Chapter 4: Knowledge production and autonomy: the challenge from
3. Knowledge
„rationality‟ and „objectivity‟ in terms of conditions of accurate representation is a self- deceptive effort to eternalise the normal discourse of the day, and that since the Greeks, philosophy‟s self-image has been dominated by this attempt”. Rorty finds the representational paradigm problematic, and insists that the attempt to advance a theory of knowledge that is a “permanent, neutral framework for inquiry, and thus for all of culture”, is not achievable.358
In arguing against the idea of knowledge as an accurate representation of reality made possible by special mental processes, Rorty claims that knowledge is “simply a name or label for the subject of agreement among any group of humans concerning beliefs, values and action, rather than a matter of interaction with nonhuman reality.359 A persuasive truth assertion is fundamentally a victory in argument rather than an accurate representation of reality. Blake explains that “it is not a solitary subject who attaches words to things, but rather a social group who share the same language. The developing person cannot start with idiosyncratic perceptions of her own and then create words to represent them. On the contrary, she needs a language already in order to sort out and order her perceptions in the first place.”360 Meaning is seen in this view to be socially constructed – knowledge of the world consists in learning to follow complex sets of rules and concepts in a variety of different language games. That knowledge is regarded as socially constructed can account for the sharing of knowledge; the representational paradigm fails to explain how cognitive representations of external reality can be shared.
In the postmodern view, the social dimension is ontologically prior to the concept of the subject. Knowledge is the achievement of a context-bound consensus, rather than the outcome of scientific investigation. Implied in this view is the dissolution of the distinction between facts and values – facts, conceived of in the representational paradigm as external, observable realities, in the postmodern view cannot exist outside of language.
Derrida, too, opposes the foundationalist approach to language and knowledge. This he terms a „metaphysics of presence‟ that supposedly guarantees the subject
358 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1980, p.8.
359 Ibid. pp.156–157.
360 Nigel Blake, “Truth, identity and community in the university”, Curriculum Studies, 3 (3) 1995, p.268.
unmediated access to reality.361 He argues that the idea that one can know something that exists independent of the knower is an illusion, and that such claims about knowledge and reality depend on the idea that reality is revealed to the intellect through the medium of human speech.362 But language is itself human artifice, and the argument is thus paradoxical.
For Lyotard, to know is „to discourse‟, and language is, in effect, the ground of knowledge. All human interaction can be understood as embodying different kinds of language games, which follow specific sets of rules and criteria for truth claims.
Following the later work of Wittgenstein, Lyotard argues that there are various types of utterances, such as denotative ones (statements), performative ones (in which the effect on that to which it refers coincides with its enunciation) and prescriptive ones (in which the sender has the authority to require an action to be performed). Different types of utterance can be regarded as forming the basis of different language games, each with its own rules. The rules of a game arise from a contract between players, and if there were no rules, there would be no game. Every utterance can be construed as a move in the game, and the social bond is considered to be composed of language „moves‟.
The implications of this view for scientific knowledge as traditionally construed are far- reaching. Lyotard writes:
The fact is that the Platonic discourse that inaugurates science is not scientific, precisely to the extent that it attempts to legitimate science. Scientific knowledge cannot know and make known that it is the true knowledge without resorting to the other, narrative kind of knowledge, which from its point of view is no knowledge at all. Without such recourse it would be in the position of presupposing its own validity and would be stooping to what it condemns: begging the question, proceeding on prejudice.363
Lyotard‟s concern is with who proves the proof; who decides on the conditions of truth? For him, the rules of the game exist only on account of the consensus extended to
361 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, (trans. G.C. Spivak), Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976, p.16.
362 Roger P. Mourad, “Postmodern interdisciplinarity”, The Review of Higher Education, Winter 1997, 20 (2) p.125.
363 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1987, p.29.
them by the experts in a particular field. For Lyotard, there is a heterogeneity of language games – consensus is thus provisional and local. In his view, “knowledge is produced … by dissent, by putting into question existing paradigms, by inventing new ones, rather than assenting to universal truth or agreeing to a [universal] consensus.”364 The problem with modernity is that what is in effect a particular language game – science – has not only been privileged as a universal to the detriment of alternative language games, but that it fallaciously posits its neutrality and independence of particular viewpoints.
The postmodernist cause is thus an argument for a plurality of voices and narratives.
Postmodern theory attempts “with its emphasis on the specific and the normative, to situate reason and knowledge within rather than outside particular configurations of space, place, time and power. Partiality in this case becomes a political necessity as part of the discourse of locating oneself within rather than outside of history and ideology.”365 Different language games, being partial, are also tied to different interests. For postmodernists, there can be no category of impartial competence.
Foucault argues that knowledge is discourse created by humans in an effort to attain power. If there are different discourses, then some have prevailed over others, which he terms „subjugated knowledges‟. In particular, scientific discourse has been dominant in Western thought. He writes:
By subjugated knowledges I mean two things: on the one hand, I am referring to the historical contents that have been buried and disguised in a functionalist coherence or formal systematisation … On the other hand, I believe that by subjugated knowledges one should understand something else … namely, a whole set of knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated: naïve knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity.366
364 Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations, London, Macmillan, 1991, p.166.
365 Stanley Aronowitz and Henry A. Giroux, Postmodern Education: Politics, Culture and Social Criticism, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1991, p.69.
366 Michel Foucault, “Genealogy and social criticism”, in Seidman, S. (ed), The Postmodern Turn: New Perspectives on Social Theory, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, p.41.
By such knowledges he is referring to the local and partial knowledges of particular communities, of the patient as opposed to the doctor, of localised anti-psychiatric discourses – all of which are silenced to some extent by the mainstream. Central to the postmodern cause is the concern to recognise and value subjugated knowledges without attempting to
provide a solid and homogenous theoretical terrain for all these dispersed genealogies, nor to descend upon them from on high with some kind of halo of theory that would unite them. Our task, on the contrary, will be to expose and specify the issue at stake in this opposition, this struggle, this insurrection of knowledges against the institutions and against the effects of the knowledge and the power that invests scientific discourse.367