The Man Who Would Be King by Huston, 1975

“We hear they’ve two and thirty idols there. So we’ll be the 33rd and 34th.”

“And gold and sapphires and rubies.”

“And the women are supposed to be very beautiful.”

“It’s a place of warring tribes, which is to say — a land of opportunity for such as we who know how to train men and lead them into battle.”

“We’ll go there and say to any chief we can find, ‘We’ll vanquish all your foes and make you King — King of all Kafiristan — for half the booty!” …So we’ll fight for him and loot the country four ways from Sunday!”

“Millionaires we’ll be when next you see us!”

“How’s that for a plan?”

– Screenplay by John Huston and Gladys Hill, from a story by Rudyard Kipling

Moderation Tuesday

So the Catholics invented Carnival and Lent, Mardi Gras and Ash Wednesday, the cycle of excess and fasting, of dissipation and self-abasement. The Anglicans kept half the wheel but got rid of the other half. They even turned Fat Tuesday into Shrove Tuesday, “shrove” being the past tense of “shrive,” which means to obtain absolution for one’s sins through confession and repentance. I thought that’s what Ash Wednesday was for.

Carnival celebrates the last days of eating meat (carne) before lent, so Mardi Gras is traditionally a carnivore’s delight. Shrove Tuesday replaces the pig roast with a pancake supper. Those Anglicans sure know how to party.

I think maybe Shrove Tuesday ought to be celebrated as international WASP day. But let’s not get carried away.

Color as a Tool

Anne is reading a book called My Stroke of Insight, in which neuroscientist Jill Taylor describes her massive left-hemispheric stroke and subsequent recovery. At one point Jill’s mother is helping with the rehab by having Jill work on crossword puzzles:

“My right hand was extremely weak so just holding the pieces and making comparisons took a lot of effort. Mama watched me very closely and realized that I was trying to fit pieces together that obviously did not belong together based upon the image on the front side. In an effort to help me, G.G. noted ‘Jill, you can use color as a clue.’ I thought to myself color, color, and like a light bulb going off in my head, I could suddenly see color! I thought, Oh my goodness, that would certainly make it much easier! I was so worn out that I had to go to sleep. But the next day, I went straight back to the puzzle and put all the pieces together using color as a clue. Every day we rejoiced what I could do that I could not do the day before. It still blows my mind (so to speak) that I could not see color until I was told that color was a tool I could use. Who would have guessed that my left hemisphere needed to be told about color in order for it to register?” (p. 99)

Neurological research has demonstrated that the right brain is dominant in color detection, but the left brain controls systematic problem-solving tasks. The implication is that, while this person’s intact right hemisphere could see color even after the stroke, her damaged left hemisphere didn’t remember how to use color pragmatically in solving the puzzle. Based on this self-report we infer that her brain injury severed the unconscious connection between sensation and perception, between the ability to pick up information from the environment and the ability to make sense of that information. She said that, when someone suggested that she use color intentionally as a clue to assembling the puzzle, she could “suddenly see color.” She must have retained the ability to sense color: just knowing that color could potentially be useful wouldn’t help a colorblind person solve the problem. However, since she couldn’t figure out how color contributed to her understanding of the world, from a practical point of view she might just as well have been colorblind.

Realities and the “Really Real”

The realism wars have left me confused about what to call things.

I acknowledge that there are real things and forces “out there,” independent of my perceptions and thoughts about it. But I also think that there are are socially-constructed realities like languages and laws and politics and art. And I think there are individually-constructed realities, and fictional realities, and virtual realities. It seems to me that important distinctions are lost by regarding these different kinds of realities, as well as the things and forces that occupy them, as being ontologically equivalent objects, each of varying size and complexity, related to each other in various ways within one all-encompassing reality.

I’ve habitually spoken of alternate realities, not in a scifi sense but with reference to the different ways in which things and forces can be clustered together. Architectural realities and poetic realities differ in the ways in which trees and words and emotions are put together and understood and used. The raw universe hangs together all on its own, but scientific reality embeds that raw universe in a network of mental constructs and technical terms and theories and research methods and practitioners. Is it fair to refer to a scientific reality that’s related to but also distinct from the raw reality that is its subject matter? I’ve tended to think so.

To refer to the accumulation of scientists and methods and theoretical constructs and studies as a composite object seems inadequate to the task. Granted, the object-oriented approach acknowledges that the individual components making up such a complex object are affected by their participation in the larger context that links them all together. But it’s this larger context that spawns the ever-growing assembly of individual scientists and instruments and studies of which science consists and by which science expands and transforms itself. The larger context seems to determine whether the individual components are or are not science.

It’s possible to contend that individual objects contain properties or potentials that enable them to participate in various larger contexts. So, since a cedar tree is made up of molecules and elements it contains within itself the potential to engage in relations with physicists and their theories; since it’s also made up of genes it contains the potential to engage in relations with biologists; since it’s tall and pointed it has the potential to be incorporated in a metaphor comparing it with a flame. Did the cedar tree have metaphorical potential even before there were sentient beings inventing metaphors? That seems backward. I think that the invention of metaphor as a way of thinking and speaking creates the framing context in which the metaphorical potential of already-existing objects comes into existence. Surely the individual potentials and the contexts in which those potentials have meaning are interdetermined.

So what do I call these larger contexts that link things and forces together in particular ways? To me a scientific “object” connotes not something that possesses scientific potential, but rather something that is studied by scientists, or perhaps something that is used by scientists to study other objects. So too with a poetic object: it’s the tree, or the words to describe the tree, or maybe even the kind of literary device used to describe the tree.  To call science or poetry an “object” doesn’t work for me. To call science or poetry a “reality” does work for me, but it’s confusing. There are multiple realities, but then there is the “really real” of raw nature. There is the physical tree and the genetic tree and the poetic tree, but then there is just the tree.

In the Margins

Is it just me, or is this whole blogging thing exemplifying the law of diminishing marginal utility?

First Super Bowl

I would have watched the game, but my parents took me to a classical concert instead. I don’t remember anything about the music. I do remember that there was a girl sitting near us who I’d never seen before but who was cute as could be. I was I guess thirteen years old, and my passion burned for weeks over this mystery girl.

Two years later, and now it’s the beginning of my second year of high school. I’m an oboist in the concert band; right behind me sit the bassoonists. There’s a new girl, a freshman. Is it? Yes: it’s the same girl. My passions had drifted elsewhere by then, but over the next three years I got to know this cute, scholarly and shy bassoonist a bit. Elizabeth.

I quit university after my third year, intending to see the world, perhaps become a novelist. For six months I worked in a book warehouse to finance my trip, living with my parents to save money. I hung around some with Cliff, one of my old high school buddies who was also living at home. He had a girlfriend; I didn’t. Why don’t you ask Elizabeth out? It turned out that she was an old family friend of Cliff’s. Elizabeth was studying music at the best of the several local universities and — wasn’t everyone? — living with her parents, who told Cliff’s parents that she was feeling lonely.  So I called her up. I’d love to go, said Elizabeth. I remember it was a double bill: Leo Kottke, the 12-string player with a rather mournful baritone; and Jesse Colin Young, former leader of the Youngbloods, a folk rock band whose cover of “Get Together” became a kind of hippie anthem. I bought four tickets — we would double-date with Cliff and his girlfriend. The night of the concert arrives and I drive to her house to pick her up. Oh I’m so sorry, her mom says, but Elizabeth and her boyfriend are still out of town and they won’t be back until next week. I don’t know how, since I can’t imagine that I ever actually laid eyes on the guy, but I still have a picture of the boyfriend in my head: a bit older, tall, bushy black hair, full beard, headband.

Soon afterward the US military called me in for my pre-draft physical, which hastened my departure for foreign shores. I never saw Elizabeth again. Or maybe we went out once, and she told me about college, and how things weren’t working out with her boyfriend, and she showed me his photo. I guess I don’t really remember that part.

I googled her yesterday. She teaches private bassoon lessons at our old high school.

Some may come and some may go
We shall surely pass
When the one that left us here
Returns for us at last
We are but a moment’s sunlight fading in the grass

C’mon people now,
Smile on your brother
Everybody get together
Try to love one another right now

Is Radical Democracy Possible?

Here’s a topic on which I hope to learn more than I can contribute, which I admit isn’t very much. Does asserting the political agency of individual humans automatically identify someone as neoliberal? This topic came under discussion on the last post, but the comment thread has gotten so tangled I’m not even sure I can find my way back in.

Much earlier in its history this blog hosted an acrimonious exchange about Hardt & Negri, whose idea of the “multitude” purports to open up the possibility of individuals allying together into emergent networks that generate new alternatives to the global capitalist order, alternatives that can compete with it on multiple local fronts and that can perhaps even undermine it from within. This seemed plausible to me; others in the discussion regarded H&N as sellouts, as neoliberals in Marxist clothing. Similarly, Deleuze & Guattari’s rhizomes and creative lines of flight are regarded by some on the left (and perhaps also some on the right) as a philosophical justification for entrepreneurial capitalism. Latour too: isn’t he providing a pragmatic and perhaps even an ontological rationale for neoliberalism, where coalitions of the wealthy are sure to dominate any and all trials of strength and thereby impose their reality on everyone else? Revolutionary political-economic forces cannot succeed inside of or in parallel to global capitalism, it is argued, because the hegemony of the dominant order can and will either prevent or defeat or coopt any potential competitors that arise. Only by overturning the dominant and dominating sociopolitical structures and displacing the ruling class is any meaningful alternative conceivable.

Liberal democracy presumably achieves social order from both the bottom up and the top down. From the bottom, individuals vote, form coalitions and power blocs, elect representatives, effect changes in governance that reflect their interests. From the top, the constitution, laws, and institutions of government maintain the democratic process and ideology. Presumably if enough people alllied together in support of a radical cause — worker ownership of the means of production, say — then through the gradual but irresistable exercise of emergent collective force the radical changes would be incorporated into the democracy, with top-down mechanisms adapting to enable those changes that have built their mandate from the bottom up. Laws, the constitution, enforcement, executive administration: all would be amended, within the broad top-down structures and ideals of the democracy, in conformance with the majority’s mandate for implementing the radical change.

I recognize that the likelihood of seeing radical change bubble up from the bottom seems pretty remote in the US, given both the imfluence of big money on all the elected politicians and the evidently non-radical preferences of the vast majority of the populace. But the whole idea of trickle-up political-economic change: is this the definition of political liberalism, regardless of how radical the proposed changes might be? In other words, is any sort of rationale for working within the liberal-capitalist system by definition a rationale for the system itself and so by definition not Marxist or even anti-Marxist?

Merged Road-Foot Object

“ …any relation must count as a substance. When two objects enter into a genuine relation, even if they do not permanently fuse together, they generate a reality that has all of the features that we require of an object. Through their mere relation, they create something that has not existed before, and which is truly one… Granted, a relation between two objects may last only a brief while. But the same is true of objects that are obviously substances, such as mayflies or the fleeting chemical elements of californium. Durability is not a requirement for objecthood, just as being part of nature or having an exceptionally tiny size is not.”

“Inspired and radical claims,” is how Levi at Larval Subjects recently described this passage from Graham Harman’s Guerrilla Metaphysics. I remember that while reading the book I found these claims particularly troubling. I was thinking about them again today (or I guess it’s yesterday by now) while I was out running.

I start out walking, one foot or the other constantly maintaining contact with the road. So this ongoing relation between feet and road is itself a substance, an object. Then I start to run. With each stride both feet temporarily leave the ground. Does this mean that, whereas walking constitutes a single object, running creates a new object every time one of my feet hits the road? Or does the act of running constitute an ongoing relation between feet and road even when the feet aren’t actually in contact with the road? Maybe running is an “objectile,” a process with object-like qualities and vice versa, a kind of two-stroke engine moving steadily across the surface even when both “pistons” are up in the air. Or maybe the substance of running includes feet, road surface, and a zone of air extending a few inches above the road surface, with which my feet never lose contact.

As I run I look at a pedestrian walking toward me on the other side of the street. Now I’ve established a relation between my eyes and that person: another new object comes into being! Then my attention is drawn to a tall pine tree: yet another new object! But what about the eyes-pedestrian relational object: it’s gone now, the connection having been severed by shifting my gaze to the evergreen. While looking at the tree I blink my eyes, then open them again. Though my brain maintained continuity of attention on that tree, assuring me that the tree’s existence persists even with my eyes momentarily closed, in fact I could not see the tree during the blink. So did the eyes-tree object extinguish itself with that blink, only to be replaced almost immediately by a nearly identical eyes-tree object?

It seemed to me in reading the book that Graham insists on this proliferation of temporary objects because he’s persuaded that two objects never come into direct relationship with each other. Relations between objects are indirect and vicarious. Relations within objects, however, are direct. In order for my foot to have a relationship with the road, then, a new merged foot-road object must come into being. As subcomponents of this new merged object, foot and road can enter into relations with one another inside the inner “plasm” of this merged temporary foot-road object.

Levi says that this proliferation of temporary merged objects brings a lot of clarity to some persistent conundrums confronting continental philosophy. Maybe so. I must say, though, that it seemed to me while running that my two feet were continually making intermittent, alternating, direct contact with the road. Well actually, the contact wasn’t quite direct: I always wear shoes when I run, intentionally preventing direct (and painful) contact of feet with road. Anyhow, that’s the impression I get while engaged in the activity. I suppose I could teach myself to realize that these impressions are mistaken, just as I’ve taught myself to realize that the sun isn’t really going around the earth even though it looks that way. I could also remind myself that each time I glance toward the sun during the day I’m creating a new temporary eyes-sun object, and when I look away I’m destroying that object. Kinda cool.

Bullshit, Romantic Bullshit, Childish Bullshit

[30 JAN. UPDATE: Per blog stats, yesterday was the busiest day ever on Ktismatics. Just goes to show…]

“a) critics are trolls = bullshit, it’s a way to demonize critique and critics, it’s not new and it’s not useful, hate critics if you want, don’t pretend you can do without them.  b) philosopher as a solitary genius writing away his books in his study = Romantic bullshit, never happened before, will never happen, regardless of all that propaganda aka “advice on how to write” (aka “Just do it like I do it”)  c) trolls are out to get me/us = childish bullshit (“mommy, there’s a monster under my bed”), no one cares and wishes Harman “to fail” – philosophical is personal: you’re either with Harman all the way (with allowable deviance a la Shaviro) or you are his enemy (cf. Paul Ennis’ sad fate) – there’s no neutral third position. Love it or leave it, if you’re not leaving, you’re secretly loving etc etc.”

This is Mikhail’s dismissal of Graham Harman’s “troll theory,” on which yesterday’s post-and-discussion at Ktismatics was premised. Of course Mikhail is under no obligation to engage substantively with Graham’s position or with my posted engagement with it. Bullshit, Romantic bullshit, childish bullshit: this profane responsorium to Graham’s litany probably does summarize succinctly Mikhail’s views on the subject. But what’s to be done with it? At every turn it transforms the abstract into the personal, debate into disdain.

On the timeline of yesterday’s thread Mikhail’s comment immediately followed one of my own. I had just cited portions of Verene’s Speculative Philosophy — a book that Mikhail had previously recommended on his blog — suggesting that the distinction between speculation and critique upheld by Harman conforms to a long continental philosophical tradition. Bullshit, says Mikhail. I follow Mikhail’s “Three Bullshits” polemic with this:

Clearly the whole Troll conflict isn’t just a matter of creation versus discovery or speculation versus critique. Personalities clash, feelings are hurt, people act like bigger assholes than they might otherwise be. I’m probably regarded as an ally of the Trolls inasmuch as I condemn the dehumanizing and demonizing rhetoric so often employed against them (us?) by the “Bullies.” However, I find that practically the only time the philosophical Trolls comment here is when I write about the Bullies, and the only time the Bullies comment here (even more rare) is when I write about themselves. The recently-departed Kvond once accused me of writing posts like this one in order to boost readership for the blog. I don’t think that’s the case (at least not consciously); nevertheless, posts like this do draw more readers and commenters than anything I might write about realism or social constructivism or science or any of the other substantive topics on which the philosophical Trolls and Bullies disagree intellectually. I used to feel slighted, but no more, for I too have transcended commentary and ascended into the rarefied air where pure creation is wrought by the mighty Titans of Thought!

I just downloaded a review of Harman’s book on Latour referenced by someone on your blog, Mikhail, but since I’ve only read part of the book in question and none of Latour I’ll probably not have anything substantive to say about it.

…to which Mikhail replied thusly:

Wait, am I a Troll or a Bully?

I read that review, but since I haven’t read the book, I don’t know how accurately it represents the book’s problems. I once had a conversation with an old friend who confided that he read some Harman before Harman started blogging and thought it was okay, but now he cannot read him anymore, because he knows more about the author. Now, how does one react to this? On the one hand, we all read biographies, we all want to know who was the person behind the books – and Harman’s own argument is that it is important to keep philosopher and his/her philosophy together. On the other hand, biographical data is only good when it helps us LOVE the author and we are not allowed to use any of the biographical data to criticize the argument (it’s ad hominem and so on). I find this strange, don’t you?

So I creatively came up with the following characterization of Harman’s “troll theory” – everyone back the fuck off from MY idea – I think it’s a preventive ad hominem strike (a la George W. Bush and The Terrorists). That is to say, you strike your critics before they strike you by identifying a fundamental flaw in their being, not their doing (being a troll as being-critical): “no matter what you say, you are always already a troll; you are not a troll because you snark from nowhere, you snark from nowhere because you are a troll, it’s part of your being, you are a toxic person – now, speak!”

All of this is quite amusing; it might even be accurate. But does Mikhail give ME some love even after I practically begged him for it? He does not. I’ve just gotten done pointing out that the Trolls — and I reassure Mikhail in my next comment that he definitely is a Troll — typically comment on my philosophically-inflected posts only in order to bash the Bullies. So what does Mikhail do in response to this observation? He calls attention to himself (“am I a Troll or a Bully”), then goes ahead and bashes the Bully some more.

I guess in Mikhail’s case I’ll have to agree with him: it’s all personal. If his seeming obsession with Graham was once grounded in philosophical critique, it isn’t any more. It’s an outpouring of personal antagonism. Personally, I don’t believe that Mikhail “hides” behind a false blogging identity: in all likelihood he would say the same things to Graham in personal conversation at a coffee shop that he does in the blogs. Is that a good thing?

I’m sure that Graham believes that the uniqueness of his work stems at least in part from his uniqueness as a person: he sees things that others have not seen, and he presents them in a style that speaks to some who might not otherwise hear. In my view Graham over-psychologizes honest intellectual disagreements, a tendency which he demonstrates several times in the interview I linked to in yesterday’s post. So I suppose the Troll can point a finger at the Bully and say “he started it.” “Did not,” the Bully counters. “Did so!” “Did not!” Where’s René Girard when we need him? Here’s the main difference I can see in this mimetic rivalry: the Bullies all have book deals; the Trolls do not.

More or Less Real

From this interview with Graham Harman:

“My theory is that the troll is simply the predictable excrescence or repellent underside of an era of philosophy that values critique far too highly. Even university administrators praise philosophy mostly because it teaches “critical thinking” skills. In short, it is believed that philosophy teaches us to be less gullible, to believe in quantitatively fewer things, to stand at a transcendent distance from any particular personal commitment. The mission of philosophy is to debunk and tear down and to say: “no, I don’t believe it.” Against this attitude, I agree with Latour’s maxim that the point of thinking is to make things more real, not less.”

I resonate strongly with Graham’s creative Gulliver who finds himself continuously pestered and held down by the swarm of little Negative Nancies. The question is this: do I claim to be discovering something about already-existing reality, or am I trying “to make things more real”? I certainly get bogged down while drafting fiction if I have to worry about continuity and consistency of details: that’s what editing is for. If I’m designing a new artifact or service, I work on the general architecture first before getting into the detailed engineering and construction and debugging. On the other hand, if I’m doing science, the details of the real don’t just constrain me; they shape the discipline. My job as scientific realist is to anticipate “the critique from nowhere,” aka “the Null Hypothesis,” in order to demonstrate empirically the critique’s inadequacy in accounting for the way things really are. Scientists aren’t trying to make things “less real;” they’re trying to get a view of reality that’s less distorted by error and illusion and bias.

A Way of Painting Nature

“I must tell you that I spent my time in my study, lying on a sofa facing the window, from which I could see  stretch of the sea, and the horizon. One evening, when the sun was setting and the sky was broken by clouds, I lay there a long while watching a white cloud taking on a marvelous shade of pure tender green. The clouds in the west were fringed with red, but a pale red, bleached by the white rays of the sun shining directly upon it. The light dazzled me, and after a while I closed my eyes. Then it was clear to me that all my attention and love had been given to that shade of green, for its complementary colour was produced on my retina, a brilliant red that had nothing to do with the luminous, but pale red of the sky. I gazed in enchantment at the colour I had myself brought into being. My great surprise came when I opened my eyes again, for then I saw that flaming red spread over the whole sky and cover up my emerald green, so that for some time I was unable to see it. So I had actually found a way of painting nature! I naturally repeated the experiment several times. The strange part was that I had actually endowed the colours with movement. When I opened my eyes again, the sky would not at once take on the colour from my retina. There was a moment’s hesitation during which I could just detect the emerald green from which the red had sprung, and which seemed to have been destroyed by it. It emerged now from within and spread in all directions like a giant conflagration.”

– Italo Svevo, Confessions of Zeno (1923)

This narrative reflection appears near the end of the novel in a chapter entitled “Psychoanalysis.” Zeno has entered analysis in the hope that it will help him quit smoking, an objective he had repeatedly tried and failed to achieve throughout his life. Zeno’s doctor has been encouraging him to report his dreams, looking for content that will reveal Zeno’s unresolved Oedipus complex. In order to palliate the doctor, Zeno invents an Oedipal dream. His imagination is so rich, his ability to persuade the doctor of the dream’s reality so effective, that, says Zeno, “I almost succeeded (and this is no contradiction) in deceiving myself too… It made me feel quite sick.”

As part of his analysis Zeno had written some “memory-pictures” — reminiscences of his childhood — and presented them to his doctor. Zeno had loved these waking dreams:

“And I did not simulate the emotion; it was really one of the strongest I have ever felt in my life. I was bathed in perspiration while creating the images, and in tears when I recognized them. The idea of being able to live again one day of innocence and inexperience gave me inexpressible delight. Was it not like plucking in October the roses of May? …I know now that I invented them. But invention is a creative act, not merely a lie. My inventions were like the fantasies of fever, which walk about the room so that one can survey them from all sides and even touch them. They had the solidity, the colour, and the movement of living things. My desire created these images. They existed only in my brain and in the space into which I projected them; I felt the air, I saw the light that was in this space, and even its hard corners, just as in any other space that I have walked through… I remembered them as one remembers an event one has been told by somebody who was not present at it.”

In one of these memory-pictures Zeno is being walked to school by the family servant, who seems enormous to him. Zeno is in his first year of school; his brother, a year younger, hasn’t started school yet.  The Zeno of this created dream knows that he will have to go to school forever and ever while the brother gets to stay home. Realizing that he may well be punished when he gets to school, Zeno pictures his little brother and thinks: “They can’t touch him.” When Zeno comes out of his reverie he remembers that in fact his brother envied him for being able to go to school, and that the enormous servant was in fact a short woman. The memory-pictures stopped when Zeno realized the memories were inventions.

“Now alas, to my sorrow I believe in them no longer, and know that it was not the pictures that fled, but my eyes from which a veil was lifted, so that they looked out again on real space, where there is no room for spirits.”

It is after the memory-pictures have stopped that Zeno begins his experiments with optical illusion: “I suddenly felt called to complete the physiological theory of colour,” he says of them. He reports his findings to his analyst, who is unimpressed.

“The doctor polished me off by saying that my retina had become ultrasensitive from so much nicotine. It was on the tip of my tongue to reply that in that case the visions that we had regarded as a reproduction of events of my childhood might also have been due to the same poison.”

In conclusion, it is perhaps worth recalling that the color of an object we see is generated by those wavelengths of light that are not absorbed by the object and that bounce off the surface of the object onto our retinas. Would it be fair to say that the real color of an object, the color that penetrates the surface of the object, the color that is absorbed into and becomes part of the object, is actually the complement of the color we see with our eyes?

Fear of Knowledge

“On October 22, 1996, the New York Times ran an unusual front-page story. Entitled ‘Indian Tribes’ Creationists Thwart Archaeologists,’ it described a conflict that had arisen between two views of where Native American populations originated. According to the standard, extensively-confirmed archaeological account, humans first entered the Americans from Asia, crossing the Bering Strait some 10,000 years ago. By contrast, some Native American creation myths hold that native peoples have lived in the Americas ever since their ancestors first emerged onto the earth from a subterranean world of spirits.”

Is one of these two accounts true, or do they stem from two equally valid ways of knowing? Is the subterranean passage just as real for the traditional Zuni people as the Bering passage is for modern archaoeologists? Is it symptomatic of Western hegemony to impose its totalizing scientific worldview on every culture it encounters?

These are the sorts of questions that philosopher Paul Boghossian explores in Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism, a book recommended to me by someone whom a news reporter might describe as a reliable source. Boghossian systematically explores and critiques what he calls

“the doctrine of Equal Validity: “There are many radically different, yet ‘equally valid’ ways of knowing the world, with science being just one of them.”

Speaking personally, I accept and embrace the fact that there are many ways of knowing the world, including personal observation, interpersonal relationships, literature and film, and direct manipulation of the stuff that comprises the world. But I also privilege science as the closest thing to objective knowledge about the world that’s on offer. Psychology was my field of study in school. I did some training as a therapist, but mostly I learned how to conduct empirical research. Though its subject matter overlaps considerably with sociology and the humanities, the practice of academic psychology has more in common with biology and chemistry. Psychologists do science. Flights of theory and rhetoric are reserved for the superstars and the emeriti; everyone else is expected to stick closely to the data.

Scientists believe that they’re discovering truths about the world. Sure, they’ve heard of Kuhn: they’re aware that biases can affect results and funding and professional status. But human perception is biased too: that’s why you need carefully calibrated observational tools and  measurement instruments and data-analytic techniques. Good technique includes being aware of the biases that might affect your results and either eliminating, controlling, or compensating for them. Someone might come along after you’ve completed your study and identify another bias that you missed. So you try again, tightening up the methods, cleaning up the data, generating results that are just a little bit purer, a little closer to the ideal of objectivity.

I certainly didn’t learn about social constructivism in my graduate education. When eventually I did become exposed to this sort of thinking I regarded it as both insightful and intuitively obvious. Of course worldviews and moralities and tastes aren’t discovered; they’re created by people. And I also thought: that’s why science is so valuable — the method exposes and controls for sociocultural biases as well as perceptual and cognitive ones.

Boghossian, though, contends that the prevailing view in contemporary humanities and social sciences is that

“the truth of a belief is not a matter of how things stand with an ‘independently existing reality;’ and its rationality is not a matter of its approval by ‘transcendent procedures of rational assessment.’ …All knowledge, it is said, is socially dependent because all knowledge is socially constructed.”

Many if not most scientists would agree that they “construct” theories to explain their empirical findings, and that there is a “social” component to establishing consensus within the discipline about whether theory A is better than theory B. But that’s a far cry from saying that scientific knowledge itself is a social construct. Knowledge is discovered. Theories are constructed to explain this knowledge, but the adequacy and general acceptance of a theory always depends on whether that theory accounts adequately for reliable observations of the real world.

Maybe it’s because I trained and worked as a scientist that I find realist ontologies and epistemologies generally more persuasive than social constructivism when it comes to scientific knowledge about the world. Boghossian asserts that analytical philosophers tend also to subscribe to scientific realism, a contention confirmed by a recent survey of Anglophone philosophy departments. Presumably realism strikes a more radical chord among social scientists, humanities scholars, and continental philosophers.

Since part of what I’ve gotten out of blogging is a greater familiarity with just this crowd, I’ve felt more inclined to consider the arguments against realism than is my ordinary inclination. And I don’t deny my naivety regarding much of the sophisticated sociocultural theorizing that identifies systematic bias in the whole scientific enterprise. Still, when I read a book like Boghossian’s, even though it’s a work of philosophy rather than science, I feel like I’m in my element. Here’s the last paragraph:

“The intuitive view is that there is a way things are that is independent of human opinion, and that we are capable of arriving at belief about how things are that is objectively reasonable, binding on anyone capable of appreciating the relevant evidence regardless of their social or cultural perspective. Difficult as these notions may be, it is a mistake to think that recent philosophy has uncovered powerful reasons for rejecting them.”

It’s nicely done, Boghossian’s book. I’m not going to work through his arguments in favor of scientific realism, most of which I find persuasive. Perhaps the book’s biggest weakness is that it doesn’t really explore the extent to which human empirical observations of the real might not correspond with or accurately represent or describe the real itself. For that matter, in my view the book doesn’t adequately describe or debunk the sort of epistemological stance whereby tradition or faith trumps empiricism and reason; e.g., where the Zuni genesis story is deemed true while the anthropologists’ story is false. These gaps are understandable, since Boghossian maintains a sharp focus on critiquing postmodern relativist hermeneutics. And the book is only 130 pages long, so it can’t cover everything.

That said, I still find constructivist theories of knowledge quite exotic when compared with scientific realism. So too with some of the more speculative variants of realism. I think they all have a prominent role to play in contemporary speculative fiction.

A History of Masoporn

Today is the anniversary of the publication in 1789 of William Hill Brown’s first novel, which he saddled with the ungainly title The Power of Sympathy: Or the Triumph of Nature. Founded in Truth. This book, which I’ve not read, was the first novel published in America written by an author born in America. Today’s installment of The Writer’s Almanac describes the plot thusly:

The Power of Sympathy is a cautionary tale whose plot and subplots feature several young couples. Harriot and Harrington are lovers who discover that they are half-siblings and their relationship is incestuous, and Harriot is so upset that she becomes ill and dies, and then Harrington kills himself. There is Ophelia, who is seduced by her sister’s husband, Martin, becomes pregnant, and kills herself. Fidelia is “carried off by a ruffian” a few days before her wedding, and her fiancé kills himself because of the shame. And finally, there is a young woman who gives birth to an illegitimate child with an unknown father, and then dies.