RESPONSIBLE BELIEVING

S. Joel Garver

CHAPTER FIVE

The Power of "Truth":
Foucault and Doxastic Practices

Section II: Part A

The first thing I believe it is important to keep in mind when approaching Foucault is that his primary epistemological interest is not to construct a normative account of what it means for a belief to be justified or to be knowledge or under what normative conditions we should take a belief to count as such. Rather, Foucault's primary epistemological interest lies in an examination and account of under what conditions our social forms actually authorize us to take a belief to count as justified or as knowledge and the power that those social forms exercise over how we live and think. And Foucault takes most of our dominant, hegemonic, and seemingly well-established social forms to be seriously warped in this respect. Similarly, Foucault is not primarily interested in what truth "really is," but rather how truth is a powerful concept and under what conditions we are led to take propositions to be true.

Secondly, Foucault's primary focus is on what we believe, what we take to be true, and what we consider to be knowledge within a rather limited sphere. That sphere includes sets of beliefs about medicine, madness, the human sciences, criminality, sexuality, ethics, and the self as subject. Foucault, therefore, does not discuss rudimentary perceptual beliefs concerning tables, squirrels, lollipops, and things that go bump in the night. Nor does he directly discuss event and fact memory. It is an open question, then, as to what extent and in what ways his accounts can include those kinds of cases.

My discussion of Foucault is, therefore, qualified: it is drawn within certain limits, it is not meant to account for every kind of belief and knowing, and it makes only modest claims about areas into which Foucault does not explicitly delve. Some of Foucault's interpreters may disagree with my approach, but I believe our examination of Foucault will bear out these points.

It is also of note that my approach does not say that Foucault shows no interest in normative concerns or under what conditions we really should take propositions to be knowledge or justified or true. His whole discussion is, in fact, aimed at exposing the powerful distortions of "truth" and "knowledge" so that a more normative and constructive--though not hegemonic or universal--account can be given. Moreover, even the very distortions of truth and knowledge that Foucault discusses are not without positive and constructive elements. After all, if Foucault is correct, then part of the power of these distortions lies in the ways in which they imitate actual patterns of truth and knowledge and so their structures will reveal and illuminate normative structures as well.

Most controversially, since I take Foucault's primary interest to be practical ascriptions of knowledge, justification, and truth, I don't take his account to be necessarily in conflict with more traditional approaches. In fact, I believe his accounts are compatible with modified versions of epistemological foundationalism regarding what justification is, with a weaker form of metaphysical realism, and with a non-coherentist and non-epistemic account of what it is for a proposition to be true (at least a kind Tarskian "disquotational" theory, though perhaps something short of a full-blooded or traditional correspondence theory).

With these points in mind, then, let us examine what Foucault actually has to say. In this examination I will be largely following and dependent upon the treatment given to Foucault by Linda Alcoff in her article "Foucault as Epistemologist" (1993:95-124), though my account diverges from hers at several significant points, particularly regarding coherentist theories of justification and truth.

The following discussion will be divided into two major sections. The first section will discuss Foucault's views regarding how he takes beliefs actually to be formed within discursive formations, how they come to be taken to be true, to have justification, and as knowledge, and how "power" functions in the formation of belief. This first section, then, is largely a descriptive account or, perhaps, a "sociology of knowledge." The second section will discuss Foucault's normative account, drawing on elements from the first section that he takes to characterize all belief-formation as well as noting a number of additional elements that he takes to characterize those beliefs that we ought to take as justified or as knowledge. This second section will suggest various constraints on and additioal conditions to what we will count as a well-established doxastic practice and as proper engagement in a practice.