Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (134 page)

The main contribution of the philosopher Hilary Putnam, from Harvard, was an examination of the impact of science on our notions of reason and rationality. Putnam’s argument is that what we call ‘“truth” depends both on what there is (the way things are) and on the contribution of the thinker … there is a human contribution, a conceptual contribution, to what we call “truth.” Scientific theories are not simply dictated to us by the facts.’
³⁸
This view had important implications, in Putnam’s mind, for he felt that by now, the end of the twentieth century, the ‘scientific method’ had become a very ‘fuzzy’ thing, an idea that for him had peaked in the seventeenth century and had been gradually dissolving since, making the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle anachronistic. By this he meant the idea that science, and therefore reason, could only apply to directly observable and neutral ‘facts,’ which led to easily falsifiable theories. Many modern scientific theories, he pointed out, were by no means easily falsifiable – evolution being a case in point.
³⁹
He therefore agreed with Rorty that ‘reason’ ought to mean what most of us mean by it, how a reasonable person behaves in his/her approach to the world. But Putnam went further in arguing that there is much less distinction between facts and values than traditional scientists, or philosophers of science, allow. He agreed with Kuhn and Polanyi that science often proceeds by some sort of intuitive or inductive logic, because not all possible experiments are ever tried, merely the most plausible, ‘plausible’ itself being derived from some ‘reasonable’ idea we have of what we should do next. Arising from this, Putnam argued that certain statements, traditionally taken to be values, or prejudices (in the widest sense), are also facts just as much as the facts produced by science. Two examples he gives are that Hitler was a bad man and that poetry is better than pushpin. In the case of pushpin, for example, Jeremy Bentham said in the eighteenth century that expressing a preference for poetry over the game is a mere prejudice, subjective – an argument much loved by the relativists, who believe that the subjective life of one person, and even more so of one culture, cannot
be fruitfully or meaningfully compared to that of another. Putnam’s refutation was not anthropological but philosophical, because the argument gave credence to ‘prejudice’ as a mental entity while denying it to, say, ‘enlarged sensibilities,’ ‘enlarged repertoires of meaning and metaphor,’ ‘self-realization,’ and so on: ‘The idea that values are not part of the Furniture of the World and the idea that “value judgements” are expressions of “prejudice” are two sides of the same coin.’
⁴⁰
Value judgements, Putnam is saying, can be rationally supported, and it is time to get away once and for all from the idea that scientific facts are the only facts worthy of the name. ‘Even the distinction between “classical” physics and quantum mechanics, with their rival views of the world, is itself observer-dependent.’ ‘The harm that the old picture of science does is this: if there is a realm of absolute fact that scientists are gradually accumulating, then everything else appears as non-knowledge.’

Willard van Orman Quine,
another Harvard philosopher, took a very different line, while still retaining the importance of science, and the scientific method, for philosophy. In a series of books,
From a Logical Point of View
(1953),
Word and Object
(1960),
Roots of Reference
(1974),
Theories and Things
(1981),
Quiddities
(1987), and
From Stimulus to Science
(1995), Quine set out his view that philosophy is continuous with science, even part of science, and that there are essentially two aspects to reality: physical objects, which exist externally and independently of us, and abstract objects, notably mathematics. Quine is a dedicated materialist, holding that ‘there is no change without a change in the distribution of microphysical properties over space.’
⁴¹
This approach, he says, enables him to eschew dualism, for ‘mental’ events are ‘manifested’ by behaviour. In other words, the understanding of mental events will ultimately be neurological, whether or not we ever reach such understanding. Mathematics, on Quine’s formulation, has a twofold importance.
⁴²
First, the existence and efficiency of numbers in helping describe and understand the universe is fundamental, the more so as numbers exist only as an abstract concept. Second, there is the idea of sets, the way some entities group together to form higherorder superentities, which imply similarity and difference. This, for Quine, relates number to words and words to sentences, the building blocks of experience. In zoology, for instance, living organisms have evolved into different genera and families – what does that mean philosophically? Are there genuine families and genera in nature, or are they a figment of our brains, based on our understanding of similarities, differences, and the relative importance of those similarities/differences? What goes on in the brain, at the microphysical level, when we think or talk about such matters? How closely do words,
can
words, correspond to what is ‘out there,’ and what does that mean for the microphysical processes in the brain?
⁴³
When words that mean similar (but not identical) things in different languages are translated, what does that involve for microphysical properties in the brain? Quine is an unusually difficult philosopher to paraphrase, because many of his writings are highly technical, using mathematical notation, but broadly speaking he may be seen in the tradition of Bertrand Russell, the logical positivists, and B. F. Skinner, in that for him philosophy is not a discipline as Rorty or Nagel would have it, beyond science, but is a part of science, an
extension that, although it asks questions that scientists themselves might not ask, nevertheless talks about them in ways that scientists
would
recognise.

Whose Justice? Which Rationality?
(1988), by
Alasdair Maclntyre,
is perhaps the most subversive postmodern book yet, uniting as it does the work of Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Geertz, Rawls, and Dworkin in a most original fashion.
⁴⁴
Maclntyre looked at notions of reason, and rationality, and their effects on ideas of justice, in earlier societies – in classical Greece, classical Rome, Saint Thomas Aquinas’s teaching at the University of Paris in the thirteenth century, the Scottish enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – and in modern liberal times. He looked at their arguments, as developed in political, philosophical, legal, and literary works, but also at their language and how it did, or did not, conform to modern notions. Rhetoric in Athens, for example, was regarded as the high point of reason, and its aim was to spur to action; it was not thought proper, therefore, to refer to rival points of view, to weigh both sides of the argument before deciding. Reasoning, as we would understand it, was kept to a discussion of means toward an end, not about the end and the justice of that end, which was understood implicitly to be shared by all. Only people who possessed the virtues were felt to be capable of reason in Athens, says Maclntyre, and this concept was even given a special name,
boulesis,
‘rational wish.’ In this context, the rational person in Athens acted ‘immediately and necessarily upon affirming his reasons for action … very much at odds with our characteristically modern ways of envisaging a rational agent.’
⁴⁵

Saint Thomas Aquinas believed, along with all Christians, that everyone had the potentiality to act in a reasoned way, which would lead to a moral life, but that only education in a certain order – logic, mathematics, physics – could bring about full realisation of those potentialities. There was, for him, no difference between being rational and being moral. The Scottish enlightenment, on the other hand, turned back to an emphasis on the passions, David Hume distinguishing between the calm passions and the violent passions, which take priority over reason. ‘Truth in itself according to Hume … is not an object of desire. But how then are we to explain the pursuit of truth in philosophy? Hume’s answer is that the pleasure of philosophy and of intellectual inquiry more generally “consists chiefly in the action of the mind, and the exercise of the genius and understanding in the discovery or comprehension of any truth.” Philosophy, so it turns out, is like the hunting of woodcocks or plovers; in both activities the passion finds its satisfaction in the pleasures of the chase.’ For Hume, then, reason cannot motivate us.
⁴⁶
‘And the passions, which do motivate us, are themselves neither reasonable nor unreasonable…. Passions are thus incapable of truth or falsity.’
⁴⁷
Hume himself said, ‘Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.’
⁴⁸

In the modern liberal society, on the other hand, Maclntyre tells us there is a rival concept of reason and of justice, based on different assumptions, namely that people are individuals and nothing more: ‘In Aristotelian practical reasoning it is the individual
qua
citizen who reasons; in Thomistic practical reasoning it
is the individual
qua
enquirer into his or her good and the good of his or her community; in Humean practical reasoning it is the individual
qua
propertied or unpropertied participant in a society of a particular kind of mutuality and reciprocity; but in the practical reasoning of liberal modernity it is the individual
qua
individual who reasons.’
⁴⁹
Maclntyre’s conclusion is that our concepts of reasoning (and justice) are just one tradition among several. He offers no concept of evolution in these matters, and neither Darwin nor Richard Dawkins is mentioned in his book. Instead, Maclntyre thinks we continue to deform our relationship with the past by coarse translations of the classics (even when done by some scholars), which do not treat ancient words to their ancient meanings but instead offer crude modern near-equivalents. Quoting Barthes, he says that to understand the past, we need to include all the signs and other semiological clues that the ancients themselves would have had, to arrive at what Clifford Geertz (who
is
referred to in Maclntyre’s book) would call a ‘thick description’ of their conceptions of reason and justice. The result of the liberal conception of reason, he says, has some consequences that might be seen as disappointing: ‘What the student is in consequence generally confronted with … is an apparent inconclusiveness in all argument outside the natural sciences, an inconclusiveness which seems to abandon him or her to his or her pre-rational preferences. So the student characteristically emerges from a liberal education with a set of skills, a set of preferences, and little else, someone whose education has been as much a process of deprivation as of enrichment.’
⁵⁰

The tide of David Harvey’s book
The Condition of Postmodernity
is strikingly similar to Lyotard’s
Postmodern Condition.
First published in 1980, it was reissued in 1989 in a much revised version, taking into account the many developments in postmodernism during that decade.
⁵¹
Contrasting postmodernity with modernity, Harvey begins by quoting an editorial in the architectural magazine
Precis 6:
‘Generally perceived as positivistic, technocentric, and rationalistic, universal modernism has been identified with the belief in linear progress, absolute truths, the rational planning of ideal social orders, and the standardisation of knowledge and production. Postmodernism, by way of contrast, privileges “heterogeneity and differences as liberative forces in the redefinition of cultural discourse.” Fragmentation, indeterminacy, and intense distrust of all universal or ‘totalising’ discourses (to use the favoured phrase) are the hallmark of postmodernist thought. The rediscovery of pragmatism in philosophy (e.g., Rorty, 1979), the shift of ideas about the philosophy of science wrought by Kuhn (1962) and Feyerabend (1975), Foucault’s emphasis on discontinuity and difference in history and his privileging of “polymorphous correlations in place of simple or complex causality,” new developments in mathematics emphasising indeterminacy (catastrophe and chaos theory, fractal geometry), the re-emergence of concern in ethics, politics and anthropology for the validity and dignity of “the other,” all indicate a widespread and profound shift in “the structure of feeling.” What all these examples have in common is a rejection of ‘metanarratives’ (large-scale theoretical interpretations purportedly of universal application).’
⁵²
Harvey moves beyond this summing-up, however, to make four
contributions of his own. In the first place, he describes postmodernism in architecture (the form, probably, where most people encounter it); most valuably, he looks at the political and economic conditions that brought about postmodernism and sustain it; he looks at the effect of postmodernism on our conceptions of space and time (he is a geographer, after all); and he offers a
critique
of postmodernism, something that was badly needed.

In the field of architecture and urban design, Harvey tells us that postmodernism signifies a break with the modernist idea that planning and development should focus on ‘large-scale, metropolitan-wide, technologically rational and efficient urban
plans,
backed by absolutely no-frills architecture (the austere “functionalist” surfaces of “international style” modernism). Postmodernism cultivates, instead, a conception of the urban fabric as necessarily fragmented, a “palimpsest” of past forms superimposed upon each other, and a “collage” of current uses, many of which may be ephemeral.’ Harvey put the beginning of postmodernism in architecture as early as 1961, with Jane Jacobs’s
Death and Life of Great American Cities
(see chapter 30), one of the ‘most influential anti-modernist tracts’ with its concept of ‘the great blight of dullness’ brought on by the international style, which was too static for cities, where
processes
are of the essence.
⁵³
Cities, Jacobs argued, need organised complexity, one important ingredient of which, typically absent in the international style, is diversity. Postmodernism in architecture, in the city, Harvey says, essentially meets the new economic, social, and political conditions prevalent since about 1973, the time of the oil crisis and when the major reserve currencies left the gold standard. A whole series of trends, he says, favoured a more diverse, fragmented, intimate yet anonymous society, essentially composed of much smaller units of diverse character. For Harvey the twentieth century can be conveniently divided into the Fordist years – broadly speaking 1913 to 1973 – and the years of ‘flexible accumulation.’ Fordism, which included the ideas enshrined in Frederick Winslow Taylor’s
Principles of Scientific Management
(1911), was for Harvey a whole way of life, bringing mass production, standardisation of product, and mass consumption:
⁵⁴
‘The progress of Fordism internationally meant the formation of global mass markets and the absorption of the mass of the world’s population, outside the communist world, into the global dynamics of a new kind of capitalism.’
⁵⁵
Politically, it rested on notions of mass economic democracy welded together through a balance of special-interest forces.
⁵⁶
The restructuring of oil prices, coming on top of war, brought about a major recession, which helped catalyse the breakup of Fordism, and the ‘regime of accumulation’ began.
⁵⁷