Page 224 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

TRUTH

particular significance is the development of abstract clock time, which allows time,
space and place (locales) to be separated from each other and then enables social
relations to develop between people who are not co-present. The development of
new forms of communication and information control also allows transactions to 201
be conducted across time and space so that any given place is penetrated and
shaped by social influences quite distant from it. For example, the development of
money and electronic communications allows social relations to be stretched across
time and space in the form of financial transactions conducted 24 hours a day
throughout the globe.

Links City, globalization, glocalization, modernity, place, space

Truth Contemporary common sense and Enlightenment philosophy both understand
truth to be constituted by a description that corresponds to or pictures an
independent object world in a neutral language of observation. The adoption of this
form of epistemology, known as representationalism, leads thinkers to seek out
universal propositions that apply across time, space and cultural difference. All the
modern social sciences from sociology to economics and psychology were founded
on the premise that conceptual and empirical truth can be discovered. This includes
cultural studies in so far as one of its early theoretical pillars was Marxism.
However, representationalism has now largely been displaced within cultural
studies by the influence of poststructuralism (for example, Foucault),
postmodernism (for example, Lyotard), neo-pragmatism (for example, Rorty) and
other anti-representationalist paradigms. Here truth is a matter of expression in
language where sentences are the only things that can be true or false with
acculturated authority arbitrating between sentences. That is, truth is a matter of
interpretation of the world and of whose interpretations count as truth, that is, it
is an issue of power. Thus instead of truth, Foucault speaks about particular ‘regimes
of truth’ whereby statements are combined and regulated to form and define a
distinct field of knowledge/objects that is taken to be true. That is, truth and
knowledge do not possess metaphysical, transcendental or universal properties but
are specific to particular times and spaces.
Richard Rorty, from within the parameters of neo-pragmatism, shares the view
that knowledge cannot mirror an independent object world but is inherently
culture-bound in character. In particular, Rorty argues that there is no Archimedean
vantage point from which one could verify any claimed correspondence between
the world and language. From this it follows that we cannot hold our descriptions
of the world to be true in the sense of correspondence with an independent object
world. Instead, the word truth is best understood as indicating a social
commendation rather than an accurate picture of an independent object world.
That is, we give reasons that seek to justify our statements and actions in the
context of intersubjectively formed constitutive rules regarding what establishes
legitimate forms of reasoning. There is no final vocabulary of language that is true
in the sense of accurately picturing an independent object world called reality. Our
vocabularies are only final in the sense of currently without tenable challenge.