The Post-Truth Era

The so-called post-truth era has revealed vigorous disagreement over the truth of claims of fact — even for claims that are easy to verify.

That disagreement has alarmed our society. After all, it’s often assumed that the labels ‘true’ and ‘false’ should correspond to the objective accuracy of a claim.

But is objective accuracy actually the only criterion we consider when deciding what should qualify as true or false? Or, even when we know how objectively accurate a given claim of fact is, might we be sensitive to features of the social context—such as the intentions of the information source?