Abstract
Truth and knowledge are conceptually related and there is a way of construing both that implies that they cannot be solely derived from a description that restricts itself to a set of scientific facts. In the first section of this essay, I analyse truth as a relation between a praxis, ways of knowing, and the world. In the second section, I invoke the third thing—the objective reality on which we triangulate as knowing subjects for the purpose of complex scientific endeavours like medical science and clinical care. Such praxes develop robust methods of “keeping in touch” with disease and illness (like biomarkers). An analysis drawing on philosophical semantics motivates the needed (anti-scientistic) account of meaning and truth (and therefore knowledge) and underpins the following argument: (i) the formulation and dissemination of knowledge rests on language; (ii) language is selective in what it represents in any given situation; (iii) the praxes of a given (sub)culture are based on this selectivity; but (iv) human health and illness involve whole human beings in a human life-world; therefore, (v) medical knowledge should reflectively transcend, where required, biomedical science towards a more inclusive view. Parts three and four argue that a post-structuralist (Lacanian) account of the human subject can avoid both scientism and idealism or unconstrained relativism.
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Notes
The style of truth theory here is based on the work of Alfred Tarski (1944) and is widely accepted in current philosophical accounts of truth.
The footnote in the 1997 Cambridge edition helpfully translates: “[Because of] agreement with a third thing, they agree among themselves” (Kant 1997, B849).
Because our paradigm for thoughts involves their propositional content (as if they had a sentential form), we could call this a propositional structure, even though that idea is more comfortable in analytic philosophy than continental philosophy where the dependence of language (and some would say thought) on speech is more widely accepted (Vygotsky 1962).
Lacan uses tuche, variously translated as contingency, chance, or luck, to indicate the mismatch between the orderly world of grammar or thought and the raw Dionysian power of the world in which we find ourselves and to put an interesting twist on the Freudian “thing,” which Freud himself directly borrowed from the Kantian “ding an sich” (the thing in itself that becomes the third thing to which two subjects co-refer). This is, I find, one of the most difficult areas of his thought because it inflects subjectivity away from discursive articulation.
Wittgenstein reflects this structuralist thought when he remarks that meanings reflect the post where the word is stationed in language and grammar 1953, ¶29).
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Gillett, G. Culture, Truth, and Science After Lacan. Bioethical Inquiry 12, 633–644 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11673-015-9664-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11673-015-9664-2