Each Tuesday in the TELOSscope blog, we reach back into the archives and highlight an article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Timothy Stacey looks at Philip Goodchild’s “Truth and Utopia,” from Telos 134 (Spring 2006).
In the wake of the global economic meltdown, it is once again time to reassess the parameters of the free market. Politicians would have us believe that this reassessment can stand outside of ideology, offering us a clear choice at the ballot between the can-dos and the has-beens of fiscal responsibility. In his article “Truth and Utopia,” Philip Goodchild reveals how this attitude is philosophically misguided, using as it does contingencies of human error as scapegoats for deeper faults of the economy. For Goodchild these faults, alongside those of technology and science, reside in modern optimism, founded on the propositional model of truth, a model that presupposes the positivist Parmenidean maxim truth is true:
