>At 2:57 PM 11/17/96, James Michael Craven wrote: > >>Gradually >>through debate, cross-testing provisional hypotheses and data/data >>sources, paradigm/power shifts, old-timers dying etc etc some of the >>"constructions of truth" become patently untenable for all but the >>totally warped, some become less provisional and more established, >>some become the established orthodoxy until dialectically, the >>spiral process continues with the established orthodoxy under >>challenge, new and old constructions of truth emerging as >>provisional, some narratives remaining "local" while other local >>narratives become more generalized through linking up of people >>living under not-so-common conditions and forms of oppression and so >>on > >Uh, is this another way of saying that approximations of "truth" are >arrived at through experimentation, struggle, and conversation? > >Doug I will say it again: the whole point (disagreement, dispute, difference) is not whether there is or is not truth, just as we are not disagreeing about the existence of physical reality. This is just a red herring. The issue is what we think we mean by "truth," "reality," and so on. And this is precisely about how to communicate with people who do not already see the world the way we do (as Marxists, e.g.) when our opponents and enemies are more powerful than we. *Some* pomos may be paralyzed by relativity; I know many pomoish social theorists who are totally involved in radical, militant, anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-sexist political activity, whose activity is fundamentally shaped (and for the better, as I see it) by their commitment to something we could generally and loosely call "post-modernism." Blair Blair Sandler [EMAIL PROTECTED]
