Culture, Truth, and Science After Lacan

Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 12 (4):633-644 (2015)
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Abstract

Truth and knowledge are conceptually related and there is a way of construing both that implies that they cannot be solely derived from a description that restricts itself to a set of scientific facts. In the first section of this essay, I analyse truth as a relation between a praxis, ways of knowing, and the world. In the second section, I invoke the third thing—the objective reality on which we triangulate as knowing subjects for the purpose of complex scientific endeavours like medical science and clinical care. Such praxes develop robust methods of “keeping in touch” with disease and illness. An analysis drawing on philosophical semantics motivates the needed account of meaning and truth and underpins the following argument: the formulation and dissemination of knowledge rests on language; language is selective in what it represents in any given situation; the praxes of a given culture are based on this selectivity; but human health and illness involve whole human beings in a human life-world; therefore, medical knowledge should reflectively transcend, where required, biomedical science towards a more inclusive view. Parts three and four argue that a post-structuralist account of the human subject can avoid both scientism and idealism or unconstrained relativism

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Author's Profile

Grant Gillett
University of Otago

Citations of this work

Care for Language: Etymology as a Continental Argument in Bioethics.Hub Zwart - 2021 - Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 18 (4):645-654.
Bioethics and Epistemic Scientism.Christopher Mayes, Claire Hooker & Ian Kerridge - 2015 - Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 12 (4):565-567.

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References found in this work

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.Thomas S. Kuhn - 1962 - Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Edited by Ian Hacking.
The Varieties of Reference.Gareth Evans - 1982 - Oxford: Oxford University Press. Edited by John Henry McDowell.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.Thomas Samuel Kuhn - 1962 - Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Edited by Otto Neurath.
Empiricism and the philosophy of mind.Wilfrid Sellars - 1956 - Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 1:253-329.
Truth and truthmakers.D. M. Armstrong - 2004 - New York: Cambridge University Press.

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