Thinking and science beyond truth, that god of the state

To ask if a concept has an existing object or if a statement is true because there is a state of things in the world that it describes is the obsessional idea of truth as a metaphor that can be found implemented or, which is the same thing, enforced. And so truth in the usual sense is a fiction corresponding to social power.

But concepts are related not only to the objects they designate and represent, but also to other concepts. It is one question to ask if a concept applies (there is an object named by it, or that object 'exists') and another to wonder whether the matters being described are best named with the concepts in use with them. Different concepts may pick out different entities or 'parts' of the world, but they may also fit different uses for them.

Science requires the latter even more than the former. It can ask, do we have the best descriptive characterization or theory of the matter we are considering? The former question, which we can call truth without alternatives, is that of religion, and the state when it is linked to society, the entity it claims to be different from but to both dominate and represent, by way of religion. In this scheme, the opposite of truth and sign of its failure is not error, which is deviation, but denial, which is disobedience. In this scheme, if a person with authority says you are something, then because they are saying this to and of you, and they are using terms that can be applied to you, you cannot reasonably deny it. All the tu quoque arguments ("See? You yourself have admitted it, by saying it") are a form of this.

So is the correspondence theory of truth and the forms of epistemic (and ethical) skepticism that go with it. One question is that of which forms to use in the instance to describe what is in the instance, of the matter. Another is whether the form of being in question is a form of being, or only appears to be, being a form appearing in a space and time where appearances can be called into question. Politically, this is related not only to the question of enforcement of social rules, but to it through interpellation, when the subject being addressed is made aware that it is him or her, here and now, being addressed. Metaphysics is the prose of force.