Echoing an iconic cover from the ‘60s, an April 2017 issue of Time Magazine
featured no image at all, but rather asks, “Is Truth Dead?” Many shudder at the
specter that we have entered a new, so-called “Post-Truth” age, in which truth has
been toppled from its perch as the summum bonum of thought and inquiry.
Wouldn’t such a world only give aid to those anti-intellectual troglodytes who wish
to dismiss the value of science and other responsible inquiry as “fake news,”
inconveniences which can be brushed aside simply by advancing “alternative
facts?” Absent truth, how can we value honesty in our political discourse? Indeed,
what would become of philosophy itself, if truth no longer served as its norm or
highest aim? In a recent advertising campaign, The New York Times reassures us
that The Truth, though hard to find and hard to know, is nevertheless “more
important now than ever.”
At the same time, recent accounts in the popular press have sought to pin our
current anti-intellectual climate upon forces from within the academy itself. In
particular, it has been suggested that pernicious elements of the American
pragmatist tradition have paved the way for truth’s demise. For instance,
Christopher Scalia (and son of the Supreme Court Justice) writes in The
Washington Post that the pragmatist label “could very well lend Trump that
always-coveted air of gravitas, gilding his unpredictable and inconsistent ideas
with a semblance of respectability and intellectual seriousness.”
