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Dear Editors
I would like to comment on R. Wallerstein's (2009) and D. Bell's (2009) papers (without overlooking C. Hanly's specifications on the basics of truth, in the same Education Section as Bell's paper). These two articles can be seen as a junktim, given the addition of a few, somewhat newer epistemological ideas useful to consider the problems related to psychoanalysis as a science.
D. Bell is quite straightforward when he claims that “a peculiar new orthodoxy” (2009, p. 332) is the result of the challenge to the older modernistic orthodoxy, meaning that the “relativization of ‘truth”’ of postmodernism results in proposing that “‘… there is no such thing as truth”’ (2009). He shows that, instead of solving complexities, there appears a new positivistic stance, a new dyadic exclusiveness of a ‘positive and negative’ kind.
D. Bell makes an accurate synthesis of the crucial epistemological discovery of Freud (germane with Marx's proposal), and the fact that “social theorists” have, subject to “scrutiny”, the “link between what is held to be knowledge” and “a powerful tendency to substitute for truth wishful illusions”. He adds: “Truths about the world, which may be very hard to come by, do not depend on perspective” (2009). So, every “… explanatory structure is still underpinned by a conception of truth. Uncovering ideology and self-deception brings a world that is broader, truer than the one that preceded this understanding” (2009). Furthermore, he claims that: “The relativization of ‘truth’ brings not a recognition that there are no ultimate truths”, but a claim that “‘therefore there is no such thing as truth”’ and “therefore there are no facts” (2009). So there appears a “celebration of multiplicity, pluralism and the abandonment of a conception of truthfulness” (p. 334).
Bell also describes the philosophical idealism of postmodernism and goes one step further, showing that it also denies the possibility of searching for historical continuity, i.e. the developm