Truth Regimes and Discourses that Maintain Mathematics as an Instrument of Exclusion

Abstract

In this paper, we present, as a result of qualitative research, some regimes of truth, sustained by positivist myths. In the investigation, we take enunciation residues related to Mathematics and speeches that take it as a control device, therefore, of social exclusion. Furthermore, we used the method of analysis of the production of meanings, pertinent to the Semantic Field Model, with the objective of producing meanings to the regimes of truth that involve discourses aimed at maintaining a conception of universalist Mathematics. As a result, we formed three nuclei, with their respective local stipulations, objects, legitimacy, and interlocutors. Hence, we find that the nuclei of antitheses to positivist truth regimes are diametrically opposed to the nuclei of the Index librorum prohibitorum, and its local stipulations are antithetical to the stipulations of the first two nuclei. We also verified that the local stipulations of the nuclei of the Index librorum prohibitorum are sustained by positivist myths that, added to the competence ideology, they form a substrate that feeds the systems of exclusion from discourses. Such speeches, in turn, end up supporting the local stipulations of the nucleus of the antitheses to positivist truth regimes.