How Did We Enter the Post-Truth Era?

The problem of truth is one of the central issues in philosophy. Our understanding of truth shapes what we believe and what we rely on in our lives and judgments. Over the centuries, thinkers like Aristotle, Socrates, Kant, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Foucault, and others have tried to answer questions such as: What is truth? Does it exist? What are its criteria? In 2,500 years, philosophers have moved from exalting truth as beauty and justice to deconstructing the concept entirely, replacing it with simulation, where reality disappears and post-truth prevails.

Crispin Sartwell, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Dickinson College and author of “Political Aesthetics,” examines how truth was interpreted by pragmatic, analytic, and continental philosophers in the 20th century and reflects on why, despite the “dissolution” of truth, we still need it.

Truth: From Central Concept to Crisis

People often say in passing that truth is dissolving, that we live in a “post-truth era.” But truth is one of our central concepts—perhaps the most central—and I don’t think we can do without it. To believe that masks prevent the spread of COVID-19 is to believe that this is true. To assert it is to claim it is true. Truth, it seems, is a core element of thinking and communication. And, of course, it is often at stake in practical political debates and decisions, whether about climate change, vaccines, who really won an election, or whom we should listen to and about what.

One might hope to turn to philosophy for clarification about the nature of truth, or even for its vindication. But pragmatic, analytic, and continental philosophy entered the post-truth era a century ago. If truth is now a problem for everyone—if the idea seems empty or useless in the “age of social media,” “science denial,” “conspiracy theories,” and so on—perhaps it means that “everyone” has caught up with philosophy circa 1922.

Truth in the Western Tradition

Before the 20th century, Western intellectual and spiritual traditions typically exalted truth. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty; that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,” declared John Keats, echoing Plato, who saw truth as the goal of philosophy and human life. In the “Phaedrus,” Socrates says:

“One must finally dare to speak the truth, especially when speaking about truth [aletheia], for that is where true being resides, which has neither color nor shape and cannot be touched; only the mind, the pilot of the soul, can contemplate it, and all true knowledge is knowledge of it.”

For Plato, truth is identical not only with beauty but also with goodness and justice. It is the highest thing. Jesus agrees, declaring himself in John 14:6 to be the way, the truth, and the life.

Philosophical reflection has not always treated truth as a god, but it has certainly been a central concept, commitment, and question for about 2,500 years. Notably, Aristotle, more grounded than his teacher Plato, gave the classic formulation of the correspondence theory of truth:

“To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false; while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true.”

This is a rather discouraging, if not confusing, definition, and like many characterizations of truth, it seems oddly redundant and not very informative. On the other hand, any formulation seems redundant, and the daunting question arises: Is the definition of “truth” itself true?

Correspondence and Coherence Theories

The correspondence theory of truth was formulated and reformulated over centuries. “Truth is the agreement between the intellect and the object,” said Thomas Aquinas, explaining “agreement” with synonyms like “coherence” or “correspondence.” Immanuel Kant put it this way: “Truth is the agreement of knowledge with its object.” This seems clear enough until you dig deeper, since Kant believed empirical facts are constructed within human consciousness. In a sense, for Kant, truth is the agreement of knowledge with itself or with its own involuntary constructions, not with external reality.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, in the “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” (1921), perhaps the last great statement of the correspondence theory, saw propositions as pictures of states of affairs: if the elements of the picture correspond to elements of the overall picture of reality, which represents them in precise relations to each other (a configuration of objects)—if the picture matches the fact—then the proposition is true.

But “agreement” or “correspondence” is hard to explain. Philosophers found they could not agree on what (propositions? beliefs? cognitions? images? ideas?) should correspond to what (objects? facts? the world? reality?). And then there was the small matter of correspondence itself, which seemed to require creating a simulation or picture of reality in your head or language, and trying to judge whether this representation is similar enough to things as they really are, apart from all representations. As many 20th-century philosophers, including Wittgenstein himself, noted, this is obviously impossible. It seems to require stepping outside our own consciousness and culture.

For these reasons, and under the influence of Kantian and Hegelian idealism, various classical versions of the correspondence theory were challenged by coherence theories, which reimagined truth. Underlying these debates was a struggle over what reality itself is: a series of discrete facts independent of human consciousness, as the correspondence theory suggests, or a web of interrelated facts, dependent on each other and perhaps on human consciousness, accessible only as a whole, as idealists insisted.

Of course, logical consistency is relevant to truth: for example, if you believe both sides of a contradiction, you have at least one false belief. Sometimes an error can be corrected by pointing out that what someone says now is incompatible with what they said earlier. British idealist F. H. Bradley put it this way in 1914:

“The general view, which may be said to have been inherited [from Hegel] by others and myself, is this: the criterion [of truth] lies in the idea of system. Theoretically, an idea is true because and insofar as it occupies its place in the organism of knowledge and contributes to it. Conversely, an idea is false if the opposite is true of it.”

To reach ultimate truth, we must see how a particular statement fits into something like a complete theory or system of the universe as a whole: each fact is a fact only in connection with such a system. Harold Joachim wrote in 1906:

“We cannot assume that the idea in question possesses its ‘meaning’ (fullness of sense or capacity to represent truth) by itself. It, in turn, draws its meaning from the larger meaningful system to which it contributes.”

Bertrand Russell, responding to Joachim, considered the obviously false statement “Bishop Stubbs was hanged for murder.” Suppose Bishop Stubbs was a saint, and his supposed hanging is completely inconsistent with most of what is known about him. However, belief that he was hanged for murder might fit happily into an anti-clerical system of beliefs such as “Most bishops are violent criminals” or “Bishops are usually hanged.” And, for that matter, consider the case where Bishop Stubbs actually was guilty of murder, which doesn’t fit with what we thought we knew about him. Strangely, that might turn out to be true.

In short, the key objection to the coherence theory is that there can be two or more equally coherent theories or belief systems that contradict each other, and in that case, coherence seems to force us to describe two or more completely incompatible beliefs, such as “vaccines work” and “vaccines don’t work,” as true, if each is part of a sufficiently coherent system. And perhaps that’s the case, since each functions in its own information bubble. Maybe a certain commitment to coherence led Hegel to reject the law of non-contradiction, which says that if a proposition is true, it cannot also be false. But at that point, coherence becomes rather inconsistent. And to get any truth at all, we may have to wait, like Hegel, for the synthesis of all knowledge and history into a single final picture.

The Pragmatist and Analytic Turn

By the early 20th century, many philosophers felt these views created more confusion than clarity. In academia, where the natural sciences and mathematics were producing relatively clear and useful results (and where most scientists and mathematicians got by just fine without a grand metaphysical theory of truth), the millennia-old history of reflection on the topic began to seem embarrassing.

The first real blow to the ship of truth was struck by American pragmatism, developed around 1880 by C. S. Peirce to bring philosophy in line with empirical science. Pragmatism demanded truths that could matter to someone, and a theory of truth that shows “what we practically mean” when we say something is true. Philosopher William James, in his lecture “What Pragmatism Means” (1906), called for a theory that gives us a sense of the “cash value” of truth. Or, as John Dewey put it in “Reconstruction in Philosophy” (1920):

“If ideas, meanings, concepts, theories, systems contribute to the active reorganization of a given environment, to the resolution of certain concrete problems and perplexities, then the test of their validity and value lies in the possibility of achieving this goal. If they succeed, they are reliable, solid, valid, good, true… If they increase confusion, uncertainty, and harm when acted upon, they are false. Confirmation, verification lies in deeds, consequences. By their fruits you shall know them. What truly guides us is true—demonstrated ability to guide is exactly what is meant by truth.”

For pragmatists, a belief or theory is true to the extent that it practically helps us solve problems or allows us to continue inquiry usefully. This is what we mean when we say it’s true that vaccines are effective. A metaphysical theory or convoluted formula, mired in obscurity and circularity, cannot serve a practical purpose. Pragmatism, wrote Richard Rorty in 1982, “says that truth is not the sort of thing one should expect to have a philosophically interesting theory about.”

After Dewey (and Russell), philosophy entered the post-truth era when, in 1927, Frank P. Ramsey flatly stated that the concept of truth is redundant, conveying no content or information:

“There is really no separate problem of truth, but only a linguistic muddle. ‘It is true that Caesar was murdered’ means no more than that Caesar was murdered, and ‘It is false that Caesar was murdered’ means that Caesar was not murdered.”

Ramsey acknowledged that the phrase “That’s true!” can express emphasis or agreement, but it has no content beyond the proposition it highlights. Truth, he added, is “a redundant addition.” Most subsequent analytic reflection on truth only refreshed these ideas. Philosophers formulated “deflationary” theories or simply declared the whole question a useless mess.

The problem shifted from trying to encapsulate a comprehensive characterization of truth in a neat aphorism to observing concepts that can be confirmed in logic or science. Alfred Tarski’s T-schema, first proposed in 1933, offers a procedure for saying what makes each true statement true, but does not provide a clear definition of the concept. The resulting formula is circular or redundant, agreeing with Ramsey’s claim that “truth” is superfluous. The statement “Snow is white” is true if and only if snow is white, Tarski notes, and in this way, one can start listing the truth conditions for every declarative statement, or any statement containing a positive assertion, by simply removing the quotation marks to show that we’re talking about the world, not words.

Although Tarski’s T-schema was presented as an interpretation of the role of truth in logic and mathematics, this is all we can really say about the meaning of truth even in ordinary language, if Ramsey is right. This position became known as “deflationism,” or the deflationary theory of truth. Tarski’s approach gives a recursive definition, a procedure for generating correct uses of the concept, rather than telling us directly “what it means.” But it is also, in its way, an attempt to say what “truth” means—whatever the statement it is embedded in means, without the word itself.

By 1996, Donald Davidson, in “The Folly of Trying to Define Truth,” described the now extensive history of Ramsey/Tarski/deflationists, to which he contributed centrally, as an attempt to “eliminate” truth. He also somewhat vaguely suggested reviving the concept of truth to try to show what role it plays in everyday human communication. Perhaps he hinted that, while “The election was stolen” is true if and only if the election was stolen, this doesn’t help us build a democracy.

Continental Philosophy and the Politics of Truth

On the continental side of the great disciplinary divide, philosophers held onto truth as a general concept a bit longer. Martin Heidegger’s wild and difficult essay “On the Essence of Truth” (1930), despite his own distrust of metaphysics, was perhaps the last great burst of speculation on the topic in the Hegelian style. Heidegger begins by asserting the need to know what must exist in the world and in humans for correspondence to be possible. Consider, for example, a common statement about a coin and what it must mean to correspond to the coin itself. “The coin is made of metal,” he reasonably notes, and continues:

“The statement itself is not material. The coin is round. The statement has no spatial character. You can buy something with the coin. The statement about it is never legal tender. But despite all these differences, the statement, as true, agrees with the coin. And this agreement, according to the usual concept of truth, is considered similarity. How can something completely unlike—a statement—be equated with a coin? It would have to become a coin and thus give up itself entirely.”

Heidegger’s approach was not to abandon the question of truth, but to return to the “essence” of truth—the conditions that make correspondence between statements and reality possible. He returns to truth, you could say, with a capital “T,” and does so in terms like “unconcealment of essence” and the idea of the essence of truth as a kind of “behavior”: a psychological or cultural state of openness in which things “appear” and thus support ordinary true statements. His attack on correspondence is sharp, persuasive, and familiar (as in James and Joachim). But his subsequent turn to the “essence” of truth, while I think it is genuinely deep, confirmed the worst suspicions of the pragmatists. Of course, in terms of the role of truth in, say, mathematics, concepts like “behavior” and “unconcealment” are, at best, meaningless.

If analytic philosophers were skeptics on conceptual grounds, the critique from the continental wave following Heidegger was political, focusing above all on the intertwining of truth and power—a problem that goes directly back to Friedrich Nietzsche. What united them with analytic philosophers, besides the suspicion that truth cannot or should not be theorized, was a relentless focus on the centrality of language. Both camps shifted the emphasis from the meaning of truth itself, as before, to the meaning of the word “truth.” And then they “deflated” that meaning.

Michel Foucault began one of his reflections as follows:

“Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint… Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the types of discourse it accepts and makes true; the mechanisms and instances that enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.”

“Truth is a thing of this world” and the link between truth and power—these points were made by Dewey. But pragmatists asserted them as entirely practical, directly linking truth to the prestige of science, technological development, and structures of expertise working for the common good. Foucault was much less optimistic. He, you could say, foresaw how the Chinese state would use the truth about its citizens, or what Facebook knows about its users and what it does with that information.

If Anglo-American philosophers kept trying to “deflate” truth even after all the air was gone, the continentals undermined it, then undermined their own undermining, and then even undermined that. One place this is evident is in Jean Baudrillard’s “hyperreality.” As early as the 1980s, he argued that much of our lives is so mediated by simulations, representations, and media that the distinction between representation and reality, or statements and facts, disappears. And if he and Rorty thought so in 1982, they would be even more certain now, if they saw Instagram. In “The Precession of Simulacra” (1981), Baudrillard wrote:

“There is no longer a mirror of being and appearance, of the real and its concept. The passage into a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor that of truth, opens the era of simulation, eliminating all referents.”

The Gulf War of 1991, Baudrillard argued, was more a television performance of war, and as he claimed in the title of one of his books, “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place.”

With this idea, continental philosophy too entered the post-truth era.

Why We Still Need Truth

Taken together, the continental and analytic crises show that truth is either an evil authoritarian force or nothing at all. That’s the story, right? Either way, then and throughout the century, truth seemed to be in collapse—a scene of confusion and despair, a land from which philosophers emigrated.

But we have not stopped needing to understand what truth is, nor have we stopped arguing about it as if we know what we mean. Questions about what truth is are, if anything, as relevant now as in 1900. Truth, it turns out, is as hard to eradicate as it is to clarify. We keep finding that we need the concept, and it certainly has practical value, despite all the debates. Do mRNA vaccines work? What should we do about the climate crisis? Did Joe Biden win the 2020 election fairly? Ideas that truth is fabricated, or is a simulation in which reality disappears, or is not a property of statements or theories and is a useless redundancy, or that talk of truth is always corrupt—all these views create difficulties and contribute in their own small way to the ongoing disaster.

I don’t think, despite all the attacks on the concept by philosophers of all stripes for a century, that we can do without truth. In a sense, I don’t think these attacks ever really touched truth itself, which (as we’ve seen) is necessary, still the only possible remedy.

It’s puzzling that Ramsey and the deflationists think that the fact that the idea of truth is presupposed in every act of belief or assertion shows that it is trivial or unnecessary. On the contrary, it is present everywhere and always. Ramsey showed that truth is central: it is impossible to believe anything while denying its existence. If it is meaningless, then all beliefs and assertions are meaningless. This is self-evident because it is everywhere. And if claims to possess, embody, or represent truth are often exercises of power, as Foucault rightly notes, they are also often acts of resistance. For example, oppressed groups have to fight for central truths about their identity and experience. All this is not limited to the realm of simulacra: as Foucault might ultimately say, it’s about bodies negotiating the social and physical world together.

As a first step toward resolving this, we might broaden our focus, shifting from the philosophical question of what makes a statement or proposition true or false, and focus on some of the ways the concept of truth functions in our discourse. That love is true does not mean its representation matches reality. It does not mean love is consistent with the rest of the lover’s belief system. It does not mean the hypothesis that my love is true helps us solve our problems (it may create more problems). It means love is deep and genuine, or, as I would put it, that it is relevant, real. That my goal is true does not mean my goal exactly reflects the external world, but that it strikes at the heart of the real world, so to speak.

Perhaps what is true or false is not only, or even primarily, a statement, but love, a goal, and the world itself. That is, I would like to start from the idea that “true” is a near-synonym for “real.” If I were to phrase my thought in Aristotle’s style, I might say: “What is, is true.” And perhaps there is something Heideggerian in this: to know and speak of the real requires a certain kind of commitment—a commitment to face reality. Failures of truth are often failures to face the facts. I’m not sure how much this helps mathematics, but mathematics needs to understand that it is just one of many forms of human knowledge. We—or at least I—can hope that from this broader framework of understanding, an account may emerge that addresses the traditional questions about propositional truth. I admit this is speculative.

Truth may not be the eternal, unchanging Form Plato thought it was, but that doesn’t mean it can be destroyed by a few malicious politicians, tech moguls, or linguistic philosophers, though tech moguls and some philosophers (like David Chalmers) may also be trying to undermine or invent reality. So far, they have not succeeded, and the question of truth is as urgent as ever, or even more so, and I would say that, despite the difficulties, philosophers need to make another attempt. Maybe it’s not about Aletheia as eternal joy, but about the truth we seek and need right now.