I Feel Therefore I Am

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I Feel Therefore I Am: Who Owns the Truth?

Who Owns the Truth?

BBC Radio 4 - I Feel Therefore I Am, Who Owns the Truth?

Professor Abigail Williams explores the history of facts versus feelings.

What's more valuable - first-hand experience or second-hand expertise? Professor Abigail Williams explores the history of facts versus feelings.

Where once facts, evidence and rationality were the path to knowledge, now the logic of feeling, of ‘my truth’ and ‘lived experience’ offers an alternative. Do we know our world through objective facts, or through subjective feelings? 

In the second programme in the series, Professor Abigail Williams explores how subjective experience and individual feeling has offered a profound challenge to institutional authority, from John Bunyan's Pilgrims to the French Revolution and beyond. 

Abigail looks back at Michael Gove's claim that people 'have had enough of experts' and explores how a new focus on lived experience is reshaping our institutions, from the patients invited onto NHS Lived Experience Panels to Victim Impact statements in courtrooms. Who knows more about crime, illness or poverty, someone who has experienced it or someone who has studied it?

But it's hard to value both 'my truth' and 'your truth' without descending into identity politics, outrage and intolerance. And what happens to our institutions when we no longer agree on who knows best: the person with expertise or the person with first-hand experience? 

Producer: Julia Johnson
Presenter: Abigail Williams
Executive Producer: Samir Shah

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