For those who don’t recall their sophomore philosophy class, epistemology concerns the question of how we know what’s what. That is, can we believe the evidence of our senses? How do we tell fact from fiction, belief from knowledge, information from supposition? Without consensus on this problem, all further reasoning about ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics is moot,

Ordinarily, this issue would be distant from day to day civic concerns, but the Trump administration is a special case. From the first day of his campaign, observers noticed the candidate’s remarks had only a passing acquaintance with the agreed upon facts of everyday life.

Falsehood is not unusual in the political realm, but it has now been elevated to a daily torrent of bunk. Those who keep count say the tally since inaugural day has topped four thousand untruths and is now averaging seven official lies a day. It keeps the fact checkers working overtime.

Generally, the lies we encounter are subtle and venial, these are bald-faced whoppers. In fact, Trump and his minions make it a habit to refute the notion of objective reality and to suggest whatever they claim today is self-evidently true and everything else is fake news, or as Kellyanne Conway memorably put it — “alternative facts.”

Now, Trump’s least trustworthy mouthpiece, Rudy Giuliani, has gone Kellyanne one better, expressing the governing ethos of this administration with lunatic pith — “Truth isn’t truth.” His clarification only made it worse. If two people describe an event differently, (he said, she said), each has his own truth, so there isn’t only one true truth.

Perhaps we are meant to believe we are in the land of quantum physics, Heisenberg’s uncertainty, Schroedinger’s cat, and the multiverse, but for more traditional-minded folks this sounds a lot like the patter of the bunco artist. Most of us tend to believe there is an objective reality, not a world where wishful thinking makes things so. In short, we operate on this side of the looking glass.

Philosophers generally do too. Francis Bacon began his essay “Of Truth,” by alluding to the Bible. “‘What is truth?’ said jesting Pilate and would not stay for an answer.” But Bacon goes on to say that there is an answer. There is truth, and there are lies. He notes that poets lie to give pleasure and merchants to gain an advantage, but in civil life to lie debases man’s nature, as an alloy debases a pure gold or silver coin. “These winding and crooked courses are the goings of a serpent.”

Montaigne, a wittier commentator than Bacon, thought the trouble with lies was their endlessness. “If falsehood had, like truth, but one face only, we should be upon better terms; for we should then take for certain the contrary to what the liar says: but the reverse of truth has a hundred thousand forms, and a field indefinite, without bound or limit.” This is Trump incarnate, described over 400 years ago.

In the novel, “Alas, Babylon,” the protagonist can hardly bear to lie because his father, a judge, only punished him with an old-fashioned whipping once, but it was memorable. “He implanted the virtue of truth through the seat of his pants,” for the sin of telling a lie. And the judge explained his severity to his son. “Lying is the worse crime. It is the indispensable accomplice of all others.”

It make sense that a judge should feel so strongly about the matter. Courts are finders of fact, and layers of blame. Their business is to decide who speaks the truth when “he says” and “she says,” not to suppose that each person is entitled to his own truth.

In the worst case, prior to the Trump administration, of an untrustworthy president and his minions, Richard Nixon and those who abetted him eventually found themselves in legal jeopardy. By the time the dust settled, forty-eight men were found guilty of crimes, not counting the unindicted co-conspirator.

They were in contempt of court, committed perjury by lying under oath, committed burglary, and obstruction of justice. One was an Attorney General of the United States, one a former Attorney General, others had worked for the CIA and the FBI, three were White House Counsels, like Trump’s man Don McGahn.

He has apparently learned the lesson of Watergate, even if no one around him has. He has spent thirty hours testifying to the Special Counsel’s investigators, truthfully presumably. He no doubt doesn’t want to end as half a dozen Nixon attorneys did — disgraced, disbarred, and/or serving prison terms.

What is truth? In cases like this, it’s what keeps you from being indicted, convicted, incarcerated or impeached. Nixon found out the hard way that, “If the president does it, it isn’t illegal,” isn’t true. It’s a lie. And the price for lying to the wrong people is high.