This discussion will be 9-10 a.m. Friday, April 18, in Weil Hall’s Kuehner Court. RSVP here.

Truth?

We are in the business of science and scholarship. Our job is to uncover fundamental truths about nature, to document these truths, and to advance them so that we can better understand the world, and, in so doing, make the world better. Core to our ability to do so is confidence that we can identify the truth. We spend an enormous amount of time in science ensuring that our methods are robust, that we are inoculating our work against biases, that we are drawing the correct inferences. In other words, we want to make sure that what we document, what we advance, is true.  But how certain are we that what we think is true really is true?

We could be approaching problems that we tackle incorrectly; our methods could leave us vulnerable to misunderstanding foundational truths. We also could be viewing a problem the wrong way, bringing biases to the problems we tackle that put us on a wrong inferential path. Or we could be asking the wrong questions. The history of science and scholarship is rife with errors that we then corrected. Linus Pauling thought that DNA was a triple helix and published a paper documenting that. It turned out he was wrong, that was not true. And what do we do when others doubt our facts, and suggest alternate versions of truth? How do we deal with alternative truths? With personalized versions (“my truth”)? How can we be sure that what we are documenting is true, and how do we advance that truth against forces that wish to promote their truth? What is the place for humility in assessing what we think is true, and where do we push back with certitude? After all, we do know that the Earth is not flat. Don’t we?

To help ground the discussion:

“2. Plato’s Understanding of Reality,” by Jest Education

Power/Knowledge : Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, by Michel Foucault (See comments on truth, on pages 131-133)

Ioannidis JPA. Why Most Published Research Findings Are False. PLoS Med. 2005; 2(8): e124. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124

Nuzzo, R. Scientific method: Statistical errors. Nature. 2014; 506(7487): 150–152. https://doi.org/10.1038/506150a

“Live Not By Lies,” by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn“How to Convince Your Flat-Earth Friends the World Is Round” by Rhett Allain in Wired