Throughout the past few decades, it seems that truth has become harder to define in people’s minds. In a world filled with information from countless sources, misinformation and outright disinformation seem to distort our understanding of truth – perhaps now more than ever.
The question of truth also brings out the question of responsibility. Whose responsibility is it to ensure that what we see or hear is true? While propaganda has been employed in societies for ages, one can argue that in our time it wields a sword more powerful than ever.
The term “post-truth” was Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year in 2016 and was suggested then to be one of the defining terms of our time. Now why could “post-truth” have been the word of the year specifically in 2016? At least Brexit and the first presidency of Donald Trump could be listed as likely causes, with Brexit as the “first major vote in the era of post-truth politics”, according to Oxford Dictionary. Now, more than a decade into the post-truth era, our world has been profoundly changed.
Polarization and societal divide seem to have taken over the social discourse. The divides between people, beliefs, and their ideas of truth are growing rapidly. In the era of deep fakes, how do we even tell the truth from a lie and real from manipulated? What can we rely on to make informed decisions and take part in societal discussions? As social scientists, these are developments that we need to confront.
While our theme for the conferment can be explored by the evolving concept of “truth” in the context of a post-truth society, we must also consider our own perspective on it as social scientists and as a community. Challenges are posed by mis- and disinformation in contemporary discourse, and the university and social scientific research play an important role in combatting this. We do not wish to simply paint a dystopian picture of a future where truth no longer has any role, or that we are powerless against these forces that aim to distort truth. Rather, there is power in our academic community and the knowledge of the world that we can produce.
The strategic plan of the University of Helsinki 2021-2030 is based on four core values, the first one being truth. As social scientists we have a wide understanding of our society and yearn for an understanding of the meaning of “truth”. In the University strategy truth is defined as something that “makes us pursue new knowledge, requires critical thinking and promotes high-quality research and teaching.” To embrace this core value of the strategy it is important to think about the dimensions that truth has. Do we see truth as science or is science the truth? Do we even have to have a concrete idea of truth, or do we know how to reach it? With this theme, we want to encourage our academic community to reflect on their understandings of truth, and their relationship with ever-elusive concept. Will “unarmed truth and unconditional love” have the final word in reality?