But no one is asking you to subscribe to naive realism or the correspondence theory of truth. (Are they?) So why are responding as if you must have been asked to do this thing?

john halasz: “The “memo” was sent in “Being and Time”, though PI would do just as well, since part of the purport of both works is the critical dissolution of traditional epistemology.”

Ah, I got both of THOSE memos, of course. I don’t really buy the first, largely on Wittgensteinian grounds. And I reject your reading of the PI on what I take to be later Wittgensteinian grounds as well. Probably we’ll just have to leave it at that for today.

Dave M., I pretty much agree (as you know). The key is realizing that a certain sort of constructivist anti-realism (john halasz is a good example) does not actual get around the old problems with realism but reproduces them by means of a new metaphysical theory that is no worse (maybe) but no better. Meet the new boss, same as the old. But I hasten to add that this is a more subtle error than putting it this way suggests. It’s an easy trap to fall into, and it’s easy to misread Wittgenstein as a proponent of the sort of metaphysical anti-realism john favors, and many smart people have done so. (Again, I don’t expect john to take it from me.)

Really. So for you, evolution is just a theory?

I didn’t choose the straight line metaphor. I responded to it. My mistake. I suppose I should have said, “What is it you deny when you say there is no straight line between the physical world and ‘language’”.

“All worldly knowledge, experience, activity and intentional agency is mediated through our meanings and concepts”.

Except knowing when you are hungry, or experiencing pleasure or pain. Or the many examples I’ve listed. Are you saying, if someone cuts off my tongue, the pain I know I feel is mediated through meanings and concepts? Yes, a vast degree of concepts are entangled with prior, usually unexamined, claims that have no ability to be verified (“He stole my sunglasses”). But human beings do a lot of knowing that is not so entangled. I know I am alive, I know the past precedes the present and future, etc… The expression of these objectively known ideas to others will be mediated by meanings and concepts, but the knowing itself is not. So I take issue with the absolutes in your first big paragraphs (everything, always, nothing).

“Both subject and object are already comprised in or “constituted” by language”

What’s exactly wrong with these entirely intuitive notions?: Subject and object are not consistuted by language but by consciousness. The differentiation of self from other (“this hand is my hand, that stone is not me”) is biologically hard-wired into our consciousness and presents itself as true without reference to any conceptual system. Subjective knowledge (“that film was awful”) and objective knowledge (“I’m dizzy”) are indeed constituted by language; both are just what brains in people do. I agree that subjective knowing doesn’t and can’t require the thoughts occurring sui generis in the consciousness of the subject thinking them. And yet, one knows objectively that one didn’t feel pleasure or attraction to the film while seeing it.

“Which is to say, interpretive understanding itself plays a role in assessing the legitimacy and scope of causal explanations in natural science, since, er, natural science is itself a socio-cultural institution.”

I think I agree: “Interpretive understanding” is the agent in your sentence, it “plays a role”. But there is no actual thing as “interpretive understanding” in the world, so your agent is a conceit, an illusion created by thought. That’s not a problem; the problem is that I take you to believe that you are attempting to make a truth claim that is inherently unverifiable. You want me to believe that the statement “interpretive understanding itself plays a role in assessing the legitimacy and scope of causal explanations in natural science” but there is no thing to believe. So I don’t get your point.

I think your point is: the value that a person places on scientific facts and theories needs to be assessed and interpreted. And I agree. But why not just say that? Maybe you believe that you cannot disentangle e=mc2 from the meaning and concepts that arise with it (including the social context in which it appears). There, I would disagree: the practice of natural science is a socio-cultural institution, but truth claims that occasionally result from its practice transcends the institution from which it arose.

I normally agree with what you say novkant, but this sentence just made my head hurt.

What does ‘implausible’ mean if you are outside the world of truth claims? And even more so ‘useless’? What does ‘implausible’ mean that can get away from something like “provoking disbelief that the thing in question is objectively true”?

As for the rest of the ongoing argument, I guess for me, I find much of Theory in literature to be an enormous distraction from the work of understanding and enjoying (or being challenged by) actual texts. It is more often than not a way of avoiding engagement with the text itself and instead using it as an object for political statements and prounouncements. At its best Theory might be ok as a branch of historical or applied sociology, but it sucks at the things that actually draw readers to literature. It rarely acts as a liason with the text, or an attempt to get to know the text better, but rather as more of a rape of the text—an attempt to force it to submit purely to your own uses.

That amounts to the perfect example of an unarguable and nonsensical assertion. Shit happens!

@69 & @70:

The point of my comment @67 was not to question or deny the possibility or meaningfulness of the term “objective knowledge”, but rather to deny the reflex generated by the notion that objective knowledge is the sole legitimate object or aim of inquiry, which is that there would somehow be unique and particular “subjective knowledge”, which is at once irreducible and impalpable, which would constitute the “object” and justification of the “humanities”. Of course, our language readily affords us with the capacity to make cognitive validity claims with referential import, though that of itself doesn’t establish validity. But there is no possibility of reference outside of any frame-of-reference, which relies on a framework of meanings and concepts involved in “the kind of understanding which makes connections.” All worldly knowledge, experience, activity and intentional agency is mediated through our meanings and concepts, (which does not mean sheerly reducible to or indifferent from them), and there is no way to somehow strip off our frameworks of meanings and concepts from the world and compare them, thus separated, to the “thing” itself. We are always involved in the warp and woof of a form-of-life as a background condition, and there is no way to step outside of that form-of-life, Platonically, transcendentally, or dialectically, to judge that form-of-life as a whole. (Which is not to say that parts or aspects of it can not be judged or criticized from within it, or other forms-of-life judged in terms of our standards, though without the full existential consequentiality of that other). Hence I simply pointed out the aporia: if nothing can be judged true or false (or just or good or any other dimension of validity) without first being meaningful, then can our meanings and concepts themselves be adjudicated true or false? Indeed, we do falsify and revise our validity claims, but that is a fairly complicated process that does not proceed through sheer appeals to reference and independently of the underlying activity of interpretive understanding, but involves further differentiations within our form-of-life and “justification” in terms of the needfulness thereof. But the fact of the matter is that we always encounter reality through horizons of possibility and skeins of implication, and there is nothing merely “subjective” about that fact of the matter, but rather that fact of the matter bears inquiry, (especially when and where possibilities and implications break down). (It is a reasonable intuition that reals are particulars, but we do not simply group together such particulars and form meanings through generalizing them, if only because the referential identification of particulars already requires the operation of meanings).

But, at any rate, my objection was directed at the notion of “subjective knowledge”. The notion of a “subject” is a term from traditional epistemology and means a ground of knowledge, traditionally identified with individual consciousness. The “memo” was sent in “Being and Time”, though PI would do just as well, since part of the purport of both works is the critical dissolution of traditional epistemology. Both subject and object are already comprised in or “constituted” by language and consciousness alone is not sufficient to account for our actual cognitive practices, which don’t actually appeal to or require such a foundation in a “subject”. But then the term “subject” just loses functional meaning, becoming just a synonym of “existent human being” or “self”. The notion then that there would be some sort of purely subjective knowledge, as knowledge of something so particular that it would be devoid of any real or objective effects, but also absolutely essential to “constituting” any knowledge of the real just lapses into incoherence, and certainly won’t do for specifying the domain of the “humanities” or their “justification”.

But then Gadamer wrote is fat book nearly 50 years ago partly to explicate that “justification” for the humanities as independent of natural sciences, partly by explicating and criticizing how the humanities had become entangled in imitating the methodologism of the natural sciences, thereby seemingly de-legitimating their own modes of inquiry. The title was chosen at the last moment, with the working title moved to the subtitle, presumably because it was not just pithy, but echoed Goethe. But given the thrust of the work it should have been “Truth or Method”. IMO part of the problem is that American academics began importing that weird form of French formalistic scientism called “structuralism” and then followed up the “internal” critiques of it forming what Anglo-Saxons only call “post-structuralism”. (Though I never understood how “structuralism” quite got going in the first place. Yes, a critique of phenomenological intentionality. But then abusing a rather thin linguistics to form a notion of “signifying structures” that operate as an “autonomous language”? Language operating without the interpretive understanding of its agents? I would think “we” operate language at least as much as it operates us. As best I can figure, “structuralism” amounts to an incompetently formulated attempt at general systems theory). This then leads to the highly presuppositioned and recondite institution of “Theory” in literature departments and endless entanglements and disputes over its status and legitimacy.

But I’m going to be a bit old-fashioned here. I’ve never understood why, in the first instance, one needs a form of theory to read and interpret literary works. Yes, as a second order matter, inquiring academically into the status and “nature” of literary works in general, the construction of a theoretical framework might be useful and interesting. But no theory can substitute for the actual work of interpretive reading, nor externally validate it. (At any rate, deconstructing the rhetorical nature of essentially rhetorical works seems a bit too easy, carrying coals to Newcstle). And it’s the works themselves that count, as having an independent, transpersonal “existence” beyond the intentions of both their authors and readers. Because it’s such works or artefacts involved in the socio-cultural institution of reality, which we can’t get out of, that comprise the domain of the “humanities”. And their “justification” is simply the necessity of interpretation, that is, the fundamental or basic role of the underlying activity of interpretive understanding, at once unavoidable and unstoppable, in comprising human existence in the world. This is not to say that interpretation is or should be ad hoc, licentious, without recourse to recurrent structures, without appeal to background assumptions of secured understandings, and without regard to considerations of validity or evaluations of better or worse interpretations. But it is to say that there is no scientific or theoretical substitute for the work of such interpretive understanding, and to commit such a category mistake is to do damage to the self-understanding of human beings in the world. Which is not to say that the “justification” of humanistic inquiry is that it enriches the self and its appreciation of the world. That would be just the old subjectivistic aestheticism, “humanism”, in the pejorative sense of an individual cultivation of the glorious personality. It doesn’t matter whether interpretation is “enriching” or “impoverished”; what counts is whether it enhances the understanding of existence in the world.

For example, to inquire into how the Parthenon was constructed is a question about ancient engineering, and adopting the objectifying stance of causal theory and gathering thereby the relevant empirical facts is appropriate. But inquiring into the role that the Parthenon played in the political religion of ancient Attica involves a much different stance with different relevant facts. To insist on an objectifying causal explanation in the latter case, say ,in terms of a reductive and impoverished account of a Darwinian struggle for existence, would be to entirely miss the mark, to deny and “abolish” the very matter “given” to be understood. Which is to say, interpretive understanding itself plays a role in assessing the legitimacy and scope of causal explanations in natural science, since, er, natural science is itself a socio-cultural institution.

Similarly, if one is a modern medieval historian, understanding the etiology and epidemiology of the plague is an important part of the story. Also understanding how mass depopulation would alter the distribution of rents, raise per capita yields and thus affect the conditions of bonded labor would be relevant considerations. But such causal factors are applied to understanding how the people understood and reacted to the course of events in terms of the socio-cultural institutions of their day, else one is not doing historiography, whether empirically or not. Since history concerns particular, unrepeatable courses of events, and “there can be no science of the particular” (Aristotle), there’s no question of empirical facts or causal explanations yielding to general methodology or universal theory of a scientific sort, (though it’s hard to see how such inquiry could be got going without some sort of comparative method, if only the implicit one between then and now). But then the role of the struggles of past agents, however conditioned and structurally constrained, in potentiating (or revising) present structures and understandings of the world is the very point of the exercise of historical inquiry. Which is counter-scientific, if not at all anti-scientific, in limiting any sweepingly “universal” claims for the theoretical mastery of the present.

There is obviously no such thing as knowledge that is independent of all belief, because knowledge just is a belief. So why would a realist ever think you could have knowledge without belief?

MIchael wasn’t demanding “knowledge without belief”; he wanted “an example of something that humans know objectively, independently of their [...] beliefs” [my bold]. Not the same thing.

Rorty quite obviously isn’t saying that realists demand the former (although there are realists—Timothy Williamson?—who do). Take it as settled that knowledge is a species of belief. Rorty is suspicious of the idea of “objective truth” as a goal of inquiry. In inquiry, when evidence is taken to be conclusive, what pragmatists say happens is “the fixation of belief.” Rorty doesn’t see the point in going on to say “and btw my belief is true” or “I don’t just believe it, I know it.” By “knowledge independent of belief” I take Michael to mean that “extra” something invisible to Rortyan pragmatists but which realists make a big deal about.

How about “objective knowledge”? This is not a term I use either; but that’s not because it denotes a “hopeless” quest for an incoherent transcendence (we’ve got other words for that). So in response to this:

Is it hopeless because it’s so obvious that all knowledge is objective that it’s redundant, but in an irritatingly self-important way? (Yes, but MY cat is a mammal! But MY knowledge is objective knowledge.) Or is it hopeless because it’s obvious that no knowledge is objective so it’s a kind of oxymoron? (Nothing is REALLY objective, so putting the term in there is inherently misleading.) Or am I missing it and it’s something else entirely?

my answer is: both. That is, the problem with the term is that realists have spoiled it through rampant equivocation between these two senses, exploiting our “common sense” rejection of wacky relativism in order to cover for tendentious and pernicious philosophical doctrine (okay, antirealists do it too, in reverse). So it’s like “mind-independent”, which renders meaningless any sentence in which it occurs.

Not that you asked, but I myself tend to say that knowledge is objective, because it’s true and truth is objective; but that realists (and antirealists in recoil) construe objectivity wrongly, i.e. in dualistic opposition to “subjectivity.” So “objective knowledge” and “objective truth” are redundant; but isn’t redundancy of this sort objectionable, in being so easily corrupted to nefarious ends?

I think it’s basically right that (a lot of) Theory tends to reject the possibility of objective knowledge, for certain plausibly central values of ‘objective knowledge’. Now we would need to spell out what that means, but let’s just say it’s sorta kinda Protagorean. ‘Man is the measure of all things’. There is something fundamental subjective (distorting, ideological, perspectival) about all beliefs, hence it is wrong to regard man as the sort of creature who ever REALLY knows anything, or knows it objectively. What we call ‘knowledge’ is really something less than realists have supposed they could attain, objectivity-wise.

Bleah. That last sentence is true. Realists demand more than is coherent to demand. But we do indeed know things (really), and know them objectively. Yet there is also something ineliminably “subjective” about our knowing (we’re subjects, after all). That something is objective doesn’t mean it’s not subjective, and vice versa. How else would you like me to express my anti-dualism than by saying this?

But that’s just my view (or the truth, if you prefer). What about “Theory”? Here I think the key is the gloss you give on “subjective”: “distorting, ideological, perspectival.” To claim that our beliefs “distort” reality is to recoil from realism into antirealism, leaving the dualism in place. “Theory” (qua “hermeneutics of suspicion”) can indeed be guilty of this. But that’s not the same as “perspectival” (at least, again, in my usage, which defines the term in direct opposition to “relativistic”), and I do wish that you at least would not use that term this way.

So on this gloss of “objective knowledge,” D. might even come out right (emphasis on “tends to take this line”). But I actually think Bill Benzon has the most plausible interpretation; and on that reading (on which “objective” runs the senses together in the realist manner) Michael is basically right to respond as he did: show me something of which both senses are true, and no, scientific facts don’t count. My own question is why he thinks that, given his care to distinguish scientific facts from Theoretical questions about value. But that’s another story for another day, I imagine.

And then (I’ll drop the dubiously useful analogy) to get so carried away with the sheer iconoclastic (or ‘scary’!) novelty of it all as to make obvious blunders like confusing inquiry into what ‘objective reality’ means with the ordinary business of discovering what is (objectively) real or unreal.

I suppose it would be more a question of whether your school of medicine claims there’s no such thing as health.

Close. It would be a question of whether the school of medicine were so crazy as to claim there’s no single context-free definition of “healthy.”

Look, it probably won’t help dispel overgeneralizations about scary liberal arts practitioners who hate dead white guys and facts, but Professor Bérubé has given multiple indications elsewhere that he belives gravity actually exists. Precisely delineating what “objective reality” means can nevertheless be a tricky undertaking, which is why cosmologists keep falling prey to anthropic principles.

a) don’t like being told that straight white male conservative historians might be biased

and/or b) worry that if you say there is no historical truth that’ll provide ammunition for Holocaust deniers

and/or c) think that Keith Jenkins and Alun Munslow couldn’t write a decent historical article in a month of Sundays, so why listen to them?

These competing views on historical truth then get further simplified in magazine articles to become either Brave Scholars versus Trendy Relativists or Establishment Stooges versus Brave Activists. Most historians in the sludgy middle, meanwhile (we can know something about the past, but imperfectly) just get on with trying to do history, with more or less theory to taste.