Making (Up) the Truth: Constructivist Contributions

BARBARA HERRNSTEIN SMITH Making (Up) the Truth: Constructivist Contributions There is~ it appears, the appearance of truth, 'verisimilitude/ and, over and against that, the reality of truth, truth itself. Or so it appears, but perhaps it is not true, or not any longer. Certainly, the certification of true truth and genuine knowledge in their classic senses - as, for example, the accurate affirmation or faithful representation of an altogether autonomOllS reality - has proved elusive. And, as we know, alternative conceptions of truth and knowledge - as, for example, the relatively coherent, relatively viable, and relatively stable products of various social and institutional practices - have been proposed in recent years ... and have proved relatively coherent, viable, and stable. These alternative conceptions have emerged from a number of fields: philosophy, of course, especially along lines marked by Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, but also other fields, such as biology and psychology, which have yielded important redescriptions of the interactive mechanisms of language, perception, and cognition,' and, of particular interest here, the history and sociology of science, which, during the past two decades, have developed a pragmatist/rhetoricist approach to these questions often referred to as 'constructivisrn./2 I shall not attempt to describe here the work of individual constructivists . Nor will I be discussing in any detail their characteristic investigations , analyses, and arguments. I would note at the outset, however, the strong affinities and, in fact, extensive intellectual connections between constructivist analyses and arguments - if not the historical and sociological investigations themselves - and the critiques of traditional epistemology associated with 'deconstruction' and 'poststructuralism.' Indeed, it is often difficult to tell exactly which of these is intended by such descriptively vague, though clearly adversarial, terms as 'postmodernisrn,' 'extreme relativism,' and 'fashionable irrationalism.' Adversarial matters shall be of further interest, below. First, however, we may consider the broader topic at hand. I Paradoxes of truth are recurrent in the literary-critical tradition: the truer truth that is told only, or best, in fiction; the poetry that, being the most feigning, is the truest; the poet who, not offering to tell the truth, cannot UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 61, NUMBER 4, SUMMER }992 MAKING (UP) THE TRUTH 423 tell lies; and so forth. These paradoxes are signs and reminders of the conceptual instabilities that attend - and, it seems, have always attended - the,familiar distinctions on which they play: truth and fiction, being and seeming, telling and fabricating, and so on. They are also signs, I think, of the more fundamental instabilities and incoherences of the classic accounts of truth that generate such distinctions: the idea, for example, that certain discourses, notably those of history and (as we would say now) science, offer (at least ideally) direct, objective - and thus properly credible - representations of an autonomous reality; or the corollary idea that such discourses are, at least ideally, aJtogether distinct from such manifestly rhetorical and presumptively incredible discourses as poetry and fiction. But, of course, the classic ideas (and ideals) of objective description and unmediated representation have become increasingly problematic, as have, with them, the corollary distinctions between rhetorical and non-rhetorical discourses.;! I do not mean to rehearse here the history of twentieth-century thought or contemporary commonplaces on these topics. Indeed, the focus of my concern, below, will be certain practical, political, and what could be called 'pub1ic-relations' problems that these developments seem to entail. Of considerable interest in relation to those problems, however, are recent constructivist accounts of how truth is produced - or verisimilitude achieved - in fields such as medicine, microbiology, and physics.4 For example, in their engaging and illuminating study, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer describe the beginnings of modern empirical science and the related development of what they call 'the technology of virtual witnessing.' What they mean by this is an array of textual techniques, largely verbal but also pictorial - painstaking descriptions of experimental procedure, minutely detailed illustrations of experimental equipment, charts, diagrams, figures, and so on - aimed at 'producing in a reader's mind ... such an image of an experimental scene as obviates the necessity for either direct witness or replication.'s As Shapin and Schaffer observe, this textual technology, as developed and defended by Robert...