Show us your traces: Traceability as a measure for the political acceptability of truth-claims

Abstract

This article considers some political potentialities of the post-constructivist proposal for substituting truth with traceability. Traceability is a measure of truthfulness in which the rationality of a truth-claim is found in accounting for the work done to maintain links back to an internal referent through a chain of mediations. The substitution of traceability for truth is seen as necessary to move the entire political domain towards a greater responsiveness to the events of the natural-social world. In particular, it seeks to disarm the strategy of exploiting scientific uncertainty in order to defer political action concerning issues such as global warming. A broad acceptance of traceability as a standard for measuring truth-claims responds to the problem of the political impact of a given claim to truth often being inversely correlated to the degree of truth behind the claim because of the oft-prevailing faith in the purity of representation. This substitution has implications for policymaking based on scientific research, styles of journalism and classification of documents. Its success, however, depends on an arduous decoupling of the supposed link between truth and the purity of representation without the deleterious undercutting of all truth-claims.