Tuomo Tiisala, When “Happy Positivism” Met “Politics of Truth”: Foucault on Inquiry

In many circles in philosophy, Michel Foucault has a reputation as a proponent of radical type of relativism regarding truth and knowledge. My goal in this talk is to show that this reputation receives no support from a scholarly engagement with Foucault’s work, granted that truth is an epistemic notion. In particular, I will argue that Foucault’s ideas about “a history of truth” are a consequence of the verificationist theory of truth, whose adoption was a key commitment both in French epistemology and in logical positivism. In doing so, I will offer the first scholarly appraisal of Foucault’s notes on Moritz Schlick, Rudolph Carnap, and other positivist thinkers, archived in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, in Paris. Against this background, which constitutes an aspect of Foucault’s self-avowed “happy positivism”, I will then identify and assess with new clarity the significance of his studies on relations of dependence between knowledge and power. It turns out, as I will show, that these ideas concern relations of dependence as well as potential conflicts between epistemic values and other values in the context of inquiry.