Digressions&Impressions

The Epistemology of Discursive Authority (ah yes, foucault, Quine, and postmodernism)

What, in short, we wish to do is to dispense with 'things'. To 'depresentify' them. To conjure up their rich, heavy, immediate plenitude, which we usually regard as the primitive law of a discourse that has become divorced from it through error, oblivion, illusion, ignorance, or the inertia of beliefs and traditions, or even the perhaps unconscious desire not to see and not to speak. To substitute for the enigmatic treasure of 'things' anterior to discourse, the regular formation of objects that emerge only in discourse. To define these objects without reference to the ground, the foundation of things, but by relating them to the body of rules that enable them to form as objects of a discourse and thus constitute the conditions of their historical appearance. To write a history of discursive objects that does not plunge them into the common depth of a primal soil, but deploys the nexus of regularities that govern their dispersion.--Michel Foucault (1969) "The Formation of Objects" chapter 3 in The Archaeology of Knowledge, translated by A.M. Sheridan Smith [1972], pp. 52-3 in the 2002 edition.

More than thirty years ago there was a buzz around Foucault and 'social constructivism' on campus. I don’t think I was especially aware of what this was about, but along the way I took a course in the ‘experimental college’ (a relic from the campus turmoil of an earlier generation) where I was introduced to the idea by way of the classic, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, then twenty five years old. (It was published in 1966.)

I never got around to reading Foucault as an undergraduate, but I was in graduate school studying with Martha Nussbaum when her (1999) polemic against Butler appeared. (I assume the essay was triggered by the second edition of Gender Trouble, but I am not confident about it.) This essay has a passage that nicely sumps up the general attitude toward Foucault that I was exposed to:

“These developments owe much to the recent prominence of French postmodernist thought. Many young feminists, whatever their concrete affiliations with this or that French thinker, have been influenced by the extremely French idea that the intellectual does politics by speaking seditiously, and that this is a significant type of political action. Many have also derived from the writings of Michel Foucault (rightly or wrongly) the fatalistic idea that we are prisoners of an all-enveloping structure of power, and that real-life reform movements usually end up serving power in new and insidious ways.”--Nussbaum "The Professor of Parody"

I was not nudged into reading Butler’s Gender Trouble during my graduate research (eventually when I became an instructor my own broad eduction started). However, I was confronted with the recent prominence of French postmodernist thought in works that now would be classified as foundational to STS, but that I was reading in virtue of my interest in the history of science such as Pickering’s The Mangle of Practice, which could generate heated debate among the PhD students. What made those debates frustrating was that we lacked distinctions so we often would talk passed each other.

A good part of those debates died down and were, subsequently domesticated after the publication of Hacking’s (1999) The Social Construction of What?, which we read immediately after it appeared. Hacking didn’t settle any debates for us, but allowed us to do more sober philosophy with it and while I do not want to credit him solely without mention of Haslanger, his book certainly contributed to the normalization and disciplining of the debate. Hacking and Haslanger also visited shortly thereafter, and so could ask for clarifications. Interestingly enough, in that book Hacking treats Foucault as a constructivist in ethical theory akin to Rawls, although he notes that others (Haslanger) treat Foucault as an ancestor to the idea that reality is constructed 'all the way down.'

As regular readers know my own current interest in Foucault is orthogonal to questions of construction. But I was struck by the fact that in his Foucault: His Thought, His Character, Paul Veyne treats Foucault fundamentally (not wholly without reason) as a Humean nominalist (and a certain kind of Nietzschean skeptic). And, in fact, the nominalism is itself exhibited by a certain kind of positivism about facts. (Deleuze might add quickly: a positivism about statements.) Veyne is not a reliable guide to matters philosophical, but I wondered if Foucault’s purported social constructivism was all based on a game of telephone gone awry in translation and academic celebrity culture.*

Now, if we look at the passage quoted at the top of the post, we can certainly why Foucault was treated as a social constructivist. The first few sentences  in the quoted paragraph do look like a form of linguistic idealism. And this sense remains even if one has a dim awareness that the passage seems primarily directed against a kind phenomenology [“presentify” is clearly an allusion to Husserls [Vergegenwartigung]], even (perhaps) trolling Heidegger (“primal soil”).

However, the point of the passage is not ontology. It’s method. (No surprise because that is sort of the general aim of the Archeology of Knowledge.) And this, is in fact instructive of Foucault’s larger project. In the passage, Foucault is, in fact, explaining that he will try to leave aside questions of ontology in his own project. This is not to deny he is interested in what we might call epistemology. But the epistemology he is exploring is what one might call discursive authority. And the effect of such authority is “the regular formation of objects that emerge only in discourse.” (emphasis added).

In fact, Foucault here is not far removed from Quine (but in a way to be made precise). In one of the most Whitehead-ian passages of Two Dogmas, Quine writes: “The physical conceptual scheme simplifies our account of experience because of the way myriad scattered sense events come to be associated with single so-called objects; still there is no likelihood that each sentence about physical objects can actually be translated, however deviously and complexly, into the phenomenalistic language. Physical objects are postulated entities which round out, and simplify our account of the flux of experience.”

Now, don’t be distracted by Quine’s ‘sense events’ or empiricism. For, what Foucault is interested in is the manner by which (to quote Quine again) ‘myriad scattered sense events come to be associated with single so-called objects.’ In particular, (and now I am back to Foucault) “the body of rules that enable them to form as objects of a discourse.” This body of rules is characteristic of an authoritative discipline. And in particular, Foucault is interested in what the social effects are of simplifications produced by postulated entities in the human sciences on these sciences and larger society. I don’t mean to suggest this is Foucault’s only game. He is also interested in the social structures that stabilize the possibility of semantics across disciplines in a particular age.

To be sure, in Quine the epistemology of discursive authority is only treated cursory (in the context of regimentation). Whereas Foucault is focused on how the sciences acquire and constitute (even replicate) such authority. But that is compatible with all kinds of ontologies in Quine’s sense or, to be heretical for a second, a metaphysically robust realism; notice Foucault’s own hint of a ‘rich, heavy, immediate plenitude.' One will not get more than hints from Foucault on what his answers might be to the kind of epistemological or metaphysical questions we are trained to ask. That, of course, is a feature not a bug of his project.

Nancy Bauer vs Carnap and Langton on Philosophical Authority

    What kind of authority is necessary for a philosopher’s vision of how things are with the world to hold sway? What is necessary, to put the question in Austinian terms, for the successful execution of a philosophical speech act? More fundamentally, what is a philosophical speech act? What sort of illocutionary force does a felicitous philosophical speech act wield? Under what conditions is such a speech act felicitous? Let us pose these questions in light of one of Langton’s philosophical speech acts. At the climax of “Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts” Langton writes: “The claim that pornography subordinates has good philosophical credentials: it is not trickery, or ‘sleight of hand’; it is by no means ‘philosophically indefensible.’” What act is being attempted in this passage? Well, at this juncture in her article Langton is epitomizing a claim that she has been trying in the article to defend. She is also engaged in a further act of claiming (that the claim that pornography subordinates has good philosophical credentials). If we inspect the felicity conditions for such an act, we will not find that having authority is one of them. But we can say more about Langton’s speech act than that she is lodging a claim. For isn’t she trying to legitimate MacKinnon’s view of the relationship between pornography and sexual subordination, to rank this claim as better justified than the claims that would purport to undermine it, and perhaps even to make it the case that the lodgers of these would-be undermining claims are silenced at the level of the success of their own illocutions—that their attempts to extol pornography will come off as unauthoritative? If so, then by her own lights these actions will misfire to the extent that she lacks the requisite authority. But what is the requisite sort of authority? What authorizes philosophical speech?
    The obvious answer is: reason itself. But this answer begs the question of how reason, on any construal of the notion, gets its authority in the culture. All you have to do is look around to conclude that, contrary to the assumption that appears to pervade philosophical writing these days, the culture does not take reason’s authority to be self-evident. Plato, for one, felt this state of affairs to be intolerable: on his view, any philosopher worthy of the name was obligated not just to commune with the forms but to come down from the mountaintop and attempt to attract the citizenry to the sublime, if almost imperceptible, beauty of reason. It was not enough for the philosopher to churn out journal articles on the mountaintop and hope that the hoi polloi would at some later date decide to take an interest in their acts of legitimating, ranking, and so on. To be a philosopher for Plato is to provide a vision of how things are with the world and to attempt to attract people to the project of recognizing themselves—or not, as the case may be—in this vision.
    Aristotle agreed with Plato. So did the medievals, and so did any number of modern philosophers. In fact, it was not until the mid-twentieth century that philosophy seems to have beaten a retreat to the proverbial ivy tower. Part of the impetus, of course, has been the increasing specialization and institutionalization of the discipline. But philosophers’ relatively recent reluctance to worry about our authority in the culture also has nobler roots. It is to some extent a product of horror at the way their colleagues’ work had been exploited by dangerous ideologues—how Marx’s investment in humanizing humanity had given way to Stalinist Russia, how Nietzsche’s celebration of human nature had provided grist for the mill of Hitler. The young Rudolph Carnap alludes to this horror in the preface to the Aufbau, as we see in the following passage:

We cannot hide from ourselves the fact that trends from philosophical-metaphysical and from religious spheres, which protect themselves against [a scientific, rational, and anti-individualistic conception of philosophy], again exert a strong influence precisely at the present time. Where do we derive the confidence, in spite of this, that our call for clarity, for a science that is free from metaphysics, will prevail?—From the knowledge, or, to put it more cautiously, from the belief, that these opposing powers belong to the past.

Vigorously progressive in his politics, committed to the ideals of socialism, and horrified by the elitism he saw in the metaphysics of, most prominently, his contemporary and compatriot Martin Heidegger, Carnap passionately believed that he was morally and politically obliged to treat philosophy as an at least potentially rigorous science. It is understandable, then, that Carnap in his day and age felt that the cost of philosophizing in the old way—the cost of attempting to arrogate cultural authority by the sheer act of writing—was simply too high. Philosophy was instead to take its carefully circumscribed place in a new world, one grounded not on the philosopher’s personal metaphysical vision but on pure reason itself. The philosopher’s goal, Carnap thought, was to employ reason to make progress on fundamental scientific questions of universal interest and importance. The social and political cost of construing the cultural role of philosophy otherwise, he claimed, was simply too high.
   Carnap is to be lauded for his relentless thoughtfulness about what he was doing, within both philosophy and the wider world. My beef is neither with Carnap nor with the style of philosophizing he bequeathed to the next century. My worry, rather, is that Carnap’s conception of philosophical reason has come apart from the reasons for his investment in it—that we have inherited his thought but not his thoughtfulness. (Crucially, I could say exactly the same thing about Freud or Wittgenstein or Kant as an ethicist.)
   What I am in effect worrying about, then, is whether we can afford to continue to cleave to the narrow conceptions of philosophy we have inherited and their implicit claims to self-evident authority. I am not suggesting that we dumb philosophy down in order to rescue the masses. I am not advocating a return, or forward leap, to any particular style or form of philosophizing. I am not denying that we take tremendous political, social, and moral risks when we attempt to provoke other people to unsettle their settled opinions. I am not encouraging us to aim too high. But I am calling for us to commit ourselves to a grander, more ambitious, and more explicit expression of interest in the question of what it is that we are doing and what licenses our doing it. What would it look like for philosophy to issue an audible call for genuine thinking, to compete, that is, with the penchant for self-anesthetization that contemporary culture encourages? What would it look like for us to aspire above all to have a say in the world?--Nancy Bauer (2015) "On Philosophical Authority" in How to do Things With Pornography, pp. 125-128 

Last week, in the context of her criticism of Timothy Williamson, I noted that Bauer's book is full of metaphilosophy. In many ways the quoted passage, which ends chapter 7, is the meta-philosophical core of the book which is why I quoted it length. 

In contemporary philosophy, clarity and rigor in argument is often held up as the ideal. And this can be understood in two ways. One sees in getting the argument right a means to facilitate further discussion (about the premises, or significance of the conclusion). I associate this (dialogic) view of argument with my former NewAPPS colleague, Catarina Dutilh Noveas, and it can also be discerned, as a dynamics of progress, in Daniel Stoljar (recall) Philosophical Progress: In Defence of a Reasonable Optimism.

The other way sees that arguments have a silencing effect at the pain of being called, as Nozick noted, 'irrational.' Nozick expressed the idea as follow:

The terminology of philosophical art is coercive: arguments are powerful and best when they are knockdown, arguments force you to a conclusion, if you believe the premise you have to or must believe the conclusion, some arguments do not carry much punch, and so forth. A philosophical argument is an attempt to get someone to believe something, whether he wants to believe it or not. A successful philosophical argument, a strong argument, forces someone to a belief” Philosophical Explanations, p. 4.*

Bauer's worry about Langton's paper has a family resemblance to Nozick's concern about arguments. I mention Nozick, because there is a natural way to construe Langton's exercise as a kind of legitimate self-defense against the previously successful efforts to delegitimize MacKinnon's views which attempt to end the silencing and subordination of women. To put that in context, in May, I put a tentative syllabus for a feminist theory course online, and a very distinguished legal and political philosopher opined on my facebook page that I should put Langton and not MacKinnon on my syllabus because Langton is far more sophisticated and, after I pushed back, that MacKinnon is philosophically not rigorous. His reaction suggests that indeed Langton has legitimated certain views (and simultaneously and ironically allows some to continue to devalue MacKinnon's contribution). And Langton has become the (ahh) authoritative spokesperson within certain overlapping disciplines -- because conforming to certain standards -- for these views.

Nozick also rejects the self-defense model: "For one's own protection it should not be necessary to argue at all, merely to note publicly what bludgeoning the others are attempting-intellectual satyagraha, to use Gandhi's term for nonviolent resistance." (5) But while this is a noble stance in philosophy, perhaps, it is not apt for the law where it might entail unilateral acquiescence in one's subordination. And while satyagraha is a legitimate political stance, it is not to be prescribed to others (because then it can be a further means of subordination). 

In fact, Langton's paper is not just directed at philosophers who did not give MacKinnon's ideas their due (because they mistakenly treated these as incoherent), it is, as the closing sentence of her paper reveals, also designed to open the door to a change in government policy/law.** And the line of influence is pretty clear: if legal philosophers and judges better understand the coherence and legitimacy of MacKinnon's views, they may well prevent courts from rejecting local (and national) anti-porn ordinances. The form of Langton's speech act is perfectly calibrated to try to shape legally influential elite opinion (which has been preventing local democratic majorities from exercising their political authority). So, it strikes me as a mistake to claim that Langton has not properly conceptualized, as Bauer claims "the illocutionary force of her own words." (114)

I mention this because while Bauer recognizes that Langton is "underwriting a particular political position," (120) Bauer also represents Langton as taking a "very carefully circumscribed role with respect to a certain feminist antipornography position...simply to remove a stumbling block--a charge of incoherence---from the path of MacKinnon and like-minded activists" (122). And as should be clear from the long block quote above, Bauer opposes to this a "grander vision of our profession, our capacity to speak in an authoritative voice in our culture, our capacity to call ourselves and others to task of serious reflection." (122) But because the way elite legal opinion co-shapes judicial review, Langton's approach is not a good exemplar for "the irrelevance of contemporary philosophy in the culture at large....for to be worthy of the name feminists must...be committed to serious and social transformation." (116) For, while Langton's approach (writing in P&PA in 1993) may not be known to the culture at large it does help shape social transformation. 

What Bauer misses is that Stateside, and in places with traditions of constitutional review, the authority of philosophical speech is albeit partially, imperfectly, and indirectly, secured by the constitutional order and the customs/practices and force that secure it. (And if one thinks that philosophy or reason is immanent in the sciences, then the political process institutionalizes philosophy into a powerful force in society in many more (imperfect, partial etc.) ways.) This is why it is not wholly misleading to call constitutional government an Enlightenment project. For contemporary critics (often religious and nationalist in character), these constitutional orders also exhibit the dangers of giving a certain philosophy too much power.+ 

Notice that if this is right, it suggests it is wrong to treat Carnap and others move into the ivory tower as a retreat from political influence. (This is not Bauer's view, but it is sometimes associated with Reisch's influential interpretation of cold war philosophy of science.) For in the proper constitutional order, philosophy's uptake is mediated by judiciary, bureaucracy, technology, and sciences. This is, in fact, a kind of mediated trickle-down of philosophy. 

But this observation actually helps illuminate Bauer's larger project: given the incentives, it is very tempting to speak to fellow elites and not the culture at large if you happen to be a philosopher aiming at political influence. On my view this is, for example a feature of utilitarianism as a technology of government, and helps explain some of its moral failures (when it fails to notice that those not at the table or not as sophisticated with the tools may be harmed badly). Of course, political influence may well fall short of social transformation and so one can, with equal justice, describe the position I have just outlined as a form of pacification of philosophy.

So far I have suggested that Bauer has asked the right question about the authority of philosophical practice. I also have suggested she offers the right diagnoses of most of it, but that it misfires in the case of Langton's project. And while I agree with Bauer that in general, philosophers have 'appropriated' Austin's distinctions against the spirit of Austin's own philosophy, Langton's speech act is an important example of how philosophers can do things with words in our political culture. And I say this even though I agree with Bauer's more methodological criticisms of Langton's approach to claims of pornography's authority (on which I have been silent here).

Now,  I have not suggested that Bauer is wrong to want something different from philosophy. But I think her position is at odds with herself and that her use of Plato exhibits this tension. For even in her depiction of Plato, philosophy does not have an authoritative voice in a culture if by that we mean capable of shaping and even transforming the culture.

Rather, what she shows Plato as doing (and I think this is a plausible and inspiring reading of Plato's philosophy and its role as an instrument to call people to the academy) as being skilled in persuading some to an intellectual way of life in which they are challenged to think autonomously. She never mentions Thoreau, but Thoreau's (delayed, perhaps) effect on the young may be thought an instance of such a true education. This still involves philosophy with a public-facing rhetoric, but it is not a rhetoric aimed at the people at large.  

Yet, feminism has -- by her own lights -- a broader ambition: to end patriarchy, and, thus, to transform society radically. And one may well believe that a kind of mediated trickle-down and the Platonic call to individuals are insufficient if it is divorced from a larger social movement shaping the culture, as it were, from below.  Of course, social movements are populated by individuals who think for themselves and recognize themselves in properly transformed social reality. But if you want an authoritative philosophy apt for that project, I suspect you have to be willing to play with the fire that Carnap warns against.

 

 

Covid Diaries: hermeneutic self-care

On a beautiful Sunday evening I got my AstraZeneca (Oxford) jab at the Francis Crick Institute. They were running ahead of schedule, so they called me (on a foreign mobile phone-number!) to ask me to come in early. It was brilliantly organized; the crew was cheerful -- 'yes, I was ready to make history!' I responded --  and I was in and out of the building under fifteen minutes. Sometimes, I get a glimpse of why the the Brits adore their NHS.

Anticipating the moment six weeks ago, my wife had initiated the effort to get me -- a foreign citizen living abroad -- registered in the NHS through her GP. (Long story, but the bureaucratic hurdles to my family arrangements are the effect of Brexit.) It was not a very easy process, not the least because of my foreign phone-number. If I had been able to leave my bedroom, I would have gotten a local phone, but all the High street phone-stores were closed through lockdown anyway.

As it happened, just after I confirmed my booking for the jab, I met my local GP last Thursday for the first time. She was extremely empathetic and informative. She had also had suffered from long haul covid since March 2020, and had just gone back to work full time again after a year of struggles. (I suspected she still struggled with it because she was a bit scattered and very fatigued; she did not deny my observation.) She took her time with my story, referred me for blood-work and to a special long haul covid clinic to see a neurologist. She was adamant that I should not expect much medical help, but that she did expect my convalescence to be enhanced by proper diagnosis of my symptoms. It will help you craft your narrative. I noted quietly, based on a small sample, that while Dutch physicians love their new-age 'energy-levels,' the English are more into hermeneutic self-care. In her view, covid had induced a viral encephalitis in me. After six months you should see real improvement. A bit of mental calculation told me, I was probably near the end of my fourth month.

Maybe it was the emotional let-down of feeling heard, but the next day (after my visit to the local GP) I felt awful. It was a long day of fatigue and headaches. I was concerned because due to my wife's shift, I was alone with my son for three whole days. But Saturday I awoke after a restful sleep and then had my best 48 hours since mid December. (For my covid diaries, see here;  here;  here;  here;  here;  here;  here; here; here; here; and here.) We walked all over NW3 to farmer's markets, tennis, table-tennis, and other errands. When I got the jab, the superstitious part of me worried that I was messing with success. 

I was right to be worried. Monday I had a strange new headache. On Tuesday I had a strange new nausea; and on Wednesday I was intensely fatigued. While the blood-test on Tuesday was unavoidable, the whole experience was dispiriting: standing in long queues in a truly ugly building (the Royal Free), and a computer mishap that turned me into Eric Liesser. I very much regretted going to my dental hygienist yesterday (mercifully she turned off the radio for me). But postponing it every other week for the last few months, had felt like giving in to the microbes. I also had a sore arm, but it was not as bad as I had worried.

In order to cheer myself up, I tried reading the final lecture/chapter of Foucault's Birth of Biopolitics in order to see if I could still do philosophy and re-start these digressions properly. (I really do want to complete my series on the book this Spring.) It was not a wholly silly plan; I have been reading sci fi for two weeks now. And increasingly the reading has become less effort and pure fun. This has been good for my sanity; I love watching movies endlessly in the theatre, but at home I actually find it tiresome.  I now was almost at the 'being-sick is fun' part of my convalescence. 

Anyway, I have learned that there is a major difference between reading a book without much concentration immersed in a kind of flow and reading a book with concentration in order to, say, write about it. In the second, I am constantly taking mental notes (sometimes I scribble these in the margins) and I am in a perpetual silent conversation with the implied author about the work I am digesting. To be sure the flow is not absent in the second kind of reading, which I find very enjoyable and ordinarily (forgive me) energy enhancing, but it involves a further mental activity that I am clearly incapable of now. What's interesting to me -- switching briefly to auto-phenomenology of disease -- is that I find my hyper-engaged ordinary style of reading no less immersive than the kind of reading without much concentration now. 

As regular readers know, one of the side-effects of my covid (or the encephalitis) is a great deal of irritability when engaged with conversations with more than one person at a time (or having radio or music in the background during a conversation), and any zoom/phone conversations. It's pretty clear to me -- I am, after all, the editor of a volume on sympathy -- that my capacity to engage in even modest sympathetic activity has been greatly reduced. This is why I have compared myself recently to an Asperger's. I had not quite realized before that my manner of reading involved so much mental, dialogic activity.  It's a skill that presupposes a brain that I don't have at the moment.

Interestingly enough, and undoubtedly not a coincidence, a lot of the sci-fi novels I have been reading have been exploring the nature of such dialogic activity by positing brains with two or more minds. It's a nice mirror to all the plot-devices that explore the nature of networked intelligence (and AI). A brain with two minds also is a nice metaphor, thus, for reading and so these sci-fi space operas are engaged in a sly form of intertextuality.

It didn't help me, of course, that in violation of  all teaching manuals, Foucault introduces whole new special jargon in the final lecture! (This prevented me from reading the lecture merely at the surface in the way I am reading social media.) He gets away with it not because he is Foucault, but because he treats his lectures at the Collège de France as serial in nature rather than as self-standing series. (There are cross-references among them.)* It's a bit unfair to say this (and given Derrida's criticism of Searle, ironic), but by the end of the 1970s, he is clearly also understanding himself as a franchise.

 

 

21 March 1979: Foucault Diagnoses American Analytic Philosophy (XXXI)

The second interesting use of these neo-liberal analyses is that the economic grid will or should make it possible to test governmental action, gauge its validity, and to object to activities of the public authorities on the grounds of their abuses, excesses, futility, and wasteful expenditure. In short, the economic grid is not applied in this case in order to understand social processes and make them intelligible; it involves anchoring and justifying a permanent political criticism of political and governmental action. It involves scrutinizing every action of the public authorities in terms of the game of supply and demand, in terms of efficiency with regard to the particular elements of this game, and in terms of the cost of intervention by the public authorities in the field of the market. In short, it involves criticism of the governmentality actually exercised which is not just a political or juridical criticism; it is a market criticism, the cynicism of a market criticism opposed to the action of public authorities. This is not just an empty project or a theorist’s idea. In the United States a permanent exercise of this type of criticism has developed especially in an institution which was not in fact created for this, since it was created before the development of the neo-liberal school, before the development of the Chicago School. This institution is the American Enterprise Institute whose essential function, now, is to measure all public activities in cost-benefit terms, whether these activities be the famous big social programs concerning, for example, education, health, and racial segregation developed by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations in the decade 1960–1970. This type of criticism also involves measuring the activity of the numerous federal agencies established since the New Deal and especially since the end of the Second World War, such as the Food and Health Administration, the Federal Trade Commission, and so on. So, it is criticism in the form of what could be called an “economic positivism”; a permanent criticism of governmental policy.
Seeing the deployment of this type of criticism one cannot help thinking of an analogy, which I will leave as such: the positivist critique of ordinary language. When you consider the way in which the Americans have employed logic, the logical positivism of the Vienna School, in order to apply it to scientific, philosophical, or everyday discourse, you see there too a kind of filtering of every statement whatsoever in terms of contradiction, lack of consistency, nonsense. To some extent we can say that the economic critique the neo-liberals try to apply to governmental policy is also a filtering of every action by the public authorities in terms of contradiction, lack of consistency, and nonsense. The general form of the market becomes an instrument, a tool of discrimination in the debate with the administration. In other words, in classical liberalism the government was called upon to respect the form of the market and laisser-faire. Here, laissez-faire is turned into a do-not-laisser-faire government, in the name of a law of the market which will enable each of its activities to be measured and assessed. Laissez-faire is thus turned round, and the market is no longer a principle of government’s self-limitation; it is a principle turned against it. It is a sort of permanent economic tribunal confronting government.--Michel Foucault, 21 March, 1979,  translated by Graham Burchell, Lecture 10, The Birth of Biopolitics, 246-247 [emphases added]

It's difficult to leave the riches of lecture 9 behind without exhausting all possible angles of comment, but it it is clear that in lecture 10 Foucault starts harvesting the fruits of the first nine lectures. This lecture contains two great set-pieces: (i) the comparison between the neo-liberalism of ORDOs and Chicago-school in part to explore the contrasting analysis of the relationship between market/state and market/society; (ii) the evolution of what we may call law and criminality since the Enlightenment in light of Becker's approach. So, it may strike you as a bit perverse that today's post zones in on an apparent aside. 

So, the emphasized passage is odd because it is by no means obvious that Foucault's audience ("one") will have thought of this particular analogy. As I have noted throughout my comments, Foucault is constantly assuming a kind of Bien pensant marxism in his audience. I don't want to make too much of the grammatical structure of his thought -- and I am not conformatible in the French [On ne peut pas ne pas penser, en voyant s'exercer ce type-là de critique à une analogie que je laisse encore une fois sous la forme d'analogie], but it is notable that the (analogical) thought is inevitable (and that Foucault represents his own thought in such disassociated way, and being so analogical) while Foucault takes responsibility for conveying it in the (analogical) manner he has the thought. 

Before, I get to the substance of Foucault's claim, a bit of context is useful. First, I would not be surprised if the possibility of visiting Berkeley (which starts the following year) was not already on Foucault's horizon. As we know he was visiting California from the mid 70s onward. Second, Foucault would have tracked Derrida's confrontation with analytic philosophy, first in the brilliant, and oddly neglected, (1973) The Archeology of the Frivolous. This book is ostensibly about Condillac, but it is simultaneously (recall this post) a critique of Foucualt's earlier practice of archeology and a clever exploration of the nature of analysis. I would be amazed if Foucault were unfamiliar with it because I think it can help explain some important shifts in Foucault's method(s)/stance(s). And then in the infamous exchange with Searle (Foucault's future colleague) that unfolded through the 1970s.* I assume that Foucault would have been familiar with this 'event'. So, perhaps, for Foucault, a possible personal confrontation with American analytic philosophy would have made the thought inevitable.

Let's return to the emphasized bit in the quoted passage from lecture 10 above. And to avoid misunderstanding, Foucault here is not discussing ordinary language philosophy. Earlier, in Lecture 4 (see p. 76) Foucault had noticed the significance of the movement from Vienna (and Freiburg) of certain intellectual practices to the States.** And this point gets amplified by Foucault's surprising organicist commitment in lecture 8, that when ideas travel from their origin, they are radicalized/amplified in new environments. (We may call such intensification in a new ecological niche a law of memetics!) So, on Foucault's view, we may say that what starts out as possible source of emancipation in Left Vienna, is turned into a form of speech policing Stateside.+ 

And Foucault is explicit that the policing speech is not just directed at ordinary speech, but also at scientific and philosophical speech. The significance of this is that Foucault interprets the (ahh) tools and practices of this branch of analytic philosophy in terms of technologies of control.

As an aside, it is worth noting, and a kind of historical irony, that Foucault here is kind of tracking the general atmosphere of victory of Quine-ean regimentation and, especially, a wider naturalizing program(s) over the Carnapian explanation, which had explicitly limited itself (recall here; and here) to artificial speech. I use 'general atmosphere' because what Foucault is describing (as theoretical virtues and non-virtues "contradiction, lack of consistency, nonsense",) while undoubted familiar in some sense, is surely not Quine-ean regimentation (with its own specialist clarified language)--this is a diffuser form of score-keeping familiar from polemics and classroom instruction.

So, I use 'general atmosphere' for another reason. Because the analogy itself is I think itself intended to point to what happens when certain practices leave the rarified technical discussion in elite journals and seminar rooms, and become a more general mode of thought. For, as a disciplinary practice of deploying (philosophical) technologies of speech control that American analytic philosophy is used as an elucidatory analogy for the fact of what happens when think tanks deploy techniques developed by the Chicago school to try to score and police government policy.

This is not to say one can avoid mentioning Quine. For Quine's (rather juridical) tribunal of experience is now transformed (by way of the magic of analogy) "into permanent economic tribunal confronting government."  That is to say, as the ideas of the Chicago school leave Hyde Park and are institutionalizes by well financed interests, a democratic-republican government is now made to account itself not to the voters, and their representatives, or the press, or supreme court judges, but to an intellectual edifice that deploys (protected) theoretical speech. And this edifice represents itself a strand of the liberal tradition that, as Foucault argued in lecture 9, is itself one of the animating principles of the constitutional order. 

I return to the previous paragraph in subsequent digressions on Birth of Biopolitics. Foucault leaves hanging what to make of his view of American analytic philosophy. It's important to realize that the analogy is not a moralizing criticism. If I understand Foucault's larger meta-philosophical (political) position, he thinks that the development and application of technologies of control have a kind of inevitability to them. And it is not impossible -- but here i speculate -- that he believes that (the philosophical politics of) philosophical speech itself is (given the significance of the law of non-contradiction to its way of being) also, always, constituted by technologies of control. And what may be novel here, is unusual clarity and zest of the Americans in deploying such technologies of speech control.

 

 

 

 

On the Development of Social Kinds: On Brian Epstein's The Ant Trap

Brian Epstein’s The Ant Trap: Rebuilding the Foundations of the Social Sciences is a wonderful contribution to metaphysics, social ontology, and philosophy of social science (and relevant for all the human sciences). I rarely find myself agreeing with Christian List, but I agree with his claim (blurbed on the back of the book) that the book is “beautifully written and packed with insights.”  I predict that down the road the book will improve the practice of establishing causes in social science (about that some other time more). The book also contains lovely material on all kinds of topics (including a fantastic essay on Virchow, an excellent treatment of reduction in the sciences, fine criticism of Searle on social ontology, amongst other gems, etc.)

The key concepts in the book are "anchoring," "grounding,"* and "frame principle(s)." Here I can't do justice to Epstein's rich discussion, but if I provide his definitions, you'll get a sense of the position.

• A frame "is a structure containing...a set of possible worlds in which the grounding conditions for social facts are fixed in a particular way. Each of these possible worlds may have different grounding facts from one another." (78)
• A frame principle "gives the grounding conditions not just for the actual world, but for all possibilities" [that belong to a particular frame]. (78) This principle is the constitutive principle of the frame.
• Anchoring is "a relation between a set of facts and a frame principle. For a set of facts to anchor a frame principle is for those facts to be the metaphysical reason that the frame principle is the case." (82) (So anchoring is external to a frame.)
• Grounding is "a relation between facts."** In the context of Epstein's inquiry he uses '"grounding" to describe a relation within a frame between the more fundamental "grounding facts" (or grounding conditions) and what he calls "social facts." A social fact  is a "fact that corresponds to a proposition that has any social entity as a constituent;" a social fact might "have social objects as constituents, or it might have social properties as constituents, or both." (67).

There is a "separate inquiry" within social ontology into grounding and anchoring (86). In addition, Epstein insists that "the grounding inquiry tends to precede the anchoring inquiry." (86) It is certainly the case that in much data-driven social science the anchoring inquiry is simply taken for granted, but as Epstein's wording implies, there is no firm reason why one inquiry ought to precede the other.

Epstein uses these distinctions to diagnose a lot of confusions in existing discussions about social ontology. (I was especially impressed by his ability to sort out a whole variety of conflations in discussions about 'indvidualism' in social science/social ontology.) But in what follows I want to flag one limitation of his existing (sorry for the pun) framework. I don't think the objection I am about to raise is fatal; I suspect it can be repaired, too. I quote before I comment:

In speaking about social kinds...it is useful to think of them as the categories we might use in the social sciences, but remain open-minded about the sorts of categories these might be. Maybe the social kinds are the same as the social properties. Maybe they are a subset of the social properties. Or maybe they are different things altogether. To make progress, we do not need to start with comprehensive understanding. We can just regard "social kind" as a generic way of referring to categories like these.

Social kinds--like social properties--have fixed instantiation conditions. Or, more appropriately, we might say that kinds have fixed membership conditions. The conditions under which something is a member of a social kind are the same across all times and possibilities. The reason for this is the same as the one I gave above. Social kinds serve a variety of functions: we employ them for recognizing things, classifying things in various situations, finding and correcting departures from norms, drawing inductive inferences, and accomplishing other practical matters (68; [emphasis in original]).

Here Epstein inherits what I take to be the traditional problem of analytic philosophy's thinking about concepts and kinds (a problem which tempts some folk toward pragmatism, after all). To be sure, for lots of projects, Epstein's approach is sufficient. But I think it is inappropriate if one is, say, interested in the electoral franchise over time in the UK and its (former) Colonies. Membership conditions in electoral franchises -- let's stipulate -- have evolved rather dramatically over time. Moreover, a whole host of functions and symbolisms have been added and subtracted from belonging to (or being denied membership in) the franchise in the English speaking world alone.

On Epstein's approach to social kinds, in the case of dramatic changes in franchises one is comparing different social kinds over time (as the membership conditions and the grounding relations between the frame principles and the social kinds shifts). Now this can be the right stance for some purposes; it can be really illuminating to recognize that the franchise has become a  different kind. But this view of social kinds is also a self-limitation on his approach. (The issue also came up obliquely in my response to his excellent NYT piece on evolving conception of marriage.) So, what's needed is to augment Epstein's picture with a view that allows social kinds to evolve over time or that allows comparison of the 'same' social kind in different frames.

 

 

On refereeing

Schliesser: I am being overwhelmed by refereeing requests

Big Deal Philosopher: Life is short; I only review for the top journals.

Schliesser (enviously): define 'top'

Big Deal Philosopher: Healy 4; maybe Ethics, too.

Schliesser (even more enviously): I would feel as if I were free-riding. How about tenure reviews?

Big Deal Philosopher: no more than two or three a year.

Schliesser (whispering): I hate you.

One unexpected side-effect of blogging has been the marked increase in referee, tenure, and blurbing requests in my life. (I am not attributing the whole increase to blogging; undoubtedly some of it has to do with normal seniority.) I largely keep saying yes to many more requests than I would like. I doubt duty has much to do with my service. I self-justify my enduring commitment to refereeing with three reasons:

(i) I enjoy shaping the future of the field--call that the gate-keeper-function.

(ii) I have a vague sense that I need to give back to the profession that has treated me so well, including, especially, some very generous referees of my earliest papers; we're in it together, after all--call that the vocational spirit. (Maybe for some this would count as duty.)

(iii) I recognize that the really senior scholars I admire keep reading outside their own privileged circle; by refereeing I stay aware of what's happening and stave off the worst features of a certain form of intellectual narcissism common at the top (see Josh Armstrong's review of Searle for what I have in mind)--call that the stay fresh strategy.*

As my 'research days' get consumed by refereeing and other (often reviewing) obligations, (i-iii) start to seem increasingly quixotic.  I have never felt that refereeing is rewarded by academic employers. (The present post was prompted by this one at Dailynous; sadly the discussion is very brief.) In fact, in my experience, at institutions that incentive-ize refereed journal publications (as is increasingly common in European grant-driven research environments [recall]) there is a tacit, corrupting encouragement to free-ride on other people's editing and refereeing efforts.  Since I have been amply rewarded by these same institutions, I feel like I owe the system (see II above).

When I started blogging, I advocated -- following a suggestion by Alva Noë -- to give referees partial credit for accepted papers (this was an obsession at the time--there are a whole bunch of more posts I did). That is, their names should be listed on the published paper (in the manner of how some learned societies include the fellow who communicated a paper) and, ideally, their referee reports should be available online. While I imagine that risk-averse referees will let fewer papers through (and thereby stay secret), the proposal gives credit where (partial) credit is due. Implementing the proposal may also help expose refereeing echo-chambers/buddy systems. (I have seen some science journals include anonymized referee reports with publications.) I still defend the proposal, especially because more and more journals seem to be working with a-quasi-algorithmic demand of two positive reports before a paper can be accepted in effect entailing that the editor(s)'s name(s) on the mast-head does not convey a seal of quality, but (no less important) organizational skill and commitment.

There was a period in which I hoped that the (philosophical) blogosphere would facilitate the creation of a new knowledge economy in which journal publication becomes far less relevant to professional advancement. (Yeah, that is a self-serving hope because it would liberate me from writing such articles. Schliesser daydream: "Yes Dean X, I understand you want to hire me as Distinguished Professor of Digital Philosophy and your only demand is that I keep blogging?") But while some blogs certainly have created a (newish) version of the gate-keeping function, with (solid) jobs scarce relative to (increasing) number of PhDs, credentialing by a limited number of journals stands to become only more important.

At some point, I kind of expected that the system would simply grind to a halt--everybody with multiple papers under review waiting for some referee report. But editors are actually getting better at nudging us in various ways (undoubtedly relying on the journal for peer-reviewed nudge-technologies).

Having said that, I need to turn to that overdue report.

 

On Searle on Williams

Yes. Well, Bernard was a very good friend of mine. He had an enormous influence on me of the kind that would be hard to describe because it was mostly just admiration for his sheer intellectual abilities. I think Bernard was as intelligent as any human being I’ve ever met. He had a kind of quickness which was stunning. Now one consequence of that is there’s a sense in which people who knew him well, or at least in my case, we always feel the published work is not up to the level of the Bernard we remember. Yes, it’s wonderful and admirable, the published work, but the particular fire and light that came from discussions with Bernard are lost on the printed page. Now whether that’s inevitable, or whether or not he had actually been more patient about sitting down and doing a hard slog necessary to write a great book, I don’t know. I know that in the last years of his life he suddenly became very productive. I think -- I mean now since we’re talking about somebody I admire -- that in some ways his career was a disappointment to his admirers because he never produced a work of the calibre of his highest ability. And one of the reasons for that is he had all this other stuff going on. He was always on some Royal Commission, or dining in Buckingham Palace...

He could see instantly the flaws in arguments, including his own. This was the fatal element: that Bernard could see the limitations of philosophical theories, but they led to him seeing the limitations of his own theories, and that was partly debilitating.--John Searle interviewed by Tim Crane [HT Dailynous]

Searle's recent interviews have been making a splash (recall). I am a bit sad that in these interviews, nobody knowledgeable interrogates his exchanges with Derrida.

Anyway, Searle's comment on Williams has escaped, I think, scrutiny. Williams's career was not a professional failure; he was at one point Knightsbridge Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge and Deutsch Professor at Berkeley. His books are widely cited (I blogged about his truth book once), and some of his thought experiments have become evergreens in moral philosophy. I read Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy before I went to graduate school and it assured me that analytical philosophy need not be forfeited to the technicians. (Recently, I wrote a paper on moral luck in which I offer a correction to his account from the vantage point of Adam Smith's treatment.)

Searle's comments remind us of two non-trivial facts: (i) it's very hard to capture in print "the particular fire and light that came from discussions;" (ii) even the most talented and best situated amongst us (e.g. Williams) are unlikely to write "a great book." The two facts are connected, although not by logical entailment. The known professional ways of communicating philosophy -- the journal article, the book -- are both designed to prevent 'fire and light.' Some such affect, "quickness," and "insight" (a key word in the interview with Searle) are not the product of journal articles and books, specially written in the registers of analytical philosophy, in particular; it embraces the ideals of responsible speech in its self-image opposed to purported Heideggerrian nonsense.

John Searle does not like the Extended Mind

I think there’s no question that we’re getting an impoverished sensibility as a result of overexposure to electronic media. I don’t read much philosophy, it upsets me when I read the nonsense written by my contemporaries, the theory of extended mind makes me want to throw up…so mostly I read works of fiction and history. I love reading history books and I love reading works of fiction, there’s just an enormous amount of great stuff written.

Faulkner, the great American modernists, I can’t tell you the influence they’ve had on me. No philosopher has influenced me as much as Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald – they’ve had an enormous influence on my whole sensibility – and the whole American modernist tradition. There are so many great history books and great novels, not to mention poetry and other forms of literature, that I spend much more time on literature than I do on philosophy. I’m not boasting about that, I’m complaining, I probably should read more philosophy than I do. But I think a lot of works of philosophy are like root-canal work, you just think you’ve got to get through that damn thing.--John Searle in NewPhilosopher [HT: Lucas Thorpe on FB]

There is no doubt that in old age (Searle is "past 80") some mechanisms can reduce our normal social inhibitions. I wouldn't be surprised if the reduced presence of ordinary routines of external, social control -- work, friends, spouses, etc. -- plays some role in the process. The impartial spectator within can do her job more forcefully in the presence of the right sort of real spectators, after all. And, if we can distribute some of our memories into our environment (computers, diaries, pictures, emails, etc.), why not some of our socially relevant monitoring? This idea is a kind of corollary to the idea of an 'extended mind,' which Searle -- once one of the most important professional philosophers around -- finds so upsetting.