Abstract
That we have culturally acquired certain concepts and beliefs, that many concepts that refer to or impose social or cultural classifications have their origin in intended or unintended declarative speech acts, that the institutional facts they intentionally and unintentionally create have a contingent existence and that it is not always fully transparent to us that the facts so created are institutional facts, were Foucault's key insights in his early work. I argue that these insights can be fully articulated, explored and discussed with a minimalist conception of truth in mind. His observations anticipate current "rediscoveries" of those insights by analytic philosophers. A minimalist about truth holds that these insights do not require a revision of our ordinary concept of truth. The flip side of my argument is that Foucault and his followers should not have grounded his views in a substantial revision of the concept of truth. Truth is and has always been "a thing of this world"; his idiosyncratic reconceptualizations of truth are not needed to explore social dimensions of belief systems, the way social facts emerge and the relevance of genealogies.
Highlights
A Truth-minimalist Reading of FoucaultThat we have culturally acquired certain concepts and beliefs, that many concepts that refer to or impose social or cultural classifications have their origin in intended or unintended declarative speech acts, that the institutional facts they intentionally and unintentionally create have a contingent existence and that it is not always fully transparent to us that the facts so created are institutional facts, were Foucault's key insights in his early work
A minimalist about truth holds that these insights do not require a revision of our ordinary concept of truth
Readers of Michel Foucault's diverse and multifaceted pronouncements on truth have often found it difficult to reconcile his tendency to revise the concept in his early work with perfectly reasonable statements where he marks the uncontentious difference between what someone thinks is true and what is true, a perfectly clear and commonsensical distinction even Foucault had to rely on when investigating in his genealogies what we took to be true about madness, penal systems, sexual policies, "biopower", etc
Summary
That we have culturally acquired certain concepts and beliefs, that many concepts that refer to or impose social or cultural classifications have their origin in intended or unintended declarative speech acts, that the institutional facts they intentionally and unintentionally create have a contingent existence and that it is not always fully transparent to us that the facts so created are institutional facts, were Foucault's key insights in his early work. I argue that these insights can be fully articulated, explored and discussed with a minimalist conception of truth in mind. His observations anticipate current "rediscoveries" of those insights by analytic philosophers. A minimalist about truth holds that these insights do not require a revision of our ordinary concept of truth. The flip side of my argument is that Foucault and his followers should not have grounded his views in a substantial revision of the concept of truth. Truth is and has always been "a thing of this world"; his idiosyncratic reconceptualizations of truth are not needed to explore social dimensions of belief systems, the way social facts emerge and the relevance of genealogies
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