Postmodern Critique

Scenario

On 15 December 1973, the board of the American Psychiatric Association voted to remove homosexuality from the second edition of its diagnostic manual. A membership referendum confirmed the vote the following year. Until that date, the same behavior had carried a formal clinical diagnosis for over two decades: "sociopathic personality disturbance" in the first manual (1952), then "sexual deviation" in the second (1968). The diagnosis was not a fringe opinion. It sat inside licensing exams, insurance codes, courtroom testimony, and every major psychiatric textbook, and it functioned there as settled clinical fact.

Nothing about the underlying behavior changed between 1968 and 1974. What changed was who could speak, and be heard, inside the institution that produced the diagnosis. Gay activists disrupted APA conventions starting in 1970. In 1972 a psychiatrist named John Fryer addressed the annual convention in a wig and a distorting mask, presenting himself as "Dr. H. Anonymous," because speaking under his own name and license would have ended his career. Evelyn Hooker's 1957 study, which had already found no measurable difference in psychological adjustment between gay and straight subjects, had sat available for sixteen years without moving the diagnosis on its own. What moved it was a shift in who was permitted to challenge it.

This is a case where the content of accepted expert knowledge tracked institutional power, specifically who was allowed into the room where the category got written and who was excluded from it. The description is exact and checkable against a documented sequence of votes and testimony, and it is the full strength of the claim this entry isolates.

Definition

The strong claim

State the strong claim in its most defensible form: knowledge production is institutionally situated. Any field that produces knowledge about people, psychiatry, criminology, medicine, economics, does so through institutions, journals, funding bodies, licensing boards, that decide which questions get asked, which findings get published, and which speakers count as credible enough to be published or cited at all. None of that is a claim about what is true. It is a claim about the machinery that filters which candidate truths reach general acceptance, and the DSM case above shows that machinery operating in the open: the diagnostic content held steady for two decades not because the evidence was settled but because the people positioned to challenge it were excluded from the process that would have let them.

Two thinkers give this claim its sharpest names. Jean-Francois Lyotard, in The Postmodern Condition (1979), diagnosed what he called incredulity toward grand narratives: modern societies once legitimated their knowledge by appeal to sweeping stories, reason's steady progress, history's arc toward emancipation, and Lyotard's claim was that those legitimating stories had lost their hold, leaving each field to justify its own knowledge claims locally. Michel Foucault, across Discipline and Punish (1975) and the 1976 interview collected as "Truth and Power," named the mechanism power and knowledge: what a society accepts as true forms a "regime of truth" bound up with the institutions that enforce it, since you cannot study a category of person, the criminal, the madman, the homosexual, without an institution that gathers and manages that category, an institution that in turn depends on the knowledge naming and justifying it. His histories of madness, punishment, and sexuality are the worked cases behind the general claim above; the DSM sequence is a smaller instance of the same pattern, a diagnostic category, an institution empowered to apply it, and a shift in who counted as a legitimate speaker that moved what the institution certified as true.

The weak claim, and where the two part ways

A second claim rides along with the strong one often enough that they get treated as a single package: there are no facts, only interpretations, so nothing is more true than anything else. Call this the weak claim, weak not because it is timid but because it cannot survive its own application. State it plainly and test it against itself: "no claim is more true than any other" is itself offered as more true than its denial. If the sentence is right, it defeats its own authority to be believed; if it is wrong, then some claims genuinely are more true than others, which is the position it was trying to rule out. Either way, the sentence cannot do the work asked of it, and this is a standard problem for global relativism about truth, pressed at length by Paul Boghossian in Fear of Knowledge (2006).

The strong claim does not have this problem, and naming the reason draws the exact line between the two. The strong claim, that institutions shape which candidate truths circulate, is itself put forward as true: the APA sequence really happened, the votes are dated, the testimony is on record. It borrows the very idea of "what actually happened" that the weak claim tries to dissolve. That is the asymmetry worth holding onto: the strong claim presupposes a fact of the matter in order to explain how some other fact got obscured or delayed, while the weak claim denies there is a fact of the matter at all, including about itself. The strong claim can be pushed hard, checked against records and testimony, and often vindicated; the weak claim cannot be pushed at all without falling over.

Common mistakes

The most common mistake is refuting the weak claim and declaring the whole critique dead. Pointing out that "nothing is true" refutes itself is a real point, and it disposes of exactly one sentence. It says nothing about whether institutions shape which findings circulate, which is a separate, checkable claim that the refutation never touches. This exchange, slogan stated, slogan refuted, critique declared finished, is the standard strawman and the reason this entry exists.

A second mistake runs the opposite direction: treating the strong claim as a universal acid that dissolves every knowledge claim it touches, including the claim doing the dissolving. Someone who says "all expert consensus just reflects power" and exempts that very statement from the same treatment is claiming a privileged, non-institutional vantage point for their own claim while denying one to everybody else's. The strong claim survives only by admitting it, too, is a claim that could turn out to be institutionally convenient in some case, and by staying answerable to evidence in each specific instance rather than announced as a blanket verdict.

A third mistake treats "institutionally situated" as a synonym for "false." A finding can be both institutionally convenient for the people who produced it and correct. Tobacco-industry-funded research that understated the risks of smoking is institutionally situated and was also false; a public-health finding that a vaccine is safe is institutionally situated, produced by funded labs and credentialed reviewers, and can also be true. Which case is which has to be settled by checking the actual evidence, not decided in advance from the fact of institutional situation alone.

A fourth mistake takes the critique as a license to dismiss expertise wholesale, treating any credentialed claim as suspect for that reason and no other. The DSM case argues the reverse lesson: the fix for a distorted regime of truth was not to stop trusting psychiatric diagnosis in general, it was to change who was heard inside the process that produced the diagnosis. The strong claim is a reason to audit how a finding was produced and by whom it was contested, not a reason to stop checking findings at all.

Test yourself

Pick a real body of expert knowledge you personally rely on: a dietary guideline, a diagnostic criterion, an economic forecast, a safety standard. Write one sentence in the strong form about it, naming a specific institutional fact, who funds the relevant research, who is credentialed to publish findings that would revise the guideline, or whose objections have historically been excluded from the process. Then write one sentence in the weak form about the same guideline, stating that nothing about it is really true, only asserted.

Apply the self-refutation test to both sentences: ask whether each sentence, if true, undercuts its own right to be believed. Success on this task has two parts. First, the strong sentence must name an actual institutional mechanism, funding, credentialing, or exclusion, checkable in principle against a real record, the way the APA votes and Fryer's testimony are checkable, and it must pass the test, since it asserts itself as true rather than denying that anything is. Second, the weak sentence must fail the test in one line: state plainly that if nothing is true, that claim about the guideline is not true either, so it cannot be used to dismiss the guideline or anything else. A completed attempt ends with two clearly separated sentences and a one-line verdict on each, not a single blended paragraph that leaves the two claims tangled together.