thank god for that. i know you're not criticizing foucault for changing his mind, so this is just a riff.... and, btw, i think the problem with megill's account his that he only sees power as a negative thing. he's forgetting power as a postivie, generative, productive force. it's not a bad thing, to me, to be surrounded by power everywhere. if i thought i had none around me and that i couldn't grab me some o' that and change the world, or at least take a stab at it, i can't imagine why life would be interesting. power aint' a dirty word.
anyway, one reason i admire doug: he changes his mind sometimes. other authors i've read have had to give concessions speeches of sorts. e.g., Habermas (speaking of a foucauldian foe and another intellect i've studied) gave up the project of epistemically grounding social sciences in the ideal speech situation as the result of criticisms.
the thing that i love about carrol -- and there are a lot of things and not just this one -- is that, while he can be cranky, I also notice that he has changed and learned over the years. isn't that the coolest fucking thing in the world. When we're carrol's age, we'll still be learning and developing our ideas. living well is the best revenge man.
but the thing i was remembering was something he's sometimes harangued about in the past -- and i'm glad he did.
i'm tired from being up since three a.m., so i'm forgetting the details, but it was this big conversation we had -- actually offlist -- about the sophists, plato, artistotle, and learning. we were talking about an incident where people were attacking a guy on another list, trying to suggest that he ought to be booted out of academia for having violated a norm. in this case, the guy had allowed a publisher to present his credentials as if to say he was a full prof when, in fact, he was an adjunct assistant prof.
other people thought this was silly and thought that, if anything, the dude ought to be booted out of academia for being wrong. i asked carrol about all this for some reason - it was bugging me that people wanted to boot someone out of academia for being wrong -- and research shows that hardly anyone is booted out of academia (or any profession) for being wrong. they are, however, booted for violating norms. but more on that another time.
carrol made one of the most fascinating and forceful -- indeed, passionate -- arguments for why denouncing someone in academia for being wrong would be a travesty. why we should never let such a thing happen, really.
he quoted a passage in plato IIRC, about the corrigibility of knowledge.
and, you know, it really hit home to me how tragic it is, sometimes, when we harshly criticize people for being wrong, especially in academia. someone looks at a thinker's work and points and laughs to say, "dude. you were wrong about that back then. why should we listen now?"
but this gets it wrong. someone realizing they were wrong or could do a better job of explaining, it's admirable that people do that. the ridicule has only encouraged people to try to deny or hide or paper over instances when they've realized they were wrong. and hence the ridiculous pissing matches and denials, in the pages of journals, on lists, etc.
so, to me, i think it's awesome that a thinker changes his or her mind as the years pass. wouldn't it suck if you were right at 25 and just kept being right all your life. how boring.