ABSTRACT
This chapter explores political discourse. This type of discourse is the first test for the conception of truth advanced in this book. Several issues will be discussed: the reliability of political discourses, the relationships between emotion and political discourses, the nature of journalists’ commentaries and analyses, and the nature of experts’ and journalists’ analytical discourses (exegesis, decoding, decipherment). The question of what makes these discourses audible—what makes them potentially acceptable—is one of the central points developed in this chapter. In order to make sense of how we accept or reject this type of discourse, the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman's theory of a dual cognitive system, System 1 (fast and superficial) and System 2 (slow and deep), is discussed and applied to fake news. This chapter will focus on the nature of politicians’ commitment, in contrast to the conclusion of Chapter 3, which centred on speakers’ commitment.
