absorbed many of the radically relativistic attitudes
that predominate in postmodern cultural anthropol-
ogy. The central doctrine of science studies is that
science is “socially constructed” in a way that disal-
lows traditional notions of scientific validity and ob-
jectivity. On this view, scientific theories are merely
narratives peculiar to this culture and this point in
its history. Their chief function is to create stories
about the world consonant with dominant social
and political values. Thus, they are no more “true,”
or even more reliable, than the myths, legends, and
just-so stories of other cultures. All are equally cul-
ture-specific.^15
Post-truth claims were just as prominent in
the 1990s as they are now, and no less criticized,
even parodied. Recall that this was the decade
of the wildly popular television series The X-Files,
a conspiracy-laden mosh pit of aliens and UFOs,
monsters and demons, mutants and shape-shifters,
urban legends and government cover-ups, and all
manner of paranormal piffle. So trendy was the
show that The Simpsonscaricatured it with an
episode titled “The Springfield Files,” in which
Homer has a close encounter of the third kind
after downing ten bottles of beer. X-Filesstars
Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny (Scully and
Mulder) guest star as investigators of the alien
abduction, and Leonard Nimoy, host of the 1970’s
more-or-less nonfiction version of The X-Files
called In Search of...,voiced the introduction, an-
nouncing: “The following tale of alien encounters
is true. And by true, I mean false. It’s all lies. But
they’re entertaining lies, and in the end isn’t that
the real truth? The answer is no.”
So post-truthiness is not new, but the avail-
ability bias dialed up to eleven through social
media led the Oxford Dictionariesto name “post-
truth” as its word of the year in 2016 after it doc-
umented a 2000 percent spike in usage over the
previous year, characterizing it as “relating to or
denoting circumstances in which objective facts
are less influential in shaping public opinion than
appeals to emotion and personal belief.” As the
dictionaries’ editor Casper Grathwohl noted: “We
first saw the frequency really spike this year in
June with buzz over the Brexit vote and again in
July when Donald Trump secured the Republican
presidential nomination. Given that usage of the
term hasn’t shown any signs of slowing down, I
wouldn’t be surprised if post-truth becomes one
of the defining words of our time.”^16 Even the vet-
eran CBS anchorman and 60 Minutescorrespon-
dent Scott Pelley succumbed to the temptation to
think we’re living in a post-truth era. On the final
day of 2019, reflecting on the message of his new
book Truth Worth Telling, summed up what has
happened to truth in the decade of the 2010s:
This is the thing that worries me the most about
our beloved country. We have gone from the in-
formation age to the disinformation age. I think
our viewers and our readers now have a responsi-
bility that they’ve never had before, and that
is that they have to be careful about how they
choose their information diet. This is going to be a
problem for the rest of our history, in particular
for democracies.^17
Not only is post-truthiness not new, but the
response to challenges to objective knowledge
are as robust today as in the past, if not more
so, having moved far beyond the pages of niche
magazines like Skepticand Scientific American,
which defend science, reason, empiricism, and
fact checking, and is now routinely addressed
in national news magazines and newspapers.
Despite President Trump’s constant reference
to the “failing New York Times” in his Twitter
feed,^18 for example, the circulation of the Grey
Lady has skyrocketed since Trump was elected.
In the 4th quarter of 2018 alone, for example, the
New York Timesadded 265,000 digital subscrip-
tions, turned a profit of $55.2 million, and saw its
newsroom staff grow to 1,600 people, the largest
number in its 167-year history.^19
Today, as dictionaries track the upswing in
post-truth language, and as political pundits
pronounce the end of truth and with it the Re-
public (if you can keep it), the Internet of ideas
has responded with tools to combat the illiber-
alism of unreason: real time fact-checking. As
politicians engaged in the old-time art of spin-
doctoring the truth in speeches, fact-checkers at
OpenSecrets.org, Snopes.com, FactCheck.org,
and PolitiFact.com tallied their errors and lies,
the latter cheekily ranking statements as True,
Mostly True, Half True, Mostly False, andPants
on Fire. As PolitiFact’s editor Angie Holan ex-
plained: “journalists regularly tell me their
media organizations have started highlighting
fact-checking in their reporting because so many
people click on fact-checking stories after a de-
bate or high-profile news event.”^20
Finally, the idea that post-truthiness could
invade the brains of gullible citizens is gainsaid
by new research by cognitive scientists that demon-
strates that people are not nearly as gullible as we’ve
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