[Fwd: Re: TRUTH]

Matthew King wrote:
>
> On Wed, 25 Nov 1998, John S. Ransom wrote:
>
> > What we are concerned with here is finding those grounds on which Foucault
> > can argue we should prefer genealogical accounts to discourses associated
> > with the disciplines given the seemingly universalist claim that all
> > knowledge and discourses are constituted in a "power-knowledge circuit."
>
> This is basically the question Habermas asks in _The Philosophical
> Discourse of Modernity_. The answer is: why do you want *grounds*? You
> do genealogical analyses when you find that the truth hurts, that some
> formation of knowledge is hurting people with whom you're sympathetic.


Why is 'some formation of knowledge' assumed to be the same as truth, if
we are dealing not in the Foucauldian sense of knowledge as constructed
but in a sense in which it does make sense to talk of 'truth' as some
kind of absolute? Is it not, in that scenario, possible that some
instances of the 'formation of knowledge' are so poorly grounded that
they are not 'true' at all?

It is true that one is more likely to do a 'genealogical analysis ' when
one thinks that the power of knowledge is having an adverse effect: what
would be the motivation for working in an alternative context: 'I am
very happy with the state of the world, therefore I am going to go to
the effort of thinking how it could be otherwise'? Even technologists
don't invent labour-saving devices unless labour is being expended in a
way they conceive to be inefficient - or expensive.

Nesta

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