Philosophy Speakers “Truth and Vindication in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada”

Cindy Holder is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Victoria. Her research focuses on cultural rights and ethical and theoretical issues in international law, including the human rights of indigenous peoples and transitional mechanisms such as truth commissions and international criminal tribunals. She is giving a public talk on “Truth and Vindication in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada” hosted by the Department of Philosophy as part of their Philosophy Speakers series. About the talk Truth commissions, special criminal tribunals and lustration processes seek to establish collective knowledge of past abuse. This goal of collective knowledge commits such institutions to identification and deployment of arbitral truths: truths that tell between beliefs, assertions and narratives, rendering the cognitive space within which the past is discussed such that actions become intersubjectively defensible and—perhaps more importantly—susceptible to intersubjective criticism. In this paper, I use the example of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada to explore the limitations of non-arbitral conceptions of truth in the context of transitional justice institutions, and the potential value within such a setting of conceptualizing truth as vindication by experience. Decisions about which subjects’ experiences — and which dimensions of those experiences — matter, structure the cognitive space within which collective knowledge projects are pursued. Vindication by experience as a basis for arbitrating between beliefs, assertions and narratives exposes these decisions and makes it possible to ask how the experiences that are taken to be vindicating fit the knowledge projects to which they are harnessed. Vindication by experience further opens a window on transitional knowledge projects themselves as reflection on the relevance of some experiences but not others may reveal features of a project that are otherwise obscured.

Location:

Social Sciences Tower 1253

More information at http://www.ucalgary.ca/events/calendar/philosophy-speakers-truth-and-vindication-truth-and-reconciliation-commission-canada