Jim Joquico

The post-truth era is as much about defining truth as a concept as it is about identifying which truth is the truth. On one hand, many still subscribe to the idea of a singular, objective reality that can be accessed with the right epistemological tools. On the other hand, a pluralistic approach that embraces equally valid realities, where the positivist lens is just one of many, is becoming an increasingly acceptable explanation for our current social configuration. Truth is not just debatable; it is experiential — personal, even. Reality has reproduced itself into fractured, competing versions depending on the observer, and as a result, discourse has morphed into a shadow of its former constructive self. When faced with this postmodern iteration of meaning, we grasp for explanations as to why others seem so committed to “wrong” realities, and we typically reach for one of three frameworks: pathology, strategy, or machinery. And they’re not enough. Pathology explains epistemic deviance as individual dysfunction, caused by cognitive failures, from bad heuristics to poor education. This locates the problem in the person, bringing forth appropriate interventions like media literacy and inoculation against false beliefs. Strategy blames individual agency, where people rationally engage in disinformation for personal gain. This framing is carried through the proposed fixes, such as combating information interference and manipulation. Machinery sees the problem as a systemic product, where algorithmic influence and institutional authority are understood as creating the necessary conditions for a post-truth reality. This explanation calls for structural and regulatory solutions, including platform regulation and anti-trust action against technological monopolies. What if all three explanations miss something more fundamental? Many draw upon some or all of these frameworks to create comprehensive solutions to the multiple reality “problem,” which itself points to something more foundational that operates underneath these interpretations of the issue. What if people are motivated by something deeper: the existential need to maintain their very being by projecting meaning? And what if the emergence of competing realities isn’t a breakdown of rational discourse or a failure of information systems, but the inevitable result of human beings asserting their right to exist meaningfully in this world? This is the starting point for contestivism: a paradigm that views social reality as perpetual contestation of meaning through and for power, where the stakes are nothing less than being itself. Rather than treating competing worldviews as pathology to cure, strategy to counter, or machinery to reconstruct, contestivism recognizes them as expressions of the fundamental human drive to defend meaning as a condition for existence. The paradigm reveals the structural grammar underlying all meaning contests — including the very debates about truth and reality that define our current moment. It provides analytical tools for understanding how meaning emerges, stabilizes, and transforms without requiring us to adjudicate which meanings are “correct” or assign moral judgment to their proponents. Most importantly, it acknowledges that these contests aren’t peripheral to social life — they are social life. This paper develops contestivism as both a theoretical framework and an analytical lens, demonstrating how it can illuminate phenomena from disinformation to political polarization to social change. By understanding social reality as perpetual contestation rather than fixed truth or infinite relativism, we gain tools for understanding the post-truth era not as a symptom of an underlying problem, but as an inescapable condition of human society.

This paper develops contestivism as a meta-paradigm for understanding social reality as perpetual contestation of meaning through and for power. The framework operates from the foundational premise that meaning constitutes a necessary condition for human being: to lose control is to risk existential erasure. Contestivism theorizes the structural grammar underlying all social phenomena through three intersecting analytical dimensions: domains of contestation, orders of social organization, and modes of power. These elements form recursive engines that generate gradients of being that motivate further contestation. Unlike frameworks that pathologize competing realities, contestivism recognizes meaning contests as the fundamental mechanism of human social organization. The framework offers analytical tools for understanding the post-truth era as the inevitable condition of human society.