DRAFT
Note: Even by my rather lax standards, this is not a wellstructured and well-argued piece: my hope is that it is
suggestive and provocative, and I welcome comments. Please
don’t quote from it without checking with me.
If You Believe in Truth, Fight for Justice
Abstract
A minimal criterion for scientists’ successful
communication with lay publics is that it not be irrational
for members of those publics to take scientists’ claims to
be credible. Much of what is done by and in the various
institutions that house and support scientific work
(training and credentialing, peer review of grant proposals
and publications, articulation and enforcement of ethical
practices, etc.) is designed precisely to undergird the
presumptive credibility of that work, to help make
scientific claims and practices trustworthy. To most lay
publics, however, those institutions are opaque, and—
lamentably—to many they appear anything but trustworthy.
The rational credibility of all the research and
researchers in a university, for example, suffers from
practices ranging from disrespectful interactions between
researchers and communities their research bears upon, to
outsourcing and other anti-labor policies regarding nonacademic staff, to the unaddressed alienation of students
from non-dominant cultural backgrounds. I will argue that
not only the rational credibility, but also the objectivity
of research demands an institutional commitment to social
justice.
If You Believe in Truth, Fight for Justice
A minimal criterion for scientists’ successful
communication with lay publics is that it not be irrational
for members of those publics to take scientists’ claims to
be credible. Much of what is done by and in the various
institutions that house and support scientific work
(training and credentialing, peer review of grant proposals
and publications, articulation and enforcement of ethical
practices, etc.) is designed precisely to undergird the
presumptive credibility of that work, to help make
scientific claims and practices trustworthy. To most lay
publics, however, those institutions are opaque, and—
lamentably—to many they appear anything but trustworthy.
The rational credibility of all the research and
researchers in a university, for example, suffers from
practices ranging from disrespectful interactions between
researchers and communities their research bears upon, to
outsourcing and other anti-labor policies regarding nonacademic staff, to the unaddressed alienation of students
from non-dominant cultural backgrounds. I want to argue
that not only the rational credibility, but also the
objectivity of research demands an institutional commitment
to social justice.
My aim is to make a case for the centrality to 21st century
epistemology and philosophy of science of ethically and
politically engaged social epistemology. We need, I want
to suggest, a fundamental reorientation of these fields
away from the epistemological problems that start inside
the consciousness of an individual knower and toward the
problems that confront those who would, in today’s world,
be doxastically responsible.
The orientation of epistemology around the problems
confronting an individual knower has a well-know, if underappreciated, history. The social, cultural, economic, and
political revolutions of modernity—notably including those
that grounded modern science—each required and collectively
constructed the individual subject, in particular as
authoritative. One’s station in life was to be determined
by one’s individual talents and efforts, the power of the
state was to be legitimated by appeal to the rights and
interests of individual citizens, morality was to be
grounded in individual reason and conscience, and knowledge
was to be sought by individuals empowered to pursue and
recognize it. In the latter two situations in particular
the transfer of authority to individuals posed an obvious
problem: what if they disagreed? Think about the paradigm
example for the emergence of the scientific revolution—
Galileo’s concluding, based in part on his telescopic
observations, that the earth revolved around the sun. What
if someone else, using some other device, reached a
different conclusion? Epistemic individualism wasn’t
supposed to lead to epistemic individuality; it was
supposed to lead to the truth.
The importance of scientific method lies in its promise
that those who comply with it will arrive at identical, or
compatible, results, usually expressed in terms of
discovering the truth (or, at least, moving reliably in its
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direction). For Descartes, generally granted paternity of
this way of thinking and of the many philosophical problems
it engenders, what this promise meant in theory was that
independent researchers would arrive at the same place,
each pursuing knowledge on his or her own. But even in his
own time and overwhelmingly in ours the promise has meant
in practice that we could rely on others to discover facts
about the world we were unable to discover for ourselves.
Scientific method, that is, has grounded the rationally
sanctioned response to unavoidable epistemic dependency,
namely trust in testimony, specifically the testimony of
experts. One cornerstone to that trust has been the
institutionalization of expertise—in the training,
selection, and credentialing of experts and in the
oversight of their practice.
Think about institutions charged with the
discovery/creation of knowledge—centrally universities, but
also other sites of disciplined expertise, including
engineering, manufacturing, medicine, agriculture,
government, social services, the military, etc.—everywhere
some people claim to have knowledge not readily available
to those without specialized training and access to sources
of relevant data or evidence. How can the knowledge claims
that issue from such sites be credible to outsiders? How,
that is, can rational and reasonably autonomous agents make
doxastic decisions that require them to rely on testimony,
trusting claims they cannot independently verify, made by
agents they cannot individually vet?
Descartes and the other philosophers of epistemic modernity
answered this question by appeal to generic human
rationality: if your doxastic choices were deemed worthy of
consideration, then you were essentially the same as those
with the expertise and could trust that, if they were
following the specified disciplined method, the results
they came up with would be the same as those you would come
up with, were you to follow that same method. Those who
were regarded as not essentially interchangeable with the
experts were, tautologically, those whose doxastic behavior
was taken to be fundamentally unreliable—precisely because
of their essential difference. Thus, the progress of
liberalism has been marked by more and more groups’ staking
a claim to essential sameness.
As unfinished as this liberal agenda remains, it has—since
at least the mid-1960’s—fallen into increasing disfavor—
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with post-colonial nationalisms, Black nationalism, queer
theory and activism, many forms of feminism, and some
disability rights theory and activism. From these
perspectives, the political goal is not recognition in the
ranks of the same, and diversity is not seen as either
superficial or as a liability. While some post-modern
theorists take the implication of such moves to be the
demise of notions of objectivity, truth, and reality (or at
least the irreducible pluralization of the latter two),
there are good reasons for resisting such claims—reasons
that are grounded in the dependency we all have on
unverifiable expertise. If I need to know if it’s safe to
drink the water, a playful pluralism is not very helpful—I
need the truth.
Thus, there is a pressing need for practical, public
epistemology, which starts with the recognition that what
we take to be the founding texts of the field in its modern
incarnation—those that gave us the conception of rational
individual thought leading to universally justified belief
and even knowledge—were just that: public, engaged
epistemology, rather than the exercise of pure reason that
we have been taught to regard them as. They were
interventions into questions of enormous public moment—
explicit attempts to craft both individual personhood and
the (singular) public that could be its collective
expression. It should be clear that such discussions are
once again urgently needed, since the past half-century has
effectively undermined the work of our 17th C predecessors,
and we have not yet found anything to replace it.
Part of that undermining has been a diminishing ability to
rely on (either a shared conception of or the reality of)
“the public.” There are two major, and quite divergent,
difficulties in thinking about the public nowadays (I’ll be
talking specifically about the U.S., but the phenomena in
question are importantly trans-national.) The first is the
phenomenon of structural adjustment’s coming home to roost.
The rhetoric behind pressuring debtor nations to privatize
at least everything that could conceivably be privatized,
has struck a chord with influential social, political, and
economic forces in the U.S., leading to the weakening of
support for our few genuinely public institutions, notably
those involved in education at all levels. (The extent to
which this trend might be reversible, in part through the
Obama administration’s responses to the crises that have
predictably followed the erosion of the public sphere is an
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open question.)
These developments are especially salient to those of us
who teach in (increasingly nominally) public colleges and
universities, which are becoming “private publics,”
increasingly dependent on increasingly private research
funding, endowments that are coming to rival those of
private universities, and tuition increases. The latter
are, we are told, to be off-set by financial aid, which,
however, is increasingly based on merit, rather than need,
with “merit” defined in ways—standardized tests and GPA’s
adjusted for the quality of the school and the availability
of advanced placement courses—that are correlated with
relative affluence—i.e., negatively correlated with need.
The privatization of public universities, thus, on the
education side, exacerbates the widening wealth gap and
increasing class stratification, placing public
universities increasingly in the camp of social
institutions associated with the contraction of democracy,
rather than—as had historically been the case—with its
expansion. On the research side privatization leads to the
setting of research agendas in line with corporate profit
rather than either human need or scientific curiosity, as
well as to now well-documented conflicts of interest, and
hence to the growing public distrust of scientific
expertise.
The perception—and often the reality—of university-based
research is that it is no longer especially trustworthy, a
development that further erodes public support and further
undermines the attractiveness of universities as sites for
research, since the relatively greater oversight and
bureaucratic hurdles (compared to research in the private
sector) no longer reliably pay off in terms of greater
acceptance of the results both within and beyond scientific
communities. There’s a consequent rush toward the bottom—
as research is not only conducted in private settings in
the U.S., but, for a range of reasons, out-sourced to
other, typically poorer, countries—leading universities to
further relax their standards in an attempt to compete.1
Two recent articles in the Business section of the New York Times illustrate the
problem: One (Natasha Singer, 18 February 2009) reports on an article in the New
England Journal of Medicine (19 February 2009), “Ethical and Scientific Implications of
the Globalization of Clinical Research,” about the potential ethical and scientific
problems of drug trials’ being increasingly carried out in developing countries. A second
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The other major strain on the concept of the public is
pluralization—the widely lamented, so-called
“Balkanization” into many publics, typically delineated
along identity lines. On one dominant view of the matter,
this fragmentation undercuts the force of notions like
objectivity, truth, and reality itself, by denying the
common humanness that unites us, beneath merely superficial
difference, and that supposedly allows us to adopt a
disinterested perspective from which the world appears as
it really is. This is a long and oft-told story, but I
want to bring it together with concerns about
privatization. Apparently, the two forces are working in
tandem to undermine a viable notion of the public, whether
that be in determining, and embracing, the common good, or
in appealing to the public nature of evidence and argument
to ground notions like objectivity. In practice, however,
those who decry one development are generally unconcerned
about the other, an example of a not uncommon schism in
political thinking—so that, for example, those who wax
eloquent about the ways in which feminism is supposedly
undermining the family are typically ill-disposed toward
arguments that the workings of late capitalism are having
precisely that effect.
I want to look at the opposite set of views (in part
because I share them)—decrying the privatization of the
public while applauding its pluralization. I want to
suggest that the appearance that pluralization undermines
viable notions of objectivity, truth, and reality is just
that—(mere) appearance. I want to suggest, instead, that
the embrace of diversity is a route to the restoration of
genuinely public goods and the responsibility for them—and
that we can best understand objectivity, truth, and the
conception of a shared reality as public goods, dependent
on expert testimony held to public—ethical and political—
standards. Furthermore, I want to suggest that philosophers
have a distinctive role to play, one that is parallel to
the role played by philosophers in the long 17th C in
articulating the conceptions of individual personhood and
generically human rationality that grounded not only the
scientific revolution but equally the rise of capitalism
and the liberal nation state.
(Andrew Pollack, 19 February 2009) reports on the problems university-based plant
scientists are facing in doing research on genetically modified crops, since the companies
that own the patents on the seeds refuse to allow them to be grown for research purposes.
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One especially salient feature of classic modern
epistemology is its foundationalism, which can take various
forms, but which has at its heart the metaphorical notion
that we (the recognized generic knowers) are all standing
on the common ground of shared rationality and (at least
potentially) shared experience, ground in which scientific
knowledge in particular can and should be firmly rooted.
Conversely, the rejection of foundationalism is
characteristic of otherwise widely diverse post-modern
approaches to (or rejections of) epistemology; and that
rejection of common ground has led to the conclusion that
(for better or worse) objectivity, truth, and reality are
all in trouble. I want to suggest, however, that in
rejecting metaphoric, foundational grounding we should not
lose sight of the literal ground that connects us to each
other.
Nor should we lose sight of—or fail to adequately
appreciate—the fact that while the foundations on which
rational argumentation was supposed to rest were an
illusion, it was no illusion that, sometimes, the arguments
did actually work; and there is no reason why they should
not continue to do so—unless, of course, they shouldn’t
work, because they’re bad arguments, in which case someone
should point that out. Maybe doing so will work; maybe it
won’t; but in either case the relevance of the “really
real” will be inferential rather than practically
efficacious: anything actually a part of the practices of
persuasion lacks the independence supposedly definitive of
Reality.
The real problem with foundationalism is that the
foundations are never there when you need them: either we
all agree—about the self-evident truths, or the empirical
evidence, or the line of reasoning—in which case it doesn’t
matter whether we have foundations or not; or we disagree,
in which case it does no good at all for me to claim that
my views are objectively true, grounded in reality as it
really is, since you’ll say exactly the same things about
your views. It is, to say the least, baffling that credit
for hard-headed realism goes to those who scrupulously
ignore what really matters in the course of real disputes
about things that affect real lives, placing their faith
instead in something always over an ever-receding horizon.
The preceding paragraph is, I hope, recognizably
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Wittgensteinian in spirit, and I want to suggest a reading
of his later work that places it in relation to feminist—
but also, or as inflected by, queer, anti-racist, and postcolonial—theory and politics. Wittgenstein famously urges
us to “bring our words back home” from the “holiday” on
which philosophers are wont to take them, the idea being
that—unmoored from their tethering to ordinary use—words
take on exotic trappings and consort with suspicious
characters who claim to know better than do those boring
folks back home what the words really need, and, in the
name of those supposed needs, make firm, albeit
inscrutable, demands. (Some holiday. . .)
Terry Eagleton, in his screenplay for Derek Jarman’s
Wittgenstein: The Movie, has John Maynard Keynes recount a
parable to Wittgenstein, about a young man who dreamt into
being a shimmeringly perfect ice palace, which, sadly, he
could not approach, since the very perfection of the
surrounding ice made walking impossible. 2 He sat on the
shore, looking longingly at the perfect palace, “homesick
for the ice.” That phrase aptly captures the appeal of the
Tractatus and complicates the notion that philosophers take
our words on holiday. As my description of that “holiday”
suggests, it’s more akin to children’s fantasy of having
real parents—king and queen of some thrilling, distant
realm—from whom they inherited their wonderful strangeness,
so different from the boring people who claim to be mother
and father, sister and brother. (Think of Harry Potter, or
of Descartes, for whom God was his only possible true
parent.)
So home is a far more complicated affair than Wittgenstein
might lead us (and has led many philosophers) to believe.
On the one hand, there is the ordinary home we have always
known—the “rough ground,” which (as Eagleton described it)
is made up of imperfect, broken, rusted things, whose very
roughness provides the traction we need in order to walk.
But there is also that other home, of imagined memory,
which is a rather uncanny place. ‘Uncanny’ in German is
‘unheimlich’ (“un-home-like”), making Wittgensteinian
philosophical therapy a complex and protracted Heimlich
maneuver, less a matter of simply finding our way home
(from, for example, a holiday) than of accepting as home a
place that seems too arbitrarily jumbled to play that role,
Eagleton/Jarman Wittgenstein: The Terry Eagleton Script/The Derek Jarman Film,
(London: British Film Institute, 1993), p. 55.
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while simultaneously understanding and renouncing the
spooky allure of our supposedly “real” home.3
But another complication is that there are many reasons
other than being in the grip of a philosophical picture for
finding it hard to return home. Diasporas—individual and
collective—exist for many reasons: one may have been driven
off one’s native land, or threatened with death if one
stays; what was home might simply no longer be there, or
one might need to leave in order to live a life that feels
like one’s own. While numerous political movements take as
their impetus the reversal of diaspora—the return to and
the claiming of home—there are distinctively diasporic
politics, which either do not dream at all of a return or
demand the deferral of such a dream until the completion of
ethical and political work undertaken in diaspora and
responsive to the problems on diasporic ground.
Such politics, and the ethics that animate and flow from
them, see agents as never quite at home, as always at some—
often ironic—remove from prevailing local customs and mores
(though compared to the natives they may be equally adept
at them and are almost certainly more articulate about
them), as attached in varyingly non-normative ways to
others “of their kind” (a suspicious-sounding description
that often fails to make sense even to those who deploy
it), as “outsiders-within,”4 “resident aliens,” even if
formally citizens, and as active—even if slyly subversive—
participants in civic life, no less likely than natives to
be responsible and trustworthy, even if it’s not always
entirely clear what grounds those traits.
As, for example, socially, academically, and politically
more privileged western feminisms have been confronted by
feminisms from more marginalized locations, as well as by
feminist and non-feminist post-colonial and variously queer
theories and politics, such distinctively diasporic
subjectivities have proliferated, and, along with them, I
want to suggest, ways of reading Wittgenstein that rescue
Freud, in his discussion of the uncanny, remarks that ‘heimlich,’ in addition to meaning
comfortably familiar, can mean concealed or hidden—that is, the site of home can be the
site of the repressed. See Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny’” [Das Unheimliche] (1919).
From Standard Edition, Vol. XVII, trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1955.
pp. 217-256.
4 See Patricia Hill Collins, (1986). “Learning From the Outsider Within: The Sociological
Significance of Black Feminist Thought”. Social Problems, 33 (6). pp.14-32.
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him from the disdain and, far worse, the domestication that
have been his more usual philosophical fates. At the same
time, such readings can help to inform an epistemology and
politics of responsibility, for which the ground is the
tangible, materially real, densely inter-connected site of
multiple, lateral inter-dependencies, rather than
presumptive bedrock.
Such a conception of ground and groundedness draws
attention to the ways in which we (all of us, the
inhabitants of this complexly interconnected planet) are
dependent upon and causally related to each other, as well
as to the ethical implications of those connections—
including those of specifically epistemic import. Those of
us who work in academia, for example, are (presumably)
committed to the value of the work done there, including
the rationally trustworthy nature of expert testimony. We
therefore have a stake in, and some responsibility for, the
relationships between the institutions in which we work and
those who may have little reason to trust anything that
issues from those institutions. No amount of good research
practice on the part of academics can rationally ground
trust when those practices occur within an institution
whose public face (including the face presented to
surrounding neighborhoods, non-academic employees, students
from marginalized groups, or communities scrutinized by
arrogant researchers) makes trust in that institution
irrational.
A commitment to objectivity—to the broad trustworthiness of
knowledge claims—thus requires a commitment to social
justice, to the conditions that would make it broadly
rational to trust institutions that embody socially
recognized authority and privilege. Equally important is a
recognition of the epistemic value of diversity, of the
contributions to knowledge-creation of diversely located
observers and critical commentators, including those who,
for various reasons, are not at home in the social
mainstream. What Stanley Cavell has called a “Manichaean”
reading of Wittgenstein, which places each of us either
(uncritically) inside or (cluelessly) outside of any form
of life,5 occludes the actual complexity of social
topography and hence the complexity of perspectives
available to us and the resources of that complexity for
See Stanley Cavell, “The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy,” in Must We
Mean What We Say? (New York: Scribner’s, 1969), p.47.
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correspondingly complex conceptions of reality.
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If we (those of us who feel the force of these remarks)
think of “home” as where our words are attached to the
world by practices that we can wholeheartedly embrace—where
we can (as Sabina Lovibond puts it) utter our words without
ironizing shudder quotes7—then we are in this world
diasporically, connected to it not because we are native to
it or because it is where we are deeply meant to be, but by
the complex connections we (and here I mean all of us) have
to the others who share it with us, and by the ethical
commitments those connections demand of us. For those of
us who are epistemologists or philosophers of science,
among those ethical commitments is the reorientation of our
discipline away from the anachronistic demands of modernity
and toward the real needs of the 21st century.
See Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and
the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14:3, Spring 1988, for a
wonderfully succinct account of this idea.
7 Sabina Lovibond, Reason and Imagination in Ethics (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 123.
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