Abstract
Recent political developments have made the notion of 'post-truth' ubiquitous. Along with associated terms such as 'fake news' and 'alternative facts', it appears with regularity in coverage of and commentary on Donald Trump, the Brexit vote, and the role – relative to these phenomena – of a half-despised, half-feared creature known as 'the public'. It has become commonplace to assert that we now inhabit, or are entering, a post-truth world. 
 In this paper, I issue a sceptical challenge against the distinctiveness and utility of the notion of post-truth. I argue, first, that the term fails to capture anything that is both real and novel. Moreover, post-truth discourse often has a not-fully-explicit political force and function: to ‘irrationalise’ political disaffection and to signal loyalty to a ‘pre-post-truth’ political status quo. The central insight of the speech act theory of J. L. Austin and others – that saying is always also doing – is as indispensable for understanding the significance of much of what is labelled ‘post-truth’, I’ll argue, as it is for understanding the significance of that very act of labelling.
 Keywords: post-truth, speech acts, Trump, brexit, Austin
Highlights
The term ‘post-truth’ is still relatively new, and often used without much consciousness or explicit explanation of its meaning
Along with associated terms such as ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts’, it appears with regularity in coverage of and commentary on Donald Trump, the Brexit vote, and the role – relative to these phenomena – of a half-despised, half-feared creature known as ‘the public’
That recent years have seen a radical increase in the amount of lying or propaganda in politics, sufficient to justify the rather grand-sounding assertion that we have entered a new era of ‘post-truth’
Summary
What I am calling the ‘post-truth thesis’ is a claim to the effect that some kind of deep and significant shift has occurred – and has. Occurred quite recently – in people’s relationship to truth. I noted that the post-truth thesis, as it stands, is crucially underspecified. It is not always clear, for example, which people are meant to have changed their relationship to truth (for the worse). Too, what the nature of this change in the relationship to truth is supposed to be, according to proponents of the thesis. This presumably varies from case to case, so that there is not a single ‘posttruth thesis’ but many. I’ll outline the three which I take to be the most prevalent, whether implicit or explicit, in post-truth discourse
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