Post-truth

Post-truth is a term that refers to the 21st century widespread documentation of and concern about disputes over public truth claims. The term's academic development refers to the theories and research that explain the historically specific causes and the effects of the phenomenon. While the term was used academically and publicly before 2016 (post-truth politics), Oxford Dictionaries popularly defined it as "relating to and denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief." The term was named Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year in 2016, after the term's proliferation in the 2016 United States presidential election and the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom. Oxford dictionaries further notes that post-truth was often used as an adjective to signal a distinctive kind of politics – post-truth politics. Some scholars argue that post-truth has similarities with past moral, epistemic, and political debates about relativism, postmodernity, and dishonesty in politics. Others insist that post-truth is specifically concerned with 21st century communication technologies and cultural practices. Post-truth is about a historical problem regarding truth in everyday life, especially politics. But truth has long been one of the major preoccupations of philosophy. Truth is also one of the most complicated concepts in the history of philosophy, and much of the research and public debate about post-truth assumes a particular theory of truth, what philosophers call a correspondence theory of truth. The most prominent theory of truth, though with its share of critics, is correspondence theory, roughly, where words correspond to an accepted or mutually available reality to be examined and confirmed. Another major theory of truth is coherence theory, where truth is not just about one claim but a series of statements that cohere about the world.