Thursday, March 26, 2009
What is reflexivity?
I was just noticing that a lot of posts in Ars Synthetica are tagged with 'reflexivity' (everything from pictures of the Vatican to comments on a sci-fi-ish ear-in-arm). But I don't really know what reflexivity means in human science terms. Anyone care to offer a down-to-earth explanation? Tom Schilling got me halfway there with this explanation. Then I read the wikipedia entry, which kind of went in a different direction.
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They were using the term 'reflexivity' in the technical sense from Michel Foucault's '81-'82 lectures, "The Hermeneutics of the Subject". In "Anthropos Today" Paul Rabinow wrote,
"by reflexivity Foucault means exercises of thought in which the act of thinking is itself made an object of thought. The three forms were memory, meditation, and method."
These forms produce a specific kind of relation between the knower, the way in which she can know and the practices that make her adequate to know and the effects on her of such knowledge.
Each of the students in the group were interested in ways that thought itself is made an object of reflection.
If it is true that truth has a history then historically there have been different relations between the truth and the knower of truth. It is a relatively recent phenomenon that the knower has "access" to knowledge without having to undergo a certain transformation to be "adequate" to the truth.
Steven Shapin's "A social history of truth" is one account of such a history, taking early modern science as his object of study. The blurb says the following; Among 17th Century English 'gentleman-philosophers' "problems of credibility in science were practically solved through the codes and conventions of genteel conduct: trust, civility, honor, and integrity. These codes formed, and arguably still form, an important basis for securing reliable knowledge about the natural world".
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