In recent years, much attention has been focused on post-truth (Parasia, 2017), "fake news" (Molina et al., 2019; Allen et al., 2020), and conspiracy theories of all kinds (Bronner, 2013). The questioning of objective knowledge obviously undermines the very foundations of pluralist debate and democracy. However, do all current challenges in terms of knowledge pertain to post-truth? Is this notion well suited to life in an uncertain world (Callon, Barthes and Lascoumes, 2001; Akrich and Méadel, 2007), where the stakes are not those of the post-truth, for the good reason that the truth is not known, but has yet to be established? Wouldn't it be better to symmetrize the reflection, by completing the examination of the post-truth with a questioning of the pre-truth, that is to say, of the scholarly and secular approaches that aim, independently or jointly, to take into account and remove uncertainties? We propose to address these questions based on the case of the pandemic crisis, and more specifically on the controversies that have surrounded the use of face masks (Cochoy, 2020). In order to assess the "post-truth" and "pre-truth" dynamics that are unfolding in the face of masks, we will mobilize a large corpus of press articles published in 2020 and readers comments about these articles. What our survey shows is that, people do not simply affirm opinions; they also express aloud a large number of uncertainties. Thus, it is perhaps only by supplementing the monitoring of post-truth with the examination of pre-truth that we might find the means to develop new certainties and, ideally, to re-establish the conditions for a life without masks, a common meaning and a common world.