EPISTEMOLOGIJA POSTISTINE I KOLAPS ZAJEDNIČKOG KOGNITIVNOG HORIZONTA: FILOZOFSKI TEMELJI SAVREMENIH KRIZA DEMOKRATIJE
EPISTEMOLOGY OF POST-TRUTH AND THE COLLAPSE OF SHARED COGNITIVE HORIZON: PHILOSOPHICAL FOUNDATIONS OF CONTEMPORARY DEMOCRATIC CRISES

Summary/Abstract: The article develops a philosophical analysis of how contemporary democratic crises can be understood as consequences of the collapse of the shared cognitive horizon — the structural condition under which citizens of a political community can share enough epistemic ground to conduct rational public deliberation about common questions. The research employs a mixed-method critical-analytical approach that integrates a structured synthesis of peer-reviewed literature published between 2014 and 2023, comparative documentary analysis of empirical studies on the spread of disinformation and polarization, and conceptual decomposition of philosophical frameworks in the fields of social epistemology, political epistemology, and deliberative democratic theory. The central finding is that the phenomenon of post-truth represents not a contingent epoch of particular untruthfulness, nor a technological consequence of social media, but a structural collapse of three coupled dimensions of the shared cognitive horizon — the epistemic dimension of shared methodological standards, the discursive dimension of the shared public sphere, and the institutional dimension of shared epistemic authorities — and that no dimension can be substantively restored in isolation from the other two. The empirical pattern documented in the reviewed literature — from data on the dramatically asymmetric spread of false news on social media, through studies of the polarizing effects of exposure to opposing views, to analyses of the contestation of epistemic authorities in contemporary populist movements — confirms that reform initiatives directed at any single dimension systematically fail because the unaltered dimensions compensate for the local change. The original contribution of the article is the introduction of an analytical framework of the tripartite collapse of the cognitive horizon, which decomposes the post-truth crisis into three components and specifies the feedback paths through which each component intensifies the other two. The paper concludes with implications for contemporary democratic theory and proposes criteria of systemic adequacy for future reform interventions. Methodological limitations include reliance on English-language academic literature and the necessary abstractness of conceptual synthesis.

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