Conference Program

In 1980, Ian McBride led a collective that produced the McBride Report for UNESCO. The title of the report was One World, Many Voices. This report did not directly concern our discipline; but it identified two issue areas that are. The first, which is a result of the coming together of the world as one global international society, is the value of truth, its production, and access to it. The second, more central to us that the McBride Committee, is how to adjudicate truths as canons. The nature, accuracy, and/or essence of disciplinary regimes of truths matter particularly in troubled times. To be sure, this is an old problem; one identified as far back as Plato, when Socrates enjoined the collective us to guard against the pernicious effects of false opinions and untruths. The central point of my reflection today is to call attention to the manners in which our discipline produces untruths and misunderstandings as science only to hold them as predicates for war, violence, expropriation, and hegemony. A vast topic undoubtedly.