What is truth? Humanities faculty offer their perspectives
While debate about “truth” seems to dominate public discourse lately, this is nothing new: scholars and thinkers have been wrestling with concepts of truth since ancient times.
UCLA
Josiah Royce: “The world is a progressively realized community of interpretation.”
| January 10, 2019
For Bruins, including the humanities faculty we’ve quoted in this issue, the pursuit of truth is a fundamentally social process. Any claim is subject to testing, refinement and occasionally flat-out debunking. We seek truth like connoisseurs – passionate and ever wary of shoddy substitutes.
Whoever you are and wherever you come from, when you step onto the UCLA campus, you’re invited to speak your own ideas, to defend them through the peaceful exercise of good thinking, to answer critiques, perhaps to change a mind, perhaps to change the world.
We know that books alone won’t preserve or defend truths. For that we need the willing, critical engagement of young and diverse thinkers who will take on the pursuit of truth as a project for their own time.
Little wonder that UCLA’s early leaders thought to inscribe iconic Royce Hall with Josiah Royce’s observation: “The world is a progressively realized community of interpretation.”
This world belongs to you.
– David Schaberg, Dean of Humanities