Synopses & Reviews
Truth, reason, and objectivity--can we survive without them? What happens to law, science, and the pursuit of social justice when such ideas and ideals are rejected? These questions are at the heart of the controversies between traditionalists and "postmodernists" that Barbara Herrnstein Smith examines in her wide-ranging book, which also offers an original perspective on the perennial--perhaps eternal--clash of belief and skepticism, on our need for intellectual stability and our experience of its inevitable disruption.
Focusing on the mutually frustrating impasses to which these controversies often lead and on the charges--"absurdity," "irrationalism," "complicity," "blindness," "stubbornness"--that typically accompany them, Smith stresses our tendency to give self-flattering reasons for our own beliefs and to discount or demonize the motives of those who disagree with us. Her account of the resulting cognitive and rhetorical dynamics of intellectual conflict draws on recent research and theory in evolutionary biology, neuroscience, developmental psychology, and the history and sociology of science, as well as on contemporary philosophy and language theory.
Smith's analyses take her into important ongoing debates over the possibility of an objective grounding of legal and political judgments, the continuing value of Enlightenment rationalism, significant challenges to dominant ideas of scientific truth, and proper responses to denials of the factuality of the Holocaust. As she explores these and other controversies, Smith develops fresh ways to understand their motives and energies, and more positive ways to see the operations of intellectual conflict more generally.
Review
It is typical of Smith that she can accommodate such questions of reality and truth, without self-contradiction, in the course of a defence and explication of what is variously called scepticism, perspectivism, constructivism or postmodernism, but for which relativism seems a perfectly good term. Belief and Resistance is not only a substantively powerful book; its conscientious approach and restrained style are equally welcome. Indeed, its only possible rivals are the work of Joseph Margolis...and the late, unjustly neglected Paul Feyerabend...Smith's point is not that there is anything wrong about objectivity in the classic sense of 'justifiable in a context-transcendent and subject-independent way'. It is, rather, that whether legal, scientific, or political, such evaluation--'as distinct from judgments that are good under certain (perhaps quite broad) conditions and from the perspectives of certain (perhaps especially relevant) people'--never occurs. In epistemology and axiology, there are 'no touchstones of truth, no automatic refutations of error, no ready-made exposures of deception'. In rich and subtle detail, Smith explores the implications of this view in relation to (among other things) Holocaust denial and the 'Science Wars'. Proceeding from the view that what we variously call nature, reality, or truth is the result of ongoing material, cognitive, conceptual and social interactions (but not social or linguistic alone), she offers some fascinating speculations on the general dynamics of belief and resistance. Their overall context is the project of a naturalized but non-reductive evolutionary epistemology, very much in the spirit of Gregory Bateson. Barbara Hernnstein Smith's book, however, sets a new standard. Patrick Curry
Review
Smith's analyses of recent controversies about objectivity are unusually subtle, and very helpful indeed. Times Literary Supplement
Review
Barbara Herrnstein Smith is not the UN peace-keeping forces intervening in the Science and Moral Wars. Rather, she does an ecological study of many entangled controversies, paying due attention to all the camps while not pretending to be above any of them--thus exemplifying the fact that relativism leads not, as many believe, to a lake of fire in which illegitimate scholars are inevitably fried, but to the open seas on which it is possible to travel much further than on the supposed solid ground of 'firm foundations,' if only we have ship! Richard Rorty, University of Virginia
Review
Sober and wise, engaged yet tolerant, this book offers--for those who really want one--an antidote to the absolutism and the incivility of our present controversies. Bruno Latour, Ecole Nationale Sup & eacute;rieure des Mines, Paris
Synopsis
What happens to law, science, and the pursuit of social justice when the ideas of truth, reason and objectivity are rejected? This question is at the heart of the controversies between traditionalists and "postmodernists." Barbara Herrnstein Smith here examines the debate across a wide range of disciplines and through important and ongoing controversies.
About the Author
Barbara Herrnstein Smith is Braxton Craven Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Duke University, where she is also Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Science and Cultural Theory.
Table of Contents
Preface
The Unquiet Judge: Activism without Objectivism in Law and Politics
Making (Up) the Truth: Constructivist Contributions
Belief and Resistance: A Symmetrical Account
Doing without Meaning
Unloading the Self-Refutation Charge
The Skeptic's Turn: A Performance of Contradiction
Arguing with Reason
Appendix: Webs of Reason
Microdynamics of Incommensurability: Philosophy of Science Meets
Science Studies
Notes
Index