epistemology « Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective

Archives For epistemology

Against Ideal Theory Ignorance, Susan Dieleman

SERRC — May 9, 2019 — 1 Comment

Author Information: Susan Dieleman, University of Southern Illinois, Edwardsville, sdielem@siue.edu.

Dieleman, Susan. “Against Ideal Theory Ignorance.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 9, no. 5 (2019): 11-15.

The pdf of the article gives specific page references. Shortlink: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-48M

Is the relationship between information technology and ignorance as simple as it often seems?
Image by Daniele Marzocchi via Flickr / Creative Commons

Daniel R. DeNicola’s Understanding Ignorance delivers on its promise to provide “an extended, exploratory essay” on ignorance (28). This exploration, after an introductory section, traverses four spatial metaphors: ignorance as place, as boundary, as limit, and as horizon. Each spatial metaphor reveals, according to the author, something different about knowledge, about ignorance, and about the relationship between them.

Navigating Ignorance

In Part II: Ignorance as Place (chapters 3 and 4), DeNicola considers the idea that ignorance is sometimes understood as a place in which we dwell, like Plato’s cave (chapter 3) or the Garden of Eden (chapter 4). Though ignorance is conceived as something to be left behind in both cases, these departures are differently valenced. Whereas Plato’s cave is a “horror” (51), the Garden is a “moral ideal” (51).

Thus, departing Plato’s cave is considered a good thing, allowing the escaped prisoners to come to know, through the process of learning, the True, the Beautiful, and the Good. Leaving the Garden of Eden, on the other hand, is considered wholly negative, representing the loss of innocence the garden represented. DeNicola wants to point out, however, that innocence is not always a good thing, and its loss is not always a bad thing.

The innocence Adam and Eve experience so long as they remain in the Garden is not chosen – how could it be? – but is thrust upon them. So long as one exists in this state of innocence and ignorance, one is at risk of moral immaturity, the vices of insensitivity, obtuseness, and silliness, and the possibility of exploitation (53-54). DeNicola’s comparison of the cave and the Garden demonstrate his claim that “awareness, experience, and knowledge are good things” (55), and that innocence, and the ignorance it entails, is not always virtuous.

When we dwell within ignorance, as do the prisoners in the cave and Adam and Eve in the Garden, we do not know that or what we do not know. Our ignorance can only be recognized from a place of knowledge, once we’ve left the cave or the Garden (35). However, when we dwell in knowledge, “we confront ignorance at the boundary of what is known” (62).

Thus, in Part III (chapters 5-8), DeNicola argues we can also understand ignorance as a boundary. A boundary, he contends, “implies that which it excludes” (137); it points beyond knowledge to that which is unknown. It also sets up a “frontier,” which “suggests the need for exploration or defense and the possibility of alteration or advancement of the boundary” (66).

This is an unfortunately colonialist understanding of ignorance, derived in part from the example that opens chapter 5 of the “ornately framed” 1472 Ptolemaic map of the world DeNicola has hanging in his office, with the words Terra Incognita on three sides. DeNicola sees in this map, he claims, “a wondrous interplay of knowledge and ignorance” (65). Insofar as one can place themselves in the position of the cartographer, it demonstrates that “we” dwell with ignorance; that “our” knowledge is bounded by it (67).

The Bounds of Knowledge

Boundaries, DeNicola contends, can be natural (considered in chapter 5) or artificial (considered in chapter 6). Natural boundaries create what DeNicola calls “simple ignorance,” which includes various kinds of “not-knowledge,” including prediction, the forgotten, the unknowable, and so on (71-72). These kinds of not-knowing can be remedied by learning, since “[a]n immense subset of our recognized ignorance comprises things it is possible to learn” (74, emphasis in original). Failure to engage in the task of learning, therefore, is the only hindrance to pushing beyond the natural boundaries of knowledge and thereby expanding our epistemic maps.

However, some boundaries are not natural but artificial; they are constructed in order to prevent knowledge. DeNicola calls this “nescience” to designate “what we or other have determined we are not to know” (79, emphasis in original). He identifies five forms of nescience, which in most cases can be both self-imposed and other-imposed.

The first is rational ignorance, which refers to the ignorance that results from calculating that the effort required to learn (or teach) something is not worth the knowledge such learning (or teaching) would produce. The second is strategic ignorance, which refers to those situations where not knowing something is more advantageous (to be morally or legally exculpable, for example) than knowing it. The third is willful ignorance, which often involves the willful avoidance of certain knowledge (such as evidence of infidelity or information about traumatizing events in one’s past).

The fourth is secrecy, which includes privacy and confidentiality, and which imposes barriers to what certain individuals or groups should and should not know (about, for example, one’s clients or about classified government documents). The fifth is forbidden knowledge, which implies a barrier drawn paternalistically by an authority around knowledge that is forbidden specifically because it is defiling or harmful (as in sexual taboos or off-limits research topics).

Chapters 7 and 8, where DeNicola examines questions about the ethics of ignorance that understanding ignorance as boundary raises, round out Part III of the book. He argues, in these chapters, that there exists an epistemic obligation to “disrupt privileged ignorance and the conceptual framework that creates it” (114), but also that ignorance “has its uses” (133). Thus, the virtuous knower understands that knowledge and ignorance are related in complicated ways, and that both must be considered within an epistemic community.

In Part IV (chapters 9 and 10), DeNicola contrasts the understanding of ignorance as boundary presented in previous chapters to an understanding of ignorance as limit. Whereas a boundary “implies that which it excludes,” with a limit, “there is only a sense of something having run its course, finish and exhaustion, the end, whether in completion or incompleteness” (137).

In other words, one can transgress boundaries, and the boundaries themselves can shift, but limits are final. He contends that there are limits to what we can know, and beyond those limits is the unknowable. Such epistemic limits can be reached in two ways: by completion or by an exhaustion of capacity. Epistemic completion is captured in the idea of omniscience, where “everything would be known that could be known” (138).

Epistemic exhaustion refers to the limited biological, conceptual, and theoretical capacities of actual epistemic agents and communities: our ability to know is limited by our imperfect memory and sensory systems, by the unknowability of counterfactual conditions, and by paradoxical phenomena that elude even our most sophisticated scientific theories.

Given their unavoidability, we have learned how to manage these epistemic limits and the challenges they present. In chapter 10, DeNicola examines how rituals, inquiry, insurance, the use of statistical tools, and other methods, have been developed specifically to deal with the ignorance such limits present (157-176).

Our Limits or How Far We Choose to Go

DeNicola concludes Understanding Ignorance with his final spatial metaphor in Part V: Ignorance as Horizon. Though similar to boundaries and limits, horizons are distinct in that they are “apparent and perspectival;” horizons are “relative to our position and our visionary resources” (179). Yet horizons also beckon us, he thinks, and this is a positive outgrowth of ignorance; it motivates “ingenuity, inventiveness, originality, spontaneity” (186). This is why philosophy is particularly valuable; it “rejoices in its questions” (189), questions that can extend the “horizonal span” of ignorance (185).

This insight leads to DeNicola’s conclusion, an epilogue that summarizes the specifically epistemological implications of his exploration, which amount to an argument for expanding epistemology as it has been traditionally understood and practiced. He writes, “we learn a great deal by thinking of epistemology as an arena of value theory and ethical concern” (208) – an argument, it’s worth noting, that has been made by many critics of “traditional” epistemology, over the last few decades at least, such as feminist epistemologists.

At various points throughout Understanding Ignorance, DeNicola considers contemporary issues that are relevant to his exploration, including the challenge to democracy of an uninformed citizenry (77), worries about “trigger warnings” (87), the use of preference-driven technology (95), and digitized information (143).

Of these issues, public ignorance, which DeNicola defines as “widespread, reprehensible ignorance of matters that are significant for our lives together” (5), seems to serve as a key motivation for his project. Political ignorance in particular, he worries, “is now so severe that the ideal of an informed citizenry seems quaint” (5). When this ignorance is flaunted and celebrated, as it is in the “tenacious strain of anti-intellectualism” found in contemporary populism, it becomes an ideological stance (7).

That All-Too-Familiar Public Ignorance

This ideological, public ignorance worries DeNicola, and prompts his investigations into the phenomenon of ignorance more generally. To support his claim that there is a severe problem of political ignorance in the United States, he refers to the sorts of survey results that regularly make the rounds on social media in unfortunately mocking and snide tones: US citizens do not know what rights are enumerated in the First Amendment, cannot state how many branches of government exist, do not understand the difference between Latin and languages from Latin countries, and cannot locate Ukraine on a map (6-7).

Yet I worry that DeNicola’s project reasserts a worn-out and harmful dichotomy: to resist the populist anti-intellectualism that accompanies, and perhaps contributes to, political ignorance, one must endorse an elitist intellectualism. In other words, DeNicola’s project seems to think that the only alternative to populist anti-intellectualism is to defend exactly that which it finds problematic: a decidedly elite, cosmopolitan, and at times smug, intellectualism.

I doubt that DeNicola would so baldly assert such an endorsement, but his failure to articulate an alternative, given the opportunity to do so, is unfortunate. Despite DeNicola’s careful exploratory work, and his provocative claim that ignorance need not be vicious, more evidence for the claim that public ignorance takes the form he thinks it does, and that it is “reprehensible,” is required (5).

Nescience (or constructed ignorance), on DeNicola’s account, is a likely culprit of public ignorance, but he claims that simple ignorance (or natural ignorance), which can be remedied by learning, can cause public ignorance as well. When it comes to simple ignorance, the failure of the attitudes and aptitudes that “determine our interest in learning” leads to the problem of public ignorance (78).

This failure is exacerbated by technology, he suggests. Given that facts have become easily searchable, individuals need not know things they can easily look up; the motivation for learning is diminished. “Why learn anything,” he asks, “except the skills of ‘finding out’” (77)? Similarly, preference-driven technology (which is not constructed with the intention of producing ignorance, but does so indirectly) allows us to have “thorough control over our epistemic input” by showing us ads for things we already want, news from sources that confirm our prejudices, and stories from friends who share our ideological commitments (95). This sort of technology, DeNicola argues, “fuels the growth of ideologies and their ‘true believers’” (96).

Missing Essential Distinctions

These points highlight an inconsistency in DeNicola’s project that is worth exploring further. At points throughout, DeNicola seems to limit knowledge to the sort of thing that must exist in one’s head. Indeed, the examples he provides to demonstrate the existence of widespread public ignorance are all examples of propositional, S-knows-that-P, knowledge. Yet at other points, he wants to broaden our understanding of what comprises knowledge beyond just “knowing that.”

But if knowledge takes multiple forms (knowing that, knowing how, and knowing by direct acquaintance (23) then why are the skills of using technology to “find out” derided as something less than knowledge? The existence of technology should make a reconceptualization of knowledge as more than just “knowing that” more plausible, yet when it comes to the relationship between technology and public ignorance, DeNicola falls back on the concepts provided by traditional epistemology: remembering where Ukraine is counts as knowledge, but “finding out” where Ukraine is does not.

DeNicola’s failure to consider how technology can lead to a reconceptualization of knowledge is also evinced by his claim that humans’ capacity to know can be exhausted by our biological limits (142-144). Given his distinction between boundaries, which can be shifted and transgressed, and limits, which are final, why think of biology as a limit? Isn’t one of the promising (and potentially threatening) features of technology that it allows us to transgress our biological, and thus epistemological, boundaries?

This seems to be acknowledged by DeNicola, who uses the example of a microscope as a tool that enables learning (73), but this acknowledgement is not carried forward to his investigation of other sorts of technologies.

The Same Old Mistakes of the Comfortable

Those of us who decry public ignorance would do well to conduct explorations that are less prone to endorse elitist intellectualism. These explorations should begin with where we are, epistemically speaking, rather than where we like to imagine ourselves to be. In short, explorations of knowledge and ignorance should be carried out using a nonideal-theory method rather than an ideal-theory method, one that considers how technology has radically altered our epistemological landscape.

Criticisms of public ignorance emerge, it seems to me, out of (certain people’s) hopes for an ideal, cosmopolitan world that have so far been dashed. Many of us see things like globalism, the internet, international trade and travel, as epistemological boons that remove all excuse for ignorance. But it is a mistake to think these benefits have been realized and then suddenly lost. Like ignorance, knowledge is also “often the privilege of the powerful” (113), and we ignore this at our own peril.

Contact details: sdielem@siue.edu

References

DeNicola, Daniel R. Understanding Ignorance: The Surprising Impact of What We Don’t Know. Boston: MIT Press, 2017.

Circles or Regresses? The Problem of Genuine Expertise, Stephen Turner

SERRC — April 11, 2019 — Leave a comment

Author Information: Stephen Turner, University of South Florida, turner@usf.edu.

Turner, Stephen. “Circles or Regresses? The Problem of Genuine Expertise.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 8, no. 4 (2019): 24-27.

The pdf of the article gives specific page references. Shortlink: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-48a

Image by Revise_D via Flickr / Creative Commons

This article responds to Jamie Carlin Watson (2019) “What Experts Could Not Be.” Social Epistemology 33(1): 74-87. DOI: 10.1080/02691728.2018.1551437

Jamie Carlin Watson’s article raises some crucial questions about expertise, and about its relation to truth and competence, questions on which discussions of expertise have usually foundered, or at least run up against and tried to avoid. One can summarize the problem as the question of whether expertise, or a given claim to expertise, is genuine or valid.

The problem, as Watson shows, is tougher than it appears. The easiest way out is to epistemologize it, by linking expertise to true beliefs. This off-loads the problem of expertise into a problem of truth, which presumably is easier to resolve. The problem with this approach is that expertise does not in fact, and cannot in principle, work in this way. When we rely on experts, it is because we don’t know for ourselves what is true. Nor can we impose tests of reliability on them, at least not easily or directly.

Determining whether they possess a set of true (or at least credible) beliefs would require us to possess the relevant true beliefs ourselves. It would require also meta-knowledge about the content of their beliefs—not merely sharing them, but having knowledge of their truth. Judging something to be true, in expertise contexts, is a matter requiring expertise.

Indeed, this is almost the definition of expertise: we can “understand” what the expert is telling us, but what makes for genuine expertise is the ability to make epistemic judgments about the truth of what the expert says, without relying on their status—their reputation, as experts. The model of testimony doesn’t help here. Assessing their reliability as testifiers would require even more knowledge, knowledge of their past testimony, knowledge of what standard of reliability to apply, for example, on the analogy of eye-witnessing, knowledge of how good eye-witnessing in general is.

Can a History of Performance Justify Expertise?

On the surface, it looks like it would be simpler to just assess expert performances. Did the surgeon’s patients live or die? Did the football coach win or lose? But this runs into the same regress problems. Who is able to judge such things? Did the surgeon take on difficult cases, and have a lower success rate than the surgeon who took only easy cases. This is a real-world issue that figures in actual health regulation discussions, not merely an academic hypothetical.

And the same goes for coaches. Did they exceed expectations or fall below them, given the team they were coaching and its talent? This kind of judgment seems to require a great deal of meta-expertise. And one can ask where the expectations came from? So this expertise is subject to the same sorts of regress problems.

And there is yet another problem with these judgments—circularity or uninformativeness. I can illustrate this by a response my own mother—a physician in a surgical specialty—once gave me to my question “how can I tell if a surgeon is any good?” Her answer—“you need to look at their technique.”

Of course, the prospective patient never has an opportunity to do this, but in any case would have no idea what a good surgical technique looked like, even if they could look. So this is completely uninformative. But it is also circular. One never gets out of the circle of expertise in this case, and this is characteristic: evaluation of expert judgment, even if it is formalized peer judgment, is more expert judgment.

No Reputation Need Be Genuine

The reputational theory of expertise, if we can call it that, does not rely on truth, at least the truth of the expert’s beliefs. It says instead that to be an expert is to be reputed to be an expert. Expert authority is analogous to political legitimacy in the sociological rather than normative sense; this kind of legitimacy, if it produces obedience, is “real.”

The analogous view of expertise, similarly, ignores the normative question of whether expertise is real in the sense of being valid. This kind of assessment does not rely on expert judgment. It needs only the ordinary judgment of people who need only to have in their possession ordinary facts about reputation.

This seems pretty empty. Can’t people have fake reputations, based on erroneous beliefs about their competence or honesty? But there is more to it. The paper explicitly says it is avoiding a discussion of reputational views of expertise, and rejects them, but it seems to me that this rejection is subject to the same kind of argument the paper makes with respect to performance: it is caused.

One might ask what causes reputation—it is not something separate from either performance or credible beliefs. Indeed, how do you get reputation without performance, in some sense? What is the reputation for? How does one get it? One might say that the “reputational theory” is neutral between means of acquiring a reputation—it could be performance, recognition of the possession of true beliefs, or both, with the caveat that “true” is audience relative. And this seems to mean that reputation doesn’t answer the question of genuineness. But to get a reputation you need to do something real, and that also seems to be the point of the argument against the separation of belief and performance.

This does help. One need not be an expert to raise and judge the answers to ordinary questions about how someone got their reputation. One can be wrong, of course. But there is a plethora of ordinary fact available to the person who wants to know, for example, how a surgeon got their reputation or came to be accredited with their expertise.

Relying on this kind of fact, even if it is fallible, avoids the problem of the circularity of basing assessments of expertise on other assessments of expertise. It can include such assessments, for example, evidence of peer judgment by other experts. But it looks on this kind of evidence not as an expert by as a consumer of the processes that generate the judgment, and asks whether they are fair, or produce good results for other consumers.

From this point of view, expertise is an agency problem—a problem of asymmetric information (though the term “information” makes it seem as though information for the expert is the same thing as information for the non-expert, which misses the point of expertise)—which the producer of expertise has a large role in resolving.

It can’t be resolved directly, by the reiteration of expert claims. There truth is the issue, and the point is that the consumer as non-expert can’t assess them. This is characteristic of a large class of relationships, where the issue is resolved in different ways (cf. Turner 1990). So the expert needs to establish credibility indirectly, through such things as processes of certification, which do not take expertise to at least get a sense of the value of.

I’ve argued elsewhere that these processes are central to science as a whole (Turner 2002). But I also think that they are the only real answer to the question of validity from an external point of view. Direct judgments of truth are the business of the expert. But this should not distract us from the fact that expertise is a relation between experts and consumers of expertise. Experts are not just knowers. They are people making claims within a social relationship.

The Deeper Problems of Expertise

This key feature of expertise points to a deep problem, which on examination is perhaps not so deep, and primarily a semantic one. There is an overwhelming sense that an expert is someone who possesses something, and that this possession is what marks genuine expertise out from fake expertise, such as merely reputed expertise.

A reputation is a possession, just a possession of the wrong kind, because it fails to guarantee genuineness. And this is what motivates the argument that the existence of expertise does not depend on the existence of non-experts. But there is a difference between having an ability—say that of a four octave coloratura soprano—and justifiable credibility about what the possessor of this ability might say about it. Whether it is actualized or not, expertise is a social relation. The strength of the testimony view of expertise was that it recognized this implicitly.

But “reliability,” the concept it is associated with, doesn’t work because it implies a record of acts or pronouncements on which users rely. So perhaps we need a better word: trustability, or if we loathe linguistic inventions, trustworthiness with respect to epistemic pronouncements. This keeps the idea of possession, and the recognition that it pertains to a social relation, and allows for multiple grounds for trust, and most importantly, grounds that do not depend, circularly, on the relevant expertise.

Contact details: turner@usf.edu

References

Turner, Stephen. 1990. Forms of Patronage. Pp. 185-211 in Theories of Science in Society, edited by Susan Cozzens and Thomas F. Gieryn. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Turner, Stephen. 2002. Scientists as Agents. Pp. 362-384 in Science Bought and Sold, edited by Philip Mirowski and Miriam Sent. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Jamie Carlin Watson (2019) “What Experts Could Not Be.” Social Epistemology 33(1): 74-87. DOI: 10.1080/02691728.2018.1551437

What Is “Genuine” African Philosophy? Anke Graness

SERRC — March 28, 2019 — Leave a comment

Author Information: Anke Graness, University of Hildesheim, anke.graness@atunivie.ac.at.

Graness, Anke. “What Is ‘Genuine’ African Philosophy? An Answer to John Lamola.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 8, no. 4 (2019): 6-13.

The pdf of the article gives specific page references. Shortlink: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-47Q

A uniquely ordinary shop in Nairobi.
Image by Ninara via Flickr / Creative Commons

This article responds to Lamola, John. “Will We Ever Have a Genuine African Philosophy?” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 8, no. 1 (2019): 39-45.

In his review of the The Palgrave Handbook of African Philosophy, edited by Adeshina Afolayan and Toyin Falola (2017), South African philosopher John Lamola regrets that the volume does not contribute to the task of developing a ‘genuine African philosophy’. But what is a ‘genuine’ philosophy, whether it be African, European, Asian, or any other? Or to put it in a different way, what makes a philosophy ‘genuine’?

Conditions of Original Genuineness

According to Lamola, the precondition for a ‘genuine African philosophy’ is ‘an epistἔmἔ that is crafted and articulated in an African language by persons whose lived-experience is embedded in Africa, and/or what Africa represents to the world’. On the basis of this tentative definition and Lamola’s critique of the volume, I would first like to discuss some of the achievements and shortcomings of The Palgrave Handbook of African Philosophy, then return to the question of ‘genuine’ philosophy.

The Palgrave Handbook of African Philosophy tries to cover a wide range of topics. The first part, ‘Preliminaries and Reappraisals’, includes essays which discuss such fundamental subjects as the issues that confront historians of African philosophy (‘Rethinking the History of African Philosophy’, by Safro Kwame); the difficulties posed by the use of indigenous and colonial languages in intellectual life (‘Revisiting the Language Question in African Philosophy’, by Godfrey Tangwa); and the diverse concepts of logic in African cultures (‘The Question of African Logic: Beyond Apologia and Polemics’, by Jonathan O. Chimakonam).

It also traces major trends in twentieth-century African philosophy in essays that discuss influential philosophers and their works, including ‘A Philosophical Re-reading of Fanon, Nkrumah, and Cabral in the Age of Globalization and Postmodernity’, by Teodros Kiros; ‘Africanizing Philosophy: Wiredu, Hountondji, and Mudimbe’, by Dismas Masolo; and ‘Oruka and Sage Philosophy: New Insights in Sagacious Reasoning’, by Gail Presbey.

Part II of the handbook, ‘Philosophical Traditions and African Philosophy’, introduces specific philosophical traditions of the continent, including essays on classical Ethiopian philosophy (by Teodros Kiros, 181–206) and Islamic philosophy (by A.G.A. Bello, 223–230), and discusses ideas developed in the diaspora, including Afrocentricity (by Molefi K. Asante, 231–244), Africana philosophy (by Lucius T. Outlaw, 245–268), or presents examples of comparative philosophy, for example Confucianism and African philosophy (by Thaddeus Metz, 207–222).

Part III is topic-centred and includes articles on African Feminism (by Louise du Toit and Azille Coetzee, 333-348, and Olayinka Oyeleye, 349–370), philosophy and sexuality (by Workineh Kelbessa, 371–390), nationalism (by Pieter Boele van Hensbroek, 405–416), communitarianism (by Ifeanyi Menkiti, 461–474), Ubuntu (by Leonhard Praeg, 493–506), African cinema (by Adeshina Afolayan, 525–538) and the philosophy of science (Helen Lauer, 539–553).

Part IV, entitled ‘African Development and African Philosophy’, presents essays on such urgent issues of our time as good leadership (‘Supporting African Renaissance: Afrocentric Leadership and the Imperative of Strong Institutions’, by Lesiba Teffo, 557–570), democratic governance (‘Africa and the Philosophy of Democratic Governance’, by Polycarp Ikuenobe, 571–584) and the environment (Humanitatis-Eco (Eco-Humanism): An African Environmental Theory’, by Michael O. Eze, 621–632, and ‘Ubuntu and the Environment’, by Edwin Etieyebo, 633–658), as well as terrorism (‘African Philosophy in a World of Terror’, by Leonhard Praeg, 659–670) and peace (‘Yorùbá Conception of Peace’, by Adebola B. Ekanola, 671–680).

The last part of the book is entirely dedicated to essays on the challenges of including African philosophy in the curricula of our universities and schools (for example, ‘Teaching African Philosophy and a Postmodern Dis-Position’, by Philip Higgs, 765–778, and ‘An African Philosophy for Children: Towards a Situated Paradigm’, by Amasa P. Ndofirepi, 779–794). The book closes with a ‘Bibliographical Report on African Philosophy’ (by Anthony O. Chukwu, 813–826). Including the index, there are more than 850 pages on African philosophy, but, apparently (for Lamola), there is no ‘genuine’ African philosophy in sight.

The State of the Tradition: African Philosophy

In my opinion, the The Palgrave Handbook of African Philosophy offers a comprehensive survey of the state of and debates in African philosophy by summarizing basic issues of doing African philosophy (particularly in Part I), presenting particular traditions of philosophy in Africa and the African diaspora (Part II), and discussing recent issues of philosophical interest in the twenty-first century from different angles (Parts III–V).

It is a valuable and timely contribution to a task which started back in the 1980s with African Philosophy: An Introduction, edited by Richard A. Wright (1984), and continued with African Philosophy: An Anthology, edited by Emmanuel C. Eze (1998), and the well-known Blackwell Companion to African Philosophy, edited by Kwasi Wiredu (2004). A similar project is the lesser-known but extremely rich two-volume Reclaiming the Human Sciences and Humanities through African Perspectives, edited by Helen Lauer and Kofi Anyidoho (2012), which although it transcends the discipline of philosophy, includes a majority of articles on philosophical topics, many of them written by influential African and non-African philosophers of our time.

Anthologies on African philosophy are designed to provide the academic community with ‘an up-to-date go-to source on African philosophy in the global age’—as Lamola puts it (Lamola, 39). Lamola’s comment is intended to be rather critical, but I think it is a good description and even a compliment for a volume which is meant to serve as a tool for teaching and research in African philosophy. Teaching and research depend on such ‘up-to-date go-to’ sources.

The new volume differs from previous collections in that questions which dominated the discourse for decades—Is there an African philosophy? What is ‘African’ in African philosophy? What are the traits that distinguish a philosophy as ‘African’?—have been set aside completely or are mentioned only in summaries of closed debates (see the introduction by Afolayan and Falola, 1-16; ‘African Philosophy: Appraisal of a Recurrent Problematic’, 19-33, and ‘Revisiting the Language Question in African Philosophy’, 129-40, both by Godfrey Tangwa; and ‘Rethinking the History of African Philosophy’, 97-104, by Safro Kwame). The focus is definitely on recent work in African philosophy.

A View of Lamola’s Critiques

But it is not the thematic range of the content that Lamola criticises. At the centre of his concerns are ‘issues relating to the epistemic sovereignty of Africa’ (39). Lamola asserts that ‘the reconstruction of African thought is carried out in The Handbook through the prism of Euro-American globalism’, and thus, that global economic power dynamics continue to determine the prospects of Africa’s epistemic sovereignty (40). Among the anthology’s faults he includes not only the lack of ‘a formal article that problematises globalisation as it affects Africa’, but also the choice of topics and authors, which seems to him to reflect a dependency on Euro-American epistemes (42).

Lamola concurs with the editors that there is a need for African philosophers to be deeply entangled in the realities on the African continent, but he asks, ‘But how can this be achieved when those who are Afrophilosophising are sitting in Florida, Austria and the Europeanised enclaves of South African life? Has this African discipline made any progress when approximately twelve out of forty-three of the contributors to this important reference guide on contemporary African thought are non-indigenous Africans?’ (42)

I completely agree with Lamola that this is indeed a problem–even though in an ideal world it shouldn’t be, since the study of philosophical topics should be guided by interests and not dependent on the origin of the philosopher. I think limiting each philosopher to the study of the traditions of his or her own cultural context is not really helpful, and to do so would destroy the philosophical enterprise of wondering and seeking the roots of knowledge about our world.

I also wonder if Lamola would raise the same objections about an anthology on classical German philosophy authored by a group of mostly non-German, anglophone writers—which is actually the case with any given handbook on Kant. Would Lamola suggest that, for example, Kant’s philosophy is part of the universal heritage of humanity, accessible to anyone who would like to deal with it, but African philosophy is not? Should we measure European and African philosophy with different scales? Such an approach would relegate African philosophy to the curio cabinet once again.

An Intersectional Parry

As I mentioned above, I agree with Lamola’s concerns about the (cultural, politico-economic) background of the handbook’s authors. As long as we are not living in an ideal world and colonial structures persist in the academic landscape, we must pay attention to them, even in respect of the contributors to a volume. However, what Lamola does not notice and therefore does not criticise—but should—is the fact that the author list is dominated by men.

Philosophers differ not only in their geographical and socio-political backgrounds, but also in gender. Altogether, there are only seven women whose work is included in this publication: three white philosophers from the US and Europe, two white philosophers from South Africa, and only ONE black African, a doctoral philosophy student from Nigeria.[1] My apologies for referring to skin colours here, but unfortunately, skin colour, like gender, still matters—even in academe.

Interestingly, the list of female contributors seems to reflect quite well the global asymmetries of academe. Moreover, the three African women’s essays were about African feminism—of course! What else would women philosophers write about? Many of our male colleagues still seem unable to imagine that women deal with a wide range of philosophical issues. Where are all the distinguished black African women philosophers one would expect to appear in such an important work?

Sophie Oluwole (unfortunately passed away in Dec. 2018), Nkiru Nzegwu, Betty Wambui, Tanella Boni, to mention only a few, all ‘genuine’ philosophers with ‘genuine’ philosophy PhDs—none of them contributed to the handbook. Editors should make more of an effort to include their female African colleagues in such important publications! I can practically repeat here my sentence above: as long as we are not living in an ideal world and patriarchal structures persist in the academic landscape, we must pay attention to gender, even in respect of the contributors to a book.

Definitions of African

But back to Lamola: For Lamola, the definition of ‘African philosopher’ remains crucial; the validity of the knowledge depends upon the background (or even ethnicity) of the person who produces it. Lamola disagrees with my statement (Graness 2018) that a definition of the term ‘African philosophy’ is crucial because the continental affiliation of those who practise philosophy in Africa is less important than the definition and demarcation of the content.

I base my argument on—among other things—the question of the distribution of financial resources, arguing that an African Wittgenstein specialist would certainly have plenty of funding possibilities available via various kinds of funding foundations and research programmes in such things as analytic philosophy, philosophy of language, and continental philosophy, whereas an African philosopher dealing with marginalised and formerly excluded African philosophical traditions would have hardly any funding prospects at all.

Lamola asks: ‘Is this all that it comes down to? Is it a fact that until African scholarship and institutions have their own African financial fountains, we will forever have to have themes, books and conferences whose leitmotif will be dictated from the “developed North”?’ Now, in a tentative attempt to answer Lamola’s intriguing questions: No, of course not, funding is not all it comes down to. Nevertheless, knowledge production always emerges in specific economic and political power relations, as well as in a situation of epistemic hegemonies.

Knowledge never emerged in a vacuum, but always under very concrete historical, political, and economic conditions, as well as under historically shaped conditions of cultural and epistemic domination.[2] It would be fatal to ignore this and to assume that one could produce knowledge independently and autonomously, that is, free from these conditions. Only a critical distance from the conditions of knowledge production frees us to a certain degree and enables us to criticise or change those conditions. Once the canonizing power of certain factors is recognised, such factors can be changed. (Graness 2015)

Does Definition Create a One-Dimensional Human?

Moreover, I do not reject the importance of the origin of an author, but I do think that origin or background means far more than geography. Class, race, and gender are aspects with the same relevance which, moreover, point to power hierarchies within a certain geographical or social context like the academe.

Indeed, what I criticise is the one-dimensionality of attempts to define who an African philosopher is or might be that are based on a question which ignores other determinants of a speaker’s positioning and discounts the mobility of human beings and the personal and intellectual exchange between humans. Such attempts also ignore the existence of a large number of multicultural people who grew up at the intersection of bordering cultures, countries, or even religions and are at home in more than one.

Furthermore, Lamola strongly criticises the criteria for measuring progress in philosophy that were suggested by the editors Afolayan and Falola in their introduction. He objects to the fact that the editors uphold ‘relevance to and in the global age […] as the litmus test of the contemporary efficacy of African philosophy’ (42). I think Lamola’s critique does not do justice to the editors’ rather extensive discussion of the question of the possibility of progress in philosophy, a discipline where Plato and Aristotle are as current and influential as they were 2000 years ago.

The authors suggest that progress in philosophy cannot be measured by the same criteria as in science, where the accumulation of knowledge is one decisive criterion of progress. Like John Kekes, they suggest considering philosophy a ‘problem-solving enterprise’ for generating solutions to perennial problems (10), specifically problems of the human condition.

I think we cannot neglect the fact that globalization, climate change, and other vast, all-encompassing challenges are the basic human issues of our time – of our human condition – for which philosophers worldwide must seek solutions. African philosophers cannot and should not ignore those challenges.

Moreover, Afolayan and Falola’s admonition that African philosophy, if it is to be relevant, must face Africa’s problems instead of losing itself in sophisticated argumentation or indulging in ‘the joy of internal philosophical squabbles’ (13) could be directed to present-day European and North American analytic philosophers as well. Even though I do not agree with Lamola’s critique of Afolayan and Falola, I think that his quest for an independent African episteme raises important questions, namely, has African philosophy really progressed, or can it ever progress if anthologies that canonise its developmental stages can only be undertaken by publishing interests that are based in the colonial metropolises?

Following the Markets to Uncomfortable Places

And why are these collections being published by global entities like Blackwell and Palgrave Macmillan? The Handbook was published, as Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2014) would say, ‘on this side of the line’, that is, in the global North, whereas the content, the thinking, comes from ‘the other side of the line’, the global South.[3]

It is indeed an interesting question: why have publishing houses like Palgrave, Routledge, and Oxford University Press recently shown a growing interest in publishing Handbooks and Encyclopaedias of African philosophy and African thought?

A positive explanation for this would be that there is a growing consciousness that students and researchers of the intercultural dimension of philosophy require appropriate resources in order to make their discipline bear fruit. A rather negative view would be that there is a new awakening of interest in the exotic Other, accompanied by renewed efforts to subject the thinking of the Other to a neocolonial episteme. This latter seems to be Lamola’s fear.

At this point let me return to the question of a ‘genuine African philosophy’. What makes a philosophy genuinely African? That it is ‘crafted and articulated in an African language by persons whose lived-experience is embedded in Africa’? (44) At first glance, Lamola’s definition seems to be plausible. A ‘genuine European philosophy’ would be in this case something that is crafted and articulated in a European language by persons whose lived experience is embedded in Europe. Does this definition describe traditions of European philosophy?

While it is correct that European philosophy is articulated in European languages—more often now in English than in the philosopher’s mother tongue—however, historically and at present philosophers neither referred solely to their European lived experience nor reflected only on the significance of Europe to the rest of the world; they sought universally valid knowledge. In doing this, they often forget the contextuality of their thinking, but this is another problem which cannot be explored here.

That philosophers in Africa are extremely conscious about their own context and conditions of knowledge production, is certainly an advantage that can be fruitfully explored. But to reduce philosophy in Africa to lived experiences embedded in Africa alone, means to clip the wings of philosophy in Africa–and presumably this is not John Lamola’s aim.

Conclusions

Lamola’s suggested definition of ‘genuine African philosophy’ seems very restrictive to me. Concerning the language question: Even though a lingua franca in academe is not a new phenomenon, for example, Greek, Latin, and Arabic were linguae francae in previous centuries, I would repeat here that the language question is not a trivial one in philosophy. (Graness 2015, 136) And it is surely not a problem only for African philosophers.

Since English has become the predominant academic language of our day, philosophers with different language backgrounds are increasingly forced to formulate and publish their ideas in English if they want to pursue an academic career. What Tangwa calls ‘linguistic pragmatism’ (Tangwa, ‘Revisiting the Language Question’, 135), that is, submission to the English language, is already an undeniable fact in academe worldwide.

For example, a considerable percentage of early-career German and Austrian philosophers who are under the age of 30 no longer publish in German. Even though a postcolonial situation like Africa’s is completely different from the situation in former colonising countries like Germany, France, and Italy, submission to English will have similarly serious consequences for philosophy in them, too, consequences of which many European philosophers are not yet conscious.

They can learn a lot from African debates on the language question in philosophy. With Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o I strongly support the idea that it is necessary to use one’s mother tongue for artistic or scientific knowledge production; however, we cannot ignore that it is of equal importance to work and publish in the scientific language of our time in order to be part of the international discourse and not remain imprisoned in our language enclaves. The basis of fruitful scientific work is exchange; what is really needed is the investment of appropriate financial and human resources for translation work.

So, is it an expression of Africa’s epistemic sovereignty to produce philosophical thought in African languages and to make the African experience and its issues the focus of that thought? Yes! But this is not all. Another expression of Africa’s epistemic sovereignty – which is of equal importance – is the discussion between intellectuals from Africa and elsewhere about issues of global interest, from their own diverse perspectives, in the language of their choice.

From its beginnings to the present, in all the different regions of the world, philosophy has been the result of intercultural interaction, and it will continue to be even more so in a world in which interdependence in everything—history, economy, politics, ecology, and all other aspects of life—will only increase, making regions no longer able to exist in isolation—or able to do so only artificially. We cannot ignore our world’s new level of interconnectedness.

Even though Lamola criticises ‘The representation of African philosophy as a centreless, open-ended, free-to-all enterprise, as in The Palgrave Handbook‘, (44) I think that philosophy should be exactly that: a centreless, open-ended, free-to-all enterprise, wherever people in this world philosophise.

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

References

Afolayan, Adeshina, and Toyin Falola, eds. The Palgrave Handbook of African Philosophy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

Graness, Anke. ‘Is the debate on “global justice” a global one? Some considerations in view of modern philosophy in Africa’. Journal of Global Ethics 11, No. 1 (2015): 126–140. DOI: 10.1080/17449626.2015.1010014

Graness, Anke. ‘African Philosophy and History’. Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, No. 10 (2018): 45–54.

De Sousa Santos, Boaventura. Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. London: Routledge 2016.

Lamola, John. “Will We Ever Have a Genuine African Philosophy.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 8, no. 1 (2019): 39-45.

Wiredu, Kwasi, ed. A Companion to African Philosophy. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.

[2] As much as I personally like the film Black Panther, Lamola’s reference to a Hollywood blockbuster in the midst of his complaints about hegemonies and the control of knowledge consumption is not without irony. The African country ‘Wakanda’ was invented in part to serve strong commercial interests operating in a matrix of profound asymmetries of power. The film earned $1.35 billion worldwide, becoming the ninth highest-grossing film of all time, precisely because its story reverses these power asymmetries.

[3] Or at least partly, since some of the authors live and work in the global North.

A Critical Catalogue of Ignorance, Nadja El Kassar

SERRC — February 26, 2019 — Leave a comment

Author Information: Nadja El Kassar, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, nadja.elkassar@gess.ethz.ch.

El Kassar, Nadja. “A Critical Catalogue of Ignorance: A Reply to Patrick Bondy.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 8, no. 2 (2019): 49-51.

The pdf of the article gives specific page references. Shortlink: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-46U

Image by Lynn Friedman via Flickr / Creative Commons

This article responds to critiques of El Kassar, Nadja (2018). “What Ignorance Really Is: Examining the Foundations of Epistemology of Ignorance.” Social Epistemology. DOI: 10.1080/02691728.2018.1518498.

Including Bondy, Patrick. “Knowledge and Ignorance, Theoretical and Practical.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 12 (2018): 9-14.

Thanks to Patrick Bondy for these inspiring comments that allows me to further explain the arguments and rationale of the integrated conception of ignorance.

Weak and Strong Ignorance

Bondy’s suggestion that there is weak ignorance and strong ignorance just as there is strong and weak knowledge is very interesting and perceptive (Bondy 2018, 11-12). But I take it that this distinction is more relevant for defenders of the propositional conception of ignorance, in particular supporters of the Standard View and New View.

In my reply to Peels (2019), I suggest that we should not see knowledge and ignorance as simple opposites, nor that their accounts should be mirrored. And in the original article I have argued that the Standard View and the New View are not adequate for capturing ignorance. Therefore, Bondy’s suggestion and the related criticism of the debate between the Standard View and New View is not as pertinent for my integrated conception of ignorance, but I think it should be taken seriously as an alternative approach to distinguishing forms of ignorance.

“Agential Ignorance” and “Agential Conception of Ignorance”

I need to point to a terminological issue in Bondy’s reply that may be central for distinguishing conceptions of ignorance and particular instances of ignorance, and thus also for motivating and defending the integrated conception of ignorance: Bondy swiftly changes between “agential conception of ignorance” and “agential ignorance” and seems to use these terms interchangeably. Similarly, for “structural conception of ignorance” and “structural ignorance”.

But these terms are importantly distinct: the former refers to a conception or an approach, the latter to a form of ignorance, or also particular instances of ignorance. In my article I only discuss agential conceptions and structural conceptions and I do not use the terms “agential ignorance” or “structural ignorance” because I am specifically interested in conceptions of ignorance

Practical Ignorance

Bondy, like Peels, points out that I do not address lack of practical knowledge or lack of know-how. Again, I fully agree that this is an open question in my article and for the integrated conception and I look forward to addressing this question in more detail. In his reply, Bondy suggests that my integrated conception can be extended to apply to such “practical ignorance” in the following way:

Theoretical ignorance: this would remain as El Kassar formulates her integrated conception of ignorance, as “a disposition of an epistemic agent that manifests itself in her beliefs – either she has no belief about p or a false belief – and her epistemic attitudes (doxastic attitudes, epistemic virtues, epistemic vices)”

Practical ignorance: a disposition of an agent that manifests itself in her actions – where S fails to φ, or S does not φ well or properly – and her practical attitudes (ethical and pragmatic attitudes, ethical or practical virtues and vices). (Bondy 2018, 13)

Yet, I have to reject this charitable extension. Bondy, as well as Peels, is right that there is work to do in this field, but simply imposing the integrated conception on “practical ignorance” would not be appropriate, nor is it an approach that I would wish to take.

First, I doubt that we can simply replace epistemic attitudes, virtues and vices with practical attitudes, practical virtues and vices to cover the practical case. Second, I think we need to respect the highly-evolved debate about know-how and include their concerns and arguments in any account that wants to address the lack of know-how or lack of practical knowledge. Any further conclusions require starting communication between the different fields and debates – a genuinely exciting prospect for philosophy of ignorance!

A first step might be to examine the terminology that we are using: Bondy discusses “practical ignorance” but maybe the term “incompetence” is more apt for these practical cases? Interestingly enough, psychologists who work on ignorance and meta-ignorance sometimes frame ignorance in terms of incompetence, see, for example Dunning in describing the Dunning-Kruger-Effect (Dunning 2011, 260).

Finally, and more fundamentally, I do not see why one should go for a unified account of theoretical and practical ignorance that uses the same components for both forms of ignorance. As I explain in my reply to Peels, I think that one should not aim for a unified account of ignorance and knowledge but instead take the phenomena seriously as they are. For now I take the same considerations to hold for theoretical ignorance and practical ignorance.

“We Can Say Everything That We Want to Say About Ignorance”

Bondy claims that “we can say everything we want to say about ignorance” (Bondy 2018, 9) with the propositional conception. But his claim is based on the assumption that what I call constituents of ignorance really are just causes of ignorance and I hope that my clarificatory remarks in this reply and my reply to Peels’ contribution explain why the assumption is not warranted and why the propositional conception does not say enough about ignorance. Let me briefly return to some arguments to motivate my position:

One problem is that Bondy’s (and Peels’) interpretation of closed-mindedness and other virtues or vices as causes of ignorance makes it seem as if these virtues and vices are naturally efficient causes; i.e. they turn the original claim that epistemic virtues and vices are co-constituents of ignorance into the claim that they are efficient causes.

But I would like to hear more about why we should draw this conclusion or why it is warranted. Again, a parallel in philosophy of know-how may be helpful in that context: know-how as a disposition does not explain why a performance occurred, it explains “why a certain kind of act … is possible in the first place” (Löwenstein 2017, 85, emphasis in original). And, similarly, a disposition, like open-mindedness or closed-mindedness, does not explain why someone does not know that p or why someone is ignorant of that particular fact. We need events in the world, decisions, beliefs, and motivations and the like to explain why someone is ignorant.

Second, as I say in the article, ignorance is more than a doxastic issue, it also has an attitudinal component, how one is ignorant – not how one has become ignorant, but the particular character of one’s ignorance. That also involves more than saying what kind of ignorance (e.g. propositional ignorance or practical ignorance) the particular instance belongs to. There is another facet of ignorance that is constitutive of ignorance and it cannot be captured by the propositional conception since it is restricted to the doxastic component.

That is why I want to say more about ignorance than just refer to the doxastic component. And even more, I suggest that everyone who wants to capture actual instances of ignorance should want to say more about ignorance than the propositional conception does.[1]

Contact details: nadja.elkassar@gess.ethz.ch

References

Bondy, Patrick. 2018. “Knowledge and Ignorance, Theoretical and Practical.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7 (12): 9–14.

Dunning, David. 2011. “The Dunning–Kruger Effect.” In Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 44:247–96. Elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-385522-0.00005-6.

Löwenstein, David. 2017. Know-How as Competence: A Rylean Responsibilist Account. Studies in Theoretical Philosophy, vol. 4. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann.

Peels, Rik. 2019. “Exploring the Boundaries of Ignorance: Its Nature and Accidental Features.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 8 (1): 10–18.

[1] Thanks to David Löwenstein and Lutz Wingert for helpful discussions.

On the Successfulness of Venting and Its Venues, Manuel Padilla Cruz

SERRC — February 21, 2019 — Leave a comment

Author Information: Manuel Padilla Cruz, Universidad de Sevilla, mpadillacruz@us.es.

Padilla Cruz, Manuel. “On the Successfulness of Venting and Its Venues.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 8, no. 2 (2019): 39-48.

The pdf of the article gives specific page references. Shortlink: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-46P

Image by Emery Way via Flickr / Creative Commons

This article continues the points from Padilla-Cruz, Manuel. “On the Pragmatic and Conversational Features of Venting: A Reply to Thorson and Baker.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 8, no. 2 (2019): 21-30.

And the author ultimately replies to Juli Thorson & Christine Baker (2019) Venting as Epistemic Work, Social Epistemology, DOI: 10.1080/02691728.2018.1561762.

In their recent paper “Venting as epistemic work”, Juli Thorson and Christine Baker (2019: 5) depict venting as a face-to-face action. They deem it to differ from consciousness-raising in that the audience of a venting episode may already have their consciousness raised about some state of affairs. Its importance is claimed to reside in its emotional helpfulness: it enables venters to make “[…] sense of the tangled thoughts and feelings” resulting from the epistemic injustice originating it (Thorson and Baker 2019: 6).

Venting succeeds, the authors argue, when the audience understand testimonial and hermeneutical injustices, even if implicitly, and have “[…] the right kind of standpoint” (Thorson and Baker 2019: 4). This facilitates recognition of the venter’s credibility and may prompt the audience to initiate epistemic work by undertaking the appropriate remedial action to eradicate the epistemic injustice in question.

Such a remedial action may simply amount to a re-assessment of the venter’s epistemic personhood. However, venting may be risky and be likely to cause further epistemic damage, Thorson and Baker (2019: 5-6) aver, if someone vents to the wrong person, i.e., a person who has already undermined or is prone to undermine her epistemic personhood.

In a previous paper, I have addressed the pragmatic and conversational features that enable an adequate and precise characterisation of venting (Padilla Cruz 2019). For it to spark off epistemic work, venting must certainly meet certain requisites, which unveil its felicity conditions (Searle 1969). In terms of propositional content, venting must focus on a recent or past state of affairs. While its preparatory condition establishes that the venter must assess the state of affairs as negative or unfair to herself, its sincerity condition determines that the venter must genuinely believe the state of affairs to be detrimental to herself.

Finally, its essential condition sets that venting must be an attempt by the venter to have her audience recognise that the state of affairs in question has affected her negatively and given rise to a variety of feelings like indignation, anger, disappointment, anxiety, etc.

However, a series of issues still deserve consideration in order to gain a fuller understanding of why venting can result in epistemic work:

What does having “the right kind of standpoint” involve?
When or why may venting actually be dangerous?
Can the interactional locus of venting be limited to face-to-face interaction?

The first issue will be tackled from the angle of Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986/1995; Wilson and Sperber 2002, 2004), a cognitive pragmatic model that considers the linguistic properties of utterances and the mental operations that they trigger during comprehension. The second issue will be dealt with from an anthropological angle, some notions coming from psychology and the sociocultural or sociolinguistic branch of pragmatics. More specifically, part of the discussion will rely on concepts and viewpoints contributed by politeness theories, which centre on human verbal action, its conflict-generating or aggressive potential, and how this is softened or redressed. The last issue will be tackled from the perspective of digital discourse analysis, which looks into communicative behaviour through the new technologies and how these are exploited for various social practices and purposes. To conclude, in addition to summarising some of the views and ideas this reply presents, some suggestions for further research will be given.

On the Achievement of the Effects Associated With Venting

Thorson and Baker (2019) simply state that venting may result in epistemic work when the audience have “the right kind of standpoint” but they do not duly explain what they take such a standpoint to amount to. This is something that may be done from a cognitive angle by relying on a pragmatic framework concerned with what the human mind does when processing intentional stimuli like utterances: Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986/1995; Wilson and Sperber 2002, 2004). In particular, the effect attributed to venting may be accounted for on the basis of the relevance-theoretic notions of cognitive environment, mutual cognitive environment and metarepresentation.

Individuals represent reality mentally by constructing assumptions or forging beliefs, and store those that they regard as true. When a state of affairs actually is, or is likely to be, mentally represented, it becomes manifest to an individual, since he in effect entertains, or may entertain, (a) belief(s) about it. The whole set of beliefs about states of affairs that he entertains makes up his cognitive environment (Sperber and Wilson 1986/1995: 39). Although cognitive environments are highly idiosyncratic, those of two or more individuals may be similar in some respects, i.e. as regards their contents. If this happens, those individuals share a mutual cognitive environment (Sperber and Wilson 1986/1995: 42).

The information that individuals process and mentally represent interacts with already stored information in three ways: by lending support to and strengthening old information, by contradicting and subsequently eliminating it, or by yielding new information that can only be derived from the joint interaction of both old and recently processed information. New information coming from such an interaction amounts to contextual implications (Sperber and Wilson 1986/1995: 108).

On the other hand, utterances are public –i.e. perceptible, audible– representations of either other private representations –i.e. thoughts, beliefs– or other public ones –i.e. utterances produced by other individuals. Therefore, utterances are metarepresentations of the speaker’s own thoughts, but they can also be used to metarepresent the thoughts attributed to other individuals or the utterances that they (might) have produced.

In the former case, utterances are descriptive metarepresentations; in the latter, they are attributive metarepresentations, as long as there is an (easily) identifiable source of those thoughts or utterances. Furthermore, when utterances attributively metarepresent other individuals’ thoughts or words, speakers can also express their own attitudes towards the metarepresented content. The range of attitudes that they can express includes dissociative, endorsing or questioning ones. Expression of any of them renders utterances echoic metarepresentations (Wilson 1999; Noh 2000; Sperber 2000).

In heavy-load venting episodes where the audience know nothing about the complainable beforehand, the venter descriptively metarepresents her own thoughts and thus makes manifest to the audience assumptions amounting to new information. If the audience sense that the beliefs about the complainable that they forge are similar to those of the venter and experience similar feelings about it, there arises a cognitive mutuality or similarity between their respective cognitive environments, which is indispensable for those individuals to share a common or similar viewpoint. Such a cognitive mutuality will increase if the venter and her audience feel that they (can) further derive similar contextual implications from the beliefs manifest to themselves (Padilla Cruz 2010, 2012).

It is when such a cognitive mutuality or similarity between the venter and the audience’s respective cognitive environments is perceived that venting creates the necessary condition leading to epistemic work: the audience is acquainted with a situation, how someone experiencing it feels, its potential consequences and, eventually, how to fight it. When the audience is unaware of a problematic or unfair situation beforehand, this would be what must happen for them to have the right standpoint and be ready to undertake epistemic work.

In turn, when the audience already knows about an unfair situation and the venter is conscious of this, venting does not only metarepresent and make manifest the venter’s beliefs, but also attributively metarepresents beliefs already manifest to the audience. Similarity between the venter and the audience’s respective cognitive environments already exists, so these intersect in some respects: there is shared information or knowledge about what is vented.

Additionally, both the venter and her audience would realise that they do share (a) common negative attitude(s) towards the vented state of affairs. Hence, the venter may also simultaneously express, in addition to any of the negative attitudes characteristic of venting, a further one of endorsement with that of anger, frustration, wrath, etc., which she is certain that the audience also hold towards the state of affairs in question (Padilla Cruz 2007, 2008, 2010).

Consequently, when the audience are familiarised with what is vented, the venter may signal “the right kind of standpoint” by attributively metarepresenting beliefs already entertained by the audience, expressing her own negative feelings and simultaneously endorsing those of the audience. Such an endorsement is essential for venting to incite epistemic work because it indicates the alignment of the participants in the verbal episode as regards their viewpoints and feelings about the vented unjust state of affairs (Padilla Cruz 2010, 2012).

Why May Venting Be Dangerous?

Through heavy-load venting the venter achieves cognitive mutuality with her audience, whereas in maintenance venting such a mutuality already exists because the venter and her audience’s respective cognitive environments intersect in some respects. Venting, however, may be dangerous, and Thorson and Baker (2019) suggest that this may be the case when someone vents to the wrong person. If so, that person may inflict further epistemic damage.

The cognitive underpinnings of this undesired effect of venting are to be found mainly in an absence of cognitive mutuality, precisely. In other words, the venter and her audience’s cognitive environments not only do not intersect, but are different and perhaps (radically) opposed. To put it differently, the assumptions about the complainable which are manifest to the venter and her audience or the beliefs that these entertain do not match. As a result, the venter’s action becomes conflictive, in Leech’s (1983) terms: it questions, challenges or even attacks the audience’s viewpoint. Or, in Brown and Levinson’s (1987) view, her action amounts to an act threatening the audience’s face.

From an anthropological perspective, individuals are endowed with two quintessential attributes: rationality and face. The latter is the private and public self-image that every competent member of a sociocultural group claims for himself or herself (Goffman 1959, 1967). It is a rather vulnerable, two-sided personal attribute consisting of positive face, or the desire to be liked, appraised and admired, and feel that one’s actions are perceived as desirable or adequate by other people, and negative face, or the desire not to be questioned or challenged, and feel that one’s freedom of action is not curtailed by other people or their actions (Brown and Levinson 1987: 101, 129).

Threats to face stem from an individual’s own actions but also from other people’s actions, so that individuals may put at risk their own positive and negative face, but also those of other individuals at the same time.

Face is a complex and non-stable personal attribute liable to constant (re-)negotiation actions. Its more specific components may even be defined culturally (Arundale 1999). According to Spencer-Oatey (2000, 2008), face may even include what she labels quality face, which is linked to an individual’s skills, capacities, role, job, etc., and identity face, which is connected with the individual’s self-ascription to a sociocultural group, self-delineation, values, beliefs, ideology, viewpoints, etc.

When something is vented to a person with differing ideas or views, the venter is somehow challenging that person’s ideas or views, and thus challenging that person’s identity face. Or, following Brown and Levinson (1987), the venter threatens her audience’s positive face, as their viewpoints, ideas or beliefs about a state of affairs may be implicitly suggested not to be desirable, right or adequate. Venting, then, becomes a face-threatening act.

The reason why such challenge or threat arises is to be found in two psychological traits. On the one hand, confirmation bias or perseverance of belief (Klayman 1995). This is the human tendency to tenaciously adhere to beliefs obtained or conclusions drawn by one’s own means and for which enough supportive evidence is thought to exist. Confirmation bias makes individuals reluctant to abandon beliefs that they think are well rooted or well founded on evidence or reason.

As a consequence, individuals become or remain egocentric –the other psychological trait– and almost blindly trust their own set of beliefs without further questioning and do not admit other individuals’ perspectives. This may also explain why when something is vented to someone, venting may turn out dangerous: the hearer might not be open to differing views and ready to accept criticism, and would perceive the venter’s action as an attack. To it, he would react with some sort of counterattack intended to affirm and secure a safe epistemic position where his beliefs remain unquestioned.

On the Face-to-Face Nature of Venting

Paradoxically, even though the example of venting with which Thorson and Baker (2019) begin their discussion is an e-mail received by one of them, they contend that successful venting must be a face-to-face activity. In other words, venting must occur in situations characterised by the interlocutors’ physical co-presence, where there is immediacy, sequentiality and synchronicity in their verbal contributions (Biber 1988).

Such a claim is excessively restrictive and ignores other advantageous, more recent, less traditional, less text-based forms of communication where those four features of conversational interaction need not be indispensable: computer-mediated communication –e-mailing, instant messaging, blogs, discussion forums, message boards or websites[1]– mediated social networks –Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, to name but some– or the many applications for instant texting.

Venting needs not solely occur in face-to-face contact, but could also be successfully accomplished through any of these new technologies, which greatly facilitate visibility or exposure by reaching larger audiences (Signorelli 2017: 4). Indeed, venters could benefit from what these new technologies now offer in order not to simply achieve their goals, but also to increase the impact of their action and secure the desired reaction(s).

The advent and consolidation of new technologies like the computer decades ago, and the mobile phone or the smartphone more recently, gave rise to new forms of communication that rapidly spread and became new sites for a plethora of social practices (Androutsopoulos 2011: 281). As the technologies were developed and updated to satisfy further social, interactive needs, such forms of communication massively gained adept users and these introduced new conventions and ways of interacting: acronyms, lack of punctuation, new opening or closing formulae, innovative address forms, briefness in messages, etc. (Gains 1999; Wellman and Haythornthwaite 2002; White 2014).

As a result, communication was progressively deprived of its traditional defining features. Their absence may involve disadvantages and increase the probability of misunderstanding, above all when certain new conventions are unknown (Economidou-Kogetsidis 2011, 2016; Padilla Cruz, forthcoming), but the new technologies have attempted to overcome them by facilitating an incredibly rich variety of communicative resources that endow interaction through them with an additional characteristic: multimodality.

For instance, texting or messaging tools incorporate a wide range of emoticons enabling the expression of psychological states (Yus Ramos 2014) and offer the possibility of sending images, videos or voice notes. Similarly, e-mail servers, websites, blogs, discussion forums and message boards allow various formats for attachments and postings –textual and (audio)visual– which enable addition of photographs, drawings, videos, recordings, presentations, etc.

Moreover, discussion forums and message boards permit diverse participants to make their contributions or replies to a particular message, thus generating polylogues. All these resources are not only exploited by the users in order to make their informative intention[2] clearer or to secure correct understanding by helping other users visualise something, but also affect how users carry out their various social practices in the distinct venues that the new technologies offer. As a consequence, specific genres have been reshaped and redefined.

Each of the new technologies may be an excellent venue for venting and any communicative resource may be exploited for venting. Indeed, photographs, videos or drawings may become the first, initial contribution to a potential technology-mediated exchange that will actually unfold when (an)other participant(s) react(s) by means of a reply, further comments, postings, etc.

Subsequent reactions may give rise to polylogues, threads, (mass) forwarding, sharing, etc. Accordingly, it is possible to vent not just orally or textually through more traditional verbal means or written media, but also by displaying videos, posting comments, sharing pictures, etc. Venting, then, can also be multimodal and polylogal.

In this respect, Signorelli (2017) has shown how members of an online community subvert dominant discourses concerning obesity through their messages. Similarly, Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (2018) has also explained how a user of the new technologies took advantage of them in order to denounce the unfair, prejudiced and racist behaviour of a customer at a service encounter.

Smartphone in hand, the user recorded the customer’s offensive, denigrating and abusive words on site and posted the video, which was viewed and shared by several other users. This sparked off an impressive number of furious comments and reactions that resulted in the customer being prosecuted for misconduct, abuse and racism.

Conclusion

When the audience is not previously acquainted with the topic of venting, the venter metarepresents and makes manifest her own viewpoints, and voices her negative feelings with a view to achieving cognitive mutuality with her audience. If the audience is already aware of its topic, the venter metarepresents the thoughts and ideas that she attributes to them, and endorses their negative feelings.

Thus, the venter hints that cognitive mutuality between her and the audience actually exists. Cognitive mutuality increases when the audience feel that they can draw contextual implications that are similar to those that the venter can draw.

Cognitive mutuality is essential for achieving the pursued effects through venting, as it involves an alignment between the venter and her audience. If their cognitive environments are not mutual and do not intersect in any respect, venting may be perceived as a questioning of the audience’s ideas, ultimately threatening their identity. This is why venting may be dangerous and lead to further epistemic damage: the audience may attempt to secure their epistemic position by counterattacking.

Venting cannot be limited to traditional forms of social interaction such as face-to-face verbal communication or written communication. On the contrary, it may appear in more recent technology-mediated forms of communication, which potential venters can certainly take advantage of with a view to reaching larger audiences and magnifying its impact. The new and fascinating challenge that pragmatists, analysts of mediated discourse and communication, researchers in the new technologies and social epistemologists interested in venting now face is to examine and account for the dynamics of newer technology-based forms of venting and their contribution to fighting and eradicating injustices and inequalities.

Future research could look into the characteristics of and constraints on multimodal and polylogal venting, and ascertain their effectiveness. Scholars could additionally examine strategies and techniques deployed in order to increase the exposure of vented states of affairs and the (dis)advantages of specific media or venues. It could also be illuminating to investigate if venting can blend with or shade into other actions such as shaming.

These are just some avenues for future research which will surely shed much light onto this social and epistemic practice and its consequences, and widen our understanding thereof.

Contact details: mpadillacruz@us.es

References

Androutsopoulos, Jannis. “From Variation to Heteroglossia in the Study of Computer-mediated Discourse.” In Digital Discourse: Language in the Media, edited by Crispin Thurlow and Kristine Mroczek, 276-298. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Arundale, Robert. “An Alternative Model and Ideology of Communication for an Alternative to Politeness Theory.” Pragmatics 9 (1999): 119-153.

Biber, Douglas. Variation across Speech and Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson. Politeness. Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Economidou-Kogetsidis, María. “‘Please Answer Me as Soon as Possible’: Pragmatic Failure in Non-native Speakers’ E-mail Requests to Faculty.” Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011): 3193-3215.

Economidou-Kogetsidis, María. “Variation in Evaluations of the (Im)Politeness of Emails from L2 Learners and Perceptions of the Personality of their Senders.” Journal of Pragmatics 106 (2016): 1-16.

Gains, Jonathan. “Electronic Mail –A New Style of Communication or just a New Medium?: An Investigation into the Text Features of E-mail.” English for Specific Purposes 18, no. 1 (1999): 81-101.

Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, Pilar. “Smart Mobs, Cyber Public Shaming, and Social Justice”. Plenary talk delivered at the 11^th International Conference on (Im)Politeness. University of Valencia, Spain.

Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday, 1959.

Goffman, Erving. Interactional Ritual: Essays on Face to Face Behavior. New York: Garden City, 1967.

Klayman, Joshua. “Varieties of Confirmation Bias.” In Decision Making from a Cognitive Perspective. The Psychology of Learning and Motivation, edited by Jerome Busemeyer, Reid Hartie and Douglas L. Medin, 385-418. Vol. 32. New York: Academic Press, 1995.

Leech, Geoffrey. Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman, 1983

Noh, Eun-Ju. Metarepresentation. A Relevance-Theory Approach. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2000.

Padilla Cruz, Manuel. “Metarepresentations and Phatic Utterances: A Pragmatic Proposal about the Generation of Solidarity between Interlocutors.” In Current Trends in Pragmatics, edited by Piotr Cap and Joanna Nijakowska, 110-128. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007.

Padilla Cruz, Manuel. “Mindreading and the Communicative Functions of Phatic Utterances.” In Modern Developments in Linguistics and Language Teaching, edited by Tatiana Dubrovskaya and Yrina Kitayeya, 141-146. Moscow: MNEPU (Penza Branch), 2008.

Padilla Cruz, Manuel. “Metarepresentation and Indirect Complaints: A Relevance-Theoretic Approach.” In In the Mind and across Minds: A Relevance-theoretic Perspective on Communication and Translation, edited by Ewa Wałaszewska, Marta Kisielewska-Krysiuk and Agnieszka Piskorska, 167-187. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010.

Padilla Cruz, Manuel. “Metarepresentation, Attitudinal Utterances and Attitude Combination: A Relevance-theoretic Approach.” In Relevance Studies in Poland. Volume 4: Essays on Language and Communication, edited by Agnieszka Piskorska, 75-88. Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2012.

Padilla Cruz, Manuel. “Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis.” In The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics, edited by Carol A. Chapelle, 1-6. Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2015.

Padilla Cruz, Manuel. “On the Pragmatic and Conversational Features of Venting. Reply to Thorson and Baker.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 8, no. 2 (2019): 21-30.

Padilla Cruz, Manuel. “El malentendido.” Forthcoming.

Searle, John. Speech Acts. An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969.

Signorelli, Julia A. “Of Pumpkin Spice Lattes, Hamplanets, and Fatspeak: The Venting Genre as Support and Subversion on Reddit’s r/Fatpeoplestories.” MA diss., The University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Spencer-Oatey, Helen D. (ed.) Culturally Speaking. Managing Rapport through Talk across Cultures. London: Continuum, 2000.

Spencer-Oatey, Helen D. (ed.) Culturally Speaking: Culture, Communication and Politeness Theory. London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2008.

Sperber, Dan (ed.). Metarepresentations: A Multidisciplinary Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson. Relevance. Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986.

Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson. Relevance. Communication and Cognition. 2^nd edition. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995.

Thorson, Juli, and Christine Baker. “Venting as Epistemic Work.” Social Epistemology. A Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Policy (2019).

Wellman, Barry, and Caroline Haythornthwaite (eds.). The Internet in Everyday Life. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002.

White, Jonathan. “Standardisation of Reduced Forms in English in an Academic Community of Practice.” Pragmatics and Society 5, no. 1 (2014): 105-127.

Wilson, Deirdre. “Metarepresentation in Linguistic Communication.” UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 11 (1999): 127-161.

Wilson, Deirdre, and Dan Sperber. “Relevance Theory.” UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 14 (2002): 249-287.

Wilson, Deirdre, and Dan Sperber. “Relevance Theory.” In The Handbook of Pragmatics, edited by Larry Horn and Gregory Ward, 607-632. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.

Yus Ramos, Francisco. “Not All Emoticons Are Created Equal.” Linguagem em (Dis)curso 14, no. 3 (2014): 511-529.

[1] In technical terms, the difference between a discussion forum and a message board is that the former contains chains of comments on an issue or topic that may be read in block, while the latter organises contributions in thematic groups that can be selected by users.

[2] An individual’s informative intention is the intention to make manifest a specific set of assumptions, i.e. the intention to transmit a specific message (Sperber and Wilson 1986/1995).

Suppressed Subjectivity and Truncated Tradition, Jeff Kochan

SERRC — December 11, 2018 — 1 Comment

Author Information: Jeff Kochan, University of Konstanz, jwkochan@gmail.com.

Kochan, Jeff. “Suppressed Subjectivity and Truncated Tradition: A Reply to Pablo Schyfter.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 12 (2018): 15-21.

The pdf of the article gives specific page references. Shortlink: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-44s

Image by Brandon Warren via Flickr / Creative Commons

This article responds to: Schyfter, Pablo. “Inaccurate Ambitions and Missing Methodologies: Thoughts on Jeff Kochan and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 8 (2018): 8-14.

In his review of my book – Science as Social Existence: Heidegger and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge – Raphael Sassower objects that I do not address issues of market capitalism, democracy, and the ‘industrial-academic-military complex’ (Sassower 2018, 31). To this, I responded: ‘These are not what my book is about’ (Kochan 2018, 40).

In a more recent review, Pablo Schyfter tries to turn this response around, and use it against me. Turnabout is fair play, I agree. Rebuffing my friendly, constructive criticism of the Edinburgh School’s celebrated and also often maligned ‘Strong Programme’ in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK), Schyfter argues that I have failed to address what the Edinburgh School is actually about (Schyfter 2018, 9).

Suppressing the Subject

More specifically, Schyfter argues that I expect things from the Edinburgh School that they never intended to provide. For example, he takes what I call the ‘glass bulb’ model of subjectivity, characterises it as a ‘form of realism,’ and then argues that I have, in criticising the School’s lingering adherence to this model, failed to address their ‘actual intents’ (Schyfter 2018, 8, 9). According to Schyfter, the Edinburgh School did not have among its intentions the sorts of things I represent in the glass-bulb model – these are not, he says, what the School is about.

This claim is clear enough. Yet, at the end of his review, Schyfter then muddies the waters. Rather than rejecting the efficacy of the glass-bulb model, as he had earlier, he now tries ‘expanding’ on it, suggesting that the Strong Programme is better seen as a ‘working light bulb’: ‘It may employ a glass-bulb, but cannot be reduced to it’ (Schyfter 2018, 14).

So is the glass-bulb model a legitimate resource for understanding the Edinburgh School, or is it not? Schyfter’s confused analysis leaves things uncertain. In any case, I agree with him that the Edinburgh School’s complete range of concerns cannot be reduced to those specific concerns I try to capture in the glass-bulb model.

The glass-bulb model is a model of subjectivity, and subjectivity is a central topic of Science as Social Existence. It is remarkable, then, that the word ‘subject’ and its cognates never appear in Schyfter’s review (apart from in one quote from me). One may furthermore wonder why Schyfter characterises the glass-bulb model as a ‘form of realism.’ No doubt, these two topics – subjectivity and realism – are importantly connected, but they are not the same. Schyfter has mixed them up, and, in doing so, he has suppressed subjectivity as a topic of discussion.

Different Kinds of Realism

Schyfter argues that I am ‘unfair’ in criticising the Edinburgh School for failing to properly address the issue of realism, because, he claims, ‘[t]heir work was not about ontology’ (Schyfter 2018, 9). As evidence for my unfairness, he quotes my reference to ‘the problem of how one can know that the external world exists’ (Schyfter 2018, 9; cf. Kochan 2017, 37). But the problem of how we can know something is not an ontological problem, it is an epistemological one, a problem of knowledge. Schyfter has mixed things up again.

Two paragraphs later, Schyfter then admits that the Edinburgh School ‘did not entirely ignore ontology’ (Schyfter 2018, 9). I agree. In fact, as I demonstrate in Chapter One, the Edinburgh School was keen to ontologically ground the belief that the ‘external world’ exists. Why? Because they see this as a fundamental premise of science, including their own social science.

I criticise this commitment to external-world realism, because it generates the epistemological problem of how one can know that the external world exists. And this epistemological problem, in turn, is vulnerable to sceptical attack. If the world is ‘external,’ the question will arise: external to what? The answer is: to the subject who seeks to know it.

The glass-bulb model reflects this ontological schema. The subject is sealed inside the bulb; the world is external to the bulb. The epistemological problem then arises of how the subject penetrates the glass barrier, makes contact with – knows – the world. This problem is invariably vulnerable to sceptical attack. One can avoid the problem, and the attack, by fully jettisoning the glass-bulb model. Crucially, this is not a rejection of realism per se, but only of a particular form of realism, namely, external-world realism.

Schyfter argues that the Edinburgh School accepts a basic premise, ‘held implicitly by people as they live their lives, that the world with which they interact exists’ (Schyfter 2018, 9). I agree; I accept it too. Yet he continues: ‘Kochan chastises this form of realism because it does not “establish the existence of the external world”’ (Schyfter 2018, 9).

That is not quite right. I agree that people, as they live their lives, accept that the world exists. But this is not external-world realism, and it is the latter view that I oppose. I ‘chastise’ the Edinburgh School for attempting to defend the latter view, when all they need to defend is the former. The everyday realist belief that the world exists is not vulnerable to sceptical attack, because it does not presuppose the glass-bulb model of subjectivity.

On this point, then, my criticism of the Edinburgh School is both friendly and constructive. It assuages their worries about sceptical attack – which I carefully document in Chapter One – without requiring them to give up their realism. But the transaction entails that they abandon their lingering commitment to the glass-bulb model, including their belief in an ‘external’ world, and instead adopt a phenomenological model of the subject as being-in-the-world.

Failed Diversionary Tactics

It is important to note that the Edinburgh School does not reject scepticism outright. As long as the sceptic attacks absolutist knowledge of the external world, they are happy to go along. But once the sceptic argues that knowledge of the external world, as such, is impossible, they demur, for this threatens their realism. Instead, they combine realism with relativism. Yet, as I argue, as long as they also combine their relativism with the glass-bulb model, that is, as long as theirs is an external-world realism, they will remain vulnerable to sceptical attack.

Hence, I wrote that, in the context of their response to the external-world sceptic, the Edinburgh School’s distinction between absolute and relative knowledge ‘is somewhat beside the point’ (Kochan 2017, 48). In response, Schyfter criticises me for neglecting the importance of the Edinburgh School’s relativism (Schyfter 2018, 10). But I have done no such thing. In fact, I wholly endorse their relativism. I do suggest, however, that it be completely divorced from the troublesome vestiges of the glass-bulb model of subjectivity.

Schyfter uses the same tactic in response to this further claim of mine: ‘For the purposes of the present analysis, whether [conceptual] content is best explained in collectivist or individualist terms is beside the point’ (Kochan 2017, 79). For this, I am accused of failing to recognise the importance of the Edinburgh School’s commitment to a collectivist or social conception of knowledge (Schyfter 2018, 11).

The reader should not be deceived into thinking that the phrase ‘the present analysis’ refers to the book as a whole. In fact, it refers to that particular passage of Science as Social Existence wherein I discuss David Bloor’s claim that the subject can make ‘genuine reference to an external reality’ (Kochan 2017, 79; cf. Bloor 2001, 149). Bloor’s statement relies on the glass-bulb model. Whether the subjectivity in the bulb is construed in individualist terms or in collectivist terms, the troubles caused by the model will remain.

Hence, I cannot reasonably be charged with ignoring the importance of social knowledge for the Edinburgh School. Indeed, the previous but one sentence to the sentence on which Schyfter rests his case reads: ‘This sociological theory of the normativity and objectivity of conceptual content is a central pillar of SSK’ (Kochan 2017, 79). It is a central pillar of Science as Social Existence as well.

Existential Grounds for Scientific Experience

Let me shift now to Heidegger. Like previous critics of Heidegger, Schyfter is unhappy with Heidegger’s concept of the ‘mathematical projection of nature.’ Although I offer an extended defense and development of this concept, Schyfter nevertheless insists that it does ‘not offer a clear explanation of what occurs in the lived world of scientific work’ (Schyfter 2018, 11).

For Heidegger, ‘projection’ structures the subject’s understanding at an existential level. It thus serves as a condition of possibility for both practical and theoretical experience. Within the scope of this projection, practical understanding may ‘change over’ to theoretical understanding. This change-over in experience occurs when a subject holds back from immersed, practical involvement with things, and instead comes to experience those things at a distance, as observed objects to which propositional statements may then be referred.

The kind of existential projection specific to modern science, Heidegger called ‘mathematical.’ Within this mathematical projection, scientific understanding may likewise change over from practical immersion in a work-world (e.g., at a lab bench) to a theoretical, propositionally structured conception of that same world (e.g., in a lab report).

What critics like Schyfter fail to recognise is that the mathematical projection explicitly envelopes ‘the lived world of scientific work’ and tries to explain it (necessarily but not sufficiently) in terms of the existential conditions structuring that experience. This is different from – but compatible with – an ethnographic description of scientific life, which need not attend to the subjective structures that enable that life.

When such inattention is elevated to a methodological virtue, however, scientific subjectivity will be excluded from analysis. As we will see in a moment, this exclusion is manifest, on the sociology side, in the rejection of the Edinburgh School’s core principle of underdetermination.

In the mid-1930s, Heidegger expanded on his existential conception of science, introducing the term mathēsis in a discussion of the Scientific Revolution. Mathēsis has two features: metaphysical projection; and work experiences. These are reciprocally related, always occurring together in scientific activity. I view this as a reciprocal relation between the empirical and the metaphysical, between the practical and the theoretical, a reciprocal relation enabled, in necessary part, by the existential conditions of scientific subjectivity.

Schyfter criticises my claim that, for Heidegger, the Scientific Revolution was not about a sudden interest in facts, measurement, or experiment, where no such interest had previously existed. For him, this is ‘excessively broad,’ ‘does not reflect the workings of scientific practice,’ and is ‘belittling of empirical study’ (Schyfter 2018, 12). This might be true if Heidegger had offered a theory-centred account of science. But he did not. Heidegger argued that what was decisive in the Scientific Revolution was, as I put it, ‘not that facts, experiments, calculation and measurement are deployed, but how and to what end they are deployed’ (Kochan 2017, 233).

According to Heidegger, in the 17^th c. the reciprocal relation between metaphysical projection and work experience was mathematicised. As the projection became more narrowly specified – i.e., axiomatised – the manner in which things were experienced and worked with also became narrower. In turn, the more accustomed subjects became to experiencing and working with things within this mathematical frame, the more resolutely mathematical the projection became. Mathēsis is a kind of positive feedback loop at the existential level.

Giving Heidegger Empirical Feet

This is all very abstract. That is why I suggested that ‘[a]dditional material from the history of science will allow us to develop and refine Heidegger’s account of modern science in a way which he did not’ (Kochan 2017, 235). This empirical refinement and development takes up almost all of Chapters 5 and 6, wherein I consider: studies of diagnostic method by Renaissance physician-professors at the University of Padua, up until their appointment of Galileo in 1591; the influence of artisanal and mercantile culture on the development of early-modern scientific methods, with a focus on metallurgy; and the dispute between Robert Boyle and Francis Line in the mid-17^th c. over the experimentally based explanation of suction.

As Paolo Palladino recognises in his review of Science as Social Existence, this last empirical case study offers a different account of events than was given by Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer in their classic 1985 book Leviathan and the Air-Pump, which influentially applied Edinburgh School methods to the history of science (Palladino 2018, 42). I demonstrate that Heidegger’s account is compatible with this sociological account, and that it also offers different concepts leading to a new interpretation.

Finally, at the end of Chapter 6, I demonstrate the compatibility of Heidegger’s account of modern science with Bloor’s concept of ‘social imagery,’ not just further developing and refining Heidegger’s account of modern science, but also helping to more precisely define the scope of application of Bloor’s valuable methodological concept. Perhaps this does not amount to very much in the big picture, but it is surely more than a mere ‘semantic reformulation of Heidegger’s ideas,’ as Schyfter suggests (Schyfter 2018, 13).

Given all of this, I am left a bit baffled by Schyfter’s claims that I ‘belittle’ empirical methods, that I ‘do[] not present any analysis of SSK methodologies,’ and that I am guilty of ‘a general disregard for scientific practice’ (Schyfter 2018, 12, 11).

Saving an Edinburgh School Method

Let me pursue the point with another example. A key methodological claim of the Edinburgh School is that scientific theory is underdetermined by empirical data. In order to properly explain theory, one must recognise that empirical observation is an interpretative act, necessarily (but not sufficiently) guided by social norms.

I discuss this in Chapter 3, in the context of Bloor’s and Bruno Latour’s debate over another empirical case study from the history of science, the contradictory interpretations given by Robert Millikan and Felix Ehrenhaft of the natural phenomena we now call ‘electrons.’

According to Bloor, because Millikan and Ehrenhaft both observed the same natural phenomena, the divergence between their respective claims – that electrons do and do not exist – must be explained by reference to something more than those phenomena. This ‘something more’ is the divergence in the respective social conditions guiding Millikan and Ehrenhaft’s interpretations of the data (Kochan 2017, 124-5; see also Kochan 2010, 130-33). Electron theory is underdetermined by the raw data of experience. Social phenomena, or ‘social imagery,’ must also play a role in any explanation of how the controversy was settled.

Latour rejects underdetermination as ‘absurd’ (Kochan 2017, 126). This is part of his more general dismissal of the Edinburgh School, based on his exploitation of vulnerabilities in their lingering adherence to the glass-bulb model of subjectivity. I suggest that the Edinburgh School, by fully replacing the glass-bulb model with Heidegger’s model of the subject as being-in-the-world, can deflect Latour’s challenge, thus saving underdetermination as a methodological tool.

This would also allow the Edinburgh School to preserve subjectivity as a methodological resource for sociological explanation. Like Heidegger’s metaphysical projection, the Edinburgh School’s social imagery plays a necessary (but not a sufficient) role in guiding the subject’s interpretation of natural phenomena.

The ‘Tradition’ of SSK – Open or Closed?

Earlier, I mentioned the curious fact that Schyfter never uses the word ‘subject’ or its cognates. It is also curious that he neglects my discussion of the Bloor-Latour debate and never mentions underdetermination. In Chapter 7 of Science as Social Existence, I argue that Latour, in his attack on the Edinburgh School, seeks to suppress subjectivity as a topic for sociological analysis (Kochan 2017, 353-54, and, for methodological implications, 379-80; see also Kochan 2015).

More recently, in my response to Sassower, I noted the ongoing neglect of the history of disciplinary contestation within the field of science studies (Kochan 2018, 40). I believe that the present exchange with Schyfter nicely exemplifies that internal contestation, and I thank him for helping me to more fully demonstrate the point.

Let me tally up. Schyfter is silent on the topic of subjectivity. He is silent on the Bloor-Latour debate. He is silent on the methodological importance of underdetermination. And he tries to divert attention from his silence with specious accusations that, in Science as Social Existence, I belittle empirical research, that I disregard scientific practice, that I fail to recognise the importance of social accounts of knowledge, and that I generally do not take seriously Edinburgh School methodology.

Schyfter is eager to exclude me from what he calls the ‘tradition’ of SSK (Schyfter 2018, 13). He seems to view tradition as a cleanly bounded and internally cohesive set of ideas and doings. By contrast, in Science as Social Existence, I treat tradition as a historically fluid range of intersubjectively sustained existential possibilities, some inevitably vying against others for a place of cultural prominence (Kochan 2017, 156, 204f, 223, 370f). Within this ambiguously bounded and inherently fricative picture, I can count Schyfter as a member of my tradition.

Acknowledgement

My thanks to David Bloor and Martin Kusch for sharing with me their thoughts on Schyfter’s review. The views expressed here are my own.

Contact details: jwkochan@gmail.com

References

Bloor, David (2001). ‘What Is a Social Construct?’ Facta Philosophica 3: 141-56.

Kochan, Jeff (2018). ‘On the Sociology of Subjectivity: A Reply to Raphael Sassower.’ Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7(5): 39-41. https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-3Xm

Kochan, Jeff (2017). Science as Social Existence: Heidegger and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers). http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0129

Kochan, Jeff (2015). ‘Putting a Spin on Circulating Reference, or How to Rediscover the Scientific Subject.’ Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 49:103-107. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2014.10.004

Kochan, Jeff (2010). ‘Contrastive Explanation and the “Strong Programme” in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge.’ Social Studies of Science 40(1): 127-44. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312709104780

Palladino, Paolo (2018). ‘Heidegger Today: On Jeff Kochan’s Science and Social Existence.’ Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7(8): 41-46.

Sassower, Raphael (2018). ‘Heidegger and the Sociologists: A Forced Marriage?’ Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7(5): 30-32.

Schyfter, Pablo (2018). ‘Inaccurate Ambitions and Missing Methodologies: Thoughts on Jeff Kochan and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge.’ Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7(8): 8-14.

Shapin, Steven and Simon Schaffer (1985). Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press).

The Very Being of a Conceptual Scheme, Adam Riggio

SERRC — November 27, 2018 — 1 Comment

Author Information: Adam Riggio, Royal Crown College, serrc.digital@gmail.com.

Riggio, Adam. “The Very Being of a Conceptual Scheme: Disciplinary and Conceptual Critiques.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 11 (2018): 53-59.

The pdf of the article gives specific page references. Shortlink: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-446

Image by Grant Tarrant via Flickr / Creative Commons

Jeff Kochan’s book on what the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK) can learn from Heideggerian existential philosophy is fascinating and frustrating in equal measure, and for the same reason. My own review consists of two parts. First, I will describe the fascinating frustration of Kochan’s project, then explore some of the limitations that a straightforward adaptation of Heidegger’s ideas to the conceptual plane of SSK encounters.

Kochan’s work fascinates because he puts two complex sub-disciplines of the humanities – Heidegger studies and SSK – in a constructive dialogue. Kochan isolates seemingly intractable conceptual problems at the heart of SSK’s foundational texts, then carefully analyzes concepts and epistemic frameworks from the writings of Martin Heidegger to find solutions to those problems. This open-minded approach to problem solving remains sadly rare in academic culture. Whether or not you think Kochan’s analyses and solutions are accurate or best, I think we can all agree that such a trans-disciplinary philosophical project is worthwhile and valuable.

Yet Kochan’s work also frustrates because of how vulnerable this makes him to academic attacks. This is ultimately a problem of style on Kochan’s part. He is explicit in making the ideas of Martin Heidegger himself central to his critical analysis of SSK; this leaves him vulnerable to criticisms like those of my colleague Raphael Sassower earlier in SERRC’s symposium. Essentially, the criticism amounted to “Why bother?”.

Presuming the Boundarylessness of Disciplines

Any attempt to apply the concepts and discoveries of one tradition to the problems of another faces a problem that is difficult for any writer to overcome. What one tradition takes to be a reasonable assumption, another tradition may take to be a foundational matter of inquiry.

In Kochan’s case, he takes the founders of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge to have saddled their tradition with a dangerous omission. They take for granted that the material world of everyday life does exist as we experience it, and that therefore the relationship of the subject to the world need not be a matter of inquiry.

Yet the foundational thinkers of SSK, David Bloor and Harry Collins, did not consider such an ontological inquiry worth pursuing. It would have kept them from exploring the questions, subject matters, and concepts that were their priorities.

Kochan’s book is written under the premise that SSK’s indifference to seeking a guarantee for the material reality of the world is a problematic omission. But a premise itself can be called into question, a call that on its own would remove its status as a premise. Premises are, after all, the unquestioned beginnings of any inquiry; they are the conditions of an inquiry’s validity.

To question a premise is likewise to question the validity of any inquiry flowing from that premise. So when I question whether the inquiries constituting the core of SSK as a discipline of social and epistemological theory require demonstrating the existence of reality somehow external to the subjective, I have made a decision about what the inquiries of SSK are for.

Such a decision is fundamentally practical. In creating what we now consider the research discipline of SSK, Bloor, Collins, and their fellow travellers developed goals and processes of thinking for their fundamental inquiries. They set the boundaries of what questions and concepts mattered to the pursuit of those goals and processes. And while they may not have explicitly said so, setting those conceptual boundaries simultaneously implies that what does not matter to those goals and processes is irrelevant to the discipline itself.

So if you pursue those other questions, you may be doing something interesting and valuable. But there is no guarantee that your premises, concepts, inquiries, and discoveries will be directly relevant to someone else’s discipline. To return this general point to the more direct focus of my book review, there is no guarantee that the premises, concepts, inquiries, and discoveries of a thinker working in one of the Heideggerian sub-disciplines will be directly relevant to someone working in SSK.

The boundaries of all research disciplines work this way. Over my decade of work as a professional-level philosopher, this has typically been the most controversial and provocative point I make in any discussion that puts disciplines and traditions into dialogue. It disrupts a premise that thinkers across many disciplines of philosophy and those related to them: that we are all searching for the one truth.

Limits For Universality

Many thinkers share the premise that the ultimate aim of philosophical work is the discovery and creation of universal truth. Ironically, I do not consider that Heidegger himself shares such a premise. I hope that Kochan will be okay with how I repurpose some of Heidegger’s own concepts to argue that his own attempt to blend Heideggerian and SSK concepts and inquiries becomes something of a philosophical dead end.

Start with these two of Heidegger’s concepts: enframing, and poiesis. Both of these arise in Heidegger’s inquiries on the nature of science and technology, but we should not restrict their relevance to the disciplines of philosophy who alone focus on science and technology.

Remember that Heidegger understands the institutions and cultures of science, as well as attitudes around the use of technology, to be expressions of a much broader framework of thinking. That framework includes all ways in which human action and thinking engages with existence, contributes to the ongoing constitution of being.

Heidegger’s purpose for philosophical thinking is understanding the continuing process of movement and coming to be still, or development and decay (Of Generation and Corruption?). What framework or schema we develop for this most profound task of understanding guides how our own thoughts and actions influence how and what the universe becomes.

Enframing, therefore, is such a conceptual framework of understanding existence, which guides us in our action and thinking to contribute to shaping existence. The framework that Heidegger calls enframing, is a way of thinking that understands all of existence as a potential resource for our own use. You do not understand how to experience or make sense of what exists and what you encounter as having their own way of existence from which you can learn. Understanding existence in a framework of enframing, you wrench and distort all that you encounter to your own purposes.

Thought’s Radical Openness

Poiesis is Heidegger’s alternative to the destructive, self-centred nature of conceptual schema of enframing. A conceptual framework built according to the principles of poiesis approaches all encounters as opportunities for the creative development of thought.

Whenever you encounter a way of thinking or living different from your own, you investigate and explore it, seeking to understand that mode of existence on its own terms. You examine its powers, capacities, how it forms relationships through encounters of its own, and the dynamics of how those relationships change itself and others.

That Heidegger considers conceptual frameworks of poiesis the alternative to the depressingly destructive schema of enframing, reveals how the philosophy which Kochan advocates as a productive partner for SSK, actually argues against Kochan’s own most fundamental premises. This is because poiesis fundamentally denies the universality of any one framework of thinking, action, and existence.

The conception of philosophy as seeking a single universal truth would explicitly oppose how you would engage different research disciplines as poiesis. Like Heidegger’s enframing, yoking all inquiries and ways of thinking into a single trajectory wrenches all those modes of thinking out of their own character of becoming and adapts them to the goal of another.

More dangerous even than this, bending all thinking to the pursuit of a single goal which you yourself already holds presumes that your and only your framework of thinking is the proper trajectory. In presuming that SSK is obligated to include an account of how we know our experiences of social and scientific worlds are genuine interactions with a shared materiality, Kochan guides his own philosophical mission in Science as Social Existence using a conceptual framework of enframing.

For Heidegger, This Openness Nonetheless Remains Closed

Conceptual frameworks that are fundamentally of poiesis appear to be a profound antidote to humanity’s current crisis of technology, science, and ecology. People who think this way would consider all differences they encounter as learning opportunities, and come to respect the origins of those encounters as opportunities to make your own thinking more versatile and open.

Heidegger, however, takes this line of thinking in a regressive direction. As Heidegger understands poiesis, the best way to think in accordance with existence itself is to accept, explore, and adapt your thinking to all the varieties of existence that you encounter. You deny that any single way of existence or understanding is fundamentally universal, and instead create many schemes of understanding what exists to suit the singular character of each encounter.

This approach to the encounter with the different and the alien is still being developed today at the forefront of politically progressive activist philosophers. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, for example, is a philosopher doing the best ongoing work with such an attitude, in my own knowledge. However, I am not sure if Kochan, Heidegger scholars, or contemporary SSK researchers would be aware of her work, as she exists outside both their disciplines.

She is characterized academically as working in Indigenous Studies, a label that, despite the good intentions of its inclusion in the contemporary Canadian university system, also tends to marginalize such work for more mainstream professors. So a genuine potential for one set of disciplines to learn from another is stalled by the presumption of too much difference from so-called ‘real’ philosophy. Betasamosake Simpson would often be dismissed in more conservative disciplines as being ‘merely’ post-colonial, or ‘merely’ ethnic studies.

Instead of following the openness of a conceptual framework that supposedly encourages a more open mind, Heidegger conceives of poiesis as a passive and meditative way of existence. This is because he understands a person’s encounters in existence as essentially an event that happens to the person, in which that person is acted upon, instead of engaging in mutual action. Openness to the singular logics and processes unique to an encountered other, for Heidegger, means a willingness to accept as necessary the happenstance of where we contingently fall into existence.

What Do We Do With Our Disciplines?

More profound problems lurk in the nature of our existence’s happenstance, which guides our best framework for understanding existence, poiesis. The Heideggerian concept of poiesis guides arguments of his infamous Black Notebooks. This was the political expression of Heidegger’s approach to philosophy as passively adapting your thinking and existence to the circumstances of your contingent existence as a person.

The existence of the migrant, no matter whether colonizer or refugee, is an act of violence against existence, because moving imposes your own logic and desires on alien existence. You disrupt your tradition out of a demand for something different. It disconnects you from the long inheritance of a relationship with the more durable existence of your land and your culture.

These stable beings constitute the place where you contingently fall. To fall contingently into existence is birth, so the land and culture of your birth constitute the ‘There’ in the complete assemblage of a person’s ‘Being.’ So the Black Notebooks continue Heidegger’s explication of his concept of Dasein, an inquiry central to all his work. They are no exception.

The language that expresses these concepts in the Black Notebooks is horrifying in its contempt for cultures whose global mobility or dispersion breaks them from continuity with a single territory of land at a pace faster than many millennia. It confounds my own everyday political orientations. In its most straightforward terms, it is a pro-Indigenous and anti-colonial, but also anti-Semitic in equal intensity.

One way to interpret Kochan’s program in Science as Social Existence is as an advocate to merge the disciplines of SSK and Heidegger Studies, blending their central premises and conceptual frameworks to create a hybrid discipline. But if we think disciplinarily, we may be forced to account for the many other problems in a body of work that have nothing to do with the problems we want to investigate. The example of how the Black Notebooks express the political implications of Heidegger’s concept of enframing, poiesis, and Dasein is only the most recent of many equally massive issues.

No Disciplines, Instead Concepts

Jeff Kochan’s Science and Social Existence is subtitled Heidegger and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge. In both this title and throughout the book, he attempts a very valuable experiment to make a philosophical hybrid of two sets of concepts, inquiries, and methods of thinking. On one hand, we have the social epistemological frameworks and principles in the discipline, Sociology of Scientific Knowledge. And on one hand, we have the conceptions of grounded subjectivity found in the works of Martin Heidegger, and elaborated in the discipline based on interpreting those works.

However, there are two problems with this approach. The first problem is that he misunderstands the reason for his inquiry: sociologists of scientific knowledge need a conceptual account of how we know that the external world exists to be studied.

The way Kochan understands how to solve the external world is brilliantly insightful in how philosophically challenging and creative it is: develop for SSK a concept of subjectivity that pays no mind to any premises of an ontological separation of subject and world at all. He finds such a concept in the works of Martin Heidegger, and explores its epistemological aspects as enframing and poiesis.

Laying our justification problem aside, this other problem helps explain what made it arise in the first place. Kochan’s focus is on the disciplines of SSK and Heidegger interpretation. Yet his inquiry is conceptual, more purely philosophical: adapting a concept of subjectivity that unifies subject and world without needing to make a problem of their separation, to the practice of sociology focussing on the production of scientific knowledge.

His focus is disciplinary rather than conceptual, talking about what Heidegger and his interpreters have said about Heidegger’s own concepts, and the sociologists whose research explicitly continues the general program of the originators of the SSK approach to social science. Such a disciplinary focus unfortunately implies that the related problems of those thinkers themselves complicate our use in thinking of the concepts themselves.

So using in sociological practice any concept that does what Kochan wants Heidegger’s enframing, poiesis, and Dasein to do, ends up dragging along the problematic and dangerous elements and interpretations in Heidegger’s entire corpus and tradition.

Because he was thinking of the discipline of SSK instead of the techniques and concepts alone, he presumes that the actual practitioners of SSK working in university departments need an alternative conception of subjectivity beyond modernist dualism. They themselves do not need such a concept because they are too busy asking different questions.

Fortunately, practice, concepts, and discipline are only contingently linked. Instead of using concepts from different disciplines to improve an established practice, you can develop new concepts to guide the practice of a new discipline.

The fundamental problem with Kochan’s book is that he has misinterpreted its scope, and aimed without the ambition that his thinking actually already requires. He thought he was writing a book about how to bring two seemingly unrelated traditions together, to solve an important problem in one.

Yet Kochan was actually writing a book that had the potential to start an entirely different tradition of sociological theory and practice. Instead of writing about Martin Heidegger and David Bloor, he could have written something with the potential to leave him mentioned in the same breath as such epochal thinkers. He could have become epochal himself.

How about next time, Jeff?

Contact details: serrc.digital@gmail.com

References

Betasamosake Simpson, Leanne. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

Heidegger, Martin. Ponderings II-VI: Black Notebooks 1931-1938. Translated by Richard Rojcewicz. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2016.

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

Kochan, Jeff. “On the Sociology of Subjectivity: A Reply to Raphael Sassower.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7 no. 5 (2018): 39-41.

Sassower, Raphael. “Heidegger and the Sociologists: A Forced Marriage?” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7 no. 5 (2018): 30-32.

Schyfter, Pablo. “Inaccurate Ambitions and Missing Methodologies: Thoughts on Jeff Kochan and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 8 (2018): 8-14.

Between Forteana and Skepticism, Matthew R. X. Dentith

SERRC — November 22, 2018 — 1 Comment

Author Information: Matthew R. X. Dentith, Institute for Research in the Humanities, University of Bucharest, m.dentith@episto.org.

Dentith, Matthew R. X. “Between Forteana and Skepticism: A Review of Bernard Wills’ Believing Weird Things.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 11 (2018): 48-52.

The pdf of the article gives specific page references. Shortlink: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-43y

Image by David Grant via Flickr / Creative Commons

Sometimes, when it is hard to review a book, it is tempting to turn in some kind of personal reflection, one demonstrates why the reviewer felt disconnected from the text they were reviewing. This review of Bernard N. Wills Believing Weird Things – which I received three months ago, and have spent quite a bit of time thinking about in the interim – is just such a review-cum-reflection, because I am not sure what this book is about, nor who its intended audience is.

According to the blurb on the back Believing Weird Things is a response to Michael Shermer’s Why People Believe Weird Things (Henry Holt and Company, 1997). Shermer’s book is one I know all too well, having read and reread it when I started work on my PhD. At the time the book was less than ten years old, and Shermer and his cohort of Skeptics (spelt with a ‘K’ to denote that particular brand of sceptical thought popular among (largely) non-philosophers in the U.S.) were considered to be the first and final word on the rationality (more properly, the supposed irrationality) of belief in conspiracy theories.

Given I was working on a dissertation on the topic, getting to grips with the arguments against belief in such theories seemed crucial, especially given my long and sustained interest in the what you might call the contra-philosophy of Skepticism, the work of Charles Fort.

Times for the Fortean

Fort (who Wills mentions in passing) was a cantankerous collector and publisher of strange and inconvenient phenomena. His Book of the Damned (Boni and Liveright, 1919) is an early 20th Century litany of things which seemed to fall outside the systemic study of the world. From rains of frogs, to cities floating in the sky, Fort presented the strange and the wonderful, often without comment. When he did dare to theorise about the phenomena he cataloged, he often contradicted his previous theories in favour of new ones. Scholars of Fort think his lack of a system was quite deliberate: Fort’s damned data was meant to be immune to scientific study.

Fort was hardly a known figure in his day, but his work has gained fans and adherents, who call themselves Forteans and engage in the study of Forteana. Forteans collect and share damned data, from haunted physics laboratories, to falls of angel hair. Often they theorise about what might cause these phenomena, but they also often don’t dispute other interpretations of the same ‘damned data.’

John Keel, one of the U.S.’s most famous Forteans (and who, if he did not invent the term ‘Men in Black’ at least popularised their existence), had a multitude of theories about the origin of UFOs and monsters in the backwoods of the U.S., which he liberally sprinkled throughout his works. If you challenged Keel on what you thought was an inconsistency of thought he would brush it off (or get angry at the suggestion he was meant to consistent in the first place).

I was a fan of Forteana without being a Fortean: I fail the Fortean test of tolerating competing hypotheses, preferring to stipulate terms whilst encouraging others to join my side of the debate. But I love reading Forteana (it is a great source of examples for the social epistemologist), and thinking about alternative interpretations. So, whilst I do not think UAP (unexpected aerial phenomena – the new term for UFO) are creatures from another dimension, I do like thinking about the assumptions which drive such theories.

Note here that I say ‘theories’ quite deliberately: any student of Forteana will quickly become aware that modern Forteans (contra Fort himself) are typically very systematic about their beliefs. It is just that often the Fortean is happy to be a systemic pluralist, happily accepting competing or complimentary systems as equally possible.

Weird and Weirder

Which brings me back to Believing Weird Things. The first section concerns beliefs people like Shermer might find weird but Wills argues are reasonable in the context under which they developed. Wills’ interest here is wide, taking in astrology, fairies, and why he is not a Rastafarian. Along the way he contextualises those supposedly weird beliefs and shows how, at certain times or in certain places, they were the product of a systemic study of the world.

Wills points out that a fault of Skepticism is a lack of appreciation for history: often what we now consider rational was once flimflam (plate tectonics), and what was systemic and rational (astrology) is today’s quackery. As Wills writes:

The Ancients do not seem to me to be thinking badly so much as thinking in an alien context and under different assumptions that are too basic to admit evaluation in the ordinary empirical sense (which is not to say they admit of no evaluation whatsoever). Further, there are many things in Aristotle and the Hebrew Bible which strike me as true even though the question of ‘testing’ them scientifically and ‘skeptically’ is pretty much meaningless. In short, the weird beliefs I study are at minimum intelligible, sometimes plausible and occasionally true. [4]

Indeed, the very idea which underpins Shermer’s account, ‘magical thinking,’ seems to fail the skeptical test: why, like Shermer, would you think it is some hardwired function rather than culturally situated? But more importantly, how is magical thinking any different from any other kind of thinking?

This last point is important because, as others have argued (including myself) many beliefs people think are problematic are, when looked at in context with other beliefs, either not particularly problematic, or no more problematic than the beliefs we assume are produced rationally. The Psychology of Religion back in the early 20th Century is a good example of this: when psychologists worried about religious belief started looking at the similarities in belief formation between the religious and the non-religious, they started to find the same kind of ‘errors’ in irreligious people as well.

In the same respect, the work in social psychology on belief in conspiracy theories seems to be suffering the same kind of problem today: it’s not clear that conspiracy theorists are any less (or more) rational than the rest of us. Rather, often what marks out the difference in belief are the different assumptions about how the world is, or how it works. Indeed, as Wills writes:

Many weird ideas are only weird from a certain assumed perspective. This is important because this assumed perspective is often one of epistemic and social privilege. We tend to associate weird ideas with weird people we look down upon from some place of superior social status. [10]

The first section of Believing Weird Things is, then, possibly the best defence of a kind of Fortean philosophy one could hope for. Yet that is also an unfair judgement, because thinking of Believing Weird Things as a Fortean text is just my imposition: Fort is mentioned exactly once, and only in a footnote. I am only calling this a tentatively Fortean text because I am not sure who the book’s audience is. Ostensibly – at least according to the blurb – it is meant to be a direct reply to Shermer’s Why People Believe Weird Things. But if it is, then it is twenty years late: Why People Believe Weird Things was published in 1997.

Not just that, but whilst Believing Weird Things deals with a set of interesting issues Shermer did not cover (yet ought to have), almost everything which makes up the reply to Why People Believe Weird Things is to be found in the Introduction alone. Now, I’d happily set the Introduction as a reading in a Critical Thinking class or elementary Epistemology class. However, I could not see much use in setting the book as a whole.

What’s Normal Anyway?

Which brings us to the second half of Believing Weird Things. Having set out why some weird beliefs are not that weird when thought about in context, Wills sets out his reasons for thinking that beliefs which aren’t – in some sense – considered weird ought to be. The choice of topics here is interesting, covering Islamophobia, white privilege, violence and the proper attitude towards tolerance and toleration in our polities.

But it invites the question (again) of who his intended audience is meant to be? For example, I also think Islamophobia, racism, and violence are deeply weird, and it worries me that some people still think they are sensible responses. But if Wills is setting out to persuade the other half of the debate, the racists, the bigots, and the fans of violence, then I do not think he will have much luck, as his discussions never seem to get much further than “Here are my reckons!”

And some of those reckons really need more arguments in favour of them.

For example, Wills brings out the old canard that religious beliefs and scientific beliefs are one and the same (presented as ‘religious faith’ and ‘scientific faith’). Not just that, but, in chapter 6, he talks about the things ‘discovered’ by religion. These are presented as being en par with discoveries in the sciences. Yet aren’t the things discovered by religion (‘humans beings must suffer before they learn. … existence is suffering’ [48]) really the ‘discoveries’ of, say, philosophers working in a religious system? And aren’t many of these discoveries just stipulations, or religious edicts?

This issue is compounded by Wills specification that the process of discovery for religious faith is hermeneutics: the interpretation of religious texts. But that invites even more questions: if you think the gods are responsible for both the world and certain texts in the world you could imagine hermeneutic inquiry to be somehow equivalent to scientific inquiry, but if you are either doubtful of the gods, or doubtful about the integrity of the gods’ prophets, then there is much room to doubt there is much of a connection at all between ‘faith’ in science and faith in scripture.

Another example: in chapter 8, Wills states:

Flat-Earthers are one thing but Birthers, say, are quite another: some ideas do not come from a good place and are not just absurd but pernicious. [67]

Now, there is an argument to be had about the merits (or lack thereof) of the Flat Earth theory and the thesis Barack Obama was not born in the U.S. Some might even claim that the Flat Earth theory is worse, given that belief might entail thinking a lot of very disparate institutions, located globally, are in on a massive cover-up. The idea Barack Obama is secretly Kenyan has little effect on those of us outside the U.S. electoral system.

None of this is to say there aren’t decent arguments to be had about these topics. It is, instead, to say that often these positions are stipulated. As such, the audience for Believing Weird Things seems to be people who agree with Wills, rather than an attempt by Wills to change hearts and minds.

How to Engage With Weird Beliefs

Which is not to say that the second half of the book lacks merit; it just lacks meat. The chapters on Islamophobia (chapter 8) and racism (chapter 9) are good: the contextualisation of both Islamophobia and the nature of conflicts in the Middle East are well expressed. But they are not particularly novel (especially if you read the work of left-wing commentators). But even if the chapters are agreeable to someone of a left-wing persuasion, all too often the chapters just end: the chapter on violence (chapter 10), for example, has no clear conclusion other than that violence is bad.

Similarly confused is the chapter on tolerance (chapter 11). But the worst offender is the chapter on the death of Conservatism (chapter 14). This could have been an interesting argument about the present state of today’s politics. But the chapter ends abruptly, and with it, the book. There is no conclusion, no tying together of threads. There’s hardly even any mention of Shermer or skepticism in the second half of Believing Weird Things.

Which brings us back to the question: who is this book for? If the book were just the first half it could be seen as both a reply to Shermer and a hesitant stab at a Fortean philosophy. But the second half of the book comes across more as the author’s rumination on some pertinent social issues of the day, and none of that content seems to advance far beyond ‘Here are my thoughts…’

Which, unfortunately, is also the character of this review: in trying to work out who the book is for I find my thoughts as inconclusive as the text itself. None of this is to say that Believing Weird Things is a bad or terrible book. Rather, it is just a collection of the author’s ruminations. So, unless you happen to be a fan of Wills, there is little to this text which substantially advances the debate over belief in anything.

Contact details: m.dentith@episto.org

References

Fort, Charles. The Book of the Damned, Boni and Liveright, 1919

Shermer, Michael. Why People Believe Weird Things, Henry Holt and Company, 1997

Wills, Bernard N. Believing Weird Things, Minkowski Institute Press, 2018

The Turn of Postscript Narratives, Priyadarshini Vajaisri

SERRC — October 9, 2018 — Leave a comment

Author Information: Priyadarshini Vijaisri, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, vijaisri@csds.in.

Vijaisri, Priyadarshini. “The Turn of Postscript Narratives.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 10. (2018): 22-27.

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

Image by Ian D. Keating via Flickr / Creative Commons

Recalcitrant narratives are ever relegated to the status of dispensable appendages of dominant ideological and epistemic regimes. Vaditya’s paper captures the turn of such postscript narratives’ epistemic concerns that are gaining critical significance in African, Latin American and Asian countries, emerging from intellectual and sociopolitical movements within and outside the Western context.

The driving force being the inadequacy of Eurocentric philosophical and epistemology to engage with contra Western cosmologies and the critical recognition that epistemology is no pure science but mediated by ideologies, shaped by historical factors and undergird by institutionalized epistemic suppression and entrenched in power. Such turn fundamentally foregrounds fidelity to ‘fact’ and universe of study rather than acquiesce to epistemic mimesis and has immense potential to bring in critical reflexivity into newer disciplines like exclusion and discrimination created precisely due to the failure of traditional disciplines to deal with issues concerning the marginalized.

Prior to making some very preliminary points to think about future directions in exploration of these issues would require recognizing problems dominant epistemic practices pose, especially in thinking about marginality in the Indian context. Proposed here is a promising mode of enquiry to disentangle the over-determined idea of the oppressed, i.e., the aesthetic frame.

An Essence of Oppression

It is increasingly recognized that the predominance of western epistemology based on dualism, certitude, and mechanistic conception of the universe is culmination of negation of contra episteme, worldviews and technologies. Its methodological and ideological epistemic filters occlude range of ideas, experiences and processes from its purview that can barely pass through scientific rationalist sieve or appear within a specific form; power should appear in the political, reason must be untainted by emotion, fact must correspond to the principle of bivalence, and true belief could be certified as knowledge if it arrived in a particular mode, any non-rational detour could consign it to false knowledge – deformed episteme, methodless technologies, illogical mythical, irrational sensorial etc.

Thus, the simmering discontent in non-western societies, especially its marginalized collectivities, against a soliloquy of the western rational self which entitles itself as arbitration of true knowledge; and whose provenance of authority is expanded and reinforced by its apologists outside itself by virtue of institutionalization of epistemic authority in the image of the western ‘form’. Such that the West is the transcendental form, and replication being impossibility, the rest are at best ‘copies’ or duplicitous entities whose trajectory is deeply bound to the center.

For the diverse ideologies, grounded in positivism and enlightenment philosophy, the non-Western subjects (especially the marginalized amongst them) are the feral boys, who have accidentally strayed into civilization and ought step into universal history to reclaim humanness. Such modernist discourses riddled with a priori conceptions have impoverished the oppressed and resulted in mystification and entrenched impertinence towards other cognitive modes has caused damage both in representations of and self-representations by the non-west/marginalized on the validity and relevance of their forms of knowing, and technologies.

The crisis in Marxist politics and ideological framework, despite its brief revolutionary spells and significant role in generating radical consciousness in few regions, is too evident despite its entrenchment in the academia. While it has rendered native categories and non-western world as regressive deviance the crisis is reflected in politics too, with exit of oppressed from the Marxist bands, paradoxically due to its own convoluted caste bias and negative valuation of their worldviews.

Inversely, the Subaltern subject is a peculiar species whose appearance and consciousness in finitude nature of appearances/traces is at best mediated, its very essence or ephemeral ontology simply lost in the many layers of obfuscating consciousness; an ontology of the disembodied subject. Thus, the Freirean pedagogic vision was in India at best an inadvertent idyllic where the epistemic base for liberation couldn’t take off, given the many ‘lacks’ in the subject/cognitive agent and distorted worldview and materiality. It is against this history of many interstices in cartographies of repression that B. Sousas Santos’s subversive stance resonates and foregrounds break from the epistemic center as a necessary condition for emancipation.

Diversity and Homogeneity

Thus, standpoint perspectives’ critique of positivism marks a fundamental shift making legible/accountable cognitive agency and diversification and revitalization of discursive space. Positivist epistemology’s conception of scientism and universalism (unadulterated by particularities) is consequence of homogenization, which allows for transposition of singular particularity (of the West) as the universal. Scientific method by implication is premised on the presupposition that truths and representations are products of cognitive process free from cultural and ideological bias.

Thus, the conception of the knower as outside the world of enquiry by implication reinforces a positivist common sense, that errors/distortions are solely a consequence of method, absolving the epistemic agency (complicity/accountability) of the knower, precluding recognition of the nature of relation between epistemology and worldview. While, epistemology originates in the need for exposition and justification of ontological and metaphysical truth claims. As such it creates discursive space both within particular philosophical tradition and outside it for debate and justification of its claims and thus epistemology is a collective dialogical process and open to critique and revision.

Thus, within Indian philosophical tradition deeply antithetical ideas (eg., multiplicity of standpoints on truth or ideas of self/selves/non-self) could be disputed/conceded as a consequence of epistemic plurality and debate (as exemplified in the theory of sources of knowledge).

Worldviews/structures are founded on cultural substratum with their own rendering of the ontology of ideas/mental artifacts- i.e., the cognitive, unconscious/conscious and experiential states by which axiomatic truths are arrived at from the seamless flows between intuition, reason, emotion etc. Such ontology is complexly interwoven with the distinctive conceptions of self and effect the ways in which the knower is defined in relation to the objects of knowledge or the phenomenal world. Application of a mechanistic worldview or historical materialism is incapable of engaging with entirely different universalisms opposed to it.

Also, while dominant codified systems offer coherent theories in grasping the essence of ideas, understanding oral tradition is beset with problems over form and validity of knowledge. In speech traditions codified text (of art, technology or knowledge practices) where knowledge and skills are transmitted orally by collectivities textualization marks a crisis in a culture. Text at best is instrumental for purposes of legible affinity or entitlements rarely a referent for practice or validation of epistemic claims.[1]. Failure to appreciate such epistemic practices have resulted in repression of technologies and cognitive systems of the marginalized as invalid forms of knowledge.

Genuinely Overcoming Domination

This double bind of falsified traditional representations and positivist accounts have led to creative explosion of other representative forms that enable more critical introspection as in literature, fiction and the autobiographical. Dominant ‘disciplinary matrix’ overlooks ‘crisis’ as a dissoluble diversion. Such politics of knowledge fetters the marginalized in a double bind; tradition has its own pernicious facets while modernity, (its antidote to internal repression and non-recognition), and its evocation serve as a justification of the credibility of such episteme and politics.

Struggles of emancipation find legitimacy within a specific mode, i.e., through eliciting proof of their abomination-the prototypical ideal of the oppressed, and irreverence to oppressive tradition. This entails a conscious repression of histories and traditional forms of cultural critique, grounded in a logic and worldview that is in contradiction with modern values. It is within this contradictory pull of modern/negation of tradition and pathos and pre-modern/positive self-affirmation that the consciousness of the oppressed wrestles given the distortion of these spaces with the privileging of textual and singular dominant historical and cultural representations. Abandoning such discourses constricts routes to retrace the lost epistemic/metaphysical ground and its non-redundancy via folk cultures and further obstructs the resources for a grounded critical subject.

It would be erroneous to assume that the domain of the marginalized is distorted/disjointed part of the whole, incapable of unfolding universals or coherent systems. Claims to validity of such cognitive systems and technologies rest on its firm anchoring within the whole. By nature of inherence constituent parts of a whole possess the potential to reveal the whole. Thus, the margins is a site of immense potentiality, as signifier of a space that has no fixed or categorical relation with any single institutionalized or hegemonic discourse. Its potentiality rests in refractory power and thereby offers pathways to retrace the basic organizing principles of Indic systems of knowledge.

The evidence for such epistemology is offered in the perceptible folk/marginalized non-androcentric worldview. Such universe as a play of elements, the distinctive ontology of the elemental body, transfigures the conception of and interrelatedness between spirit and matter, non-human entities, spatiality and the many planes of existence and states of consciousness and their relevance for relating to realities beyond conscious mind, the value attributed to work untethered with profit, meaning of and relation with land, difference/hierarchies, ethics, the cyclical nature of time, etc.

This metaphysical substratum mediated by and enlivened through enactments, myths, rituals, customs as part of coherent system is formative of Indic universalism and it is this shared ground that is expressive of the inherence of truth claims of the marginalized discourses. Undeniably, presentation and disputations against dominance, violations and counterclaims manifest within this form and experience. The material artifact, a product of collective labor, itself becomes a universal metaphor for positive self-affirmation, and re-imagination of the universe, radically centering collective self in cosmology. The modern conceptions of labor, materiality and individualism substitute such aesthetic with a mechanistic and atomistic worldview.

The Validity of Validity

The hegemonic deontic texts and archives with a purposive language enunciate a desired ideal and a ‘fact’ isolating it from the diffuse cognitive/cultural system and can barely provide a clue to the aesthetic. What then are the sources of validity of such folk beliefs and experience? This question strikes at the core of any epistemology founded in orality; ‘uncodified’ technologies, cognitive systems and experience and problematizes the naive idea of the detached knower and the distant object of knowledge. Such an enquiry necessitates understanding the general folk epistemic orientation and the identifiable connections between the folk and the classical to grasp the continuities and disjunctions.

The folk is the proximate arche and constitutes the substratum of a culture. Pervasion of orality signifies its primal quality in virtue of which it transcends the definitive value attributed to it in philosophical and epistemic practices. Thus, its validity lies as much as its locus within the general knowledge tradition as its inherence to ontology and synchrony with the essence of its cosmology. Given the current limitations some very basic links can be identified between folk modes of knowing and ‘formal’ epistemology.

Word or testimony/sabda is recognized, though not uncontested, among most schools of Indian epistemology as a valid source of knowledge, and has two broad conceptualizations; one in terms of the self-evident, infalliable truth of the Vedic scriptures and the other the truth claim of statements of reliable person accompanied by necessary conditions (absence of deceit and specific form of presentation). Uniqueness of orality is evidenced by the creative combination of various skills of narration, argumentation and presentation/artistic representation in highly stylized form involving a sensibility and intimacy different from Mimamsa hermeneutics and Nyaya logic.

Another shared epistemic resource is analogy/upamana with divergent conceptualization as source of knowledge and subject to intricate analysis. Generally it is a specific type of cognition generating new knowledge through similarities or resemblances. For folk cultures analogy possess a truth bearing quality, as a proof of an idea, wise dictum of deontic value that shed light in times of moral dilemma, or exposition of a metaphysical truth.

Analogical reasoning for the folk has special significance as a didactic and literary device to elicit truth, in establishing common ground, in grounding disputes and subversion and allows for seamless flows of ideas and experiences. Off the repertoire of the reliable knowers analogical and logical reasoning is a skill cultivated optimally.

Thus, self-evident truth of such beliefs are referents of ‘facts’ or of factive collective experience whose meaning and value is tied to and codified in custom, mythologies, collective rites, festivities, everyday life and tales people tell about themselves and others. Thus, orality has a very distinctive metaphysical and epistemic value in this context.

It thus cannot be strictly translated as orality for in subsumption of other epistemic forms it radically attains a quality of universalism. Sustained by specialized communities (genealogists/bards) as testifiers/transmitters of such primal truths untethered by external justification, verdicality is intrinsic in its efficacious quality to produce culturally desired goals and reconfiguration of the world. It gains legitimacy from collectivities that participate in its recreation with the knowers.

Subversive Aesthetic

Such being the overarching frame of reference subversion and conflict are presented in specific cultural forms that resonate with the spirit of the whole. Such an aesthetic mode (continuous with the theory of emotions/rasa vada) is grounded in a positive valuation of emotions and sense experience different from western aesthetics/formalism. Emotions in folk aesthetic have a positive value as catalytic states for realization of higher states of being and grasping of truth, of the heroic, and refinement. If any it is the marginalized who have sustained the robust tradition of aesthetic as it is in this form that their representations of their self and the world are anchored.

Ironically, Nietzsche would have found an unlikely protagonist in the ‘Pariah’! Inevitably, any systematic exploration of aesthetic, and its cultural trajectories would mandate a return to its basic connotation as relating to sense(s)/perception, for discerning root categories, foundational to epistemology and metaphysics. It then becomes possible to trace the broad trajectory of primacy accorded to reason and its affinity with sense of sight in western thought (from the Platonic allegories, idea of panoptican vision, concept of gaze) to its deployment as a mechanism of power, (as in racial differentiation, color being secondary property of vision) and technologies of surveillance. Any uncritical application of such concepts, originating within a particular historical context, to non-Western contexts obscures other realities, mechanisms of power and worldviews founded on contrary conceptualization of the senses.

Thus, sustainability of critical ‘pluriversal’ epistemology demands an investment in comparative philosophy/epistemology. It would be a fallacy to assume that engaging with the oppressed is little more than working on the fringes, with the residue of dominant knowledge systems. These vital sites allow for looking at the whole from the peripheries in enriching ways and paradoxically as one of the solid anchors by which to retrace the credence and rootedness of culture specific epistemological traditions in its critique of traditional forms of oppression.

To maximize the progress made thus far entails identifying newer sources of knowledge, exploring knowledge practices, generating root concepts that can enable coherent understanding of the many universalisms in comparativist perspective. Fundamentally, such quests are about restitution of lost ground of the oppressed, undoing the immeasurable damage of epistemic stigmatization through demystification of hegemonic myths and repositioning of and meaningful dialogue across alternative ethical cosmologies.

Contact details: vijaisri@csds.in

References

Friere, Paulo. The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Herder and Herder, 1970.

Obeyesekere, Gananatha. The Awakened Ones: Phenomenology of Visionary Experience. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.

Matilal, B. K., A. Chakrabarti. Knowing from Words: Western and Indian Philosophical Analysis of Understanding and Testimony Dordrecht: Springer Science Business Media, 1994.

Sarukkai, Sundar. What is Science? Delhi: National Book Trust India, 2012.

de Sousa Santos, Baoventura. Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide. London: Routledge, 2014.

Vaditya, Venkatesh. “Social Domination and Epistemic Marginalisation: Towards Methodology of the Oppressed,” Social Epistemology, DOI: 10.1080/02691728.2018.1444111, 2018.

[1] Observations are based on folk/marginalized communities of Southern India wherein knowledge is hereditarily transmitted. For example, communities have cultural mechanisms for transmission of particular types of knowledge within each community, for example among the leather workers, potters, ironsmiths, masons, sculptors, stone cutters, artists, toddy tapers, rope makers, weavers, washermen, healers, acrobats, jugglers, nomads, and tribals etc.

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.

Archives For epistemology

What Is “Genuine” African Philosophy? Anke Graness

The Turn of Postscript Narratives, Priyadarshini Vajaisri

Recent Posts

Archives

Follow Blog via Email

The Fundamental Question of Social Epistemology

SERRC Tweets

Archives For epistemology

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Recent Posts

Archives

Follow Blog via Email

The Fundamental Question of Social Epistemology

SERRC Tweets