Reality and Truth

Criticism, Contact with Reality and Truth

Truth without consequence: reality and recall in refugees fleeing persecution.

Truth telling is one of the most fundamental tenets, not only of forensic psychiatry, but also of life in general. Within bioethics, deontological principles espouse truth telling, and in consequentialist approaches, truth telling is thought to foster respect and autonomy and ultimately to promote the greater social good. Paul Appelbaum writes of it as the first pillar of forensic ethics. Intui...

Ecosystem service: from virtual reality to ground truth.

E service is the collective name for the benefits that people obtain from ecosystems. As a scientific concept, it can be dated back to the 1960s; whereas, the proliferation of ecosystem service research has been since the late 1990s driving by the increasing environmental concerns of human societies. Ecosystem service has been defined from an anthropocentric perspective that links ecosystems an...

Viewing CSI and the Threshold of Guilt: Managing Truth and Justice in Reality and in Fiction

The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing But the Truth

This discussion aims to provide the occasional medical expert witness with background knowledge of the adversarial court system and the role of the medical expert witness within it. The parallel evolution of the adversarial and inquisitorial legal systems has been more out of tradition rather than any systematic review of the effectiveness of one system or the other. Both legal systems have the...