The Construction of the Truth- Teller in the Early Issues of the Philosophical Transactions from 1665: The Relationship between Author Functions and Enunciatory Power
The Construction of the Truth- Teller in the Early Issues of the Philosophical Transactions from 1665: The Relationship between Author Functions and Enunciatory Power

Summary/Abstract: One astonishing feature characteristic of the early issues of the Philosophical Transactions from 1665 is that each text is not ascribed an author. In this paper, I study this remarkable feature by exploring the relationship between authors and texts through an intra-textual analysis of the various author functions in the texts in order to discuss how (and if) the ascription (or omission) of an author’s name marks the truthfulness of a text. By analysing the various author functions, a complex network of positions of the knowing subjects emerges, which shows that the contributors are bestowed with different degrees of enunciatory power to speak the truth. The dispersion of the positions of the knowing subjects ranges from an elevated position of the truth-teller as a gentleman scientist to the dubious entertainer. While the truth-teller is endowed with the authority to speak the truth, the entertainer is in a subordinated position marked by epistemic relativity. Within this distribution of the positions of the knowing subjects, laypersons could contribute to knowledge production, yet they remained in a subordinated position. Thereby, I show how the speaking of truth was distributed unequally in the early issues of the Philosophical Transactions.

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