What Post‐Truth Politics Does to the Belief‐Desire Model

ABSTRACT This paper argues that if the wildly popular expression ‘post‐truth politics’ means anything, it describes a political situation in which political speech elicits support from its audience without the public believing it to be true or not (Section 2). As a result, the phenomenon of post‐truth (PT), if there is such a thing at all, forces us to move our account of political action away from the standard belief‐desire model (BDM) (Section 3). I offer an alternative where attention replaces belief in Section 4.