Relativism is cheap

My favorite bourgeois intellectual again:

It is at bottom a question of original authority: with what conviction — basic orthodoxy — about where truth and illumination are to be found do you begin? Once that question is answered satisfactorily for you (by revelation, education or conversion), you cannot test the answer by bringing it before the bar of some independent arbiter, for your answer now is the arbiter (and measure) of everything that comes before you. Your answer delivers the world to you and delivers with it mechanisms for distinguishing good evidence from bad or beside-the-point evidence and good reasons from reasons that just don’t cut it.

The occasion for this was some smug discussion about religion and global warming denial by Richard Dawkins et al on an msnbc discussion show. A rather silly comment by Dawkins gave Fish an opening to make this declaration, which amounts to the claim that on an epistemological level, there's no principled difference between scientific knowledge and religious dogma: both depend ultimately on an arbitrary answer to the "question of original authority," which then provides the basis for judging the truth-value of individual propositions.

Phrased in this way--in terms of the the foundations for epistemological judgment--there is indeed no way to rule the possibility of radical relativism: that two subjects could have incommensurable epistemological foundations. The historical and social importance of science, however, is not that it is an epistemological system (pace the claims of some of its champions) but instead a set of social institutions that organize inquiry. Science is not a way of thinking; the sciences are communities defined by norms for the investigation of questions and the resolution of disputing claims. A key feature of these norms is that they are represented as referring not to any fixed authority or revelation but instead to universally accessible reality. Of course, as Fish (somewhat clumsily--he never quite manages to give a good example of this) indicates, this is always, strictly speaking, a false representation: scientific communities have rather high barriers for participation and at any given time proceed on the basis of limited, quasi-arbitrary "paradigms" that define what constitutes a "real" problem for the field and an acceptable solution to it.

In principle, it would be possible for an individual to do what Weber at one point calls making the intellectual sacrifice of claiming that religious authority trumps in principle the appeal to empirical inquiry and debate. But, my sense is that the ranks of those willing to willing embrace this "sacrifice" are actually quite thin in the contemporary u.s. This is suggested by the fact that the various "deniers" feel obligated to produce pseudo-science and to allege conspiracies of suppression within the relevant disciplines. Alternatively, the bulk of global warming denialism (which is the specific example Fish mentions) is anchored not on religious conviction but instead in the principles of an alternative academic discipline, namely neo-classical economics. Now, as far as disciplines living up to scientific aspirations for universality, neo-classical economics scores poorly to put it mildly, but still even its most dogmatic representatives would be careful to defer to the practices of inquiry of, at least, the "hard" sciences.

What's more, the scientific pretension to universality and objectivity is not something that should be discarded lightly. A scientific discipline cannot dismiss criticism out of hand, even if coming from the "wrong" type of critic or even if it is in bad intellectual faith (as much criticism of global warming, and anti-darwinist pseudo-science are, though for different reasons), precisely because the current state of knowledge in any field is in some way flawed, and it is only by the insistence that scientific knowledge ought to be subjected to rigorous, public, and objective confirmation--even if this ideal is in practice never met for any individual finding or theory--that those flaws can be gradually overcome. This has important political dimensions because there have been many cases of knowledge claiming scientific justification has been employed in repressive or exclusionary policies.

There is, as it happens, a curious genre of French "critical" intellectuals unexpectedly waxing poetic about the norms of rational debate. There's a late essay by Foucault along this lines, but I've forgotten where I saw it. In any event, here's Bourdieu (arguably being sufficiently dialectical):

However, under the cover of saying what a thing really is, what it is
in reality, one is always liable to say what it should be in order to be
really what it is, and so to slide from the descriptive to the normative,
from 'is' to 'ought-to-be'. We have to acknowledge the universality
of the official recognition granted to the imperatives ofuniversality,
a kind of 'spiritual point of honour' of humanity - the imperatives
of cognitive universality which require the negation of the subjective,
the personal, in favour of the transpersonal and the objective; imperatives
of ethical universality which require the negation of egoism
and particular interest in favour of disinterestedness and generosity.
But we must also acknowledge the universality of the actual transgression
of these norms. And analysis of essence has to give way to
historical analysis, the only kind that is capable of describing the very
process of which analysis of essence unwittingly records the result,
that is to say, the movement whereby the 'ought-to-be' advances
through the emergence of universes capable of practically imposing
the norms of ethical and cognitive universality and really obtaining
the sublimated behaviours corresponding to the logical and moral
ideal.
    If the universal does advance, this is because there are social microcosms
which, in spite of their intrinsic ambiguity, linked to their
enclosure in the privilege and satisfied egoism of a separation by
status, are the site of struggles in which the prize is the universal and
in which agents who, to differing degrees depending on their position
and trajectory, have a particular interest in the universal, in reason,
truth, virtue, engage themselves with weapons which are nothing
other than the most universal conquests of the previous struggles.