Who Owns Truth? Orders of Disenchantment and the Reconfiguration of Epistemic Authority

Current debates on the societal role of science point simultaneously to the erosion and overstretching of its epistemic authority. Diagnoses such as a “crisis of factuality”, or “post-truth politics” suggest that the symbolic orders through which science has historically been legitimised are becoming unstable. While these developments are observable across democratic contexts, this paper takes the German discourse and its associated public controversies as an illustrative point of departure. Drawing on Weber and contemporary analyses by Bogner (2021), Kumkar (2022), Vogelmann (2023), Strohschneider (2024), and Kaldewey (2025) it develops the concept of orders of disenchantment as narrative regimes of epistemic authority. The paper argues that struggles over truth today are best understood as conflicts between coexisting and historically layered narrative orders that shape how science is imagined, invoked, and contested. The three orders of disenchantment proposed here are developed as ideal-typical rather than chronological configurations. The first order corresponds to the Weberian narrative of the disenchantment of societies through rationalisation, in which scientific objectivity, demarcation, and neutrality form the basis of epistemic authority. The second order reflects the reflexive turn of the twentieth century, in which constructivist and situated epistemologies reveal the contingency, positionality, and social embeddedness of knowledge production. The paper develops the third order as a heuristic for the present moment: a constellation in which science is simultaneously elevated as a final authority of orientation and destabilised through strategic delegitimation, affective polarisation, and the proliferation of “alternative facts.” This third order does not merely reflect diminishing trust; it signals a transformation in the political function of truth itself. Scientific authority is not rejected wholesale but redistributed: detached from institutional sites and selectively reappropriated within political and cultural struggles. Conspiratorial expert mimicry, “nostalgic positivism”, and the symbolic performance of scientific credibility illustrate a dynamic in which scientific language retains high legitimacy even as institutional expertise is contested. The resulting epistemic landscape is marked by ambivalence—science appears indispensable and suspect, authoritative and ordinary, stabilising and destabilised. The paper situates these dynamics within broader transformations of democratic governance. As political legitimacy becomes increasingly tied to scientific validation, the epistemisation of the political intensifies. Conflicts about interests, values, and worldviews are reframed as conflicts about “truth”, thereby shifting democratic contestation onto epistemic terrain. Interpretive and critical perspectives reveal that what is at stake is not merely factual accuracy but the narrative infrastructures through which societies orient themselves towards expertise. The erosion of shared epistemic reference points undermines the conditions for deliberation and critique. By conceptualising contemporary tensions as conflicts between narrative regimes, the paper moves beyond standard evidence-based policymaking frameworks and contributes to theoretical debates about the politics of truth in post-truth times. The orders of disenchantment illuminate why technocratic aspirations and anti-expert sentiments intensify simultaneously and why neither improved communication nor appeals to scientific literacy suffice to explain current epistemic conflicts. Grounded empirically in the German case yet offering broader analytical traction, the framework provides a historically informed and interpretively grounded lens for understanding the reconfiguration of epistemic authority today.