Author: Ophelia Benson

This is a good read. At least if you’re interested in social constructivism – and how could you not be? It’s quite reflexive – a review of a book about Steve Fuller’s social epistemology. So we have three levels here: the reviewer, the book being reviewed, and the subject of the book being reviewed, which is the work of Steve Fuller. You need to know that to understand the quotations.

The framework of the book is outlined in the Introduction and further elaborated in Chapter 1. “Kuhn’s questioning of legitimation has become a central problem for discussion in the philosophy of science. The question that arises from Kuhn’s work is: What legitimizes scientific knowledge claims if science does not have a method to yield truth?” (2) Needless to say, this is a tendentious way of putting matters: what is meant by “if science does not have a method to yield truth”? Unobjectionable if it were to indicate the mere fallibilism of knowledge claims, discussable if it were to suggest instrumentalist anti-realism towards theoretical entities, interpretations become highly problematical when they deny the applicability of epistemological standards to the cognitive efforts of scientists.

Yup, that’s a tendentious way of putting matters all right. I wonder if social constructivists ever put matters in any other way. ‘If science does not have a method to yield truth’…Feh. Yeah I could put it better but Thomas Uebel did it for me, so I’ll just go with Feh.

“If science does not have the right method, a method that would guarantee access to truth, then it does not have privileged authority.” (11) That’s like saying that unless knowledge entails certainty, any belief is as good as any other. Yet no better argument for taking the radical problematic seriously is ever given

That ‘privileged authority’ trope is very popular. As, for that matter, is the slide from fallibilism to anything goes.

Again it is hard to discern an argument in Remedios’ review of Fuller’s tu quoque responses to various critics beyond the insistence that “normatively constituted groups” lie behind the “‘oversocialized individual who is a microcosm of the entire social order to which she belongs” (18). Instead, things begin to fall into place when Remedios observes that Fuller is not interested in “traditional problems of knowledge such as justified true belief” but rather “in how texts become certified as knowledge” (ibid.) and in “the material embodiment of knowledge”(19)…[I]ssues pertaining to epistemological justification are simply dropped from the discussion. Certainly Remedios’ affirmation that Fuller pursues the normative project as a “rational knowledge policy” with the goal of the “self-conscious reorganisation and administration of scientific disciplines for democratically chosen goals” (20) and his defense of Fuller against criticisms that he fails to address epistemological concerns do not allay the worry.

Uh oh. ‘self-conscious reorganisation and administration of scientific disciplines for democratically chosen goals’ is it. Have people like Fuller never heard of little items like ‘Intelligent Design’? Do they not realize that if it were put to a vote in the US, ID would replace biology in a great many public schools? Or do they know that perfectly well and think it’s only fair? Social constructivists are scary…

Remedios is aware that “philosophers may find Fuller’s rhetoric of inquiry unsatisfactory, for they may accuse Fuller of changing the subject to sociology and leaving problems of epistemic justification unanswered.” His response in Fuller’s voice, however, is equally unsatisfactory: “traditional notions of knowledge and justification are contested notions and cannot be assumed to be valid”. (7) The paucity of this response should be readily apparent. Calling notions contested does not absolve us from the task of providing defenses of the alternatives put forward. It is no good, therefore, to dismiss demands for explanations of why the replacement of epistemological concerns with political ones should help answer the original problem.

Especially since they’re the ones doing the contesting. That move is way too easy. Hey, I contest the traditional notion that the moon is a satellite of the earth, so it’s a contested notion, therefore the traditional notion that it is a satellite of the earth cannot be assumed to be valid. Period. On my say-so alone.

There’s a lot more. Check it out.

So we see that the combination of rural isolation and fundamentalist religion is, shall we say, rough on women in more places than Pakistan and in religions other than Islam.

The license the Amish have been granted rests on the trust that the community will police itself, with Amish bishops and ministers acting in lieu of law enforcement. Yet keeping order comes hard to church leaders…Once a sinner has confessed, and his repentance has been deemed genuine, every member of the Amish community must forgive him. This approach is rooted in the Amish notion of Gelassenheit, or submission. Church members abide by their clergymen; children obey their parents; sisters mind their brothers; and wives defer to their husbands (divorce is taboo). With each act of submission, the Amish follow the lesson of Jesus when he died on the cross rather than resist his adversaries.

One can spot a built-in problem with that right away. Much of the time, especially in a life based on agriculture, the chain of submission is going to stop with one person. There isn’t going to be anyone else around for that one person to submit to – so that one person can have things his own way. He’s supposed to ‘abide by’ the clergymen, apparently, but the clergymen aren’t around all the time, and he is. So for girl children and for women, even apart from the fact that they are the target of sexual predation not the perpetrators of it, there is simply a built-in disadvantage. They have to defer to brothers, fathers, husbands. Brothers have to submit to fathers, but fathers and husbands are where it stops. So if the father has a habit of raping his daughter or daughters – that’s that. And that’s even before you get to the part about permanent forgiveness.

It is sinful for the Amish to withhold forgiveness—so sinful that anyone who refers to a past misdeed after the Amish penalty for it has ended can be punished in the same manner as the original sinner. “That’s a big thing in the Amish community,” Mary said. “You have to forgive and forgive.”

You have to forgive and forgive, while male relatives rape and rape. Uh oh.

When their trust is betrayed, women like Kathryn and Sally see themselves as having little recourse…Sally didn’t call the police because she’d been taught to defer to the men in her household, even if they were her sons, and because she belongs to a community that believes the greater threat comes from without, not within.

So…not to belabour the obvious, but one implication is that teaching women always to defer to men has drawbacks that even some non- and anti-feminists might be able to perceive.

The relatively light sentences meted out to these men stand out at a time when sex offenders are punished with increasing harshness. The fear that many pedophiliacs can’t be stopped has led Congress to lengthen sentences for child sex offenders and has persuaded some states to use involuntary civil commitment laws to keep them behind bars indefinitely. Why did these Amish, by contrast, receive only mercy?

I’ll give you one guess.

Read the nice part about Anna, whose mother told the Amish dentist to pull all her teeth out for punishment. He complied. “After he had pulled the last tooth,” Anna remembered, “my mom looked at me and said, ‘I guess you won’t be talking anymore.’” Pretty. What price forgiveness and forgiveness now eh? Apparently it’s the victims who are supposed to do all the forgiving, and the bullies who get to go on bullying – as Jane Eyre pointed out to Stoical Helen Burns at Lowood. There was a lot of forgiving to be done there, too; a lot of children taught to be exceedingly deferential, a lot of bullies coasting along on all that deference and treating the deferential people like dirt.

“They don’t believe it’s any of our business,” said Roberts, Anna’s Ohio social worker, of the Amish attitude toward child abuse investigations. But it’s the job of social workers, police, and prosecutors to make child abuse their business. The state’s duty to push past the barriers thrown up by parents and the community can’t hinge on the religion they practice. Its role becomes more essential, not less, when adults wall off children from the outside world.

Exactly. That’s one place where the phrase ‘it’s their job’ makes sense. It is their job and the state’s duty. Deference to religion allows horrors to go unchecked.

We’ve been talking about passion, commitment, feeling, grievance, sincerity – about the whole idea that intensity of feeling is some sort of index of validity. Eve Garrard put it clearly: ‘do you think that one possible reason why Eagleton and (many) others are so impressed by the passion and commitment of suicide bombers, and think it must be in the service of justice and freedom, is some deep underlying moral subjectivism, ie the belief that moral claims just are validated by the sincerity and passion with which they’re held?’ I do think that, along with thinking that most people who hold that belief don’t hold it with full awareness. That it’s perhaps not so much a belief (properly so called) as a vague association, an absent-minded linkage. I’m not at all sure of that. I’m also not at all sure if that’s a charitable reading, or on the contrary an uncharitable reading that rests on the thought that people who believe anything so damn silly are the kind of people who don’t examine their beliefs carefully enough to have beliefs properly so-called.

At any rate, it all reminded me of what Mill said about his father.

For passionate
emotions of all sorts, and for everything which bas been said or
written in exaltation of them, he professed the greatest contempt.
He regarded them as a form of madness. “The intense” was with him a
bye-word of scornful disapprobation. He regarded as an aberration of
the moral standard of modern times, compared with that of the ancients,
the great stress laid upon feeling. Feelings, as such, he considered
to be no proper subjects of praise or blame.

Also of a remark of Hume’s in a letter.

For the purposes of life and conduct, and society, a little good sense is surely better than all this genius, and a little good humour than this extreme sensibility.

And Yeats’ familiar line ‘the worst are full of passionate intensity.’

Arguing (or at least speaking) for the other side, there is Keats’ ‘the excellence of every art is in intensity’. But then he was talking about art, not political thought.

This is also the argument between Elinor and Marianne in Sense and Sensibility – the novel, not the fillum. Marianne would be a suicide bomber. And yet – she has her good qualities. Intensity and passion do have their good qualities. But – ah well. Just ‘but,’ that’s all.