"Instead, I want to raise a concern about the way those seeking to defend absolute or universal truth pursue this project. To put it succinctly, skepticism of absolute universal truth is about so much more than power structures and social construction. In that sense, a perfect and complete refutation (if that is even possible) of the idea that the truth is determined by power or other similar notions does very little to prove what defenders of absolute truth are presumably trying to do."
meaning de Buen's topic wasn't the culture wars, but problems with determining the truth that continue to exist even if the "truth isn't just a power relation" side wins the culture wars. I found de Buen's essay sketchy, as in preliminary, neither polished nor fleshed out, but he may not have intended it as any more than a sketch.
Separately, you're an expert writing for a general audience here. By estimating a range (“somewhere between 12 million and 13 million”) over which "one might agree" that the statement "Approximately 12.5 million Africans were enslaved by Europeans in the period 1500-1900" is true, you're communicating an estimate of how far off the original estimate can be and still be truthful. Still, accuracy in these measurements is a matter of degree, and if someone were to discover the real number of Africans enslaved by Europeans during that exact time period were one less than 12 million or one more than 13 million, could the estimate of 12.5 million be reasonably said to flip from being wholly true to wholly false? (After all, if "one might agree" that 13 million is close enough, one would probably agree 13 million plus one is, too, and so on, with discomfort and dissent gradually emerging as the addition got larger.)
To the extent you're talking about culture wars, even if de Buen isn't, a feature of these wars is a variable willingness to agree with how others use language to approximate their ideas, depending on how much we trust them, or want them to be trusted by others. If I felt like being lawyerly, I could argue that the plain-English meaning of what you said was to give a range, exactly 12 million to exactly 13 million, no more or less, under which the 12.5 million estimate would be categorically true and outside of which it would be categorically false. After, all, there's nothing logically preventing mapping the statement to True if the historical number is anywhere within the range and False if it's anywhere outside it. But that's not how numerate people typically use estimation, at least if they trust one another, is it?
Did we read the same piece? De Buen wrote,
"Instead, I want to raise a concern about the way those seeking to defend absolute or universal truth pursue this project. To put it succinctly, skepticism of absolute universal truth is about so much more than power structures and social construction. In that sense, a perfect and complete refutation (if that is even possible) of the idea that the truth is determined by power or other similar notions does very little to prove what defenders of absolute truth are presumably trying to do."
meaning de Buen's topic wasn't the culture wars, but problems with determining the truth that continue to exist even if the "truth isn't just a power relation" side wins the culture wars. I found de Buen's essay sketchy, as in preliminary, neither polished nor fleshed out, but he may not have intended it as any more than a sketch.
Separately, you're an expert writing for a general audience here. By estimating a range (“somewhere between 12 million and 13 million”) over which "one might agree" that the statement "Approximately 12.5 million Africans were enslaved by Europeans in the period 1500-1900" is true, you're communicating an estimate of how far off the original estimate can be and still be truthful. Still, accuracy in these measurements is a matter of degree, and if someone were to discover the real number of Africans enslaved by Europeans during that exact time period were one less than 12 million or one more than 13 million, could the estimate of 12.5 million be reasonably said to flip from being wholly true to wholly false? (After all, if "one might agree" that 13 million is close enough, one would probably agree 13 million plus one is, too, and so on, with discomfort and dissent gradually emerging as the addition got larger.)
To the extent you're talking about culture wars, even if de Buen isn't, a feature of these wars is a variable willingness to agree with how others use language to approximate their ideas, depending on how much we trust them, or want them to be trusted by others. If I felt like being lawyerly, I could argue that the plain-English meaning of what you said was to give a range, exactly 12 million to exactly 13 million, no more or less, under which the 12.5 million estimate would be categorically true and outside of which it would be categorically false. After, all, there's nothing logically preventing mapping the statement to True if the historical number is anywhere within the range and False if it's anywhere outside it. But that's not how numerate people typically use estimation, at least if they trust one another, is it?