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Introduction 11 what immediately comes to mind when post-truth is mentioned, namely, Donald Trump’s pronouncements and the persistent media coverage of those pronouncements. Serious though the implications of Trump’s pronounce- ments may be, the larger difficulty is that people are increasingly basing their personal and political decisions and actions on what the courts would call hearsay: unsubstantiated claims and assertions that gain unmerited force from sheer reiteration and presentation as all on a par with respect to their worth. The issue of truth decidedly has escaped seminar rooms and philoso- phy texts. It is now a pressing practical problem. We very much need to keep clearly in mind what is fundamentally at issue when post-truth is used and accepted. We cannot allow ourselves to forget or overlook that unlike expressions of emotions, desires, or fears, all assertions capable of being true or false have truth conditions that must be satisfied for the assertions to be true and to be rightly taken as true. Those truth condi- tions are satisfied only when mind-independent reality is so disposed that it contains delineable states of affairs that satisfy what the assertions say is the case. When the assertions correspond to how things are, to those delineated states of affairs, they are true. Admittedly, there are complications. These mainly have to do with two areas of ambiguity. The first area of ambiguity involves assertions about the past. In these cases, assertions about some events and states of affairs cannot be conclusively confirmed. The second area of ambiguity has to do with descriptions of events and states of affairs from different points of view and prompted by different interests. The same state of affairs or event may be described in ways that differ from one another regarding details, signifi- cance, causes and effects, or scope. This second area of ambiguity is the sole grain of truth in talk by Trump supporters about so-called alternative facts. With respect to assertions about the past, it is crucial to differentiate between a claim to the effect that Abraham Lincoln was assassinated and a claim such as that economic problems were the main cause of the U.S. Civil War rather than slavery. In the former case, there is abundant, relevant evi- dence in the latter case, interpretations of social and economic conditions will vary, and though there is reasonable evidence for each of the two differ- ent causes, it is not possible to say that one is true and the other false. The truth of many assertions about the past calls for special assessment of evi- dence and some measure of compromise in drawing conclusions about which description is preferable. But the reality of this undeniable ambiguity does not mean that the fact that there is such ambiguity regarding assertions about past events and states of affairs precludes that any assertions about the past can be judged true or false. Ambiguity due to diversity of descriptions of events and states of affairs is more complicated. The reasons descriptions may vary usually have to do with interests prompting the descriptions and with attribution of consequences.