Archives For Books and Book Reviews

African Philosophy and History, Anke Graness

SERRC —  October 23, 2018 — 1 Comment

Author Information: Anke Graness, University of Vienna, anke.graness@univie.ac.at.

Graness, Anke. “African Philosophy and History.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 10 (2018): 45-54.

The pdf of the article gives specific page numbers. Shortlink: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-42b

 

A view from Abwond, in South Sudan.
Image by SIM USA via Flickr / Creative Commons

 

Edwin Etieyibo’s recent collection of papers is the result of the conference ‘African philosophy: Past, Present and Future’ held at the University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa) in 2015. The presentations and lively discussions during that conference, especially those concerning the future methodology of philosophy in Africa and the steps to be taken towards integrating African philosophy in university curricula, were organised into four sections of the book: (I) African Philosophy and History; (II) Method in African Philosophy); (III) Substance of African Philosophy); (IV) African Philosophy and its Future. All four parts raise important questions and deserve a detailed discussion. However, I will focus my review on the first chapter, ‘African Philosophy and History’.

How Important Is the History of Philosophy?

The importance of the history of philosophy is vigorously contested. In particular, it was challenged by logical positivism and the analytic school during the twentieth century, both of which maintained that historiography had a weak epistemic basis. However, despite all attempts to minimise the role of the history of philosophy in current research and teaching, it continues to play a crucial role in present-day philosophy. An examination of what Africa has done towards writing a history of philosophy is of utmost relevance, especially to the formation of educational policy.

The first article is Edwin Etieyibo’s ‘African Philosophy in History, Context, and Contemporary Times’. Here, the first sentence of the essay is problematic. The author claims: ‘African philosophy does have a long history, albeit mostly undocumented, unwritten, and oral.’ (13) The author seems to assume that orality is a fundamental characteristic of African cultures and societies, and perhaps even that one cannot speak of philosophy in the absence of a written tradition.

Both assumptions have to be strongly refuted. There is a long tradition of written philosophy on the African continent, extending from the time of the ancient Egyptians and including Ethiopian philosophy, the Arabic-Islamic philosophical tradition in Africa south of the Sahara, the Ajami tradition, and the written tradition in the Swahili culture. Souleymane Bachir Diagne sharply criticises the equation of Africa with oral traditions. He calls it a gaze that confines Africa to its oral tradition and de-historicises the whole continent. He argues that the debate:

is often carried out in complete ignorance of the established history of intellectual centres in Africa, where texts containing an undeniable philosophical dimension were studied and commented on, in writing, and where the names of Plato and Aristotle, for example, were well known long before the European presence. (Diagne 2016, 57)

A number of philosophers, including Henry Odera Oruka and Sophie Oluwole, have provided positive proof of the existence of philosophy in oral traditions. And as Diagne argues:

to understand orality is to understand that it too involves intertextuality, which is to say the art of producing a text (it makes no difference if this text is oral) in relation to another one, which the new text evokes in different ways: by citing it, making allusion to it, imitating it, miming it, subverting it, treating it at times with derision. In this way orality returns on itself, becoming a critical reworking of its own stories, and along with them the knowledge and values that they can carry and transmit: it produces new stories that put the old ones, often established as canonical, into question. (Diagne 2016, 54)

It is troubling that prejudices about the history of philosophy in Africa are still widespread. Precisely for this reason, a more detailed study of the history of pre-twentieth-century African philosophy is urgently needed.

Discovering Long-Maligned African Thought

While the next sections of Etieyibo’s article deal with the rejection of African philosophy and in particular with the racist theses of some European philosophers such as Hume, Kant and Hegel, the fourth section of his contribution is devoted to the question of who can be regarded as an African philosopher. I will deal with this question in more detail in a moment.

Towards the end of his essay the author names six areas in which African philosophy lags behind international discourse, among them African metaphysics, African epistemology, African logic, and African philosophy of mind. Etieyibo leaves open what the qualifier ‘African’ means in this context. Concerning the institutional frame of academic philosophy, Etieyibo rightly laments that there is an insufficient number of publications on African philosophy and limited access to them; that there are too few specialist conferences and meetings regarding it; that the discipline suffers from a lack of financial support; and that there is too little exchange between scholars in the field. He maintains that the institutional framework of philosophy production in Africa must be significantly improved.

Two scholars who made major contributions to the reconstruction of the history of philosophy in Africa, particularly African philosophy’s development since the beginning of the twentieth century, also contributed to this section of the book: the American philosopher Barry Hallen (A Short History of African Philosophy, 2002, second edition 2009) and the Kenyan philosopher Dismas A. Masolo (African Philosophy in Search of Identity, 1994).

Barry Hallen starts his article with a number of important questions which have to be answered in order to demarcate the scope of research of a history of African philosophy:

Does African philosophy include all philosophy done by Africans regardless of content?

Does African philosophy include the work of non-Africans who focus on African content?

Can Africans who focus only on researching and teaching ‘Western’ philosophy be considered ‘African philosophers’?

In other words, who should be included in and excluded from the narrative of a history of African philosophy? Hallen’s questions concern the geographical and socio-cultural origin of the scholars and concepts which should be included in a history of philosophy in Africa, or to put it differently, how to localise thought and scholarship. Hallen does not answer these questions but rather focuses his explorations on the general significance of cultural or geographical labels like ‘Indian’, ‘Chinese’ or ‘African’ for philosophy and examines the relationship between the universal and the culturally particular in philosophy.

What Is an African Philosopher?

However, in his article Etieyibo tries to define ‘African philosopher’ using analytic and logical methods. Etieyibo asks whether blackness or being African obliges one to do African philosophy and, moreover, who may count as an African philosopher. To answer these questions, he differentiates between a ‘narrow view’ and a ‘broad view’ of who may be deemed an African philosopher.

According to the ‘narrow view’, ‘one is an African philosopher if one engages with works in African philosophy and works towards developing it.’ (19-20) Unfortunately, Etieyibo leaves open ‘what sorts of work count as African philosophy’ (20). He argues that this issue is not decisive; however, if we do not know what work counts as African philosophy, we will not be able to apply the ‘narrow view’ criterion (‘engages with works in African philosophy’) to identify someone as an African philosopher. Thus, we are thrown back on the old question, ‘What is African philosophy?’.

In the ‘broad view’ the basis of identification as an African philosopher is the ‘person’s origin and what the person does … That is, one is an African philosopher if one is an African and works in philosophy’ (20). Furthermore, Etieyibo argues that ‘just because one … is African does not mean that she does or ought to do African philosophy’. (22) Of course, it is absolutely correct to remind us that philosophers from Africa do not have any duty to do African philosophy– if doing African philosophy means one is constrained to dealing with theories and methodologies which emerged on the African continent or with issues that concern the African Lebenswelt alone.

Like philosophers anywhere in the world, philosophers in and from Africa are free to choose their areas of research without losing their identity as an African. If I do not lose my identity as a European when I deal with philosophical traditions from Africa, the same applies to philosophers from Africa. However, Etieyibo’s remarks do not bring us any closer to answering the questions raised by Hallen, which target issues of classification.

I think it is less important to clarify the continental affiliation of those who practice philosophy in Africa than it is to clarify the definition and demarcation of African philosophy. This clarification has important consequences, for example for the integration of African philosophy into curricula and publication projects, and especially for financial support: What exactly is the ‘African philosophy’ that has to be integrated in curricula? What is to be labelled and promoted as ‘African philosophy’—the work of a philosopher from Africa who is a Wittgenstein specialist? Or does ‘African philosophy’ include only the work of philosophers who deal with African thought traditions, the relevance of those traditions, issues of the African Lebenswelt, such as questions about concepts of justice in the present-day African context, etc.?

The Wittgenstein specialist would certainly have plenty of funding possibilities via research programs in analytic philosophy, philosophy of language, continental philosophy and all kinds of funding foundations; those dealing with marginalised and formerly excluded philosophy traditions in Africa hardly any funding prospects at all. In this respect, a definition of the term ‘African philosophy’ is not only relevant here, but also decisive.

Africa and Universality

Barry Hallen discusses in his essay the relationship between the universality and the particularity of philosophical knowledge with regard to the debates on African philosophy since the 1960s, when African philosophers started to discuss and to attack centuries-old ‘Western’ stereotypes that denied Africans’ ability to think rationally, logically, and critically. During the 1960s African philosophers started to reassert their capability and reclaim their right to describe and to represent the history, present, and future of their continent as well as the African history of ideas, and they refused to be defined and represented according to ‘Western’ anthropological and colonial terms. Hallen describes the debates about the question ‘What is African philosophy?’ between the 1960s and the 1980s as being of immense importance, for here African philosophers:

were putting their own house in order, and they were conscious of their responsibility as scholars to do so. This was Africa talking to Africa about an issue that mattered to Africa. (39)

But still, during these early years of academic philosophy in Africa south of the Sahara, ‘Western’ philosophers considered these debates ‘culture philosophy’ because of the focus on African languages and culture and their philosophical dimensions. For ‘Western’ philosophers, African philosophy seemed to lack the universal dimension characteristic of philosophy.

In the following passage, Hallen refers mainly to the Ghanaian philosopher Kwasi Wiredu and his counterarguments against such allegations. Wiredu, who conducted a thorough study of his mother tongue Twi and the culture and political institutions of his people, the Akan, insisted that:

African philosophers are doing the same thing as Western philosophers when they extrapolate from the ideas, beliefs, and practices of their cultures to see their relevance to and for more transcendent concerns. African philosophers must therefore insist that the intellectual playing field be levelled and that our cultures be accorded the same initial integrity as any others. In Africa as in other places of the world African philosophy is philosophy, full stop. (41)

This is an important point: why is Heidegger’s theoretical work, which was devoted to the study of the German language and its origins and the Lebenswelt of his time, or Wittgenstein’s analysis taken to be philosophy, but theoretical work on African languages or Lebenswelten classified as cultural studies? Philosophy always starts from particular or contextual circumstances that give rise to further considerations. Wiredu has made this a fundamental principle of his work: he has applied the method of analytic philosophy to the study of a particular language and a particular context in order to make further, general judgments on this basis. The particular language in his case is his mother tongue Twi.

Or as Hallen expresses it:

The whole point of his philosophy is to demonstrate … that a philosophical methodology identified with the “Western” tradition … can be extracted from that tradition and applied to African content with positive consequences …’ (48) and ‘… using African content as a basis for abstracting alternative conceptualizations of truth, of the person, of the community, of development, of modernization that can then be placed in comparison with those more conventionally taken as paradigmatic by academic philosophy. (46-47)

Hallen is concerned that the current generation of young philosophers has not adopted Wiredu’s approach and method. So he asks: ‘Who else is doing philosophy in the African context along the lines of Wiredu?’ (45) Like Wiredu, Hallen argues that it is right and important to apply accepted philosophical methods to African content. He urges that those who argue that new and different forms of approach to philosophy are needed to represent African philosophy independently and fairly should develop and successfully implement such new methods.

One can only agree with Hallen’s criticism of the term ‘World philosophy’: that it is a euphemism for non-‘Western’ thought, for in such volumes on ‘World philosophy’ there is no section devoted to European philosophy (47). This also shows that there is a long way to go before non-European philosophy ceases to be considered exotica.

Africa Beyond Reaction

Dismas Masolo also begins his essay by referring to the difficulties that beset African philosophers in the twentieth century:

much of what we have done in the contemporary history of African philosophy appears to be only corrective work – that is, to respond to bad philosophy that came out of equally bad scholarship on Africa by European social scientists. (54)

Despite all the progress that has been made since then, Masolo criticises the current discourse in African philosophy as follows:

we have not developed out of those responses and corrections what Wiredu calls ‘a tradition of philosophy’ that builds on highlighting a discursive sparring among ourselves about our own specific conceptions, beliefs, or experiences in a manner that would be called philosophical. (56)

With reference to Wiredu, who demands ‘that folks throughout the continent should develop a sustainable or self-sustaining tradition of a philosophical discourse that explores Africans’ beliefs and conceptions of the world’ (57), Masolo underlines that a ‘sustainable tradition of a philosophical discourse’ has to be developed. Masolo does not provide us with a definition of ‘sustainable tradition’, but he points out that ‘sustained discourses among locals give traditions of thought their identities’ (57) and that it is important ‘to confront and interrogate the informing historical or ontological contents (such as specific socio-political or cultural interests) of philosophical or deontological principles when in competition with others.’ (57)

According to Masolo, it is vital to recognise the importance of the time and place in which philosophy emerges; no philosophers can completely free themselves from their locally and temporally conditioned context, which determines their thinking in important ways, e.g. their methodology, content, and research interests. Even so, it is necessary to try to transcend the local and to come to universal judgments. To demonstrate how local knowledge production can be made fruitful for philosophy and a ‘sustainable’, proprietary tradition of philosophy can be built, Masolo uses his own research on the famous intellectual, poet, and essayist Shaaban Bin Robert (1909-1962), who supported the preservation of the Tanzanian verse tradition and wrote Utubora Mkulima, a story about the search for human perfection which offers guidelines for a good life.

Masolo does not consider the difficult and complex situation of present-day African knowledge production an obstacle. This complexity is due to various tensions that emerge from aspects of colonial and neo-colonial heritage, among them the intersection of indigenous and colonial traditions of knowledge production, the relationship between local and global cultures, and the need to participate in international discourse and yet remain free of the domination of Western dictates of discourse. Masolo argues with reference to Hegel that such complex systems of social contradictions are a precondition for the formation of philosophy.

On campus at University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Image by oncampus.ru via Flickr / Creative Commons

 

Questions of Progress

The last article in this section is Edwin E. Etieyibo and Jonathan O. Chimakonam’s analysis ‘The State of African Philosophy’. Their starting point is the question: What progress has African philosophy made since the end of the great debate about its existence and nature?

Now, it is always difficult to define ‘progress’, but in philosophical debates it is even more difficult to make ‘progress’ manifest, because after all, philosophical research and debates do not lead to billable results or established form of output as do social sciences, economics or natural sciences. How can progress be measured in a discipline like philosophy, which despite continuous effort over thousands of years, has never even been able to reach definite conclusions about such key concepts as justice, truth, or being?

In order to measure ‘progress’ in African philosophy, the two authors propose to elicit numbers regarding scholars and researchers engaged in African philosophy, including the number of undergraduate and graduate students specializing in African philosophy; the number of publications, conferences, and courses about African philosophy; etc. (72) Thus, in the first line, Etieyibo and Chimakonam focus on progress as a matter of quantitative, not qualitative, analysis.

However, the authors also suggest analysing the content and substance of current research and debates in African philosophy. Here, of course, the standard or yardstick is again particularly unclear: how should the ‘substance’ of philosophical work be measured? And how can subjective preferences (with regard to the philosophical methods or schools considered relevant) be excluded from such an evaluation? What is considered to be ‘substantial’ – and what is not? The answer to these questions is never free of interests, preferences, and positions of power. What are the possible guidelines for questions about ‘substance’? The two authors do not give us any criteria.

Due to the scope of such quantitative research, the authors limit their enquiries to an investigation of the number of universities and philosophy departments in sub-Saharan Africa that offer courses in African philosophy. The two authors are well aware of the inadequate basis for their study; many of the departments they tried to contact in Africa did not respond, so no statements can be made about them, which leaves the authors’ database incomplete.

It is notable that there are many lusophone and francophone universities among those Etieyibo and Chimakonam were unable to include in their study due to lack of response to their enquiries. This suggests that the two Anglophone authors, disregarding the language issue, may have contacted those universities only in English. A language-sensitive approach would be necessary in a follow-up attempt. It is astonishing that none of the East African universities which exerted a profound influence on the development and traditions of African philosophy—such as Makerere University in Uganda, Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia, and Nairobi University in Kenya—appear in the authors’ study.

Even though their search cannot claim to be complete, the authors think that it is possible to prove emerging tendencies from it. In their analysis of the curricula of philosophy departments of various African universities, they come to the conclusion (which is not new in itself but rather obvious) that philosophical education at African universities continues to be Eurocentric, since there are few or no courses in the curriculum that cover philosophical traditions which originated on the African continent.

Of course, such a numerical listing is interesting–especially against the background of the call for decolonization of curricula and universities. However, it would be more interesting to make a comparison between the present time and the situation in the 1960s and 1970s than between present circumstances and those prevalent less than half a dozen years ago. Such a comparison would certainly show a significant increase in the frequency of these courses and thus ‘progress’ in the quantitative sense. After all, the figures collected in Etieyibo and Chimakonam’s study can provide a basis of comparison should such a study be repeated in a few years.

It would be important in a follow-up study to examine to what extent the integration of African philosophy has progressed on an international level, e.g. in teaching at non-African universities (the US is certainly leading here) as well as at international conferences. African philosophy and African philosophers demonstrated an impressive presence at the most recent World Congress of Philosophy (WCP), which took place in 2018 in Beijing. Here, too, a lot has happened since the first appearance of African philosophy at the WCP in Düsseldorf, Germany, in 1978.

Bringing African Thought Throughout the Globe

The authors raise but do not answer a crucial question of didactic methodology concerning the integration of African philosophy in the curriculum of philosophy departments worldwide: is it better to offer standalone courses in African philosophy or to integrate topics and content from African philosophy into existing courses on, for example, ethics, metaphysics, or political philosophy? Is it better to present African philosophy separately or to weave African philosophical perspectives into general philosophy courses? (77) Which of these approaches is more effective in disseminating knowledge about the history of ideas and the current philosophical debates in Africa? Which is more effective in diversifying the conversation in both educational settings and international discourse?

Unfortunately, the authors do not answer this fundamental question. And it is indeed a central and important question, for it entails the following issues: Does presenting special courses in African philosophy perpetuate the assumption that African philosophy is an exotic discipline somehow outside ‘normal’ discourse? Courses labelled ‘European philosophy’ are rarely offered, because the European tradition is presumed to stand as philosophy proper, and as such needs no further geographical qualification. To avoid viewing African discourse as exotica, it might be better to integrate examples from it into overviews and historical lectures.

Furthermore, is it possible to solve philosophical problems solely from the perspective of one philosophical tradition? Perhaps an intercultural approach to teaching and research should be the ‘normal’ way of doing philosophy. If so, it might not make sense to present courses solely on African philosophy; it would be more effective to integrate ‘African’ content into general philosophy courses.

The last part of Etieyibo and Chimakonam’s paper addresses the issue of the ‘substantiality’ of the discourse in African philosophy. What does it mean to do philosophy in a ‘substantial’ way? The authors do not answer this question but offer very sharp criticism of contemporary discourses on African philosophy–large parts of which I, for my part, cannot comprehend at all. For example I do not see contemporary African philosophers as ‘telling worthless stories’ or view them as being isolated people (86). Personally, I see a very serious struggle to create philosophical concepts that are rooted in the African experience. I do agree with Etieyibo and Chimakonam’s observation of a revival of the ethnophilosophical discourse (87).

However, most of the criticism seems to me, especially because of its lack of specificity, to be unfounded accusations. Without reference to certain works or examples, these accusations cannot be investigated and therefore remain unproven; as such, they cannot lead to substantial reflection on ways to avoid certain mistakes. Also the authors’ accusation that Heinz Kimmerle, the German philosopher who was instrumental in introducing African philosophy to the German-speaking world, denied the existence of African philosophy (87), must be decisively rejected.

Lastly, the authors urge that a link between theory and practice in philosophy is very important. Citing Karl Marx, the authors assert that philosophy must become practical (74), and in order for that practice to be relevant, they argue, it must engage with the African Lebenswelt. Only then can African philosophy be part of the solution to the problems Africa faces today.

Conclusion

Edwin Etieyibo rightly states in his article ‘that any serious discussion of African philosophy in terms of its progress must and ought to be cognizant of its history.’ (14) However, not even one article in this part of the book is dedicated either to philosophical traditions in Africa before the twentieth century, or to methodological issues of writing the history of philosophy in Africa. On the contrary, Etieyibo and Chimakonam even claim: ‘Pre-colonial Africa was a period where emotions rather than reason primarily reigned supreme.’ (74)

Not only does such a statement testify to a certain ignorance of the long history of philosophical traditions, written and oral, in Africa, but it also plays into the hands of those who have always accused the Africans of a lack of rationality and always maintained that only the encounter with Europe made education, science, technology, and even philosophy possible on the African continent. However, Etieyibo underlines in his article that ‘saying that philosophy does not exist in Africa and among Africans because they lack rationality is to say that Africans are both biologically and ontologically inferior’ (16)–an argument Etieyibo sharply rejects. His rejection of racist arguments on the one hand and statements like the one above, that emotion rather than reason reigned in Africa, seem inconsistent to me.

A thorough reconstruction of the history of philosophy in Africa should be one of the basic tasks for African philosophers, since a self-determined view of history is the basis for a self-determined concept of the future of a discipline or even of an entire continent. How philosophies of earlier centuries can be researched and integrated into the history of philosophy and what difficulties remain to be solved (for example the question of the significance of orally transmitted philosophy, the question of the place of Arabic-Islamic philosophy in the history of philosophy in Africa, etc.) are not addressed in this part of the book. The really important questions about the history of philosophy remain unexamined. It is quite disappointing that the part entitled ‘African Philosophy and History’ of the book offers no new understanding of the really important questions in the history of philosophy in Africa.

Contact details: anke.graness@univie.ac.at

References

Bachir Diagne, Souleymane. The ink of the scholars: reflections on philosophy in Africa. Dakar: CODESRIA 2016.

Etieyibo, Edwin E. ‘African Philosophy in History, Context, and Contemporary Times’. In: Edwin Etieyibo, ed., Method, Substance, and the Future of African Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan 2018, pp. 13-33.

Etieyibo, Edwin E., and Jonathan O. Chimakonam: ‘The State of African Philosophy’. In: Edwin Etieyibo, ed., Method, Substance, and the Future of African Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan 2018, pp. 71-90.

Hallen, Barry. ‘The Journey of African Philosophy’. In: Edwin Etieyibo, ed., Method, Substance, and the Future of African Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan 2018, pp. 35-52.

Masolo, Dismas A. ‘History of Philosophy as a Problem: Our Case’. In: Edwin Etieyibo, ed., Method, Substance, and the Future of African Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan 2018, pp. 53-69.

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Crisis. Reform. Repeat. by William Davis

SERRC —  October 18, 2018 — Leave a comment

Author Information: William Davis, California Northstate University, William.Davis@csnu.edu.

Davis, William. “Crisis. Reform. Repeat.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 10 (2018): 37-44.

The pdf of the article gives specific page references. Shortlink: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-422

Yale University, in the skyline of New Haven, Connecticut.
Image by Ali Eminov via Flickr / Creative Commons

 

If you have been involved in higher education in recent decades, you have noticed shifts in how courses are conceived and delivered, and what students, teachers, and administrators expect of each other. Also, water feels wet. The latter statement offers as much insight as the first. When authors argue the need for new academic models, indeed that a kind of crisis in United States higher education is occurring, faculty and administrators in higher education are forgiven if we give a yawning reply: not much insight there.

Another Crisis

Those with far more experience in academia than I will, likely, shake their heads and scoff: demands for shifts in educational models and practices seemingly occur every few years. Not long ago, I was part of the SERRC Collective Judgment Forum (2013) debating the notion that Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are the future of higher education. The possibilities and challenges portended by online education would disrupt (“disruptive technologies” often represent the goals not the fears of the California culture where I live and work) the landscape of colleges and universities in the United States and the rest of the world.

Higher education would have to adapt to meet the needs of burgeoning numbers of people (at what point does one become a ‘student?’) seeking knowledge. The system of higher education faced a crisis; the thousands of people enrolling in MOOCs indicated that hordes of students might abandon traditional universities and embrace new styles of learning that matched the demands of twenty-first century life.

Can you count the number of professional crises you have lived through? If the humanities and/or social sciences are your home, then you likely remember quite a few (Kalin, 2017; Mandler, 2015; Tworek, 2013). That number, of course, represents calamity on a local level: crises that affect you, that loom over your future employment. For many academics, MOOCs felt like just such a threat.

Historian of technology Thomas Hughes (1994)[i] describes patterns in the development, change, and emergence of technologies as “technological momentum.” Technological momentum bridges two expansive and nuanced theories of technological development: determinism—the claim that technologies are the crucial drivers of culture—and constructivism—the idea that cultures drive technological change. MOOCs might motivate change in higher education, but the demands of relevant social groups (Pinch and Bijker 1984) would alter MOOCs, too.

Professors ought not fear their jobs would disappear or consolidate so precipitously that the profession itself would be transformed in a few years or decade: the mammoth system of higher education in the U.S. has its own inertia. Change would happen over time; teachers, students, and universities would adapt and exert counter-influences. Water feels wet.

MOOCs have not revolutionized models of higher education in the United States. Behind the eagerness for models of learning that will satisfy increasing numbers of people seeking higher education, of which MOOCs are one example, lies a growing concern about how higher education is organized, practiced, and evaluated. To understand the changes that higher education seems to require, we ought first to understand what it currently offers. Cathy Davidson (2017), as well as Michal Crow and William Dabars (2015), offer such histories of college and university systems in the United States. Their works demonstrate that a crisis in higher education does not approach; it has arrived.

Education in an Age of Flux

I teach at a new college in a university that opened its doors only a decade ago. One might expect that a new college offers boundless opportunity to address a crisis: create a program of study and methods of evaluating that program (including the students and faculty) that will meet the needs of the twenty-first century world. Situated as we are in northern California, and with faculty trained at Research 1 (R1) institutions, our college could draw from various models of traditional higher education like the University of California system or even private institutions (as we are) like Stanford.

These institutions set lofty standards, but do they represent the kinds of institutions that we ought to emulate? Research by Davidson (2017), Crow and Dabars would recommend we not follow the well-worn paths that established universities (those in existence for at least a few decades) in the United States have trodden. The authors seem to adopt the perspective that higher education functions like a system of technology (Hughes 1994); the momentum exerted by such systems has determining effects, but the possibility of directing the course of the systems exists nevertheless.

Michael Crow and William Dabars (2015) propose a design for reshaping U.S. universities that does not require the total abandonment of current models. The impetus for the needed transformation, they claim, is that the foundations of higher education in the U.S. have decayed; universities cannot meet the demands of the era.

The priorities that once drove research institutions have been assiduously copied, like so much assessment based on memorization and regurgitation that teachers of undergraduates might recognize, that their legibility and efficacy have faded. Crow and Dabars target elite, private institutions like Dartmouth and Harvard as exemplars of higher education that cannot, under their current alignment, meet the needs of twenty-first century students. Concerned as they are with egalitarianism, the authors note that public institutions of higher education born from the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890 fare no better at providing for the needs of the nation’s people (National Research Council 1995).

Crow and Dabars’s New American University model (2015, pp. 6-8) emphasizes access, discovery, inclusiveness, and functionality. Education ought to be available to all (access and inclusiveness) that seek knowledge and understanding of the world (discovery) in order to operate within, change, and/or improve it (functionality). The Morrill Acts, on a charitable reading, represent the United States of America’s assertion that the country and its people would mutually benefit from public education available to large swaths of the population.

Crow and Dabars, as well as Davidson (2017), base their interventions on an ostensibly similar claim: more people need better access to resources that will foster intellectual development and permit them to lead more productive lives. The nation benefits when individuals have stimulating engagement with ideas through competent instruction.  Individuals benefit because they may pursue their own goals that, in turn, will ideally benefit the nation.

Arizona State University epitomizes the New American University model. ASU enrolls over 70,000 students—many in online programs—and prides itself on the numbers of students it accepts rather than rejects (compare such a stance with Ivy League schools in the U.S.A.). Crow, President of ASU since 2002, has fostered an interdisciplinary approach to higher education at the university. Numerous institutes and centers (well over 50) have been created to focus student learning on issues/topics of present and future concern. For instance, the Decision Center for a Desert City asks students to imagine a future Phoenix, Arizona, with no, or incredibly limited, access to fresh water.

To engage with a topic that impacts manifold aspects of cities and citizens, solutions will require perspectives from work in disciplines ranging from engineering and the physical sciences to the social sciences and the humanities. The traditional colleges of, e.g., Engineering, Law, Arts and Sciences, etc., still exist at ASU. However, the institutes and centers appear as semi-autonomous empires with faculty from multiple disciplines, and often with interdisciplinary training themselves, leading students to investigate causes of and solutions to existing and emerging problems.

ASU aims to educate broad sections of the population, not just those with imposing standardized tests scores and impressive high school GPAs, to tackle obstacles facing our country and our world. Science and Technology Studies, an interdisciplinary program with scholars that Crow and Dabars frequently cite in their text, attracted my interest because its practitioners embrace ‘messy’ problems that require input from, just to name a few, historians, philosophers, political scientists, and sociologists. While a graduate student in STS, I struggled to explain my program of study to others without referencing existing disciplines like philosophy, history, etc. Though I studied in an interdisciplinary program, I still conceptualized education in disciplinary silos.

As ASU graduates more students, and attracts more interdisciplinary scholars as teachers, we ought to observe how their experiment in education impacts the issues and problems their centers and institutes investigate as well as the students themselves. If students learn from interdisciplinary educators, alongside other students that have not be trained exclusively in the theories and practices of, say, the physical sciences or humanities and social sciences, then they might not see difficult challenges like mental illness in the homeless population of major U.S. cities as concerns to be addressed mainly by psychology, pharmacology, and/or sociology.

Cathy Davidson’s The New Education offers specific illustrations of pedagogical practices that mesh well with Crow and Dabars’s message. Both texts urge universities to include larger numbers of students in research and design, particularly students that do not envision themselves in fields like engineering and the physical sciences. Elite, small universities like Duke, where Davidson previously taught, will struggle to scale up to educate the masses of students that seek higher education, even if they desired to do so.

Further, the kinds of students these institutions attract do not represent the majority of people seeking to further their education beyond the high school level. All colleges and universities need not admit every applicant to align with the models presented by Davidson, Crow and Dabars, but they must commit to interdisciplinary approaches. As a scholar with degrees in Science and Technology Studies, I am an eager acolyte: I buy into the interdisciplinary model of education, and I am part of a college that seeks to implement some version of that model.

Questioning the Wisdom of Tradition

We assume that our institutions have been optimally structured and inherently calibrated not only to facilitate the production and diffusion of knowledge but also to seek knowledge with purpose and link useful knowledge with action for the common good. (Crow and Dabars 2015, 179)

The institutions that Crow, Dabars, and Davidson critique as emblematic of traditional models of higher education have histories that range from decades to centuries. As faculty at a college of health sciences established the same year Crow and Dabars published their work, I am both excited by their proposals and frustrated by the attempts to implement them.

My college currently focuses on preparing students for careers in the health sciences, particularly medicine and pharmacy. Most of our faculty are early-career professionals; we come to the college with memories of how departments were organized at our previous institutions.

Because of my background in an interdisciplinary graduate program at Virginia Tech, and my interest in the program’s history (originally organized as the Center for the Study of Science in Society), I had the chance to interview professors that worked to develop the structures that would “facilitate the production and diffusion of knowledge” (Crow and Dabars 2015, 179). Like those early professors at Virginia Tech, our current faculty at California Northstate University College of Health Sciences come from distinct disciplines and have limited experience with the challenges of designing and implementing interdisciplinary coursework. We endeavor to foster collaboration across disciplines, but we learn as we go.

Crow and Dabars’s chapter “Designing Knowledge Enterprises” reminds one of what a new institution lacks: momentum. At meetings spread out over nearly a year, our faculty discussed and debated the nuances of a promotion and retention policy that acknowledges the contributions of all faculty while satisfying administrative demands that faculty titles, like assistant, associate, and full professor, reflect the practices of other institutions. What markers indicate that a scholar has achieved the level of, say, associate professor?

Originally trained in disciplines like biology, chemistry, physics, or English (coming from the interdisciplinary program of Science and Technology Studies, I am a bit of an outlier) our faculty have been disciplined to think in terms of our own areas of study. We have been trained to advance knowledge in increasingly particular specialties. The criteria to determine a faculty member’s level largely matches what other institutions have developed. Although the faculty endeavored to create a holistic rubric for faculty evaluation, we confronted an administration more familiar with analytic rubrics. How can a university committee compare the work done by professors of genetics and composition?[ii]

Without institutional memory to guide us, the policies and directives at my college of health sciences develop through collective deliberation on the needs of our students, staff, faculty, college, and community. We do not invent policy. We examine publicly available policies created at and for other institutions of higher learning to help guide our own decisions and proposals. Though we can glean much from elite private institutions, as described by Crow and Dabars, and from celebrated public institutions like the University of California or California State University systems that Davidson draws upon at times in her text, my colleagues know that we are not like those other institutions and systems of higher education.

Our college’s diminutive size (faculty, staff, and students) lends itself to agility: when a policy is flawed, we can quickly recognize a problem and adjust it (not to say we rectify it, but we move in the direction of doing so, e.g., a promotion policy with criteria appropriate for faculty, and administrators, from any department). If we identify student, staff, faculty, or administrator needs that have gone unaddressed, we modify or add policies.

The size of our college certainly limits what we can do: we lack the faculty and student numbers to engage in as many projects as we like. We do not have access to the financial reservoirs of large or long-standing institutions to purchase all the equipment one finds at a University of California campus, so we must be creative and make use of what materials we do possess or can purchase.

What our college lacks, somewhat counterintuitively, sets us up to carry forth with what Davidson (2017) describes in her chapter “The Future of Learning:”

The lecture is broken, so we must think of better ways to incorporate active learning into the classroom . . . . The traditional professional and apprentice models don’t teach students how to be experts, and so we must look to peer learning and peer mentoring, rich cocurricular experiences, and research to put the student, not the professor or the institution, at the center. (248-9)

Davidson does not contend that lecture has no place in a classroom. She champion flipped classrooms (Armbruster, Patel, Johnson, and Weiss 2009) and learning spaces that emphasize active student engagement (Elby 2001; Johnson and Johnson 1999) with ideas and concepts—e.g., forming and critiquing arguments (Kuhn 2010).

Claiming that universities “must prepare our students for their epic journey . . . . should give them agency . . . to push back [against the world] and not merely adapt to it” (Davidson 2017, 13) sounds simultaneously like fodder for a press-release and a call to action. It will likely strike educators, a particular audience of Davidson’s text, as obvious, but that should not detract from its intentions. Yes, students need to learn to adapt and be flexible—their chosen professions will almost certainly transform in the coming decades. College students ought to consider the kinds of lives they want to live and the people they want to be, not just the kinds of professions they wish to pursue.

Ought we demonstrate for students that the university symbolizes a locale to cultivate a perspective of “sympathy, empathy, sensitivity, and responsiveness” (Held 2011, p. 479)? Do we see ourselves in a symbiotic world (Margulis and Sagan) or an adversarial world of competition? Davidson, Crow, and Dabars propose a narrative of connectivity, not just of academic disciplines, but of everyday problems and concerns. Professors ought to continue advancing knowledge, even in particular disciplines, but we must not imagine that we do it alone (individually, in teams, in disciplines, or even in institutions).

After Sifting: What to Keep

Crow and Dabars emphasize the interplay between form and function as integral to developing a model for the New American University. We at California Northstate also scrutinize the structure of our colleges. Though our college of health sciences has a life and physical science department, and a department of humanities and social sciences, our full-time faculty number less than twenty. We are on college and university committees together; we are, daily, visible to each other.

With varying levels of success so far, we have developed integrated course-based undergraduate research experiences for our students. In the coming year, we aim to integrate projects in humanities and social sciences courses with those from the physical sciences. Most of our students want to be health practitioners, and we endeavor to demonstrate to them the usefulness of chemistry along with service learning. As we integrate our courses, research, and outreach projects, we aim to provide students with an understanding that the pieces (courses) that make up their education unify through our work and their own.

Team teaching a research methods course with professors of genetics and chemistry in the fall of 2017, I witnessed the rigor and the creativity required for life and physical science research. Students were often confused: the teachers approached the same topics from seemingly disparate perspectives. As my PhD advisor, James Collier, often recounted to me regarding his graduate education in Science and Technology Studies (STS), graduate students were often expected to be the sites of synthesis. Professors came from traditional departments like history, philosophy, and sociology; students in STS needed to absorb the styles and techniques of various disciplines to emerge as interdisciplinarians.

Our students in the research methods class that fall saw a biologist, a chemist, and an STS scholar and likely thought: I want to be none of those things. Why should I learn how to be a health practitioner from professors that do not identify as health practitioners themselves?

When faculty adapt to meet the needs of students pursuing higher education, we often develop the kinds of creole languages elaborated by Peter Galison (1997) to help our students see the connections between traditionally distinct areas of study. Our students, then, should be educated to speak in multiple registers depending on their audience, and we must model that for them. Hailing from disparate disciplines and attempting to teach in ways distinct from how we were taught (e.g., flipped classrooms) and from perspectives still maturing (interdisciplinarity), university faculty have much to learn.

Our institutions, too, need to adapt: traditional distinctions of teaching, scholarship, and service (the hallmarks of many university promotion policies) will demand adjustment if they are to serve as accurate markers of the work we perform. Students, as stakeholders in their own education, should observe faculty as we struggle to become what we wish to see from them. Davidson, Crow, and Dabars argue that current and future crises will not be resolved effectively by approaches that imagine problems as solely technical, social, economic, cultural, or political. For institutions of higher education to serve the needs of their people, nations, and environments (just some of the pieces that must be served), they must acclimate to a world of increasing connectivity. I know: water feels wet.

Contact details: William.Davis@csnu.edu

References

Armbruster, Peter, Maya Patel, Erika Johnson, and Martha Weiss. 2009. “Active Learning and Student-centered Pedagogy Improve Student Attitudes and Performance in Introductory Biology” Cell Biology Education—Life Sciences Education 8: 203-13.

Bijker, Wiebe. 1993. “Do Not Dispair: There Is Life after Constructivism.” Science, Technology and Human Values 18: 113-38.

Crow, Michael; and William Dabars. Designing the New University. Johns Hopkinds University Press, 2015.

Davidson, Cathy. The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux. Basic Books, 2017.

Davis, William, Martin Evenden, Gregory Sandstrom and Aliaksandr Puptsau. 2013. “Are MOOCs the Future of Higher Education? A Collective Judgment Forum.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 2 (7) 23-27.

Elby, Andrew. 2001. “Helping Physics Students Learn How to Learn.” American Journal of Physics (Physics Education Research Supplement) 69 (S1): S54-S64.

Galison, Peter. 1997. Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

Hughes, Thomas. 1994. “The Evolution of Large Technical Systems.” The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Johnson, David, and Roger T. Johnson. 1999. “Making Cooperative Learning Work.” Theory into Practice 38 (2): 67-73.

Kalin, Mike. “The Crisis in the Humanities: A Self-Inflicted Wound?” Independent School, Winter 2017. https://www.nais.org/magazine/independent-school/winter-2017/the-crisis-in-the-humanities-a-self-inflicted-wou/

Kuhn, Deanna. 2010. “Teaching and Learning Science as Argument.” Science Education 94 (5): 810-24.

Mandler, Peter. “Rise of the Humanities.” Aeon Magazine, December 17, 2015. https://aeon.co/essays/the-humanities-are-booming-only-the-professors-can-t-see-it

National Research Council. Colleges of Agriculture at the Land Grant Universities: A Profile. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1995.

Pinch, Trevor and Wiebe Bijker. 1984. “The Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts: Or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology Might Benefit Each Other.” Social Studies of Science 14: 399-441.

Smith, Merritt, and Leo Marx. 1994. Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism

Tworek, Heidi. “The Real Reason the Humanities Are ‘in Crisis.’” The Atlantic, December 18, 2013. https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/12/the-real-reason-the-humanities-are-in-crisis/282441/

[i] My descriptions here of technological determinism and social constructivism lack nuance. For specifics regarding determinism, see the 1994 anthology from Leo Marx and Merritt Smith, Does Technology Drive History. For richer explanations of constructivism, see Bijker (1993), “Do not despair: There is life after constructivism,” and Pinch and Bijker (1984) “The social construction of facts and artifacts: Or how the sociology of science and the sociology of technology might benefit each other.”

[ii] Hardly rhetorical, that last question is live on my campus. If you have suggestions, please write me.

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A Call From the Great Wall of China, Pankaj Jain

SERRC —  September 25, 2018 — Leave a comment

Author Information: Pankaj Jain, University of North Texas, pankaj.jain@unt.edu.

Jain, Pankaj. “Taking Philosophy Back: A Call From the Great Wall of China.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 9 (2018): 60-64.

The pdf of the article gives specific page references. Shortlink: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-41f

Open-air restaurants and cafés on Tian Jin Street in Dalian, China.
Image by Christian Mange via Flickr / Creative Commons

 

This article is inspired by my first ever China trip in May 2018 in which I participated in a workshop at the Dalian University of Technology on American and Chinese approaches in environmental ethics and responsible innovation. The article is based on my reflections about Asian philosophical traditions and my critique of the review by Adam Briggle and Robert Frodeman of the book Taking Philosophy Back: A Multicultural Manifesto (Van Norden 2017).

After the philosophy workshop in Dalian, I chose to stay few more days in Beijing before flying back to the USA. Being in China for the first time, I wanted to make full use of my department’s funding that supported my trip. I had enriching experiences at Beijing’s historical landmarks such as the Great Wall, Forbidden City, Temple of Heaven, Beihai Park, Jingshan Park, Lama Temple, Confucius Temple, Bell and Drum Towers, Summer Palace, and Tiananmen Square. One of the world’s oldest surviving civilizations, in my opinion, has tremendous lessons for the world at so many levels.

Unspoken Xenophobia

At the workshop, almost all the papers by Chinese philosophers made references to Euro-American philosophers but American philosophers’ papers strictly remained Euro-American in their focus and approach. I was reminded of the Silk Road era in which hundreds of Chinese scholars traveled to India and learned Indian languages such as Sanskrit, Pali, and Prakrit to translate hundreds of Buddhist and other texts into Chinese.

Most famously, Faxian and Xuan Zang traveled on foot for more than a thousand miles across China, and Central Asia to reach India. and many others followed in their footsteps and became key bridges between the two most ancient Asian civilizations. In that period, Chinese scholars turned Indian knowledge systems into uniquely Chinese systems by mixing them with Daoism and Confucianism.

Their translation was so perfect that today India has lost some of its ancient knowledge systems but thanks to Chinese preservation efforts, we still have access to that lost knowledge. Chinese ethics of translation did not have the colonizing tendencies that the Western systems sometimes have tended to demonstrate. China seems to be doing the same with Euro-American knowledge systems currently. Chinese philosophers are meticulously learning Euro-American systems and are combining this with their own indigenous systems like they did with Indic systems more than 1000 years ago.

Compared to the Chinese openness for American scholarship, we in the American philosophy departments appear pretty xenophobic. We have a long way to go to truly understand and embrace “alien” philosophical ideas and Chinese scholars are good role models for us. Almost 90% of our philosophy students, even today, do not take any course on Eastern thought.

Aren’t we producing new generations of Eurocentric scholars who continue to remain ignorant about the intellectual history of major Asian civilizations that are becoming increasingly important today? Almost all philosophy departments in Asia or elsewhere study Western thought. When will the reverse happen? Philosophy majors studying Asian thought? Today, China is already one of the biggest economies in the world and yet how long will Euro-American philosophy students be stuck in the 19th century? The students in other departments or majors such as religion, anthropology, and history are much better as they do study several major world cultures.

What Is Philosophy?

Upon reading my message based on my reflections from the Chinese trip, even with his disagreements, my colleague Professor Adam Briggle shared his (and Frodeman’s) review of a recent book Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto because the book makes similar arguments to mine. Inspired by the book’s powerful arguments about Euro-centricity in American philosophy, I took a look at some of the philosophy courses and noticed that almost all of the philosophy courses focus only on Western philosophy.

Interacting with philosophers in China really opened my eyes to this issue and hopefully, we can together begin to rectify the Euro-centric nature of this oldest field in humanities that seems stuck in the colonial times of 19th century (when Euro-America were dominant in every way unlike today’s globalized world). Luckily, many other departments/majors have diversified considerably, e.g., my own field of religious studies has “Great Religions” course that introduces all the religions, not just Western ones before a student chooses his/her specialization, of course. Similarly, anthropology, history, art history, etc. are much more inclusive. It is time to get to the oldest field that continues to resist this reformation.

We know that “philosophy” is a western term based on the terms Philos and Sophia. However, many other departments with their “western” title such as religion, art, and history have become much more inclusive, so just the Western etymological significance of philosophy should no longer be a reason for its west-only focus. The issue is also not about the “identity politics.” The discussion should not devolve into a caricature of the justice issues concerning race, gender, and sexuality: identity politics is not about diversity but freedom, equality, and dignity.

I will now respond to the book-review by Adam Briggle and Robert Frodeman. In their review, both start by noting their similarity and overlaps with the project by Bryan Van Norden. Both projects started with their respective opinion pieces in the New York Times with a call for reforming professional philosophy. However, even as they note these similarities, they seem to be missing a few points. Briggle and Frodeman advocate that philosophers must engage with scientists, engineers, policy-makers, and community groups. Almost, each of these sets of people in the 19th century primarily consisted of people of Euro-American heritage, ethnicity, or nationalities.

However, in the 21st century United States, more than 25% of all scientists and engineers are from Asian and other non-Western heritage.[1] Today, religion and ecology is one of the fast-growing subfields in humanities in which we explore how different religious traditions shape the practitioners’ worldviews towards their environment. I suggest that it is time to also explore similar connections between different cultural and religious backgrounds of policy makers, scientists, and engineers. And for that, philosophy courses need to look beyond Western thought.

Finally, the fourth set of people, i.e., community groups are similarly becoming increasingly diversified in the United States. In summary, Briggle and Frodeman need to revise their own project to reflect today’s diversified, globalized, and pluralistic world, not just the interdisciplinary world that they already recognize in their project.

Reflections and Disagreements

The next issue I discovered in their book review is when they challenge Van Norden’s approach by stating, “He tends to focus only on ‘top’ (via Leiter’s definition) philosophy departments or PhD-granting departments. This can give a skewed picture, which is something we wonder about, given that we have two faculty members in our relatively small department focused on Southeast Asian philosophy and religion.” Almost all the Asian philosophy courses are taken exclusively by religion students, not philosophy students.

Next, they state, “He first isolates different kinds of LCTP (Chinese, Indian, Native American, and African) and then notes how rarely each feature on the roster of philosophy departments. But it could be that when LCTP are aggregated the problem dissipates”. This statement seems to be ignoring the fact that as of now philosophy departments are overwhelmingly dominated by experts only in Western thought. Rarely if ever a faculty is hired to teach non-Western philosophy.

If I compare this situation with the religion counterpart, I have noticed that there are two or sometimes three professors who focus on different eras and/or aspects of Judaism and/or Christianity but almost all religion departments have distinct individuals with expertise in Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, and in some cases with indigenous traditions as well. To be sure, I am not suggesting about the ethnicity or background of the person teaching different traditions, but I am simply sharing the observation that there are multiple traditions and religions represented by specialists in the religious studies department, regardless of their own personal background or ethnicity.

Similar is the case with most history departments in North America where two or three professors focus on Euro-American history with other professors focusing on South Asian (Indian), East Asian (Chinese), and other regions of the world. I am humbly requesting a similar model for American philosophy departments. Just as in other departments, philosophy also should not be West-only and also not “West and all the aggregated rest” either.

Further, I disagree with their statement, “We certainly would not list ourselves as specialists in any LCTP (Less Commonly Taught Philosophies), but we both draw from a variety of traditions and cultures in the classroom. We suspect this kind of practice is widespread”. This kind of sprinkling of non-Western traditions is not the way citizens of today’s globalized and pluralistic world can be prepared. This approach will continue to keep American philosophy students oblivious about the worldviews of more than three fourth of world’s population whose heritage is not based on Western thought.

So, when philosophy folks say, “we cannot cover every kind of philosophy,” they effectively end up dedicating almost 100% of their resources on the knowledge traditions of less than quarter of humankind. No other discipline is as parochial and xenophobic as this oldest humanities discipline, the discipline of religious studies has certainly moved beyond Christian theology and now includes several major world traditions and religions. One final and important criticism they make is this:

We subscribe to a different conception of philosophy. On our view, philosophy does not primarily consist of a series of problems (e.g., free will; intrinsic value) which one can take a variety of positions on. Philosophy consists of a tradition and a narrative across time.  The thoughts of Hegel or Heidegger can best be understood as a rumination on an ongoing conversation involving Nietzsche, Christianity, Duns Scotus, Aristotle, Plato, etc. In short, we picture philosophy in narrative and historical terms as embedded in cultural contexts. And given that there is only so much time and so many credit hours in the degree plan, a philosophical education is understandably limited to one tradition (though, again, not exclusively – there should be room for cross-cultural comparisons).

In this quote above, I agree that philosophy is a diachronic tradition but I would like to also suggest that it is also one of the earliest globalized traditions that included the long history of interactions among several philosophical traditions. For instance, a monumental work as The Shape of Ancient Thought (McEvilley 2002) demonstrates the continuous exchanges between Greek and Indian philosophers?

Similarly, others have demonstrated similar exchanges between Indian and Greek Aesthetics (Gupt 1994), Christianity and Buddhism, European Enlightenment with Muslim and Indian traditions and so on. When much of the history of the Western intellectual tradition has been a history of interactions with Muslims and Asians, why must today’s American students forget all those interactions and live as if three fourth of world’s people do not exist intellectually?

In conclusion, I hope we will be as zealous about internationality of philosophy as they have been about interdisciplinarity. It is time for philosophers to realize that the field today already has become a global village. The study of LCTP is not just about justice, diversity, or identity politics, it is about professional ethical commitment to preparing tomorrow’s students as well-rounded as possible. Philosophy professors need to just look over their shoulders at their Religious Studies, Anthropology, and History colleagues and that will be a good beginning.

Contact details: pankaj.jain@unt.edu

References

Gupt, Bharat. Dramatic Concepts Greek & Indian: A Study of the Poetics and the Nāṭyaśāstra. New Delhi: D.K. Printworld, 1994.

McEvilley, T. The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative studies in Greek and Indian philosophies. New York: Allworth Press, 2002.

Van Norden, B. W. Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto. Columbia University Press, 2017.

[1] https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2015/nsf15328/

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McBride on Knowledge and Justification, Robin McKenna

SERRC —  September 20, 2018 — Leave a comment

Author Information: Robin McKenna, University of Liverpool, r.j.mckenna@liverpool.ac.uk.

McKenna, Robin. “McBride on Knowledge and Justification.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 9 (2018): 53-59.

The pdf of the article gives specific page references. Shortlink: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-417

Image by Ronan Shahnav via Flickr / Creative Commons

 

I would like to thank the editors of the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective for giving me the opportunity to review Mark McBride’s rich and rewarding book. To begin, I will give a—fairly high-level—overview of its contents. I will then raise some concerns and make some (mildly) critical comments.

Overview

The book is split into two parts. Part 1 concerns the issue of basic knowledge (and justification), whereas the second concerns (putative necessary) conditions on knowledge (specifically, conclusive reasons, sensitivity and safety conditions). We can start with Part 1. As McBride defines it, basic knowledge is “knowledge (or justification) which is immediate, in the sense that one’s justification for the known proposition doesn’t rest on any justification for believing other propositions” (p. 1).

Two central issues in Part 1 are (i) what, exactly, is wrong with Moore’s “proof” of the external world (Chapter 1) (ii) what, exactly, is wrong with inferences that yield “easy knowledge” (Chapters 2-3). Take these arguments, which for ease of reference I’ll call MOORE and EASY-K respectively:

MOORE:

(Visual appearance as of having hands).
1-M. I have hands.
2-M. If I have hands, an external world exists.
3-M. An external world exists.

EASY-K:

(Visual appearance as of a red table).
1-EK. The table is red.
2-EK. If the table is red, then it is not white with red lights shining on it.
3-EK. The table is not white with red lights shining on it.

It seems like a visual appearance as of having hands can give one knowledge of 1-M, and 2-M seems to be knowable a priori. But it seems wrong to hold that one can thereby come to know 3-M. (And mutatis mutandis for EASY-K and 3-EK).

I want to single out three of McBride’s claims about MOORE and EASY-K. First, it is commonly taken that “dogmatist” responses to MOORE (such as Pryor 2000) are at a disadvantage with respect to “conservative” responses (such as Wright 2004). The dogmatist holds that having a visual appearance as of hands provides immediate warrant for 1-M, whereas the conservative holds that one can have warrant for 1-M only if one has a prior entitlement to accept 3-M. Thus the dogmatist seems forced to accept that warrant can “transmit” from the premises of MOORE to the conclusion, whereas the conservative can deny that warrant transmission occurs.

In Chapter 1 McBride turns this on its head. First, he argues that, while a conservative such as Crispin Wright can maintain that the premises of MOORE don’t transmit “non-evidential” warrant to the conclusion, he must allow that “evidential” warrant does transmit from the premises to the conclusion. Second, he argues that Wright cannot avail himself of what McBride (following Davies 2004) takes to be a promising diagnosis of the real problem with MOORE. According to Martin Davies, MOORE is inadequate because it is of no use in the epistemic project of settling the question whether the external world exists. But, for Wright, there can be no such project, because the proposition that the external world exists is the “cornerstone” on which all epistemic projects are built.

Second, in Chapter 3 McBride seeks to show that the dogmatist can supplement Davies’ account of the problem with Moore’s proof in order to diagnose the problem with EASY-K. According to McBride, EASY-K is problematic not just in that it is of no use in settling the question whether the table is not white with red lights shining on it, but also in that there are all sorts of ways in which one could settle this question (e.g. by investigating the lighting sources surrounding the table thoroughly).

Thus, EASY-K is problematic in a way that MOORE isn’t: while one could avail oneself of a better argument for the conclusion of EASY-K, it is harder to see what sort of argument could improve on MOORE.

Third, while Part 1 is generally sympathetic to the dogmatist position, Chapter 5 argues that the dogmatist faces a more serious problem. The reader interested in the details of the argument should consult Chapter 5. Here, I just try to explain the gist. Say you endorse a closure principle on knowledge like this:

CLOSURE: Necessarily, if S knows p, competently deduces q from p, and thereby comes to believe q, while retaining knowledge of p throughout, then S knows q (p. 159).

It follows that, if one comes to know 1-EK (the table is red) by having an appearance as of a red table, then competently deduces 3-EK (the table is not white with red lights shining on it) from 1-EK while retaining knowledge of 1-EK, then one knows 3-EK. But—counter-intuitively—having an appearance as of a red table can lower the credence one ought to have in 3-EK (see pp. 119-20 for the reason why).

It therefore seems inarguable that, if you are in a position to know 3-EK after having the appearance, you must have been in a position to know the 3-EK prior to the appearance. So it seems like the conservative position must be right after all. In order for your appearance as of a red table to furnish knowledge that there is a red table you must have been in a position to know that the table was not white with red lights shining on it prior to having the appearance as of a red table.

The second part of McBride’s book concerns putative (necessary) conditions on knowledge, in particular conclusive reasons (Chapter 6), sensitivity (Chapter 7) and safety (Chapter 8). McBride dedicates a chapter to each condition; the book finishes with a (brief) application of safety to legal knowledge (Chapter 9). While most epistemologists tend to argue that either sensitivity or (exclusive) safety are a (necessary) condition on knowledge, McBride provides a (qualified) defense of both.

In the case of sensitivity, this is in part because, if sensitivity were a condition on knowledge, then—as Nozick (1981) famously held—CLOSURE would be false, and so the argument against dogmatism (about knowledge) in Chapter 5 would be disarmed. Because of the centrality of sensitivity to the argument in Part 1, and because the chapters on conclusive reasons and sensitivity revolve around similar issues, I focus on sensitivity in what follows.

Here is an initial statement of sensitivity:

SENSITIVITY: S knows p only if S sensitively believes p, where S sensitively believes p just in case, were p false, S would not believe p (p. 160).

Chapter 7 (on sensitivity) is largely concerned with rebutting an objection from John Hawthorne (2004) to the effect that the sensitivity theorist must also reject these two principles:

EQUIVALENCE: If you know a priori that p and q are equivalent and you know p, then you are in a position to know q.

DISTRIBUTION: If one knows p and q, then one is in a position to know p and to know q.

Suppose I have an appearance as of a zebra. So I know:

(1) That is a zebra.

By EQUIVALENCE I can know:

(2) That is a zebra and that is not a cleverly disguised mule.

So by DISTRIBUTION I can know:

(3) That is not a cleverly disguised mule.

But, by SENSITIVITY, while I can know (1), I can’t know (3) because, if I were looking at a cleverly disguised mule, I would still believe I was looking at a zebra. Hawthorne concludes that the sensitivity theorist must deny a range of plausible principles, not just CLOSURE.

McBride’s basic response is that, while SENSITIVITY is problematic as stated, it can be modified in such a way that the sensitivity-theorist can deny EQUIVALENCE but keep DISTRIBUTION. More importantly, this rejection of EQUIVALENCE can be motivated on the grounds that initially motivate SENSITIVITY. Put roughly, the idea is that simple conjunctions like (4) already cause problems for SENSITIVITY:

(4) I have a headache and I have all my limbs.

Imagine you form the belief in (4) purely from your evidence of having a headache (and don’t worry about how this might be possible). While you clearly don’t know (4), your belief does satisfy SENSITIVITY, because, if (4) were false, you wouldn’t still believe it (if you didn’t have a headache, you wouldn’t believe you did, and so you wouldn’t believe (4)).

The underlying problem is that SENSITIVITY tells you to go the nearest possible world in which the relevant belief is false and asks what you believe there, but a conjunctive belief is false so long as one of the conjuncts is false, and it might be that one of the conjuncts is false in a nearby possible world, whereas the other is false in a more distant possible world. So the sensitivity theorist needs to restrict SENSITIVITY to atomic propositions and add a new condition for conjunctive propositions:

SENSITIVITY*: If p is a conjunctive proposition, S knows p only if S believes each of the conjuncts of p sensitively (p. 167).

If we make this modification, the sensitivity theorist now has an independent reason to reject EQUIVALENCE, but is free to accept DISTRIBUTION.

Critical Discussion

While this only touches on the wealth of topics discussed in McBride’s book, I will now move on to the critical discussion. I will start by registering two general issues about the book. I will then develop two criticisms in a little more length, one for each part of the book.

First, while the book makes compelling reading for those already versed in the literatures on transmission failure, easy knowledge and modal conditions on knowledge, the central problematics are rarely motivated at any length. Moreover, while McBride does draw numerous (substantive) connections between the chapters, the book lacks a unifying thesis. All this to say: This is maybe more of a book for the expert than the novice. But the expert will find a wealth of interesting material to chew over.

Second, readers of the Collective might find the individualism of McBride’s approach striking. McBride is almost exclusively concerned with the epistemic statuses of individuals’ beliefs, where those beliefs are formed through simple processes like perception and logical inference. The one part of the book that does gesture in a more social direction (McBride’s discussion of epistemic projects, and the dialectical contexts in which they are carried out) is suggestive, but isn’t developed in much detail.

Turning now to more substantive criticisms, in Part 1 McBride leans heavily on Davies’ solution to the problem with MOORE. I want to make two comments here. First, it is natural to interpret Davies’ solution as an inchoate form of contextualism (DeRose 1995; Lewis 1996): whether MOORE (and EASY-K?) transmits warrant to its conclusion depends on the context in which one runs the inference, in particular, the project in which one is engaged.

This raises a host of questions. For example: does McBride hold that, if we keep the context (project) fixed, no transmission failure occurs? That is: if we’re working with the (easier) project of deciding what to believe, does an instance of MOORE transmit warrant from premises to conclusion? If so, then if we’re working with the (harder) project of settling the question, does an instance of MOORE fail to transmit warrant? (This would fit with the more general contextualist line in response to the skeptical problem, so this is only a request for clarification).

Second, and more importantly, we need to distinguish between the project of fully settling the question whether p and the project of partially settling the question whether p. Let’s grant McBride (and Davies) that someone who runs through an instance of MOORE has not fully settled the question whether there is an external world. But why think that—at least by the dogmatist’s lights—they haven’t partially settled the question? If dogmatism is true, then having the appearance as of a hand provides immediate warrant for believing that one has a hand, and so, via MOORE, for believing that there is an external world.

McBride (like many others) finds this conclusion unpalatable, and he invokes the distinction between the project of deciding what to believe and the project of settling the question in order to avoid it. But this distinction is overly simplistic. We can settle questions for different purposes, and with different degrees of stability (cf. “the matter is settled for all practical purposes”). The dogmatist seems forced to allow that MOORE is perfectly good for settling the question of whether there is an external world for a range of projects, not just one.

(I have a parallel worry about the solution to the problem of easy knowledge. Let’s grant McBride that one problem with EASY-K is that there are far better ways of trying to establish that the table is not white but bathed in red light. But why think that—at least by the dogmatist’s lights—it isn’t a way of trying to establish this? To point out that there are better ways of establishing a conclusion is not yet to show that this particular way is no way at all of establishing the conclusion).

Finally, in his response to Hawthorne’s objection to the sensitivity theorist McBride is at pains to show that his modification of SENSITIVITY isn’t ad hoc. To my mind, he does an excellent job of showing that the sensitivity theorist should reject EQUIVALENCE for reasons entirely independent of Hawthorne’s objection.

This suggests (at least to me) that the problem is not one of ad hocness, but rather that sensitivity theorists are forced to endorse a wide range of what Keith DeRose (1995) calls “abominable conjunctions” (cf. “I know that I have hands, but I don’t know that I’m not a handless brain in a vat”). DeRose’s own response to this problem is to embed something like SENSITIVITY in a contextualist theory of knowledge attributions. DeRose proposes the following “rule”:

Rule of Sensitivity: When it’s asserted that S knows (or doesn’t know) p, then, if necessary, enlarge the sphere of epistemically relevant worlds so that it at includes the closest worlds in which p is false (cf 1995, 37).

His idea is that, when the question of whether S knows p becomes a topic of conversation, we expand the range of worlds in which S’s belief must be sensitive. Imagine I assert “I know that I have hands”. In order for this assertion to be true, it must be the case that, if I didn’t have hands, I wouldn’t believe that I did.

But now imagine I assert “I know that I’m not a handless brain in a vat”. In order for this new assertion to be true, it must be the case that, if I were a handless brain in a vat, I wouldn’t believe that I wasn’t. Plausibly, this will not be the case, so I can’t truly assert “I know that I’m not a handless brain in a vat”. But no abominable conjunction results, because I can no longer truly assert “I know that I have hands” either.

My suggestion is that, if McBride were to adopt DeRose’s contextualist machinery, he would not only have a way of responding to the problem of abominable conjunctions, but also an interesting modification to DeRose’s “rule of sensitivity”.

For note that DeRose’s rule seems subject to the same problem McBride sees with SENSITIVITY: when I assert “I have a headache and I have all my limbs” we only need to expand the range of worlds to include worlds in which I don’t have a headache, and so my assertion will remain true in the updated context created by my assertion. Further, adopting this suggestion would furnish another link between Part 1 and Part 2: solving the problem of basic knowledge and formulating a satisfactory sensitivity condition both require adopting a contextualist theory of knowledge attributions.

Contact details: r.j.mckenna@liverpool.ac.uk

References

Davies, Martin. 2004. ‘Epistemic Entitlement, Warrant Transmission and Easy Knowledge’. Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 78 (1): 213–245.

DeRose, Keith. 1995. ‘Solving the Skeptical Problem’. Philosophical Review 104 (1): 1–52.

Hawthorne, John. 2004. Knowledge and Lotteries. Oxford University Press.

Lewis, David. 1996. ‘Elusive Knowledge’. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 74 (4): 549–67.

Nozick, Robert. 1981. Philosophical Explanations. Harvard University Press.

Pryor, James. 2000. ‘The Skeptic and the Dogmatist’. Noûs 34 (4): 517–549.

Wright, Crispin. 2004. ‘Warrant for Nothing (and Foundations for Free)?’ Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 78 (1): 167–212.

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Spitting Out the Kool-Aid, Arianna Falbo

SERRC —  September 6, 2018 — 1 Comment

Author Information: Arianna Falbo, Brown University, Arianna_Falbo@brown.edu.

Falbo, Arianna. “Spitting Out the Kool-Aid: A Review of Kate Manne’s Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 8 (2018): 12-17.

The pdf of the article gives specific page references. Shortlink: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-40A

The years of far-right rhetoric about Hillary Clinton have formed a real-time theatre of misogyny, climaxing at the 2016 Presidential election.
Image by DonkeyHotey via Flickr / Creative Commons

 

Kate Manne’s Down Girl breathes new life into an underexplored yet urgently important topic. Using a diverse mixture of current events, empirical findings, and literary illustrations, Manne guides her reader through the underbelly of misogyny: its nature, how it relates to and differs from sexism, and why, in supposedly post-patriarchal societies, it’s “still a thing.”[1]

Chapter 1 challenges the standard dictionary-definition or “naïve conception” of misogyny, as Manne calls it. This view understands misogyny primarily as a psychological phenomenon, operative in the minds of men. Accordingly, misogynists are disposed to hate all or most women because they are women.

The naïve conception fails because it renders misogyny virtually non-existent and, as a result, politically inert. Misogynists need not feel hatred towards all or even most women. A misogynist may love his mother or other women with whom he shares close personal relationships. Manne insists that this should not detract from his being an outright misogynist. For example, the naïve view fails to make sense of how Donald Trump could both love his daughter while simultaneously being misogyny’s poster boy. A different analysis is needed.

Following Haslanger (2012), Manne outlines her “ameliorative” project in chapter 2. She aims to offer an analysis of misogyny that is politically and theoretically useful; an analysis that will help to reveal the stealthy ways misogyny operates upon its perpetrators, targets, and victims. Manne argues that misogyny should be understood in terms of its social function: what it does to women and girls.

On her view misogyny functions to uphold patriarchal order, it punishes women who transgress and rewards those who abide.[2] Misogyny is thus selective: it does not target all women wholesale, but prioritizes for those who protest against patriarchal prescriptions. In Manne’s words: “misogyny primarily targets women because they are women in a man’s world…rather than because they are women in a man’s mind.”[3]

Chapter 3 outlines, what I take to be, one of the most original and illuminating insights of the book, a conceptual contrast between sexism and misogyny. Manne dubs sexism the “justificatory” branch of patriarchal order: it has the job of legitimizing patriarchal norms and gender roles. Misogyny, on the other hand, is the “law enforcement” branch: it patrols and upholds patriarchal order. Both misogyny and sexism are unified by a common goal “to maintain or restore a patriarchal social order.”[4]

In Chapter 4, Manne discusses the gender coded give/take economy that she takes to be at the heart of misogyny’s operation.[5] Patriarchal order dictates that women have an obligation to be givers of certain feminine-coded goods and services such as affection, sex, and reproductive labour.

Correspondingly, men are the entitled recipients of these goods and services in addition to being the takers of certain masculine-coded privileges, including public influence, honour, power, money, and leadership. When men fail to receive these feminine-coded goods, which patriarchal order deems they are entitled to, backlash may ensue. What’s more, women who seek masculine-coded privileges, for example, leadership positions or other forms of power and prestige, are in effect violating a patriarchal prohibition. Such goods are not theirs for the taking—women are not entitled takers, but obligated givers.

In chapter 5, Manne considers a popular “humanist” kind of view according to which misogyny involves thinking of women as sub-human, non-persons, lifeless objects, or mere things. She turns this view on its head. She argues that: “her personhood is held to be owed to others in the form of service labour, love, and loyalty.”[6] As per the previous chapter, women are socially positioned as human givers. Manne’s contends that misogyny is not about dehumanization, but about men feeling entitled to the human service of women. She pushes this even further by noting that in some cases, when feminine-coded human goods and services are denied, it is men who may face feelings of dehumanization.[7]

Chapter 6, in my opinion, is where a lot of the action happens. In this chapter Manne presents the much-needed concept of himpathy: the undue sympathy that is misdirected away from victims and towards perpetrators of misogynistic violence.[8] She explains how certain exonerating narratives, such as the “the golden boy”, function to benefit highly privileged (normally: white, non-disabled, cis, heterosexual, etc.) men who commit violent acts against women.[9]

In this chapter Manne also draws upon and adds to the growing literature on testimonial injustice. Testimonial injustice occurs when a speaker receives either a deficit or surplus of creditability owing to a prejudice on the part of the hearer.[10] Manne discusses how in cases of he said/she said testimony involving accusations of sexual assault, privileged men may be afforded excess creditability, thereby undermining the creditability of victims – there is only so much creditability to go around.[11]

This, she notes, may lead to the complete erasure, or “herasure” as Manne calls it, of the victim’s story altogether.[12] Creditability surpluses and deficits, she says: “often serve the function of buttressing dominant group members’ current social position, and protecting them from downfall in the existing social hierarchy.”[13] Exonerating narratives puff up privileged men and, as a result, deflate the creditability of women who speak out against them. These unjust distributions of creditability safeguarding dominate men against downward social mobility. In a slogan: “testimonial injustice as hierarchy preservation.”[14]

In Chapter 7, Manne discusses why victims of misogynistic violence who seek moral support and attention are regularly met with suspicion, threats, and outright disbelief. Patriarchy dictates that women are human givers of moral support and attention, not recipients (as per the arguments of chapter 4). Drawing moral attention towards women who are victimized by misogyny attempts to disrupt patriarchy’s divisions of moral labour. Manne says that this is “tantamount to the server asking for service, the giver expecting to receive…it is withholding a resource and simultaneously demanding it.”[15]

In chapter 8, Manne explores how misogyny contributed to Hillary Clinton’s loss of the 2016 US presidential election. She claims that misogyny routinely targets women who infringe upon man’s historical turf; women who try to take what patriarchal order decrees as the jobs and privileges reserved for men. Overstepping or trespassing upon his territory often results in misogynistic retaliation. Such women are seen as “greedy, grasping, and domineering; shrill and abrasive; corrupt and untrustworthy”[16] or, in the words of the current President of the United States, “nasty.”[17]

Down Girl ends by discussing the prospects of overcoming misogyny. At one point Manne says, as if to shrug her shoulders and throw up her arms in despair: “I give up.”[18] Later, in a subsequent interview, Manne claims she did not intend for this to be a discouraging statement, but a “liberating declaration.”[19] It is an expression of her entitlement to bow out of this discussion (for now), after having said her piece and making conversational space for others to continue.

In my opinion, Down Girl is essential reading for any serious feminist, moral, or political scholar. The proposed analysis of misogyny is lucid and accessible while at the same time remaining acutely critical and rigorous. The text does not get bogged down in philosophical jargon or tedious digressions. As such, this book would be fairly congenial to even the philosophically uninitiated reader. I highly recommend it to both academics and non-academic alike. Moreover, Manne’s addition of “himpathy” and “herasure” to the philosophical lexicon helps to push the dialectic forward in innovative and insightful ways.

Despite being on such a sombre and depressing topic, I found this book to be engrossing and, for the most part, enjoyable to read. Manne has an inviting writing style and the book is scattered with a number of brilliant quips, clever examples, and gripping case studies.  Though, be warned, there are certainly sections that might reasonably be difficult, uncomfortable, and potentially triggering. Down Girl examines some of the most fraught and downright chilling aspects of our current social and political atmosphere; including real life depictions of horrific violence against women, as well as the attendant sympathy (himpathy) that is often given to those who perpetrate it. This is to be expected in a book on the logic of misogyny, but it is nonetheless important for readers to be extra cognisant.

After finishing the book, I have one main concern regarding the explanatory reach of the analysis. Recall that on Manne’s account: “misogyny’s primary function and constitutive manifestation is the punishment of “bad” women, and policing of women’s behavior.”[20] Misogyny’s operation consist in a number of “down girl moves” designed to keep women in line when they fail to “know their place” in a man’s world.[21] She emphasizes the retaliatory nature of misogyny; how it functions analogously to a shock collar: fail to do as patriarchy demands as and risk being shocked.[22]

I worry, though, that this emphasis on punishing patriarchy’s rebels fails to draw adequate attention to how misogyny can target women for what appears to be nothing more than the simple reason that he is dominant over her. It is not only rebels who are misogyny’s targets and victims, but also patriarchy’s cheerleaders and “good” girls. (Though, those who protest are presumably more vulnerable and have greater targets on their backs.)

Perhaps the analogy is better thought of not in terms of him shocking her when she fails to obey patriarchal order, but him administering shocks whenever he sees fit, be it for a perceived failure of obedience or simply because he is the one with the controller. Or, to use another analogy that picks up on Manne’s “policing” and “law enforcement” language, maybe misogyny is characterized best as a crooked cop, one who will pull you over for a traffic violation, but also one who will stop you simply because he feels he can, for he is the one with the badge and gun.

A woman might play her role in a man’s world to a tee; she may be happily complacent, she may give him all of her feminine-coded goods, in the right manner, in the right amount, at the right time, and so on. She may never threaten to overstep historical gender roles, nor does she attempt to cultivate masculine-coded privileges. She may even add fuel to patriarchy’s fire by policing other women who disobey. Even still, despite being on her very best behaviour, she too can be victimized by misogynistic violence. Why? It remains unclear to me how Manne’s analysis could offer a satisfying answer. While I deeply admire the proposal, I am curious of how it captures non-corrective cases of misogyny that don’t aim to punish for (apparent) violations of patriarchal order.

Manne notes that a major motivation for her writing is “to challenge some of the false moral conclusions we swallow with the Kool-Aid of patriarchal ideology.”[23] I came away from this book having learned a great deal about the insidious ways misogyny operates to put women and girls down; many a Kool-Aid has been spit out. Down Girl also plants fertile seeds for future research on misogyny, a topic desperately in need of more careful attention and intelligent investigation.

In the preface Manne says that: “ultimately, it will take a village of theorists to gain a full understanding of the phenomena.”[24] This book makes headway in offering theorists a myriad of conceptual tools and resources needed to facilitate and push the discussion forward. I anticipate that Down Girl will be a notable benchmark for many fruitful discussions to come.

Contact details: Arianna_Falbo@brown.edu

References

Berenson, Tessa. “Presidential Debate: Trump Calls Clinton ‘Nasty Woman’.” Time, 20 Oct. 2016, time.com/4537960/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-nasty-woman-debate/.

Bullock, Penn. “Transcript: Donald Trump’s Taped Comments About Women.” The New York Times, 8 Oct. 2016, nytimes.com/2016/10/08/us/donald-trump-tape-transcript.html.

Cleary, Skye C. “It Takes Many Kinds to Dismantle a Patriarchal Village.” Los Angeles Review of Books, 2 Mar. 2018, lareviewofbooks.org/article/takes-many-kinds-dismantle-patriarchal-village/.

Davis, Emmalon. “Typecasts, Tokens, and Spokespersons: A Case for Credibility Excess as Testimonial Injustice” Hypatia, 2016.

Fricker, Miranda. Epistemic Injustice Power and the Ethics of Knowing. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Haslanger, Sally. Resisting Reality. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Manne, Kate. Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Medina, José. The Epistemology of Resistance. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Medina, José. “The Relevance of Credibility Excess in a Proportional View of Epistemic Injustice: Differential Epistemic Authority and the Social Imaginary” Social Epistemology, 2011.

Penaula, Regan. “Kate Manne: The Shock Collar That Is Misogyny” Guernica, 7 Feb. 2018, https://www.guernicamag.com/kate-manne-why-misogyny-isnt-really-about-hating-women/.

Yap, Audre. “Creditability Excess and the Social Imaginary in Cases of Sexual Assault.” Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, 2017.

[1] Manne (2017): xxi.

[2] Manne (2017): 72.

[3] Ibid: 69.

[4] Ibid: 80.

[5] At least as it is manifests in the cultures of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, these are the focus of Manne’s analysis. Cf. ibid: fn. 3.

[6] Ibid: 173.

[7] Ibid: 173.

[8] Ibid: 197.

[9] Ibid: 197.

[10] Cf. Fricker (2007), though, Fricker focuses primarily upon creditability deficits. See, Davis (2016), Medina (2011, 2012), and Yap (2017), among others, for discussions of how creditability surpluses can also constitute testimonial injustice.

[11] See Manne’s discussion of Medina (2011) who stresses this point, 190.

[12] Ibid: 209-14.

[13] Manne (2017): 194.

[14] Ibid: 185.

[15] Ibid: 304.

[16] Ibid: 303.

[17] Berenson (2016).

[18] Manne (2017): 300.

[19] Cleary (2018).

[20] Manne (2017): 192.

[21] Ibid: 68.

[22] Cf. Penaluna (2018).

[23] This is from an interview with Los Angeles Review of Books; see Cleary (2018).

[24] Manne (2017): xiii.

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Imagining a Different Political Economy, Raphael Sassower

SERRC —  September 4, 2018 — Leave a comment

Author Information: Raphael Sassower, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, rsassowe@uccs.edu.

Sassower, Raphael. “Imagining a Different Political Economy.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 9 (2018): 7-11.

The pdf of the article gives specific page references. Shortlink: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-40v

Image by Rachel Adams via Flickr / Creative Commons

 

One cannot ask for a kinder or more complimentary reviewer than Adam Riggio.[1] His main complaint about my book, The Quest for Prosperity, is that “Stylistically, the book suffers from a common issue for many new research books in the humanities and social sciences. Its argument loses some momentum as it approaches the conclusion, and ends up in a more modest, self-restrained place than its opening chapters promised.”

My opening examination of what I see as the misconceptions of some presuppositions used in political economy is a first, necessary step towards an examination of recent capitalist variants (that are heralded as the best prospects for future organization of market exchanges) and for a different approach tor political economy offered by the end of the book. Admittedly, my vision of a radically reframed political economy that exposes some taken for granted concepts, such as scarcity, human nature, competition, and growth is an ambitious task, and perhaps, as Riggio suggests, I should attempt a more detailed articulation of the economy in a sequel.

However, this book does examine alternative frameworks, discusses in some detail what I consider misguided attempts to skirt the moral concerns I emphasize so as to retain the basic capitalist framework, and suggests principles that ought to guide a reframed political economy, one more attentive to the moral principles of solidarity and cooperation, empathy towards fellow members of a community, and an mindful avoidance of grave inequalities that are not limited to financial measures. In this respect, the book delivers more than is suggested by Riggio.

On Questions of Character

Riggio also argues that my

templates for communitarian alternatives to the increasingly brutal culture of contemporary capitalism share an important common feature that is very dangerous for [my] project. They are each rooted in civic institutions, material social structures for education, and socialization. Contrary to how [I] spea[k] of these four inspirations, civil rights and civic institutions alone are not enough to build and sustain a community each member of whom holds a communitarian ethical philosophy and moral sense deep in her heart.

This, too, is true to some extent. Just because I may successfully convince you that you are working with misconceptions about human nature, scarcity, and growth, for example, you may still not modify your behavior. Likewise, just because I may offer brilliant exemplars for how “civil rights and civic institutions” should be organized and legally enshrined does not mean that every member of the community will abide by them and behave appropriately.

Mean-spirited or angry individuals might spoil life for the more friendly and self-controlled ones, and Riggio is correct to point out that “a communitarian ethical philosophy and moral sense deep in [one’s] heart” are insufficient for overcoming the brutality of capitalist greed. But focusing on this set of concerns (rather than offering a more efficient or digitally sophisticated platform for exchanges), Riggio would agree, could be good starting points, and might therefore encourage more detailed analyses of policies and regulation of unfettered capitalist practices.

I could shirk my responsibility here and plead for cover under the label of a philosopher who lacks the expertise of a good old-fashioned social scientist or policy wonk who can advise how best to implement my proposals. But I set myself up to engage political economy in all its manifold facets, and Riggio is correct when he points out that my “analysis of existing institutions and societies that foster communitarian moralities and ethics is detailed enough to show promise, but unfortunately so brief as to leave us without guidance or strategy to fulfill that promise.”

But, when critically engaging not only the latest gimmicks being proposed under the capitalist umbrella (e.g., the gig economy or shared economies) but also their claims about freedom and equal opportunity, I was concerned to debunk pretenses so as to be able to place my own ideas within an existing array of possibilities. In that sense, The Quest for Prosperity is, indeed, more critique than manual, an immanent critique that accounts for what is already being practiced so as to point out inevitable weaknesses. My proposal was offered in broad outlines in the hope of enlisting the likes of Riggio to contribute more details that, over time, would fulfill such promises in a process that can only be, in its enormity, collaborative.

The Strength of Values

Riggio closes his review by saying that I

offered communitarian approaches to morality and ethics as solutions to those challenges of injustice. I think his direction is very promising. But The Quest for Prosperity offers only a sign. If his next book is to fulfill the promise of this one, he must explore the possibilities opened up by the following questions. Can communitarian values overcome the allure of greed? What kind of social, political, and economic structures would we need to achieve that utopian goal?

To be clear, my approach is as much Communitarian as it is Institutionalist, Marxist and heterodox, Popperian and postmodern; I prefer the more traditional terms socialism and communism as alternatives to capitalism in general and to my previous, more sanguine appeal to the notion of “postcapitalism.”

Still, Riggio hones in on an important point: since I insist on theorizing in moral and social (rather than monetary) terms, and since my concern is with views of human nature and the conditions under which we can foster a community of people who exchange goods and services, it stands to reason that the book be assessed in an ethical framework as well, concerned to some degree with how best to foster personal integrity, mutual empathy, and care. The book is as much concerned with debunking the moral pretenses of capitalism (from individual freedom and equal opportunity to happiness and prosperity, understood here in its moral and not financial sense) as with the moral underpinnings (and the educational and social institutions that foster them) of political economy.

In this sense, my book strives to be in line with Adam Smith’s (or even Marx’s) moral philosophy as much as with his political economy. The ongoing slippage from the moral to the political and economic is unavoidable: in such a register the very heart of my argument contends that financial strategies have to consider human costs and that economic policies affect humans as moral agents. But, to remedy social injustice we must deal with political economy, and therefore my book moves from the moral to the economic, from the social to the political.

Questions of Desire

I will respond to Riggio’s two concluding questions directly. The first deals with overcoming the allure of greed: in my view, this allure, as real and pressing as it is, remains socially conditioned, though perhaps linked to unconscious desires in the Freudian sense. Within the capitalist context, there is something more psychologically and morally complex at work that should be exposed (Smith and Marx, in their different analyses, appreciate this dimension of market exchanges and the framing of human needs and wants; later critics, as diverse as Herbert Marcuse and Karl Polanyi, continue along this path).

Wanting more of something—Father’s approval? Mother’s nourishment?—is different from wanting more material possessions or money (even though, in good a capitalist modality, the one seeps into the other or the one is offered as a substitute for the other). I would venture to say that a child’s desire for candy, for example, (candy being an object of desire that is dispensed or withheld by parents) can be quickly satiated when enough is available—hence my long discussion in the book about (the fictions of) scarcity and (the realities of) abundance; the candy can stand for love in general or for food that satisfies hunger, although it is, in fact, neither; and of course the candy can be substituted by other objects of desire that can or cannot be satisfied. (Candy, of course, doesn’t have the socially symbolic value that luxury items, such as iPhone, do for those already socialized.)

Only within a capitalist framework might one accumulate candy not merely to satisfy a sweet tooth or wish for a treat but also as a means to leverage later exchanges with others. This, I suggest, is learned behavior, not “natural” in the classical capitalist sense of the term. The reason for this lengthy explanation is that Riggio is spot on to ask about the allure of greed (given his mention of demand-side markets), because for many defenders of the faith, capitalism is nothing but a large-scale apparatus that satisfies natural human appetites (even though some of them are manufactured).

My arguments in the book are meant not only to undermine such claims but to differentiate between human activities, such as exchange and division of labor (historically found in families and tribes), and competition, greed, accumulation, and concentration of wealth that are specific to capitalism (and the social contract within which it finds psychological and legal protection). One can see, then, why I believe the allure of greed can be overcome through social conditioning and the reframing of human exchanges that satisfy needs and question wants.

Riggio’s concern over abuse of power, regardless of all the corrective structures proposed in the book, deserves one more response. Indeed, laws without enforcement are toothless. But, as I argue throughout the book, policies that attempt to deal with important social issues must deal with the economic features of any structure. What makes the Institutionalist approach to political economy informative is not only the recognition that economic ideals take on different hues when implemented in different institutional contexts, but that economic activity and behavior are culturally conditioned.

Instead of worrying here about a sequel, I’d like to suggest that there is already excellent work being done in the areas of human and civil rights (e.g., Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow (2010) and Matthew Desmond’s Evicted (2016) chronicle the problems of capitalism in different sectors of the economy) so that my own effort is an attempt to establish a set of (moral) values against which existing proposals can be assessed and upon which (economic) policy reform should be built. Highlighting the moral foundation of any economic system isn’t a substitute for paying close attention to the economic system that surrounds and perhaps undermines it; rather, economic realities test the limits of the applicability of and commitment to such foundation.

Contact details: rsassowe@uccs.edu

References

Riggio, Adam. “The True Shape of a Society of Friends.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 7 (2018): 40-45.

Sassower, Raphael. The Quest for Prosperity. London, UK: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017.

[1] Special thanks to Dr. Denise Davis for her critical suggestions.

In Books and Book Reviews, Critical Replies , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Heidegger Today, Paolo Palladino

SERRC —  August 23, 2018 — 1 Comment

Author Information: Paolo Palladino, Lancaster University, p.palladino@lancaster.ac.uk

Palladino, Paolo. “Heidegger Today: On Jeff Kochan’s Science and Social Existence.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 8 (2018): 41-46.

The pdf of the article gives specific page references. Shortlink: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-40b

Art by Philip Beasley
Image by Sean Salmon via Flickr / Creative Commons

 

I have been invited to participate in the present symposium on Jeff Kochan’s Science as Social Existence: Heidegger and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge. I would like to preface my response by expressing my gratitude to the editors of Social Epistemology for the opportunity to comment on this provocative intervention and by noting the following about my response’s intellectual provenance.

I have long worked at the intersection of historical, philosophical and sociological modes of inquiry into the making of scientific accounts and technological interventions in the material world, but at an increasing distance from the field of science and technology studies, widely defined. As a result, I am neither invested in disciplinary purity, nor party in the longstanding arguments over the sociology of scientific knowledge and its presuppositions about the relationship between the social and natural orders.

I must also admit, however, to being increasingly attracted to the ontological questions which the wider field of science and technology studies has posed in recent years. All this is important to how I come to think about both Science as Social Existence and the argument between Kochan and Raphael Sassower over the merits of Science as Social Existence.

Kochan’s Problems of the Strong Programme

As the full title of Science as Social Existence evinces, Kochan’s principal matter of concern is the sociology of scientific knowledge. He regards this as the field of study that is dedicated to explaining the production of knowledge about the material world in sociological terms, as these terms are understood among proponents of the so-called “strong programme”. As Kochan’s response to Sassower conveys pointedly, he is concerned with two problems in particular.

The first of these is that the sociology of scientific knowledge is hostage to a distinction between the inquiring subject and the objective world such that it is difficult to understand exactly how this subject is ever able to say anything meaningful about the objective world. The second, closely related problem is that the sociology of scientific knowledge cannot then respond to the recurrent charge that it holds to an unsustainable relationship between the social and natural orders.

Kochan proposes that Martin Heidegger’s existential phenomenology provides the wherewithal to answer these two problems. This, he suggests, is to the benefit of science and technology studies, the wider, interdisciplinary field of study, which the sociology of scientific knowledge could justifiably be said to have inaugurated but has also grown increasingly detached from the latter. Incidentally, while Kochan himself refers to this wider field as “science studies”, “science and technology studies” seems preferable because it not only enjoys greater currency, but also conveys more accurately the focus on practices and materiality from which stems the divergence between the enterprises Kochan seeks to distinguish.

Anyway, as becomes evident in the course of reading Science as Social Existence, Kochan’s proposal calls first for the correction of Joseph Rouse’s and Bruno Latour’s arguably mistaken reading of Heidegger, particularly in regard to Heidegger’s pivotal distinction between essence and existence, and to Heidegger’s further insistence upon the historicity of Being. This is followed by the obligatory illustration of what is to be gained from such a philosophical excursus.

Kochan thus goes on to revisit what has become a classic of science and technology studies, namely the arguments between Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes over the former’s signal invention, the air-pump. Kochan shows here how Heidegger’s thought enables a more symmetric account of the relationship between the social and natural order at issue in the arguments between Boyle and Hobbes, so disarming Latour’s otherwise incisive objection that the sociology of scientific knowledge is a neo-Kantian enterprise that affords matter no agency in the making of the world we inhabit. From this point of view, Science as Social Existence would not only seem to answer important conceptual problems, but also offer a helpful explication and clarification of the notoriously difficult Heideggerian corpus.

It should also be noted, however, that this corpus has actually played a marginal role in the development of science and technology studies and that leading figures in the field have nonetheless occasionally felt compelled to interrogate texts such as Heidegger’s Question Concerning Technology. Such incongruity about the place of Heidegger within the evolution of science and technology studies is perhaps important to understanding Sassower’s caustic line of questioning about what exactly is to be gained from the turn to Heidegger, which Science as Social Existence seeks to advance.

Real Love or a Shotgun Marriage?

Bluntly, Sassower asks why anyone should be interested in marrying Heideggerian existential phenomenology and the sociology of scientific knowledge, ultimately characterising this misbegotten conjunction as a “shotgun marriage’. My immediate answer is that Science as Social Existence offers more than just a detailed and very interesting, if unconventional, examination of the conceptual problems besetting the sociology of scientific knowledge.

As someone schooled in the traditions of history and philosophy of science who has grown increasingly concerned about the importance of history, I particularly welcome the clarification of the role that history plays in our understanding of scientific knowledge and technological practice. Kochan, following Heidegger to the letter, explains how the inquiring subject and the objective world are to be understood as coming into being simultaneously and how the relationship between the two varies in a manner such that what is and what can be said about the nature of that which is are a matter of historical circumstance.

As a result, history weighs upon us not just discursively, but also materially, and so much so that the world we inhabit must be understood as irreducibly historical. As Kochan puts it while contrasting Kant’s and Heidegger’s understanding of finitude:

For Heidegger … the essence of a thing is not something we receive from it, but something it possesses as a result of the socio-historically conditioned metaphysical projection within which it is let be what it is. On Heidegger’s account, not even an infinitely powerful intellect could grasp the intrinsic, independently existing essence of a thing, because no such essence exists. Hence, the finitude of our receptivity is not the issue; the issue is, instead, the finitude of our projectivity. The range of possible conceptualisations of a thing is conditioned by the historical tradition of the subject attempting to make sense of that thing. Only within the finite scope of possibilities enabled by the subject’s tradition can it experience a thing as intelligible, not to mention develop a clearly defined understanding of what it is (258-9).

Literally, tradition matters. Relatedly, I also welcome how Science as Social Existence helps me to clarify the ambiguities of Heidegger’s comportment toward scientific inquiry, which would have been very useful some time ago, as I tried to forge a bridge between the history of biology and a different set of philosophers to those usually considered within the history and philosophy of science, not just Heidegger, but also Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze.

As I sought to reflect upon the wider implications of Heidegger’s engagement with the biological sciences of his day, Science as Social Existence would have enabled me to fend off the charge that I misunderstood Heidegger’s distinction between ontic and ontological orders, between the existence of something and the meaning attributed to it. Thus, Kochan points out that:

Metaphysical knowledge is, according to Heidegger, a direct consequence of our finitude, our inescapable mortality, rather than of our presumed ability to transcend that finitude, to reach, infinitely, for heaven. Because the finitude of our constructive power makes impossible a transcendent grasp of the thing in-itself — leaving us to be only affected by it in its brute, independent existence — our attention is instead pushed away from the thing-in-itself and towards the constructive categories we must employ in order to make sense of it as a thing present-at-hand within-the-world.

For Heidegger, metaphysics is nothing other than the study of these categories and their relations to one another. Orthodox metaphysics, in contrast, treats these existential categories as ontic, that is, as extant mental things referring to the intrinsic properties of the things we seek to know, rather than as ontological, that is, as the existential structures of being-in-the-world which enable us to know those things (133-4).

The clarification would have helped me to articulate how the ontic and ontological orders are so inextricably related to one another and, today, so entangled with scientific knowledge and technological practice that Heidegger’s reading of Eugen Korschelt’s lectures on ageing and death matters to our understanding of the fissures within Heidegger’s argument. All this seems to me a wholly satisfactory answer to Sassower’s question about the legitimacy of the conjunction Kochan proposes. This said, Heidegger and sociology are not obvious companions and I remain unpersuaded by what Science as Social Existence might have to offer the more sociologically inclined field of science and technology studies. This, I think, is where the cracks within the edifice that is Science as Social Existence begin to show.

An Incompleteness

There is something unsettling about Science as Social Existence and the distinctions it draws between the sociology of scientific knowledge and the wider field of science and technology studies. For one thing, Science as Social Existence offers an impoverished reading of science and technology studies whereby the field’s contribution to the understanding the production of scientific knowledge and related technological practices is equated with Latour’s criticism of the sociology of scientific knowledge, as the latter was articulated in arguments with David Bloor nearly two decades ago.

Science as Social Existence is not nearly as interested in the complexity of the arguments shaping this wider field as it is in the heterogeneity of philosophical positions taken within the sociology of scientific knowledge with respect to the relationship between knowledge and the material world. It bears repeating at this point that Kochan defines the latter enterprise in the narrowest terms, which also seem far more attuned to philosophical, than sociological considerations. Such narrowness should perhaps come as no surprise given the importance that the sociology of scientific knowledge has attached to the correspondence theory of truth, but there also is much more to the history of philosophy than just the Cartesian and Kantian confrontations with Plato and Aristotle, which Heidegger privileges and Kochan revisits to answer the questions Rouse and Latour have asked of the sociology of scientific knowledge.

Sassower’s possibly accidental reference to a “Spinozist approach” is a useful reminder of both alternative philosophical traditions with respect to materiality, relationality and cognitive construction, and how a properly sociological inquiry into the production of scientific knowledge and technological practices might call for greater openness to the heterogeneity of contemporary social theory. This might even include actor-network theory and its own distinctive reformulation of Spinozist monadology. However, Science as Social Existence is not about any of this, and, as Kochan’s response to Sassower reminds us, we need to respond to its argument on its own terms. Let me then say something about Kochan’s configuration of phenomenology and sociological thought, which is just as unsettling as the relationship Kochan posits between the sociology of scientific knowledge and the wider field of science and technology studies.

Ethnomethodology is the most obvious inheritor to the phenomenological tradition which Kochan invokes to address the problems confronting the sociology of scientific knowledge, and it has also played a very important role in the evolution of science and technology studies. Key ethnomethodological interventions are ambivalent about Heideggerian constructions of phenomenology, but Kochan does not appear to have any great interest in either this sociological tradition or, relatedly, what might be the implications of Heidegger’s divergence from Edmund Husserl’s understanding of the phenomenological project for the relationship between subjects and knowledge.

Instead, Kochan prefers to weld together existential phenomenology and interactionist social theory, because, as he puts it, “interactionist social theory puts the individual subject at the methodological centre of explanations of social, and thus also of cognitive, order” (372). This, however, raises troubling questions about Kochan’s reading and mobilisation of Heidegger. Kochan equates the subject and Being, but Heidegger himself felt the need to develop the term beyond its more conventional connotations of “existence” as he came to understand the subject and Being as closely related, but not one and the same. As Kochan himself notes Being “is not a thing, substance, or object” (39). This form of existence is to be understood instead as a performative operation, if not a becoming.

Furthermore, Kochan would seem to underestimate the importance of Heidegger’s understanding of the relationship between social existence and the fullest realisation of this form of existence. While Heidegger undoubtedly regards Being as emerging from within the fabric of intersubjective relations, Heidegger also maintains that authentic Being realises itself by extricating itself from other beings and so confronting the full meaning of its finitude. As a result, one is compelled to ask what exactly is Kochan’s understanding of the subject and its subjectivity, particularly in relation to the location of “knowledge”.

Possible Predecessors Gone Unacknowledged

Strikingly, these are the kinds of questions that Foucault asks about phenomenology, an enterprise which he regards as contributing to the consolidation of the modern subject. Yet, Kochan would appear to dismiss Foucault’s work, even though Foucault has much to say about not just the historicity of the subject, but also about its entanglement with mathēsis, a concept central to Kochan’s analysis of the encounter between Boyle and Hobbes. Despite the richness and symmetry of the account Kochan offers, it seems quite unsatisfactory to simply observe in a footnote that “Heidegger’s usage of mathēsis differs from that of Michel Foucault, who defines it as ‘the science of calculable order’” (234 n20).

Put simply, there is something amiss about all the slippage around questions of subjectivity, as well as the relationship between the historical and ontological ordering of the world, which calls into question the sociological foundations of the account of the sociology of scientific knowledge which Science as Social Existence seeks to articulate.

Clearly, Kochan mistrusts sociological critiques of the subject, and one of the reasons Kochan provides for the aversion is articulated most pithily in the following passage from his response to Sassower, in relation to the sociological perspectives that have increasingly come to dominate science and technology studies. Kochan writes:

What interests these critics … are fields of practice. Within these fields, the subject is constituted. But the fundamental unit of analysis is the field – or system – not the subject. Subjectivity is, on this theory, a derivative phenomenon, at best, a secondary resource for sociological analysis. From my perspective, because subjectivity is fundamental to human existence, it cannot be eliminated in this way.

In other words, if the subject is constructed, then its subjectivity and structures of feeling can provide no insight into our present condition. This, however, is a very familiar conundrum, one that, in another guise, has long confronted science and technology studies: That something is constructed does not necessarily amount to its “elimination”. The dividing issue at the heart of Science as Social Existence would then seem to be less the relationship between scientific knowledge and the material constitution of the world about us, and more whether one is interested in the clarity of transcendental analytics or charting the topological complexities of immanent transformation.

My preference, however, is to place such weighty and probably irresolvable issues in suspension. It seems to me that it might be more productive to reconsider instead how the subject is constituted and wherein lie its distinctive capacities to determine what is and what can be done, here and now. Anthropological perspectives on the questions science and technology studies seek to pose today suggest that this might be how to build most productively upon the Heideggerian understanding of the subject and the objective world as coming into being simultaneously.

Perhaps, however, I am just another of those readers destined to be “unhappy” about Science as Social Existence, but I am not sure that this is quite right because I hope to have conveyed how much I enjoyed thinking about the questions Science as Social Existence poses, and I would just like to hear more about what Kochan thinks of such alternative approaches to reading Heidegger today.

Contact details: p.palladino@lancaster.ac.uk

References

Kochan, Jeff. Science as Social Existence: Heidegger and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2017.

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Social Epistemology as Fullerism, James H. Collier

SERRC —  August 14, 2018 — 15 Comments

Author Information: Jim Collier, Virginia Tech, jim.collier@vt.edu.

Collier, James H. “Social Epistemology for the One and the Many: An Essay Review.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 8 (2018): 15-40.

Jim Collier’s article “Social Epistemology for the One and the Many” will be published in four parts. The pdf of the article includes all four parts as a single essay, and gives specific page references. Shortlinks:

Introduction: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-3ZN

Part One, Social Epistemology as Fullerism: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-3ZY

Is it appropriate to call a public intellectual, a university-employed academic, a rock star?
Image by Ernesto de Quesada via Flickr / Creative Commons

 

Remedios and Dusek present social epistemology wholly as Fullerism; that is, current social epistemology amounts to glorifying Fuller’s supposed acumen and prolificacy.

Fullerism’s Narrow Scope

Fullerism oversimplifies the processes and aims of social epistemology. If Knowing Humanity in the Social World just extolled Fuller and explicated and his corpus, Remedios and Dusek would have written a book within an established genre in academic publishing—a very crowded genre, to be sure, of titles about august individual thinkers. However, in Remedios and Dusek’s presentation, Fullerism becomes conflated with social epistemology. Ultimately, Fullerism requires one to wait briefly and then react to Fuller’s next publication or scholarly incursion.

Fullerism’s origin story takes root in Fuller’s extraordinary education at “… two of the best programs in the world in philosophy and history of science” (we get class ranking for good measure), which led to work “… socially and historically richer by far than that of most philosophers and far more philosophically sophisticated than that of other sociologists” (10, emphasis mine). One will not miss the point amid the clunky phrasing that Fuller’s “breadth of reading in the humanities and social sciences is extraordinarily broad” (10).

Remedios and Dusek catalogue Fuller’s great learning by listing multiple subjects and fields about which he either possesses knowledge or “extensive familiarity.” Too, Fuller’s “range is far wider than most philosophers of science, including medieval scholastic philosophy” (emphasis mine). Readers should not ignore Fuller’s philosophical mastery and uncanny ability to get the root of a particular matter (11).[1]

Fuller deploys “great originality” (10) against the “many philosophers, historians, and sociologists of scientific knowledge [who] are simply failed scientists” (10). Remedios and Dusek’s unsubtle dig at the founders and early practitioners of STS tries to lend heft to Fuller’s broadsides against the field. Fullerism remains a game that Fuller wins by outsmarting any and all interlocutors. After all, Fuller “even if hyperbolic … has a point” (19).

Remedios and Dusek, and Remedios in his earlier book (2003), give notice that reader will encounter “Steve Fuller’s Social Epistemology.” For the precious few scholars informed on such matters the phrase gestures, in part, to an internecine scrum regarding the field’s proper origin and pursuit. Remedios and Dusek fortunately avoid the temptation to repot social epistemology’s history. Doing so would only rehearse a tired historiography that has hardened into a meme. Still, by not redressing this narrative, Remedios and Dusek reinforce the fiction that social epistemology is Fullerism.

Remedios and Dusek strike a deferential critical posture that also serves as a model for readers as they observe and assess Fuller’s performances. The reader should temper their judgments and entertain, say, a casual embrace of eugenics (116-117), or the past and future benefits of human experimentation (123), because Steve Fuller is a singular, prophetic thinker. Fuller sees the future—although the future, to be sure, looks suspiciously like Silicon Valley neoliberalism promulgated by entrepreneurs since the mid-1990’s.

Double Movement: Expansion in Contraction

In Knowing Humanity in the Social World, Fuller gets to impose his ideological will not only because of his unique personal powers, but because of how Remedios and Dusek treat the “social” in social epistemology. The book proceeds in a manner found in much of academic philosophy (and, so, in a way antithetical to a social epistemology). Broadly, academic philosophers tend to present arguments against a frictionless background to focus on definitional clarity, logical structure, internal consistency and the like. On certain practical grounds, one can understand attending less to cultural factors than, say, fallacies in a philosophical account.

However, as a consequence, Remedios and Dusek render the world as a passive constraint to the active knower. On the odd occasion, then, when the world pushes back, as in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, it is the judge that “largely misconstrued [a] major part of Fuller’s presentation” (72).

Remedios and Dusek forward a myopic view of social epistemology all the while extolling the grandiosity of Fuller’s corpus.[2] Owing, in part, to Fuller’s hyper-productivity, a tension arises immediately in Knowing Humanity in the Social World. While extolling his virtuosity (particularly in Chapter 1), the book fails to address adequately the majority of Fuller’s work.[3] Focusing on publications since the year 2000 and primarily on one, Humanity 2.0 (2011), of approximately two dozen total books, Remedios and Dusek pay little critical attention to Fuller’s collective body of work.[4]

A few articles play minor supporting roles. Moreover, Remedios and Dusek deal only with print media. As of this writing, 180 audio, and dozens of video, presentations reside online.[5] Certainly, one can sympathize with the monumental effort in dealing with such inordinate output; yet, Remedios and Dusek set out such a task in the title of their book.

Remedios and Dusek trade a great deal on the virtue of knowledge making, and makers, and the power of association. (The maker-versus-taker ethos underwrites the epistemic agent’s risk taking.) Fuller’s prolificacy demonstrates superior knowledge making, if not knowledge, and thus confers greater agency on himself and agents acting in kind.

A social epistemologist pre-2000 would have considered how and why knowledge-makers deploy resources in support of a singular epistemic source. That social epistemologist would also have questioned if epistemic power should accrue to agents, and their claims, by virtue of associating with other powerful agents. The unaccounted-for influence of powerful epistemic agents, and their surrogates, looms in the book’s background.

More importantly, Remedios and Dusek’s practically ignore Fuller’s critical reception. Even when the authors take up reception, they misapprehend the state of affairs. For example, Remedios and Dusek assert: “Despite the existence of several schools of STS, the Paris School led by Bruno Latour is the main competitor of Fuller’s social epistemology” (11). The rest of the passage gives a cursory explanation of Latour’s views, and Fuller’s opposition, but shares no evidence of responses by members of the Paris school, or actor-network theorists and practitioners, to social epistemology. Perhaps social epistemologists (read Fuller) view Latour as a “main competitor.” [6]

However, STS practitioners think little, or nothing, about social epistemology. One will not locate current social epistemology as a going concern in leading (or otherwise) STS journals, textbooks, or classrooms. I find no contrary evidence in Knowing Humanity in the Social World. Presenting social epistemology as Fullerism, Remedios and Dusek promote a narrative in which academic caricatures fight for supremacy on a dialectical battlefront. Ironically, the narrative evades how human knowledge amounts to a collective achievement (a central tenet of social epistemology itself).

Instead of taking up compelling questions that emerge from the contexts of reception, Remedios and Dusek conceive the social world much as the circumscribed space of a poorly taught philosophy course. In this class, a student tries explaining a commonplace or self-evident idea and, through the instructor’s haphazard application of the Socratic method, discovers greater uncertainty, more questions, and, more often than not, defaults to the instructor’s authority. Thus, in Fullerism, the student discovers the superiority of Fuller.

Where All Is Fuller

Pursuing Fullerism, we share our unrefined intuitions regarding human experimentation (113), or inspirations for doing science (67), or technological enhancement (94). Likely, we express our intuitions as absolutist declarations. Supplied with more information on, say, the efficacy of the Dachau hypothermia experiments, we are asked to revisit and refine our intuitions. To keep the lesson alive, the epistemic agent (Fuller being the model agent) can stir in other pieces of information, shift perspective, relay different social, historical and cultural frameworks, refer to controversies, supply voluminous references to the philosophical canon, or appeal to various philosophical schools of thought.

At each turn, we might further refine our ideas, retrench, grow bored—but in recognizing Fullerism’s true didactic aim we should rightly be impressed and supplicant. The performance of our epistemic agent should replace our certitude about obvious nonsense with gnawing doubt. Darwin was certainly a scientist, right (73)? Maybe eugenics (116-117) gets a bum rap—especially if we see human experiments “… in the cause of human progress and transcendence” (117). Sure … the overblown fear of humans “playing God” with technology just needs a little enlightened philosophical recalibration (87).

This philosophical dialectic depends on the active forms of agency attributed to Fuller. How epistemic agents learn, for example, remains captive to Fullerism’s dialectic. The “deep learning” of computers receives some attention (123-124), but the dialectical process appears an end in itself. Remedios and Dusek defer to displays of learning by Fuller and seem less interested in exploring how epistemic agents learn to make knowledge to act in the world.

Remedios and Dusek set out the distinctiveness of Fuller’s learning in the book’s opening:

Other than Steve Fuller’s work, there is no other discussion in current literature of sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), science and technology studies (STS), sociology of science, philosophy of science, epistemology of science, and analytic social epistemology on the impact of scientific knowledge on humanity. (emphasis mine, 1)

The claim’s bold start, dissipated by an ending cluster of vague prepositional phrases, compels the reader to consider Remedios and Dusek’s credulity. How could half a dozen fields of academic inquiry investigating science (to varying degrees) successfully avoid a single discussion of the impact of scientific knowledge on people?

Knowledge Becomes a Means to Transcend

We find, reading further, the matter at hand is not scientific knowledge per se; rather, knowing how to perform the accounting necessary for best achieving a preordained human future. Remedios and Dusek, like Fuller, abide in the unquestioning faith that “nanotechnology, robotics, and biotechnology” (1) will develop and converge and, inevitably, humans will transcend their biology.[7] For the next thirty years until the Singularity, we can train ourselves to tamp down our agnosticism.

Lest we forget, we can rely on Fuller’s “very well informed and richly informed historical account with delineation of varieties of theodicy” (my emphasis, 72) that include discussions of Leibniz, Malebranche and Gassendi. For Remedios and Dusek, historical analysis frequently translates into Fuller’s citational range; thus, a good argument depends on the ability to bring numerous references, preferably unexpectedly related, to bear on an issue.

For example, Fuller wins a debate with A. C. Grayling (in 2008) on intelligent design because “the historical part of Fuller’s argument is very accurate concerning early modern science. Figures such as Boyle, Newton, Leibniz, and many other figures of seventeenth-century science saw their religion as tied with their science” (my emphasis, 72). A trivially true even if “very accurate” point.

In the same paragraph, Remedios and Dusek go on to list additional clever and apt observations made by Fuller. As the adjectival emphasis suggests, Remedios and Dusek direct the reader to allow the perspicacity of Fuller’s insights suffice as an effective argument. As Remedios and Dusek lightly resist Fuller’s loose historical claims (particularly in Chapter 5), they give counter-arguments, from themselves and other scholars, short shrift. Fuller’s proactive encyclopedism assures us that we both reside in, and can actively reconstruct, the western intellectual tradition. In truth, Fullerism entails that we willingly suspend disbelief during Fuller’s ideational performance.

The social world of the book’s title remains largely unburdened by cultural complexities, and populated sparsely with one-dimensional interlocutors. Fullerism, then, is both plenum and void—space completely filled with the matter of Fuller’s creation, and void of external influences and meaning in collective effort.

Contact details: jim.collier@vt.edu

References

Barbrook, Richard and Andy Cameron. “The Californian Ideology.” Science as Culture 6, no. 1 (1996): 44-72.

Barlow, John Perry. “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” 1996. https://bit.ly/1KavIVC.

Barron, Colin. “A Strong Distinction Between Humans and Non-humans Is No Longer Required for Research Purposes: A Debate Between Bruno Latour and Steve Fuller.” History of the Human Sciences 16, no. 2 (2003): 77–99.

Clark, William. Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University. University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Ellul, Jacques. The Technological Society. Alfred A. Knopf, 1964.

Frankfurt, Harry G. On Bullshit. Princeton University Press, 2005.

Fuller, Steve. Social Epistemology. Bloomington and Indianapolis, University of Indiana Press, 1988.

Fuller, Steve. Philosophy, Rhetoric, and the End of Knowledge: The Coming of Science and Technology Studies. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993.

Fuller, Steve. Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

Fuller, Steve. “The Normative Turn: Counterfactuals and a Philosophical Historiography of Science.” Isis 99, no. 3 (September 2008): 576-584.

Fuller, Steve. “A Response to Michael Crow.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 25 November 2015. https://goo.gl/WwxFmW.

Fuller, Steve and Luke Robert Mason. “Virtual Futures Podcast #3: Transhumanism and Risk, with Professor Steve Fuller.”  Virtual Futures 16 August 2017. https://bit.ly/2mE8vCs.

Grafton, Anthony. “The Nutty Professors: The History of Academic Charisma.” The New Yorker October 26, 2006. https://bit.ly/2mxOs8Q.

Hinchman, Edward S. “Review of “Patrick J. Reider (ed.), Social Epistemology and Epistemic Agency: Decentralizing Epistemic Agency.” Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2 July 2018. https://ntrda.me/2NzvPgt.

Horgan, John. “Steve Fuller and the Value of Intellectual Provocation.” Scientific American, Cross-Check 27 March 2015.  https://bit.ly/2f1UI5l.

Horner, Christine. “Humanity 2.0: The Unstoppability of Singularity.” Huffpost 8 June 2017. https://bit.ly/2zTXdn6.

Joosse, Paul.“Becoming a God: Max Weber and the Social Construction of Charisma.” Journal of Classical Sociology 14, no. 3 (2014): 266–283.

Kurzweil, Ray. “The Virtual Book Revisited.”  The Library Journal 1 February 1, 1993. https://bit.ly/2AySoQx.

Kurzweil, Ray. The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Penguin Books, 2005.

Lynch, Michael. “From Ruse to Farce.” Social Studies of Science 36, vol 6 (2006): 819–826.

Lynch, William T. “Social Epistemology Transformed: Steve Fuller’s Account of Knowledge as a Divine Spark for Human Domination.” Symposion 3, vol. 2 (2016): 191-205.

McShane, Sveta and Jason Dorrier. “Ray Kurzweil Predicts Three Technologies Will Define Our Future.” Singularity Hub 19 April 2016. https://bit.ly/2MaQRl4.

Pein, Corey. Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley. Henry Holt and Co. Kindle Edition, 2017.

Remedios, Francis. Legitimizing Scientific Knowledge: An Introduction to Steve Fuller’s Social Epistemology. Lexington Books, 2003.

Remedios, Francis X. and Val Dusek. Knowing Humanity in the Social World: The Path of Steve Fuller’s Social Epistemology. Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2018.

Rushkoff, Douglas. “Survival of the Richest: The wealthy are plotting to leave us behind.” Medium 5 July 2018. https://bit.ly/2MRgeIw.

Shera, J.H. Sociological Foundations of Librarianship. New York: Asia Publishing House, 1970.

Simonite, Tom. “Moore’s Law Is Dead. Now What?” MIT Technology Review 13 May 13, 2016. https://bit.ly/1VVn5CK.

Talbot, Margaret. “Darwin in the Dock.” The New Yorker December 5, 2005. 66-77. https://bit.ly/2LV0IPa.

Uebel, Thomas. Review of “Francis Remedios, Legitimizing Scientific Knowledge: An Introduction to Steve Fuller’s Social Epistemology. Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 3 March 2005. https://ntrda.me/2uT2u92

Weber, Max. Economy and Society, 2 vols. Edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich. Berkeley, CA; London; Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1922 (1978).

[1] In the book, getting to the root of the matter frequently amounts to the revelation that it isn’t what you think it is or thought it was.

[2] As of 13 May 2018, Fuller’s vita (https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/sociology/staff/sfuller/vita1.docx ) comes in at 76 pages.

[3] Remedios can point to his first book Legitimizing Scientific Knowledge as wrestling with the first half of Fuller’s career. Thomas Uebel’s review, for Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (https://ntrda.me/2uT2u92) notes a similar problem in not addressing the reception of Fuller’s work—the “paucity” of responses to counter arguments: “Calling notions contested does not absolve us from the task of providing defenses of the alternatives put forward.”

[4] Fuller’s “trilogy of transhumanism” all published by Palgrave Macmillan: Humanity 2.0: What It Means to Be Human Past, Present and Future (2011), Preparing for Life in Humanity 2.0 (2012), and The Proactionary Imperative: A Foundation for Transhumanism (co-authored with Veronika Lipinska, 2014).

[5] While writing this essay, I received notice of yet another book authored by Fuller Post-Truth: Knowledge As A Power Game (Anthem Press).

[6] Remedios and Dusek put Latour and Fuller into conversation predominantly in Chapter 2. As framed, Fuller “speaks at” views held by Latour (uncharitably summarized by Remedios and Dusek), but no direct exchange, or dialectic, occurs. Emblematic of this state of affairs is a “debate” between Latour and Fuller in 2002 (published in 2003), regarding what defines ‘human’ and ‘non-human’, that concludes with this editorial note: “[The debate] was least successful, perhaps, in making the issues clear to the audience, especially to those who were not familiar with the work of Bruno Latour and Steve Fuller” (98).

[7] Slightly different iterations of the trinity that will converge to give us the Singularity include Ray Kurzweil’s “nanotechnology, robotics, and biotechnology” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil), and “genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics” (https://bit.ly/2LZ42ZB).

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Social Epistemology for the One and the Many, James H. Collier

SERRC —  August 9, 2018 — 1 Comment

Author Information: Jim Collier, Virginia Tech, jim.collier@vt.edu.

Collier, James H. “Social Epistemology for the One and the Many: An Essay Review.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 8 (2018): 15-40.

Jim Collier’s article “Social Epistemology for the One and the Many” will be published in four parts. The pdf of the article includes all four parts as a single essay, and gives specific page references. Shortlink: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-3ZN

 

Happy birthday, Steve!

Steve Fuller has built a remarkable career in the academy, bringing brilliant and singular insight to help understand turbulent times. But we should always ask ourselves whether we let our own thought be eclipsed by the powers of our heroes. 
Image by Babette Babich, courtesy of Steve Fuller

 

Early in Knowing Humanity in the Social World (2018), Remedios and Dusek treat the reader to a breathless summary of Steve Fuller’s exceptionalism (10-11). Fuller “by far” outpaces his interlocutors’ learning and knowledge while engaging with “wit and panache” in an “endlessly ironical dialectic” (10). Bookending Fuller’s eminence in a postscript, a 2014 interview, Remedios asks him directly in third person, “Is Fuller the super-agent” (131)? According to Remedios and Dusek, super-agents possess “godlike capabilities through extension of human capabilities with science and technology” (131). Fuller demurs.

Undeterred, Remedios re-asks the question: “So what about Steve Fuller as super-agent” (132)? Fuller then refers obliquely to a “knowledge policy maker person” (132).[1] Despite Fuller’s reticence, Remedios’s questions recall the book’s hyperbolic opening and highlights the desired rhetorical effect. The authors instruct their readers to see that embodied in Steve Fuller, and in following the path of his social epistemology—his word (as it were)—we find a regulative ideal of the unity of knowledge, if not godhood.

Through a Gleaming City Walks What Was Once a Man

Knowing Humanity in the Social World, in a compact 7 chapters with a conclusion, postscript interview, and glossary, wrestles determinedly with Steve Fuller’s most thorny ideas and debates. The book examines insightfully the development of Fuller’s scholarly activity since the year 2000. The authors contend that Fuller’s project shifts from epistemology and collective knowledge policy-making, to metaphysics and agent-oriented knowing. The emphasis on agents—epistemic agents need not be human individuals (25)—speaks to a form of idealism advanced in Fuller’s distinct conceptualization of transhumanism.

Concentrating on Fuller’s more recent work, especially during and after the publication of Humanity 2.0 (2011), Remedios and Dusek aim to weave a unified narrative. It is a formidable undertaking. Fuller’s atypical range of interests, inveterate work style, and academic activism, complicate the matter. Unfortunately, by lionizing Fuller or, rather, in abstracting and projecting his seeming attributes onto social epistemology writ large, Remedios and Dusek offset much of the wider impact of their book.[2]  In the vain attempt to maintain a unified narrative, and keep a through line to social epistemology, the authors resort to Fullerism.

Fullerism, I argue, projects idealized versions of Fuller himself, his scholarship, and his reasoning, onto a contrived series of social roles, events, and debates. For Remedios and Dusek, Fuller models the actions of an “agent-oriented” epistemologist who regularly triumphs, in a more or less qualified fashion, at academic brinkmanship. The singular positioning of Fuller tells the story of social epistemology as a decidedly asocial process—as though the field arose and proceeds largely on the basis of individual initiative and brilliance.[3] In essence, Remedios and Dusek envision social epistemology through “great man,” or “super-agent,” theory or, using Fuller’s slightly less exaggerated pejorative term, by “genius mongering” (1993).

Fuller wrote the book’s Foreword. In it, he claims “significant continuity” (vii) in his work if one reads appropriately. In overdetermining Fuller’s rational authority owing to a working belief in academic charisma (Weber 1922 [1978], Clark 2005), as I suggest later, Remedios and Dusek succeed in nullifying the continuity they, and Fuller, intend to promote. Social epistemology, on Fuller’s initial formulation (1988), took up the organization and pursuit of knowledge by human beings with “imperfect cognitive capacities” (3) and incomplete access to one another’s activities.

This characterization, and resulting aim, seemingly applies to all humans—unless we posit new, upgraded humans and their inevitable cognitive perfection. Perfection being just a matter time, how do post-2000 social epistemologists address these issues? They promote the illusion of proactive agents until the future arrives. Time now to retire the epistemic policy maker that inhabited the pages of Social Epistemology.

Remedios and Dusek impose a transhumanist narrative, bolstered by an unalloyed technological determinism, onto Fuller’s lauded intellectual biography. Fuller’s learnedness and interventionist role-play in various controversies gives lessons for aspirants to follow on the path of social epistemology. The path leads unremittingly to humanity 2.0—the “unstoppable Singularity” (Horner 2017). When the Singularity arrives (in 2045) as foretold by Ray Kurzweil, and assured to us by his Silicon Valley brethren, we perfect our imperfect cognitive capacities and have complete access—by uploading our consciousness to a computer cloud-like function (or some such)—to all our epistemic activities.

We might ascend to our perfection and unification sooner if we adopt Fuller’s metaphysical turn and regime of self-experimentation and risk-taking supported by proactionary social policies. Still, even if we aspire to be less than active, or proactive, epistemic agents—or humans (even so!)—an unshakable belief in technological determinism covers all bets made by futurists.[4]

Critique of a Shadow

In the three parts of this essay review I articulate the tensions, if not contradictions, and consequences for the conduct of social epistemology, if we accept Remedios and Dusek’s account. I believe these consequences go well beyond their book and affect the general conduct, and our reflexive understanding, of the field of social epistemology that stems more or less directly from Steve Fuller’s work.[5]

The sui generis nature of the work and the distinct normative landscape it inhabits, calls for a critical approach that Remedios and Dusek cannot articulate fully in the truncated framework of Knowing Humanity in the Social World. Remedios and Dusek’s shortcuts precipitate conflating Fuller with Fullerism and Fullerism with social epistemology. I maintain the following:

First, Remedios and Dusek present social epistemology wholly as Fullerism; that is, current social epistemology amounts to glorifying Fuller’s supposed acumen and prolificacy.

Second, Remedios and Dusek depict the epistemic agent as a social actor by staging roles and casting Fuller in them—“knower of the future” (3), public intellectual (5), intellectual provocateur (121), or designated, or aspiring, super-agent (131-132). Social epistemology inhabits a tediously didactic world in which social intercourse imparts triumphal object lessons owing to Fuller’s academic charisma.

Third, Remedios and Dusek submit to a powerful form of technological determinism as expressed in the Californian ideology (Barbrook and Cameron 1996), packaged by Ray Kurzweil (2005), and elaborated in Fuller’s “trilogy on transhumanism” (vii). Such determinism leaves unexamined the questionable, if not absurd, claims made on behalf of transhumanism, generally, and in Fuller’s “own promethean project of transhumanism” (99).

In the conclusion, I express consternation about social epistemology’s current state and future course. Among the broader field’s participants, we can expect a continuation of crosstalk and general indifference.[6] Analytic philosophers studying social epistemology, given their relative institutional security and faithful puzzle-solving, will persevere. I continue to believe we might fruitfully reimagine social epistemology through our necessarily collaborative textual practices. Yet always ahead, a glimmering personal future replete with academic favor, beckons and awaits.

Contact details: jim.collier@vt.edu

References

Barbrook, Richard and Andy Cameron. “The Californian Ideology.” Science as Culture 6, no. 1 (1996): 44-72.

Barlow, John Perry. “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” 1996. https://bit.ly/1KavIVC.

Barron, Colin. “A Strong Distinction Between Humans and Non-humans Is No Longer Required for Research Purposes: A Debate Between Bruno Latour and Steve Fuller.” History of the Human Sciences 16, no. 2 (2003): 77–99.

Clark, William. Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University. University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Ellul, Jacques. The Technological Society. Alfred A. Knopf, 1964.

Frankfurt, Harry G. On Bullshit. Princeton University Press, 2005.

Fuller, Steve. Social Epistemology. Bloomington and Indianapolis, University of Indiana Press, 1988.

Fuller, Steve. Philosophy, Rhetoric, and the End of Knowledge: The Coming of Science and Technology Studies. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993.

Fuller, Steve. Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

Fuller, Steve. “The Normative Turn: Counterfactuals and a Philosophical Historiography of Science.” Isis 99, no. 3 (September 2008): 576-584.

Fuller, Steve. “A Response to Michael Crow.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 25 November 2015. https://goo.gl/WwxFmW.

Fuller, Steve and Luke Robert Mason. “Virtual Futures Podcast #3: Transhumanism and Risk, with Professor Steve Fuller.”  Virtual Futures 16 August 2017. https://bit.ly/2mE8vCs.

Grafton, Anthony. “The Nutty Professors: The History of Academic Charisma.” The New Yorker October 26, 2006. https://bit.ly/2mxOs8Q.

Hinchman, Edward S. “Review of “Patrick J. Reider (ed.), Social Epistemology and Epistemic Agency: Decentralizing Epistemic Agency.” Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2 July 2018. https://ntrda.me/2NzvPgt.

Horgan, John. “Steve Fuller and the Value of Intellectual Provocation.” Scientific American, Cross-Check 27 March 2015.  https://bit.ly/2f1UI5l.

Horner, Christine. “Humanity 2.0: The Unstoppability of Singularity.” Huffpost 8 June 2017. https://bit.ly/2zTXdn6.

Joosse, Paul.“Becoming a God: Max Weber and the Social Construction of Charisma.” Journal of Classical Sociology 14, no. 3 (2014): 266–283.

Kurzweil, Ray. “The Virtual Book Revisited.”  The Library Journal 1 February 1, 1993. https://bit.ly/2AySoQx.

Kurzweil, Ray. The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Penguin Books, 2005.

Lynch, Michael. “From Ruse to Farce.” Social Studies of Science 36, vol 6 (2006): 819–826.

Lynch, William T. “Social Epistemology Transformed: Steve Fuller’s Account of Knowledge as a Divine Spark for Human Domination.” Symposion 3, vol. 2 (2016): 191-205.

McShane, Sveta and Jason Dorrier. “Ray Kurzweil Predicts Three Technologies Will Define Our Future.” Singularity Hub 19 April 2016. https://bit.ly/2MaQRl4.

Pein, Corey. Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley. Henry Holt and Co. Kindle Edition, 2017.

Remedios, Francis. Legitimizing Scientific Knowledge: An Introduction to Steve Fuller’s Social Epistemology. Lexington Books, 2003.

Remedios, Francis X. and Val Dusek. Knowing Humanity in the Social World: The Path of Steve Fuller’s Social Epistemology. Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2018.

Rushkoff, Douglas. “Survival of the Richest: The wealthy are plotting to leave us behind.” Medium 5 July 2018. https://bit.ly/2MRgeIw.

Shera, J.H. Sociological Foundations of Librarianship. New York: Asia Publishing House, 1970.

Simonite, Tom. “Moore’s Law Is Dead. Now What?” MIT Technology Review 13 May 13, 2016. https://bit.ly/1VVn5CK.

Talbot, Margaret. “Darwin in the Dock.” The New Yorker December 5, 2005. 66-77. https://bit.ly/2LV0IPa.

Uebel, Thomas. Review of “Francis Remedios, Legitimizing Scientific Knowledge: An Introduction to Steve Fuller’s Social Epistemology. Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 3 March 2005. https://ntrda.me/2uT2u92

Weber, Max. Economy and Society, 2 vols. Edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich. Berkeley, CA; London; Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1922 (1978).

[1] Such a person gives the impression of being a properly trained university administrator who can advise and lead on matters regarding knowledge transfer and distribution. As Fuller suggests in The Academic Caesar (2016), proper training refers to knowing and practicing the ways of social epistemology—particularly if one is a university administrator. Perhaps a “proto- Academic Caesar” lives in Michael Crow of Arizona State University. See “A Response to Michael Crow,” Steve Fuller (https://goo.gl/WwxFmW, 2015).

[2] In the Acknowledgements, Remedios and Dusek graciously mention a small conference in May 2017 in which the participants discussed the book in its infancy (xiii). During a spirited exchange, I expressed concerns that the project seemed like a hagiography of Fuller. I also worried that Remedios and Dusek left unaccounted in the project their own efforts, and the vital efforts of conference participants and the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective, in building and advancing social epistemology.

[3] Fuller published Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times in 2000 (paperback edition in 2001). While Remedios and Dusek give the book passing treatment, one might return to Thomas Kuhn on the occasion of this review not only as “philosophical history,” but also as a prescient allegory regarding the far-reaching unintended, even harmful, consequences resulting from an overwrought staging of a singular scholar and their work.

[4] Echoing Kurzweil, Remedios and Dusek invoke the trinity of “biotechnology, nanotechnology, and computer technology” as accelerating inevitably to the Singularity. For a counter-narrative, read Tom Simonite, “Moore’s Law Is Dead. Now What?” MIT Technology Review, May 13, 2016. https://goo.gl/EBUkDg.

[5] In his 2003 book, Remedios identifies the social epistemology related to Fuller’s work as “political social epistemology” (99). However, the phrase does not appear in the current book. I am unclear about the conceptual relation between “political social epistemology” and “Fuller’s social epistemology” aside from the apparently settled issue of who possesses it.

[6] Edward Hinchman’s recent review (2018) of Patrick Reider’s Social Epistemology and Epistemic Agency illustrates this crosstalk and the predictable retreat to comfortable conceptual environs (https://ntrda.me/2NzvPgt).

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