I don't know to what extent the following extract from Richard Rorty's
"Solidarity or Objectivity" helps, but it seems to me somewhat helpful in
taking the discussion away from obfuscating defence that both JMC and AM
seem to offer for their somewhat specious theses on Michel Foucault.
Obviously, I am more in agreement with Erica Sheen's polite rejoinder to
JMC. But then as JMC reminds each one of the discussants disagreeing with
the more readily sensible part of his argument, 'she has missed his point
about "difference" which his supporter AM has understood by trivialising
even tautology reducing it to childish nit-picking.
Here's the somewhat longish quote:
""Relativism" is the traditional epithet applied to pragmatism by realists.
Three different views are commonly referred to by this name. The first is
the view that every belief is as good as every other. The second is the view
that "true" is an equivocal term, having as many meanings as there are
procedures of justification. The third is the view that there is nothing to
be said about either truth or rationality apart from descriptions of the
familiar procedures of justification which a given society - ours - uses in
one or another area of inquiry. The pragmatist holds the ethnocentric third
view. But he does not hold the self-refuting first view, nor the eccentric
second view. He thinks his views are better than the realists', but he does
not think that his views correspond to the nature of things. He thinks that
the very flexibility of the word "true" - the fact that it is merely an
expression of commendation - insures its univocity. The term "true" on his
account, means the same thing in all cultures, just as equally flexible
terms like "here", "there", "good", "bad", "you" and "me" mean the same in
all cultures. But the identity of meaning is, of course, compatible with
diversity of reference, and with diversity of procedures for assigning the
terms. So he feels free to use the term "true" as a general term of
commendation in the same way as his realist opponent does - and in
particular to use it to commend his own view."
"However, it is not clear why "relativist" should be thought an appropriate
term for the ethnocentric third view, the one which the pragmatist does
hold. For the pragmatist is not holding a positive theory which says
thatsomething is relative to something else. He is, instead, making the
purely negative point that we should drop the traditional distinction
between knowledge and opinion, construed as the distinction between truth as
correspondence to reality and truth as a commendatory term for
well-justified beliefs. The reason that realist calls this negative claim
"relativistic" is that he cannot believe that anybody would seriously deny
that truth has an intrinsic nature. So when the pragmatist says that there
is nothing to be said about truth save that each of us will commend as true
those beliefs which he or she finds good to believe, the realist is inclined
to interpret this as one more positive theory about the nature of truth: a
theory according to which truth is simply contemporary opinion of a chosen
individual or group. Such a theory would, of course, be self-refuting. But
the pragmatist does not have a theory of truth, much less a relativistic
one. As a partisan of solidarity, his account of the value of cooperative
human inquiry has only an ethical base, not an epistemological or
metaphysical one. Not having any epistemology, a fortiori, he does not have
a relativistic one."
It seems tempting here to also quote from Jugen Habermas's "Communicative
versus Subject-Centered Reason" a somewhat controversial extract:
"The aporias of the theory of power leave their traces behind in the
selective readings of geneological historiography, whether of modern penal
procedure or of sexuality in modern times. Unsettled methodological problems
are reflected in empirical deficits. Foucault did indeed provide an
illuminating critique of the entanglement of the human sciences in the
philosophy of the subject: These sciences try to escape from the aporetic
tangles of contradictory self-thematization by a subject seeking to know
itself, but in doing so they become all the more deeply ensnared in the
self-reification of scientism. However, Foucault did not think through the
aporias of his own approach well enough to see how his theory of power was
overtaken by a fate similar to that of the human sciences rooted in the
philosophy of the subject. His theory tries to rise above those
pseudo-sciences to a more rigorous objectivity, and in doing so it gets
caught all the more hopelessly in the trap of a presentist historiography,
which sees itself compelled to a relativist self-denial and can give no
account of the normative foundations of its own rhetoric. To the objectivism
of self-mastery on the part of the human sciences there corresponds a
subjectivism of self-forgetfulness on Foucault's part. Presentism,
relativism, and cryptonormativism are the consequences of his attempt to
preserve the transcendental movement proper to generative performances in
the basic concept of power while driving from it every trace of
subjectivity. This concept of power does not free the geneologist from
contradictory self-thematizations."
I understand the quotations above are long but in my humble view important
to the present discussion.
Cheers!
Sukhbir Garewal
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