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Constructivist and Relativist Conceptions of Knowledge in Contemporary (Anti-) Epistemology: A Reply to Barbara Herrnstein Smith This ought to be an exciting time for academic philosophy, for we are witnessing today a virtually unprecedented level of interest in philosophical issues across a virtually unprecedented range of academic disciplines. Why, then, instead of a sense of intellectual euphoria do we find academic philosophy experiencing an increasingly uneasy—some might even say, hostile—relationship vis-á-vis the rest of the humanities and social sciences? When I was a graduate student in the early 1980s, the explanation that was most commonly offered was that academic philosophy, being primarily analytic in orientation, did not concern itself sufficiently with issues that really mattered, that it was overly preoccupied with the analysis of science, language, and knowledge and not concerned enough with literature, culture, and the life that most people lived. It is rare to hear this complaint these days. As the philosophical interests of humanist scholars have turned increasingly to science itself and to the authority that it is accorded in contemporary society, the complaint most often heard is not that analytic philosophy is not interested in the [End Page 213] right things, but that it is not interested in them in the right way. In particular, the most influential charge is the one that forms the backdrop to Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s discussion in her essay—that analytic philosophy is in the grip of an inadequate conception of the nature of human knowledge, a conception that it cleaves to in the face of compelling objections that it resolutely ignores. As Smith puts it, Clearly there are significant contemporary challenges to classical epistemology and mainstream philosophy of science: new ways of answering classic questions concerning the formation and validation (or is it contingent stabilization?) of belief, new questions about the nature and operations of scientific knowledge, and new assessments of the role of academic philosophy both in posing such questions and in grounding or adjudicating their answers. These challenges are by no means recent in origin. Some have been part of the philosophical tradition since Protagoras; . . . yet others have emerged during the course of the twentieth century from research and analysis in the scientific disciplines themselves, for example, in quantum theory and, more recently, in developmental biology and cognitive science. Work in all these fields has indicated the need to review and, to some degree, revise traditional ideas and conventional wisdom . . . about knowledge, science, and cognitive processes. At the same time theorists and scholars in various relatively new fields, including feminist epistemology and constructivist history and sociology of science, have pressed these challenges with especially aggressive energy and in quarters quite close to home—that is, in academic philosophy itself. There can be little doubt that vast numbers of scholars in the humanities and social sciences feel that important discoveries about human knowledge have been made by recent thinkers, discoveries that mainstream analytic philosophy ignores at its peril. The putative discovery goes by a number of different labels. Sometimes it is described as the view that all knowledge is “situated”; sometimes, as the view that all knowledge is “socially constructed.” I will refer to the family of views gestured at here as “constructivist” conceptions of knowledge. The core idea is that, in contrast with the traditional theory of knowledge—what Smith calls “classical epistemology”—knowledge is not thought of as detached from the contingent social, cultural, and political context in which it is produced. [End Page 214] Even the most cursory acquaintance with the literature to which Smith is alluding shows that, while the protest against classical epistemology has reached the level of a roar, analytic philosophy has, for the most part, turned it a deaf ear. Why? The analytic version, if I may be permitted to generalize freely, is that we often do not understand what alternative to classical epistemology is being proposed, and that when we do understand what is being proposed, it seems to amount to some species of relativism, a view about knowledge that we believe to have been discredited some time ago. According to our critics, on the other hand, the case for revising traditional conceptions of knowledge has been overwhelmingly clear for quite a while, and nothing but the usual intransigence of established orthodoxy can explain the resistance with which these new ideas have been greeted. What about the charge that constructivist views appear to entail an unpalatable relativism? There are two possible replies to the charge, both of which are represented in the literature. The first maintains that a constructivism about knowledge, properly understood, simply does not entail relativism. Thus Sandra Harding says (and is quoted by Smith as saying) that it is possible to maintain that “all knowledge is socially situated versus the conventional idea that beliefs count as knowledge only when they break free [of] . . . local, historical interests, values, and agendas [yet still do not] slide [into] relativism.” 1 The other possible answer is that while constructivism does entail some form of relativism, it is not of the objectionable variety. This is the tack taken by Lorraine Code: “Yet the relativism that my argument generates is sufficiently nuanced and sophisticated to escape the scorn—and the anxiety—that ‘relativism, after all’ usually occasions.” 2 Which of these responses does Smith favor? It is hard to figure out. On one hand, one of the central themes of her essay is that constructivist epistemology is characterized by “equivocation”: “For if one endorses a constructivist understanding of ‘human involvement in the world’ as constitutive, then one cannot consistently retain the ‘epistemic deference’ to a presumptively autonomous reality that generally defines realism. It is this sort of elaborated affirmation of mutually incompatible doctrines or, in the name of middle-road moderation, the simultaneous or rapidly oscillating avowal and disavowal of both traditional and more or less radically revisionist positions that I shall discuss here as ‘equivocation.’” This suggests that Smith thinks that there is something relativistic [End Page 215] about constructivism and, hence, that constructivists who deny that are engaged in the “elaborated affirmation of mutually incompatible doctrines.” On the other hand, she chastises Lorraine Code for being overly concerned about the charge of relativism, on the grounds that “there is reason to think that the foolish or dangerous ideas commonly scorned as ‘relativism’—the idea, for example, that all beliefs or accounts are equally valid (under all conditions, from all perspectives) or that the world can be constructed just as we choose—constitute a phantom heresy, without visible, palpable, or citable adherents.” How can this seeming inconsistency be resolved? It seems likely that Smith is best read as claiming that there is one sense in which constructivist views are relativistic and another sense in which they are not. In the sense in which constructivist views are relativistic, there is no point denying that they are, for to do so would result in the affirmation of “mutually incompatible doctrines”; however, there is also no need to deny that they are relativistic in that sense, for there is nothing objectionable about the implicated brand of relativism. As for the sense in which constructivist views are not relativistic, there is also no need to expend much effort denying that they are, for “there is reason to think that the foolish or dangerous ideas commonly scorned as ‘relativism’ . . . constitute a phantom heresy, without visible, palpable, or citable adherents.” Either way, then, according to Smith, constructivist epistemology’s recent preoccupation with the charge of relativism is misplaced. If this is even roughly what Smith has in mind—and if it is not, then I have no idea what she has in mind—it seems to me to be a very interesting claim. If true, it will have established an important result, for it will have taught us how to understand constructivism in such a way that the normal concerns about it are silenced. However, I do not really see by what supporting argument she seeks to establish the interesting and important claim. A properly convincing argument for it, it seems to me, would have to contain the following elements: First, there would need to be a clear statement of exactly what a constructivist view of knowledge is. Second, the two distinct senses of relativism, the objectionable and the nonobjectionable, would have to be defined. Third, it would have to be shown that while the first of these is objectionable, the second is not. Finally, there would need to be some demonstration that while the second thesis is entailed by constructivism, the first is not. Of the three theses that are in play, the only one that is actually defined is [End Page 216] the “bad” relativism that is allegedly not entailed by constructivism. This is formulated as the view that “all beliefs or accounts are equally valid (under all conditions, from all perspectives).” But that is not the thesis that concerns philosophers when they worry about the relativistic consequences of constructivism. Rather, the relativism that concerns them is the view that beliefs or accounts can be said to be valid only relative to particular perspectives and under particular conditions, not with respect to all perspectives and under all conditions. So showing that Smith’s version of bad relativism is not entailed by constructivism would do nothing to meet the concerns about constructivism that people actually have. * * * What I think I can most usefully do in these comments is try to explain, as clearly as I can, why constructivist views of knowledge have been generally considered problematic by the community of academic philosophers. I will aim to achieve some clarity about the substantive issues that divide most analytic philosophers today from their philosophically minded colleagues in the humanities and social sciences. As I mentioned above, I take the core idea of a constructivism about knowledge to be the view that knowledge must not be thought of as detached from its social, cultural, and political context. As feminist philosopher Kathleen Lennon puts it, “Feminist epistemologists, in common with many others strands of contemporary epistemology, no longer regard knowledge as a neutral transparent reflection of an independently existing reality, with truth and falsity established by transcendent procedures of rational assessment. Rather, most accept that all knowledge is situated knowledge, reflecting the position of the knowledge producer at a certain historical moment in a given material and cultural context.” 3 The question is, What aspect of classical epistemology does this assertion contradict? Well, what conception does classical epistemology have of the relation between knowledge and the political and social context in which it is produced? Does classical epistemology deny that knowledge is often produced collaboratively, by members of a social group? No. Does it deny that scientists have political and social values and that those values may influence what questions they ask and what they end up believing? No. Does classical epistemology have a view about how often in the course of history beliefs have [End Page 217] been shaped by political and social considerations as opposed to other types of considerations? No. What matters to classical epistemology are three things: first, the claim that only some considerations can genuinely justify a belief, namely, those that bear on its truth; second, a substantive conception of the sorts of considerations that qualify for this normative status—observational evidence and logic, for example, but not a person’s political commitments; and finally, the claim that we do sometimes believe something because there are considerations that justify it and not as a result of some other cause, such as because it would serve our interests to do so. If we let “political values” stand as shorthand for Harding’s “local, historical interests, values, and agendas,” and if we legislate some terminology and say that a “reason for a belief” is any consideration that may correctly be invoked to recommend the belief, we may encapsulate the classical conception of knowledge as follows: (1) The only considerations that are reasons for believing something are those that bear on the truth of the belief. (2) A group’s political values do not bear on the truth of an arbitrary belief about the world. So political values cannot be reasons. (3) Sometimes the correct causal explanation for why we believe something is that we have a reason for believing it. If constructivism is to dispute something that matters to classical epistemology, then it must be one of these propositions. Which one? There are three possible constructivist options: (A) It is not correct to say that the only considerations that can genuinely recommend a belief are those that bear on its truth. (B) Political values do bear on whether beliefs are true. (C) Reasons for belief cannot fully explain why we believe what we believe; political values must be appealed to as well. I think we can be very short with option (A). To believe that p is to believe that p is true: these two phrases are platitudinously equivalent. To hold that considerations that are manifestly irrelevant to the truth of a belief may nevertheless be correctly invoked to recommend it is simply to misunderstand the sort of state that belief is. It is as if I were to say, “Look, I know that the fact that it will advance my career if everyone were to believe Maxwell’s equations for electromagnetism is irrelevant to whether the equations are true, but I nevertheless think that it’s a reason for believing them.” As far as I can tell, Smith would agree with me about this (though a remark disapproving of the analysis of knowledge as justified true belief gave me pause). [End Page 218] It is tempting to be short with option (B) as well. How it is possible for anyone’s political values to be relevant to the question of whether, say, Maxwell’s equations are true? Perhaps if I am heavily invested in their being true, my interests will cause me to find it plausible that they are, but that is not the same thing as their giving me a reason to find them plausible. Tempting as it may be, there is a somewhat subtler version of this view that needs to be addressed separately, if only because it has had such a long history. The thought behind the subtler version is not that political values justify beliefs directly, but that a particular consideration can have the status of a reason for a belief only against the backdrop of a particular set of political values. Nothing can be a reason for a belief, in this view, except relative to a particular background politics; vary that background and you vary what is and is not a reason for believing something. This is the view that has traditionally gone by the name of relativism—about justification rather than truth, in this instance—for it relativizes the existence of a reason to the existence of an appropriate political perspective. 4 As a view about the nature of reasons, relativism has been around for a long time. It has failed to find many supporters within the mainstream of epistemology, however, because most philosophers became convinced long ago, by classic arguments to be found in Plato, among others, that the view is inherently self-undermining, that we cannot coherently think of ourselves as believing and asserting anything if all reasons for belief and assertion are held to be tied to background perspective in the way that the view envisions. There are many ways to show this, but the simplest is also the most well known: Is a relativism not about reasons violated by the relativist’s own stance toward his or her own view? Surely the relativist does not think that relativism is justified only relative to his or her own perspective? If he or she did, why is he or she recommending it to us, who do not share his or her perspective? Consider the claim central to Smith’s outlook, quoted above: “Work in all these fields has indicated the need to review and, to some degree, revise traditional ideas and conventional wisdom . . . about knowledge, science, and cognitive processes.”