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Show us your traces: Traceability as a measure for the political acceptability of truth-claims

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Contemporary Political Theory Aims and scope

Abstract

This article considers some political potentialities of the post-constructivist proposal for substituting truth with traceability. Traceability is a measure of truthfulness in which the rationality of a truth-claim is found in accounting for the work done to maintain links back to an internal referent through a chain of mediations. The substitution of traceability for truth is seen as necessary to move the entire political domain towards a greater responsiveness to the events of the natural-social world. In particular, it seeks to disarm the strategy of exploiting scientific uncertainty in order to defer political action concerning issues such as global warming. A broad acceptance of traceability as a standard for measuring truth-claims responds to the problem of the political impact of a given claim to truth often being inversely correlated to the degree of truth behind the claim because of the oft-prevailing faith in the purity of representation. This substitution has implications for policymaking based on scientific research, styles of journalism and classification of documents. Its success, however, depends on an arduous decoupling of the supposed link between truth and the purity of representation without the deleterious undercutting of all truth-claims.

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Notes

  1. The terms ‘hybrid constructivism’ (Harbers, 2005) and ‘heterogeneous constructivism’ (Sismondo, 1996) have also been used to describe this ‘post-constructivist’ position.

  2. But see also Disch (2010) for a more optimistic enquiry into reworking the notion of representation in response to STS insights.

  3. As such, no claim about non-human intentionality is being assumed here; post-constructivists are committed only to a distribution of the causes of action, which does not necessarily deny that persons have the rare or unique capacity for deliberate action. A simple acknowledgement of the co-constructive role of the non-human provides, at most, yet another challenge to the notion of the individual human being as a wholly sovereign actor. In fact, Latour’s accounts of human ‘delegation’ and ‘inscription’ onto material artefacts, which in turn ‘permit’ and ‘authorize’, is often regarded within the STS field as making a methodologically inconsistent a priori allocation of primary agency to human beings (see Gomart and Hennion, 1999; Verbeek, 2005).

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  1. Department of Politics, University of Otago, North Dunedin, Dunedin, 9016, New Zealand

    Stephen Acreman

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Acreman, S. Show us your traces: Traceability as a measure for the political acceptability of truth-claims. Contemp Polit Theory 14, 197–212 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2014.25

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