networks, has turned to exposing the inner truth claims of the various special-
ized branches to the alternative perspectives of different branches.
Much of the intellectual action now comes from cross-disciplinary clashes,
but this sociological point is not yet an epistemological judgment on the reality
of the objects that particular fields are studying. Analysis is not the same as
critique. Reflexivity per se is not necessarily self-undermining. To say “I am
lying” is paradoxical; but to say “I am telling the truth” is not. Why then is
it so easily assumed that sociological reflexivity undermines the truth of what-
ever socially produced knowledge it focuses upon?
The widespread assumption is that truth is determined by reality; a state-
ment is true because it meets the criteria of truth, not because of any other
reason. If truth is socially determined, then it cannot be determined by truth
itself. This is like saying that one sees things accurately only if one sees without
eyeballs, as if knowing must take place without any human apparatus for
knowing.
Truth characterizes statements. Reality is that which makes statements true,
but reality itself is neither true nor false; it simply is. Statements are inevitably
human; truth, when it exists, is inevitably a phenomenon of the human world.
The abstract truths we are concerned with, found in the statements of intellec-
tuals, arise in the specialized discourse of social networks. The very conception
of truth, and the criteria by which truth is recognized, arise within human
communities, and have been changed, abstracted, and refined over the genera-
tions of intellectual networks. That is merely a historical fact. That conceptions
of truth are human, and historical, does not automatically divorce true state-
ments from reality.
Truths do not arise in isolated brains or disembodied minds. The message
of this book is that mind is not a substance or an entity; the verbal thinking
we are concerned with is an activity of overt and internal conversations.
Thought is always linked in a flow of verbal gesture from human body to body,
among mutually focused nervous systems, reverberating with shared rhythms
of attention. Its symbols represent general and abstract viewpoints because
they are communicable markings, activities of taking the stance of all the
members of the network. Its arguments are energized by the emotional energy
arising from the ritual density of interactions in the core of the intellectual
networks, where disagreements are focused and alliances are made. The indi-
vidual thinker, closeted in privacy, thinks something which is significant for
the network only because his or her inner conversation is part of the larger
conversation and contributes to its problems. If a brain flickers and brightens
with statements which are true, this happens only because that brain is pulsing
in connection with the past and anticipated future of a social network. Truth
arises in social networks; it could not possibly arise anywhere else.
Epilogue: Sociological Realism^ •^877