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What Makes a Statement Count? Foucault and the “Will to Truth”

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1. Rethinking Truth What is truth? The question seems to ask what truth is: whether it consists in correspondence with reality, coherence, revelation, or some other relation between a statement and what it claims to describe. Foucault redirects attention from the nature of truth to the conditions under which discourse comes to be recognized as true. This shift is what he captures with the expression will to truth . The term can sound psychological, as though Foucault were describing a human desire to discover or possess the truth. He means something else: a historically variable organization of discourse around the distinction between true and false, sustained by practices and institutions that give this distinction authority. A statement enters a field in which certain forms of evidence are accepted, certain procedures are treated as legitimate, and particular speakers or institutions are recognized as authoritative. The issue is therefore not simply whether a statement is t...
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Saussure and the Problem of the Sign

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1. The Problem of Conceptual Vocabulary Words such as word , meaning , concept , and sign seem familiar enough in ordinary use. We can usually understand one another without deciding exactly what each denotes or how the terms relate to one another. In everyday language, Speakers intuitively recognize the units that matter in discourse, even though they may not be able to explain systematically how those units are distinguished or related. The difficulty begins when these expressions enter a theoretical vocabulary, where distinctions that ordinary language leaves implicit may need to be made explicit. This raises a more specific question: What happens when the vocabulary available to a theory does not provide the distinctions that the theory needs to make? At that point, the task may involve more than determining what a familiar concept means. It may require refining an inherited term, assigning it a more precise function, or introducing new terms whose relations make a theoret...
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