She will analyze "the play of conviction and skepticism, questioning and the resistance to questioning, in contemporary intellectual debate." (xi) She is not interested in the substance of particular arguments or their logical structure but in the forces that "energize, shape, and sustain" arguments. These forces are "cognitive, rhetorical, psychological, and to some extent social and institutional." (xi)
BHS is especially interested in seeing how those forces are playing out in current debates about ideas that are "central to Western thought and, in the view of many people (but not all), to the conduct of intellectual life as such"--truth, knowledge, meaning, reason, objectivity, and justification.
She will study the "dynamics of belief" that occur in a debater and "the general operations of cognition." (xiii) She means by the latter the new findings in "theoretical biology, neuroscience, and the history and sociology of knowledge." (xiii)
Additionally, she will tie both these themes to the operations of language.
"...these two aspects of belief and resistance--that is, the dynamics of intellectual controversy and the nature of cognitive process--bear a reflexive or reciprocal relation to each other, mutually illustrating and, in a sense, mutually constituting."(xiii)
Reflexivity and reciprocity, she finds, lie at the heart of the frustrations and deadlocks of debates. She calls these the "microdynamics of incommensurability." (xiv) Yet, she emphasizes that she sees the possibility of "cognitive transformations and intellectual reconfigurations" and does not despair over the inevitable impasses of argument. (xiv)
She will relate these microdynamics to the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance. She puts this intellectual problem in the context of the feelings of pain and the resolution of pain that accompany resistance to one's ideas. (xv)
BHS also will deal with the urge to maintain symmetry in analyses of beliefs. (xvi)
She also proposes to deal with ambivalence, which emerges in current controversies. This relates to the "conceptual operator" of "more-or-less." In different contexts this means "contingent variability,conditionally adequate approximation, or gradient difference." (xvii) Therein she proposes to find "viable alternatives to traditional absolutes, paralyzing dilemmas, and supposed mutually exclusive possibilities." (xviii). She will reject most alternatives based on "best-of-both syntheses" or "middle ways."
BHS discloses her intellectual sympathies with "the skeptics and revisionists rather than with the defenders and rehabilitators of traditional beliefs." (xviii)
. She believes everyone in an intellectual controversy is likely to have a "particular more or less partisan perspective on it." Yet, she also believes that there is an alternative to sheer polemics; it is "respect for the general principles and practices of intellectual fairness that are acknowledged in principle, if not always in practice, in the academic, journalistic, and broader intellectual communities. (xix) She means, at least, accurate citation, representative quotation, nontendentious summary, and forbearance from name-calling and motive-mongering." (xix)
After summarizing the contents of her individual chapters, she concludes the preface with several observations on the social and circumstantial character of intellectual arguments: She concludes the preface as follows: "...the dynamics of intellectual controversy seem to shadow, model, and predict...those [polarizations] of other types of human conflict." (xxv)
CHAPTER 1: THE UNQUIET JUDGE: ACTIVISM WITHOUT OBJECTIVISM IN LAW AND POLITICS
BHS contradicts the charge that non-objectivists are necessarily QUIETIST, as they are charged by objectivists. She asserts that non-objectivists are capable of judging and acting effectively and justifying themselves, while remaining non-objectivists. (3)
The Rhetoric of Political Justification, 3
BHS compares non-objectivist rhetoric ("mere subjective preferences") with argument based on "universal objectivity." She finds that non-objectivist rhetoric can be forceful even though it does not claim to be "objectively right or universally valid." She finds also that objectivist claims to truth have grandeur but fail to take account of "human variability and the mutability of the conditions of human existence." (4) This leads them in the end to "self-defeating dogmatism." (4)
Political Distinctions, Normative Asymmetries, 5
In this section, BHS conducts an argument against the feminist legal scholar, Robin West. She finds West's views in "Relativism, Objectivity, and Law," Yale Law Journal 99 (1990): 1473-1502. She criticizes West for trying to "redeem objectivist claims on a politically selective basis and...to establish a quasi-logical link between non-objectivist theory and legal and political conservatism--or, in her terms, between 'relativism' and 'quietism.'" (5) She exemplifies her objection to West's way of making distinctions by reference to a debate over Stanford's new more inclusive curriculum change of 1988, when Lynne Cheney of NEH and William Bennett of Dept. of Education condemned the change on objectivist grounds. (9)
Pragmatic Tests and Political/Ethical Dilemmas, 10
BHS argues further with West. She shows how a non-objectivist can seek to persuade someone (or group) to change for their own good as the non-objectivist sees it by trying to construct the situation for them. She contrasts this with West's criticism that the non-objectivist is incapable of making a judgment or seeking action because the non-objectivist does not acknowledge objective truth.
The Un/Quiet Judge, 16
More argument with West. West argues that judges cannot decide if they reject objectivist dualisms--they become "quiet." That, West says, makes them politically conservative (lacking the ability to change the status quo). BHS disputes that claim and argues for the superiority of decisions made by non-objectivist judges.
Projects and Praxis, 21
This is BHS's concluding argument with West. She says West fails to show a brand of "objectivist evaluative reasoning" that yields only progressive JUDGMENTS. So, West turns to describing JUDGES whose personal virtues will yield progessive judgments. In BHS's mind, this destroys here objectivist argument. The good judge still will have to decide particular cases in a "contingent and contestable" situatuation: he will have to CONSTRUCT the judgment and not receive it from an objective source. BHS does not despair at her rejection of objective standards. She feels that such are simply unavailable and that we have to get on with social process with "attentiveness, responsiveness, and activity, both intellectual and pragmatic." (22)
She concludes: Since no axiom can generate our judgments and no princi ple can secure their objective goodness, we must continuously figure and work them out ourselves, making them as good and justifying them as well--all things considered--as we can.
CHAPTER 7: ARGUING WITH REASON, pp. 105-124
Epigraph: Unless ye believe, ye shall not understand. Isaiah
In this chapter, BHS presents a critique of the idea of Reason, as it contrasts to the idea of constructivist accounts of knowledge. She casts Reason in the role of the classically privileged way of knowing. She casts post-structuralists, postmodernists and the like as skeptics who, according to defenders of Reason, contradict themselves. (105-106) She sums up the moves of the argument between Reason and skepticism as follows: given the rationalist's rationalism, the skeptic's argument with Reason appears demonstrably self-contradictory; and, given the skeptic's skepticism, the rationalist's argument "with"--in the sense of via or by means of--Reason appears demonstrably self-affirming and thus hollow.
BHS then considers the perplexities she finds in Habermas's Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. In his book H. responds to the challenge of postmodernists to "foundationalist moral theory" and "rationalist philosophy as such." (106) She sees in the problems of Habermas's argument "indexes of more general quandaries" concerning the conflict between orthodox rational discourse and postmodern alternatives. (106)
Cognitive Self-Stabilization
Because of his allegiance to the transcending power of ideas such as truth and the unconditional, Habermas is unable to conceive of rejecting those ideas. This makes it impossible for him to understand Richard Rorty's rejection of those ideas. Faced with rejection such as Rorty's, Habermas, like many other rationalist thinkers, restabilizes his belief in objective, unconditional truth by perceiving, conceiving, and articulating "the skeptic's skepticism in terms that construct that skepticism as necessarily absurd and...as morally or politically irresponsible." (108)
Habermas, says BHS, finds it very difficult to accept disbelief in "procedural rationality" (that is, a foundationalist theory of knowledge) upon which, for him, knowledge, morality, and esthetics rests. (108) Faced with such disbelief by skeptics, he seeks "to re-ground classic foundationalism on other newly fortified or not-quite-foundational foundations." (108/9) BHS then proceeds to examine the problem Habermas has in bringing this maneuver off successfully.
[[BHS thus situates Habermas clearly outside of the circle of postmodernist thinkers. She casts him as someone unable to leave the rationalist theory of knowledge behind, anxious to rehabilitate it in the light of contemporary attacks on it.]]
Tradeoffs, Ambivalences, Equivocations (109)
First, HBS shows how Habermas tried to re-stablize "discourse ethics" through a new alliance with the social sciences, in particular with Lawrence Kohlberg's developmental psychology and Noam Chomsky's generative linguistics. She finds his alliance awkward because rationist moral theory insists on transcendent purity (universalizability), yet here appeals for support from (lesser) empirical disciplines (concrete, contingent, contextual). (110) H. equivocally acknowledges such a perplexity. He seeks to escape it by reasserting the universality of rational theory "with...an appended claim to the effect that such rigorous criteria, though problematic for practice, are nevertheless valuable as inspirational regulative ideals." (112)
Only by such qualifiers, says BHS, can Habermas's rationalist discourse ethics be adapted for "specific and effective ethical/political application." (112) And that turns it into its own adversary, relativism. She calls this process of alternating avowal, disavowal, and re-avowal by Habermas equivocation: "the virtually simultaneous granting and cancelling of crucial concessions, and the strenuous affirmation of mutually incompatible doctrines." (113)
Philosophy's Necessity (113)
HBS charges Habermas with circular reasoning in his insistence on the crucial necessity of transcendental rationalist philsophy for a moral order. (115)
She says he bases his claim that there are universal norms on his conviction or intuition that they exist. (116)
She also charges him with creating a too-rigid binary set of opposites, rational (universal) Right or "barbarian Might." Habermas, she says, requires a right answer or else the answerer, in arguing, wins with "fist, club, or gun." (117) She counters by suggesting that there are conditional, "sublunary" methods available even when unconditional Right or Reason is rejected--methods that do not resort to sheer Might. These include being "responsive to considerations, such as prior experiences, general goals, relevant conditions, expected outcomes, and long-term implications, that may be quite subtle, informed, broadly shared, and otherwise more or less judicious but still historically contingent and more or less particular." (118)
[[[That is, it appears, Reason of a kind operates to allow for answers, but it is always, in her view, limited by the unavoidable flux, and never able to come to rest on a permanent, stable foundation.]]]
Webs of Reason(118)
BHS reiterates her charge that the "re-grounding of transcendental rationalism" by the likes of Habermas depends upon circular reasoning: they insist that their "system of ideas, claims, and definitions" be given "prior acceptance." Anyone not giving it is accused of "performative contradiction" (they use Reason to deny Reason) and thus found to be lacking in sense. (118)
The circular logic of transcendental rationalism leads its advocates to operate in a "virtually unbreachable cognitive and rhetorical system, or, one might say, as a continuously self-spinning, self-repairing, self-enclosing web." (119) Everything that does not fit INTO the system "is identified by the system as irrelevant or unauthentic." (119)
Mirrors of Circularity
BHS attacks the mission of rationality when it insists on being "pure, absolute, and across-the-board." (121) She insists that rationality, to be viable, must abjure its absoluteness. She advocates an alternative project to the "critical theory currently pursued in the name of Reason and Philosophy" (presumably referring to Habermas). "This reverse or mirror critical theory would operate as a dis-authorizing, de-sedimenting, counter-regulative ideal, prepared to be 'critical' through thick and thin: critical not only of all and any established practical (social, poliical, technological) practices, but also of the conceptual (logical, discursive, rhetorical) practices of all and any established theories, including established...versions of itself." AND ITS NAME SHALL BE CALLED SKEPTICISM. (122)
So, BHS rejects the possibility of a "middle way" between transcendental rationalist Believers and her Skeptics. They must both advance their view of truth in an "adversarial embrace" that she thinks may be "eternal." This "endless dance and clash" leads not to sterility or pointlessness. It is the only process we have to produce knowledge: "that is, all the particular theories, contingent claims, contestable judgments, local discourses, and provisional practices that we generate through and as the very process of living in an irremediably sublunary world."
[[[BHS thus reveals herself as a thoroughgoing ally of Richard Rorty, satisfied that contingency forever circumscribes our attempt to know. She is a worthy talker among the PROGRAMME's "folk around the fire" who are seeking comfort in THEIR forest in THEIR time.]]]
Appendix: Webs of Reason
BHS concludes this chapter by presenting a list of definitions of terms used by Habermas. The interconnectedness illustrates how his version of rationality is self-enclosed, a perfect circle of rationality permitting no exception. The terms she defines are argumentation, cognitive, communication, competent/ce, discourse, ethical, intuition, justify, moral, norms, philosophy, practical, practical discourse, presupposed, rational, reason/ing, reconstruction, theory, transcendental, valid/ity.
What non-traditional revisionists [to whom BHS is sympathetic] reject "is the conception of reason as a distinct, ortho-tropic process that can be separated from--or ideally, as in science, purified of--the supposed pressures and distortions of such supposedly exterior forces as the reasoner's individual embodiment, immediate situation, prior intellectual investments, and ongoing verbal interactions....the classic concepts in play in these debates--nature, reason, reality, knowledge, and so forth--are best understood as, preceisely, constructs, that is, as variable discursive and conceptual products of our osngoing interactions with the physical, cultural, and verbal worlds in which we live and act." (129)
Of particular interest here is her argument against Habermas. As noted above, she declares that he fails to rehabilitate Reason in his book, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. (trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990). Further, she identifies him as the voice of the Frankfurt School. Her argument with Habermas remains to be assessed in THE PROGRAMME at this writing. We are working on Habermas's The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity and have not yet read Moral Consciousness. Clearly, her engagement with Habermas is a major battle in the wars between modern and postmodern voices, and we must return to it in due course. At this stage, we find that her resistance to Habermas's attempt to rehabilitate Reason in the light of poststructuralist criticism is a bit confusing. As our summary notes on Philosophical Discourse show, Habermas goes far toward acknowledging the criticism of subject-centered objectivity. He sounds as if he and Barbara might share some common beliefs, but she places him outside the pale of constructivist (un)orthodoxy and pins an antagonistic label on him. We need to read his book on moral consciousness before carrying this further.
The beauty of BHS is her dogged hold on a pragmatic functionalism and her insistent rejection of ideas or ideals alleged to lie outside the human mind. She resembles Thomas Kuhn in that she submerges the intellectual enterprise fully and inescapably in the non-rational context of being human. Her title, Belief and Resistance, seems remote and abstract at first blush. But it accurately refers to the dynamics of intellectual controversy that she explicates. Combatants in the intellectual life arrive at belief in their intellectual positions. They resist their antagonists with the gutsiness of a boxer. In fact, the behaviors of intellectuals and boxers become, through the prism of BHS, kindred. Once we resign ourselves to her insistence that there are no classically rational resolutions of conflict, we join in her zest for finding "cognitive transformations and intellectual configurations" amid the rubble of intellectual "misconnections, collisions, and impasses." Like Rorty, she seems to relish the messiness of thought in a world without objective certainty. And she makes us enjoy it too.
BHS refers to the familiar attack in 1988 on Stanford's new humanities curriculum by Lynne Cheney, then head of the NEH, and William Bennett, then Secretary of Education. These conservative warriors accused Stanford of capitulating to relativist pressures for political correctness. (9) BHS's perspective on the controversy provides a colorful commentary on a familiar event in our intellectual battles of the last decade. Cheney and Bennett, of course, attacked Stanford from their redoubt on the foundations of rationalist-objectivist truth. It is fun to watch BHS thread her way around Cheney, Bennett, and their critic, Robin West.