ABSTRACT
“What is truth?” Pontius Pilate asked skeptically, hoping for the worst, and would have found himself comfortably at home with presidential politics in the United States. Philosophical disputes aside, in practical affairs almost everybody shares a definition of truth that is notably simple and clear if only because it is no more than the opposite of lying. The political imagination is unusually inventive, however, in the face of prohibitions or taboos, and a notable moment in the new history of truth occurred during the Nixon administration—not, again, with the straightforward and so. The term misspeak itself thus breaches the law of non-contradiction, at once implying and denying that what was said was said intentionally. In practical terms it is another way of denying responsibility for telling the truth. The claim is especially insidious since it also suggests, as the new history of truth does more generally, that aside from the telling, there is no truth at all.
