Over the last decade and a half, we’ve witnessed a spectacular amount of norm-breaking related to truth in American culture. That in turn has caused some to worry that we live in a “post-truth” age. But as the distinguished political theorist Linda Zerilli notes in her fascinating and insightful new study, what we are supposed to be “post” has never been particularly clear. While agreeing that democracies around the world face serious threats from misinformation and conspiracy theories, Zerilli argues that, to confront those problems intelligently, we must first ask what concept of truth we are presupposing when we talk about being “post-truth.” Often, she argues, we are pining after a concept that has little relevance in politics—and that assumption, ironically, can make us more, not less, vulnerable to anti-democratic ideals.

The concept of truth Zerilli thinks is often assumed in such discussions is that truth is human-independent, not made but found. This can be read as a truism—as a way of acknowledging the obvious fact that what you believe may not be so, and what is so you may fail to believe. But it can also be read in a more Platonic, metaphysically realist way—as the idea that true propositions either correspond to the intrinsic nature of the World-in-itself or they don’t.

The metaphysical realist’s picture may be tempting in certain realms of thought but, as Zerilli argues, it has “decisive consequences for democratic politics” (9). That’s because it binds truth in politics to “cognitive expertise and epistemic competence” and implies that “singular perspective, how the world appears to each of us, can never bring the shared world into view” (9). More importantly, Zerilli argues, metaphysical realism can lead us to think that the only problem with disinformation is that it leads to false beliefs—and thus combatting it amounts to getting the public more accurate information. Yet as Zerrilli argues, that overlooks what Arendt called the “modern political lie.” Where “traditional” political lies aim to deceive, the modern political lie “aims not to mislead us or to falsify reality but to recreate it” (5).

This is a key insight, and one that bears emphasizing. Consider nuggets like “Secret attack plans aren’t war plans” or “The January 6th protest at the US Capitol was peaceful.” Arguably, such political bald-faced lies are less like attempts to deceive and more like the schoolyard bully’s insistence that they are “safe” when they have clearly been tagged out. By insisting on his lie, the bully exerts power to “create” a new situation—a situation where everyone goes along and acts as if he really was safe. Likewise, the modern political lie—which Arendt thought was a hallmark of fascism—is meant as an exertion of power. Whether or not people believe it, the point is to make people act as if they do.

To get a better and more democratic theory of truth in politics, Zerilli recommends we follow Wittgenstein’s advice to begin “with the ordinary” (22). Three points from this strategy stand out. The first is that focusing on ordinary political practice means recognizing that we aren’t simply going around making political judgments mechanically one by one. We do so only against the backdrop of our political forms of life, emotionally embedded ideologies that tell us how to politically read our surroundings. Second, we must be “realistic” (in Cora Diamond’s phrase)—as opposed to realist—in our approach to both critique and theory in politics (146). This means, among other things, “remaining true to the facts of our lives (our cognitive capacities, conceptual abilities, finitude etc.)” and “generating questions from within our form of life” (146) not from an illusory view from nowhere. Third, for Zerilli, focusing on the ordinary means getting clear about the nature of democratic persuasion and the use (and abuse) of reasons in democratic disagreement. While there are “better and worse ‘pictures’” of political life (160), to democratically persuade someone, in Zerilli’s view, is not, at least fundamentally, about getting people to believe new truths or abandon falsehoods. It is about getting them to see that political problems and their solutions have multiple aspects. That places a demand on not just the persuadee but the persuader: “persuasion is the practice of seeing aspects anew for oneself” (169). Thus one “actually needs others to present rival pictures in order to see the limitations of one’s own picture” (171).

There is much to like in Zerilli’s account, as I’ve hopefully made clear. But one might ask for more details about the realistic theory of democratic truth. We know what it isn’t; it isn’t a “metaphysical” account. But that leaves some options one might wish had been more fully discussed.

One possibility is that Zerilli doesn’t think that truth is the sort of concept that needs much explanation. Many philosophers working on truth for a living would agree. So-called “deflationists” agree with Zerilli that truth is not a metaphysical concept. For them, to say that it is true that democracies should value diversity is just another way of saying that democracies should value diversity. There is nothing more to it. Yet it is unclear that Zerilli would adopt such an account. For one thing, she claims that the question of what is real is not the same as the question of what is true (10), something deflationists must deny. For another, she thinks there is more to say—in particular, there is more to say about what does (and doesn’t) make truth valuable for democratic politics.

At points in this book Zerilli comes closer than in her previous work to endorsing a picture of truth that aligns more with traditional pragmatism: “True discourse marks not only where a given practice gets codified and stabilized but also where questions initially arise and what was ‘certain’ takes the form of an empirical proposition” (178). This is a profoundly Deweyan thought. For Dewey, certainty is always in scare quotes. What is true is simply what empirically survives the fires of our collective experience and practices of persuasion.

I suspect that Zerilli finds the pragmatist account of truth still too “epistemic” for her taste. That may be so, but it is hard to stop epistemology from getting its nose under this particular tent. If, as Zerilli and I both believe, the work of democratic life is partly about freeing ourselves from our ideological blinders, from our tendency to only see certain aspects of political situations, we owe an account of how this gets done. Likewise, if there are better and worse political forms of life, we owe an account of the tools which we can use to tell one from the other. To answer such questions we’ll need some psychology, sociology, and feminist theory. But we’ll also need some epistemology—even if it is of a kind that is more social, more realistic, than we are used to.