Communication between Science and Society from a Linguistic Perspective: Contemporary Philosophy of Science and the Situation of ‘Post-Truth’

Communication between science and society in the era of the digital revolution poses new challenges for researchers. In particular, linguistics must take into account the contemporary view of the philosophy of science and the media status of scientific communication. In this regard, the purpose of this article is to review the current vectors of consideration of scientificmedia interdiscursivity. Analysis and synthesis of foreign and domestic concepts of science-society interaction allow us to speak of a new linguistic parameter in this sphere of communication: the categorical situation of ‘Post-Truth.’ A number of its key communicative features have been identified. Among them is the formation of a meaning-forming institution that has received the philosophical definition of ‘digital Leviathan’ (AI, neural networks). The machine approach to the semantic unity of ‘Truth/Falsehood’ (as a binary code ‘0/1’) separates scientific Truth from Knowledge as such and makes it dependent on the synchronising parameter ‘Contemporaneity’. In the trinity of scientific communication models ‘Deficit – Dialogue Participation’ this leads to a number of consequences. Science is ‘depressurised’ in favour of the media communication roles of scientists under the influence of the iconicity of the virtual environment, while the audience loses the ability to think dialectically, receiving content in accordance with their own preferences. This type of dialogue is accurately called ‘imitative-conventional’ by researchers. In our opinion, the main methodological conclusion of linguistics in this regard should be to pay attention to the epistemic modality of popular science statements, to the new pragmatics of delimiters and quantifiers ‘True/False’.