Truth, or the diverse types of situation to which we give that name, is, for the most part, a good thing to have. It is good, certainly, when friends are loyal, lovers faithful, their tears authentic, vows earnest, stories trust-worthy. It is generally in our interest to know what's up and what really happened. Not always, of course, or only: fiction and flattery, artifice and illusion, duplicity and pipe-dreams are also important, sometimes necessary, perhaps even, in their various ways, truthful, indeed sometimes supremely so – or so the poets have told us, though it's not clear they're to be trusted in such matters.

In any case, good though it is for the most part, truth seems to be in trouble these days. It is not that we are lying more or making more mistakes than in the past; the extent of those acts and ills appears pretty constant over human history. It is, rather, that certain familiar ways of thinking and talking about truth are proving troublesome. The concept appears elusive, difficult or perhaps impossible to articulate clearly in relation to other ideas – for example, fact, reality or objectivity – that have also become problematic. The term appears discursively slippery, its meanings multiple, irreducibly diverse, unstable and unfixable. Worrisome as all this is, even more troubling, from some perspectives, are assertions to the effect that this is, in fact, the case. For, it is said, such assertions (flying, as they do, in the face of truth) demonstrate the decay of intellectual competence in our time (at least in the humanities) or the domination of the academy (at least the literary academy) by dubious doctrines, such as postmodernism and radical relativism.