An iconography of truth

With all the talk about post-truth and post-facts swirling around me, I thought I had to write something about all this, about how utterly important it is to stand up for facts, truth, evidence, expertise, sincerity, honesty, dignity, integrity, fairness, justice…., however hard that might be in the political, economic, social, cultural, intellectual and academic …

Science, politics and certainty

I  have recently begun to think about what it might mean to give scientific advice (or science-based advice or evidence-based advice or, even, expert advice), a topic that I have not thought about before. I know that there is a lot of literature on that topic and that many people have written about it, but …

Images and visualisations: Technology, Truth and Trust

This is a GUEST blog by Andrew Balmer (University of Manchester): I recently co-chaired (with Brigitte Nerlich and Annamaria Carusi) an ESF conference on visualisation, hosted by the University of Linköping but actually held in Norrköping, Sweden. It went swimmingly, with a variety of interesting and instructive presentations and posters, from philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, nanoscientists, …