ABSTRACT
This chapter clarifies what Michel Foucault says about truth. It explains the following five Foucault's notions of truth: criterial notion of truth, constructivist notion of truth, perspectivist notion of truth, experiential notion of truth and tacit-realist notion of truth. Foucault's views on truth initially look like facile modish postmodern relativism to readers with an analytic background. Truth is, in any case, a more fundamental philosophical issue because how truth is conceived underlies any assessment of Foucault's claims about subjectivity and power relations. The textually most prevalent use of truth is the constructivist one. The relation between the criterial and constructivist uses is that Foucault's constructivist notion of truth is about how what is true in social or learned discourse comes to be so. The constructivist notion has it that truth is relative to social and learned discourses because truth is produced by power relations.
