Introduction
I’m going to talk about post-truth. The term burst onto the scene when Oxford Dictionaries made it their word of the year in 2016 in the wake of the Brexit Referendum and Donald Trump’s election. Oxford defines it as a circumstance where “objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” I don’t think this definition is very useful. I’ll say more about that later. Needless to say, post-truth and “alternative facts” certainly didn’t start with Trump. In his excellent short book Post-Truth, Lee McIntyre concludes that 20th century postmodernism is “the godfather of post-truth” [1]. This is probably the consensus view of most analytic philosophers and scientists. Although McIntyre has good reasons for this conclusion—and I will go into them in depth—it’s probably wrong.