Abstract

The article approaches »truth« from a situational point of view, arguing that truth claims are characterized by a certain type of validity claim that is in the last instance of a moral nature. In scenes of truth, a normative type of validity claim, which in Durkheim's sense refers to the maintenance of a norm even when it is trespassed by an individual, is suspended. As a consequence, scenes of truth cannot tolerate the mismatch between reality construction and empirical observation that is characteristic of normative validity claims. Instead, they tend to eliminate any distance between construction and observation, radicalizing the norm to a quasi-natural law with a moral inflection