, and audio are all described with the same two numbers: zeroes and ones. Murders, disease, political votes, corruption, and lies: zeroes and ones. What makes data journalism different from the rest of journalism? Perhaps it is the new possibilities that open up when you combine the traditional ‘nose for news’ and ability to tell a compelling story with the sheer scale and range of the digital information now available. (Gray, Bounegru & Chambers 2012: 2)

12A particularly trenchant image of this radical turn towards data journalism and a positivist conception of reality and truth in communication is the 2017 New York Times ad campaign entitled “The Truth Is Hard.” More recently, in the COVID-19 period, CNN broadcast a campaign promoting “facts first” after having declared that “facts provide clarity/correct/unite/matter most.” Obviously, advertisements are not philosophies. However, the metaphors proposed by two major players in the communications field about the “hardness” of truth and the “firstness” of facts are significant for understanding the new popularity of the scientistic shift we hinted at. The paradox is that, after having progressively eviscerated the power of communication to refer to reality, we now want to deny the possibility of multiple meanings, a possibility that has been pursued for a very long time, only to return to diminished and impoverished references to a merely numerical reality. After almost a hundred years, Lippmann’s positivist diagnosis that a reliable representation of social reality is only that which translates it into statistics of births, deaths, weddings, accidents, elections, and economic systems, consistent with the most reliable and definitive methods of knowledge known to science (Lippmann 1922), may be prevailing again. When it comes to narrating and interpreting complex and controversial events, this diagnosis necessarily leads us to surrender to the fact that ideological prejudice, imperfections of language, and constraints in the information production process inexorably encase the real world in stereotypical visions which are to a greater or lesser extent deformed.

13This theoretical position eventually reverses the Nietzschean statement that “there are no facts but only interpretations” to read that there are no interpretations, but only facts. The point is that this return to a positivist realism simply erases all the important results of the critiques of a naïf realism presented by postmodern and constructivist authors. Moreover, it cancels the fine-grained analyses of the media that have demonstrated the relevance of the construction of the news to what we call truth and credibility. Finally, the appeal to data in this new form of positivism applied to communication leaves open questions about the possibility of pure transparency or pure objectivity: the risk is that only trivial and banal facts can be reported in this system and that we must leave unexplained large amounts of difficult-to-interpret data. We would have a realist account in which ideas and ideals, feelings and opinions, habits of actions and laws of interpretation, would not be considered real, even though they have a powerful impact on real lives, society, and politics.

2. Cultivating Critical Thought

15Notwithstanding the widespread appreciation for this habit of thought, various intellectuals have lamented the fact that courses teaching critical thinking are too few in universities, and that students do not attend classes whose explicitly stated subject is critical thinking (DiGiovanna 2017). They see these failures as an indication that most people have let their guard down and cannot adequately identify fake news and debunk lies.

16Media literacy refers to an ability to decipher the media and their processes, particularly with respect to digital media, the internet, and social media. It is not only a matter of enabling users and recipients to master communication technologies or to equip themselves with a wealth of knowledge about the contents and languages of the media, but also of making the mechanisms and processes that guide the selection, packaging, and presentation of the content they see and hear more visible and intelligible to citizen-users, and therefore also of understanding the organizational and operational processes of the media themselves, the processes of newsmaking, and the processes of political and commercial influence (see Livingstone 2004; Livingstone, Van Couvering & Thumin 2005; Buckingham 2003, 2007, 2017; Frau-Meigs, Velez & Michel 2017; Bulger & Davison 2018).

17However, the diffusion of media literacy as a strategy to combat misinformation and fake news is anything but obvious and there are aspects of ambivalence and possible “perverse effects,” even if unintentional, to which we would like to draw attention. In our view, as much as this strategy is necessary, it is insufficient for two reasons. First, we do not believe that teaching syllogisms, fallacies and rhetorical devices or decoding media languages and production processes is enough to arm recipients against the risks of manipulation, partially because deception often involves a decision about what not to show, so that the receiver does not know what was excluded or distorted. The most dangerous kinds of fake news are not the easily debunked factoids or deepfakes (see Maddalena & Gili 2020: 11-34). The more uncertain area of pseudo-events, quantitative deformation, qualitative alteration, omissions and choices related to contextualization, continuity, separation, and the hierarchy of news are far more dangerous to our societies and more difficult to detect, signal and avoid.

18Additionally, we believe that this strategy is ultimately inadequate because it usually reinforces the role of mistrust and scepticism. This point is not obvious, but the Enlightenment roots present also in Dewey’s seminal work and the “willingness to inquire” as a virtue practiced by the critical thinker are inevitably subject to mistrust in the face of common-sense certainties and scepticism about commonly shared arguments. This is not an argument against critical thinking per se, but scepticism, understood as withdrawing from the pretence of truth and systematically suspending belief in all sources, is at the root of the problem of post-truth and therefore unlikely to be its solution. This risk has been highlighted by various scholars who have observed that there is a general tendency to consider media literacy to be a process of individual emancipation based on strengthening the individual’s capacity for judgment, a process that is intimately related to the affirmation of the individualistic spirit that characterizes late modernity (Beck 1992). This individualistic vision is accompanied by the exercise of methodical doubt, which leads to absolutizing one’s own point of view and distrusting all authority and mediation, including that based on scientific expertise and expert knowledge (for example, in the medical field, as we saw during the Covid-19 pandemic). More generally, as danah boyd has noted, media literacy has predominantly been taught in the U.S. as education to the culture of doubt alongside the more traditional celebration of individual freedom and responsibility (boyd 2017; Bulger & Davison 2018).

19Unfortunately, there is a misconceived notion of inquiry that naively advocates doubt as the most important principle of research. As Charles S. Peirce underlined, this is true only when we are referring to a “real doubt”; that is, to a doubt that stems from a surprising phenomenon that destroys our previous certainties (Peirce 1992: 127-32). Research moves forward on the basis of previous certainties and on trust in what has been handed down to us, even though these certainties and trust are often founded only on our habits and way of life (Wittgenstein 1969). A consistent scepticism would lead to a stalling of inquiry and open the door to various forms of conspiracy theories. Unfortunately, these impediments to research and conspiracy theories have often been the results of this attitude in the world of news and communication.

20The sceptical attitude on which critical thinking relies also carries a negative risk for social relationships: it potentially leads to a mistrust of everyone in a situation in which large chunks of reality can only be known indirectly by trusting the narratives and stories of others (Elias 1991). This is true not only for what we are taught by or learn verbally or in written form from those we know, but also for what we learn from books, newspapers, television news, documentaries and films. If this mistrust were to become a normal habitus in social relationships, it would create generalized suspicion, paralyzing relationships.

21At the macro level of society, all of this represents a risk of an impoverishment of trust and of the overall relationality present in society. One can undoubtedly agree with Niklas Luhmann (2000) that trust and distrust can be two equally rational strategies in the management of social relations, depending on particular situations and contexts. In certain circumstances, therefore, an attitude in which suspicion, excessive circumspection and distrust prevails may appear more rational. However, it should not be forgotten that trust is a “delicate” social resource (Dasgupta 1988) which spreads and strengthens if it is cultivated, but perishes if it is not defended and supported. And if relationships and trust networks become narrower, general sociality dries out and eventually collapses.

22The dangers to social life deriving from a lack of trust and reciprocal credibility seem greater than the dangers of the spread of fake news. The sceptical attitude fostered by critical thinking cannot protect social life because the remedy is worse than the disease. A second important objection about the excessive emphasis on media literacy is more political. Industry leaders (Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft) have promoted digital and media literacy initiatives by supporting and financing non-profit organizations and educational institutions in the U.S. and Europe whose underlying principle is that educating youth in critical thinking is fundamental to fighting against the manipulation of news. It has not escaped many observers, however, that the insistence on media literacy as the main strategy to counteract misinformation and manipulation – which was recently implemented to counter the infodemic that followed and aggravated the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic – is a too-convenient solution that shifts the responsibility for these negative effects from the owners and managers of mainstream media and platforms to public institutions that are not able to develop adequate media education policies (especially in schools) or, even worse, to the users of media and platforms themselves. In this sense, the responsibility for the spread of uncontrolled and fake news is placed on individuals who are “poorly educated” in the use of reason and unable to interact with the media with the appropriate critical-rational tools (Bulger & Davison 2018; Livingstone 2018; Barbieri, Natalini & Selva 2021), avoiding a focus on the economic and political interests that contribute to a much greater extent to producing these effects.

3. A Proposal of Rich, Relational Realism

23These two solutions – positivist realism and a sceptical critical attitude – seem insufficient to meet the challenge of responding to the problem of post-truth communication, and we believe that it is time to seriously consider the problem of the relationship between reality, truth and communication in a new way. The first solution, after years of sophisticated constructivist analysis, seems too weak and lacking in the means to explain the highly complex phenomena of our day. The second solution seems not to recognize that post-modernism has its roots in a sceptical attitude. Instead, we need a “rich” realism, based on a continuity of meaning between the reality of references and consciousness, a realism that knows how to harness the fruits of recent theoretical reflections, understands the essential contributions of constructivism, and is as free as possible of any debt to power and particularistic views pushing partial and interested conclusions as the only truth. A new consideration of the nature of data, of the kind of reasoning that we need, and of the kind of education we can propose will arise from this different realism.

24Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914), the founder of pragmatism, proposed an interesting form of realism that can be helpful in the current situation. Peirce read the alternatives of realism vs nominalism in a peculiar way that can help us understand the communication crisis that we have highlighted. According to Peirce, it can be believed that universals are real, yet one is still a nominalist if he/she thinks that universals are hopelessly beyond the inferential capacities of humankind. Nominalism affirms an unbridgeable gap between reality and reason, while realism affirms a continuity between them (Peirce 1998: 341-4). So defined, nominalism is the background of constructivism and postmodernism: since actual reality is unattainable, we can construct our own according to our interpretation. On the other hand, realism is the view that reality and knowledge are in continuity and, therefore, to the extent that our knowledge is always partial, it derives from, and must respect, the reality from which it stems, even when it displays its constructive capacities (Forster 2011; Maddalena 2015b).

26Peirce defended this view in his courses on the history of science. However, it is the spirit of the lab, as opposed to the spirit of seminars, that causes him to think that when a community of researchers is eager to inquire into something, they will eventually succeed by means of correcting and helping one another. Moreover, he tried all of his life to explain the evolution of reality with his research on continuity and the possibility of taking an active part in this evolution. A key tool in this work were his studies on existential graphs. His results were incomplete but some of them have recently been completed in the studies of the Colombian school of Fernando Zalamea (Zalamea 2012; Vargas & Moore 2020).

27It is not possible in this short article to fully present or explain these results. However, we can make a threefold application of them to the current problems of post-truth and fake news dialoguing with the previous strategies of solution. We call our proposal “rich, relational realism.” Its origins can be found not only in Peirce’s philosophy but also in some significant contemporary approaches in contemporary mathematics, philosophy and sociology.

28First, a conception of reality that comes after post-modern critiques of realism must not limit reality to what we can demonstrate by starting from data. Peirce eventually disarticulated the terms “reality” and “truth,” deepening the metaphysical meaning of the first. Reality was conceived of as a threefold realm of logical ontological modalities: possibility, actuality and necessity. Beyond the existence of what we feel, see and touch, namely, the world of “actualities” that form the kernel of our data, even in their electronic reformulation, there are worlds of “possibilities” and “necessities.” In technical words, Peirce described them as such: actuality is the realm in which the principles of contradiction and excluded third hold at the same time, possibility is the realm in which the principle of contradiction does not hold (while the principle of excluded third holds), necessity is the realm in which the principle of excluded third does not hold (while the principle of contradiction does) (EP2: 501). In non-technical words, this means that reality is more capacious than we usually think it is. There are facts that can be apprehended by our senses, like a person, a cat, a tree, and a stone, but there are also other kinds of effective reality. A dream about the future has its own (possible) reality, while natural laws that we do not touch are operative (necessary) realities in our lives at every moment. A family, an association, and a nation are kinds of relational realities whose necessary bonds go well beyond the physical presence of single individuals, and can spark every sort of possible and effective consequences. Fictional characters from literature, cinema, television and elsewhere have their own reality. A person could be inspired by the character of Porfiry, the magistrate in Crime and Punishment, to himself become a judge, or could be spurred to become an engineer by the desire to create the suits worn in Robocop.

29Words and relationships that we develop online, so decisive for the fake news problem, have their own form of reality and must be considered real. They are neither “just fancies” that we can dismiss easily nor “arbitrary constructions” that we can change at will. These points of view reflect a stern nominalism, according to which knowledge does not depend on reality. On the contrary, we have to pay attention to these kinds of reality, which, using an ancient and imprecise language, are both objective and constructed by human intervention. Consequently, saying that reality has various modalities does not mean that truth does not exist nor that it is impossible to discover it through the effort of our studies. Contrary to what many constructivist authors have said, a changed typology of reality does not imply the disappearance of truth. Truth will always involve a correspondence to reality, but since reality is more complex than purely sense-related data or electronic sequences, truth comes “in the long run” if inquiry is sustained for long enough over time.

30A second characteristic of a rich, relational realism is the overcoming of a dualism between theory and practice, giving birth to a new kind of criticism that is not only based on demonstrative reasoning. This is also a legacy of American pragmatism: human beings grasp reality by performing actions. We perform experiments to understand nature, we produce proofs to understand mathematics, and we write, draw or sculpt to understand human nature. In general, we do not understand through analytic means first and practical means second. In real life, every creative act, be it mathematical, scientific or humanistic, takes shape by means of particular actions; we can call these actions “gestures” (Maddalena 2015a). Our communicative acts are gestures, or means to understanding the world. Following certain constructivist insights – like those of Austin, Foucault, and Goffman – practices and habits of action can be considered to be embodied reasoning. In these habits of action, which include communicative habits that have become part of the use of our technological tools, we are always developing a comprehension of reality. This fact would allow us to interpret the electronic instruments of the digital revolution as an integral part of the effort of human reasoning to understand the world. Like the manufactured stone tools that characterized primitive human beings, and the tools for writing and eventually printing that developed into mass communication media, present-day electronic and digital tools are means of perceiving and reasoning about the world. We understand our world through the tools we use, and they in turn, as McLuhan rightly pointed out (McLuhan 1962, 1964; McLuhan & McLuhan 1988), modify our perception of reality. There is nothing abnormal about what is happening with today’s technology. Human beings always reason by means of their instruments. When we communicate through our computers, tablets, and smartphones, we embody and develop a conception of reality and of the world. Knowing these habits of action, and what they imply, is now vital, if we do not want to surrender to cognitive and social mechanisms of our own creation that are derived from these same tools. In order to be effective, education to critical thinking and media literacy must enter into this field of technology in a way that is not just abstract. This is a kind of task that it is easier to perform in social groups than alone.

31Third, from a sociological standpoint, this rich realism also becomes relational, responding to the social need for an answer to the problematic issues we tackled at the beginning of this paper. The philosophical attitudes necessary to achieving this realism require common research into the relational nature of human beings (Archer & Maccarini 2013; Donati & Archer 2015; Dépeltau 2018), research which may provide a possible answer to the social problem of fake news. The places in which we are most likely to listen to criticism are small circles bounded by reciprocal trust. Families, neighborhoods, communities, unions, political clubs and parties are examples of social realities in which we participate freely and share common goals – places where we trust other members. Given the existence of common goals in these places, the critical thinking at work there is not done in a sceptical way and references to truth are not limited to positivist data. In these groups or communities, people need to attain these common goals and they need the interpretation of data. This is the everyday reformulation of the community of researchers that was saluted by Peirce. From a sociological and political point of view, these realities are called intermediate institutions of civil society, meaning that they stand between the naked citizen and the state (Rosboch 2018). In them, the citizen is armed with his or her human relationships. The relevance of these associations and communities was the keystone of Alexis de Tocqueville’s appreciation for American democracy (Tocqueville 2000). In fact, free intermediate institutions are intrinsically democratic, since they require forms of internal dialogue and deliberation. Certainly, they do not produce democracy automatically: there are plenty of families, groups, communities, and associations that are not democratic. However, the risks of authoritarianism and self-referentiality are lower than in those realities in which the citizen remains alone in relationship to power. In short, an essential – perhaps the essential – condition for the survival of a democratic, pluralistic society is that standing between centralized state institutions, large public organizations, the mainstream media, and individual citizens there exists an active and well-defined intermediary layer of groups, communities, associations, and local media where people can meet and recognize one another. Such a layer serves as a filter for the influences of these large institutions. As some of the most important critical observers of mass society have maintained since the 1950s (Arendt 1951; Nisbet 1953; Kornhauser 1959), when this filter layer erodes and weakens to the point of failing in its essential function, the result is a “naked society” which renders individuals atomized and defenceless against influences, conditioning and manipulation from above, while at the same time exposing institutions to pressures from below, from the mass of individuals stripped of significant relationships with one another, and can therefore be easily infiltrated by professional agitators and manipulators.

Conclusion

32Even though the big political events that triggered the issue of fake news and post-truth have passed, the trouble with this topic remains (Tiercelin 2021). In fact, the political debates uncovered the real situation of the problematic status of the relationship between reality, truth, and communication in our epoch. This paper has presented three theoretical-practical mental habits related to this entanglement, looking at both its philosophical and sociological aspects. The argument of the paper is that after the postmodern deconstruction of the aforementioned plexus in the second part of the twentieth century, philosophy and sociology of communication turned to a more realist approach. This has given rise to some possible solutions to the issue of fake news and its cultural background of post-truth.

33Here we examined some new shadows of realism that lean towards a sort of new positivism or new scientism. The communicative reflex of this theoretical attitude is the culture of disintermediated journalism, as proposed by Julian Assange, or various forms of big data journalism. The claim is that this form of communication is more scientific and, thus, more respectful of “the” (single) reality. We object that this form of positivism risks allowing only trivial forms of communication, those that present “objective” data, and discards all of the analyses of communication of the past century that explained the decisive role of human constructions in creating the reality we communicate. In this sense, neo-positivist and scientist points of view about reality risk becoming naïf in their self-claimed reliability.

34The second strategy examined is the recourse to critical thinking, here understood as confidence in argumentative human capacities and the need to teach them as much as possible in educational settings. As much as this strategy may be useful, we think it is insufficient because of its weak theoretical foundation, which often relies either on rationalism or on scepticism. Both grounds would seem to provide soil for the growth of the conspiracy theories and social solipsism that are important parts of the problems of fake news and post-truth.

35Finally, we proposed a rich relational realism based on Charles S. Peirce’s studies on reality and mathematical continuity. Peirce’s Scotist realism introduces many different realities, including the metaphysical reality of relationships. Epistemically, this metaphysical realism allows for a positive look at tools that humans forge in order to develop their knowledge of reality. These tools are both parts of reality and developers of reality, a fact that causes the dichotomy between constructivism and realism with respect to communication to disappear. Finally, this metaphysical realism suggests that real relationships like families, groups, associations, and parties; namely, small groups bounded by reciprocal trust and common goals, defined also as “intermediate institutions,” are possibly the most credible players in the fight against fake news and the post-truth mentality.

36Also Berger and Luckmann, at the end of the last century, recalled the importance of these intermediate institutions in very similar terms, but with a particular attention to the production and transmission of values and norms of action (including political norms and actions) in a pluralistic environment comprised of various functional spheres and multiple kinds of normativity. They observe that two extreme and opposing reactions take place in the context of modern pluralism. The first involves an attempt to close the gaps that open up in the “subjective schemes for interpreting life” (Berger & Luckmann 1995: 59) by strengthening the defensive barrier of old and new forms of fundamentalism that strive to lead the whole society back to ancient values and traditions or, more often, by resorting to the more moderate form of “ghettoization of the ‘own’ group within society as a whole” (ibid.: 60). The second involves embracing relativist attitudes that “abandon the attempt to assert any kind of common values and stocks of meaning” (ibid.). The consequence is that a consistent relativist “will not be capable of coherent action for which he or she can assume responsibility” (ibid.).

37According to Berger and Luckmann, between the impossibility of the “relativist” reaction to modernity and the frightening possibilities of the “fundamentalism,” there is a third position, which they consider one of the few realistic possibilities:

In modern societies there are, however, also partial structures, above all the “intermediary institutions” that prevent these crises of meaning flaring up into crises of the entire society. They are more or less successful depending on their quality and quantity in modern societies. Given similar basic structural conditions the failure of counter-acting forces to develop or their decisive weakening can lead to the spread of crises of meaning, whereas strengthening these forces can help to dam the crisis. (Ibid.: 62)

38These

intermediary institutions should be supported where they do not embody fundamentalist attitudes [that is, if they do not close in on themselves in an exclusive way], where they support the “little life worlds” […] of communities of meaning and faith and where they develop their members as carriers of a pluralistic “civil society.” In the “little life worlds” the various meanings offered by agencies for communicating meaning are not simply “consumed”; rather they are appropriated communicatively and selectively processed into elements of the community of meaning and life. (Ibid.: 63)

39Opposition to post-truth culture must begin by reinforcing these realities through supportive laws and subsidies and by pushing them to educate their members to a rich, relational realism, a deep media literacy and the pursuit of truth understood as an ideal and not as violent imposition.