From Truth to Disinterestedness in the Seventeenth Century

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Words have social as well as lexical meanings. This paper traces a semantic shift of the word `objective', and the issues arising from it, in the seventeenth century. A word attaching to the concept of `truth' at the beginning of the century came increasingly to give way to considerations of `disinterestedness'; the restructuring of European intellectual life associated with the Scientific Revolution thus involved the constitution of knowledge-claims from criteria of trustworthiness, rather than from purported criteria of `objective' truth. The change appears to have followed the loss of general credibility of the scholastic educational structure, which brought about the creation of new forms for making knowledge. The career of the word `objective' took a turn away from `truth', a distancing that modern usages actively preserve.

This publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: