Abstract

In 2017, terms such as “post-truth,” “fake news,” or “alternative facts” suddenly became part of public discourse, and almost immediately scholars began to argue about their meaning. In particular, various definitions of the concept of fake news have been put forward and critically discussed in the literature (Rini 2017; Dentith 2017; Gelfert 2018; Jaster and Lanius 2018; Mukerji 2018; Zimmermann and Kohring 2018; Fallis and Mathiesen 2019). Yet, so far, there has been little explicit reflection on the methodological underpinnings of this conceptual work. Most proponents of definitional proposals appear to operate on a traditional conceptual analysis approach: The assumption seems to be that we have a firm intuitive grasp on the concept of fake news and that this puts us in a position to directly evaluate the merits of a proposed definition by evaluating its suitability in capturing this very concept. There is a striking lack of any previous problematization of methodology, as most proposals are based on this assumption by starting out to capture a set of allegedly uncontroversial cases of fake news.