ABSTRACT
In this chapter I reflect upon whether the very idea of political epistemology is of doubtful application. Politics, I argue, certainly needs to be informed by knowledge. But that knowledge may be empirical, scientific, historical, or from whatever field is deemed relevant to the political decision at hand. So there will be no special, purely political, element in its epistemology. A more direct political question is usually one of deciding what to do, and here knowledge becomes a very rare commodity. We can seldom know in advance which decisions are best, and even with hindsight we may not know whether we could have done better given the constraints under which we were acting. I add some reflections on the very idea of a “post-truth” atmosphere, and end by arguing that the current of thought, or ideology, of postmodernism has less responsibility for anything specific to the contemporary atmosphere than many writers have thought.
