The threat to reason
Dan Hind, author of ‘The Threat to Reason’ (Verso 2007), sees two primary threats to Reason – on the one hand governments and corporations seeking to monopolise Science for their own selfish, covert purposes; and, on the other, religious faith, postmodernism and New Age quackery seeking to undermine Enlightenment Reason either from disillusionment or revelation, this second threat overt, self-advertising like a side-show.
Reason posits that the world is orderly – effect always following cause, knowledge accumulating from theories, experience, and logic. Religious ideas undermine this philosophy because they posit other forms of knowledge – divine revelation and oracles for example. Postmodernism undermines by rejecting the idea of Enlightenment Reason altogether – reflecting disillusionment, claiming instead that all knowledge is socially constructed.
Even so, Hind has some sympathy for postmodernism – a justified, but ultimately mistaken, reaction to the horrors of the 20th century; with Enlightenment Reason spruiking Freedom Truth and Justice but, all the while, letting loose global warfare, totalitarianism, imperialism, concentration camps and atomic bombs.
Postmodernists argue that Enlightenment Reason is simply a self-serving rationale for the white, western, male power structure; thereby denying the universal validity of Enlightenment Reason, claiming instead that Reason is relative to specific societies at specific times and places, that knowledge is always and everywhere socially constructed. Such claims are widely supported in some circles; but, according to Hind, not really much of a threat.
Anti-Realism
True, the postmoderns themselves are not much of a threat – in any event their writings are mostly unintelligible. But the philosophy underpinning postmodernism – anti-realism – is a considerable threat. Anti-realism, the idea that facts, beliefs and explanations are mind-dependent, is extensive in many fields and disciplines. Such philosophies are ancient; not postmodern, not even modern, originating as responses to Ancient Greek scepticism. And many anti-realist philosophies are also philosophies of science. The following schematic illustrates this nicely.
Realists believe that the world exists independently of their conceptions of it. Realism, therefore, has two primary dimensions: existence and independence. Not surprisingly anti-realists attack along both dimensions. The schematic shows the main forms of anti-realism and their locations vis-à-vis the existence and independence axes.
These two axes divide the central part of the schematic into four quadrants:
- vertical axis: mind-independent/dependent, and
- Horizontal axis: existence/non-existence.
So, for example, instrumentalism as a scientific method holds that its subject matter is mind-independent but not real; instrumental facts and entities are just convenient elements of some theory or other incorporated only because they work. Conversely, social-constructivism holds that its subject matter is real, but not mind-independent. So, whilst Hind might dismiss postmodernism as largely irrelevant, he cannot so easily dismiss social constructivism and relativism. These ideas present a serious challenge to realist philosophies of knowledge: truth, justification, and explanation.
Nowhere is this better illustrated than in Raymond Bradley's paper "How to Lose Your Grip on Reality" which forcefully shows the anti-realist underpinnings of many of the founders of quantum mechanics. Bradley describes anti-realism as a virus of the mind, a condition which led some great physicists into extremely poor metaphysics. He says:
It is no secret that anti-realism – the denial that there is a way the world really is as distinct from our perceptions or conceptions of it, or even the denial that a real world exists at all – is rampant in the social sciences and among those thinkers who call themselves "Postmodernists". What is less well-known is that anti-realism is also endemic among quantum physicists. Needless to say, the literati seize upon quantum antirealism as experimental confirmation of the views. I propose to stop this myth-making in its tracks.
In this paper I don't hide the fact that I regard anti-realism as a virulent form of philosophical error – a veritable "virus of the mind" as Richard Dawkins would put it. My aim is to explain how and why it is that so many quantum theorists have become infected by it.
Boghossian characterises the classical view of knowledge as follows:
- Objectivism about Facts: the world which we seek to understand and know about is largely independent of us and our beliefs about it. Even if thinking beings had never existed, the world would still have had many of the properties that it currently has.
- Objectivism about Justification: facts of the form - information E justifies belief B - are society independent facts. In particular, whether or not some item of information justifies a given belief doesn't depend on the contingent needs and interests of any community.
- Objectivism about Rational Explanation: under the appropriate circumstances, our exposure to the evidence alone is capable of explaining why we believe what we believe.
('Fear of Knowledge', Boghossian, P. OUP 2006, page 22)
Constructivism and relativism challenge each of these objectivisms claiming instead that society socially-constructs facts, justifications and explanations in ways that reflect its contingent needs and interests.
Social Construction of facts
Boghossian claims that fact constructionism is the most common form of social construction and yet in some ways the most strange. The world was around for billions of years before humans. Clearly, there were facts about the world long before humans, but only humans can 'socially construct' facts. How can this be? First, realist philosophers readily acknowledge that society does create many facts; facts which depend on and would not exist without society; facts such as money, religion, and job titles. But there seem to be many other facts: mountains, rivers, and birds, for example, which exist independently of humans.
Not so, say the fact-constructionists. Human consciousness and language imposes structure on the world. Before humans the world existed as a formless, primeval substance. When people started to describe the world they created facts about the world just as the cookie cutter cuts shapes from the dough. So, ancient Egyptians did not die of tuberculosis because doctors did not discover that disease until much later. And, according to Foucault, there were no homosexuals until society invented the term to describe certain sorts of activities.
But, according to Boghossian, the description dependence of facts gets its force from another far less radical view: the social relativity of facts. Every society is free to describe the world in any way it sees fit; often these descriptions will be different from one another, but this fact in no way entails that the way society describes the world thereby causes the world to depend on these descriptions.
But, say fact-constructionists, society can describe the world one way and get certain outcomes, then describe it another way and get different outcomes. The facts in the world therefore do depend on society’s descriptions. For example, consider a simple scene with three basic objects in it: A, B, C. that is one way of describing it - so it has three objects. But if I now allow that any combination of two objects is also an object, the new conceptual scheme produces a world with six objects in it: A, B, C, AB, AC, BC. And if I allow combinations of three objects to be objects, then I can have up to seven objects in the world: A, B, C, AB, AC, BC, and ABC. So how many objects are there in the world? Well that clearly depends on how society chooses to describe them.
But this involves a slight of hand. Each description involving different numbers of objects is perfectly consistent with the way things are in the world; the above account equivocates on the word 'object', when we refer to three objects and then to six and seven objects, we have at the same time craftily shifted the sense of word 'object' we are using from basic objects to non-basic objects. Boghossian argues that this description is simply the same as saying that eight persons are at a party or, equivalently, four couples are there.
More damaging, however, both these fact constructionist approaches - cookie cutter and conceptual scheme - require some basic independently existing facts to even get started: primordial dough on the one hand and basic objects on the other. This clearly undermines the idea that society constructs all facts.
But a third approach exists which avoids these problems: the language game theory of fact constructionism. This simply states that no mind-independent way that things are exists; things are the way they are relative to the language game used to talk about these things. Language games simply reflect our contingent needs and interests. We are like characters in a work of fiction. What we say in the novel about the past, the future, the present or about one another or anything may or may not be true, but truth in the novel is relative only to the novel. No independent way that things are exists.
The above approach - language game relativism - asserts that no absolute truths exist. But this renders the assertion incoherent. If it asserts an absolute truth, then it contradicts itself, and if it asserts a relative truth then it has the same status as a claim in a work of fiction - we can safely choose to ignore it.
Social Construction of Justifications
Constructivism depends on relativism and relativism depends, in turn, on scepticism. Constructivism is ultimately a sceptical doctrine. Scepticism asserts that all attempts to justify knowledge must end in an infinite regress or circular reasoning. Either way, we can never justify knowledge. Societies may however choose to halt the regress at some convenient stopping point. They will define convenience in terms of their contingent needs and interests. But ultimately all such stopping points are arbitrary, so halting the regress still does not provide a justification. It does however, set up the conditions whereby different societies can set their cut-offs at different points according to their contingent needs and interests. And we have, therefore, no objective means of saying one society's cut-off is better than another. The sceptics demand for justification, therefore, creates the basis for relativism and social constructivism.
According to the sceptic, when attempting to justify our beliefs, we have three equally bad options: infinite regress, arbitrary assumptions or circular reasoning. Philosophers call this unhappy set of options Agrippa’s Trilemma or the problem of the criterion. On each outcome, the sceptic can claim that we lack justification for our alleged knowledge.
What has this got to do with relativism? In an illuminating series of papers, Howard Sankey (Witchcraft, Relativism and the Problem of the Criterion, Erkenn 2010) shows how this Trilemma underlies ‘epistemic relativism’
The regress may only be avoided by reasoning in a circle or by unjustified adoption of a norm. Neither option yields justification. Hence, the decision to adopt a given epistemic norm is not one that may be made on a rational basis. Nor is it possible for any particular epistemic norm to receive greater justification than any other. For all norms are equally lacking in justification. Instead of being a rationally based decision, the adoption of a norm is rationally unjustified. It may rest upon an irrational leap of faith, a subjective personal commitment or an arbitrary convention. But it cannot be supported by appeal to rational grounds which show one set of epistemic norms to be better justified than an alternative set of such norms.
If no norm is better justified than any other, all norms have equal standing. Since it is not possible to provide an ultimate grounding for any set of norms, the only possible form of justification is justification on the basis of a set of operative norms. Thus, the norms operative within a belief system provide justification within that belief system. Those who adopt a different belief system are justified by the norms operative within their belief system. There is no sense in which the norms operative in one belief system possess a higher degree of justification than the norms employed in another such system. Justification is an entirely internal matter of compliance with norms that are operative within a belief system.
The relativist is now in a position to claim that rational justification is relative to operative norms within a belief system. It is possible for there to be alternative belief systems with alternative sets of epistemic norms. As a result, what one is rationally justified in believing depends upon the belief system that one accepts and the epistemic norms which are operative within that belief system. There is no sense in which it may be said that any belief system possesses a greater degree of rationality than any other (Sankey, pg 5).
Sankey draws on Roderick Chisholm’s response to the sceptic.
Chisholm’s response to the sceptic
Chisholm refers to the problem of the criterion as the diallelus ‘the wheel’ or the vicious circle. He expresses it this way:
To know whether things really are as they seem to be, we must have a procedure for distinguishing appearances that are true from appearances that are false. But to know whether our procedure is a good procedure, we have to know whether it really succeeds in distinguishing appearances that are true from appearances that are false. And we cannot know whether it does really succeed unless we already know which appearances are true and which ones are false. And so we are caught in a circle.
(Chisholm, R. Ch. 5 ‘The Problem of the Criterion’, ‘Ways of Knowing’ pg 62)
He illustrates the problem by reference to sorting a pile of apples into the good and bad. This sorting is simple to do for we have standard criteria to help us make the decision. But what about beliefs; How do we sort the good from the bad? We are now on the wheel; we have shifted the problem from sorting beliefs to sorting methods for sorting beliefs. We could, of course, follow the scientific method, and this might give us good beliefs, but how do we know? And if we know, why did we need a method in the first place?
Chisholm breaks the issues down into two questions:
A) What do we know? What is the extent of our knowledge?
B) How are we to decide whether we know? What are the criteria?
Everything hinges on the starting point A or B. Assume a hypothetical person H. If H starts from A, from what H knows; or how far H’s knowledge extends, then H has some hope of answering B: ‘how does H know?’. If however H starts from B instead, by having say a good set of directions then H might hope to answer A. But the sceptic argues that H cannot answer B until H has answered A, but H cannot answer A, unless H has answered B. No possible way to decide in any particular case exists.
Suppose H needs to sort apples into good and bad heaps. Can H build the heaps without a decision rule? Or can H formulate a decision rule without the heaps? According to the sceptic, the answer is no in each case; the problem of justified belief is ultimately circular.
But two other possibilities exist: start from A or start from B. Chisholm refers to those who start from A as particularists and those who start from B as methodists. According to Chisholm, empiricists are methodists. They begin with broad and completely arbitrary generalisations about experiential criteria. As a consistent empiricist, what can you know?
All you can know is that there are and have been certain sensations. You cannot know whether there is any you who experiences those sensations--much less whether any other people exist who experience sensations. And I think, if [Hume] had been consistent in his empiricism, he would also have said you cannot really be sure whether there have been any sensations in the past; you can know only that certain sensations exist here and now (ibid pg 68).
Chisholm prefers particularism.
There are many things that quite obviously, we do know to be true. If I report to you the things I now see and hear and feel - or, if you prefer, the things I now think I see and hear and feel - the chances are that my report will be correct; I will be telling you something I know. And so, too, if you report the things that you think you now see and hear and feel. To be sure, there are hallucinations and illusions. People often think they see or hear or feel things that in fact they do not see or hear or feel. But from this fact - that our senses do sometimes deceive us - it hardly follows that your senses and mine are deceiving you and me right now. One may say similar things about what we remember (ibid pg 69).
Having the apples before us, we can look them over and formulate criteria of goodness. This procedure is the answer to the puzzle of the diallelus:
We have then a kind of answer to the puzzle about the diallelus. We start with particular cases of knowledge and then from those we generalize and formulate criteria of goodness - criteria telling us what it is for a belief to be epistemologically respectable.
Chisholm, a foudationalist, defeats the sceptic by accepting the immediate evidence of the senses as knowledge not requiring any further justification despite the possibility of dreams, hallucinations or evil Cartesian demons. Thus accepted, we can weigh the evidence in particular cases to formulate and justify rational decision criteria.
The particularist response to relativism
But how does this resolve the issues with relativism. Relativists argue that societies justify their beliefs by reference to prevailing ‘epistemic norms’, and they justify epistemic norms in terms of their contingent needs and interests. And since according to the relativist, not even the possibility of cross-cultural metanorms exists, we cannot judge cultures by any absolute, non-question begging standards.
However, irrespective of whether the non-comparable epistemic norm is science, revelation, or the oracle, each norm still has to perform against its expected outcomes in particular cases. And how society's epistemic norms perform against expectations in particular cases will therefore be of great interest to it. Consequently, it might be reasonable to subject each norm to a test of its performance against expected outcomes in particular cases. If any norm were to emerge superior in any such contest, then clearly some epistemic norms would be superior to others and we would therefore have an absolute yardstick - a meta norm - which spans the cultural divide. The relativist case evaporates.
Sankey writes:
It is entirely possible for the members of a community to justify their beliefs in terms of a set of norms that they possess. But for such norms to provide the beliefs with genuine epistemic support, the norms must themselves convey epistemic warrant. Where an epistemic norm fails to be a reliable indicator of truth, compliance with the norm fails to provide rational support for beliefs which comply with the norm.
(Sankey, ‘Witchcraft …” pg 13)
Sankey argues that ‘robust common sense’ underpins the above approach.
Boghossian's View
Boghossian takes issue with epistemic pluralism:
There are many different, genuinely alternative epistemic systems, but no facts by virtue of which one of these systems is more correct than any of the others.
(‘Fear of Knowledge’, page 90)
Boghossian goes on to say
Every epistemic system will have a possible alternative that contradicts it. Take any such contradictory pair. If one of them is deemed to say something false, the other will have to be deemed as saying something true. Under these circumstances, it’s hard to see how it could be right to say that there are no facts by virtue of which one epistemic system could be more correct than another.
(ibid. page 91)
This seems to support the view expressed by Sankey that relative performance against stated predictions in particular cases is the best way to evaluate epistemic systems. Clearly such a procedure judges an epistemic system by its own lights, since its users often base crucial decisions on such performance and outcomes, therefore, will be of great interest to the users. Here, then, is an absolute measure of epistemic systems where the relativist claims that none can exist.
Social Construction of Explanations
Further, social constructivism attacks rational explanation - the third of Boghossian's objectivisms. The attack takes the following form:
It is never possible to explain why we believe what we believe solely on the basis of our exposure to the relevant evidence: our contingent needs and interests must also be involved.
(‘Fear of Knowledge’, page 118)
This argument is usually described as an underdetermination thesis wherein the evidence is never enough to determine the explanation. For example, any number of polynomials will fit the same set of data points; the data points themselves cannot determine which of the polynomials to use.
Boghossian posits two forms of ‘explanation-constructivism’: strong constructivism where our interests always decide the issue and evidence never enters the picture, and weak constructivism where evidence enters the picture at least some of the time.
Strong explanation-constructivism contradicts itself: anyone asserting that prejudice underpins all beliefs must accept that prejudice underpins their own beliefs as well. Hence, we have no reason to accept such an idea.
But, according to Boghossian, weak explanation-constructivism seems a little more plausible. For example, Kuhn argued that ‘paradigms’ are the source of all explanations: paradigms are frameworks of accepted propositions about some part of knowledge. Scientific revolutions sweep away old paradigms and replace them with new ones. Kuhn believes that all knowledge is relative to some paradigm or other and that paradigms are incommensurable. This incommensurability stems from the fact that adherents of different paradigms ask different questions, speak different languages and live in different worlds.
Boghossian refers to these descriptions as ‘indefensible rhetorical excess’ (page 123) that conflates a difference in representation with a difference in the thing represented. If paradigms were truly incommensurable then, Boghossian argues, even partial translation between paradigms would be impossible, but even Kuhn admits that translation is possible; for example, Kuhn supplies many ‘examples of shared predictions that provided a basis on which to prefer rationally one theory to another’ (ibid. page 125). Translatability therefore undermines weak explanation-constructivism on grounds similar to the refutation of justification-constructivism in the last section.
Pierre Duhem identified a second form of underdetermination. He claimed that the outcome of an experiment depends not only on the explanatory theory but also on all the auxiliary equipment, methods and procedures used. If the outcome is not as expected, then the problem could lie with any of these factors. If we are stargazing, for example, and spot an anomaly; the problem might lie with the heavens or with the telescope. The theory cannot tell us which.
But in general we do have a way of dealing with such problems. We will rationally begin by identifying the weakest link. For example, unless we specifically think the telescope is at fault, we are far more likely to revise our astronomical theory.
Lessons for Progressives
Why do some progressive movements adopt anti-realist, constructivist views? Boghossian thinks that it might be because constructivism supplies the philosophical resources to protect oppressed cultures from the charge of holding false or unjustified views (page 130). Well, it might, but this seems shortsighted. If the powerful cannot criticise the views of the oppressed because those views are reflections of cultural norms; then, by the same token, the oppressed cannot challenge the views of the powerful for the same reasons. This leads only to the maintenance of the status quo - but in most cases the status quo is precisely what we must change.
Boghossian is correct when he states that things are independent of human opinion and we are capable of arriving at belief about how things are that is objectively reasonable and therefore binding on anyone capable of appreciating the evidence.
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