Words embody ideas, and their changing usage
and meaning are tracked by lexicographers in dic-
tionaries, which therein become barometers of cul-
tural trends. In 2006, for example, the American
Dialect Society and Merriam-Webster’s both chose
as their word of the year the neologism “truthi-
ness”, introduced by the comedian Stephen Colbert
on the premiere episode of his satirical mock news
show The Colbert Report(on which I appeared
twice^1 ), meaning “the truth we want to exist.”^2 It
was a prescient comedic bit as a decade later three
examples of truthiness entered our lexicon.
After Donald Trump’s Presidential inaugura-
tion on January 22, 2017, his special counselor
Kellyanne Conway concocted the term “alternative
facts” during a Meet the Pressinterview while de-
fending White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s
inaccurate statement about the size of the crowd
that day. “Our press secretary, Sean Spicer, gave al-
ternative facts to that [the inaugural crowd size],
but the point remains that....” at which time NBC
correspondent Chuck Todd cut her off: “Wait a
minute. Alternative facts? ... Alternative facts are
not facts. They’re falsehoods.”^3 German linguists
deemed it the “un-word of the year” (Unwort des
Jahres) for 2017. Later that year the related term
“fake news” became common parlance, leaping in
usage 365 percent and landing it on the “word of
the year shortlist” of Collins Dictionary, which de-
fined it as “false, often sensational, information dis-
seminated under the guise of news reporting.”^4
Such words (or un-words) are often invoked
as evidence that we are living in a “post-truth” era
brought on by Donald Trump (according to liber-
als) or by postmodernism (according to conser-
vatives). Are we living in a post-truth world of
truthiness, fake news, and alternative facts? Have
the populists and postmodernists won the day? Is
all the political, economic, and social progress we
have achieved over the past several centuries inreversal—the abolition of slavery and torture, the
decline of homicide, crime, and violence, the ces-
sation of the European Great Powers wars, and
the expansion of the moral sphere to include civil
rights, women’s rights, children’s rights, worker’s
rights, and gay rights for more people in more
places more of the time? Are we lurching back-
wards to the Middle Ages when bigots lighted
faggots to torch women as witches?
No. The Fall 2019 cover story of Skepticby
the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, “Why
We Are Not Living in a Post-Truth Era,” explains
why, starting with this question: Is the statement
“We are living in a post-truth era”...true? If it is,
then it isn’t! That is, if you argue that the state-
ment is true then you are making an argument,
which means you are committed to determining
whether the statement is true or false, which
means we have not passed into a post-truth world.
Similarly, is the statement “humans are irra-
tional” rational? If it is, then it can’t be because,
as Pinker asks rhetorically, “If humans were truly
irrational, who specified the benchmark of ra-
tionality against which humans don’t measure
up?”^5 As Pinker reflected in his 2018 book En-
lightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Hu-
manism, and Progress, “Mendacity, truth-shading,
conspiracy theories, extraordinary popular delu-
sions, and the madness of crowds are as old as our
species, but so is the conviction that some ideas
are right and others are wrong.”^6
In this issue of Skepticthe philosopher Lee
McIntyre, author of the book Post-Truth,^7 challenges
Pinker, starting with a definition of post-truth as
the “political subordination of reality,” which he as-
certains to be “a tactic in the authoritarian toolbox.”
McIntyre’s definition is much narrower than the
way Pinker and I use the term, confining it as he
does to political propaganda, which he says “is not
meant to convince you, but to show you who’s42 SKEPTIC MAGAZINE volume 25 number 1 2020ARTICLE
The Truth About
Post-Truth Truthiness
B Y M I C H A E L S H E R M E R