ABSTRACT
Positivism is a plan that can be only tautological, stipulative, contradictory, and elliptical. In sum, the failure of positivism necessarily turns us to what people do collectively. This chapter describes how seeking truth might actually be done. It focuses on the behavior of seeking truth, and on the institutional and essentially public character of truth, in contrast to the usual psychological and semantic descriptions that depict private disembodiments of that behavior. The object-determined standard requires of shared or common truth that each observer be located in precisely the same position—physically, psychologically, socially—vis-a-vis the object. The truth practices of men, comprised by their use of an institutional canon in language, are in positivism limited to conforming to a determinant world of objects and only those objects. The phenomenon of truth is one phenomenon of social order, its “criteria” therefore no more or less than the way it is socially done.
