I took a short break from posting about the book I’m working on to review Purser’s book on mindfulness—which seems to have been of little interest generally. Except for a handful of nasty personal emails, and some incomprehensibly stupid discussion of my post elsewhere on the internet, there wasn’t a whole lot of response. It seems I’m just not capable of making my concerns with mindfulness clear to most people.
Which is, of course, my biggest concern regarding the book I’m working on: can I make my point clear to my target audience? So I’m going to post a draft of one of the short chapters from Part II of the book (see the outline: Working Outline). I hope any interested readers will let me know if my arguments, and my prose, are clear enough to be effective.
Chapter 7: Realism
It is a common assumption that we can never know anything objectively, as it is in itself; that we have access merely to our distorted perception of external reality. Remember the discussion of the Kantian concept of the noumena? That the “thing as such” is beyond our access, and we only ever deal with the limited concepts possible for the human mind? Our goal here is to escape this error. It is an error that has long baffled attempts to correctly understand how ideology works.
The goal of this chapter is to shift the founding assumption from which we begin when thinking about realism—that is, about what it means to be able to say of something that it is real. Remember that, as with all the chapters in this section, I am not going to make an extensive argument for a particular kind of realism; it would take a book longer than this to make such an argument in a way anyone versed in contemporary philosophy would understand, much less be convinced by. Our goal here is simply to point up the usually implicit assumptions from which we begin, and to suggest that we try beginning from different ones.
There is a universal assumption that realism requires objectivity. We must be able to see something from what is often called a “God’s-eye view” in order for our account of it to be realist. Short of this, we are seeing only a distorted mental image of the thing, and so not seeing “reality” at all. And since this God’s-eye view is impossible, realism is impossible.
But remember my analogy of the x-ray. When we x-ray an arm to see if it is broken, we are not at all looking at the arm “objectively.” We are looking at it with an intention, and are purposefully distorting the image of it. Nevertheless, what we find is very much the reality of the current state of the arm!
Realism, as I mean it, makes certain claims, each of which could be argued for cogently, but which I will simply state as basic assumptions to start:
- That there are things that exist independently of our knowledge about them.
- These things will impact us in ways determined by their own metaphysical properties, regardless of how, or whether, we know about them.
- We can gain objective knowledge of such things—which is to say knowledge of what the metaphysical natures of the things are regardless of their role in our intentions.
This either seems obvious or absurd to most people today, either in need of no argument or so implausible that no argument for these assumptions will be given a hearing. I will try to give a minimal defense, and simply ask that we make the attempt to think from these assumptions and see what happens.
The more difficult claim to argue for, thought, will be that these assumptions also apply to Md things:
- Md things may have both causes and effects of which we remain unaware.
- They will often impact us in ways we do not intend or expect.
- We can gain objective knowledge of these Md things, including of those causes and effects which are beyond our initial intentions and expectations.
I don’t know how evident these things are to you at this point in reading this book, but they seem to be difficult to grasp even for those who seem to be arguing for realism. So I am going to offer a defense of this position in an unusual way: by defending it against the errors made by those who are claiming to support the realist position.
Let’s begin with the example I mentioned in the introduction to Part II, from the book Retrieving Reality by Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor. They are attempting to recover the possibility of realism from the general philosophical position dominant today, which would deny it. However, toward the end of the book they discuss the matter of whether a thing actually has any kind of objective essence of its own, separate from what we think of it, and conclude that in order to save realism we will have to admit that it does not. They use the example of gold. We might think that it is in one sense objectively true of gold that its defining feature, what makes it gold, is that it is the element with the atomic weight of 79. This, they think, is a mistake. Because “any property of gold, even, for instance, where it was mined, could be picked out as essential by some culture” (151), and there is no objective way to decide such disagreements. On their account of what they call “plural realism,” it might just be true that “the Egyptians might well have revealed properties of gold only accessible through their religious practices.”
The point here is that Taylor and Dreyfus will not maintain the distinction between Mi and Md, and so the only way they can find to save realism at all is to allow that it is perfectly likely that “all attempts fail to bring the different ways of interrogating reality into a single mode of questioning that yields as unified picture or theory (so they stay plural)”(154).
To me, this seems obviously absurd. Let me state, as clearly as I am able, why.
It seems clear enough to me that this is a conflation of the intentional purpose for which we use gold, and the thing in itself as it exists outside of any human intentions. There are certain things that gold can do because of its physical properties, and we may want to make use of its different capacities in different cultural practices. Maybe the fact that it does not tarnish or oxidize is important, or its tendency to turn purple when mixed with certain other elements. But none of these uses are essential to the gold itself. We certainly can arrive at clear and correct scientific knowledge of what makes gold different from other kinds of matter, even though we may want this knowledge for a number of different ideological reasons.
Once we sort out the reason we want to know about gold from the nature of the gold, we realize we can in fact gain correct knowledge about both kinds of things: both what the gold is in itself, and how the culture we are engaged in operates. We will often do this only when the gold fails to accomplish what we intended it to, or when there is some contention about which of its possible uses is the one we ought to desire. But we can gain this knowledge about reality, even if we gain it for some human intention that is not at all objective. We could, for instance, learn more about the life cycle of trees and how they exist as a metaphysical object—that is, how they tend to go on being what they are despite sometimes adverse conditions (see Chapter 2); but we may only learn that as a way to make it possible to harvest more or better wood than we had been able to previously. When we undertake such learning tasks, there is very much a non-objective intention at work; however, we may wind up with some real knowledge about both the Mi object and the Md way of meeting our needs for shelter in the process.
The failure to guard agains the ontological collapse lead to a denial of realism even by those keen to argue for the possibility of realism. We don’t need “plural realism.” That amounts only to a conflation of Mi and Md aspects of reality, and right back to the Kantian problem we began with: the idea that we cannot really know a thing, only our particular distorted image of that thing. Rather, what I am arguing for is that we know the thing for a reason, but that doesn’t require that our concept of the thing be incorrect. We cannot, for instance, decide that gold is a nutritious food, or is useful to make shoes out of. Or perhaps we could, but the results will be bad and we will come to question this particular intention. Picking out where it was mined as the essential property of gold would be such a mistake, exactly because where it was mined has no effect at all on the capacities of the gold.
Now let’s consider another kind of error common to the defense of realism: the refusal to make explicit the human intention at work in some particular practice. This error also leads us right back to a kind of relativism, and forfeits the realist position.
I’ll use an example from the well known literary critic Stanley Fish. In 1996, Fish wrote an editorial in the New York Times responding to a popular scandal in academia at the time—one still often cited today. Alan Sokal, a physicist, had written an essay that was mostly made up of nonsense and gibberish, and sent it to the journal Social Text, a journal advocating a social-constructionist position. Sokal took it that the acceptance of his nonsensical article proved that in fact social constructionism was a lot of nonsense. His position was that any social constructionist would clearly deny that “There is a world; its properties are not merely social constructions; facts and evidence to matter.” His claim is that no “sane person would contend otherwise,” but since social constructionists did contend otherwise they must not be quite sane.
Sokal was clearly missing the point here. Social constructionism does not necessarily deny the properties of the world. It just adds that there is also a Md world, which is in fact socially constructed, and which does have real causal powers. Fish denies that any of Sokal’s targets would, in fact, deny the reality, the non-sociality, of the properties of the world: “none of his targets would ever make such statements.”
Unfortunately, Fish is wrong here. Many social constructionists do make exactly the kinds of claims Sokal suggests a sane person could not make. The psychologist Kenneth Gergen, author of the widely used textbook An Invitation to Social Constructionism, for instance, makes exactly that claim. In a talk at the Taos Institute that is posted as a video on various internet sites, he explains social constructionism in exactly the way Sokal fears. He uses the example of a water bottle, and suggests that the water bottle has no real nature, that it just is whatever we choose to say it is. We can discuss it as a collection of molecules, as an object of art, as a talisman with magical powers—and it just is that thing because we think it is. This, of course, gets social constructionism exactly wrong. It assumes that we have a mind that freely chooses how to make the world it wants, without being socially constructed at all. The point of social constructionism, however, is not always taken to be something so absurd. Many social constructionists would claim that the real point is that our values and intentions are shaped by the use of water bottles; that is, that once water becomes a commodity sold for profit in a way that destroys the environment—once even the most basic necessity of life is commodified in this way—then our possible intentions in the world are constructed by this practice we are obliged to engage in. The point is not that we can decide to grant the water bottle magic powers, but that the practice of bottling water alters the world we live in, in ways that have real causal powers beyond what we might be aware of.
However, even if we were to dismiss folks like Gergen, and focus on the more intelligent social constructionists Fish seems to have in mind, we are still left with an important error. Because Fish employs the analogy of the rules of baseball to defend social constructionism. As he says, “balls and strikes are both socially constructed and real.” His evidence for their reality is that “some people get $3.5 million for producing balls and strikes or for preventing their production.” And he further argues that the “distinction between baseball and science is not…so firm.” Like baseball, which is made up of humanly created rules, the truth of a scientific fact is in large part up to humans: “scientists don’t…present their competing accounts to nature and receive from her an immediate and legible verdict. Rather, they hazard hypotheses that are then tested by other workers in the field in the context of evidentiary rules.” This is, as Fish puts it, “the way the game goes.” That is, the decision that a scientific hypothesis fits the “evidentiary rules” will determine who gets the money to continue producing their hypotheses. In this sense, the “facts yielded by both [baseball and science] will be social constructions and be real.” Real, apparently, because they cause a certain distribution of money (the only effect Fish seems to consider significant proof).
This, then, is a defense of realism that collapses right back into relativism. It does so because Fish does not want to consider the implications of a social practice, the intentions it is meant to fulfill, beyond the obvious one of getting others to give one money.
But surely baseball has many social functions beyond the distribution of millions to a small number of players. And just as surely, the proof of a scientific discovery is often not up to the acceptance of the rules of the game, but to the actual concrete effects in the world. If the polio vaccine had failed to actually stop polio, it would hardly matter that Salk played the game of science by the rules.
Now, it is possible that often science does work the way Fish suggests, more concerned with playing by the rules than with reality. I would even suggest the fear that this is true might be what is really motivating Sokal’s response. But when this happens, it is not to be taken as a model of how science ought to work, but as an unfortunate case of Md realities obscuring Mi realities. As when the Pope decides that Galileo must be wrong, and the Earth just is at the center of the universe.
Consider the situation faced by Einstein, and many other physicists, at the beginning of the twentieth century. Physics had become a profitable gentleman’s profession, and little progress was being made. Einstein describes an encounter with the chief editor of the journal Annalen der Physik:
To two pertinent objections which I raised about one of his theories and which demonstrate a direct defect in his conclusions, he responds by pointing out that another (infallible) colleague of his shares his opinion. (Cited in Stone, Einstein and the Quantum)
The problem here is one common to academic fields today. If no actual results are expected, an incorrect understanding can be held in place by mere “evidentiary rules.” This is not uncommon in psychology, for instance, where proof of a claim is never even expected, and the failure of a therapeutic technique to relieve symptoms is simply called “empirical validation.” And perhaps the quantum theory which Einstein helped create would not have been accepted had it not been for a particular demand for results. The intentions to build an atomic bomb, which could not be done on the old model of physics, ultimately forced a radical changing of the guard in physics faculties around the world.
Now, we may not see the atomic bomb as a laudable intention. But the point is that we begin to access reality only once we have intentions we hope to fulfill, which we cannot fulfill with just any construal of the world. The intention to pass on good jobs to friends and family members may have required the old-guard physicists to ignore actual empirical facts. And they did produce a very real social institution. But it was not one functioning to address Mi reality at all. That is, we can gain real knowledge of the discipline of physics once we address fully its intentions at a given time, whether those intentions are making a bomb or creating a prestigious profession. We can then tell whether is is producing a Md reality, or describing a Mi one.
It is important, then, to avoid the errors we have seen here. We can defend realism only if we do not make the mistake of ontological collapse and do not fear the addressing of all the intentions at work in a practice.
But there is one more essential assumption I need to add. Something we have already touched upon, but will need to be borne in mind if we hope to make a case for realism. That is the reality of objects. I mean here something like ordinary objects in the world, things like rabbits and water and trees. We need to bear in mind what we said about the metaphysical reality of such objects, their irreducibility to any ultimate and final “really real” basic elements.
We tend to think that realism must mean getting to some ultimately “really real” level, some final cause that is determinant of all else, like the big bang, or subatomic particles. But realism depends, instead, on accepting that middle-sized objects have real causal powers. We will make more progress when we understand that any model of what subatomic particles is depends, ultimately, on a theoretical account of what we can see occurring at the “macro” level. The Nobel Prize winning physicist Gerard ’t Hooft wants to go In Search of the Ultimate Building Blocks, but even he has to admit that on the standard interpretation “it is senseless to search for such a reality. The quantum mechanical rules by themselves, and the actual observations performed by the detectors, are the only realities we are allowed to talk about”(13). In short, and overstating just a bit, the best realist model is concerned not with ultimates, but with the real effects, on the success of our intentions. The subatomic particles are only models useful to help us better predict what will happen in our CD players or cellphones. We can never detect any of them directly, we can only determine whether they serve as useful concepts to help us achieve our intentions. As ’t Hooft puts it, “even the simplest molecules, such as those of water or alcohol, can often better be studied by doing simple experiments with the substances themselves than by doing ab initio calculations starting with our equations”(8).
One way to think of this is as a return to the old fashioned metaphysics of Aristotle. What is it we do when we try to understand reality? We must arrive at some general categories into which we can organize things so that we become better able to make use of them. We must find the underlying type which is represented by a particular instance. If we have done a good job of creating such categories, we will be able to successfully fulfill our intentions. Here’s how Alistair MacIntyre describes this:
Aristotle distinguishes between epistēmē, scientific knowledge, which involves universals and phronēsis, practical intelligence, which is concerned with particulars as well. But inability to exercise phronēsis can have two different sources. We may fail to identify the characteristics of a particular which are relevant to the actions that we should be about to perform either for lack of experience of the relevant set of particulars or from inadequate epistēmē, so that we do not understand the universal, the concept of the form this particular exemplifies. (92)
Lots of Greek words, so let me explain. What is at stake in Aristotelian metaphysics is always an assumption that there is something we want to do—some “action” we are “about to perform.” We gain practical knowledge of how to get something done by engaging with empirical objects. But we may sometimes fail to get that thing done because we misunderstand what kind of thing a particular object actually is.
Let’s think of an example. We want to make bricks, and have experience digging loam and heating it to make bricks. But now your bricks don’t hold. They tend to dissolve in the rain. The error here might be a lack of epistēmē, an inadequate idea of the kind of thing you are using. The loam may look like other loam you’ve used, but may contain inadequate amounts of clay to hold together. What we need, then, is to gain better scientific knowledge of the categories into which we can divide soil. Of course, we could have such adequate scientific knowledge, but lack the practical ability to locate or recognize them out in the field. So we need some combination of practical skill and theoretical knowledge, and an intention to pursue, in order to gain any correct knowledge of Mi objects.
The overall point here, what we need to take away from this discussion of realism in order to eventually get to our understanding of ideology, is that reality exists at the level of mid-size objects with which we can interact. We don’t need to go down to the “ultimate building blocks” to find reality. In fact, to do so is to mistake the model for reality itself. That is, this kind of metaphysics would suggest that what is ultimately real is phenomenal reality. That the kinds of subatomic particles we need to theorize are merely what Aristotle would call the archē: the conceptual forms we use to enable us to better accomplish the actions we intend. That is to say, the reason it works better to investigate water or alcohol directly is that these just are the ultimate building blocks. Things like neutrinos, for example, are simply necessary concepts to avoid impossible contradictions in the existing models we use to manipulate the physical world. Now, I won’t argue for this implication here, because it would take a whole book in itself and the argument would shock and horrify any science teachers who might read it. But we will need to bear with the possibility that it might be true that basic elements are not made up of subatomic particles, but that metaphysical objects interact in ways we explain by using models that include concepts of subatomic particles.
However, for our purposes here we need only accept that realism means we can gain knowledge of what scientists sometimes call medium-sized object; but we can only gain this knowledge if we are invested in trying to accomplish something. That is, contrary to the common assumption, a disinterested God’s-eye view of the world would fail to give us any knowledge of things as they are in themselves. It is only once we engage the world with some intention that we can begin to get actual knowledge, and realism becomes possible. Recall, once again, the example of the x-ray of a broken arm. Objectivity, on this understanding, risks falling into what Aristotle would call an ineffectual epistēmē, a good theory that may be elegant and formally coherent, but which doesn’t correspond to the external world. As in Stanley Fish’s example, when science relies on internal rules of debate, and forgets to engage with real actions of consequence, only then are we in danger of falling into relativism. Realism, that is, requires intentions. It is not impeded by our “biases,” but enabled by them.
We gain knowledge because we often fail at our intentions, and can tell that we have failed. Many things in the world happen that we do not expect, that don’t fit our construal of how the world works. Contrary to the naive version of social constructionism espoused by Gergen, we do not create the world in our concepts of it. This will be important to keep in mind when we try to explain why ideology is not a prison trapping us in delusion, why it is in fact corrigible and empowering. Our intentions are fundamental to our ideologies, but we often fail at them. And when we fail, we can gain new knowledge about reality, about how the Mi world works independently of our beliefs about it.
We may also miss some of our intentions. That is, there may be real effects of our practices we mostly remain unaware of. Recall the discussion of The Hunger Games in the previous chapter. We generally think we read novels for mere entertainment, and we do. But we also create and consume fictions for the purpose of reproducing a particular construal fo the world necessary to our collective intentions—necessary to keep reproducing our existing way of organizing human life. We often miss this part of the intention, but we can get it. We do so when, as with The Hunger Games, we are surprised that a practice did not have the effect we expected it to have, and we try to examine why. Why, for instance, did the enormous popularity of this series of novels and films fail to produce a politically active and radically feminist generation of young adults?
We can, then, also be realists about Md things. We can gain correct knowledge of how Md things actually work, what effects they have in the world, beyond just the subjective assertions we usually stop at.
But all this talk of mind independent and mind dependent kinds of things of course assumes something called a mind. What exactly do we mean by that troubled term? Now that we have shifted our assumptions about human nature, language, and realism (even if at this point you merely entertain my position hypothetically), we are in a position to engage this difficult term, and to explain what kind of thing a mind is.
Again, if you want to pursue this question of realism, I will suggest some useful reading to fill out this short discussion.
Andrew Collier’s Critical Realism: an Introduction to Roy Bhaskar’s Philosophy (Verso, 1994) is fairly easy reading, as writing on this topic goes, and helps explain further some of the assumptions I am suggesting we adopt.
Christopher Norris’s On Truth and Meaning (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006) is harder reading, but a good overall survey of the debate over realism, as well as his proposed defense of a realist position.
Daniel Devereux’s essay “Particular and Universal in Aristotle’s Conceptions of Practical Knowledge”, (Review of Metaphysics 39, 1986) is helpful in explaining better than I have some of the classical concepts I’ve used to argue for realism.