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Dated: Wednesday, 26 May 1999 Bob Holden writes: shouldn't ethics always come first, in the sense that our work should have some moral foundation? And what foundation could there be if we reject the possibility of Truth? (None of this, I should say in case you were wondering, necessarily makes me a positivist or a believer in an objective or value-free "social science" nor do I think power or language are the least bit irrelevant in the making of knowledge -- these are insights that postmodernism has indeed usefully highlighted.) A very quick comment: It strikes me that the heart of this disagreement is crystalized in Holden's "throw away" lines at the end of his last posting. He writes that language and power are not "the least bit irrelevant." Yet there is a sense in the phrasing that, for Holden, "language" and "power" are problems to be puzzled out and eventually "solved" -- mere roadblocks on the path to an ultimate "Truth." This represents a trend among many historians who adopt some of the language of postmodernism but plod doggedly along the same old paths. However, postmodernists argue that "truths" are constructed from language embedded in a dense web of power relations, that language itself is arbitrary and without foundation. One cannot claim a foundation of "Truth" and at the same time nod toward the arbitrariness of language. Thus, the question remains how we approach our own work when "truth" is entirely positional. In sum, I'm simply saying "hooray!" to Van Young's assertion that "we should stop bashing postmodernism and deal with the issues it raises for our discipline." Michelle Molina University of Chicago
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