Let’s say you want to send a confidential message to me, and possibly receive a reply. Through employing asymmetric encryption, you can prevent a third party from reading its contents, even if it can intercept the ciphertext. Through signatures, you can verify the authenticity of the message, and therefore detect any possible tampering. But for all this to work, you need to be able to verify the authenticity of the public keys first. In other words, we need to be able to prevent the aforementioned third party — possibly capable of intercepting your communications and publishing a forged key with my credentials on it — from tricking you into using the wrong key.
This renders key authenticity the fundamental problem of asymmetric cryptography. But before we start discussing how key certification is implemented, we need to cover another fundamental issue — identity. After all, who am I — who is the person you are writing to? Are you writing to a person you’ve met? Or to a specific Gentoo developer? Author of some project? Before you can distinguish my authentic key from a forged key, you need to be able to clearly distinguish me from an impostor.