Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-xtgtn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-23T18:05:10.042Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

AGONIES OF THE REAL: ANTI-REALISM FROM KUHN TO FOUCAULT*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 March 2012

PETER E. GORDON
PETER E. GORDON*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Harvard University E-mail: pgordon@fas.harvard.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

When did historians begin to put quotation marks around the word real? There are many examples of this habit and some of them will be set forth as evidence in what follows. But before doing so we might ask a preliminary question: What are the quotation marks themselves supposed to mean? Today we find them so familiar they hardly need to be written and they are more frequently consigned to the everyday repertoire of silent gesture: two fingers on either hand clutch at the air as if they meant to tickle the flanks of the invisible beast between them. The popular term is “scare-quotes,” a pun on the word “scarecrow.” Its etymology is revealing: just as a mere representation of a body in a field may scare off birds, so too scare-quotes permit someone to deploy a word without sincere commitment to what it normally means. But further reflection tells us that the effects are not so similar after all: To use a term without sincerity robs it of its original meaning and holds up its lifeless corpse to ridicule. The more knowing sort of crow can settle on the shoulder of the figure on the pole precisely because it recognizes that such a sorry excuse for a man can in fact harm no one. Similarly when one puts reality in quotation marks (thus: “reality”) we are put in mind of the living concept but we are immediately alerted to the fact that, for the user at least, the new term enjoys no metaphysical prestige. How did this happen? When and why did the single most privileged word in the entire lexicon of metaphysics begin to lose its authority such that in certain spheres of intellectual sophistication its sincere use would only seem an embarrassment and a sign of naïveté?

Type
Forum: Kuhn's Structure at Fifty
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , April 2012 , pp. 127 - 147
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Kuhn, Thomas, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd edn (Chicago, 1996; first published 1962), 110CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Ibid., my emphasis.

3 Ibid., 118, my emphasis.

4 Ibid., 118.

5 Ibid., 121, my emphasis.

6 Godfrey-Smith, Peter, Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (Chicago, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Ibid., 181–3, original emphasis.

8 Giere, Ronald, “Kuhn's Legacy for North American Philosophy of Science,” Social Studies of Science 27/3 (June 1997), 483–50, 497, original emphasisGoogle Scholar.

9 Lakatos, Imre, “Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes,” in Lakatos, Imre and Musgrave, Alan, eds., Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge, 1970), 91–196, 140 n. 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Pickering, Andrew, ed. Science as Practice and Culture (Chicago, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Kuhn's reference to Quine appears in Kuhn, Structure, “Postscript,” 202 n. 17.

12 Quine thus eschewed dogmatic realism and added that as an empiricist he considered physical objects “irreducible posits” that were necessary for science but epistemologically comparable to “the gods of Homer.” Quine, W. V., “Two Dogmas,” in idem, From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge, MA, 1961), 20–46, 44Google Scholar.

13 Kuhn, Structure, 126–7.

14 Ibid., 135, my emphasis.

15 Ibid., 192.

16 Ibid., Postscript, 192, my emphasis.

17 Ibid., Postscript, 206, my emphasis.

18 Ibid., Postscript, 206.

19 Kuhn, Thomas, The Road since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970–1993, with an Autobiographical Interview, ed. Conant, James and Haugeland, John (Chicago, 2000)Google Scholar, quoted from Kuhn's 1977 paper “Metaphor in Science,” reprinted in Kuhn, Road since Structure, 203.

20 Thoimas Kuhn, “Possible Worlds in History of Science,” in idem, Road since Structure, 58–89, 77.

21 Putnam, Hilary, Reason, Truth, and History (Cambridge, 1981), see esp. 60–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Kuhn, “Possible Worlds,” 86, my emphasis.

23 Van Frassen, Bas, The Scientific Image, (Oxford, 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 As explained in Hacking, Ian, Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science (Cambridge, 1983), 17CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 See e.g. Blackburn, Simon, “Realism: Deconstructing the Debate,” Ratio XV/2 (June 2002), 111–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which describes the standoff, with Richard Boyd and Putnam on one side and Van Frassen on the other. Arthur Fine's “fictionalism” represents another attempt to get past the stalemate by proposing a “natural ontological attitude.” See e.g. Fine, Arthur, “Piecemeal Realism,” Philosophical Studies 61 (1991), 79–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 Braver, Lee, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-realism (Evanston, 2007)Google Scholar.

27 Ibid., 347.

28 Ibid., 352.

29 Han, Béatrice, Foucault's Critical Project: Between the Transcendental and the Historical, trans. Pile, Edward (Stanford, 2002), 41Google Scholar.

30 Braver, Thing of this World, 353.

31 Foucault, Michel, Archaeology of Knowledge, and the Discourse on Language, trans. Smith, A. M. Sheridan (New York, 1972), 47Google Scholar; as quoted in Braver, Thing of This World, 353.

32 Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 45, quoted in Braver, 354, my emphasis.

33 Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York, 1973), 47Google Scholar.

34 Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction (New York, 1980), 72Google Scholar. Original French as quoted in Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité, I: La volunté de savoir (Paris, 1976), 97. My emphasisGoogle Scholar.

35 “Or, justement, c'est cette idée du sexe qu'on ne peut pas recevoir sans examen. ‘Le sexe’ est-il, dans la réalité, le point d'ancrage qui supporte les manifestations de ‘la sexualité,’ ou bien une idée complexe, historiquement, formée à l'intérieur du dispositive de sexualité?” Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 152. French, 201. Original emphases. I have modified the English translation and its grammatical marks to reflect the original.

36 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 157, Histoire de la sexualité, 207.

37 On Foucault's relation to Bachelard see Gutting, G., Michel Foucault's Archaeology of Scientific Reason (New York, 1989), 9–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 Hacking, Ian, “The Looping Effect of Human Kinds,” in Sperber, D. et al. , eds., Causal Cognition: An Interdisciplinary Approach (Oxford, 1995), 351–83Google Scholar.

39 Hacking, Ian, “Five Parables,” in idem, Historical Ontology (Cambridge, MA, 2002), 27–50, 49–50Google Scholar.

40 Goodman, Nelson, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis, 1978), 1–22Google Scholar, reprinted in McCormick, Peter J., ed., Starmaking: Realism, Anti-Realism, and Irrealism (Cambridge, MA, 1996), 63Google Scholar.

41 Israel Scheffler, “The Wonderful Worlds of Nelson Goodman,” reprinted in McCormick, Starmaking, 133–41 (first published 1980).

42 Goodman, Nelson, “On Starmaking” originally published in idem, Of Mind and Other Matters (Cambridge, MA, 1984)Google Scholar, reprinted in McCormick, Starmaking, 143–7.

43 As Hacking has observed, Kuhn himself never meant to endorse full-blown anti-realism. Both Putnam and Kuhn are best understood as nominalists rather than genuine idealists, since neither denied that the world contains some sort of mind-independent “real stuff.” They denied only that this stuff “is naturally and intrinsically sorted in any particular way, independent of how we think about it.” Hacking, Ian, Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science (Cambridge, 1983), 108–11Google Scholar.

44 Laqueur, Thomas, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA, 1990)Google Scholar.

45 Ibid., 169, my emphasis.

46 Ibid., 12.

47 Ibid., 13.

48 Ibid., 14–15, original emphasis.

49 Ibid., 21.

50 Ibid., 14, emphasis in original.

51 Ibid., 16.

52 Kuhn, Thomas, “Afterwords,” in Horwich, Paul, ed., World Changes: Thomas Kuhn and the Nature of Science (Cambridge, MA, 1993), 314Google Scholar. As quoted in Zammito, John H., A Nice Derangement of Epistemes: Post-positivism in the Study of Science from Quine to Latour (Chicago, 2004), 296 n. 53Google Scholar.

53 The classic statement of SSK is Bloor, David, Knowledge and Social Imagery. (Chicago, 1976)Google Scholar. As Paul Roth observed, “At the philosophical center of the strong programme is Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.” Roth, Paul, “Voodoo Epistemology: The Strong Programme in the Sociology of Science,” in idem, Meaning and Method in the Social Sciences (Ithaca, N.Y, 1987), 174Google Scholar.

54 Since sociology is only one science among many, it is unclear why a sociology of natural science would be the one discipline uniquely authorized to furnish a scientific explanation. Thus Slezak, Peter, “Scientific Discovery by Computer as Empirical Refutation of the Strong Programme,” Social Studies of Science 19/4 (Nov. 1989), 563–600CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

55 For criticism of Bloor on causality and sociological explanation as science, see Slezak, Peter, “Bloor's Bluff: Behaviourism and the Strong Programme,” International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 5/3 (1991), 241–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

56 Fuller, Steve, Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times (Chicago, 2000), 3Google Scholar.

57 Alan Sokal, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” originally in Social Text (Spring–Summer 1996), reprinted in Franca, Lingua, eds., The Sokal Hoax: The Sham that Shook the Academy (Lincoln, 2000), 11–45Google Scholar.

58 Guillory, John, “The Sokal Affair and the History of Criticism,” Critical Inquiry 28/2 (Winter 2002), 470–508CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

59 Latour, Bruno, “‘Do You Believe in Reality?’ News from the Trenches of the Science Wars,” in idem, Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 1–23, 1Google Scholar.

60 To detect an alliance between anti-realism as a philosophical doctrine and the anti-realist trends evident in the era of media-saturated capitalism may seem overly speculative. But it is crucial to note that the movement toward aesthetic anti-realism first developed in complicity with a theory-enriched avant-gardism according to which “realism” was seen as a conformist residuum of nineteenth-century bourgeois aesthetics and therefore inimical to social emancipation (despite the historical connection between the earlier style of literary and pictoral realism and redemptive ethnographies of the laboring classes, e.g. Engels, Eliot, Dickens, Courbet). Ironically, however, postmodern anti-realism itself was a species of realism insofar as it furnished a realistically accurate representation of “the cultural logic of late capitalism.” If Jameson is right that there is a logic to the aesthetic that dominates a given era, it would not be surprising to discern a rarefied species of the same logic within academic discourse itself. See Jameson, Fredric, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, 1990)Google Scholar.

61 As quoted in Zamora, Lois Parkinson and Faris, Wendy B., “Introduction” in Zamora and Faris, eds., Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community (Durham, 1995), 5Google Scholar.

62 Foster, Hal, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century. (Cambridge, MA, 1996)Google Scholar.

63 Rorty, Richard, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, 1979)Google Scholar.

64 Boghossian's pronounced distaste for anti-realist or social-constructivist theories of science occasionally moves him to adopt an overly dismissive stance; see Boghossian, Paul, Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism (New York, 2007)Google Scholar.

65 M. Cieply, “A Film School's New Look Is Historic,” New York Times, 8 Feb. 2009, archived online at www.nytimes.com/2009/02/09/movies/09film.html.