I’m reading Thomas Kuhn’s controversial classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which Kuhn put forward, among other things, the suggestion that there not be any sense in which we can say that modern science puts us closer to the truth than Aristotelian and Ptolemaic science. Kuhn rejects the kind of foundationalist epistemology that claims we can have objective certainty about our knowledge. Since intellectuals were practically required to take a position on Kuhn in the several decades after he published, I’ve been flipping through the books on my shelf to see if I can make more sense out of discussions of Kuhn the second time through.

List night I pulled down Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, and found that its one reference to Kuhn was simply dripping with disdain:

So psychologists like Freud are in an impossible halfway house between science, which does not admit the existence of the phenomena he wishes to explain [i.e. consciousness], and the unconscious, which is outside the jurisdiction of science. It is a choice, so Nietzsche compellingly insists, between science and psychology. Psychology is by that very fact the winner, since science is the product of the psyche. Scientists themselves are gradually being affected by this choice. Perhaps science is only a product of our culture, which we know is no better than any other. Is science true? One sees a bit of decay around the edges of its good conscience, formerly so robust. Books like Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions are popular symptoms of this condition.

-Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987. 200.

Bloom is contemptuous of Kuhn and other thinkers that he takes to be relativists because he takes the desire for wisdom to be the starting point of philosophy, which is for him the only truly worthy way of life. Taking non-foundationalism as a starting point — a paradoxical position, perhaps — makes mush of the yearning for truth. If the transcendentals are out of reach, why strive? A large part of the rhetorical power of Closing comes from the series of insults in the early part of the book, which Bloom designed to evoke the passion he wants to see: You have no connection to literature! You have no heroes! Your taste in music disgusts me!

But the non-academic can make good use of non-foundational thinking without doing away with the hope for the Good, the True, the Beautiful. If there’s anything I’ve learned in my reading, it’s that a good grasp on the transcendentals is hard to come by. That is to say, real access to truth, if you can get it, is either the product of immense intellectual achievement or it’s a truly precious gift, a pearl of great price. For someone who doubts her access to truth and hasn’t formally joined an intellectual tradition, a non-foundational stance is actually good way to navigate our intellectual culture, where competing conceptions of the world offer radically different answers to the question of what the world’s really like. The non-foundational stance means that the searcher puts off the task of trying to find one way of talking that explains all the other ways of talking, and instead tries to understand different speakers in their own terms. If the searcher is reflective enough to be aware of her own tradition — and searchers should be reflective in this way — then she no longer has to consider those outsider her tradition to be fools, liars, or makers of drastic mistakes.

What’s the alternative? Bloom offers a ready-made intellectual history, into which the searcher is supposed to fit other thinkers until she has time to study them on her own. Bloom wants to convince us that any thinker we come across will fit somewhere in the frame, and that we can express their thoughts and expose their errors in the language that he offers. In my experience, non-scholars who take this approach set themselves up to terribly misunderstand thinkers that don’t fit easily in the frame. While a deep and careful study of a hard-to-understand thinker could conceivably yield a real understanding of what that thinker meant to say, the non-scholar probably doesn’t have the time for such a study, and ends up with a reduced image or a bad reading of, say, Sartre or Derrida.

It is better, I think, for the non-scholar to adopt the non-foundational stance when exploring the landscape of contemporary inquiry. The layman doesn’t have to take the position that truth is always, necessarily, and forever out of reach: her non-foundational stance can and should be combined with a sincere hope that somewhere out there somebody’s getting it right.

The conservative-attack-on-Ayn-Rand essay isn’t anything new, and I don’t know if anyone will ever top Whittaker Chambers’s classic review of Atlas Shrugged, but The New Criterion’s Anthony Daniels has made another entry in the genre. [Read more →]

I need to vent a little bit about the way the discussions under Jason’s post on markets and E.D.’s response have tended to move into debates about the merits of communism and capitalism, as if the question is whether markets can solve either all problems or none. I doubt that speaking about markets at this level of abstraction is very useful, but since we’re already doing it, I’ll toss in my opinion.

The reason that basically all large and lasting human cultures have made some space for markets (and formed black markets in the event that someone powerful tries to outlaw legal markets) is that when people trade with each other, the distribution of goods necessarily moves toward matching the map of preferences. This happens for a simple reason. If a proposed trade doesn’t alter the distribution of goods in a way that the parties to the trade prefer, then they won’t trade. In just the way that Jason described, market spaces take distributed information into account, and they’re extremely powerful and rather amazing.

So if markets work so well, why don’t we use them for everything?
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OG Scott has just started a new blog over at True/Slant that, in his words, “looks at the politics of lobbying and the impacts of lobbyists on politics,” called The Lobbiest (oh, Scott and his titles). Check out his opening salvo.

I don’t have much to say about race issues in the USA, since I think I’m still at a stage where I should be doing much more listening than speaking, but this month-old blog post by Pitchfork critic Nitsuh Abebe seems sharp enough that I should post an excerpt and point you to the rest of it. [Read more →]

E.D. mentioned Julian Sanchez’s “ressentiment” rant from Coldcocked the other day. Don’t miss Julian fleshing out his thesis.

Jason Kuznicki responds to my Nozick review, arguing that people who think some large-scale rectification of previous injustices is required before we can do anything practical about making government minimal are wrong. I don’t think his first point hits me as a target, since I’m wondering what the entitlement theory would say about specific large-scale historically unjust acquisitions or appropriations, not trying to advocate patterned distribution. But I’ll quote his other two objections:

Second, I think Nozick may err slightly in that he seems to take the advocates of rectification too much at their word. There are certainly better and worse ways of rectifying injustice within an entitlement system. We mustn’t suspend all judgment once someone yells “Rectification!”

It may very well be, as Nozick suggests, that “no considerations of rectification of injustice could apply to justify” a given redistribution. This doesn’t seem a terribly high bar to surmount. Indeed, the world overflows with unjust redistributions, and we have politics in order to fight about them.

Third, justifying a given rectification requires far more than mere ignorance about whether it’s right or wrong.

I admit that “you can’t apply Nozick’s argument to the modern United States!” was a tad hyperbolic. But my problem with rectification isn’t that I think the principle Nozick spells out can justify all our current programs. Rather, it’s that Nozick doesn’t give us a principle of rectification at all:

Idealizing greatly, let us suppose theoretical investigation will produce a principle of rectification. … The principle of rectification presumably will make its best estimate of subjunctive information about what would have occurred (or a probability distribution over what might have occurred, using the expected value) if the injustice had not taken place. (ASU, 152-3)

Presumably, Nozick the activist had some guess as to what the principle of rectification required, and which parts of the modern state could or could not conceivably be justified as an approximation of the principle. But these guesses aren’t given in the book.

For example, I am pretty convinced that any good principle of rectification would require some form of reparations to, say, descendants of slaves (at least from certain corporations and municipalities), but I don’t have the first clue how such reparations would be determined or structured on a large scale. I really don’t. I’ve no idea how to go about making a “best estimate of subjunctive information about what would have occurred … if the injustice had not taken place.” I don’t know how you’d balance the value of the redistributions we’ve already made (especially if one takes the conservative position that welfare has actually hurt the victims of historic injustice more than it has helped them). But justice is too important to brush aside the principle of rectification because we don’t think it would work out for the people to whom the injustice was done. The theory really needs a principle of rectification.

I do have to grant that “There are certainly better and worse ways of rectifying injustice within an entitlement system.” But you’ve already gone further than ASU in suggesting guidelines for rectification. And you’re right that on a the practical political level, if we accept the entitlement theory we do have to work with our best guesses as to what rectification requires. However, without a solid principle to work with, the range of possible best guesses is pretty huge.

Sometime last summer I announced that I was reading Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia, and that I’d try to post evaluations as I went. Well, due to a string of events I won’t relate here, I put the book aside for a few months, but picked it back up last week and I’ve now finished it. I’m so glad I did: if there are other books of political philosophy out there that are as delightful to read as this one, I’d like to get my hands on them. Nozick peppers his argument with stray questions and thought experiments, any one of which could provide enough material for a late-night philosophy argument. On top of that, he admits his doubts and points out weaknesses in his own argument, which is a pretty admirable way of writing. So even though I wasn’t a libertarian when I started the book and I’m not a libertarian now, I can say it’s well worth reading.

For those of you that aren’t familiar with Anarchy, State, and Utopia, it’s Nozick’s 1974 work of libertarian political philosophy, written in part to respond to John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. Nozick shores up and extend lines of argument from John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1690), arguing that nothing more than a minimal state — i.e., one which does nothing more than protect its citizens from murder, theft, fraud, etc. — can be justified. One great virtue of the book, at least from the perspective of a non-libertarian, is that Nozick is much more interested in the argument than the application, and he never lets a policy preference get in the way of structural clarity. This isn’t to say that he doesn’t have policy preferences, only that the book is not about policy, and indeed, as I’ll argue below, probably doesn’t do enough to get us from philosophy to policy.
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Esteemed Ordinary Gentleman E.D. reads the Manhattan Declaration and remarks: “Well, this is the trajectory of the modern Christian right.” Actually, not quite. The trajectory of the modern Christian right isn’t totally clear right now, and the Manhattan Declaration announces an attempt to set that trajectory — but whether it will succeed is an open question.

I realize that the inner social structure of Evangelicalism can be a bit opaque to outsiders, so I’d like to provide a little bit of context, if I can. If you read the list of the document’s signatories, you’ll see that they’re in pretty high places: seminary presidents, pastors of large churches, bishops, theologians, and think-tankers. What’s missing is the younger generation, and this document is in part an attempt to make young evangelicals (like me, maybe) fall in line. But don’t take my word for it. Here’s an excerpt from the New York Times article on the declaration:

They say they also want to speak to younger Christians who have become engaged in issues like climate change and global poverty, and who are more accepting of homosexuality than their elders. They say they want to remind them that abortion, homosexuality and religious freedom are still paramount issues.

“We argue that there is a hierarchy of issues,” said Charles Colson, a prominent evangelical who founded Prison Fellowship after serving time in prison for his role in the Watergate scandal. “A lot of the younger evangelicals say they’re all alike. We’re hoping to educate them that these are the three most important issues.”

See that? They’re worried that young evangelicals are going soft on gay marriage and abortion. In my experience, at least, they’re right to be worried: for every young evangelical that goes in the direction of Mark Driscoll, it seems another one follows after Rob Bell, getting into what’s called the “emergent church.” (And everybody goes to a church called Mars Hill.)

Anyways, that’s probably too many words for what should really be a quick point: the trajectory’s not set. See slacktivist for a somewhat more polemical response to the declaration. [h/t Lee]

The American Scene announced this season as Fall of the USA, and I had high hopes that we’d be treated to cornucopia upon cornucopia of reflections on John Dos Passos’s USA Trilogy. Alas, it’s not nearly as popular an idea as Infinite Summer. In part, it must be that autumn’s a busier time. But surely another factor is that while both Dos Passos and David Foster Wallace are intent on getting inside the problems of their eras, David Foster Wallace’s milieu is very much our own. John Dos Passos is writing about the first few decades of the twentieth century, which in some ways might as well be another planet. Nevertheless, here’s my progress report and some thoughts so far. [Read more →]

My Tar Heels had a rough day in football this weekend, losing to NC State by a point. But it was some small consolation to come across the suggestion that the Tar Heels invented the forward pass in the first place. [Read more →]

There are several bloggers and writers I used to love, but now I find them dry or irritating. I’ve gone through the same cycle with each of them. If you want to go through it too, follow these steps!

1. Go to a popular blog. The Daily Dish will do in a pinch. Click around for a while until you see an interesting paragraph quoted from some other blog, and then check out that blog. Keep doing this until you find a fresh voice making arguments that you’ve never heard before, or never heard quite in that way.

2. Subscribe to this Fresh And Interesting Blog (FAIB) in your RSS reader of choice. Repeat step 1 if desired to find more FAIBs.

3. Read regularly, comment occasionally. You should start your own blog if you find that your comments regularly exceed three paragraphs. In this case, you will want to find several other FAIBs, and put them on your “blog roll.” A good way to do this is to follow links on the primary FAIB. After a few months you will find that you have a pretty good handle on how the primary FAIB will respond to anything. At this point, the FAIB has become a Predictable But Still Interesting Blog (PBSIB).

4. Realize that the writer who drew you to the PBSIB repeats himself or herself quite a bit. At this point, two things might happen:

(4a) The writer realizes this at the same time, and, through a combination of posting less frequently and actively aiming at new ideas, turns the PBSIB back into a FAIB. Return to step 3.

(4b) The writer, cozened into complacency by fawning readers or edged into defensiveness by hostile ones, stays in the rut and becomes boring at best, self-parodic at worst. The writer now produces a Predictable And Boring Blog (PABB). Continue to step 5.

5. Let posts from the PABB pile up in your RSS reader. Scroll through them out of a feeling of obligation once every two weeks or so.

6. After a month or so, ruefully remove the blog from your RSS reader, wondering whatever happened to that fresh and interesting voice you were so excited about.

Note: If you find that the writer hardly ever repeats herself or himself (step 4) over a long period of frequent posts, congratulations. You have found a very good blog.