On 06/03/2010, at 7:41 AM, Edward Comstock wrote:
It also seems to me that even what we call human nature or look for is
going to change based on different knowledge practices, such that the
question can only be answered within given systems of knowledge. Foucault,
after all, for instance, believed that modern medicine presented valid
abstractions against which we could gain usefull knowedges. But I dont'
take this to mean that he believes modern medicine to be "true" in the
absolute sense.
This seems similar to Althusser's attempts to distinguish between discourses in terms of the 'adequacy' of their 'grasp' of the material world, a rather tricky notion in that idealist discourses such as empiricism always attempt to exploit it. I'm not sure how one avoids it though, unless one accepts the extreme relativism that would assert that the phlogiston theory is equally valid way of looking at the generation of heat as thermodynamics. It is clear that one gives us a more adequate grasp of material reality, but if one attempts to 'go around' discourse to find a way to see whether it corresponds to something outside of itself then, whoops, there we are back with the 'subject of knowledge' etc etc.