Meta-semiotics and Practical Epistemology

Abstract

This paper is a response to debates on Foucault’s articulations of power and regimes of truth, particularly in the recent work of Derek Hook. It is also a response to the specific issue of Latour’s ‘crisis of objectivity’. It deals with the issues of objectivity, subjectivity, subjects, discourses and communities of practice, and develops the concept of ‘metasemiotics’ to help explore and analyse some of the articulations of power and knowledge, particularly in modernism. This should help us to achieve the goals of Latour’s ‘political ecology’, or what we call a ‘practical epistemology’, which allows us to escape from being trapped in the reification of objectivity that characterized modernism, without rejecting the considerable advances that modernism has made.