Speak Truth to Power

Speaking truth to power?

anyone who has read Hilary Mantel’s magnificent Booker prize-winning novel Wolf Hall will be in no doubt about the fate of government advisers who give their masters the wrong advice. During the reign of England’s tudor king, Henry Viii, refusal to recant your views resulted not only in a swift fall from grace and power, but also a short trip from Westminster to the tower of London. if you were...

Your Call Could not be Completed as Dialled: Why Truth Does not Speak to Power In Global Health; Comment on “Knowledge, Moral Claims and the Exercise of Power in Global Health”

This article contends that legitimacy in the exercise of power comes from the consent of those subject to it. In global health, this implies that the participation of poor country citizens is required for the legitimacy of major actors and institutions. But a review of institutions and processes suggests that this participation is limited or absent. Particularly because of the complex political...

‘ ‘ If a lion could speak . . . ’ ’ : Online sensitivity to propositional truth - value of unrealistic counterfactual sentences

People can establish whether a sentence is hypothetically true even if what it describes can never be literally true given the laws of the natural world. Two event-related potential (ERP) experiments examined electrophysiological responses to sentences about unrealistic counterfactual worlds that require people to construct novel conceptual combinations and infer their consequences as the sente...

Speaking Truth to Power to Change the Ivory Tower

A Dallas doctor who spoke truth to power: three perspectives.

This internal medicine grand rounds is the first Elgin W. Ware Lectureship in Medical History (Figure (Figure11). Dr. Elgin Ware, a long-time urologist at Baylor University Medical Center at Dallas and chief of urology from 1986 to 1987, has spent his entire life in Dallas: he graduated from Highland Park High School, Southern Methodist University, and the University of Texas Southwestern Medic...