Course Description:
We are going to think about a widespread view, currently a subject for bitter and often contemptuous disagreements. Though there are gossipy and seductive emotional issues tempting us away from the upward path as we investigate, this reading group is going to focus on the question, to what extent are social constructivist claims correct, and what would an entirely correct view be?
Don't worry, though; we won't have to stay pure. We have to descend into the mud, the sociology of philosophy and sociology of intellectuals, in order to tell what is going on. We will read some of the choice documents in which some thinkers accuse other thinkers of imbecility or offer parodies of other's views--though we of course will keep our noses in the air and our eyes on the Truth.
(Here's a truth to keep our eyes on: Social constructionism is either correct to some degree or it is not. And here's another: Truth is, to some extent, either socially constructed or it is not. Oddly, not even the social constructivists say that those two claims are socially constructed or that social constructionism is a social construct--it (social constructivism) is offered instead as an insight, a truth--maybe, even, though otherwise the term is taken to be lethal, Truth. It should be clear, then, that asking the question up there at the top, to what extent are social constructivist claims correct?--that asking that is a hostile act and a vulnerable one. If correct is a social construction, then asking the question with the understanding that we intend to find out not just whether the claims are correct within that weird culture which takes them as matters of faith but whether they are really correct is logically incoherent--and if social constructionists wish to claim that their views are not just right for them but are really, truly, essentially correct, then we are in business. Well, now. Two down.)
And yet, surely it is correct to say that, for example, women have different lives in Saudi Arabia than in Arcata, and that being a woman is different in those two places. Science is a different thing in the Bible Belt Ozarks than it is on the HSU campus. It is thought of differently, it has a different force in conversations, those who talk of it are possessed of a different consensus of beliefs in those different places. We could have chosen many more examples: race, education, faith, individual identity, art, morality, a meaningful life, etc. For each of these things, the understanding a person will have is a result of social processes, of cultural influences, which (careful; here's where the issues come in--that "surely it is correct" may not apply to the following) determine what it is possible to think and determine what can be fought over and what can be known. Science, gender, race--but also knowledge itself, language, authorship, the world, individual identity--are all social constructions.
Standard Waiver and Warning: These reading groups can be used to meet requirements for a philosophy major (three graded one credit readings groups may be substituted for one of the electives), and like most reading groups we are taking up contemporary issues in philosophy. That makes it look as if this reading group is something like a regular class. Other factors might seem to confirm this impression. There is a teacher and there are students, with that power imbalance, as usual, screwing up thinking. There are readings. There are writing requirements. There are grades. You have to show up. But there are important differences. The instructor is offering the group on a voluntary, overload basis, (the instructor would be paid the same and would be counted as having fulfilled all instructional responsibilities if this group never existed) and one of the main purposes is to help the instructor think about the particular issues. It may be that you, the students, will get some benefit out of the reading group--you get to watch some philosophy being done right before your very eyes rather than picking it up in a bubblewrapped package at the postoffice. And even that benefit to you is not what the group is about. Responsibilities for meeting the reading, writing, and grading requirements, and for shaping the discussions are shifted to some degree to the students (see below). The group is an attempt get together and to help all of us think something through. Sometimes this works well, but sometimes, ummm, well, not so much. or not for everyone. If there are rough edges, count them as part of the plan.
Okay, back to the Course Description: In some ways, the issues regarding constructions may look small or silly. There's something weird about the disciplines involved, for one thing. Like deconstructionism or Rorty-style pragmatism or other postmodernisms and other attacks on philosophy, this controversy thrives in some cupboards and closets in the outbuildings away from the main house. Philosophy won't have much to do with it, and when it does pay attention it tends to march in with a shop vac and pesticides and deodorants and air fresheners and wets everything down and then leaves. The controversies are a bigger deal in the social sciences and in cultural studies and in literary theory than they are in philosophy, even though the views are presented as, and they are, philosophical views. Some ambitious forays by constructions advocates have lashed out at sciences and logic, including math, and have been received--well, that's the wrong word--reacted to, I suppose--with outraged jeers, parodies, and singing with fingers in ears. Those reactions have an odd status, in that they come off as like a great-grandfather's superstitious rejection, so maybe there's something to the stuff being rejected. I've had philosophers tell me that they began to take constructions seriously only after seeing PTSD flooding reactions by opponents in which thinking seemed to have completely shut down. Of course taking those reactions as evidence is not exactly high quality thinking either. Still, this is a set of philosophical views which doesn't get taken very seriously within philosophy and which is taken by others at the margins of philosophy as evidence that philosophy has lost touch with reality--which, reality that is, is a construction, right?
So we may have to tolerate some uncommon philosophical phenomena as we work on these matters. Relatively fresh bullshit on and in our shoes and socks; recurrent treks through high-altitude halls of mirrors to which we have to bring our own oxygen; melodrama; screaming; eminences grises with curled aristocratic lips; mimes; mystical rants; mixtures of profundity and Profundity Hamburger Helper; hidden psychological fears and other needs under and perhaps driving deliberate and oh-so-calm fundamentalist rationalism. I'll try to keep this down to a tolerable level, but we'll have to acknowledge some of it. --Even though we philosophers often regard all drama as melodrama.
A word on periphrasis. You've already seen me dithering in this syllabus about what to call that of which we are speaking. In the literature, it is often referred to as constructionism and the proponents as constructivists or constructionists. I'm not quite sure why these terms are so grating, though it seems to me a school of thought endorsed by artists and poets ought to have a label which is not in poetic scansion a second paeon (or an ell in Morse Code, ditdahditdit), as if Gerard Manley Hopkins were its patron saint. Anyway, I find myself reaching for alternative ways to refer to the positions under discussion and their advocates, including the deconstructionists who take these positions for granted. Sometimes I'll speak of the school of constructions, constructions advocates, or something even worse. Sorry. --well, sort of.
I've kept away from this topic in the reading groups because I felt I was not ready. Ian Hacking (of Toronto, College de France, and recently a distinguished visitor at UC Santa Cruz), who wrote some of our texts, was for part of a term a distinguished philosopher in residence where I was teaching (this all seems centuries ago) at Oregon State University, and I became convinced by him that the issues were worthwhile but complex. My view has changed somewhat--I still think that the issues are worthwhile (especially for illuminating the nature of philosophy and how philosophy can go bad), but I also now think that work like those done in these past few reading groups can help simplify the problems. More about the series below.
We are going to learn how to think like (or at least sing along with) those who advocate constructions, which is somewhat like learning to walk like an Egyptian. We will read from the Science Wars and related controversies. We will then worry about whether we are making problematic singing assumptions. As part of this we will spend some time questioning the questions, which is where I think the discussions have been most conspicuously inadequate. That is, we will clarify the issues involved. We will think about to what extent the issues--before we even get to answers, to the positions and arguments for those positions--may have been shaped by problematic thinking. It is in this kind of work that Wittgenstein's questioning the questions and his ordinary language methods may be especially helpful.
I have not thought all this through yet, and part of the purpose of the reading group, as I wrote above, is to help me think (you are welcome to go along for the ride). Still, here's some foreshadowing, though admittedly peering through the scrim.
Some of what motivates the construction school (and the deconstructionists after them) is a political interest in resisting illegitimate and oppressive power. That illegitimate power is seen at work in structures which shape our thinking. Science, logic, fundamentalist Rationalist approaches, excessive emphases on hierarchies and on law and order and being guided by rules--all these things are regarded as likely to squash diversity and to rob the oppressed of their voices. The construction school is then a natural ally of Marxism, of novelty, of avant garde thinking including avant garde art and lit, of anti-authoritarian tricksters, of eccentricity, and of the downtrodden. "Let a thousand flowers bloom," Mao says in his little red book, and this could be the insignia of the construction school, a tattoo in four Chinese characters across their knuckles. These allies and their shared interests in noble resistance and liberation bring enormous charm and appeal to the constructions school, and by extension they help make the alternative views look stodgy, authoritarian, conservative. The process of appraisal becomes a politically charged one--are we going to side with Old Money and the authorities, or are we going to strike out for liberation? The relation between endorsing constructions and endorsing social justice--does doing one help or harm doing the other?--is part of our investigative agenda.
An important part of the constructions school is a resistance to letting our thinking be shaped by binary polarities, which (thinking that way) it is recognized is a way that old oppressive hidden agendas of power have been maintained. I am sure that there is something importantly right about this--that either-or-thinking really does have the noxious side effects which have been being pointed out since Nietzsche. Part then of getting clear about constructions will be getting clear about dichotomies, often called binary thinking or dualisms. Rorty and Foucault have done some of the work on this. Part of saying that knowledge, for example, is constructed, is saying that it is false to say that a particular case is a case of knowledge or it is not regardless of circumstance. For other examples, saying a particular person is the author of a work or saying that the category woman has a certain meaning needs to be framed or bracketed by acknowledgement of the culture and circumstances within which the saying takes place. Sometimes we will endorse that this framing is taking place by using scare quotes and sometimes we constructionists will drive our opponents crazy by doing this, and sometimes we will be ironic in ways that get us dismissed as nonserious (as John Searle has dismissed Jacques Derrida by saying that "Derrida gives bullshit a bad name"). As I say, I am convinced that the constructions school has something importantly right here, a mainly negative insight about a failure among their opponents, that their opponents uncritically and disastrously endorse dichotomies ripped out of context.
What to do with this insight is a thorny problem, though, since it threatens to either invite a kind of relativism which undermines any social justice agendas (we have no place left to stand which allows us to say that women ought to be allowed freedom or equality), or it just implodes with the criticism that the constructionist position is a dualist or dichotomous or binary position after all--either you endorse dichotomies or you reject them, but if you reject them, you just have endorsed that dichotomy. There probably is no abstract way to coherently escape dichotomous thinking. We may examine a couple of attempts, such as Buddhist recommendations that we acknowledge that words have to have false meanings in order for us to live in this world even though we might understand that we are papering over the nothingness which lies underneath. There are plenty of writers who recommend swimming in this sea, and it requires bravery. This bravery, a willingness to proceed in the absence of strict logical coherence, is one of the factors shaping the emotional contours of the debate--for some it is like flipping away the last cigarette with an ironic quip and straightening to face the Fascist firing squad, and for others it is like renouncing the need to make sense.
So, hang on, please. I want now to slap around constructionism for incoherence and failures, but I want to do this after endorsing that it has something importantly right, namely that its opponents are making terrible mistakes. And I do believe in negative criticism, that demolition is an important function of philosophy, including demolition which threatens to demolish philosophy itself. I am, though, confident that philosophy survives any such attacks, and I want here to point out, in a kind of toy argument, that if philosophy is bad and we need to reject philosophy, we find that that is still a philosophical position which requires arguments to sustain it, and that we find philosophy reassembles itself like a phoenix right before our very eyes. This issue is relevant to reading Rorty, and this position I just sketched is endorsed by Derrida. Some things are deeper than constructions. (Followers of Derrida are divided on this, and it will behoove us to keep in mind C. G. Jung's famous quip, "Thank God I am Jung and not a Jungian!"--versions of which would certainly be endorsed by Plato, Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Derrida, Wittgenstein.)
Further, you cannot be a member of the construction school, cannot get the tattoo, unless you agree to some philosophical views (never mind whether this puts us at odds with our tattoo--let a thousand flowers bloom but make sure they are our flowers). These required endorsements may be disastrous to the constructions school. To wit. Names are separate from the things that are named by them. Words are only conventional tools used for the purpose of communication. Words, that is, have no essential or divine connection to the things communicated by their means. Words are mere nonliving tokens in the public sphere, but the meanings of words are to some extent private and subjective and alive. Thinking this means we take for granted that, to put it ponderously, there is a valid dichotomous relation between objective and subjective, though when we sing along we find we voice the standard Continental philosophy preference for the subjective because we think it is special to us , meaning the individual speaker--it is accessible to us immediately and forcefully, it is incorrigible, it is private in the sense of being unshareable. Every human being, in addition to moving around in a public world, has an internal world view. When these world views coincide with the views of others, then groups operate on bases which have no real external foundations--they think that women or Jews or sciences or numbers are a certain way with no other basis besides their consensus, because, after all, there is no other basis possible.
Another problem with this issue we can now see foreshadowed in that above. It is, if this constructivist view is wrong, what's that show? The constructivist school is engaged in a war against a despicable foe. Understanding what makes that foe despicable is important to understanding the school. (You just heard the mantra from Eastern philosophy, Sun Tzu, and from martial arts, right? "One defines oneself by what one battles against." You might want to worry about the fact that only you heard it.) If meaning is not subjective, that must mean it is objective, which is transparently nonsense, right? The alternatives to constructions are usually taken to be essences--god-given or logic-given necessary and sufficient conditions for something being what it is and being tied inextricably to whatever it is tied to, all this in a context-free way, everywhere and for alllllll time. Constructionism gets part of its force from the conviction that if constructions are not it, then women really are females everywhere and forever, African-Americans really are Negroes like it or not, knowledge really is scientific and science really is, you know, science and that's all there is to it.
If we can, however, see past this set of either/or choices, and if we can show that essentialists and the construction school are fighting with each other because they need to take off the popbottle glasses they share, if they have mistaken a paltry oasis for the world, that might be a help to the discipline. If that feeds the sarcasm of those who have taken a wry view of the controversy as a tempest in a teapot, maybe we can figure out some putdowns for them as well. Actually, I'm pretty sure we can, though I don't know we'll have time--my experience is that it is easy to turn ordinary citizens into Berkeleyan idealists or into Hobbesian cynics or into Humean skeptics or into Zenoesque monists or into scientific physicalists or constructionists or essentialists at the drop of a hat. It is harder to show that the new converts have demonstrated the need for care and for re-examination of their own arguments and, especially, for re-examination of the questions to which they are responding.
At times (such as the weak moment in which I agreed to do this reading group) it seems to me that the stakes in these issues are huge. The division between Anglo-American analytic philosophy and Continental philosophy has its origins at the same spring which gives rise to the constructions school. The Eastern references hint at a possible resolution. We have to be careful with that, though. Even though some Eastern schools of thought pride themselves in having escaped thinking shaped by dichotomies of self and other, present vs. past or present vs. future, existence vs. the void (I don't know why I'm picking on those in particular--there's a whole raft of them), in fact those Eastern thinkers may still be in the grip of illusory dichotomies. I think they are, and this problem can show us the need to clear away enormous recalcitrant blackberry brambles of bad philosophy East and West. The Wittgensteinian methods of doing therapy on problems by illuminating them through nonphilosophical examples, which methods have been credited as a Copernican revolution in philosophy, show some promise of healing human alienation from the world by showing how that alienation results from Cartesian and Platonistic pictures, pictures from which we can free ourselves.
This reading group continues a series on philosophical methods
and Wittgenstein. Constructions may be a topic in which application of some
Wittgensteinian insights will produce progress. Wittgenstein suggests that, rather than focusing on answers or solutions to many philosophical problems ("What is knowledge, really?" "Can we ever know based on perceptions?" "Why should I be good?" "Why is there something rather than nothing?" "What is reality, really?" "How is it possible for humans to communicate using language?"), we may be better off to step back and re-examine, one at a time, each problem itself. He finds after doing some of these re-examinations that some problems result from thinking in mistaken ways as we formulate the problems. That is, some philosophical problems rest on mistakes. There are different mistakes we can make, and we can describe the mistakes in different ways, so that investigating to find out whether a particular issue is based on a mistake might require several different kinds of thinking. That is, there is no one stake we can carry around to pound through the hearts of all these various problems.
Wittgenstein remarks of some of these problems that the work on the problem is like doing therapy on a neurosis. I think this is because, among other things, we work to become conscious of our own thought processes in ways we find ourselves resisting. The goal of this kind of work is unlike much, perhaps most, traditional philosophical work in which we try to discover an answer to a philosophical problem--here we are trying to discover the confusions, assumptions, pictures, overextended analogies, and grammatical errors on which the problem rests, such that when we become clear about those mistakes, perhaps we find we no longer have to ask the philosophical problem. We work, he remarks, not toward a solution but toward the problem's dissolving. Becoming clear about the problem prevents the problem from arising.--at least, until we forget the clarity we achieved and find ourselves once again in the grip of the thinking which gave rise to it--and so, once again, in the grip of the issue.
Text and Materials:
The list of readings is being assembled on the Moodle web page, which is to be regarded as part of this section of this syllabus. We will read, after some background documents and a couple of allegedly noncontroversial examples, several pieces of Ian Hacking's Construction of What?. My worry about that book is that you will believe it and will throw off your chains of constructionism but without realizing the chains you and Hacking still drag behind you. We will then read essays developing examples which are more controversial or at least pushy, including Foucault on authorship, Nancy Tuana's (by-the-way mention of) primate studies, Sandra Harding on science generally. I will be putting other articles from journals and anthologies up on Moodle or handing them out in class. We will look at one famous parody, published as a serious document by a central constructivist journal, the controversy which resulted (the Sokol Social Text affair and the so-called "Science Wars,") and the later appraisal by the parody's author. At this writing I am not yet being successful finding defenses of the construction school against the telling criticisms raised by Hacking and Wittgensteinian others (though there are plenty of defenses in the form of attacks against realists and essentialists--one gets the impression of a very large canoe in the fog, the rowers whacking each other with paddles while they drift toward the falls). After we are clear about what the issues are, we may, depending on the needs of class members, pause on a siding with materials on methods and metaphilosophy while we get ready to return to the issues about constructions.
Most readings will be posted on Moodle. The reading load is intended to be consistent with the general University's expectation that each hour of class time involves two hours of preparation. Philosophy requires intense, active, critical reading, and that goes slowly. Some readings may be handed out in class or placed on reserve. I will enable a forum on the class Moodle page. If you have problems with access, let me know right away, and I can send you digitized documents via e-mail. I have been able to make all accomodations requested for students with disabilities (and giving writing assignments as take home work with long lead times prevents some need for accomodation)--please let me know if these concerns apply to you.
Class format The learning that takes place will be the result of reading, lecture, and discussion--and then writing. We are many of us likely to be so busy that student questions and remarks don't get made as often as we would like. When that happens I find myself talking. It looks like lecturing, except that I am trying to think something through rather than provide the results of that thinking. It will help us all if you have done the reading, made some notes, and expose your thinking to the group as comments and questions. At the very least, you can ask me to write summaries of what we are doing. The literature regarding constructions is vast, but we are taking up fundamental issues in this reading group, and on those matters there is not as much written as one might expect.
Course writing requirements and grading: Students must write, consistent with departmental guidelines for this kind of course, 7-10 pages (2000 to 2500 words) of graded work. (Remember, this is a one-credit course; in the standard three-credit courses the expectation is twenty pages of writing for grades.) If that seems a lot, well, tough %#$--the course is not about your grade but instead is about thinking things through, and clear thinking requires writing. Without the writing we lie to ourselves that we understand when in fact we do not. All your writing has to be complete and received by me by Friday of finals week at dusk (and it's going to be getting dark earlier). You have lots of choices about how you do the writing. It is common for students to put it off and then find themselves in trouble. Half a page a week would do it, but hardly anyone does that. You may do the writing as a series of one-page papers on your own schedule or as a larger paper at the deadline (my daughter Rachel's generally good argument in favor of procrastination is relevant here: "The longer you put it off, the wiser you are when you do it"), or as something in between those. One conspicuous possibility I'll promote is to have some students read their own essays on particular reading assignments in class in order to launch discussions. I will provide some suggestions for paper topics in the form of arguments for you to describe and appraise, but I am not going to nag or monitor your progress, and you are free to stay in denial about the writing requirements and about your own satisfaction of those requirements right up until you get your grades. I don't give incompletes. Also, attendance is required: Anyone who misses more than two sessions (out of fifteen total) will lower her or his grade by one third of a grade point (e.g. B to B-), more than four by one letter grade. Essays which do describe and evaluate arguments will be graded using the
Outcomes and their assessment:
Scheduling: The second and third meetings will be given to presenting arguments for the claim that some things are constructions. By the third meeting, please post to the Moodle forum a summary, say, 200-500 words, of what you take constructionism to be or what it involves or what reasons there might be for thinking it is correct, and demonstrate self-awareness in your summary. Our own beliefs are a subject for this group, and so our schedule will reflect our ongoing re-examination of those beliefs. That means that the schedule is subject to change. We will at each class meeting decide or provide reminders about where we will go next. We'll read the Sokol PostModern Culture piece and some reactions, and compare our assessments of that affair with Sokol's own later assessment. Then we'll start in on Hacking and stick with that as long as we can stand it, then discuss and read whatever is most helpful to us. We might bring in a real live Constructionist or two as audiovisual aids.
Miscellaneous Legal and Regulatory Notices