Author: Ophelia Benson

Massimo Pigliucci says why Fish is wrong and silly.

[T]he problem lies with Fish’s cheap rhetorical trick: Stanley seems to think that once one has refuted the naive logical positivist view that human beings can adopt a purely objective viewpoint and grasp reality for what it actually is (a position that in philosophy has been abandoned since the 1950s, by the way), voilà, all knowledge has ultimately been shown to be a matter of faith…It is simply not true, as our friend cavalierly maintains, that “once the act of simply reporting or simply observing is exposed as a fiction — as something that just can’t be done — the facile opposition between faith-thinking and thinking grounded in independent evidence cannot be maintained.” And the reason this is not the case is that there are more than two options on the table. True, facts don’t speak for themselves, and evidence is such only within a particular conceptual framework, which itself depends on certain assumptions. But the framework and the assumptions don’t need to be arbitrary. In science, they are not (contrary to postmodern literary criticism).

The web of scientific knowledge is reliable, Pigliucci says, because it works; one can keep examining particular threads, and pulling them away if necessary, without destroying the whole web.

As always in the case of postmodernism, a perfectly reasonable and potentially interesting idea (the non-independence of facts and theories, which was not discovered by postmodernists) gets blown out of proportion to justify an insane conclusion (that science is the same as religion, or that reason and faith are on the same epistemological level), a conclusion that very likely the author himself does not believe. A famous quip by philosopher Bertrand Russell comes to mind: I wish that all philosophers who do not believe in the existence of walls would get into a car and drive straight into a wall (any would do) at a speed proportional to their skepticism concerning the existence of the wall itself.

To finish, Pigliucci tells Fish off for the childish last paragraph in which he reports that somebody wrote a piece that started ‘Why is Stanley Fish so much smarter than Richard Dawkins?’

Stanley Fish is back.

Evidence, understood as something that can be pointed to, is never an independent feature of the world. Rather, evidence comes into view (or doesn’t) in the light of assumptions…that produce the field of inquiry in the context of which (and only in the context of which) something can appear as evidence.

Yes yes yes, but it doesn’t follow that any and all assumptions are reasonable and sane and that therefore any old evidence is good evidence as long as it ‘comes into view in the light of’ some assumptions.

Then there is a swerve into a new topic, the fact that some people who commented on his previous musings on God claim that religion is too optimistic. Fish knows better than that.

The religions I know are about nothing but doubt and dissent, and the struggles of faith, the dark night of the soul, feelings of unworthiness, serial backsliding, the abyss of despair.

Really?! Nothing but doubt and dissent? So the religions he knows do not include any of the majors, which are about considerably more than doubt and dissent? If the religions he knows are about nothing but doubt and dissent, he must be acquainted exclusively with very peculiar very tiny minority religions which hardly anyone is aware of. His post on the other hand seem to be about ‘God’ which usually refers to a character with some connection with the familiar and well-known monotheisms.

Brian Leiter asks Does the NY Times Not Realize That Stanley Fish is Philosophically Incompetent? Jason Brennan has an interesting comment:

Nicholas Shackel has a fun paper in Metaphilosophy called “The Vacuity of Postmodernist Methodology.” Among other things, he describes the method of “Troll’s Truisms.” The idea is that postmodernists like to express radical claims about reality and rationality, but when pressed, retreat into trivial claims no one disagrees with. Shackel gives Fish as an example of someone who does this.

I actually saw Fish perform this maneuver in person. A student group had him out here (to Brown) a few years ago. He spent 20 minutes saying that there is no objective reality, etc.–all the typical twaddle and poppycock. When some student criticized postmodernism, Fish berated the student, and then said that postmodernism is nothing more than the simple claim that all our beliefs are mediated by concepts. I was stunned.

Yep. Susan Haack calls that ‘the bit where they say it and the bit where they take it back.’

Brandon does some passive-aggressive self-chastisement:

I at least try to follow principles of amiability on this weblog. I do not always succeed; in a recent argument with Ophelia Benson in the comments thread to this post, when her response seemed to me to be a set of equivocations and red herrings of a pernicious kind that should not be tolerated on such an important subject as people’s lives, I became impatient and lost my temper; whatever the reason, however, the lapse of amiability was simply inexcusable.

I would say it’s not really the lapse of amiability itself that is inexcusable; I think a certain amount of heat is to be expected in substantive disagreements, and can be harmlessly expressed and perhaps dissipated by certain kinds of vehemence. What I think was wrong about Brandon’s reaction was the actual content of what he said – in particular this charge:

Don’t think it has escaped my notice in my years of reading you that on the topic of Muslims you only worry about the obnoxiousness and invidiousness of criticisms applied to you, and that while you’re quick to talk about Muslim liberal friends when you are being criticized, you only use them as shields against criticisms and not as friends to support in public.

That’s a very strong and very offensive accusation, and it’s also false. (Gina Khan’s Diary, anyone?) That’s what I object to – the content, not the heat. So it’s interesting and ironic and…somewhat distasteful that Brandon manages to combine this display of repentance with another round of offensive accusation. It’s interesting and distasteful that on the way to rebuking is own lapse of amiability he accuses me of pernicious equivocations and red herrings of a kind that should not be tolerated on such an important subject as people’s lives – meaning, basically, that I tell lies in an effort to harm or endanger people’s lives. Pretty poisonous stuff for a humble apologetic guy.

What’s the issue here? As near as I can tell, it’s the claim that beliefs are beliefs and that they affect 1) other beliefs and 2) actions. My underlying assumption has been that Islam entails some core beliefs, and that some of those are in tension with liberalism. Brandon’s assumption is, apparently, that Islam is completely irrelevant to how difficult it is for Muslims to be liberals.

Well…there is a sense in which that can be true: if one is talking about de facto Muslims as opposed to doctrinal Muslims. It may well be that that’s what Nussbaum meant in the Boston Review article – Muslims as a population, a group, a ‘community’ within the larger population of India. Certainly people are born into religious groups, and that doesn’t necessarily mean they sign up to all the official beliefs of the religion in question. But then – that is something that has to be cleared up. It’s not possible to be sure what is meant either way, unless it is spelled out, and in any case there is of course a huge amount of overlap: people are born into religious group X, but then the beliefs of X are handed on to them, and they may sign up to most or all of them. One can’t assume that the word ‘Muslim’ means someone who agrees with every word of the Koran, and one also can’t assume that it means the opposite.

Now, in a way, I think Brandon has a point about Nussbaum’s article. In a way my comment on it was ungenerous. Her main point was that Muslims are treated horribly in India – which is a subject I know more about because of her, specifically because of what she’s been writing about the Gujarat massacre ever since it happened. Intercommunal hatred is India’s nightmare (that is, it’s the nightmare of the people of India) – and I admire Nussbaum’s work in explaining that to Americans.

But in another way, I still think I have a point, because Nussbaum does tend to sentimentalize religions and religious beliefs, and to gloss over some unpleasant realities about them. Reading her is often an ambivalent exercise for me: I’m always having to bracket off certain bits where she lapses into rhetoric about profoundest precious etceteras. I prefer to turn a colder eye on religion.

It’s nice to think we can all get along, but it isn’t always true. The US thought the mujahideen were just the ticket for opposing atheistic global communism in Afghanistan, but that turned out to be a mistake. Before that the US thought the Shah was just the ticket for opposing the nationalization of British Petroleum in Iran, and that turned out to be a mistake too. The US made similar mistakes in Guatemala…Chile…and a good many other places. It’s better to ask searching persistent questions about exactly what we’re signing up to before we sign up to things.

Nussbaum quotes Hasan himself saying something related in her article:

The stranglehold of the orthodoxy, especially in its political and religious form, has to be loosened and slackened. The answer lies in more and more Muslim communities moving towards democracy. There is no short cut to democracy…There is no place for pharaohs in the modern world.

He’s saying there is a strangling political and religious orthodoxy which has to be loosened and slackened, and that more democracy is needed. He’s saying there is not enough liberalism, and there is a need for more. Well – that’s all I’m saying.

The Guardian continues its commitment to publish commentary from excitingly reactionary clerics and fans of clerics with the vomitings-forth of George Neumayr. His comment is an exceptionally lazy and vulgar diatribe.

Notre Dame’s now-infamous president, Father John Jenkins, is very fond of politically correct patter…This year Jenkins has rolled out his broken wheelbarrow of inane PC clichés to justify honouring the most pro-abortion American president ever.

And so on; it’s all like that.

A brilliant commenter posted a list of bishops taken from a Dallas Morning News list of Catholic bishops who protected sexually abusing priests. There are 19 bishops on the list, out of 61 who signed a petition protesting Notre Dame’s invitation to Obama. She suggested a different headline for Neumayr’s blurt:

George Neumayr and paedophile apologists are outraged by the existence of a liberal African-American president.

A hit, a palpable hit.