Rethinking "Rethinking": A Mechanism of Truth Emergence through Historical Evolution

Calls to rethink an established concept, theory or institution ordinarily proceed by criticising an inherited framework and offering a successor. The successor then occupies the position the predecessor vacated, and the historicity that grounded the criticism is quietly withheld from the criticising position. This paper treats that pattern as a structural feature of critique and offers an account of what makes rethinking recur. The account has three parts. The conditions under which a relation can be observed, articulated, tested and contested are materially and institutionally produced, and they vary with instruments, infrastructures, forms of labour and the organisation of inquiry; the relation itself obtains independently of those conditions, so a failure of recognition is a fact about the situation of describers. The enlargement of what can be recognised carries no guarantee of direction, since recognition can be lost, suppressed, distorted and absorbed into institutional form. From these two together it follows that revisability belongs to the structure of any historically grounded claim, and that a course which irreversibly forecloses the conditions of future recognition carries a burden of justification that a revisable course does not carry. The paper concedes its principal ancestors directly. That historical conditions introduce new candidates for truth and falsehood is owed to Hacking; that a lived relation can go unrecognised for want of collective interpretive resources is owed to Fricker; the distinction between the changing knowledge of an object and the object known is owed to Bhaskar. What the paper adds is a materialist account of the conditions of recognition, an insistence that the relation remains independent of them, and the forward-looking obligation that follows. On the question whether the historicity of the standards of appraisal collapses into relativism the paper declines to adjudicate, and states the material conditions under which each of the available resolutions became formulable, on the ground that a framework asserting the historicity of answers owes the same treatment to answers it would like to give itself.