Theory seminar: What is truthfulness and what are truth claims of media?
During this week's IMS seminar, IMS member Beate Schirrmacher poses the question "What is truthfulness?"
About the seminar
The seminar explores the concepts of truthfulness, authenticity and truth claims in media. The reliability and trustworthiness of information is often primarily discussed based on sender intentions, factual pacts and source criticism. Lars Elleström’s concept of truthfulness in communication as the indexical interplay between “external truthfulness” and “internal coherence” encourages to spell out truth claims made by media products and they enable us to move beyond binary understandings of authentic/true/factual vs. fake/false/fictional. Thus, the aim of the seminar is not to discuss the question of truth, but explore concepts that enable us to discuss these difficult questions.
Please read the chapter “The dynamics of truthfulness and media” as a preparation for the seminar. Beate will give a short introduction to how she applies the concepts in her research on factual narratives in journalism. She invites us to discuss cases from our areas of research that could profit from closer inspection of questions of truthfulness and truth claims. If you bring a short example, which serves as an illustration for the questions you would like to discuss, this will help us to together explore how the Elleström’s and related concepts can be used in this context.
Reading for the seminar:
Photo: 'Aurora - Connecting Senses’, Cristina Pop-Tiron & Signe Kjær Jensen