The Cracks In Our Foundations

Antirealist foundationalism? Realist antifoundationalism?

In this post on William Gillis’s Did The Science Wars Take Place? I’m going to consider a topic the book doesn’t discuss directly, namely antifoundationalism. I think the question of foundationalism and antifoundationalism is orthogonal to that of realism and antirealism, and has different downstream consequences. Richard Rorty, for example, is one of Gillis’s antirealist bêtes noirs, but I think he is best understood as an antifoundationalist whose philosophical position requires him to argue that mind-independent reality is simply not consequential in the way foundational commitments are chosen and stabilised. That is, I don’t think Rorty has a problem with the notion that there is a mind-independent reality per se, but he evidently has no truck with any of the ways such a notion might be put to work in a philosophical context to support an account of how we might arrive at the right foundational commitments.

This is subtly different from saying that there may be a mind-independent reality but we can’t know anything about it as such: it allows that we might know all sorts of things in all sorts of ways, but asserts that the specifically philosophical project of assembling a model of how knowledge has to work and what kinds of things have to be true cannot be successfully scaffolded up out of the things we know and the ways we know them. Of course Rorty goes somewhat further than that, regarding “true” and “truth” as philosophical jargon in a foundationalist register which ought to be abandoned, which means that while we can know things about reality — of course we can, we do it every day! — we can’t know true (in the philosophical jargon sense) things about reality. We know things about reality in ways that are contingent (Rortyan philosophical jargon) on all the usual sorts of factors: historical path-dependencies in the development of theoretical vocabularies, socially-embedded perspectives, quirks of individual disposition and so on.

So here is Gillis saying, no, motherfucker, there is a truth-seeking activity called science which works in such a way as to drive out contingency, because it ruthlessly and restlessly seeks compression and generality: a robust theoretical kernel which flexes across the widest possible range of observable cases and contexts. And the pomo habit of trying to particularise it back into its place — “Western” science, and so on — is a reactionary refusal of the culturally corrosive power of this endeavour, which threatens every enclave of “true for us, and that’s good enough for us” that insists there’s nothing beyond the bounds of the village but swirling void and howling ghosts. Gillis’s frustration with this wilful cognitive parochialism is sharpened by his having come from an especially stupid village (Christian Scientists, whose “reading rooms” he at one point suggests should be burned down). In practice, “true for us, and that’s good enough for us” invariably means “true according to those with the greatest social power, and that’s good enough for you peasants”.

There’s a scene in the HBO series Vikings which illustrates this quite well. Lagertha is holding court, deciding rights and wrongs among the villagers. A man comes before her with his wife, who after many years of childlessness has fallen pregnant after an encounter with a travelling merchant. He demands that she be punished for her infidelity. Lagertha tells him instead to rejoice in his good fortune: evidently his family has been visited by the trickster-God Loki, in the guise of a merchant, and blessed with a much longed-for child. “But that’s just a story!” he complains. “Our whole lives are stories”, she retorts, and the matter is closed. Now there is wisdom in this: the man is plainly infertile, his wife has opportunistically taken her fertility (not to mention her pleasure) into her own hands, and telling the story of this happenstance as a piece of unexpected good fortune is undoubtedly better for everyone concerned than the kind of punitive enforcement he was looking for. Power, on this occasion, is being used to coerce a better outcome. But we also see what power looks like: it looks like the chief telling you what stories you must accept, with the implicit threat of punishment or death if you refuse to abide by their judgement. Our whole lives are their stories, and woe betide anyone who asks awkward questions about reality.

Now it could have gone another way. Lagertha might have said, look, your wife has done something personally understandable and beneficial for both of you, it’s not her fault you’re firing blanks, we may have rules about paternity and so on but bending them in this case produces a better social outcome and you ought to live with it. If you’re having trouble wrapping your head around that, try this: just picture it as if a supernatural entity with a special mandate to stir shit up came and did something benignly wayward of a kind we have conditioned ourselves, through stories about that entity, to accept and even have a good laugh about. Do you get what I’m saying here? Be nice to her, look after the baby, and don’t be a dick. And we can also read the scene as her saying essentially that, but in a locally accepted cultural shorthand, and him being obtuse about it, and her reminding him that the use of imaginative means such as stories about randy deities is part of the set of rules his community plays by¹.

If you believe, as IIRC Gillis does, that telling children stories about Santa Claus is sabotaging their epistemic agency, then the framing of this as “see how these Nordic folkways enable people to give communal weight to nuanced moral decisions” will not fill your heart with sentimental appreciation. Besides, these are the literal Vikings, notorious for murder, pillage, rape and enslavement: it’s one thing to savour their folk wisdom from a historically safe distance, but Odin-believers were no fun at all to be raided by.

When Derrida suggests, in “White Mythology”, that philosophy’s search for foundations, for the logos stabilising a universe of meaning (that word again), is a search for epistemic leverage in an enterprise of global domination, he’s not wrong. But I think the core of the issue is in the distinction between foundationalism, or the attempt to bootstrap mythology into cognitive necessity, and realism, or the attempt to discern and systematically theorise what happens to be the case. Foundationalism says, there are fundamental premises you have to think from in order to think rightly, and we can know what they are and, knowing what they are, proceed from there to knowing what it is right to think about everything. Realism says that you can’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps in this way: you have to face and take direction from reality, which reserves the prerogative of forcing (if you are disciplined about the encounter) a revision of your priors. We might describe “scientism” as the conversion of science (as a body of theories and theoretical vocabularies) into mythology for purposes of bootstrapping a foundationalist project, and “radical realism” (per Gillis) as the resistance of science itself (as a practice and disposition towards reality) to this conversion. Some in the “science wars” were antifoundationalists battling scientism; others were antirealists defending their own (or others’) mythoi against the abrasions and incursions of scientific skepticism and rigour; many seemed not to have known quite which they were, from one moment to the next.

1. This would of course be an extremely, well, postmodern way of framing the issue, in the popular sense of “willing to ironise one’s vocabulary while carrying on using it anyway”.