Salience vs. Correctness
Phenomenology in the Post-Truth Era
Not all information is salient; and not all salient information is correct.
One of the hallmarks of phenomenology, particularly of Heidegger’s thought, is the recognition that the ability to judge something as correct or incorrect, valid or invalid, presupposes a more original relationship to things, a “clearing.”
One demystifying way to translate the idea of the clearing is to say that “salience precedes correctness” or “care comes before verification.”
If you want to put this idea even more ambivalently—with a head-nod to our post-truth era—you might channel Gadamer (Heidegger’s student) who says “prejudice is a condition for understanding.”
Thomas Kuhn articulates a similar idea as the phenomenologists with his concept of “paradigms”—one can’t assess the data before one unless one has an organizing orientation that allows one to organize it. But that organizing orientation is not in the data; it’s what makes something like data possible.
To the person toting facts, the Heideggerian or Kuhnian might respond, “Why should I care?”
Assuming the phenomenologists are correct that correctness is not the be-all and end-all, at least experientially, how much weight should we give to the aspiration to correctness, no matter what? Conversely, what are the domains where we should be willing to forgive the dismissal of correctness in the name of salience, and what are the domains where we should not be willing to forgive such dismissal?
One might respond that one should seek the quadrant in the 2x2 where correctness and salience converge—and yet in many realms this is neither feasible nor desirable.
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