About Us

The Virtual International Consortium for Truth Research (“VICTR”) is an online community of scholars with an interest in the value and nature of truth, broadly construed. We welcome anyone with an interest in these issues.

Our mission is to:

give researchers a platform for sharing their work with a virtual community of colleagues, independent of geographical location and institutional affiliation;
foster an environment of critical, constructive feedback;
promote gender, racial, and ethnic inclusivity among those doing work on truth; and
support research in all areas of the philosophy of truth, including but not limited to work on the nature of truth, the value of truth, alethic virtues and vices, verisimilitude and accuracy, and the importance of truth to issues in social, political, and moral philosophy

VICTR regularly hosts online work-in-progress sessions, sessions highlighting recent publications, colloquia, themed series, and online conferences featuring submitted papers, marquee sessions, panel discussions, and author-meets-critics sessions. You can find recordings of sessions from the Truth 20|20 conference on their YouTube channel.

We are grateful for the generous support of the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute and The Future of Truth Project, the University of Alabama, and the University of Waikato. See our web presence with the Future of Truth Project here.

VICTR’s connection with the Future of Truth project

Philosophers have become increasingly aware of how understanding the nature of truth requires appreciating its role in our thought, our language, our society, and our own lives. Modern technology has broken down barriers that once prevented access to information, but the darker side of this change is well-known. It has delivered a flood of misinformation, disinformation, bald-faced lies, and falsehoods to an unprepared general public. Often unwittingly, we have replaced old barriers with new ones by confining ourselves to echo chambers of opinion and epistemic bubbles of shared tribal convictions.

VICTR includes not only cutting-edge contemporary philosophical work on what it means for something to be “true,” but also historical reflection on how philosophical thinking about truth has developed over the past hundred or so years. It connects with the Future of Truth project’s mission to investigate “what truth is now and if, and how, it will matter in the future.” The connection is precisely what one would expect from scholarship in the humanities: Engagement with big questions about human life that have affected us in the past, concern us now, and will be examined in the future. Such engagement includes studying and appreciating these perennial questions within their historical and current contexts while also aiming to improve our approach to confronting them.

VICTR Administrator

TBD

VICTR’s Steering Committee

Robert Barnard, University of Mississippi

Douglas Edwards, Utica College

Filippo Ferrari, Universität Bonn

Will Gamester, University of Leeds

Poppy Mankowitz, University of Bristol

Susanna Melkonian-Altshuler, University of Connecticut

Adam Podlaskowski, Fairmont State University

Chase Wrenn, University of Alabama