Is Truth an Illusion? Psychoanalysis and Postmodernism1

The sort of reflection that I have been engaging in is just the sort of reflection that both Comte and Rorty see as pointless. For Comte, such reflection is a throwback to a pre-scientific age; for Rorty, a reluctance to enter fully into the postmodern one. Some of you will probaly agree with one or other of these thinkers. But in my view reflection on just what it is that makes thinkers like Rorty doubt the very idea of representing the world, and I think there is a Rorty as well as a Comte in each of us, however suppressed, is part of understanding ourselves, and not just part of understanding certain sophisticated and influential thinkers. For what is common to Rorty and Comte is the idea that much of what we think we know cannot have the status it seems to have. For Richard Rorty the recommended response is to take a more ‘playful’ attitude to what we think we know; and for August Comte it is to sternly restrict ourselves to ‘positive knowledge’. But understanding the temptations and seductions of the idea that Comte and Rorty share, so that we can live with those temptations and seductions without succumbing to them, is far more important, and more valid as a response, than pretending that the world is either just a playpen or just a scientific laboratory.

The philosopher Susan Haack tells the following story:

Not long ago I heard my Dean, a physicist by training, express his unease at the suggestion that the Mission Statement for the College of Arts and Science included the phrase ‘concern for truth’. The word makes people nervous, he warned, and they are bound to ask “whose ‘truth’”. A sociologist colleague seconding the Dean's reservations remarked that, while of course his research advances knowledge, he isn't concerned with ‘truth’. A couple of us pointed out that unless your conclusions are true, they aren't really knowledge, only purported knowledge and I did my best to explain that it doesn't follow from the fact that peop