SYP IV: Kitcher's four theses of scientism

My SYP reading has lead me to Phil Kitcher's Science, truth, and democracy (2001). The first, introductory chapter introduces two of what I, borrowing some postmodernist jargon, will call metanarratives. One metanarrative is called `scientism' or `faith in science', and Kitcher identifies four theses:

1. The sciences can provide us with knowledge of nature.
   
2. They have a definite aim, namely to offer knowledge that is as systematic and complete as possible.
   
3. That knowledge can be used for practical ends, but the moral appraisal of the uses is properly directed at technology and public policy, not at science itself.
   
4. Besides its practical benefits or harms, the knowledge has intrinsic value, and that value typically overrides mundane practical concerns.
   

I want to go through these one by one, with a little analysis and a little more of my own personal opinions.

First, I take the sciences to be paradigmatic of knowledge. But this doesn't mean that I think scientific theories are (generally) true in any standard correspondence conception of truth. It also doesn't mean that I think scientific theories are not (generally) true according to such a conception. Rather, I don't care about truth. I think truth is a metaphysical notion, and hence philosophically suspect at best. Instead, I think theories are epistemically adequate, and paradigmatic of epistemic adequacy. I won't talk about this notion in any detail here, except to assert that it is epistemic, rather than metaphysical, and is orthogonal to the realist/antirealist debate.

Second, I do not think science has a definite aim, yet it does aim at systematic and complete knowledge. This aim is not definite because it is complex, heterogeneous, and contextual. Complex and heterogeneous because knowledge is a complex good, which can be valuable in many different ways. As a first pass, knowledge can be valuable for making predictions or for providing explanations; and some pieces of knowledge will be valuable in one respect but not do well in the other. Contextual because the standards for knowledge depend upon the socio-political and epistemic context in which the knowledge claims are made.

Third, I have a modified pragmatic understanding of epistemology: knowledge is primarily valuable both in itself and for enabling more complex interactions with the world and the pursuit of non-epistemic projects. I do not make a strong distinction between `knowledge that' and `knowledge how', and hence do not recognise a strong distinction between `pure' science and technology. To the extent that the third thesis presupposes such a distinction, therefore, I reject it.

But I also, following Helen Longino, believe that socio-political values play an essential role in guiding certain lines of enquiry. Without racist and sexist values, for example, research into innate sexual and racial differences in cognitive abilities would not exist. Such lines of enquiry can therefore be criticised for their close connection to objectionable values.

Finally, I do think that knowledge has intrinsic value. But I do not think this intrinsic value overrides its pragmatic value, or exempts it from criticism on grounds that would classically be considered non-epistemic. So I agree with the fourth thesis, but only up through the `and'.

SYP blogging III: MacIntyre against the pluralists

MacIntyre is a contextualist:

There is no standing ground, no place for enquiry, no way to engage in the practices of advancing, evaluating, accepting, and rejecting reasoned argument apart from that which is provided by some particular tradition or other. (WJ? 350)

All reasoning and rational argument must take place within a tradition, or in roughly equivalent jargon, from some particular socio-politically, historically, and theoretically constituted standpoint.

But he is also very much neither a relativist nor a perspectivist. More specifically, MacIntyre seems to be a monist, someone who rejects the idea that there must necessarily be a plurality of acceptable or true theories. At least with regard to ethics, MacIntyre believes in an end or completion of enquiry, at least as what Kant would call an ideal of reason. He writes,

To engage in intellectual enquiry is ... to understand the movement from thesis to thesis as a movement toward a kind of logos which will disclose how things are, not relative to some point of view, but as such .... So the terminus and telos of enquiring into what justice is has to be an account of justice as such, of the eidos of all partial and one-sided [ie, contextually-bound] exemplifications and one-sided elucidations. (78-9)

Each of his four criteria for a successful tradition articulate the way in which `a retrospective examination [of the tradition, from within the tradition] shows, not merely a movement without [sic] direction, but progress pointing toward a goal' (79). (Note, however, that `although one can definitely progress toward the final completion of rational enquiry, that completion lies at a point which cannot itself be attained' in a finite amount of time (81). This completion is strictly ideal. Hence MacIntyre's nitpicking rejection of Hegel (361).)

Chapter XIX of Whose justice? is MacIntyre's rejection of relativism and perspectivism. Perspectivism seems to be defined as a realist pluralism:

Instead of interpreting rival traditions as mutually exclusive and incompatible ways of understanding one and the same world, one and the same subject matter, let us understand them instead as providing very different, complementary perspectives for envisaging the realities about which they speak to us. (352)

Relativism, by contrast, is an anti-realist pluralism, whether of a full-blown `anything goes' variety (Ibid) or a more moderated pluralism (366). Since it would be fair to call me a perspectivist by this definition (along with Longino, Dewey, Quine, and many of my other philosophical heroes), I'm most interested in trying to understand MacIntyre's rejection of perspectivism.

Unfortunately, this seems to be the rejection in its entirety:

The perspectivist ... fails to recognize how integral the conception of truth is to tradition-constituted forms of enquiry. It is this which leads perspectivists to suppose that one could temporarily adopt the standpoint of a tradition and then exchange it for another, as one might wear first one costume and then another, or as one might act one part in one play and then a quite different part in a quite different play. But genuinely to adopt the standpoint of a tradition thereby commits one to its view of what is true and false and, in so committing one, prohibits one from adopting any rival standpoint. Hence the perspectivist could indeed pretend to assume the standpoint of some one particular tradition of enquiry; he or she could not in fact do so. The multiplicity of traditions does not afford a multiplicity of perspectives among which we can move, but a multiplicity of antagonistic commitments, between which only conflict, rational or nonrational, is possible. (367-8)

The idea seems to be that, because the perspectivist is locked into her particular tradition (A), she cannot comment on whether a different tradition (B) is viable according to its own standards (the standards internal to B). All she has available are her own standards and assumptions, which are internal to A, and according to which, MacIntyre seems to claim here, B must be rejected as unviable.

This just seems to be a variation on a theme often used against simplistic relativism. The relativist says `All truths are relative!'; the anti-relativist retorts that this itself is supposed to be an absolute truth, and hence is self-defeating. Note that MacIntyre must reject this scheme for his contextualism: There must be a tradition (indeed, the tradition inhabited by MacIntyre himself) within which we can survey a variety of traditions and thereby contruct a theory of traditions. Such a theory will be tradition-bound, but this is only a problem if we require our theories to be tradition-independent.

Now look at perspectivism again. It is a claim of a theory of traditions: according to the theory of traditions we have constructed from within our particular tradition, traditions work in thus and such ways, and among their workings is this fact of pluralism. MacIntyre's monism is a rejection, not of the possibility of constructing a theory of traditions within some particular tradition, but of some particular part of a rival theory of traditions (whether this rival has been constructed in his own or an alien tradition).

However, what MacIntyre seems to reject in his argument is not the particular claim of perspectivism, but the possibility of any theory of traditions whatsoever. `From within our particular tradition', he seems to argue, `we cannot examine how well another tradition does according to its own standards, only our own, because we cannot internalise their standards'. This is not just incidentally incompatible with MacIntyre's approach; it's specifically rejected earlier in the chapter, when MacIntyre is rejecting anything-goes relativism and defending the claim that there can be rational, progressive engagement between traditions:

the adherents of a tradition which is now in this state of fundamental and radical crisis may at this point encounter in a new way the claims of some particular rival tradition .... They now come or had already come to understand the beliefs and way of life of this other alien tradition, and to do so they have or have had to learn ... the language of the alien tradition as a new and second first language.

When they have understood the beliefs of the alien tradition, they may find themselves compelled to recognize that within this other tradition it is possible to construct from the concepts and theories peculiar to it what they were unable to provide from their own conceptual and theoretical resources .... (364)

MacIntyre's philosophical methodology requires the possibility of at least partly internalising the standards of a rival tradition in at least some circumstances.

Indeed, there is an easy inductive argument here for pluralism. Start with the recognition that `Every tradition ... confronts the possibility that at some future time it will fall into a state of epistemological crisis, recognizable as such by its own standards of rational justification' (Ibid). As a lemma, recognise that some elements which we take to be fundamental to our own tradition will inevitably lead us (or our descendents) into such a crisis. This crisis will be concluded in part by assimilating the resources of a rival tradition, as per the observation above. That is, by our own standards, our current tradition contains some falsities and our rivals contain some truths. Finally, generalise this theorem to all traditions, and we have a claim as close to perspectivism as I think makes no difference.

MacIntyre's attack on perspectivism is too coarse-grained. He cannot reject all theorising about traditions, because his own work is a theory of traditions; he must instead target the particular rival theory (or theories) of traditions which endorses perspectivism. And, at least in chapter XIX, he has failed to do this.

SYP blogging II: MacIntyre on conservatism

On (WJ? 54), MacIntyre is discussing the period of conceptual change in Athens during and after the Peloponnesian War. He writes the following:

Those who respond to periods of rapid and disruptive change by appealing for a retention of or a return to the ways of the past, to the customary, to the traditional, always have to reckon with the fact that in an established customary social order those who follow its ways do not have and do not need good reasons for so doing .... It is only later when these routines [of the normal day, month, and year] have more largely and more radically been disrupted that the question of whether it was not in fact better to follow the older ways unreflectively can be raised, and when the conservative offers his contemporaries good reasons for returning to an earlier relatively unreflective mode of social life, his very modes of advocacy provide evidence that what he recommends is no longer possible. So in Aristophanes' comedies the conservative figures portrayed are in part comic victims because forced into the very rhetorical modes which they abhor in order to argue against those modes.

This is a difficult yet intriguing passage. As a first pass, I think I can understand it by considering the arguments for `traditional family values' and against redistributive welfare, affirmative action programmes, and the progressive cultural transformations of the mid- and late-twentieth century more generally.

Note first that these conservatives generally do not argue that these programmes and transformations are bad because they harm members of privileged classes by taking away some of their privileges. For example, no opponents of affirmative action programmes argue that making it harder for wealthy white people to get into prestigious universities is, in and of itself, a bad thing. Similarly, no advocate of `traditional family values' argues that women need to be full-time homemakers so that men can enjoy less competition in the workplace.

Note second that the arguments we actually see are, instead, that these programmes and transformations harm members of the classes they are intended to help. Affirmative action is tantamount to grade inflation, and will just end promoting people beyond their real ability, being on welfare is demeaning, women who work outside the home are too busy to be good mothers, and so on.

In short, racists and sexists no longer feel they can appeal to racist and sexist principles to criticise anti-racist and anti-sexist policies, at least explicitly. Instead, they attempt to appropriate and turn anti-racist and anti-sexist principles. Affirmative action and welfare programmes are racist, it's sexist to encourage women to work outside the home, and so on. Just as MacIntyre says, the sexist and racist routines of sixty years ago have been largely replaced with more progressive routines, and even conservative opponents of our contemporary routines must argue their case in the conceptual framework of these same routines.

This does not entail that conservatives can never be successful, at least in the middle term. Anyone who is familiar with the history of the anti-feminist backlashes in the wake of the First and Second Waves will know just how successful conservatives can be. But even when conservatives are successful, their success is not a true return to the old routines. What conservatives can accomplish is a synthesis of the conservative thesis and progressive antithesis: a social order which rejects some, but not all, aspects of the progressive order as `excessive'.

SYP blogging I: Introduction

This summer, for my Ph.D programme, I'm required to write a `Second-year paper'. Roughly, this is a 8,000 word paper suitable for publication in a general-interest journal of academic philosophy. My paper will be a revision of one of my term papers from last Fall, on similarities between the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, preeminent Notre Dame ethicist, and Helen Longino, feminist philosopher of science currently at Stanford.

As part of this project, I'm reading what is arguably MacIntyre's magnum opus, Whose justice? Which rationality? (henceforth simply WJ?). This is an extremely dense book, and I'll be spending some time blogging interesting and difficult points here. Later in the summer, I hope to blog rereading the other three primary texts in the project: Longino's Science as social knowledge (SSK) and Fate of knowledge (FK), and MacIntyre's After virtue (AV). All four of these texts deserve the status of classics in their respective areas of philosophy.