A Truth-minimalist reading of Foucault

Readers of Michel Foucault’s diverse and multifaceted pronouncements on truth have often found it difficult to reconcile his tendency to revise the concept in his early work (culminating, perhaps in the famous 1976 interview on truth) with perfectly reasonable statements where he (like the rest of us) marks the uncontentious difference between what someone thinks is true and what is true, a perfectly clear and commonsensical distinction even Foucault had to rely on when investigating in his genealogies what we took to be true about madness, penal systems, sexual policies, ‘biopower’, etc. My aim in this paper is to show that in exploring these (and other) issues, the early but extremely influential Foucault might have had in mind a cluster of distinctions and issues which make perfect sense: the distinction between reasons for believing something, and explanations of why we believe what we believe, the fact that the way we acquired certain contested concepts is not always fully transparent to us, and the key role of declarative speech acts in creating and maintaining institutional objects and social identities.