Digressions&Impressions

On Irresponsible Science Journalism: No, those studies do not show that a market in Wuhan was the source of the Coronavirus

International scientists on Saturday released two major studies which one participant said made it “extraordinarily clear” a market in Wuhan, China was the source of the coronavirus which fueled the Covid-19 pandemic – and not a Chinese government laboratory, a theory championed in the US by rightwing campaigners, columnists and politicians.

The question of where Covid-19 came from and how it spread has proved divisive...

In August last year, a US intelligence review of the issue proved inconclusive.

The New York Times first reported the new studies, which it said had not been published in any journal.--"Coronavirus came from Wuhan market and not Chinese lab, twin studies say"--The Guardian, 26 February, 2022. 

For those who may read my blog for the first time, I am not a rightwing campaigner.  I have been a critic of former President Trump since 2015. I am also not a virologist or epidemiologist, however, I am a philosopher of science and my original interest in the field is evidential arguments. I will suggest below that the claims in The Guardian and in The New York Times are examples of irresponsible and sloppy science journalism. Before I get to explaining why I think that, here is a flavor of The New York Times reporting:

The studies, which together span 150 pages, are a significant salvo in the debate over the beginnings of a pandemic that has killed nearly six million people across the world. The question of whether the outbreak began with a spillover from wildlife sold at the market, a leak from a Wuhan virology lab or some other event has given rise to pitched debates over how best to stop the next pandemic.

“When you look at all of the evidence together, it’s an extraordinarily clear picture that the pandemic started at the Huanan market,” said Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona and a co-author of both new studies.

Several independent scientists said that the studies, which have not yet been published in a scientific journal, presented a compelling and rigorous new analysis of available data. "New Research Points to Wuhan Market as Pandemic Origin" The New York Time, updated 27 February, 2022

One of the papers with the suggestive title "The Huanan market was the epicenter of SARS-CoV-2 emergence," is the main source of the claims reported by the The Guardian and The New York Times that I will argue are examples of irresponsible and sloppy science journalism. The paper, which I downloaded on February 27, and that I will be discussing can be found here. I heard about the paper through a tweet by Marion Koopmans shared by my colleague John Grin (since unshared after learning of my concerns below). Dr. Koopmans is a leading virologist and public health scientist in the Netherlands. Professor John Grin and I both work in a political science department; he is a former physicist, who works in public policy on issues related to transition economy. I consider both high quality sources of science related material. And so when I decided to read the paper, I assumed I would be convinced by the findings.

Michael Worobey (the lead author of the paper) and his colleagues have dome some impressive modeling and statistical analysis to argue that the source of the spread of the pandemic is probably to be found in the Wuhan market. The paper has, however, a peculiar step, which deserves some scrutiny, and which weakens the claims by the media that this article rules out a lab leak.

As is clear from the suggestive title of the paper and the media reporting I have quoted above, the political significance of this paper is it that it is presented as ruling out that the virus leaked out of the lab of the Wuhan CDC. Since outside access to it has been denied (here is the Guardian's reporting; here's the New York Times), this has generated concerns over a cover up.

What the media reporting fails to remark is that this possibility is addressed in only one sentence shown in a picture below.* 

So, naturally, I was curious to see what source (9) is. It's the Chinese CDC! (See the other picture.)

Now, clearly the authors of the report treat the Chinese CDC as a reliable source, and they may well have good reasons to do so. Both papers rely heavily on data from it, it seems.

But, if the point is to rule out a lab leak (and, hence, a cover up), this line of reasoning will not do at all. For, rather than testing whether the data they do rely on can distinguish empirically between the evidence for the Wuhan market and against a lab leak, the paper rules out a lab leak by fiat on the authority of those whose impartiality is questioned by critics of China. So this paper does not settle the matter at all.

Notice that I am not claiming this is poor science. The paper uses what it calls "spatial analyses" to "show that the earliest known COVID-19 cases diagnosed in December 2019 were geographically distributed near to, and centered on, this market." And this it undeniably does compellingly and with interesting techniques. And so the paper may well be published after proper peer review.

But in the media Michael Worobey's paper is presented as settling the politically salient issue (lab leak vs market). And his own comments seem to contribute to this perception in the context in which they are presented. I assume he consented to this because in my experience science journalists tend to be careful with their scientific sources in checking how they are presented. Yet, for the purposes of the controversy (lab leak vs market), the underlying logic of the paper  is something like this, "given that we assume on authority of an interested party that the lab cannot be the origin, we will study how data on the initial spread relates to the Wuhan market." 

I really hope I have missed something and that I am wrong about this because I do not want to contribute to the undermining of trust in science reporting of quality media. But even leaving aside the part of the story that has made it a central issue in our contemporary culture wars, there are many public health reasons to get clear on what the source of the original problem is. And it is a mistake to consider and irresponsible to claim that it is settled based on these studies. 

 

How to Fix the Referee Crisis in Professional Philosophy

It has come to the point that the most suitable referee(s) for a paper are almost never available. It takes us so long to find reviewers, sometimes a month, six weeks or more (this situation is also exacerbated by the fact that many people don't respond to referee requests at all). This lengthens the span of time even more for the total review process. All sorts of small fixes don't work anymore, e.g., shortening the time that people get to review, asking for alternatives (this is still very much appreciated, but unfortunately alternative referees are just as unavailable). 

Of course, it could be that my editorial experience is atypical--I'm just one scholar.

But it is my strong suspicion that the peer review system is finally broken beyond reasonable repair. We've seen a slow worsening of the situation and the pandemic has finally broken the system. People are burnt out and overburdened, job candidates increasingly desperate.--Helen de Cruz "Seems like the peer review system has given up the ghost" @The Philosophers' Cocoon

De Cruz's piece has generated a huge discussion, not just among the Cocooners, but also (here) at Daily Nous. The situation she describes has been a long time coming (and for once I can claim I partially predicted it (recall here; here)). There are a number of major interlinked reasons for the current status quo (extreme referee shortage): (i) an extreme scarcity of decent tenure track jobs relative to number of PhDs minted. This is a major source of anxiety throughout the profession. (ii) The unreasonably low acceptance rate of philosophy journals such that perfectly competent papers have to be refereed multiple times by a fixed number of referees. (iii) The perceived role that prestige and quality of publications play in hiring. And, perhaps, (iv) the relative ease of free-riding in the current system. The real free riders are universities (who outsource quality control without rewarding it internally--my own university never even asks to list refereeing anywhere) rather than particular individuals. In what follows, I take for granted that the low acceptance rates are functional, that is, maintained in order to produce prestige (recall this post). And the combination of (i-iii) has generated a veritable arms race in publication. In addition, (v) the long delays in refereeing time, have made it prudent to have multiple papers under review at the same time, thus, exacerbating the underlying problem.

In what follows, I take for granted that the norm of regular publication has been good for professional philosophy. Reasonable people can disagree about this. But in my view it has allowed for more fine-grained discussion and for specializations to emerge that have improved quality. Yes, it risks generating hyperspecialized echo-chambers with lowest common denomination salami publications, but these, in turn, generate arbitrage opportunities for people who read widely or who practice what I call synthetic philosophy.

I also take for granted that (i) is entrenched in the political economy of modern universities. I am complicit in it, if you find a way to create a revolution, good for you. But what we can do, as a profession, is to cut the ties between prestige, journal publication, and hiring decisions and so reduce the need for referees. And we can do that if we destroy the role of pre-eminence of journals in manufacturing prestige, and restore them to the role of disseminators of knowledge and sites of discussion. This can be achieved in two steps: first, all the major philosophy journals should commit to publishing, say, 25% of articles received. That's considerably higher than the status quo (Phil Quarterly, publishes just 4% of over 850 papers received.) This will have six obvious effects: it will reduce the load on referees; it will end the excessive role of chance in where your paper is published; it will reduce (but not eliminate) the steep prestige hierarchy of our current journal system; it will reduce the excessive delays in getting work into print caused by the difficulty of finding referees; it will turn most major journals into paper mills; it will increase citation rates within the profession.

One may worry that once journals can't play the role of extreme prestige generators, then it's entrenches the roles of PhD granting departments. I agree, and that would be bad. So, and this is the second step: another institution has to take its place. Luckily, such a practice already exists in neighboring disciplines and is present in incipient form in ours: the article (and book) prize. What we need is a proliferation of prizes in philosophy: conference prizes (which are pre-publication); professional association prizes (of the major and smaller societies); best article prizes by journals themselves; and we need more versions of The Philosopher’s Annual.:) In fact, as Don Ainslie reminded me, there should be more prizes on different grounds too: philosophy has far too few of these, which in turn impacts success in interdisciplinary competitions (e.g. national scholarly societies, grant competitions, etc.).+ 

At this point one may worry that such prizes are easily shaped by politics, and that our time will be spent adjudicating prizes rather than refereeing. On the former, I don't see how politics can be removed from the equation entirely (as it is, the journal system has a major 'trust us' component recall). I do not deny that genuine masked review, when it happens, is a real potential equalizer. And notice that on my proposal, we don't eliminate that. People who come from non prestigious intellectual backgrounds can still use journal publication to become noticed. (But the initial signal's power may well be reduced.) And one can use masked review also in prize committees. Over time prizes that show a good track record in their judgment will become more prestigious, and so complement journals in prestige generation and quality control. 

In a way, my proposal is a variant on, and complements, the post-peer crowd review advocated by Marcus Arvan, Liam Kofi Bright, and Remco Heesen which they have defended in print and at Daily Nous (here),* and the ideas promoted by Katzav and Vaessen in a paper in Philosopher's Imprint. (Recall also my post here during the Hypatia controvery, but I had limited the idea for work that might be controversial in various ways and in order to internalize political considerations in a transparent and fruitful way in the review process.) Using prizes is a mechanism to solve the coordination and collective action problem inherent in such proposals, and to assuage worries that non-experts may overwhelm the wisdom of our own crowds.

On the latter concern, this is undeniably true. But I suspect it's more fun to evaluate papers that have already been published -- and so have undergone non trivial quality and editorial control. Also, while writing a prize report is a non-trivial exercise, it's only required for the winning paper(s).  So, on balance I would expect it should reduce the load on those in the profession that are the back-bone of our current referee-system.** 

Michael Polanyi on the collapse of liberalism and the Rise of Fascism: Religion and Liberty

Anglo-American liberalism was first formulated by Milton and Locke. Their argument for freedom of thought was twofold. In its first part (for which we may quote the Areopagitica) freedom from authority is demanded, so that truth may be discovered. The main inspiration of this movement was the struggle of the rising natural sciences against the authority of Aristotle. Its programme was to let everyone state his beliefs, and to allow people to listen and form their own opinion; the ideas which would prevail in a free and open battle of wits would be as close an approximation to the truth as can be humanly achieved. We may call this the anti-authoritarian formula of liberty. Closely related to it is the second half of the argument for liberty, which is based on philosophic doubt. While its origins go back a long way (right to the philosophers of antiquity) this argument was first formulated as a political doctrine by Locke. It says simply that we can never be so sure of the truth in matters of religion as to warrant the imposition of our views on others. These two pleas for freedom of thought were put forward and were accepted by England at a time when religious beliefs were unshaken and indeed dominant throughout the nation. The new tolerance aimed pre-eminently at the reconciliation of different denominations in the service of God. Atheists were refused tolerance by Locke, as socially unreliable.

On the Continent, the twofold doctrine of free thought — anti-authoritarianism and philosophic doubt — gained ascendancy somewhat later than in England and moved on straightaway to a more extreme position.--Michael Polanyi (1951) "Perils of Inconsisency" in The Logic of Lberty, p. 117 (in the Libertyfund edition.)

In The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi popularized (recall here; and here) for many Marxists and progressives a fairly straightforward narrative about the rise of fascism, totalitarianism, and national-socialism (sometimes I'll just use 'fascism' for this whole group): by undermining social cohesion the markets promoted by liberalism give rise to fascism. And (echoing a trope from Adam Smith himself) the workplace in the capitalist economy undermines cognitive proper functioning and the functioning of wider culture (this is especially so when it is accompanied by violence as it was under imperialism and even domestic development). In particular, because markets are also inherently fragile, they generate disruptive crises which fatally undermine the authority of ordinary politicians and open the doors to strongmen of various types (or 'fascism') who take advantage of a wider sense of despair and humiliation.

Sometimes people also add an idea (recall) derived from Lenin to this argument: that is, that capitalist economies naturally become monopolistic. And (partially drawing on the liberal Hobson) such monopoly promotes violent imperialism and/or militarism (and not to mention opens the door to the a concentration of power in the hands of few oligarchs). And from there it is small step to a strongman (if a worker's revolution doesn't stop the process). 

By contrast, market friendly liberals (e.g., Austrians, Ordoliberals, and neoliberals) when confronted with the collapse of liberal civilization after World War I and the aftermath of the Wall Street crisis, offered a different analysis one that also harkened back to Hobson's views: while on the surface the nineteenth century looks liberal, liberals were never so powerful as to defeat mercantilism (which historically preceded it). And depending on the liberal thinker the details will differ, but all agree that in its political guise liberalism suffered setback after setback from the 1870s onward (or even earlier). On this view the early partial success of liberalism actually enhanced the rent-seeking and militaristic forces of mercantile imperialism. On this view, monopoly is not a necessary byproduct of market economies, but the effect of political decisions (tariffs, especially). And one may add, even if monopolies were the consequence of market economies left to themselves, this only shows the need for robust antitrust (ordoliberals especially argued this). The problem for this 'solution' is that it has to prevent rent seeking even though the view itself predicts its likelihood.

It should be noted that both explanations suggest that democracy (broadly conceived) cannot save itself if the economic circumstances are dire enough. And it is no surprise that some theorists thought that democracy inevitably led to Bonepartism (or military dictatorship by plebiscite), also sometimes known as caesarian democracy (recall here). Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon offers a nice expression of the idea, and as I recently learned (recall) it became a staple of the so-called Italian Elite school. 

In particular, as James Burnham notes, while drawing on Michels' (1911) Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy in his (1943) The Machiavellians, because of mechanisms that drive elite capture (recall) and because of the doctrine of the general/popular will, it is actually fairly predictable that a leader of a democracy can turn himself into the true representative of the general will of the people. And so rather than Bonepartism being at odds with democracy it is actually its "logical culmination," (Burnham, p. 145). To be sure Bonepartism itself is not totalitarianism, but the step to it may not be so difficult.

But all these explanations suffer from an obvious problem: some states managed to remain broadly liberal warts and all (Switzerland, Holland, the United Kingdom and many of its Dominions, as well as the United States), despite suffering many of the same evils as the countries that did succumb to various strongmen. And this opens the door to alternative approaches.

As I noted before (recall), Karl Polanyi's brother, Michael Polanyi went in a different direction, one of the attendees of Lippmann Colloquium in 1938. (Today he is primarily known for ideas about tacit knowledge in the philosophy of science. In what follows, i will first be alluding to his (1941) "The Growth of Thought in Society, Economica). He noted that in places where fascism (now broadly conceived) succeeded, there had been a previous successful ideological and violent campaign attacking society's intermediaries: these partially self-governing intermediary societies (within science, art, law, the crafts, engineering, medicine, the press, etc.) are for him constitutive of liberal society. This form of liberalism partially harkens back to features we now more often associate with Burke's little platoons and with continental corporatism. But in his Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom, Jacob T. Levy has shown that what I here call Michael Polanyi's move is, in fact, a recurring theme within liberalism (that we can also find in Adam Smith).

And in fact Michael Polanyi thereby provides a mechanism for an observation that had figured prominently in Karl Polanyi's argument: that liberal authority seemed to collapse in the face of an organized but not especially threatening minority.  The collapse may look sudden, but it builds on a period of successful intimidation of the ordinary functioning of lots of intermediaries that stabilize liberal society. And if I can glance obliquely to our own time, one crucial lesson of this is that it is really important to bring the rule of law down on those that intimidate these intermediaries. It's to be feared that our own governments have not really learned Michael Polanyi's lesson.

Michael Polanyi himself must have felt that this account leaves out a crucial bit: motivation. Where do the would-be-elites and early cadres of fascists come from in a liberal society? In "Perils of Inconsistency," first published in his collection The Logic of Liberty (1951), Michael Polanyi tackles this question. Echoing and anticipating themes one finds in Hayek, Polanyi thinks that the difference maker is to be found in differential uptake of certain philosophical ideas. (And this also echoes Russell's views in The History of Western Philosophy then recent.) 

For Michael Polanyi, liberalism has its roots in a rejection of religious fanaticism and Church authority (p. 116). Both were replaced by a conception of liberty involving intellectual freedom. And for Polanyi this conception was internally contradictory (see above).* He claims one cannot simultaneously obtain a market place of ideas in public opinion -- notice that he does not attribute this idea to Mill -- and profess a mitigated skepticism at the same time. 

And simply put: on Polanyi's view, because of the demands of religious toleration (p. 122), Locke taught some places how to live with this inconsistency, while maintaining the authority of conscience and ideals pertaining to reason and justice formerly associated with church authority. (This is the bit, I think, is also in Russell--apologies that I lack an exact reference.) To put this amusingly, Locke taught the virtue of hypocrisy to Anglo-Saxon political culture--one continues to pay more than lip-service to certain ideals and so prevent their popular collapse. (On Polanyi's view this one also sees in Utilitarian practice.) As Polanyi puts it (again echoing Russell): "I believe that the preservation up to this day of Western civilization along the lines of the Anglo-American tradition of liberty was due to this speculative restraint, amounting to a veritable suspension of logic within the British empiricist philosophy." (121) One person's shallowness, is another's heroic self-command.

But, by contrast, under the influence of the French Enlightenment, other places tried to remove the inconsistency and replace Church authority with the authority of a public and objective reason. And to simplify greatly, nineteenth century continental philosophy -- special animus is directed by Polanyi at Hegel and Fichte, and then Marx and Nietzsche -- showed that this cannot be done, and that a species of nihilism is a result:

The process of replacing moral ideals by philosophically less  vulnerable objectives was carried out in all seriousness. This is  not a mere pseudo-substitution, but a real substitution of  human appetites and human passions for reason and the ideals  of man.

This brings us right up to the scene of the revolutions of the twentieth century. We can see now how the philosophies which guided these revolutions and destroyed liberty wherever they prevailed, were originally justified by the anti-authoritarian  and sceptical formula of liberty. They were indeed anti-authoritarian and sceptical to the extreme. They set man free  from obligations towards truth and justice, reducing reason to its own caricature : to a mere rationalization of conclusions, pre-determined by desire and eventually to be secured, or already held, by force. Such was the final measure of this liberation: man was to be recognized henceforth as maker and master, and no longer servant of what had before been his ideals.

This liberation, however, destroyed the very foundations of  liberty. (p. 126)

And this opened the door, on Polanyi's view to fanatics that could mobilize the serious moral passions of individuals who had been taught contempt for public morality. So, crucially, rather than seeing the varieties of fascism as inherently "savage," Polanyi sees fascism as building on a moral inversion  developed by Marxism. On this view, where public reason and public morality are seen as ideological, or merely a fig leave for the operation of power, fascism and authoritarianism can appeal to the moral sensibility of dissatisfied (and ambitious) individuals.

The important point here is that rather than seeing the success of strongmen as merely the success of cynicism, Polanyi glimpses that they can win in contexts where liberal society has lost its inner faith because they (the fascists) manage to channel moral grievance and moral disgust into a politics of violent renewal. 

Polanyi's own conclusion is that that liberalism and certain forms of religion are natural allies. (He is greatly cheered by the Christian Democratic defeat of Communism in Italy, and elsewhere.) Historically this was an important move because it prefigures the fusionism (of market friendly and religious conservative types) that made the Republican Party so successful in the latter half of the twentieth century (and so interestingly studied by Melinda Cooper in Family Values). And confronted by the success of Trumpism, I have been tempted by the idea (recall), in dialogue with Thomas Pink, that liberalism needs the help of religion, a revitalized Catholic Church, especially.+ 

Okay, let me wrap up. I don't mention all of this because I think Polanyi's history of philosophy is especially accurate or insightful. Nor do I mention it because I think we should go back to fusionism Stateside or Christian Democracy in Europe. But rather, I think Polanyi, is insightful that a successful public culture must do some justice to, or find a way to channel to proper public ends, the moral sensibility of the population. This means, I think, that liberal neutrality needs to be rethought without giving up on the virtues of liberalism.

 

Gil Harman (RIP 1938-2021): On Adam Smith, Kuhn-Loss and Historiography

One important type of ethical theory treats moral properties as analogous in certain respects to "secondary qualities" like colors. According to this sort of theory, whether something is right or wrong depends on how impartial spectators would react to it. In the 18th Century, the Scottish philosophers Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith explored theories of this type.1 In the 20th Century this sort of theory has sometimes been discussed under the name "ideal observer theory."2 Recently, especially in England, there has been renewed interest in this sort of ethical theory and its comparison between moral properties and secondary qualities.3

One possible objection to an impartial spectator theory is that it seems to require an -overly aesthetic conception of morality to take the primary point of view in ethics to be that of a spectator rather than that of the agent.4 If the spectator is taken to be primary, then the agent's aim would seem to be to produce something that will or would please the spectator. But that is just wrong. Such an aim is too "outer directed" to count as a moral motive. Morality is more agent-centered than that. It is much more plausible to take the agent's point of view as primary. In the first instance morality is a matter of the moral reasons an agent has to act in one way or another, where these reasons derive from the relevant moral rules rather than from a desire to gain the approval of spectators.
A few years ago, I pressed this objection myself when I discussed the ideal observer theory in a textbook of ethics.5 But I was too hasty. In reading Adam Smith's Theory of the Moral Sentiments, I discovered that Smith explicitly considers this issue and provides a plausible reply to the objection.
Because 20th Century discussions have tended not to consider such "psychological" questions as why agents might be motivated to act in ways that impartial spectators would approve (or, for that matter, why impartial spectators would care about anything), I will in this paper ignore recent discussion and return to the three great versions of the theory that were developed in the 18th Century by Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith, indicating why I think Smith's version of the theory is superior to the others.--Gilbert Harman (1986) "Moral Agent and the Impartial Spectator" The Lindley Lecture, The University of Kansas, p. 1. [HT: David M. Levy]

For many years, I heard a story about the late Gilbert Harman, who by all accounts was a supportive mentor, that he put up a sign on his door that said, ‘History of Philosophy: Just Say No!’ And I heard the story from folk, who approvingly treated Harman as an authority within the profession, and those (mostly historians of philosophy) that were horrified by the message this sent about the value of their work and the development of curricula across the profession. The story always puzzled me because thanks to my outside reader on my PhD, the economist David M. Levy, I was familiar with Harman's Lindley Lecture, which is a major contribution to the study of Adam Smith (and his relationship to Hutcheson and Hume).

I quietly wondered whether Harman subscribed to the view -- that I am familiar with from (recall) reading, say,  Samuelson's obituary of Viner -- that only disciplinary royalty should work in history of the discipline, while the rest are worker-bees solving particular, localized problems (including puzzles in the presentation of historical works relevant to the undergrad education of the discipline). And I mused on the fact to what degree his colleagues and students even knew about the Lindley Lecture, which was, in fact, very hard to acquire in the early-internet days when I was a PhD student in Chicago in the 1990s. 

And so I always quietly assumed that Harman was on party 'team progress' (familiar from Kuhn): we need a division of labor within philosophy, and with text-book driven education sufficiently shared background commitments as a baseline that will make, just like the practice of the natural sciences, such progress, or the illusion of progress, possible. And that requires a kind of domestication of the past (and, as Michael Della Rocca has argued the rest of philosophy, too). 

At some point, I became aware of Tom Sorrell's correspondence with Harman on this very topic. But I never tried to figure out its contents. Helpfully, the Princeton website records (a good chunk) of the exchange here. And it suggests the sign was put up in the context of a controversy over the undergrad curriculum. In addition, it quotes Harman's own views on the matter:

I believe my views about the history of philosophy are mostly orthodox nowadays. The history of philosophy is not easy. It is very important to consider the historical context of a text and not just try to read it all by itself. One should be careful not to read one’s own views (or other recent views) into a historical text. It is unwise to treat historical texts as sacred documents that contain important wisdom. In particular, it is important to avoid what Walter Kaufmann calls ‘exegetical thinking’: reading one’s views into a sacred text so one can read them back out endowed with authority. For the most part the problems that historical writers were concerned with are different from the problems that current philosophers face. There are no perennial philosophical problems.

On the whole, these views about the history of philosophy are quite close to those of my late friend Margaret Wilson.

For reasons I do not fully understand, I have sometimes upset people by distinguishing between philosophy and the history of philosophy or by noting that philosophy is what the history of philosophy is the history of.

I also think as an empirical matter that students of philosophy need not be required to study the history of philosophy and that a study of the history of philosophy tends not to be useful to students of philosophy. (Note ‘tends’.) Similarly, it is not particularly helpful to students of physics, chemistry, or biology to study the history of physics, chemistry, or biology.

Of course, it may be helpful for students of physics to start with classical Newtonian physics before taking up relativity theory and quantum mechanics. But it tends not to be helpful for them to read Newton.

The playful sign that was once on my office door, ‘History of Philosophy: Just Say No!’ was concerned with whether our students should be required to do work in the history of philosophy.

That is not to say that I have anything against the study of the history of philosophy. I do not discourage students or others from studying the history of philosophy. I am myself quite interested in the history of moral philosophy for example and have occasionally taught graduate seminars in Kant. I have done a certain amount of work on Adam Smith’s relation to Hume and others.

These remarks suggest I was mostly right about Harman. I have spent a good chunk of my blogging here and previously (sometimes in debates with Mohan Matthen) at NewAPPS, explaining why I think the Kuhnian team progress picture is a bad idea for philosophy (and the historians of philosophy), so won't repeat it here. But as Harman himself stresses his adherence to it is only partial; he recognizes and accepts explicitly that sometimes the history of philosophy is useful to the philosopher. And he reminds his interlocuter that he himself teaches history, and has done it.

As an aside, the denial of perennial philosophy is a self-aware form of the Kuhnian picture of team progress. Within the sciences, the textbooks will treat the pre-paradigmatic states of the discipline as immature babblings about the same topic. Within philosophy, the status quo will treat much of the pre-paradigmatic states as very imperfect expressions on our topics, or material irrelevant to our concerns. After all, so much was packed into philosophy once that we now ignore (for various reasons).

Okay, and returning to main thread, what's left obscure by the exchange reported on the Princeton website is when it is useful according to Harman to do history. As it happens the introductory material in The Lindley Lecture articulates this: the past can be a source of information on moves that are missed in present professional discussions.

This is especially so, when a particular view or theory is re-discovered or renewed without -- one may add -- much attention to prior discussions. In such circumstances an argument or objection can be taken as decisive by a particular, localized professional community and the argumentative (ahh) dialectic is halted prematurely. And while one can discover this in the armchair, too, this is much harder if one is a partisan to the debate (or swayed by local authority). In those latter cases, a careful, sympathetic engagement with the past, without reading the present status quo back into the past, can help those on top of contemporary discussions discern that one has missed an argumentative turn.  Notice, that this suggests another, related use to history. When discussions on particular topics are renewed/revived, it might be helpful to do a careful survey of previous episodes.

Of course, the uses discussed in the previous paragraph -- let's call them 'The Useful Retrieval Task(s)' or 'TURT' -- require the availability of material/texts and specialist knowledge of where to find such episodes. That is to say, what we may call contextual historians of philosophy are a collective good to the profession that it pays to have a large enough pool to have around. Somewhat amusingly, the more antiquarian and bookish these historians of philosophy are the more useful they might possibly be on the rare occasion that retrieval of a missed distinction or argument can be useful. The same argument applies to historians of philosophy that specialize in (so-called) non-Western philosophy. (I once quoted a plea by David Chalmers to that effect, and discussed it critically in an engagement with Amy Olberding here.) Much of such philosophy will be about different matters (again no perennial philosophy), but that does not prevent multiple discoveries of the same problem at different times and locations far apart.

Now, at this point I wanted to discuss Harman's treatment of Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith as an illustration and examination of what I take to be the practice that he preaches. This is also worth doing because I think I can show some of the limitations of that approach. But since this digression has gone longer than it ought, I won't do that now, and hopefully can return to it some other time. 

So, let me close on another detail of Harman's Lindley Lecture. Near the end of his lecture, he writes that "Smith works this theory out with a mass of detail which I cannot try to summarize. I believe that the book in which he works this out, his Theory of the Moral Sentiments, is one of the great works of moral philosophy." (p. 13). And then he adds a remark (labelled postscript 2):

Finally, it is perplexing that Adam Smith's ethics should be so relatively unread as compared with Hume's ethics when there is so much of value in Smith. What I have talked about here only scratches the surface. Why should Smith's ethics be so neglected? Is it that Hume also had a metaphysics and an epistemology and that Smith did not? Or is it that Smith was a more important economist than Hume? And why should that matter? I do not know.19--Harman (p. 14)

Footnote 19 starts with "I am indebted to David Levy for getting me interested in this project." The older I get the more this footnote amuses me because it turns out that TURT can be outsourced to different disciplines. Of course, since professional economists have actively tried to eliminate professional historians of economics from professional economics (on grounds that look like the party of progress familiarized by Kuhn, and, as I have shown [here and here], actively promoted within professional economics before and after Kuhn), there is a real risk (tragedy of the commons) that no discipline will curate the possibility of TURT.

I am also amused because at my dissertation defense, David Levy asked me Harman's questions. At the time (almost twenty years ago), I already knew that Smith's ethics was constantly forgotten and rediscovered in philosophy. My favorite example of this can be found in C.D. Broad's (1950) review in Mind of A.N. Prior's Logic and the Basis of Ethics. Although, I don't think I realized then, as I do now, that this is itself an older, recurring trope. Levy himself thinks that Harman's use of the trope is distinctive because he is rare in thinking that Smith's ethics is in some key respects superior to Hume's (recall the quote at the top of this post).

In my (2017) book I show that Smith does have a metaphysics and epistemology (one that also crucially deviates from Hume), but they are mostly submerged in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. I reconstructed them primarily (note!) from other texts collected in Essays on Philosophical Subjects. To be sure, I did not write my book to address Harman's questions! And I am unsure if having showed this we can make (ahh) progress on Harman's last three questions in postscript 2.

But if we take a step back, we can see that postscript 2 asks the reader to consider the grounds of what Harman takes to be (what has come to be known as) "a Kuhn-loss." And here Harman clearly recognizes that he is on unsure grounds. He plausibly suggests that Smith's TMS got written out of the discipline (philosophy) in virtue of the fact that Smith became part of economics. And I have noted, these two disciplines became conceptualized as non-overlapping complements in the late nineteenth and twentieth century (see especially this article).

But I do think the answer to Harman's Kuhn-loss question is relatively simple. Sidgwick, who is (recall this post on the effect on Rawls) partially responsible for developing the party-of-progress conception in philosophy, wrote textbooks, including Sidgwick's Outlines of the History of Ethics, in which Smith was clearly presented as a lesser (proto-Utilitarian) Hume.

This happens in two ways, when in the Introduction of that influential book, Smith is first introduced, alongside Hume and Hartley, only Hume's views are briefly summarized and Hume's views are treated as not especially significant for ethical matters. They are treated as psychologically significant. (Sidgwick is here developing and anticipating the manner in which the empirical-normative contrast turns out to prefigure disciplinary salience). So, a natural effect of Sidgwick's introduction is that it looks like there is little in Smith for those interested in ethical affairs.

That Sidgwick actually does not intend this implicature about Smith only becomes clear obliquely. When discussing J.S. Mill, Sidwick notes that Mill's treatment of justice is very indebted to Adam Smith (p. 241 in the 1886 edition). 

But that point itself may not be noticed by those readers especially interested in Sidwick's views on Smith. For earlier, he treats Dugald Steward as a (superior) synthesis of the insights of Shaftesbury and Smith (note 2 on p. 221 in the 1886 edition).

Of course, if one reads the section devoted to Smith in Sidgwick's Outlines, one may well come accross two important features. First, that according to Sidgwick, Smith clearly improves on Hume on what Sidgwick calls the "quality of the moral sentiment" (205). But, this, too, is treated more as a contribution to psychology and the "analysis" of its phenomena (206), than to ethics. 

Crucially, for Sidgwick (p. 207), Hume and Smith jointly anticipate the view of the origin of the moral sentiments "current in the utilitarian school." (A point, as noted above, he clarifies on p. 241 in the context of Mill.) But he goes on to say that jointly their "methods of explanation compare unfavorably with that of Hartley," (pp. 207-208). So, at this point there is really no reason for a reader of Sidgwick's Outlines to come away thinking they should read The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS). And when he summarizes his view of Hartley, he (Sidgwick) observes that:

Hartley is obviously in earnest in his attempt to determine the rule of life, the systematic vigour which still gives an interest to his psychology, in spite of his defects of style and treatment, is not applied by him to the question of the criterion or standard of right conduct; on this point his exposition is blurred by a vague and shallow. optimism that prevents him from facing the difficulties of the problem. A somewhat similar inferiority appears in Adam Smith's work, when he passes from psychological analysis to ethical construction. He takes care to assure us that the general rules of morality impressed on us by the complicated play of sympathy which he analyzes are "justly to be regarded as the laws of the Deity;" but it can hardly be said that his theory affords any cogent arguments for this conclusion, or in any way establishes these rules as objectively valid. It would seem that the intellectual energy of this period of English [sic] ethical thought had a general tendency to take a psychological rather than a strictly ethical turn. In Hume's case, indeed, the absorption of ethics into psychology is sometimes so complete as to lead him to a confusing use of language.--Sidgwick, Outlines, pp. 211-212.

Again, a natural effect of Sidgwick's treatment is that in so far as Smith's account in TMS is interesting at all, it is primarily as a moral phenomenology or psychology of empirical affairs. But that even in that area, Hartley is more interesting. I think Sidgwick's conclusion is, in part, the result of projecting backwards a particular (anachronistic) version of the fact-value distinction onto Hume and Smith. One that become part of the professional DNA of both economics and philosophy such that a mutual, agreeable division of labor is possible (and in context Sidgwick and Marshall accepted this division).

So, I hope to have answered here Harman's postscript 2 questions (at least in provisional manner). But I also want to note that my answer illustrates one of the dangers of relying on authoritative textbook traditions (which is required by the party of progress). These can shape the self-conception of even advanced students, that even once important and famous books are mistakenly neglected. So, even the party of progress must leave room, as Liam Kofi Bright has suggested to me, for arbitrage opportunities and allow the development of seemingly epiphenomenal intellectual activities (such as history of philosophy and/or economics) that make it possible. 

4 April 1979: Foucault on The Original Neoliberalism (ep XXXVIII)

What is civil society? Well, all in all, I think the notion and analysis of civil society, the set of objects or elements that are brought to light in the framework of this notion of civil society, amount to an attempt to answer the question I have just mentioned: how to govern, according to the rules of right, a space of sovereignty which for good or ill is inhabited by economic subjects? How can a reason, a rational principle be found for limiting, other than by right or by the domination of economic science, a governmental practice which must take responsibility for the heterogeneity of the economic and the juridical? Civil society is not a philosophical idea therefore. Civil society is, I believe, a concept of governmental technology, or rather, it is the correlate of a technology of government the rational measure of which must be juridically pegged to an economy understood as process of production and exchange. The problem of civil society is the juridical structure (économie juridique) of a governmentality pegged to the economic structure (économie économique). And I think that civil society—which is very quickly called society, and which at the end of the eighteenth century is called the nation—makes a self-limitation possible for governmental practice and an art of government, for reflection on this art of government and so for a governmental technology; it makes possible a self-limitation which infringes neither economic laws nor the principles of right, and which infringes neither the requirement of governmental generality nor the need for an omnipresence of government. An omnipresent government, a government which nothing escapes, a government which conforms to the rules of right, and a government which nevertheless respects the specificity of the economy, will be a government that manages civil society, the nation, society, the social.--Michel Foucault, 4 April, 1979,  translated by Graham Burchell, Lecture 12, The Birth of Biopolitics, 295-296

In the final lecture, Foucault returns to the eighteenth century, and his main theme, the specificity of a liberal art of government. And he reminds his audience that this does not involve what they might antecedently to his lectures imagine: the liberal art of government neither involves the creation of a zone (the market) free of government interference ("sort of free port or free space in the general space of sovereignty" (293)); nor does it involve, as the Physiocrats propose, "a position of both passivity with regard to the intrinsic necessity of the economic process and, at the same time, of supervision and, as it were, checking, or rather of total and constant [scientific] verification of this process." (293) Rather, the liberal art of government will involve the management of a sphere, even an entity, that in some sense is in between government and rights bearing individuals and corporations (i.e., society); and, in other sense, is the general, but delimited common ground among government,  rights bearing individuals, corporations, and other associations (i.e., the nation).

While it is tempting to rush ahead to the end of the lecture to explore the relationship between civil society and nationalism, in order to understand the relationship between liberalism and naturalism, and to see how Foucault treats the theorists of civil society (Ferguson and Adam Smith), Foucault halts the flow of his argument, to make both a larger metaphysical point first as well as to remind his audience, as I noted, that the lecture-series itself is part of a much larger enterprise. And he, thereby invites his audience then (and later) to explore how his musings on the specifically liberal art of government related to much larger study of governmental technologies:

Civil society is not a primary and immediate reality; it is something which forms part of modern governmental technology. To say that it belongs to governmental technology does not mean that it is purely and simply its product or that it has no reality. Civil society is like madness and sexuality, what I call transactional realities (réalités de transaction). That is to say, those transactional and transitional figures that we call civil society, madness, and so on, which, although they have not always existed are nonetheless real, are born precisely from the interplay of relations of power and everything which constantly eludes them, at the interface, so to speak, of governors and governed. Civil society, therefore, is an element of transactional reality in the history of governmental technologies, a transactional reality which seems to me to be absolutely correlative to the form of governmental technology we call liberalism, that is to say, a technology of government whose objective is its own self-limitation insofar as it is pegged to the specificity of economic processes. (297)

l want to make three main points about Foucault's position here. First, it is in some sense a mistake, albeit an understandable one, to treat Foucault as a straightforward social constructivist about transactional realities. That would be to say that civil society is merely a "product"--and Foucault explicitly denies that. For while civil society is in a certain sense a new effect of certain historically specific conditions, it is not constructed on a plan or by anybody in particular; nor is it merely (a la Searle) a set of self-affirming beliefs (even if it presupposes norms and commitment). Rather, civil society is both the byproduct of particular patterns of behavior (and omission) from the bottom up (as it advocates would claim) as well as co-constituted by (as it advocates may miss noticing) the existence of governmental practice that simultaneously, and historically conditioned, aims to shape, and is shaped by, market exchange(s) and a practice which is also a form of self-limitation.

From the perspective of metaphysical clarity, the previous paragraph is frustratingly vague. To the best of my knowledge Foucault never uses 'transactional realities' again. I think it is best to understand civil society as a kind of emergent property from different levels and orders of social reality. But it is also a robust property because once it emerges it gives rise to all set of other properties that reinforce it. 

Second, it is surprising that the ontological category Foucault uses 'transactional reality' itself linguistically echoes the particular social phenomenon (market exchange) to which civil society is pegged. Perhaps this awkwardness explains the reason why Foucault does not seem to use the term again, which, after all, is also used to describe social features (madness, sexuality, etc.) that are not themselves intrinsically connected to markets or exchange.

But it is also pretty clear why Foucault uses the term. For Foucault is trying to describe what Hayek called 'spontaneous order' while denying its 'naturalness'. In addition, Foucault is clear transactional realities exist, in part, to be subjects of (governmental) technique and this is something Hayek would generally deny (although ORDOs would accept). 

The previous two points are meant as elucidation (even if you, my dear reader, might feel  have clarified nothing). The final, third point is to note how narrow liberalism is for Foucault. It is constituted by a certain governmental technology that respects rights (or governs by 'rules of right,'), that is the rule of law, and is oriented toward market processes or the economy.* What's lacking entirely are the features associated with political liberalism (representative government, consent of the governed, free press/speech, freedom of religion, separation of powers, open borders, etc. This is especially surprising because as, I have noted (see also my post on the first lecture of birth of biopolitics) the liberal art of government (even the term) is rooted in the seventeenth century philosophy of John Locke, especially chapter 5 of Locke's Second Treatise. Of course, I don't deny this also involves a commitment to economic and population growth, cheap goods, trade etc. (as discerned by Toland).

The point is not just historical (what about Locke), but also philosophical. Is liberalism constituted narrowly -- as its Marxist critics often suggest, and certain libertarian advocates imply -- to a narrow defense of property and the gospel of growth -- or does it constitute a whole range of practices that are political, social, and even cultural? In fact, Foucault recognizes that a reader may well be wondering what happened to Locke  because he continues with the following, striking claim:

In Locke, for example, civil society is precisely a society characterized by a juridical-political structure. It is society, the set of individuals who are linked to each other through a juridical and political bond. In this sense, the notion of civil society is absolutely indistinguishable from political society. In Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, chapter 7 is entitled: “Of Political or Civil Society.” So, until then, civil society is always a society characterized by the existence of a juridical and political bond. It is from the second half of the eighteenth century, precisely at the time when the questions of political economy and of the governmentality of economic processes and subjects are being addressed, that the notion of civil society will change, if not totally, then at least in a significant way, and it will be thoroughly reorganized. (297-298)

To put this as a joke: in Foucault's historiography, the original neo-liberalism is the eighteenth century's move to depoliticize its conception of civil society. Foucault's reading of Locke is a bit curious, because the leitmotif of chapter 7 of the Second Treatise, which gives a stylized natural history from marriage/family, procreation, economic contracts, to the institution of the rule of laws and punishment as well as collective self-government is that all these institutions revolve around mutual consent and shared utility, that is, "mutual peace and security" and to be "guarded from harm, or injury." (etc.)** Rather than seeing mutual, voluntary consent as the ground of a shared liberal conception of civil society, and seeing the eighteenth century conceptions as a natural development of Locke's rather terse and stylized account, Foucault implies that from the vantage point of the seventeenth century, the eighteenth century conception of civil society represents, despite some continuity, a break. And this is all the more surprising because throughout his treatment of homo economicus in the Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault had insisted (recall lecture 11) that the eighteenth century conception was the man of (voluntary) exchange. So, with that in mind we're ready for the discussion of Ferguson and Smith, which Foucault implies, re-founded liberalism by making it self-aware about how (a re-conceptualized) civil society could be governed. 

 

On Governmental Honors for Academics

I’ve largely avoided the academic open letter trend (& not gonna make a habit of this!) so a thread to explain why I signed… Substantial intellectual disputes should be settled by means of argumentation. So, e.g., with the open letter calling for the Case for Colonialism piece to be retracted, I encouraged people *not* to sign and wrote a critique of the substance… [T]he case of Stock and the OBE is not that.

This is purely a matter of what in my field receives public honours and lauding. That is to say, it is a matter of sending out a signal on what we value, what we consider especially noteworthy and positive contributions…

[G]iven what’s morally and politically at stake here, it’s worth sending out a strong counter-signal to the suggestion that Dr. Stock’s recent concerted public campaign is an exceptional philosophical contribution to higher education. If you agree, please sign!

Stock’s career and public philosophising will go on quite unperturbed by this letter. In fact, she’s thriving. Besides the OBE, keynoting the Aristotelian Society, getting a book deal, and regular media appearances, 2020 seems to have been her most cited year. So it goes…. I say that to reassure: if you’re inclined to worry about Stock being silenced you needn’t.

Open letters don’t persuade, no one who didn’t already agree will be swayed. The value of the exercise is making clear to onlookers, especially trans people considering philosophy, that many of us don’t in fact agree that what she has contributed through our field and its public role in UK life should be lauded with the highest civilian honour. Again, if you think that’s something which trans people looking at philosophy might like to know, please sign.--Liam Kofi Bright quoted at Dailynous. [The original twitter thread is here.]

My original, instinctive response to the predictable controversy over Dr. Stock's OBE was to use it as evidence for the impropriety of liberal-democratic governments to offer/convey honors at all. For, first, it is, in fact, quite natural to see them as a atavistic left-over from the hierarchy-celebrating, feudal and imperial eras. An OBE is literally an order of the British Empire award. And, second, the pattern of such honors violates all kinds of neutrality or impartiality requirements that we have come reasonably expect from liberal democracies. Third, such honors can easily become a cover for cronyism or rents and the pay-off for political services rendered (see President Trump's pattern of Medal of Freedom Medals.) 

To be sure, the conferring of honors or recognition is compatible with egalitarian versions of liberalism. But I think the more natural, liberal position is to leave such honorifics to civil society and the variety of voluntary associations (and keep the state out of this business). So, I have no problem with universities conferring academic distinctions, awards/honorifics (although as regular readers know, I think these generate complex issues [recall this post on the letter against Derrida; this post on its relationship to no-platforming; this post on the Kalven report; and many more under the influence of Jacob Levy's essay).

Interestingly, neither the open letter/petition, which I like for the comments/distinctions it makes about the character of academic freedom, nor Bright's argument quoted at Dailynous (and above) make any mention of the tension between honorifics and democratic life. I return to this below.

One reason why it is worth looking at Bright's argument is that despite his entertaining twitter persona, he is, in fact one of the world's experts on the nature and complexities of the credit economy of science/intellectual communities. And it is quite clear that he conceives of the letter as a kind of counter-signal toward those outside the profession ("onlookers," which may call 'public opinion') and, in particular, those that might become insiders one day ("considering philosophy, ") in particular "trans people." So, we can see his position as a signal about how he and his fellow-signers wish to see the future of professional philosophy.

Here professional philosophy is conceived, in part, as a relatively autonomous professional discipline. It is not treated as wholly autonomous because part of the underlying issue being debated is about how universities (which employ many professional philosophers) should associate with Stonewall a prominent LGBTQ+ rights charity and its trans-inclusive stance in particular. 

This can't be the whole story. Such an open letter is, of course, also, and perhaps, primarily, a signal to fellow insiders within the profession. As the open letter puts it, "We are professional academic philosophers committed to the inclusion and acceptance of trans and gender non-conforming people, both in the public at large, and within philosophy in particular. We write to affirm our commitment to developing a more inclusive environment, disavowing the use of professional and cultural authority to further gendered oppression." While one need not deny the earnestness of such a letter's aims to reform/improve the "public at large," and public opinion, its practical impact is mostly felt within the profession as an act of solidarity and the attempt to create inclusive norms/practices/institutions of conduct, and, as Bright emphasizes, a signal toward would be professionals who wish to join. I do not mean to suggest this exhausts it significance; it's also a mechanism to reveal support for certain norms.* But underlying Bright's argument and the one of the open letter is the idea that the professional community is also in certain respects a moral ("inclusive") community. It is no surprise, given the pluralist society we live in, that this generates debate and disagreement.

As it happens, and now I return to the opening themes of this post, as the controversy broke I was reading Michael Sonenscher's (2007) fascinating Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution. And one of the sub-themes in this dense and complex work is that the French Legion of Honor, which was instituted by Napoleon in 1802, can, in fact, be traced to the French Revolution itself! And, in particular, that this honor system was really the brainchild of the vision of Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, at the point where Sieyès helped shape some of the most egalitarian and democratic moments of the French revolution. In fact, Sonensher argues that the very idea for such a system of honors is lodged, or "first adumbrated" (78) in 1789, in What is the Third Estate?!

In Sonensher's presentation Sieyès argues, to simplify greatly, for a system of honors as a countervailing meritocratic, social hierarchy in an unequal society, where inequality of property and inequality of political power have a tendency to undermine political equality. And, interestingly, the meritocratic social hierarchy is supposed to shape and be shaped by civil service. In particular, it is also supposed to be a countervailing power to political centralization, and so ensure status and recognition (and influence) in the provinces. (It is not clear whether Sieyès would argue for a system of honors absent structural inequalities. But since he defends the right to inheritance, it is clear he does not expect equality in property/wealth.) 

Before I get to the upshot of this. Sonenscher's argument had me excited and I went back to Sieyès's seminal What is Third Estate. (which I read in an updated version of Blondel's 1963 translation).+ In one sense this was disappointing. Because I could not really find the argument I sketched in the previous paragraph (and derived from Sonenscher). What is abundantly clear is that indeed Sieyès does not call for the abolition of honors (which under feudalism generated all kind of privileges, including as Sieyès' notes different forms of public punishment).

But rather that Sieyès calls for a change in the character of honor.  In particular, he forcefully rejects the (aristocratic) idea that labor cannot be a source of honor (familiar from Greek philosophy), so he argued for widening of who may be considered for honors (nobility of birth should not be the source at all) and also the content of what should be honored. He thinks advocates for "principles of universal justice" definitely deserve public honor, once the system permits it. What this last point makes clear is that in addition to being a kind of countervailing power (in the spirit of Montesquieu as Sonenscher emphasizes), the function of public honor is as Sieyès argues "to serve the rights of citizenship." 

So, I think we now have the contours of a plausible argument why imperfect democracies may wish to promote public honors on individuals. And one can make a non-cynical, good faith argument that "services to higher education" may, in certain respects, at least indirectly, serve the rights of citizenship or principles of universal justice. (I am myself not tempted to do so.) This has to be judged on a case by honorific/honoree case basis.

Regular readers know I think scholarly activism is legitimate form of public philosophy (recall here; and here). I myself continue to think governments should not be in the business of dispensing honorifics. But given that such honorifics are compatible with a realistic interpretation of democratic life, I suspect my first two paragraphs above, even if properly spelled out and defended will convince few.

But I also think there is another (second-best) echt liberal response in the vicinity here. Rather than viewing the granting of honorifics as settling a social question. We can see it as an imperfect way of inviting debate over what society ought to honor in the name of universal justice and, more important, what the content of universal justice is.++ Even if one disagrees with Prof. Stock (as I do), her activism does speak to nature and rights of citizenship (and much more so than many other honorees). After all, in a liberal society the government's positions on a whole range of morally and ethically salient issues are contestable and (thankfully) contested. Disagreement over moral and political issues, including public recognition/honors, is the lifeblood of a free society, including philosophy. It is, in fact, a possible discovery mechanism of what we value all things considered, if there is a 'we' left after the dust has cleared.

 

On Orphaned Papers: Haldane and the Fate of Scientific Eugenics

This paper was submitted to the Annals with an accompanying letter to the Editor, Professor Lionel Penrose, dated 17 February 1960. It has lain as item 136 of the Penrose Papers in the Manuscripts and Rare Books section of University College Library until recently brought to our notice by Dr K. R. Dronamraju, to whom we wish to express our thanks. We would also like to thank Naomi Mitchison for permission to publish this interesting manuscript of her brother’s. Lastly we gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Ms G. M. Furlong, curator of Manuscripts and Rare Books in the library of University College London. J.B.S. HALDANE (1996), "The negative heritability of neonatal jaundice,"Annals of Human Genetics, 60: 3-5. [HT: David Haig]

By an 'orphaned paper' I mean to refer to a paper accepted for publication in a volume quietly abandoned by the editor and, after years of ambiguity, it becomes unseemly to ask about its fate. Often there is no malice involved in such cases. Editors are humans, after all, and their professional activities may be interrupted for all kinds of (generally sad) reasons. Sometimes journals or presses fold or transition away from existing projects. A recent discussion on social media suggests that having some papers orphaned like this is not altogether unfamiliar to senior scholars.

My advice to younger scholars is not to show infinite patience and to pull your paper and resubmit it with an eye toward tenure clocks (and to archive it at a relevant site). And, this is why I use the language of 'orphan'; because orphans need not die still-born, and may get adopted and find all kinds of lovely homes and have lives that enrich us all. 

Haldane's paper was never orphaned in the technical sense.  For, there is no evidence it was accepted for publication when it was received by Penrose initially. (I return to this below.) Even so, I understand why Prof. Haig thought it a nice example of the phenomenon given the clear family resemblance to it. 

J.B.S. Haldane (1892 –1964), was a famous scientist and public intellectual in his day. For example, as I noted a few months ago, he was one of Ernest Nagel's targets as an anti-exemplar of "malicious" (Marxist) philosophy of science. The quoted passage at the top of  this post is, as should be clear, an editorial note attached to the paper. The paper was submitted while Haldane was at the Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta (for background see here). Perhaps he thought the paper got lost in the mail or he moved on to other topics. 

The paper itself has been noticed after publication including by philosophers. So, for example, Peter Godfrey-Smith (65) cites it the make the important point that parents and off-spring may be "anti-correlated." (See also Sober, who credits learning about it from Godfrey-Smith.) More about this below.

An interesting fact about the recipient of the paper, Lionel Penrose, is that he changed the title of his chair from "Professor of Eugenics" (1945-1963) to "Professor of Human Heredity." The wikipedia entry also notes that "the "long delay" in changing this name was due to "legal problems" associated with the original donation from Francis Galton and described how Penrose simply ignored the "eugenics" element of his job title." This raises interesting questions about whether Penrose (who is the father of Roger Penrose) should have accepted the Chair in the first place (although he surely deserves our gratitude for his stance and the name change).* Be that as it may, it also tells us that UCL could have confronted its own entanglement with eugenics more forcefully already over half a century ago (rather than being shamed into incomplete and imperfect action (recall) by Dr. Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman, and others recently). 

Haldane himself clearly remained interested in eugenics. I won't attempt here to summarize seriously his views, in part because they seem to have shifted over time. He was a critic of racial eugenics of his age, because he clearly thought much of it unscientific. It is not entirely clear to me if he would have welcomed a scientifically sound racial eugenics.

And at the core of the posthumously published paper, he makes clear the connection between eugenics and his own paper:

This example will, I hope, act as a warning against the assumption that where a character is mainly determined genetically it will be more frequent in the progeny of those who manifest it than in the progeny of those who do not. This assumption is taken for granted in popular expositions of Darwinism and of eugenics. It is doubtless more often true than false. But the case here considered is not trivial. (5)

This made me wonder whether Penrose prevented publication because he wanted to downplay the association between Darwinism, human genetics, and eugenics in the mid 1960s. (One interesting fact is that no referee reports are mentioned; this makes me suspect the paper was not sent out to referees.)

So, I checked some of the works on Haldane by Dr K. R. Dronamraju, who found the paper in the archives (for more on him see here). According to him "Haldane and Penrose enjoyed a lifelong friendship that was both cordial and mutually beneficial" (Popularizing Science: The Life and Work of JBS Haldane (2017) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 249). He also emphasizes that they agreed on eugenics, "They were opposed to the sterilization of mentally defective individuals that was advocated by some eugenic groups. Both shared the belief that the science of human genetics was still in its infancy and could not justify such far-reaching decisions." (250) Oddly, he does not offer any evidence for this claim, so it is hard to say if this was always the case. Unfortunately, after an imperfect search, I have been unable to find discussion of the 1996 paper by Dronamraju anywhere. So, I view my speculation as ungrounded in evidence. 

Haldane's warning that such cases of anti-correlation are not trivial has not, as Hirsch notes by quoting the same posthumously published passage by Haldane I have just quoted, been heard by those who wish to turn eugenics into a mature science. Hirsch is scathing about the inability to confront the limitations of heritability analysis by even the most scientifically serious (and not racist) eugenicists. Hirsch's heart seems to be in the right place, but I have to admit that I feel decidedly ambivalent about the very project of improving scientific eugenics even when purged from its racialist tendencies.+

I wonder, not for the first time, if everything that advances science should be published while recognizing, with a shudder, that apparently I am willing to contemplate not treating the 'rights' of all 'orphans' alike.

 

28 March 1979: Foucault's Rational Choice Analysis of Science (XXXVI)

In the end, is not economics the analysis of forms of rational conduct and does not all rational conduct, whatever it may be, fall under something like economic analysis? Is not a rational conduct, like that which consists in formal reasoning, an economic conduct in the sense we have just defined, that is to say, the optimal allocation of scarce resources to alternative ends, since formal reasoning consists in deploying certain scarce resources—a symbolic system, a set of axioms, rules of construction, and not just any symbolic system or any rules of construction, but just some—to be used to optimal effect for a determinate and alternative end, in this case a true rather than a false conclusion which we try to reach by the best possible allocation of scarce resources? So, if it comes to it, we do not see why we would not define any rational conduct or behavior whatsoever as the possible object of economic analysis.
   In truth, this already extremely extensive definition is not even the only one, and Becker, for example—the most radical of the American neoliberals, if you like—says that it is still not sufficient, that the object of economic analysis can be extended even beyond rational conduct as defined and understood in the way I have just described, and that economic laws and economic analysis can perfectly well be applied to non-rational conduct, that is to say, to conduct which does not seek at all, or, at any rate, not only to optimize the allocation of scarce resources to a determinate end. Becker says: Basically, economic analysis can perfectly well find its points of anchorage and effectiveness if an individual’s conduct answers to the single clause that the conduct in question reacts to reality in a nonrandom way. That is to say, any conduct which responds systematically to modifications in the variables of the environment, in other words, any conduct, as Becker says, which “accepts reality,” must be susceptible to economic analysis. Homo oeconomicus is someone who accepts reality. Rational conduct is any conduct which is sensitive to modifications in the variables of the environment and which responds to this in a non-random way, in a systematic way, and economics can therefore be defined as the science of the systematic nature of responses to environmental variables.
   This is a colossal definition, which obviously economists are far from endorsing, but it has a certain interest. It has a practical interest, if you like, inasmuch as if you define the object of economic analysis as the set of systematic responses to the variables of the environment, then you can see the possibility of integrating within economics a set of techniques, those called behavioral techniques, which are currently in fashion in the United States. You find these methods in their purest, most rigorous, strictest or aberrant forms, as you wish, in Skinner, and precisely they do not consist in analyzing the meaning of different kinds of conduct, but simply in seeing how, through mechanisms of reinforcement, a given play of stimuli entail responses whose systematic nature can be observed and on the basis of which other variables of behavior can be introduced. In fact, all these behavioral techniques show how psychology understood in these terms can enter the definition of economics given by Becker. There is little literature on these behavioral techniques in France. In Castel’s last book, The Psychiatric Society, there is a chapter on behavioral techniques and you will see how this is precisely the implementation, within a given situation—in this case, a hospital, a psychiatric clinic—of methods which are both experimental and involve a specifically economic analysis of behavior.
    Today though, I would like to emphasize a different aspect. This is that Becker’s definition, which, again, although it is not recognized by the average economist, or even by the majority of them, nonetheless, despite its isolated character, enables us to highlight a paradox, because homo oeconomicus as he appears in the eighteenth century—I will come back to this shortly—basically functions as what could be called an intangible element with regard to the exercise of power. Homo oeconomicus is someone who pursues his own interest, and whose interest is such that it converges spontaneously with the interest of others. From the point of view of a theory of government, homo oeconomicus is the person who must be let alone. With regard to homo oeconomicus, one must laisser-faire; he is the subject or object of laissez-faire. And now, in Becker’s definition which I have just given, homo oeconomicus, that is to say, the person who accepts reality or who responds systematically to modifications in the variables of the environment, appears precisely as someone manageable, someone who responds systematically to systematic modifications artificially introduced into the environment. Homo oeconomicus is someone who is eminently governable.--Michel Foucault, 28 March, 1979,  translated by Graham Burchell, Lecture 11, The Birth of Biopolitics,  269-270 (emphasis added)

At the start of the eleventh lecture, Foucault says he wants to go back to the starting point of the year, which (via Freud and Walpole) was (recall) on the liberal art of governing. This is a bit disappointing because he ended the tenth lecture with hints of a new kind of governmental practice. But before we have time to reflect on this, he turns, quickly, to the nature of (what I have been calling following Talcott Parsons) 'economic imperialism. This is odd because it is the topic (recall) he had introduced at the start of the previous lecture. Foucault quickly name-checks Mises Human Action (268) as the fount of neoliberalism, and then goes on to reveal that he has been reading back-issues of the Journal of Political Economy (hereafter: JPE) the house-organ of the The University of Chicago's economics department, from the years 1960–1970, and recommends a "series of articles" from 1962 by "Becker, Kirzner, and others." (268)*

It is by no means obvious what the liberal art of government and the shifting definitions of homo oeconomicus have in common. But, amazingly, by the end of the lecture it is completely clear. To give away the punchline (and to look ahead to some future posts), in Foucault's hands (and this is already clear in what I quote above), Becker's very redefinition of homo oeconimicus effectively betrays the original achievement of liberalism, which consists in not just "limiting the sovereign’s power," but "stripping the sovereign of power" by revealing an "essential, fundamental, and major incapacity of the sovereign, that is to say, an inability to master the totality of the economic field," (292); and the betrayal is, in a certain sense, as Foucault argues during the eleventh lecture, a return to physiocracy. In Foucault's telling Becker throws away the very achievement of Adam Smith, and creates a subject capable of being (to use the phrase Foucault had introduced in lecture 9) programmed, nudged, and shaped by a knowing sovereign.

But just before Foucault explains the significance of the shift from the Robbins definition of economics ("the optimal allocation of scarce resources to alternative ends") to the Becker definition (the "science of the systematic nature of responses to environmental variables"),** he (that is Foucault) inserts a new analysis of the nature of science. Foucault does this in the first paragraph in the passage quoted above this post.

Now critics of the Robbins definition (itself indebted to Max Weber) tend to notice that it turns economics into a kind of engineering; for the ends are given, and act as constraints on an optimization problem. And since the Robbins definition is topic neutral (neither the resources, nor the ends, nor the implied agent/allocators(s) have to be trading or using money, etc.) it is no surprise that economic analysis so constituted can be applied across many different domains (and economic imperialism is out of the gates). Of course, the critics will see in the Robbins definition a paradigmatic case of instrumental rationality.   

But if one looks at the Robbins definition, as it were, 'formally,' even the pinnacle of substantive rationality -- the inferring of true conclusions from, say, a set of axioms, can be treated, or, better yet, modelled as an instance of it. One is reminded here of Leibniz thinking of the "divine perfection" in terms of God as a perfect geometer in the Discourse of Metaphysics: "He who acts perfectly is like an excellent Geometer who knows how to find the best construction for a problem." (par. 5; Clarke is also tempted by this language.)+ 

So, economic analysis can be applied legitimately to God's choices and to scientific reasoning. Of course, and to be sure, while in God the context of construction/choice and context of justification coincide, one need not claim this about ordinary scientists. So, Foucault, is not here proposing to apply economic analysis to most scientific activity -- what I call 'public choice philosophy of science' of the sort Gordon Tullock and, at Chicago, George Stigler pioneered (and made mature by Sandra Peart and David Levy, now familiar within philosophy in the burgeoning Zollman school of philosophy of science [e.g., O'Connor Weatherall; Kofi Bright, etc.]). To be sure Foucault is not ruling it out. (I follows trivially from what he says.) 

But rather, he is making the more audacious point that economic analysis is a way of conceptualizing disciplined scientific speech speaking the truth (when its claims are justified). And this is a kind of existence proof for the claim that "any rational conduct or behavior whatsoever" is "the possible object of economic analysis" with economic analysis understood in the sense of Robbins' definition. So, economic analysis might be philosophical speech, that is, capable of analyzing itself if and only if it generates "true conclusions." 

I could close with the fate of that lovely sentence hanging in the balance. But I want to note two things here: first, there is a sense in which Foucault agrees with the Frankfurt's school's claim that under capitalism even science becomes conceived as a species of instrumental rationality. But he is not critical of it. He explicitly grants that all rational action can be modelled by economic analysis in this sense. And so, second, he rejects the distinction between instrumental and substantive rationality. For, while Foucault need not accept the much stronger claim that no other form of analysis, no other grid of intelligibility, is possible (he is clearly a pluralist about such matters [Robbins' definition "is not even the only one"]), he does not accept here the possibility that something is a species of rational agency and not capable of falling under the Robbins definition.++ 

And with that, I conclude my seventh full year of solo blogging and will take my customary winter break; I wish you happy holidays my dear reader!

Three Kinds of Clarity in 'early' Analytic (Carnap, Quine, and Nagel)

Philosophers themselves are at variance as to the "proper" task of philosophy. Many students of the history of philosophy agree, however, that the great texts in philosophy are best understood when viewed as so many reflections upon issues raised by the scientific and social developments of their day. The practice, if not always the explicit intent, of a great deal of philosophy has been to function as a commentary on the intellectual life of man - a commentary whose object is to bring some order and clarity into the propositions certified by the sciences or sanctioned by social needs. The commentaries which philosophers have provided have often been confused and unintelligible: they have frequently proved obstacles to clear conceptions of nature and man and have turned out to be fresh occasions for wonder. Nonetheless, the historical fact that so much of philosophy has been a reflection upon science and society suggests that the business of philosophy is not that of adding to the sum of our knowledge of nature, in the sense in which the sciences add to that knowledge, but of clarifying such knowledge. The "wisdom" of Aristotle, accordingly, is not to be identified with his encyclopedic knowledge or with his speculative interpretation of the science and society of his day; it is to be found in the careful distinctions he drew between the meanings of terms current in his day, and in the light his analyses throw on the confusions that arise when the distinctions are not respected. The task of philosophy, on this point of view, is not to supply a cosmogony or cosmology: its task, which may be pursued by professional scientists no less than by professional philosophers, is to serve as a cathartic to men's beliefs and ideas. In other words, according to this conception of philosophy its aim is to perfect principles of logic and method and to exercise them upon the various statements
occurring in everyday discourse and the sciences.--Ernest Nagel (1938) "The Fight for Clarity: Logical Empiricism" The American Scholar 8.(1): 46

Recall that Carnap and Quine have distinct understandings of clarity. For Carnap clarity is a property or by-product of formal systems, of constructed languages. Clarity in the hands of Carnap means to capture a kind of demand for transparency in one's inferential practices, one's commitments, and the use of terms (it very much hopes to prevent equivocation and polysemous use).  Carnapian clarity is really a second-order property of an otherwise esoteric, expert practice.

By contrast, Quine had a tendency, as Greg Frost-Arnold has shown, (i) to associate clarity with more general forms of intelligibility. In later years, Quine might argue that (ii) his program (developed in Word & Object) of the philosopher regimenting scientific language to exhibit its ontological commitments, may also be aiming at a species of clarity (about the 'ontology' of science), alongside systematicity.  He also (iii) came to think of clarity as a more general theoretical virtue of a system. 

The earlier discussion of Carnap and Quine left me a bit puzzled about the to-me-intuitive notion of clarity I had picked up from my teachers as an undergraduate and PhD student. (I assume it is intuitive because of my teachers.) And while I certainly do not want to ignore the contribution of Cambridge (Russell, Moore, etc.) to my intuitive understanding, I think Ernest Nagel gives a sense of where that might have, in part, come from.

The 1938 essay by Nagel that I quote above is, as scholars of analytic philosophy have noted, an important moment in twentieth century philosophy for two reasons. First, the piece partially (re-)introduces logical empiricism to an American audience, while simultaneously defending them from (rather persistent) misrepresentation (in part based on describing the evolution away from strict verificationism). In fact, Nagel puts a kind of neo-Kantian and proto-Foucaultian spin on the mature/more recent version of logical empiricism: "Indeed the proper question is not "what does a statement mean?" but "what are the conditions which empiricists will acknowledge to be necessary for a statement to have meaning? " (51)

Second, the piece aims to contribute to a convergence between what I call the 'scientific wing of pragmatism' (as represented, especially, by Peirce in the essay) and logical empiricism, and so is a signal moment in the development of analytic philosophy. (Regular readers know I treat Nagel as the philosophical prophet of the sociological and conceptual construction, analytic philosophy.) Toward the end of the essay it becomes clear that Nagel sees himself as occupying a (mature) version of the intersection between these two movements.

Okay, while keeping in mind that there are polemical ("fight") purposes being served and that in some sense he is constructing an image of clarity that is to have wide uptake, it may be useful to look at Nagel's version of clarity. For Nagel, the search for clarity is an effect or byproduct from the advanced development and specialization and, so, esotericism of the special sciences. And this means that new criteria of intelligibility distinct from those used in ordinary language are required. As he puts it, "the increased abstractness and generality of modern science require a serious reconsideration and a recasting of those relatively simple canons of intelligibility and validity which are sufficient for the needs of every-day discourse and inquiry." (47-48) So, at a first approximation, Nagel's version of clarity involve the canons of intelligibility and validity apt for  (esoteric) special sciences.

But the reason why this effort at clarification is a philosophical task is, in part, due to a limitation on the professional scientist:

we cannot fall back upon every-day practices and habitual intuitions for aid, and most professional scientists are not sufficiently conscious of their own procedures to enlighten us; special studies must be undertaken by men sensitive to the logical issues involved. Recent methodological studies aim to supply appropriate answers and their main objectives are therefore the following: the careful analysis, formulation and expansion of those intellectual techniques which have been found reliable for controlling our conjectures about the world we inhabit; the appraisal of the import of science and of the conditions for its successful activity; the analysis of scientific concepts and the formulation of logical standards for distinguishing meaningful statements and questions from those which have no accredited meaning.
The movement known at present as "logical empiricism" is a loosely-organized group of philosophers and scientists interested in such problems of method. (48)

We see here (Nagel emphasizes it again later in the essay) the germ of Thomas Kuhn's idea that there is a sense in which ordinary scientists lack proper self-awareness about all there own practices. We might say that a lot of scientific activity (calibration, measurement practices, hidden assumption in the math) is 'black-boxed' and 'taken off-line,' say in the name of cognitive and operational efficiency. To be sure, Nagel is quick to emphasize (and nods to Mach's influence) that interest in the process of clarification, so not just the results, is widespread among "professional scientists" (47 & 58). So, it would be more apt to say that for Nagel clarification is not just developing the canons of intelligibility and validity apt for  (esoteric) special sciences, but also making transparent the methods and practices of science that generate warranted claims. 

What is nice about this notion of clarity, is  that we see in it the significance of normative epistemology and the philosophy of scientific practice ("One of the most valuable and promising tendencies of logical empiricism is the emphasis it places upon the analysis of ideas
employed in special fields of study, so that the procedures which are relevant to those ideas and which alone make them intelligible are made explicit." (57)) These are two areas of philosophy of science that (under the ongoing influence of Reichenbach) are often orthogonal to each other today. 

I don't mean to suggest this completes my analysis of what Nagel means by clarity. One question one may well ask is what he means by 'intelligibility.' And I hasten to add that Nagel is no friend of the PSR (in the same period he has a polemic against Blanshard's version of the PSR, internal relations, and monism.).  Rather, I think Nagel means by intelligibility something like showing how and the way terms/concepts (etc.) hang together (he's a holist) and function in a system of knowledge and bodies of ordinary practice. I think this because of remarks like this, "the task of philosophy lies in the clarification of terms occurring in scientific and everyday discourse, by exhibiting their interrelations and function in the contexts in which they occur." (59)*

So, finally, Nagel clarification is not just developing the canons of intelligibility and validity apt for (esoteric) special sciences, but also making transparent the methods and practices of science that generate warranted claims in part by showing how and the way terms/concepts  hang together and function in a system of knowledge and forms of ordinary practice. Now, one may think that Nagel here echoes a kind of underlaborer to the sciences conception of philosophy (but note those ordinary practices.) However, he also endorses some of the political aims for clarification by "some" logical empiricists:

Certainly the least one can say of logical empiricism is that even if it accomplished nothing else it is a powerful force that aims to introduce rational methods into all fields of inquiry. One of its functions, that of serving as a disinfectant to the thinking of men, would alone justify the continuance and spread of the movement. It rests its case not on an appeal to authority or the emotional needs of men but on an appeal to a persistent effort to think clearly. The movement is an important arm in the interminable warfare against obscurantism and for clarity. (59)+

As I noted before (recall), for Nagel government by discussion is not about achieving authoritative consensus, but rather, as his conception of science and democracy reveal, as the ongoing practice of being responsive to reasons and criticisms based on experimentally controlled facts. Our cognitive practices in science and political life are made possible, and developed and improved by, our socially embedded interactions with each other. For Nagel it is clear that "Perhaps no intellectual tendency is more dangerous than that accompanying the claim that knowledge of human affairs is the exclusive property of men endowed with a "higher insight" - which is not subject to the control of well established experimental methods."" (55) For Nagel, the cultivation of clarity is a contribution to a democratic ethos.

 

Clarity, Analytic Marxism, and the Purported Sinking of dialectics (by Sidney Hook)

The only alternative to this procedure is to present one's own theory of dialectic....I shall argue that it would be best in the interests of clarity to let the term sink into the desuetude of archaisms; in fact, I shall try to show that this is the legitimate moral that can be drawn from any critical investigation of the assumptions and types of procedure most frequently designated as dialectical in the history of thought...

There are two generic conceptions of dialectic under which the various meanings of dialectic may be subsumed. The first is the conception of dialectic as a pattern of existential change either in nature or society or man where the "or" is not exclusive. The second is the view that dialectic is a special method of analyzing such change. Usually, but not always, it is held that the method of dialectical analysis in some sense "reflects" or "corresponds to" the dialectical pattern of change. In any case, there is always a distinction drawn, though with no great regard for consistency, between the dialectical type of change and other kinds. When the dialectic is identified with change as such, it is explicitly contrasted with some other natural or supernatural element which is regarded as undialectical, e.g., unchanging form or pattern. Similarly, with the conception of dialectic as method. Whether taken as a method of analysis or discovery or both it is always distinguished from other methods called undialectical, i.e., metaphysical, scientific, commonsensical, etc. This last distinction is of the first importance. For the alleged justification of the dialectic method consists in its power to lead us to the discovery of new truths or to a deeper and more adequate understanding of old truths, not accessible to us by any other method-- Sidney Hook (1939) "Dialectic in Social and Historical Inquiry" The Journal of Philosophy 36(14), 365-366.

A while ago (recall), I remarked with sardonic bemusement -- I am a liberal bourgeois intellectual, after all -- that analytic marxism is founded in an original sin, that is, an unearned dismissal of the dialectical method. That behind the brilliant rhetoric (recall) of G.A Cohen, Elster and the whole gang lies an appeal to clarity often linked to the stipulated superiority of the existing methods of social science. And while their embrace of clarity and rigor helped their careers in professional philosophy, and -- (let's stipulate) advanced academic discussion in a number of important scholarly fields -- it is by no means obvious they advanced marxism as a revolutionary doctrine to be feared by folks like me. For, while clarity is undoubtedly an important value that can be embraced by Marxists (see my treatment of Korsch's articulation of dialectics) it does not have, let's say, lexical priority over overthrowing capitalism.

In fact, I took considerable pleasure in pointing out that analytic marxists' dismissal of dialectics was unoriginal. For the rhetoric and whole style of pseudo-argument dismissing dialectics were anticipated by (recall here; and, for broader context, here and more recently here) the very bourgeois liberal philosopher, Ernest Nagel (who plays a non-trivial role in shaping analytic philosophy as such). But I noted that Nagel was, in turn, relying on Hook's efforts; and so it is worth looking at Hook.  

I often joke (with a note of ruefulness) that oblivion is the fate of all philosophers since the hegemony of analytic philosophy. But I was pleased to learn that our institutional collective memory, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, has an informative entry on Hook, which treats him as a "leading interpreter and proponent of Deweyan pragmatic naturalism" and "polemicist." Hook was once one of the leading New York intellectuals. And, pertinent for us, Hook became after trying initially to synthesize pragmatism and marxism a leading anti-communists as time passes. (His anti-communism increasingly has a McCarthyite tendency.) A key step in Hook's attempted synthesis and eventual turn against marxism is his rejection of the dialectical method.

Now, if we look at Hook's "Dialectic in Social and Historical Inquiry" all dialectic is dismissed. But strikingly we find only a single explicit mention of Marx's dialectic in a footnote: "I have omitted specific discussion of Marx in this paper because, whether or not we regard his findings as valid, I think it can be shown that he made no distinction between the dialectic method, as he understood it, and scientific method as applied to the historical and cultural sciences." (370) The footnote is more informative than it may seem. 

For, Hook's main strategy is to compare dialectics to ordinary "scientific method" which has a "basic unity" (378), and to find dialectics wanting in comparison to scientific method (371-379). But oddly, when he does so, he takes for granted that the metric/measure of comparison are the cannons of success internal to that scientific method. And to give a flavor of these cannons, among the criteria he identifies are "piece-meal verification" (371) and "predicting as closely as we can the specific form of the institutions of to-morrow" (375). 

Now, I don't mean to remind you constantly I am no Marxist, but even I can see that Hook is rigging the comparison against the dialectician. For Hook presupposes, oddly, that the "alleged justification of the dialectic method consists in its power to lead us to the discovery of new truths or to a deeper and more adequate understanding of old truths." But while undoubtedly dialecticians make such claims, and from my bourgois perspective often exaggeratedly so, this is not what the dialectician, is fundamentally interested in. For she is, I quote, Korsch (recall) committed to articulating "a theory of social revolution." It is plausible that if that is one's aim, one may well find that at times one has deeper understanding of social reality than those with more, say, armchair sensibilities.

Even a bourgeois intellectual like me can discern that in/with the ordinary scientific method as embraced by Hook, revolution is at best an afterthought. The scientific method (which is good at describing and predicting states of affairs) then functions as a kind of input into a different process  (i.e., changing the world). But while nobody denies that in this way science can contribute to enormous social transformations, including many unanticipated ones, this way of conceiving it allows capital to have a more than fair shot at shaping these outcomes.+ People like me would consider that a virtue of Hook's approach! 

By contrast, a key methodological move the dialectician asserts to make revolution really possible,  is "the coincidence of reality and consciousness." This coincidence makes marxist dialectic often seem weird. But as Bertell Ollman shows in Dance of the Dialectic,* the weirdness merely echoes the kind of things one finds in the whole tradition of what he calls the 'philosophy of internal relations' -- with Spinoza as one of the paradigmatic exemplars --  which simply rejects what since Tarski has come to be known as the classical account of truth. And so it is, also, no surprise, again quoting Korsch, this is "bound to appear to [critics of dialectics] as theoretically false and unscientific."

I do not mean to suggest there are no other arguments in Hook. But while all of them land serious blows, none of them take 'conduciveness to the revolution' as a fundamental aim. So, I regret to say we have returned to where started. I ruefully conclude that those purportedly most in the know about marxist dialectics (Hook, the analytic marxists, etc.) have produced refutations that ought not convince the would be revolutionary.** And while I have no standing as a score-keeper on such matters, I report as a psychological fact that it strikes me as a true scandal that these purported refutations are so obviously (to use a technical term) Quatsch.