>Sed Daniel:
>>>Or in other words, there has to be such a thing as objective truth,
because
>>>it would be so politically awful if there were not.
>
>>>I can't work out whether this is a contradiction, a tautology, a very
deep
>>>insight or a rather good joke.
>Responded Steve:
>>No, I think he's pointing to something the linguistic
>>left affirms in principle and evades in practice--the
>>notion that since all truth is contingent (duh), one
>>must make a personal commitment at some point or
>>become wholly irrelevant.
>I'd go a step further. I reckon Jim's saying Foucault and his mates are
>pushing an epistemology which not only allows us to be irrelevant (an
>attractive thought at times), but underpins a take on human life which
>neither exists nor could: one without reason(s) and, therefore, one
without
>agency.
>Consciously to make a difference, to pursue one future moment as opposed
to
>another - and for a reason that makes sense to us - is our lot, I reckon.
>Didn't Marx respond to a question concerning the essence of human
existence
>with the word 'struggle'?
>Cheers,
>Rob.
Sez me again:
But Sokal & Bricmont aren't exactly going to help here either. Pending the discovery of the "free will particle" somewhere in the tenth dimension, an epistemology based on quarks, gluons and scientific laws (be the mechanics statistical or deterministic) has no more room for human agency than one based on epistemes and whatever Lacan believes in. As far as I can see, Nature simply hasn't been kind enough to provide us with a universe which matches up to our conception of free will and human agency. So if you're going to be a fully consistent scientific realist (and what point is there in being any other sort), you still have to have this same understanding of human life.
So we're left believing in an epistemology based on agency which we basically know to be untrue, because we have no other way to relate to the universe. And occasionally calling other people "worthless fakers" when they point this fact out, unless they cross their scientific t's and dot their square roots of minus one, to prove that they're part of the club of people who are allowed to talk about the universe.
Someone earlier mentioned David Hume in this context, so I'll point out that Hume definitely did not consign his "radical skepticism" to the flames; he rather nervously picked up his backgammon set and got drunk with his mates until he forgot about it.
dd
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