ABSTRACT “Truth,” it turns out, is rather slippery. As geographers have become increasingly sensitized to issues of representation, they have delved into varying understandings of truth as a social construction. Most recently, the question of post‐truth has become significant. While cartographers have long discussed this issue, such as lying with maps and maps as propaganda, the GIS community has been slow to discuss it. This paper situates the emerging nexus between GIS and post‐truth within the evolving tradition of critical GIS. It calls for abandoning the correspondence theory of truth and replacing it with the pragmatist one. Next, it summarizes the contours of post‐truth as a social and epistemological phenomenon. Finally, it points to several areas in which post‐truth and GIS intersect, including the mapping of disinformation, location spoofing, big data, deepfake videos and remote sensing, and data quality. It concludes by calling for the GIS community to abandon unrealistic notions of objectivity and instead become more socially and politically self‐conscious.
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Barney Warf (2024) studied this question.
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