The best way get a clear view of questions about truth--in the law or anywhere else--is start, not with debates over modernism versus post-modernism, and the whole dubious history of ideas they presuppose, but with a few simple distinctions. Truth is the property of being true, what it is be Of the umpteen competing philosophical theories of the most plausible are, in intent or in effect, generalizations of the Aristotelian Insight that to say of what is that it is, or of what is not that it is not, is true. (1) These theories explain truth without reference what you or I or anyone believes, without reference culture, paradigm, or perspective. Some of them, the various versions of the correspondence theory, turn the emphatic adverb for which we reach when we say that p is true just in case actually, really, in fact, p, into serious metaphysics, construing truth as a relation, structural or conventional, of propositions or statements facts or reality. (2) Others, such as Tarski's semantic theory, (3) Ramsey's redundancy theory, (4) and the contemporary deflationist, minimalist, disquotationalist, and prosententialist theories that are their descendants, (5) don't require such an elaborate ontological apparatus. Truths are the many and various propositions, beliefs, etc., which are true, including: particular empirical claims, scientific theories, historical propositions, mathematical theorems, logical principles, textual interpretations, statements about what a person believes or wants or intends, about social roles and rules, etc. To say that a claim is true is not say that anyone, or everyone, believes it, but that things are as it says. However, some claims are such that the relevant things--a person's beliefs or intentions, a legal or grammatical rule--depend, in one way or another, on us; and some are such that it makes sense ascribe a truth-value only relative this or that community or social practice. Moreover, not every sentence, not even every declarative sentence, manages express something true or false; some, for instance, are too indeterminate in meaning have a truth-value. The effect of scare quotes is turn an expression meaning X into an expression meaning so-called 'X'. So scare-quotes troth, as distinct from is what is taken be truth; and scare-quotes as distinct from truths, are claims, propositions, or beliefs, which are taken be truths--many of which are not really troths at all. We humans, after all, are thoroughly fallible creatures. Even with the best will in the world, finding out the truth can be hard work; and we are often willing, even eager, take pains avoid discovering, or cover up, unpalatable truths. The rhetoric of moreover, can be used in nefarious ways. Hence an important source of the idea that truth is merely a rhetorical or political concept: the seductive, but crashingly invalid, argument I call the Fallacy. (6) What passes for the argument goes, is often no such thing, but only what the powerful have managed get accepted as such; therefore the concept of truth is nothing but ideological humbug. Stated plainly, this is not only obviously invalid, but also in obvious danger of undermining itself. If, however, you don't distinguish truth from scare-quotes truth, or troths from scare-quotes it can seem irresistible. Nowadays, it seems, the Passes-for Fallacy is ubiquitous. Perhaps it is rooted in the philosophies of Marx and Freud, in the idea of false consciousness and the hermeneutics of suspicion. (7) It is enabled by regimes of propaganda and, in our times, by the overwhelming flood of information, and misinformation, which promotes first credulity and then, as people realize they have been fooled, cynicism. For when it becomes notorious that what are presented as truths are not really truths at all--that Pravda is full of lies and propaganda, that the scientific breakthrough or miracle drag prematurely trumpeted in the press was no such thing--people become increasingly distrustful of truth-claims, increasingly reluctant speak of truth without the precaution of neutralizing quotation marks; until eventually, they lose confidence in the very idea of and formerly precautionary scare-quotes cease warn and begin scoff: 'Truth? …