In some of the disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, and even in some of the professional schools, there now are developing two more or less distinct faculty subcultures, one might almost say two different universities. The distinction between the two subculture cuts across disciplinary boundaries, and it is not sharp. But it is there. One is that of the traditional university dedicated to the discovery, extension, and dissemination of knowledge as traditionally conceived. The second expresses a much more diverse set of attitudes and projects, but just to have a label, I will describe it as the subculture of 'postmodernism.' I do not mean to imply that this concept is well-defined or even coherent, but when describing any intellectual movement it is best to use terms the adherents themselves would accept, and this one appears to be accepted as a self-description by many of the people I will be discussing.
I referred above to 'debates,' but that is not quite accurate. There really is not much in the way of explicit debate going on between these two cultures over the central philosophical issues concerning the mission of the university and its epistemic and ontological underpinnings. There are lots of debates about specific issues such as multiculturalism and affirmative action, but not much in the way of a debate about the presuppositions of the traditional university and the alternatives. In journalistic accounts, the distinction between the traditional university and the discourse of postmodernism is usually described in political terms: the traditional university claims to cherish knowledge for its own sake and for its practical applications, and it attempts to be apolitical or at least politically neutral. The university of postmodernism thinks that all discourse is political anyway, and it seeks to use the university for beneficial rather than repressive political ends. This characterization is partly correct, but I think the political dimensions of this dispute can only be understood against a deeper dispute about fundamental philosophical issues. The postmodernists are attempting to challenge certain traditional assumptions about the nature of truth, objectivity, rationality, reality, and intellectual quality.
In what follows, I will try to identify some of the elements of the Western conceptions of rationality and realism that are now under challenge. My aim is not so much to resolve the disputes but to identify (at least some of) what exactly is in dispute. I will also briefly discuss some of the consequences different conceptions of rationality and realism have for higher education. These are not the only issues underlying the disputes in current debates about higher education, nor are these the only theoretical and philosophical issues in higher education, but they are worth discussing and as far as I know have not been addressed in quite these terms before.
Two forms of disunity need special emphasis. First, at any given time the most cherished assumptions of the Western Rationalistic Tradition have been subject to challenge. There has seldom been unanimity or even consensus within it. Second, over time those assumptions have evolved, typically in response to challenges. For example, the role of sacred texts such as Scriptures in validating claims to knowledge, the role of mystical insight as a source of knowledge, and the role of the supernatural generally have declined spectacularly with the demystification of the world that began, roughly speaking,with the advent of the modern era in the seventeenth century. Any attempt to characterize the Western Rationalistic Tradition, therefore, inevitably suffers from some degree of oversimplification or even distortion. Furthermore, any attempt such as I am about to make to describe its present form is inevitably from the point of view of a particular thinker at a particular time and place - how it seems to him or her, then and there. And, by the way, the recognition of this limitation - that accuracy and objectivity are difficult to attain because of the fact that all representation is 'from a point of view and under some aspects and not others' - is one of the central epistemic principles of the Western Rationalistic Tradition in its current incarnation.
I believe a decisive step in the creation of the Western Rationalistic Tradition was the Greek creation of the idea of a 'theory.' It is important to state this idea precisely. Many features of the Western Rationalistic Tradition - the presupposition of an independently existing reality and the presuppostion that language, at least on occasion, conforms to that reality - are essential to any successful culture. You cannot survive if you are unable to cope with the real world, and the ways that human beings characteristically cope with the real world essentially involve representing it to themselves in language. But the introduction of the idea of a theory allowed the Western tradition to produce something quite unique, namely systematic intellectual constructions that were designed to describe and to explain areas of reality in a way that was logically and mathematically accessible. Euclid's 'Elements' provides a model for the kind of logical relationships that have been paradigmatic in the Western tradition. Indeed, the Greeks had almost everything necessary for theory in the modern sense. One essential thing they lacked and which Europe did not get until the Renaissance was the idea of systematic experiments. The Greeks had logic, mathematics, rationality, systematicity, and the notion of a theoretical construct. But the idea of matching theoretical constructs against an independently existing reality through systematic experimentation really did not come in until much later. However, I am getting ahead of my story.
Another feature of Western Rationalistic Tradition is its self critical quality. Elements within it have always been under challenge; it was never a unified tradition. The idea of a 'critique' was always to subject any belief to the most rigorous standards of rationality, evidence, and truth. Socrates is the hero of the intellectual branch of the Western Rationalistic Tradition in large part because he accepted nothing without argument and was relentlessly critical of any attempts at solving philosophical problems. Recently, however, the self-critical element in the Western Rationalistic Tradition has had a peculiar consequence. If the point of the criticism is to subject all belief, claims, prejudice, and assumptions to the most rigorous scrutiny through the magnifying glass of rationality, logic, evidence, etc., then why should the criticism eventually not be directed at rationality or logic or evidence themselves? The heroic age of the Western Rationalistic Tradition came during and after the Renaissance when the faiths and dogmas of the Middle Ages were subjected to ever more savage criticism, until finally we reached the European Enlightenment and the skepticism of Hume and Voltaire, for example. But now, why should we not also be skeptical of rationality, logic, evidence, truth, reality, etc., themselves? If the uncritical acceptance of a belief in God can be demolished, then why not also demolish the uncritical acceptance of the belief in the external world, the belief in truth, the belief in rationality, indeed, the belief in belief? At this point the Western Rationalistic Tradition becomes not merely self-critical, but self-destructive. Nietzsche, on one possible interpretation, can be regarded both as diagnosing and exemplifying this self-destructive element. Nietzsche is a philosopher of considerable variety, but at his worst he exhibits a distinct shortage of argument and a tendency to substitute rhetoric for reason. For the present discussion, the interesting point is that he has come back into fashion. I believe this is, in part, because of his attacks on various aspects of the Western Rationalistic Tradition. It is not easy to locate any argument, much less proofs, in his attacks.
It may seem impossible to make even the crudest summary of the Western Rationalistic Tradition because of the enormous variety I mentioned earlier, but there is a simple test for distinguishing the center from the periphery, namely what do the attackers of the tradition feel it necessay to attack, what do the challengers feel it necessary to challenge. For example, there are lots of theories of truth, but anyone who wants to challenge the tradition has to attack the correspondance theory of truth. The correspondance theory is the norm, the default position; other positions are defined in relation to it. Similarly, there are lots of versions of realism as well as of idealism, but anyone who wants to attack the accepted view in this domain has to attack the idea that there is a mind-independent reality, a real world that exists entirely independently of our thought and talk.
We cannot discover the essential elements of the Western Rationalistic Tradition just by studying the doctrines of the great philosophers. Often the important thing is not what the philosopher said but what he took for granted as too obvious to need saying. Some of the best known philosophers became famous for attacking central elements of the Western Rationalistic Tradition - the Irish philosopher George Berkeley, Hume, and Kant, for example.
For the sake of simplicity, I will state what I take to be some of the basic tenets of the Western Rationalistic Tradition as a set of propositions.
This point needs to be stated carefully. The vocabulary or system of representation in which I can state these truths is a human creation, and the motivations that lead one to investigate such matters are contingent features of human psychology. Without a set of verbal categories I cannot make any statements about these matters or about anything else. Without a set of motivations, no one would bother. But the actual situations in the world that correspond to these statements are not human creations, nor are they dependent on human motivations. This conception of realism forms the basis of the natural sciences.
The philosophy of language has a curious history in the Western tradition. Though it is currently at or near the center of attention, especially in English-speaking countries, the forms of our present interests and preoccupations with language are fairly recent. The philosophy of language, in the contemporary sense of the expression, begins with the German mathematician and philosopher Gottlob Frege in the nineteenth century. Previous philosophers often wrote philosophically about language, but none had a 'philosophy of language' in the contemporary sense. Even such traditional topics on 'the problem of universals' and 'the nature of truth' were transformed by the post-Fregean movement.
I think part of the reason for this is that for many centuries most thinkers simply took it for granted that words communicated ideas, and they referred to objects by way of ideas. John Locke describes the accepted view, in contrast to his own, as follows:
But though words, as they are used by men, can properly and immediately signify nothing but the ideas that are in the mind of the speaker, yet they in their thoughts give them a secret reference to two other things.With Frege the philosophical tradition did not abandon the two principles but rather came to see them as immensely problematic. How does it work? How is it possible that communication can take place? How is it possible that words and sentences relate? In the twentieth century, the philosophy of language became central to philosophy in general, both because of its intrinsic interest and because it was central to other problems in philosophy such as the nature of knowledge and truth.First, To the ideas in other men's minds. - First, they suppose their words to be marks of the ideas in the minds also of other men, with whom they communicate: for else they should talk in vain, and could not be understood, if the sounds they applied to one idea were such as by the hearer were applied to another, usually to examine whether the idea they and those they discourse with have in their minds to be the same: but think it enough that they use the word, as they imagine, in the common acceptance of that language; which they suppose, that the idea they make it a sign of is precisely the same to which the understanding of men of that country apply that name.
Secondly, To the reality of things. - Secondly, because men would not be thought to talk barely of their imaginations, but of things as really they are; therefore they often suppose their words to stand also for the reality of things.
So, for example, the statement that hydrogen atoms have one electron, or that the earth is 93 million miles from the sun, or that my dog is now in the kitchen are true or false depending on whether or not things in the hydrogen atom, solar system, and domestic canine line of business, respectively, are really the way these statements say they are. Truth, so construed, admits of degrees. The statement about the sun, for example is only roughly true.
In some versions, this idea is called the 'correspondance theory of truth.' It is often presented as a definition of 'true' thus: 'A statement is true if and only if the statement corresponds to the facts.'
In recent centuries, there has been a lot of debate among professional philosophers over the correspondance theory of truth. Much of this debate is about special problems concerning the notions of fact and correspondance. Does the notion of correspondance really explain anything? Are facts really independent of statements? Does every true statement really correspond to a fact? For example, are there moral facts? And if not, does that mean that there are no true statements in morals? I hold definite opinions on all these issues, but since I am now unveiling the Western Rationalistic Tradition and not expounding my own views, I will confine myself to the following.
The concept of truth as it has evolved over the centuries contains two separate strands, and the two strands do not always entwine together. Sometimes it seems we have two different conceptions of truth. Truth is an obsession of the Western Rationalistic Tradition, so this apparent ambiguity is important. The ambiguity is between truth as correspondence and truth as disquotation. On the correspondance theory, statement p is true if and only if p corresponds to a fact. For example, the statement that the dog is in the kitchen is true if and only if it corresponds to the fact that the dog is in the kitchen. On the disquotation theory, for any statement s that expresses a proposition p, s is true if and only if p. So, for example, the statement 'the dog is in the kitchen' is true if and only if the dog is in the kitchen. This is called 'disquotation' because the quotation marks on the left-hand side of 'if and only if' are simply dropped on the right-hand side.
These two criteria for truth do not always appear to give the same result. The second makes it look as if the word 'true' does not really add anything. Saying that it is true that the dog is in the kitchen is just another way of saying that the dog is in the kitchen, so it seems that the word 'true' is redundant. For this reason, the disquotation criterion has inspired the 'redundancy theory of truth.' The first criterion, the correspondence criterion, makes it look as if there is a genuine relation between two independently identified entities - the statement and the fact. The difficulty, however, with this conception is that the two entities are not independently identiably. You cannot answer the question, 'which fact does the statement correspond to?' without stating a true statement. So, once I have identified the statement, 'the dog is in the kitchen,' and then I have identified the fact that the dog is in the kitchen, there is not anything else for me to do by way of comparing the statement to the fact to see if they really do correspond. The alleged correspondence relation has been established by the very identification of the fact.
Is there any way to explain the correspondance theory which overcomes this difficulty, and is there any way to resolve the tension between the disquotation criterion and the correspondence criterion and overcome the apparent ambiguity in the concept of truth? I think that there is.
The word 'fact' has evolved out of the Latin 'facere' in such a way that it has come to mean that which corresponds to a true statement in virtue of which the statement is true. So the correspondence theory - a statement is true if and only if it corresponds to a fact - is a truism, a tautology, an analytic statement. But the grammar of the language then misleads us. We think that because 'fact' is a noun, and nouns typically name things, and because 'corresponds' typically names a relation between things, that therefore there must be a class of complicated objects, the facts, and a relation that true statements bear to these complicated objects, correspondence. But this picture does not work. It sounds plausible for the statement that the dog is in the kitchen but what about the true statement that the dog is not in the kitchen? Or the true statement that three-headed dogs never existed? What complicated objects do they correspond to?
The mistake is to think that facts are a class of complicated objects, and that to find the truth we must first find the object and then compare it with a statement to see if they really do correspond. But that is not how language works in this area. The fact that the dog is not in the kitchen, or the fact that three-headed dogs have never existed are as much facts as any other, simply because the corresponding statements are true, and 'fact' is defined as whatever it is that makes a statement true.
For this reason, because of the definitional connection between fact and true statement, there could not be an inconsistency between the correspondence criterion of truth and the disquotational criterion. The disquotational criterion tells us that the statement, 'the dog is in the kitchen,' is true if and only if the dog is in the kitchen. The correspondence criterion tells us that the dog is in the kitchen is true if and only if it corresponds to a fact. But which fact? The only fact it could correspond to, if true, is the fact that the dog is in the kitchen. But that is precisely the result given by the disquotational criterion, because that is the fact stated by the righthand side of the equation: the statement, 'the dog is in the kitchen,' is true if and only if the dog is in the kitchen. So both the correspondence theory and the disquotational theory are true and they are not inconsistent. The corresondence theory is trivially true and thus misleads us because we think correspondence must name some very general relation between language and reality, whereas in fact, I am suggesting, it is just a shorthand for all of the enormous variety of ways in which statements can accurately represent how things are. Statements are typically true in virtue of, or because of, features of the world that exist independently of the statement.
The upshot of this discussion as far as the Western Rationalistic Tradition is concerned, is this: for the most part the world exists independently of language and one of the functions of language is to represent how things are in the world. One crucial point at which reality and language make contact is marked by the notion of truth. In general, statements are true to the extent that they accurately represent some feature of reality that exists independently of the statement.
There are various important philosophical problems about correspondence and disquotation, but if we mind our p's and q's we can see that none of these problems threatens our basic conception of truth as the accuracy of representation.
It is worth pausing to state the significance of this principle to some of the present debates. A standard argumentative strategy of those who reject the Western Rationalistic Tradition is to challenge some claim they find objectionable, by challenging the maker of the claim in question. Thus, the claim and its maker are said to be racist, sexist, phono-phallo-logocentric, and so forth. To those who hold the traditional conception of rationality, these challenges do not impress. They are, at best, beside the point. To those within the Western Rationalistic Tradition, these types of challenges have names.They are commonly called argumentum ad hominem and the genetic fallacy. Argumentum ad hominem is an argument against the person who presents a view rather than against the view itself, and the genetic fallacy is the fallacy of supposing that because a theory or claim has a reprehensible origin, the theory or claim itself is discredited. I hope it is obvious why anyone who accepts the idea of objective truth and therefore of objective knowledge thinks this is a fallacy and that an argumentum ad hominem is an invalid argument. If someone makes a claim to truth and can give that claim the right kind of support, and if that claim is indeed true, then that person genuinely knows something. The fact that the whole enterprise of claiming and validating may have been carried out by someone who is racist or sexist is just irrelevant to the truth of the claim. That is part of what is meant by saying that knowledge is objective. It is less obvious, but I hope still apparent, why anyone who denies the possibility of objective truth and knowledge might find these sorts of arguments appealing. If there is no such thing as objective truth, then the criteria for assessing claims have no essential connection with truth or falsity, and may as well be concerned with the maker of the argument, his or her motives, the consequences of making the claim, or other such issues.
Where practical reason is concerned, this point is sometimes made by saying that reasoning is always about means not about ends. This is not quite right, given the Western conception, because one can reason about whether or not one's ends are proper, appropriate or rational, but only in the light of other ends and other considerations such as consistency. The formal character of rationality has the important consequence that rationality as such cannot be 'refuted' because it does not make any claim to refute.
On a natural interpretation, the previous five principles have the following consequence.
There are endless debates in the history of Western philosophy about these issues. In my own view, for example, even objectivity only functions relative to a shared 'background' of cognitive capacities and hence is, in a sense, a form of intersubjectivity. However, for the present discussion what matters is that according to the Western Rationalistic Tradition there are rational standards for assessing intellectual quality. Except in a few areas, there is no algorithm that determines the standard and they are not algorithmic in their application. But all the same they are neither arbitrarily selected nor arbitrarily applied. Some disputes may be unsettleable - but that does not mean that anything goes.
For the traditional conception of the university this principle is crucial. For example, in the traditional university, the professor assigns Shakespeare and not randomly selected comic strips, and she does so in the belief that she could demonstrate that Shakespeare is better. No principle of the Western Rationalistic Tradition is more repulsive to the culture of postmodernism than this one, as we will soon see.
All six of these principles are currently under attack in different form, and I now want to explore some of the consequences, both of the principles and of the attacks. It is no exaggeration to say that our intellectual and educational tradition, especially in the research universities, is based on the Western Rationalistic Tradition. The scholarly ideal of the tradition is that of the disinterested inquirer engaged in the quest for objective knowledge that will have universal validity. Presisely this ideal is now under attack. In a pamphlet issued by the American Council of Learned Societies, authored by six heads of prominent humanities institutes and designed to defend the humanities against charges that they have abandoned their educational mission, we read: 'As the most powerful modern philosophies and theories have been demonstating, claims of disinterest, objectivity and universality are not to be trusted, and themselves tend to reflect local historical conditions.' They go on to argue that claims to objectivity are usually disguised forms of power seeking.
In most academic disciplines it is fairly obvious how acceptance of the Western Rationalistic Tradition shapes both the content and the methods of higher education. As professors in research universities, we traditionally take ourselves as trying to advance and disseminate human knowledge and understanding, whether it be in physical chemistry, microelectronics, or medieval history. It is less obvious, but still intelligible, how standards of rationality, knowledge, and truth are supposed to apply to the study of fictional literature or the visual arts. Even in these areas the traditional assumption by which they were studied and taught were of a piece with the rest of the Western Rationalistic Tradition. There were supposed to be intersubjective standards by which one could judge the quality of literary and artistic works, and the study of these works was supposed to give us knowledge not only of the history of literature and art but of the reality beyond to which they refer, if only directly. Thus, for example, it was commonly believed, at least until quite recently, that the study of the great classics of literature gave the reader insights into human nature and the human condition in general. It was, in short, something of a cliche that you could learn more about human beings from reading great novels than you could from most psychology courses. Nowadays, one does not hear much talk about 'great classics of literature,' and the idea of intersubjective standards of aesthetic quality is very much in dispute.
If the relation of the Western Rationalistic Tradition to the traditional ideals of the university is - more or less - obvious, the relation between attacks on the Western Rationalistic Tradition and proposals for educational reform is much less obvious. It is simply a fact that, in recent history, rejection of the Western Rationalistic Tradition has gone hand in hand with the proposals for politically motivated changes in the curriculum. So, what is the connection? I think the relationships are very complex, and I do not know of any simple answer to the question. But underlying all the complexity there is, I believe, this simple structure: those who want to use the universities, especially the humanities, for leftist political transformation correctly perceive that the Western Rationalistic Tradition is an obstacle in their path. In spite of their variety, most of the challengers to the traditional conception of education correctly perceive that if they are forced to conduct academic life according to a set of rules determined by constraints of truth, objectivity, clarity, rationality, logic, and the brute existence of the real world, their task is made more difficult, perhaps impossible. For example, if you think that the purpose of teaching history of the past is to achieve social and political transformation of the present, then the traditional canons of historical scholarship - the canons of objectivity, evidence, close attention to the facts, and above all, truth - can sometimes seem an unnecessary and oppressive regime that stands in the way of achieving more important social objectives.
In my experience at least, the present multiculturalist reformers of higher education did not come to a revised conception of education from a refutation of the Western Rationalistic Tradition; rather they sought a refutation of the Western Rationalistic Tradition that would justify a revised conception of education that they already found appealing. For example, the remarkable interest in the work of Thomas Kuhn on the part of literary critics did not derive from a sudden passion in English departments to understand the transition from Newtonian Mechanics to Relativity Theory. Rather, Kuhn was seen as discrediting the idea that there is any such reality. If all of 'reality' is just a text anyway, then the role of the textual specialist, the literary critic, is totally transformed. And if, as Nietzsche says, 'There are not facts, but only interpretations,' then what makes one interpretation better than another cannot be that one is true and the other is false, but, for example, that one interpretation might help overcome existing hegemonic, patriarchal structures and empower previously underrepresented minorities.
I think in fact that the arguments against the Western Rationalistic Tradition used by a Nietzscheanized Left are rather weak, but this does not matter as much as one might suppose because the refutation of the Western Rationalistic Tradition is not the primary goal. It is only necessary that the refutation have enough respectability to enable one to get on with the primary social and political goal. Historically, part of what happened is that in the late 1960s and 1970s a number of young people went into academic life because they thought that social and political transformation could be achieved through educational and cultural transformation, and that the political ideals of the 1960s could be achieved through education. In many disciplines, for example, analytic philosophy, they found the way blocked by a solid and self-confident professorial establishment committed to traditional intellectual values. But in some disciplines, primarily those humanities disciplines concerned with literary studies - English, French, and Comparative Literature especially - the existing academic norms were fragile, and the way was opened intellectually for a new academic agenda by the liberating impact of the works of authors such as Jacques Derrida, Thomas Kuhn, Richard Rorty, and to a lesser extent by Michael Foucault and the rediscovery of Nietzsche. Notice that the postmodernist-cultural Left differs from the traditional leftwing movements such as Marxism in that it makes no claims to being 'scientific.' Indeed it is, if anything, antiscientific, and Marxist-inspired philosophers who accept the Western Rationalistic Tradition, such as Jurgen Habermas, are much less influential in postmodernist subculture than, say, Derrida or Rorty.
There are now departments in some research universities that are ideologically dominated by antirealist and antirationalist conceptions, and these conceptions are beginning to affect both the content and the style of higher education. In cases where the objective is to use higher education as a device for political transformation, the usual justification given for this is that higher education has always been political anyway, and since the claim of the universities to impart to their students a set of objective truths about independently existing reality is a sham hiding political motives, we should convert higher education into a device for achieving beneficial rather than harmful social and political goals.
So far I have argued that the biggest single consequence of the rejection of the Western Rationalistic Tradition is that it makes possible an abandonment of traditional standards of objectivity, truth, and rationality, and opens the way for an educational agenda, one of whose primary purposes is to achieve social and political transformation. I now want to explore the specific forms that this transformation is supposed to take. Most visibly in the humanities, it is now widely accepted that the race, gender, class, and ethnicity of the student defines his or her identity. On this view it is no longer one of the purposes of education, as it previously had been, to enable the student to develop an identity as a member of a larger universal human intellectual culture. Rather, the new purpose is to reinforce his or her pride in and self-identification with a particular subgroup. For this reason, representativeness in the structure of the curriculum, the assigned readings, and the composition of the faculty becomes crucial. If one abandons the commitment to truth and intellectual excellence that is the very core of the Western Rationalistic Tradition, then it seems arbitrary and elitist to think that some books are intellectually superior to others, that some theories are simply true and others false, and that some cultures have produced more important cultural products than others. On the contrary, it seems natural and inevitable to think that all cultures are created intellectually equal. In literary studies some of these features are indicated by a change in the vocabulary. One does not hear much about 'the classics,' 'great works of literature,' or even 'works'; rather the talk nowadays is usually of 'texts' with its leveling implication that one text is as much of a text as any other text.
Another form of transformation is this: we now commonly hear in the research universities that we must accept new and different conceptions of academic 'excellence.' We are urged to adopt different criteria of academic achievement. An argument sometimes given in favor of altering the traditional conception of academic excellence is that changes in the university brought about by changes in the larger society require new standards of excellence. A number of new faculty members were not recuited according to the traditional standards and did not enter the university with the idea of succeeding by those standards. Often they have been recruited for various social, political, or affirmative action needs. For these new interests and needs, new criteria of excellence have to be designed. However, the Western Rationalistic Tradition does not give you much room to maneuver where intellectual excellence is concerned. Intellectual excellence is already determined by a set of preexisting standards. In order to redefine excellence, you have to abandon certain features of the Western Rationalistic Tradition.
The connection between the attack on rationality and realism and curricular reform is not always obvious, but it is there to be found if you are willing to look closely enough. For example, many of the multiculturalist proposals for curricular reform involve a subtle redefinition of the idea of an academic subject from that of a domain to be studied to that of a cause to be advanced. Thus, for example, many people thought these new departments were engaged in the ('objective,' 'scientific') investigation of a domain, the history and present condition of women, in the same way that they thought that the new departments of Molecular Biology were investigating a domain, the molecular basis of biological phenomena. But in the case of Women's Studies, and other such new disciplines, that is not always what happened. The new departments often thought of their purpose, at least in part, as advancing certain moral and political causes such as that of feminism.
And this shift from the territorial conception in turn has further consequences down the line. Thus, traditionally the commitment to objectivity and truth was supposed to enable the scholar to teach a domain, whatever his or her moral attitudes about the domain. For example, you do not have to be a Platonist to do a good scholarly job of teaching Plato or a Marxist to do a good job of teaching Marx. But once the belief in objectivity and truth are abandoned and political transformation is accepted as a goal, then it seems that the appropriate person to teach Women's Studies would be a politically active feminist woman. On the traditional conception, there is no reason why Women's Studies should not be taught by a scholar who is male, even by a male who is unsympathetic with contemporary feminist doctrines; but in most Women's Studies departments in the United States that would be out of the question. I hope it is obvious that analogous points could be made about Chicano Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies, African American Studies, and other elements of the recent attempts at curricular reform.
Furthermore, the shift from domain-to-be-investigated to moral-cause-to-be-advanced is often not made explicit. When making the case to the general academic public for multiculturalist curriculum, the advocates often cite the uncharted academic territories that need to be investigated and taught, and the educational needs of a changing student population. Among themselves, however, they tend to emphasize the political transformations to be achieved, and these transformations include undermining certain traditional conceptions of the academic enterprise. Traditional 'liberal' scholars are easily persuaded that new domains need to be investigated and new sorts of students need to be taught; they are often unaware that the main purpose is to advance a political cause.
I realize that the introduction of curricular reforms and even new academic departments to satisfy political demands is nothing new in the history of American universities. However, there is a difference between the traditional reforms and the new conception of education. Traditionally, the idea was that a new science of a particular area would help to solve some pressing political or social problem. For example, the development of political economy as a discipline was built in part around the conception of developing a scientific theory of economy and society that would help solve social problems. Part of the difference that I am pointing to is this: On the new conception, the very idea of 'science' is itself regarded as repressive. The idea of developing a rigorous science to investigate, for example, gender and racial differences, is precisely the sort of thing that is under attack. In short, the idea is not to build a new policy on the basis of a new scientific theory. Rather, the policy is given in advance and the idea is to develop a department and curricular base where that policy can be implemented in the university and extended to the society at large.
I do not wish these remarks to be misunderstood. There are many hard-working men and women engaged in solid traditional scholarship in these new disciplines, and they are commited to the highest standards of truth and objectivity as traditionally conceived. My point here is that they have a significant number of colleagues who do not share these values, and their rejection of these values is connected to their rejection of the Western Rationalistic Tradition.
The introduction of new academic departments is a visible sign of change. Less visible, but much more pervasive, is the change in the self-definition of the individual scholar. I mentioned earlier that there was an increase in the use of ad hominem arguments and genetic fallacies. If there is no such thing as objective truth and validity, then you might as well discuss the person making the argument and his motives for making it, as discuss its claims to validity and the alleged 'truth' of its conclusions. But this is only the tip of the iceberg of a much larger shift in sensibility. The new sensibility is usually described (and excoriated) as 'relativism,' but I think a better term for it might be 'politically motivated subjectivism.' Previous scholars tried to overcome the limitations of their own prejudices and points of view. Now these are celebrated. For example, funding agencies such as the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) receive an increasing number of applications in which it is obvious that the scholar wants to write a book about his or her politically motivated subjective reactions to feelings about, and general 'take on' the Renaissance, the plight of women in the Middle Ages, minority novelists of the Pacific Nothwest, transvestites in the eighteenth century.
Another scarcely noticed consequence of the rejection of the Western Rationalistic Tradition is the blurring of the distinction between high culture and popular culture in the teaching of the humanities. Traditionally, the humanities thought of themselves as conserving, transmitting, and interpreting the highest achievements of human civilization in general and Western civilization in particular. This view is now regarded as elitist, and there has now been a general abandonment of the idea that some works are qualitatively better than others. There is, rather, the assumption that all works are simply texts and can be treated as such.
On the traditional conception, the distinction between high culture and popular culture manifested itself in the fact that works of high culture were celebrated whereas works of popular culture were, if studied at all, treated as objects of socialogical study or investigation. They were treated as symptomatic or expressive, but not themelves as achievements of the highest order. In the subtle shift that has been taking place, no works are celebrated as such. Rather, some works are regarded as important, significant, or valuable because of a political or social message that they convey.
These attacks on the Western Rationalistic Tradition are peculiar in several respects. First, the movement in question is for the most part confined to various disciplines in the humanities, as well as some social science departments and certain law schools. The antirationalist component of the contemporary scene has - so far - had very little influence in philosophy, the natural sciences, economics, engineering, or mathematics. Though some of its heroes are philosophers, it has, in fact, little influence in American Philosophy departments. One might think that since the points at issue are in a very deep sense philosophical, the debates about the curriculum that are connected to the desire to overthrow the Western Rationalistic Tradition must be raging in philosophy departments. But at least in the major American research universities, this, as far as I can tell, is not so. Professional philosophers spend a lot of time fussing around the edges of the Western Rationalistic Tradition. They are obsessed by such questions as: 'What is the correct analysis of truth?,' 'How do words refer to objects in the world?,' and 'Do the unobservable entities postulated by scientific theories actually exist?' Like the rest of us, they tend to take the core of the Western Rationalistic Tradition for granted even when they are arguing about truth, reference, or the philosophy of science. The philosophers who make an explicit point of rejecting the Western Rationalistic Tradition, such as Richard Rorty or Jacques Derrida, are much more influential in departments of literature than they are in philosophy departments.
A second, and perhaps more puzzling, feature is that it is very hard to find any clear, rigorous, and explicit arguments against the core elements of the Western Rationalistic Tradition. Actually, this is not so puzzling when on reflects that part of what is under attack is the whole idea of 'clear, rigorous, and explicit arguments.' Rorty has attacked the correspondence theory of truth, and Derrida has claimed that meanings are undecidable, but neither in their works, nor in the works of other favorites of the postmodernist subculture, will you find much by way of rigorous arguments that you can really sharpen your wits on. Somehow or other, there is the feeling that the Western Rationalistic Tradition has become superseded or obsolete, but actual attempts at refutation are rare. Sometimes we are said to be in a postmodern era, and have thus gone beyond the modern era that began in the seventeenth century; but this alleged change is often treated as if it were like a change in the weather, something that just happened without need of argument or proof. Sometimes the 'arguments' are more in the nature of slogan or battlecries. But the general air of vaguely literary frivolity that pervades the Nietzscheanized Left is not regarded as a defect. Many of them think that is the way you are supposed to conduct intellectual life.
Two of the most commonly cited authors by those who reject the Western Rationalistic Tradition are Thomas Kuhn and Richard Rorty. I will digress briefly to say a little about them. Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, is supposed to have shown that the claims of science to describe an independently existing reality are false, and that, in fact, scientists are more governed by crowd psychology than by rationality, and tend to flock from one 'paradigm' to another in periodic scientific revolutions. There is no such thing as a real world to be described by science; rather each new paradigm creates its own world, so that, as Kuhn says, 'after a revolution scientists work in a different world.'
I think this interpretation is something of a caricature of Kuhn. But even if it were a correct interpretation, the argument would not show that there is no real world independent of our representation, nor would it show that science is not a series of systematic attempts, in varying degrees successful, to give a description of that reality. Even if we accept the most naive interpretation of Kuhn's account of scientific revolutions, it does not have any such spectacular ontological consequences. On the contrary, even the most pessimistic conception of the history of science is perfectly consistent with the view that there is an independently existing real world and the objective of science is to characterize it.
Rorty has many discussions of truth and correspondence and I could not attempt to do them justice here, but I will pick up on only one or two crucial aspects. He says repeatedly that 'true' is just a term of commendation that we use to praise those beliefs that we think it is good to believe, and that truth is made and not discovered. The difficulty with the first of these views is that in the ordinary sense of the word, there are lots of things that for one reason or another one thinks it is good to believe that are not true, and lots of things that are true but it would be better if they were not generally believed. I think, for example, that it is good that mothers believe the best of their children even though such beliefs often turn out false. Likewise, the persistence of religious beliefs is on balance a good thing, though most such beliefs are probably false. Rorty's claim suffers from the usual difficulty of such philosophical reductions: it is either circular or obviously false. On the one hand, the criterion of goodness can be defined as truth or correspondence to reality, in which case the analysis is circular. On the other hand, if one does not redefine 'truth,' there are lots of counterexamples, lots of propositions that it is good for one reason or another for people to believe but which are not true in the ordinary sense of the word; and there are propositions that for one reason or another it would be bad to believe but which are nonetheless true.
There is an ambiguity in Rorty's claim that truth is made and not discovered. Since truth is always in the form of true statements and true theories, then indeed true statements and true theories have to be made and formulated by human beings. But it does not follow from this fact that there is no independently existing reality to which their statements and theories correspond. So there is a sense in which truth is made - namely true statements are made. But there is also a sense, consistent with this, in which truth is discovered.What one discovers is that which makes the statement true (or false, as the case might be). In a word, true statements are made, but truth of statements is not made, it is discovered.
Rorty's argument is typical of these discussions in that more is insinuated than is actually argued for. What is claimed, I guess, is that true statements, like all statements, are made by human beings. What is insinuated is much more serious: there are no facts in the real world that make our statements true, and perhaps the 'real world' is just our creation.
There is something puzzling about demanding an argument in favor of, or a proof of, the validity of a whole mode of sensibility and framework of presuppositions in which what we count as a proof and as an argument take place. The situation is a bit like the common occurrence of the 1960s in which one was asked to justify rationality: ' What is your argument for rationality?' The notion of an argument already presupposes standards of validity and hence rationality. Something only counts as an argument given that it is subject to the canons of rationality. Another way to put this same point is: You cannot justify or argue for rationality, because there is no content to rationality as such, in a way that there is a content to particular claims made within a framework of rationality. You might show that certain canons of rationality are self-defeating or inconsistent, but there is no way to 'prove' rationality.
It might seem that with realism the situation is different. Surely, one might say, the claim that reality exists independently of human representation is a factual claim and, as such, can be true or false. I want to suggest that in the actual operation of our linguistic, cultural, and scientific practices, all six principles function quite differently from ordinary empirical or scientific theses. Since realism is the foundation of the entire system, I will say a few words about it. I have presented the Western Rationalistic Tradition as if it consisted of a series of theoretical principles, as if it were simply one theory we might hold along with a number of others. Those of us brought up in our intellectual tradition find this mode of exposition almost inevitable, because our model of knowledge, as I remarked earlier, comes from the presentation of well-defined theses in systematic theoretical structures. But in order that we should be able to construct theories at all, we require a set of background presupposisions that are prior to any theorizing. For those of us brought up in our civilization, especially the scientific portions of our civilization, the principles that I have just presented as those of the Western Rationalistic Tradition do not function as a theory. Rather, they function as part of the taken-for-granted background of our practices. The conditions of intelligibility of our practices, linguistic and otherwise, cannot themselves be demonstrated as truths within those practices. To suppose they could was the endemic mistake of foundationalist metaphysics.
In 'defense' of realism, the only thing that one can say is that it forms the presuppositions of our linguistic and other sorts of practices. You cannot coherently deny realism and engage in ordinary linguistic practices, because realism is a condition of the normal intelligibility of those practices. You can see this if you consider any sort of ordinary communication. For example, suppose I call my car mechanic to find out if the carburator is fixed; or I call the doctor to get the report of my recent medical examination. Now, suppose I have reached a deconstructionist car mechanic and he tries to explain to me that a carburator is just a text anyway, and that there is nothing to talk about except the textuality of the text. Or suppose I have reached a postmodernist doctor who explains to me that disease is essentially a metaphorical construct. Whatever else one can say about such situations, one thing is clear: communication has broken down. The normal presuppositions behind our practical everyday communications, and a fortiori, behind our theoretical communications, require the presupposition of a preexisting reality for their normal intelligibility. Give me the assumption that these sorts of communication are even possible between human beings and you will see that you require the assumption of an independently existing reality. A public language presupposes a public world.
Realism does not function as a thesis, hypothesis, or supposition. It is, rather, the condition of the possibility of a certain set of practices, particularly linguistic practices. The challenge, then, to those who would like to reject realism is to try to explain the intelligibility of our practices in light of that rejection. Philosophers in the past who cared seriously about these matters, and who rejected realism, actually tried to do that. Berkeley, for example. tries to explain how it is possible that we can communicate with each other, given that on his view there are no independently existing material objects, but only ideas in minds. His answer is that God intervenes to guarantee the possibility of human communication. One interesting thing about the present theorists who claim to have shown that reality is a social construct, or that there is no independently existing reality, or that everything is really a text, is that they have denied one of the conditions of intelligibility of our ordinary linguistic practices without providing an alternative conception of the intelligibility.
However, there is one danger endemic to any such presentation. You are almost forced to present the issues as clearer and simpler than they really are. In order to describe the phenomena at all, you have to state them as more or less clear theses on each side: the subculture of the traditional university and the subculture of postmodernism. However, in real life people on both sides tend to be ambivalent and even confused. They are often not quite sure what they actually think. In light of this ambivalence, it is perhaps best to think of the present account not so much as a characterization of the thought processes of the participants in the current debates but as a description of what is at stake.