How central to the disciplines they're criticizing do you think broadly subjectivist or relativist views of truth are? There's a bit in the report I thought was exactly right, but where it seemed to me to point in a different direction from where they went on to go:
"Although enormous numbers of scholars in the humanistic disciplines profess such [relativist] views, in practice views of this sort are rarely applied consistently. Scholarship that speaks the language of postmodernism and officially repudiates the rhetoric of truth and objectivity almost always proceeds in practice by giving reasons and marshalling evidence. This is clearest when these views take themselves to be exposing the false claims to objectivity in previous scholarship."
They go on to say that nevertheless, the commitment to relativism causes various problems, but while I'm inclined to agree about the problems, I'm more skeptical about the causal claim. Here's a possibility I don't take myself to be in a position to rule out. Relativist talk in the humanities is largely window dressing. Very often, it's used to dismiss criticisms from "dominant epistemologies" without thoroughly engaging them, but such dismissal is possible on all sorts of rhetorical grounds; if relativism weren't trendy, others would be used. (E.g., imagine someone at Jacobin dismissing the work that comes out of academic economics departments as bourgeois ideology. No relativism there!)
So I find myself quite often agreeing with their claims about improper politicization of scholarship in the humanities--I think they provided plenty of good examples, and it's easy to come up with plenty more, though probably impossible to make a compelling case to skeptics that such exercises don't amount to cherry picking--but pretty skeptical that a commitment to relativism is actually playing an important role in driving these problems.
I think part of the issue is that they bend over backwards to say that the problem isn't political imbalance in the professoriate, whereas I think it's extremely hard to imagine a professoriate that would consistently apply proper standards of scholarship to politically sensitive claims even while knowing that their colleagues would be overwhelmingly more likely to ding them in professionally consequential ways--not publish their papers, not give them jobs, not fund their grants, etc.--for erring on one side than the other.
I don't really disagree. In my original discussion of the report, one of my biggest concerns was that the "second path" and "third path" that rely on a use of relativism are overweighted relative to the "first path" which isn't. I could have added that there are other, obvious, undiscussed paths to bad, partisan scholarship.
The question of how much work in the humanities is sophistry is different from the question of how much of that sophistry is load-bearing when it comes to some of the larger issues in higher education and the humanities in particular. And where I come down on this is that the sophistry is bad whether or not it's load-bearing. As philosophers, we have the most straightforward value to add by calling out sophistry. A necessary but not sufficient part of needed academic reforms is attacking bad scholarship qua bad scholarship. And if one form of bad scholarship gets replaced with another form of bad scholarship, we'll have to attack that, too. But the effort to discredit relativism seems to me an indispensable part of the push for reform. If the line is that the work is all good, we just don't like the politics, well, they don't like our politics. We must make the case that the work is bad if it really is bad; and it is. And to the extent that the work as it exists is bad because of a common glib relativism, it's important to drive home that relativism (at least in its common, glib form) is dumb, and work based on the assumption of relativism is therefore bad scholarship
I don't mean to say "the work is good, we just don't like the politics", but rather, when work touches on politically sensitive topics, it's often bad, but usually not bad for distinctively philosophical (e.g., relativist) reasons.
I suppose I agree that philosophers have a comparative advantage in the kind of relativism-critique you're offering (and which the report contained), but despite having a lot of philosophers on it, it wasn't billed as "here are the distinctively philosophical problems with contemporary scholarship in the humanities".
I dunno about what the report was "billed as," but that's what the report IS, and it's quite explicit about that in the report itself. One of my frustrations about the larger discussion of the report is that lots of people want it to be something that it's not. It really is just a discussion of some distinctively philosophical problems with contemporary scholarship in the humanities! And yes, there's some discussion of how those philosophical problems tie into larger pathologies, of course, and the connection between the philosophical problems and those larger pathologies is somewhat oversold. But the report is primarily about the quality of the scholarship. And the main flaw identified with the scholarship is that everyone's a relativist and so no one puts in any effort to show that their theories are actually true, and obvious objections are waved away on relativist grounds.
"And the main flaw identified with the scholarship is that everyone's a relativist and so no one puts in any effort to show that their theories are actually true"
This is what I'm disagreeing with; the causal link between the part before the "and so" and the part afterwards.
And as for the "billed as" bit, I do think the report presented itself as giving a kind of status report on scholarship in the humanities, in which relativism played a big role. If you think, like I do, that relativism is a small part of the story of what ails the humanities right now, then I think it makes sense to say that relativism got too much emphasis in the report. But a report billed as: "here's what *philosophers in particular* have to contribute to critiquing the humanities", then a focus on relativism would make more sense.
Let's suppose someone needed to produce a work of text that included less commonly used words plus jargon, but they were both a prescriptivist and generally believed they were communicating to an educated (rather than lay) audience. Would their beliefs on this regard impact their work?
Let's assume someone believed that theism was not only false but harmful, would this assumption impact how they talk about religious people and how their address questions even tangentially related to religious concepts, like using “God” in casual conversations or having religious exemptions for dress codes?
I think your objection operates like that of someone who would demand proof of relevance for the former supposition or the latter assumption when addressing questions of conduct or bias. It beggars belief. Yes, people's worldviews impact how they do their jobs. How could they not?!
EDIT:
"Bourgeois ideology" dismissal is a genetic critique. It says one’s position reflects their interests, so it's suspect. But it presupposes a fact of the matter that ideology is obscuring; the critique is compatible with, even parasitic on, realism about economic truth. One can still, in principle, rebut it by showing that one's economic views or models aren't serving capital, or that they are true regardless of whose interests they serve.
Relativism does something else. It doesn't just flag the critic's standpoint as interested, it denies the critic's standard any claim to correctness at all, because there's no truth for either side to track. That's not bias flagging, it's disqualifying the very possibility of adjudication.
So the actual test case… when someone waves off a "dominant epistemology" objection, are they saying "you're compromised" (Jacobin style, answerable in principle) or "there's nothing here to be right or wrong about" (relativist, not answerable even in principle)? If it's mostly the former, your skepticism holds. If it's the latter, relativism isn't cover, it's the permission structure that lets engagement be deferred indefinitely rather than merely delayed.
The stuff after your edit is sort of my point. I was giving the "bourgeois ideology" example as a very non-relativist but nevertheless dismissive thing you could say to avoid engaging a critique, and suggesting that if what you really want to do is not engage with some position, "that's just your perspective" (relativist) and "that's just bourgeois ideology" (non-relativist) can function similarly.
And as to why I suspect it doesn't make a big difference, it's for a number of reasons. Maybe #1 is that it can't be consistently applied, and so my sense is that it's mainly used opportunistically; to provide rhetorical support for something people wanted to say anyway, rather than functioning as an ideological commitment that actually explains what positions they defend. As a pretty loose analogy, think about something like Christianity or Islam as a system of beliefs explaining the behavior of European imperialists or Arabic/Islamic conquerors. Is there support in Christian and/or Islamic texts for converting people at the sword? Sure, you can find it. You can also find support for pacifism, anti-slavery, etc. I think it's a pretty standard line that, in the West throughout quite a long time, Christianity was more the moral language in which people on both sides of any number disputes expressed themselves than a distinctive ideological commitment that explained how Christians as a whole conducted themselves differently from people in the rest of the world. That's roughly the kind of thing I mean to be saying about relativism in the humanities.
It's also from actually reading stuff in humanities. In my limited experience, I definitely see the case for systemic charges of bias, improper politicization, and the like. Calling everything and anything you don't like "neoliberal", etc. So I've got my complaints! But I see relativism/subjectivism much much less.
Great post Matt, very clear and very engaging for a philosophy of truth nerd like myself. I am going to write a whole post on the nature of truth to reply to this one!! 🍻
Four thousand miles from the United States, this controversy feels a bit like the beginning of Goethe's Faust: "On Sundays, holidays, there's naught I take delight in, / Like gossiping of war, and war’s array, / When down in Turkey, far away, / The foreign people are a-fighting."
But I feel like suggesting that, if there is to be a discussion in good faith between parties who disagree about these things, it would be helpful to foreground the fact that within the postmodernist-influenced critical humanities (PMICH) camp, self-criticism has been going on for a long time already. The first major back-to-the-drawing-board rethink of PMICH, Bruno Latour's "Why Has Critique Run out of Steam?", was published in 2004: that's 22 years ago, when many of the undergraduates who now need to be protected from the excesses of PMICH were not even born yet. And in the meantime it has already assumed the status of a classic with anthologisations, hundreds of pages of commentary literature, and a place on a thousand reading lists: it's to this scene what "On Sense and Reference" or "On Denoting" is to analytic philosophy. I think there should be the same requirement for current critics of PMICH to read up on its existing in-house critics as there is for PMICH people to engage with the criticisms currently being aired.
Also, framing the problem as a subjectivist theory of truth is only one possible way of putting the matter, and perhaps not the most illuminating one. There is no entailment from a subjectivist view of truth to a weak view of revisability. This always seems to be implied in moves from theories of truth to worries about what it means for claims that we hold dear. I'd like to suggest that the requirement which is not being met by much of PMICH is (at least as much as the requirement of a workable theory of truth) the requirement of falsifiability. Or if that sounds too Popperian, defeasibility. What would it take for a position held under a subjectivist theory of truth to be given up by those who hold it?
This is excellent. Clarifying and entertaining alike.
I do have a lingering point of confusion as to what you see as the value of the critical humanities. You write:
“Third, this is not to say that academic work in the humanities or the various “interpretive disciplines” is all presumptively hogwash. There is plenty of good critical humanistic work to be done. Work in the humanities needn’t consist in investigation of objective truths. It can, for instance, be done by applying different interpretive lenses to texts, to social practices, and to much else besides. But the kinds of subjective truths that come out of this kind of interpretive exercise should be understood as thin subjective truths, consisting entirely of objective facts about the relationship between a critical lens and its object of study. Applying those critical lenses can be a worthy and edifying pursuit, but let’s not let the interpretive nature of this work make us lose sight of the fundamental anchoring of the discipline in truth.”
So at first you seem to suggest they are valuable because they provide some good other than objective truth. Then you say their subjectivity is of the thin sort which, if you scratch it, breaks down to objective truths. But then, isn’t the value that they provide ultimately the illumination of some objective truth, just arrived at by detour? That is, are they being evaluated by some totally different standard (in which case, why not all the critical humanities?) or ultimately by the same standard as any other type of inquiry?
The thought that I was getting at there is a bit underdeveloped, but I'm thinking of English classes where there are a standard toolkit of critical lenses you could apply to a text. So, to take a very traditional example, "Read Hamlet by focusing on gender relations. What do you notice?" I think that can be a worthwhile exercise, and a way to get more out of the text than you might get by just doing an unstructured reading. Work that aims to apply existing critical lenses or to develop new ones (we have a Marxist lens, let's put in the work to develop a Hayekian one as well. Or a Bayesian lens, fuck, why not?) seems to me to be totally fine as a form of scholarship. The truths that are revealed in this way are thin subjective truths (basically just objective truths) of the form "Here's how this lens fits on this text," which is more or less a straightforward matter of fact. But the value of that scholarship doesn't consist primarily in the uncovering of that objective fact, but rather in the way that it can help readers get more out of the experience of reading the text. Does that make sense?
It does, more or less. I do still wonder, though, what the relationship is between what readers are able to get from the experience of reading the text, and objective truth. Applying a gender lens to Hamlet, do they become attuned to real objective features of the text they otherwise would have missed? Learn something about the gender relations/attitudes of Shakespearean England in general? Develop some faculty for identifying and analyzing objective features of gender relations that are also applicable in their own lives? Or are you thinking of something genuinely orthogonal to objective truth like, say, aesthetic appreciation? This interest me as I'm curious how whatever criterion you're applying would be used to separate the good and bad humanities, critical or otherwise.
> But then, isn’t the value that they provide ultimately the illumination of some objective truth, just arrived at by detour?
Perhaps — only that truth may not be so much about the subject they try to explore in their papers, but about the way their minds work, objectively. Which could be fundamentally different from that of… more scientifically minded people, let’s put it that way.
Think AI. It sounds like it knows what it is talking about — but does it really? Or has it just learned to sound like it? And isn’t that exactly what we asked it to do when we trained it on every human text we could find — to read it and learn to sound like it? And isn’t that what many human children feel we ask them in classrooms? Their minds, after all, are being powered by the same neural networks that power LLMs — and many may end up relying primary on that particular faculty, learning to imitate, not the real thing.
I propose that this is one of many conundrums that can never be solved for as long as we stick with the propositional theory of truth. It is wrong -- truth is not propositional, it is not even verbal or symbolic. We are only [supposed to] use words as a communication tool, to describe, to others, what we *see* in our minds -- our visual/spatial internal representations, our mental simulations of the reality outside our minds. We have this capacity to imagine how that reality must work -- by constructing its virtual counterpart in our minds. Now, that virtual reality -- however much of it you have managed to construct -- is your knowledge and your truth.
And it is subjective, yes. But it is also meant to be a simulation of the same objective reality that we all share and are part of.* So the ultimate goal it to align our individual simulations with that reality, and, as result, make our individual simulations mutually aligned. In other words, our truths are subjective, but we strive to make them objective.
So it all makes sense in the end, but not if we keep looking for truth in words themselves -- because there is no truth in them. Language is but a communication tool, imprecise and imperfect because it does not have to be otherwise. As long as the listener can -- through dialog, through back and forth, through asking repredtely for clarifications and explanations -- reconstruct in their mind the models that you are trying to describe, that's good enough.**
The real problem, as I see it, is not with epistemology -- it's psychological. The complexity of simulations -- and how much of reality they cover -- vary greatly between individuals. Some have very little knowledge in that sense, but they have plenty of intuitive ideas. And even though they rarey describe their models when they talk, they have learned to sound like they do. And that's the scientific definition of bullshit.
* The existence of such a reality -- and its being understandable as a machine (and so modeled) at least in theory -- is something we can only assume. But we can keep testing that assumption, say by imagining a house or a chariot, by trying to build those IRL, and by seeing if we can actually live in that house and ride that chariot. And given the technological civilization we have created that way, I’d say the bet on us sharing the same understandable reality has panned out pretty well.
** The rigor is in the mechanics of the model, not necessairly in its verbal description.
Are you assuming there's some tight connection between rejecting relativism and making falsifiable claims? The charge "humanists make unfalsifiable claims" strikes me as very different from "humanists presuppose relativism."
In my recent abortive attempt at grad school, one reading resonated for me for all the wrong reasons. The article in question was Believing Clayboy, by Steven Vandeerstay. The significance of the article, and why it was assigned reading, is because Vandeerstay fails to understand that Clayboy, a teenage cocaine dealer, conceptualizes his life decisions in such a way that's so alien to Vandeerstay that Vandeerstay can't even fundamentally understand Clayboy's thought process. For example, that Clayboy's decision to ditch school had less to do with any grievance with the school as it did the fact that his neighborhood friends were not in school.
What perplexed me about the rigidity of Vandeerstay's thinking is that his entire research was premised on the idea that Thatcherite style ideology, that there is a clear simple cause-and-effect element to explain crime, was wrong. Yet Vandeerstay went about his interviews with Clayboy as if all of Clayboy's actions had a clear cause-and-effect. I did not, and still do not, see how Vandeerstay could have proved his original thesis under his original presumptions. Vandeerstay's methodology, not the inscrutable nature of Clayboy's reasoning, was the reason why Clayboy's actions didn't make sense to him.
While the article frames Vandeerstay's realization of this as a triumph, the victory felt hollow to me. At no point does Vandeerstay even acknowledge, yet alone comprehend the implications of, the fact that his methodology led him down a wild goose chase because it practically required him not to actually listen to Clayboy's explanations. It's also almost certainly why every other prisoner except for Clayboy refused to participate in his project, because that's what they're used to in regard to academics.
What I'm getting at with this reply is, I don't know that I'd even quantify the phenomenon you're discussing here as a left-wing bias. There's nothing left-wing about failing to understand that a poor relationship with institutions, compared to a good relationship with social groups, leads to people prioritizing their relationships with social groups over maintaining good standing with the institutions. Vandeerlay is the academic, and Clayboy is the prisoner, because Vandeerlay cares about the institutions liking him and Clayboy doesn't.
That's the objective truth. But by fetishizing the process by which Clayboy came to his own conclusion, Vandeerlay obfuscates, rather than elucidates, why Clayboy made the decisions that he did in his own subjective self-interest. Clayboy's thought process is simple enough to objectively observe as long as we try to conceptualize them from Clayboy's perspective instead of simply assuming that everyone can or should be able to see the world the same way that Clayboy does.
What I find especially frustrating about all of this is that for all practical intents and purposes this is just orientalism by another name. Even orientalism itself is fetishized to only refer to the specific racial dimensions of what Edward Said was talking about fifty years ago. And good luck suggesting Edward Said, or any other critical theorist, might have written analysis that's intrinsically flawed based on information we have now that wasn't around back then.
This is my main grievance with critical theory personally. It seems impossible to disprove anything provided the person saying it has enough citations, even if everyone knows full well the original analysis is premised on faulty information. You don't see anyone else in any other discipline acting like this. "Einstein" is literally shorthand for a brilliant person but tell any physicist that you can't question something because Einstein said it and they will, quite correctly, look at you as if you're an imbecile.
How central to the disciplines they're criticizing do you think broadly subjectivist or relativist views of truth are? There's a bit in the report I thought was exactly right, but where it seemed to me to point in a different direction from where they went on to go:
"Although enormous numbers of scholars in the humanistic disciplines profess such [relativist] views, in practice views of this sort are rarely applied consistently. Scholarship that speaks the language of postmodernism and officially repudiates the rhetoric of truth and objectivity almost always proceeds in practice by giving reasons and marshalling evidence. This is clearest when these views take themselves to be exposing the false claims to objectivity in previous scholarship."
They go on to say that nevertheless, the commitment to relativism causes various problems, but while I'm inclined to agree about the problems, I'm more skeptical about the causal claim. Here's a possibility I don't take myself to be in a position to rule out. Relativist talk in the humanities is largely window dressing. Very often, it's used to dismiss criticisms from "dominant epistemologies" without thoroughly engaging them, but such dismissal is possible on all sorts of rhetorical grounds; if relativism weren't trendy, others would be used. (E.g., imagine someone at Jacobin dismissing the work that comes out of academic economics departments as bourgeois ideology. No relativism there!)
So I find myself quite often agreeing with their claims about improper politicization of scholarship in the humanities--I think they provided plenty of good examples, and it's easy to come up with plenty more, though probably impossible to make a compelling case to skeptics that such exercises don't amount to cherry picking--but pretty skeptical that a commitment to relativism is actually playing an important role in driving these problems.
I think part of the issue is that they bend over backwards to say that the problem isn't political imbalance in the professoriate, whereas I think it's extremely hard to imagine a professoriate that would consistently apply proper standards of scholarship to politically sensitive claims even while knowing that their colleagues would be overwhelmingly more likely to ding them in professionally consequential ways--not publish their papers, not give them jobs, not fund their grants, etc.--for erring on one side than the other.
I don't really disagree. In my original discussion of the report, one of my biggest concerns was that the "second path" and "third path" that rely on a use of relativism are overweighted relative to the "first path" which isn't. I could have added that there are other, obvious, undiscussed paths to bad, partisan scholarship.
The question of how much work in the humanities is sophistry is different from the question of how much of that sophistry is load-bearing when it comes to some of the larger issues in higher education and the humanities in particular. And where I come down on this is that the sophistry is bad whether or not it's load-bearing. As philosophers, we have the most straightforward value to add by calling out sophistry. A necessary but not sufficient part of needed academic reforms is attacking bad scholarship qua bad scholarship. And if one form of bad scholarship gets replaced with another form of bad scholarship, we'll have to attack that, too. But the effort to discredit relativism seems to me an indispensable part of the push for reform. If the line is that the work is all good, we just don't like the politics, well, they don't like our politics. We must make the case that the work is bad if it really is bad; and it is. And to the extent that the work as it exists is bad because of a common glib relativism, it's important to drive home that relativism (at least in its common, glib form) is dumb, and work based on the assumption of relativism is therefore bad scholarship
I don't mean to say "the work is good, we just don't like the politics", but rather, when work touches on politically sensitive topics, it's often bad, but usually not bad for distinctively philosophical (e.g., relativist) reasons.
I suppose I agree that philosophers have a comparative advantage in the kind of relativism-critique you're offering (and which the report contained), but despite having a lot of philosophers on it, it wasn't billed as "here are the distinctively philosophical problems with contemporary scholarship in the humanities".
I dunno about what the report was "billed as," but that's what the report IS, and it's quite explicit about that in the report itself. One of my frustrations about the larger discussion of the report is that lots of people want it to be something that it's not. It really is just a discussion of some distinctively philosophical problems with contemporary scholarship in the humanities! And yes, there's some discussion of how those philosophical problems tie into larger pathologies, of course, and the connection between the philosophical problems and those larger pathologies is somewhat oversold. But the report is primarily about the quality of the scholarship. And the main flaw identified with the scholarship is that everyone's a relativist and so no one puts in any effort to show that their theories are actually true, and obvious objections are waved away on relativist grounds.
"And the main flaw identified with the scholarship is that everyone's a relativist and so no one puts in any effort to show that their theories are actually true"
This is what I'm disagreeing with; the causal link between the part before the "and so" and the part afterwards.
And as for the "billed as" bit, I do think the report presented itself as giving a kind of status report on scholarship in the humanities, in which relativism played a big role. If you think, like I do, that relativism is a small part of the story of what ails the humanities right now, then I think it makes sense to say that relativism got too much emphasis in the report. But a report billed as: "here's what *philosophers in particular* have to contribute to critiquing the humanities", then a focus on relativism would make more sense.
Let's suppose someone needed to produce a work of text that included less commonly used words plus jargon, but they were both a prescriptivist and generally believed they were communicating to an educated (rather than lay) audience. Would their beliefs on this regard impact their work?
Let's assume someone believed that theism was not only false but harmful, would this assumption impact how they talk about religious people and how their address questions even tangentially related to religious concepts, like using “God” in casual conversations or having religious exemptions for dress codes?
I think your objection operates like that of someone who would demand proof of relevance for the former supposition or the latter assumption when addressing questions of conduct or bias. It beggars belief. Yes, people's worldviews impact how they do their jobs. How could they not?!
EDIT:
"Bourgeois ideology" dismissal is a genetic critique. It says one’s position reflects their interests, so it's suspect. But it presupposes a fact of the matter that ideology is obscuring; the critique is compatible with, even parasitic on, realism about economic truth. One can still, in principle, rebut it by showing that one's economic views or models aren't serving capital, or that they are true regardless of whose interests they serve.
Relativism does something else. It doesn't just flag the critic's standpoint as interested, it denies the critic's standard any claim to correctness at all, because there's no truth for either side to track. That's not bias flagging, it's disqualifying the very possibility of adjudication.
So the actual test case… when someone waves off a "dominant epistemology" objection, are they saying "you're compromised" (Jacobin style, answerable in principle) or "there's nothing here to be right or wrong about" (relativist, not answerable even in principle)? If it's mostly the former, your skepticism holds. If it's the latter, relativism isn't cover, it's the permission structure that lets engagement be deferred indefinitely rather than merely delayed.
The stuff after your edit is sort of my point. I was giving the "bourgeois ideology" example as a very non-relativist but nevertheless dismissive thing you could say to avoid engaging a critique, and suggesting that if what you really want to do is not engage with some position, "that's just your perspective" (relativist) and "that's just bourgeois ideology" (non-relativist) can function similarly.
And as to why I suspect it doesn't make a big difference, it's for a number of reasons. Maybe #1 is that it can't be consistently applied, and so my sense is that it's mainly used opportunistically; to provide rhetorical support for something people wanted to say anyway, rather than functioning as an ideological commitment that actually explains what positions they defend. As a pretty loose analogy, think about something like Christianity or Islam as a system of beliefs explaining the behavior of European imperialists or Arabic/Islamic conquerors. Is there support in Christian and/or Islamic texts for converting people at the sword? Sure, you can find it. You can also find support for pacifism, anti-slavery, etc. I think it's a pretty standard line that, in the West throughout quite a long time, Christianity was more the moral language in which people on both sides of any number disputes expressed themselves than a distinctive ideological commitment that explained how Christians as a whole conducted themselves differently from people in the rest of the world. That's roughly the kind of thing I mean to be saying about relativism in the humanities.
It's also from actually reading stuff in humanities. In my limited experience, I definitely see the case for systemic charges of bias, improper politicization, and the like. Calling everything and anything you don't like "neoliberal", etc. So I've got my complaints! But I see relativism/subjectivism much much less.
Great post Matt, very clear and very engaging for a philosophy of truth nerd like myself. I am going to write a whole post on the nature of truth to reply to this one!! 🍻
Awesome, looking forward to it.
Four thousand miles from the United States, this controversy feels a bit like the beginning of Goethe's Faust: "On Sundays, holidays, there's naught I take delight in, / Like gossiping of war, and war’s array, / When down in Turkey, far away, / The foreign people are a-fighting."
But I feel like suggesting that, if there is to be a discussion in good faith between parties who disagree about these things, it would be helpful to foreground the fact that within the postmodernist-influenced critical humanities (PMICH) camp, self-criticism has been going on for a long time already. The first major back-to-the-drawing-board rethink of PMICH, Bruno Latour's "Why Has Critique Run out of Steam?", was published in 2004: that's 22 years ago, when many of the undergraduates who now need to be protected from the excesses of PMICH were not even born yet. And in the meantime it has already assumed the status of a classic with anthologisations, hundreds of pages of commentary literature, and a place on a thousand reading lists: it's to this scene what "On Sense and Reference" or "On Denoting" is to analytic philosophy. I think there should be the same requirement for current critics of PMICH to read up on its existing in-house critics as there is for PMICH people to engage with the criticisms currently being aired.
Also, framing the problem as a subjectivist theory of truth is only one possible way of putting the matter, and perhaps not the most illuminating one. There is no entailment from a subjectivist view of truth to a weak view of revisability. This always seems to be implied in moves from theories of truth to worries about what it means for claims that we hold dear. I'd like to suggest that the requirement which is not being met by much of PMICH is (at least as much as the requirement of a workable theory of truth) the requirement of falsifiability. Or if that sounds too Popperian, defeasibility. What would it take for a position held under a subjectivist theory of truth to be given up by those who hold it?
This is excellent. Clarifying and entertaining alike.
I do have a lingering point of confusion as to what you see as the value of the critical humanities. You write:
“Third, this is not to say that academic work in the humanities or the various “interpretive disciplines” is all presumptively hogwash. There is plenty of good critical humanistic work to be done. Work in the humanities needn’t consist in investigation of objective truths. It can, for instance, be done by applying different interpretive lenses to texts, to social practices, and to much else besides. But the kinds of subjective truths that come out of this kind of interpretive exercise should be understood as thin subjective truths, consisting entirely of objective facts about the relationship between a critical lens and its object of study. Applying those critical lenses can be a worthy and edifying pursuit, but let’s not let the interpretive nature of this work make us lose sight of the fundamental anchoring of the discipline in truth.”
So at first you seem to suggest they are valuable because they provide some good other than objective truth. Then you say their subjectivity is of the thin sort which, if you scratch it, breaks down to objective truths. But then, isn’t the value that they provide ultimately the illumination of some objective truth, just arrived at by detour? That is, are they being evaluated by some totally different standard (in which case, why not all the critical humanities?) or ultimately by the same standard as any other type of inquiry?
The thought that I was getting at there is a bit underdeveloped, but I'm thinking of English classes where there are a standard toolkit of critical lenses you could apply to a text. So, to take a very traditional example, "Read Hamlet by focusing on gender relations. What do you notice?" I think that can be a worthwhile exercise, and a way to get more out of the text than you might get by just doing an unstructured reading. Work that aims to apply existing critical lenses or to develop new ones (we have a Marxist lens, let's put in the work to develop a Hayekian one as well. Or a Bayesian lens, fuck, why not?) seems to me to be totally fine as a form of scholarship. The truths that are revealed in this way are thin subjective truths (basically just objective truths) of the form "Here's how this lens fits on this text," which is more or less a straightforward matter of fact. But the value of that scholarship doesn't consist primarily in the uncovering of that objective fact, but rather in the way that it can help readers get more out of the experience of reading the text. Does that make sense?
It does, more or less. I do still wonder, though, what the relationship is between what readers are able to get from the experience of reading the text, and objective truth. Applying a gender lens to Hamlet, do they become attuned to real objective features of the text they otherwise would have missed? Learn something about the gender relations/attitudes of Shakespearean England in general? Develop some faculty for identifying and analyzing objective features of gender relations that are also applicable in their own lives? Or are you thinking of something genuinely orthogonal to objective truth like, say, aesthetic appreciation? This interest me as I'm curious how whatever criterion you're applying would be used to separate the good and bad humanities, critical or otherwise.
> But then, isn’t the value that they provide ultimately the illumination of some objective truth, just arrived at by detour?
Perhaps — only that truth may not be so much about the subject they try to explore in their papers, but about the way their minds work, objectively. Which could be fundamentally different from that of… more scientifically minded people, let’s put it that way.
Think AI. It sounds like it knows what it is talking about — but does it really? Or has it just learned to sound like it? And isn’t that exactly what we asked it to do when we trained it on every human text we could find — to read it and learn to sound like it? And isn’t that what many human children feel we ask them in classrooms? Their minds, after all, are being powered by the same neural networks that power LLMs — and many may end up relying primary on that particular faculty, learning to imitate, not the real thing.
I propose that this is one of many conundrums that can never be solved for as long as we stick with the propositional theory of truth. It is wrong -- truth is not propositional, it is not even verbal or symbolic. We are only [supposed to] use words as a communication tool, to describe, to others, what we *see* in our minds -- our visual/spatial internal representations, our mental simulations of the reality outside our minds. We have this capacity to imagine how that reality must work -- by constructing its virtual counterpart in our minds. Now, that virtual reality -- however much of it you have managed to construct -- is your knowledge and your truth.
And it is subjective, yes. But it is also meant to be a simulation of the same objective reality that we all share and are part of.* So the ultimate goal it to align our individual simulations with that reality, and, as result, make our individual simulations mutually aligned. In other words, our truths are subjective, but we strive to make them objective.
So it all makes sense in the end, but not if we keep looking for truth in words themselves -- because there is no truth in them. Language is but a communication tool, imprecise and imperfect because it does not have to be otherwise. As long as the listener can -- through dialog, through back and forth, through asking repredtely for clarifications and explanations -- reconstruct in their mind the models that you are trying to describe, that's good enough.**
The real problem, as I see it, is not with epistemology -- it's psychological. The complexity of simulations -- and how much of reality they cover -- vary greatly between individuals. Some have very little knowledge in that sense, but they have plenty of intuitive ideas. And even though they rarey describe their models when they talk, they have learned to sound like they do. And that's the scientific definition of bullshit.
* The existence of such a reality -- and its being understandable as a machine (and so modeled) at least in theory -- is something we can only assume. But we can keep testing that assumption, say by imagining a house or a chariot, by trying to build those IRL, and by seeing if we can actually live in that house and ride that chariot. And given the technological civilization we have created that way, I’d say the bet on us sharing the same understandable reality has panned out pretty well.
** The rigor is in the mechanics of the model, not necessairly in its verbal description.
Are you assuming there's some tight connection between rejecting relativism and making falsifiable claims? The charge "humanists make unfalsifiable claims" strikes me as very different from "humanists presuppose relativism."
In my recent abortive attempt at grad school, one reading resonated for me for all the wrong reasons. The article in question was Believing Clayboy, by Steven Vandeerstay. The significance of the article, and why it was assigned reading, is because Vandeerstay fails to understand that Clayboy, a teenage cocaine dealer, conceptualizes his life decisions in such a way that's so alien to Vandeerstay that Vandeerstay can't even fundamentally understand Clayboy's thought process. For example, that Clayboy's decision to ditch school had less to do with any grievance with the school as it did the fact that his neighborhood friends were not in school.
What perplexed me about the rigidity of Vandeerstay's thinking is that his entire research was premised on the idea that Thatcherite style ideology, that there is a clear simple cause-and-effect element to explain crime, was wrong. Yet Vandeerstay went about his interviews with Clayboy as if all of Clayboy's actions had a clear cause-and-effect. I did not, and still do not, see how Vandeerstay could have proved his original thesis under his original presumptions. Vandeerstay's methodology, not the inscrutable nature of Clayboy's reasoning, was the reason why Clayboy's actions didn't make sense to him.
While the article frames Vandeerstay's realization of this as a triumph, the victory felt hollow to me. At no point does Vandeerstay even acknowledge, yet alone comprehend the implications of, the fact that his methodology led him down a wild goose chase because it practically required him not to actually listen to Clayboy's explanations. It's also almost certainly why every other prisoner except for Clayboy refused to participate in his project, because that's what they're used to in regard to academics.
What I'm getting at with this reply is, I don't know that I'd even quantify the phenomenon you're discussing here as a left-wing bias. There's nothing left-wing about failing to understand that a poor relationship with institutions, compared to a good relationship with social groups, leads to people prioritizing their relationships with social groups over maintaining good standing with the institutions. Vandeerlay is the academic, and Clayboy is the prisoner, because Vandeerlay cares about the institutions liking him and Clayboy doesn't.
That's the objective truth. But by fetishizing the process by which Clayboy came to his own conclusion, Vandeerlay obfuscates, rather than elucidates, why Clayboy made the decisions that he did in his own subjective self-interest. Clayboy's thought process is simple enough to objectively observe as long as we try to conceptualize them from Clayboy's perspective instead of simply assuming that everyone can or should be able to see the world the same way that Clayboy does.
What I find especially frustrating about all of this is that for all practical intents and purposes this is just orientalism by another name. Even orientalism itself is fetishized to only refer to the specific racial dimensions of what Edward Said was talking about fifty years ago. And good luck suggesting Edward Said, or any other critical theorist, might have written analysis that's intrinsically flawed based on information we have now that wasn't around back then.
This is my main grievance with critical theory personally. It seems impossible to disprove anything provided the person saying it has enough citations, even if everyone knows full well the original analysis is premised on faulty information. You don't see anyone else in any other discipline acting like this. "Einstein" is literally shorthand for a brilliant person but tell any physicist that you can't question something because Einstein said it and they will, quite correctly, look at you as if you're an imbecile.