Rhetoric Before and Beyond Post-Truth

Rhetoric has long had a contentious relationship with the idea of truth, and the field of contemporary rhetorical studies has often been skeptical of easy understandings of truth. Meanwhile, hostility to truth is doing a lot of real-world damage, even if truth itself may never have been completely reliable. The idea of post-truth poses systemic problems for rhetoric’s traditional concerns. Active obfuscation, negation of truth, and even truth-indifference are certainly not new. But the past...