Defending the truth

Abstract

This article is about ‘speaking truth to power’ 1. The nature of truth has been in contention for at least two and a half millennia but it can be agreed that it has reached a particular crisis point in the present, both within the academy and in the popular imagination – while the nature of power wielded by technology as it currently pervades society could never have been remotely imagined in previous centuries. The international importance of the defence of freedom of speech in these circumstances was acknowledged by the choice of activists for press freedom as the recipients of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize. The article therefore discusses power’s influence on truth as understood historically and more recently. It discusses the limiting, ‘naturalizing’, conceptions of knowing currently prevailing in philosophies of science, along with the pragmatist (Rortyan) retreat from any fixed philosophical stance on truth, and counters these with conceptions of ‘adaptive truth’ as first conceived by Charles Sanders Pierce and developed further by Joseph Margolis, with some supporting arguments suggested by the author. The final section focusses on the investigative journalists who are prepared to defend both truth and democracy, in this increasingly dangerous environment.