Page 225 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

Having said that, some descriptions of the world are undoubtedly more useful
than others in relation to particular purposes. Thus while the physical sciences do
not have privileged access to a deeper truth, their empirical methods have yielded
202 useful and workable knowledge of the material world. Science has produced levels
of predictability that have underpinned a degree of consensus or solidarity amongst
the scientific community, leading them to call particular statements true. The
arguments of these sciences should be understood not as the revelation of objective
truth or the correspondence of language with an independent object world but as
the achievements of agreed procedures.
These arguments do not mean that material reality does not exist or that we are
‘out of sync’ with that reality. Rather, language, by which we seek to represent truth,
is an evolutionary tool developed through practice by human beings in order to
achieve various purposes. When language is conceived as a tool for action rather
than a mirror for representing the world, then it cannot be at odds with reality.
Language can only misrepresent the world if it is also able to accurately represent
it. Since the former is not possible, then the latter is an irrelevancy and to ask about
it is to pose a poor, because literally sense-less, question.
Links Enlightenment, epistemology, language, language-game, meaning, poststructuralism,
pragmatism, representation