Ah! Delighted to have someone with some more Actual Background TM around to comment :)
I feel a mild duty to quote Hayot a bit, just to let him speak for himself about what he thinks he's saying when he describes things like "truth", since he caveats himself quite a bit (read: I want to make sure I'm not totally misrepresenting him!):
In the humanities today, the assertion that one is saying true things, or attempting to, is likely to be met with a great deal of suspicion. Why? Well, for good reason: thanks to a broad sense of historical and interpersonal relativism, most humanists believe that there is no such thing as "the" truth; rather, there are only multiple, historically contingent truths that operate in particular cultural contexts and shape the truth regimes that form there. The fact that economists don't think that humanist knowledge produces truth is pretty good evidence for such a claim, but so are the vast number of ways in which the people of the past or of other places confront us with beliefs that seem to us impossible, unreasonable, outrageous, and so on, and present us with worlds that we have been trained not to judge on terms derived entirely from our own situation or our own epistemological self-satisfaction.
Most humanists believe, also, that whatever truth regime exists does so (at least partly) to consolidate the power and worldview of the social group, class, or institution that proposes it, and that it is just as likely that truth is a function of social power, and not the other way around, as most people might like to believe. [. . .]
[However], the radical critique of truth-claims, like any radical form of epistemological relativism, runs into a pretty serious set of philosophical problems. To argue that all truth is relative, or that truths are inevitably expressions of power and therefore not "true" in a strong sense, involves making truth claims. You can't possibly believe that these things are true unless you have some sense of what falsehoods they're contradicting. And even though you may well believe, in general, that truth-claims are historically specific, and therefore subject to revision, and also that truth-claims often, if not always, reproduce hegemonic power structures, (1) you do not believe the claim that truth-claims are historically specific is itself historically specific—you think that all truth-claims are historically specific, and (2) you think that the idea that truth claims server mainly to disseminate power does not apply to the claim that truth-claims mainly disseminate power.
So, I take this to mean, he's uninterested in the idea of "objective" truth that adheres exclusively to natural laws and algorithms and such, but he is interested in the kind of "historically contingent, subject to multiple interpretations, allowing contradictions to coexist" kind of truths you can get from humanist scholarship. (His bit on "empiricism" is similar; he uses the word broadly to describe "beliefs based on observation," but those observations can be reading primary/secondary sources, talking to people, and so on, and not only the kinds of thing that the hard sciences would describe as "empirical.")
Strongly agree that the design of social networks really could use some thinking from outside the weirdly monolithic-thinking folks who seem to design these things nowadays, and also
even making the division between the humanities and the sciences is dangerous, because it encourages people to only care about one or the other
^ The book has lots of interesting thoughts on this in particular!
Anyway, would be curious for your thoughts when/if you do get around to peeking at the full thing :)
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Date: 2022-02-07 07:40 am (UTC)I feel a mild duty to quote Hayot a bit, just to let him speak for himself about what he thinks he's saying when he describes things like "truth", since he caveats himself quite a bit (read: I want to make sure I'm not totally misrepresenting him!):
So, I take this to mean, he's uninterested in the idea of "objective" truth that adheres exclusively to natural laws and algorithms and such, but he is interested in the kind of "historically contingent, subject to multiple interpretations, allowing contradictions to coexist" kind of truths you can get from humanist scholarship. (His bit on "empiricism" is similar; he uses the word broadly to describe "beliefs based on observation," but those observations can be reading primary/secondary sources, talking to people, and so on, and not only the kinds of thing that the hard sciences would describe as "empirical.")
Strongly agree that the design of social networks really could use some thinking from outside the weirdly monolithic-thinking folks who seem to design these things nowadays, and also
even making the division between the humanities and the sciences is dangerous, because it encourages people to only care about one or the other
^ The book has lots of interesting thoughts on this in particular!
Anyway, would be curious for your thoughts when/if you do get around to peeking at the full thing :)