CHAPTER 1

STAYING FOR AN ANSWER

The Untidy Process of Groping for Truth

Some years ago now, I heard my then-dean, a physicist by training, expresshis unease at the suggestion that the mission statement for the College ofArts and Sciences include the phrase, "concern for truth." The word makespeople nervous, he warned, and they're bound to ask, "whose 'truth'?" A sociologistcolleague, seconding the dean's reservations, remarked that, while ofcourse his research advances knowledge, he isn't concerned with "truth." Acouple of us pointed out that, unless your conclusions are true, they aren't reallyknowledge, only purported knowledge; and I did my best to explain that itdoesn't follow from the fact that people disagree about what is true that truth isrelative to perspective. But in due course a Strategic Plan for the college specifiedcurricular innovations required by the "fundamental questions" that havebeen raised "about the presumed universality and objectivity of 'truth.'"

Probably most of you have heard, not exactly this story, but other storiesessentially similar, only set in other places and with different characters; for theideas my dean had picked up are by now almost an orthodoxy in academia, takenin some quarters—admittedly, more often in the humanities and the social sciencesthan in the physics department!—as indications of intellectual sophisticationand moral rectitude.

Naturally, proponents of this new almost-orthodoxy—the "Higher Dismissiveness,"as Anthony Gottlieb calls it, or in my terminology, the "New Cynicism"—differamong themselves on the finer points. But they agree that the supposedideal of honest inquiry, respect for evidence, concern for truth, is a kind ofillusion, a smoke-screen disguising the operations of power, politics, and rhetoric;and that those of us who think it matters whether you care about the truth, whofeel no need for precautionary scare quotes when we write of fact, knowledge,evidence, etc., are hopelessly naive. As if this weren't bad enough, the feministsand multi culturalists among them suggest that in our naiveté we are complicit insexism and racism, and the sociologists and rhetoricians of science among themsuspect us of reactionary conform ism with the military-industrial complex.

Faced with such an intimidating double accusation of naiveté and moralbackward ness, many take the ostrich attitude, apparently hoping that if theyignore the New Cynicism hard enough, it will go away. But an old-fashioned priglike myself begins to feel—well, rather like the proverbial cannibal among themissionaries.

A thoughtful cannibal will notice, at the heart of the New Cynicism, a profoundintolerance of uncertainty and a deep unwillingness to accept that the lessthan perfect is a lot better than nothing at all. And so again and again true, fallibilistpremises are transmuted into false, cynical conclusions: what is accepted asknown fact is often enough no such thing, therefore, the concept of known factis ideological humbug; one's judgment of the worth of evidence depends onone's back ground beliefs, therefore, there are no objective standards of evidentialquality; science isn't sacred, therefore, it must be a kind of confidence trick;and so on.

But there's really no need to give up on the objectivity of truth, evidence,etc., provided you're fallibilist enough. What is most urgently needed is a realisticunder standing of our epistemic situation, of how complicated evidence canget and how difficult serious inquiry can be. Of course, this will be only thebeginning of the work, for then there will be the questions of the place of the scienceswithin inquiry generally, of the differences between science and literature,of the roots of relativism, and of the claim of the New Cynicism to represent theinterests of the oppressed and marginalized.

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Evidence is complex and ramifying, often confusing, ambiguous, or misleading.Think of the controversy over that four-billion-year-old meteorite discovered in1984 Antarctica, thought to have come from Mars about eleven thousand yearsago, and containing what might possibly be fossilized bacteria droppings. Somespace scientists thought this was evidence of bacterial life on Mars; others thoughtthe bacterial traces might have been picked while the meteorite was in Antarctica;and others again believed that what look like fossilized bacteria droppings mightbe merely artifacts of the instrumentation. How did they know...