Fiction vs History?

[jbor]

on 26/10/04 12:23 PM, o j m wrote:

> You've got to be 
> careful not to universalize deconstruction as a "technique."

Wha? A technique isn't a universal.

> What he was getting at, I think, is a point I raised
> a while ago: poststructuralists set up a strawman argument against
> knowledge.  By positing that any error or ambiguity preclude knowledge or
> objectivity, poststructuralists set up an account of truth, knowledge, and
> objectivity that is 1) very easy to shoot down, and 2) an account of
> knowledge that very few people, if anybody, within the philosophical
> community would adhere to.

This'd be the straw man argument. There's a difference between "knowledge"
and those grand metanarratives ("progress", "Truth", "objectivity" etc)
which provide the mythological foundation of objectivist and positivist
epistemologies. Of course poststructuralists -- including many philosophers
and historians -- recognise and acknowledge that "knowledge" and "Truth"
aren't synonymous, even if its detractors don't.

To reiterate a point already made, it was historical positivism which
announced that the world could be "reduced" to a text. Poststructuralism
contends, more accurately in my opinion, that people do read and interpret
the world (thus the metaphor of "the world as text").

And the proof of the paella, of course, is that different people read the
world differently. A point to bear in mind -- in these times as throughout
all of recorded history --- is that it's the fundamentalists (of whatever
stripe) who hold fast to a conviction that theirs is the single, supreme,
non-negotiable "Truth".

best