Objectivity as equivocating fulcrum

Let's try this again.

A year and a half ago, I wrote a piece defending the existence of objectivity. That piece is, in some ways, the perfect companion piece to my recent discussion of the Boghossian report. But I didn’t link to it, because I don’t like it. It’s not that I disagree with anything that I wrote there, I just don’t think I hit the nail squarely on the head with that one. But in discussing and thinking more about the Boghossian report over the last week, I think I came up with a better framework for making the same point. So let me try again.

Even longer ago, I wrote a piece which just summarized some of the main points of Nick Shackel’s “The Vacuity of Postmodernist Methodology.” I do stand strongly behind that piece, which is just to say that Shackel’s paper is really good, and I just wanted to tell everyone about it. I still do. Read it, please! While you’ve probably never heard of Shackel or his paper before, this is the paper where the idea of a “motte and bailey” doctrine was introduced. That concept has become quite influential, and Shackel deserves credit for originating it.

For those who are perhaps unaware, the idea of the “motte and bailey” is a metaphor that comes from medieval warfare. A motte is an impregnable fortress, located in the middle of a bailey, some desirable territory that is otherwise difficult to defend. A motte and bailey defensive doctrine is to abandon the bailey in the face of any serious attack and retreat to the motte, where the defenders can rain arrows on the attackers until they have to run away, at which point the bailey can be occupied again. Shackel’s idea is that some people argue in this way. They have a set of easy-to-defend truisms, the motte, alongside a set of ambitious and indefensible claims, the bailey. The fact that the bailey claims are indefensible will invite criticism, but when the critics arrive on the scene to make trouble, the motte-and-bailey rhetorician retreats to the motte, and insists that they’re only asserting the most uncontroversial of truisms. Radical claims resume once the skeptic is out of earshot.

Put in terms that are this straightforward, it seems like it would be impossible for the motte and bailey to work, particularly in written scholarship. You’re not just asserting the uncontroversial truisms; the controversial claims are right there, on page 12! But motte and baileys do exist, because those who deploy them are clever. The motte and bailey are carefully constructed. The key ingredient in constructing a motte and bailey doctrine are sentences that Shackel calls “troll’s truisms.” These are sentences that are ambiguous, in the sense that they can be read in at least two distinct ways. On one reading, the sentence states an obvious truism. On the other reading, it says something much more radical. The motte and bailey happens when troll’s truisms are strung together. When the skeptic challenges them, the defender points to the obvious, uncontroversial reading. But it’s quite clear from the use that these troll’s truisms are put to that the more radical reading is intended.

There are several ways to construct a troll’s truism, but one central way is by the use of an equivocating fulcrum. An equivocating fulcrum is a key term that has two different meanings, and which the speaker will strategically vacillate between. Sometimes it is clear that one meaning is the only one that makes sense, sometimes it is the other meaning, and sometimes it is genuinely indeterminate. In this way, riffing on an equivocating fulcrum generates the set of troll’s truisms which enable the motte and bailey. Of course, if this ambiguity is brought into clear focus and terms carefully distinguished, the argument falls apart. This kind of call for disambiguation is viewed as deeply suspect by practitioners of the craft. We can illustrate this by providing an example, so I’ll cut to the chase and give the example which is my central focus here: the term ‘objective’ and its cognates (‘objectivity,’ etc).

The term ‘objective’ can have two distinct meanings. One thing that ‘objectivity’ might refer to is a property of people. Objectivity, in this first sense, contrasts with biased; a person is objective just to the extent that they are not biased in their investigations or evaluations. The other thing that ‘objectivity’ might refer to is a property of facts. Objectivity, in this second sense, contrasts with relative or subjective; a fact is objective just in case its truth does not depend on any framework, perspective, or anything similar. People will sometimes talk (usually dismissively) about “capital-T truth.” I don’t know what capital-T truth is supposed to be, as distinct from lowercase-t truth (so far as I can tell, they’re both just truth), but if anything is capital-T true, it is objective facts.

Things are complicated further because the first kind of objectivity, the objectivity of persons, comes in degrees. People can be more or less biased, and thus more or less objective. ‘Objective’ is in this way a gradable adjective. But more than this, it is an absolute gradable adjective, because the scale of objectivity has an upper bound of being perfectly objective. ‘Flat’ is another term that works in this way. A surface can be more or less flat, and there is such a thing as being perfectly flat. Few things, if any, are perfectly flat; usually, when we call something flat, we just mean that it is flat enough for our purposes. But we can insist on a strict reading of the word ‘flat’ - we’re talking perfectly flat - and when we do that, it can be clear that nothing is perfectly flat. But this doesn’t mean that it’s false to say that the table is flat.

So similarly, we can think about what it would mean for someone to be perfectly objective. This would be someone who is not at all biased. So what are the possible sources of bias? Desires and interests, most obviously. Wanting something to be true has a strong effect on how we investigate or navigate the world. But beliefs are also a source of bias. Our senses don’t present reality to us pure and unfiltered; we interpret the data of our senses, and do so through the filter of our various preconceptions. So for someone to be perfectly objective, they would have to have no desires, no interests, and no beliefs. But of course that is impossible for human agents, we cannot have this kind of “view from nowhere.” So this kind of perfectly unbiased perspective is impossible.

This gives us our troll’s truism: “Objectivity is impossible.”

“Objectivity is impossible?” the skeptic asks. Surely not! “Well, of course objectivity is impossible,” comes the reply, and the argument for this is that everyone has interests and preconceptions, so objectivity is impossible. But when the skeptic drops this line of objection, the equivocation starts. ‘Objectivity’ (of persons) could mean perfectly objective or it could mean objective enough (for present purposes). Once we’ve established the motte that it’s impossible for a person to be (perfectly) objective, a certain kind of person will rush to claim the bailey, that all thinkers are hopelessly biased and thus systematically untrustworthy.

And it doesn’t stop there. Once we’ve established that objectivity is impossible, a further bailey awaits: that there is no such thing as capital-T truth, or that all such truth is hopelessly outside of our ken. The scientist might aim at discovering objective truths, but these aims are naive at best and pernicious at worst. Objectivity is impossible; haven’t you heard?

This line of argument has been advanced by many people as a rebuttal to Boghossian and his coauthors over the last few days. Boghossian insists that objectivity is essential for scholarship. But is he really so ignorant to the fact that he has various interests and preconceptions? He is no more objective than anyone else, and his conclusions are no more objective than anyone else’s. He contradicts himself by demanding objectivity, because the standards that he attempts to apply in his demand for objectivity are themselves not objective. And how could they be?

That argument might sound compelling at first blush. But go through that last paragraph and, for each instance of the word ‘objective,’ try to pin down whether I was using that word to refer to a property of people or a property of facts (and, if a property of people, what kind of property; the absolute version or the “good enough” version). It’s not easy to do. There’s a lot of sliding, and a lot of genuine ambiguity in how the words were used. That’s how an equivocating fulcrum creates troll’s truisms.

The flaw with this kind of argument can be made clear by contrasting it with a standard example of objective knowledge. “Here’s a hand,” I say, as I wave my hand in there. “And here’s another,” as I wave the other. Those are objective facts. There are hands here, really, and the existence of these hands doesn’t depend on our frameworks or conceptual schema or anything like that. And not only are there those objective facts, but I know them to be true. I may be a biased individual in many ways, but my biases, in the form of both my interests and my preconceptions, in no way threaten my knowledge that here is a hand, as I wave it in front of my face.

So while some claims might be subjective or framework-relative, some are not. “Here’s a hand” is just true. And while I might not be perfectly objective, I’m objective enough to know that here’s a hand. So objective facts, and knowledge of objective facts, are both possible.

Of course, that there are some objective facts and some knowledge of those facts doesn’t mean that all facts are objective or that knowledge of them is just as trivial as my knowledge of my hand in front of my face. But once we’ve established that objectivity of these kinds is possible, it’s no longer relevant to point to general theoretical considerations to rule out objectivity in any particular case. If objectivity exists in some cases, why is this case not one of those cases? Answering that question involves engaging with particulars.

And so in the case of Boghossian, it’s not enough to say that he must be incoherent because objectivity is impossible. Boghossian has objective knowledge of the hands in front of his face. Why might he not also have objective knowledge of the possibility of objective knowledge in the humanities, or objective knowledge of the importance of scholastic standards which are directed at attaining such objective knowledge? “Because objectivity is impossible” won’t cut it. Nor will “because Boghossian has biases.” Perhaps the best answer to that challenge is “Because the humanities are not in the business of providing any kind of objective knowledge.” But then what are the humanities in the business of?