\u00a0<\/p>\n
Here we are, living in the \u201cpost-truth\u201d era<\/a>. Every day, the internet inundates us with alternative facts, fake news, doctored film footage, and bizarro anti-science conspiracies<\/a>. No one seems to agree on what\u2019s really real anymore<\/a>. How did we, supposedly the most technologically and scientifically advanced civilization in history, get to this point? There are a lot of answers to that question, some of which, I\u2019m sure, must involve fairly potent narcotics. But one of the most useful and informative answers has a lot to do with the social dimensions of cognition. Specifically, it has to do with how people create and then agree on social realities, or what some people call \u201csocial constructions.<\/a>\u201d In turn, the question of social construction drives straight to the heart of the so-called \u201cscience wars<\/a>\u201d \u2013 the conflict between postmodernism and science advocates \u2013 and evokes the fraught question of how religion relates to these mutual rivals.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n This essay won\u2019t invoke your righteous anger at postmodernism, scientism, religion, or any other contemporary bogeyman. I only want to look at how our relationship to \u201ctruth\u201d has changed over the past few decades, and to think about what that shift might imply. A lot of people, such as philosopher, public atheist, and Santa Claus impersonator Daniel Dennett<\/a>, blame our post-truth era on \u201cpostmodernism.\u201d Are these critics right? In many ways, I think they are indeed onto something. But I also think that postmodernists have some credible points to make, and science advocates should take seriously what their arguments might imply for real, actual small-s science, as well as for the ideology of scientific progress (big-S Science\u2122). Meanwhile, I think religion, scientism, and postmodernism are tangled in a tensely bound, three-way relationship of shared and opposing convictions and values. I think it\u2019ll be illuminating to explore that triangle.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s start out with some terms. Postmodern thinkers are often accused of claiming that everything, from cultural values to biological sex to gravity itself, is a \u201csocial construct.\u201d But what does that even mean? A lot of very smart people have argued that something is a \u201csocial construct\u201d if its reality depends somehow on the thoughts, speech, or actions of groups of people, rather than on some objective basis. Some thinkers go further and specify that social constructs proper are constitutively<\/i> dependent on social facts, which means that they\u2019re actually comprised of our beliefs, actions, and so forth. For example, the United States Supreme Court is a social construct, because without our beliefs and discourses, it wouldn\u2019t exist. By contrast, the Pacific Garbage Patch<\/a> is the result of human activity, and so it\u2019s causally<\/i> dependent on social factors. But its existence isn\u2019t sustained by our beliefs or actions. Even if every human on earth were to be suddenly raptured away tomorrow in some universalist eschatological event, the Garbage Patch would still be skulking around on the ocean\u2019s surface, poisoning equatorial fish. So, by the standards of most theorists, the Pacific Garbage Patch isn\u2019t a social construct. But the Supreme Court is.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n However, the U.S. Supreme Court is only a singular entity, which is actually the less interesting and important kind of social construct. The more important sort of social construct is social kinds<\/i><\/a>. A social kind is a general category that reflects the contingent ways that humans sort the world into types, such as \u201crefugee\u201d or \u201cnongovernmental organization\u201d or \u201cAboriginal Canadian.\u201d Social kinds of this sort are essentially ideas that people use to make sense of the world, advance their particular agendas, or accomplish their various objectives.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Social kinds are different from natural kinds<\/i><\/a>, which are categories that philosophers and scientists think really exist in the external world. Main-sequence stars<\/a>, for example, seem to be a natural kind. These stars have certain characteristics that set them apart from other stars, including that they\u2019re undergoing hydrogen fusion and maintain a balance between gravitational collapse and thermal pressure. This would probably be true regardless of whether there were any astrophysicists in the universe to observe such stars or not. Other categories commonly thought to be natural kinds include biological species (such as gray wolf or alpine sagebrush) and geological types (such as granite or quartz).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n One important difference between social kinds and natural kinds is that, as the philosopher Ian Hacking has pointed out, social kinds have an inherently interactive<\/i> relationship with the entities they\u2019re supposed to be categorizing. Hacking famously called this the \u201clooping effect.<\/a>\u201d So, for example, if you invent a social category called \u201cmillennials,\u201d then you\u2019re not just objectively describing a certain category of persons according to neutral features they all seem to share (such as being under 38 and not owning a house). You\u2019re actually creating a new template<\/i> that turns right around to influence the way the people being described see themselves and, in turn, how they behave. People who find themselves being called \u201cmillennials\u201d learn to act<\/i> like millennials. By creating a category, you\u2019ve actually changed the world, rather than simply describing it.<\/p>\n Looping social kinds mean that it\u2019s very difficult to objectively study social phenomena. The consequences can be far-reaching. For example, the United States is still wrestling with the ugly historical legacy of having decided, in one of history\u2019s more boneheaded moves, to categorize people according to race. The category \u201cwhite\u201d didn\u2019t mean a whole lot back in Europe, where everybody belonged to proud and ferociously mutually antagonistic ethnic groups. Scots and Walloons, for example, had practically nothing to do with each other, except for when they occasionally met on one of Europe\u2019s well-patronized battlefields to try and kill one another as parts of opposing coalition armies. They spoke different languages, lived in different parts of Europe, and so on. But if a Scot and Walloon both emigrated to the United States, then by gum, they both were categorized as \u201cwhite,\u201d and pretty soon they started to feel<\/i> white.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Similarly, the category \u201cblack\u201d applied to anyone with subsaharan African descent. But this criterion applied to literally thousands<\/a> of completely distinct tribes and ethnic groups, many of whom had even less in common with each other back in African than the Scots and the Walloons had in Europe. The new categories \u201cwhite\u201d and \u201cblack\u201d were nominally intended to be descriptive, but in fact they ended up creating<\/i> new, normative social classifications and, by inference, new identities. Upshot: social kinds are generative as well as descriptive. They seem to be social constructs in a deep way.<\/p>\n Now, back to postmodernism. Postmodernism is a very complicated thing and not in any way a unitary \u2013 or even coherent \u2013 movement, as I\u2019ve mentioned here before<\/a>. Many ideas and frameworks that get described as \u201cpostmodern,\u201d particularly in a pejorative sense, are quite different from each other and really don\u2019t belong in the same basket. But one thing that characterizes most postmodern thinkers is hyper-awareness of the ways that our everyday reality, which seems to be so objective and taken-for-granted, is actually an enormous leaning tower of social constructions. The feminist philosopher of science Sally Haslanger \u00a0puts it like this<\/a>:<\/p>\n in a significant range of cases \u2013 at least in the case of race, gender, and sexuality \u2013 our efforts to classify things as \u2018natural\u2019 or \u2018objective\u2019 have failed, and this has prompted a general critique of the methods we have used to justify our classifications, as well as the political institutions built to accommodate them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Accordingly, postmodern thinkers are often interested in de<\/i>construction. <\/i>For example, the superstar French intellectual Michel Foucault<\/a> tried to show that our contemporary ideas about sexuality \u2013 sexual orientation, gender, and sexual propriety \u2013 are relatively recent social constructs<\/a>. Before the early modern era, people just didn\u2019t think in terms of social categories such as \u201cdeviant\u201d and \u201cnormal\u201d sexuality. Several social innovations, including the Counterreformation Catholic practice of private confession and governments\u2019 growing interest in scientifically managing their populations, led Western societies to try to identify rigid categories that could help identify and label people according to their sexual status. In turn, these new categories fed back to shape everyday behavior, leading to the hardening of brand-new social categories like \u201cdeviant.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n By highlighting the historically contingent, politically motivated way that Western societies slowly settled on these new categories, Foucault encouraged readers to doubt the reality, and thus the legitimacy, of modern ways of thinking about sex. (Or at least this is what Foucault\u2019s followers usually want; what Foucault himself was hoping to accomplish may be another story entirely. If any philosopher deserves to be called \u201cgnomic,\u201d Foucault does.)<\/p>\n This example illustrates a critically important feature of postmodern critique: it\u2019s fundamentally political<\/i>. Unlike most scientists, postmodern thinkers aren\u2019t interested in discovering truth for truth\u2019s sake. In fact, they generally suspect that what we call \u201ctruth\u201d is actually a meta-narrative<\/a> that serves concealed interests, usually (though not always) the interests of some group of elite white men. Pointing out that something is a social construction is therefore usually not a mere neutral observation, but an implicitly normative or ideological \u201cunmasking.\u201d As Ian Hacking points out<\/a>,\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n most people who use the social construction idea enthusiastically want to criticize, change, or destroy some X<\/i> that they dislike in the established order of things.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n and, moreover,<\/p>\n (Social) constructionists are greatly concerned with questions of power and control. The point of unmasking is to liberate the oppressed, to show how categories of knowledge are used in power relationships.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n By contrast, scientists usually see themselves as trying to figure out what\u2019s really, objectively true, regardless of its political implications. This is a core aspect of the ideology of science: the belief that science is truly an objective way of learning about the world. Sometimes it\u2019s easier to live up to this ideal, sometimes harder. For example, it\u2019s difficult to see what the political consequences are of calling certain stars \u201cmain sequence.\u201d* So pointing telescopes at stars might be politically neutral enough. But petroleum geology or climate science have more obvious political implications. Are scientists who are learning to extract more shale oil from bedrock, or who are trying to predict how long it\u2019ll be before Miami has to be permanently cancelled<\/a>, just neutrally pursuing the capital-T \u201ctruth?\u201d Well, no, not really. They\u2019re trying to realize particular goals, and goals are values. Who chooses the values?<\/p>\n And let\u2019s not forget the scientific study of sex or gender. Or, really, anything social or related to humans. Because, again, it can be very difficult to prize apart what\u2019s socially constructed from what\u2019s objective in such fields. In part this is because of the looping effect of social kinds, as Hacking and Haslanger point out, but it\u2019s also because people often bring loads of concealed or semi-concealed agendas into this kind of research. These agendas influence scientists\u2019 theoretical standpoints, the way they interpret data, and their choices of experimental paradigms. A conservative scientist might be interested in proving that gender roles are largely based in biology. A more progressive scientist might try to show that they\u2019re rooted in social environment instead. And so on.<\/p>\n What\u2019s more, science produces technologies, and technologies can be used to benefit some people at the expense of others \u2013 such as the way that the Silicon Valley-centered tech economy seems to have helped facilitate massive increases in wealth inequality<\/a>. Even more unsettlingly, the social sciences \u2013 such as psychology, sociology, and demographics \u2013 got their modern starts in large part as tools for helping governments and organizations learn how to manage and manipulate people more efficiently<\/a>.<\/i> This fact has disquieting implications for my own field, the scientific study of religion and cultural systems. As one researcher puts it<\/a>,\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Natural and technical sciences\u2026are mostly undertaken in the interest of generating more effective ways of controlling the environment. What could the interest behind a \u2018science of religion\u2019 possibly be?**<\/p><\/blockquote>\n So: scientists often claim to be pursuing an ideologically neutral, socially unconditioned \u201cview from nowhere<\/a>\u201d that, postmodern critics like to point out, doesn\u2019t actually exist. So when science advocates argue that science provides a universally valid, perfectly objective viewpoint, postmodernists throw their hands up in exasperation. \u201cThat\u2019s what Europeans have been claiming for 500 years!\u201d they groan. \u201cDoesn\u2019t it strike you as a teensy<\/i> bit convenient that the supposedly universal, neutral, objective \u2018view from nowhere\u2019 you keep rhapsodizing on about conveniently matches the prejudices and preconceived notions of elite European males?\u201d<\/p>\n So postmodern critics often accuse science advocates and scientists of ignoring or trying to erase alternative viewpoints and of valorizing a disembodied, non-relational view of humanity. They believe that science has taken the place of religion in the postindustrial world, and therefore is a kind of normative (or \u201chegemonic\u201d) worldview that enforces only a very narrow, officially sanctioned type of thinking while marginalizing all the others. In this scientistic vision, heroic individual minds stand apart from physical reality, surveying it from above, insulated from each other, from the tangible universe, and even from their own bodies. In this way, postmodernism sees itself as a defense of cultural and individual particularity<\/i> and embodiment <\/i>against the overwhelming epistemic power of supposedly \u201cuniversal\u201d and abstract, scientific conceptions of the world.<\/p>\n But notice how, while trying to give a fair characterization of what postmodernists think about Science\u2122,\u00a0 <\/span>I\u2019ve been obliged to mention this interesting species called \u201cwhite males\u201d several times. This is because, as postmodernists and critical theorists grew more and more skeptical of what they call \u201cmeta-narratives\u201d \u2013 grand, explanatory stories about what the world is, where we came from, and where we\u2019re going \u2013 they came to emphasize more and more the influence that individual perspectives and agendas exert on what people claim is true. In short, if there\u2019s no such thing as a truly objective point of view, then people\u2019s various claims about truth are actually a function of who those people are<\/i>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The result has been an increasing focus on the relationship between social identity<\/a> \u2013 straight, gay, white, black, citizen, immigrant, male, female, transgender \u2013 and epistemology. Since the \u201cdominant\u201d viewpoints and truth claims in Western society are associated, fairly or unfairly, with white men (such as Isaac Newton, Immanuel Kant, or Bertrand Russell), postmodern critiques often raise questions about both the dominance of white men and scientific meta-narratives at the same time. As a result, debates about the legitimacy of science \u2013 the so-called \u201cscience wars\u201d \u2013 often heavily center around questions of identity, as postmodern critics question the ways that\u00a0<\/span>dominant male interests have structured or informed our ideas about the world. So left-leaning\u00a0academic discourse tends to blend insights from postmodern fields such as\u00a0critical race theory<\/a>, poststructuralism<\/a>, and\u00a0postcolonial theory<\/a>\u00a0to deconstruct dominant meta-narratives. As Sally Haslanger puts it,<\/p>\n once we come to the claim that everything<\/i> is socially constructed, it appears a short step to the conclusion that there is no reality independent of our practices or of our language and that \u2018truth\u2019 and \u2018reality\u2019 are only fictions employed by the dominant to mask their power.***<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This, then, is where we find Daniel Dennett getting seriously aggravated. In an interview in 2017, Dennett complained that<\/a><\/p>\n We\u2019re entering a period of epistemological murk and uncertainty that we\u2019ve not experienced since the middle ages.\u2026I think what the postmodernists did was truly evil. They are responsible for the intellectual fad that made it respectable to be cynical about truth and facts.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Dennett, of course, is a noted advocate of science, and indeed an advocate of Science\u2122 as well. (Remember that \u201cscience\u201d is the actual practice of science, whereas Science\u2122 is the ideology that defends science as the premier human institution and scientists as the best, and maybe only, arbiters of truth.) It\u2019s no surprise that Dennett would be upset by an intellectual movement that attempts to deconstruct objective truth claims, because he\u2019s spent his entire life trying to identify and write about objective truth. It\u2019s also no coincidence that, as an elite white male, he\u2019s not entirely sympathetic to a movement that reduces his deepest beliefs and convictions to his skin color and gender.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n But Dennett also displays some of the weaknesses of the ideology of Science\u2122 \u2013 weaknesses that postmodernism, for all its flaws, is right to point out. For example, quite a few years ago I heard Dennett speak at a conference on religion and science in New York City, in which he gave the usual New Atheist talking points. I asked a question from the floor: didn\u2019t he think that his strategy of tying science advocacy together with vociferous anti-religion sentiment might just possibly backfire? After all, average Americans tend to be religious. If they internalize the message that they have<\/i>\u00a0to either choose religion or science, which Dennett certainly wants them to internalize, wouldn\u2019t it be likely that they\u2019d just shrug, turn their backs on science, and choose religion? Didn\u2019t he worry that his New Atheist rhetoric would end up alienating those people who still needed religious meaning in their lives \u2013 people who might otherwise be allies for science?<\/p>\n Dennett\u2019s response was quick and dismissive. I don\u2019t remember his exact words, but his answer was essentially \u201cI don\u2019t feel I owe anything at all to stupid people.\u201d The implication was that people who feel a need for religious meaning are so mentally weak \u2013 so intellectually un-macho<\/i> \u2013 that science advocates shouldn\u2019t even worry about trying not to alienate them. Let them be alienated. This attitude epitomizes the arrogance with which science advocates dismiss those they consider socially inferior \u2013 a major complaint of postmodernism (despite the fact that postmodernists themselves aren\u2019t usually too keen on religion, either).<\/p>\n So now, about ten years later, we have a national and international situation where Science\u2122 has increasingly become the province of the political and cultural left<\/a>, and political divisions on polarizing scientific topics like climate change have grown<\/i> rather than shrunk<\/a>. More and more, what people think about core scientific debates is a pure function of their political identities<\/a>, rather than a neutral review of evidence. Yet at the same time, discourse on the intellectual left has increasingly metabolized<\/a> a perspectival and constructivist view of truth drawn from postmodern critiques of meta-narrative. So the very people who claim to be defending science are also often the those who, when faced with debate, proceed to reduce others\u2019 arguments to a mere function of their identity categories \u2013 \u201cYou only think so-and-so because you\u2019re an elite white male, and you\u2019re defending your hegemonic interests.\u201d<\/p>\n So Daniel Dennett and his allies are right to complain that postmodernism, or at least its popularizers, have gone too far. But advocates of Science\u2122 aren\u2019t exactly innocent. They have actively contributed to the partisan breaking up of scientific loyalties, in a very active and self-destructive way that precisely corroborates the complaints that postmodernists make about them.<\/p>\n Each side has a truth that the other needs. Postmodernists need the reminder that, while much of reality is socially constructed and all views on the world are inherently perspectival, we can still correct and improve our understanding of the world by taking part in careful scientific research that balances competing perspectives against each other. We can correct \u2013 imperfectly, but by no means ineffectively \u2013 for our biases. Truth is something we really can approach, if only asymptotically. It may not be possible to find a perfectly objective viewpoint, but, as philosopher Thomas Nagel has pointed out, we sure as hell can find ways to be more <\/i>objective<\/a>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Advocates of Science\u2122, meanwhile, need the reminder that real science is significantly less heroic and more socially conditioned than they\u2019d like to admit. Most of all, they need to admit that particular, subjective viewpoints really do matter, and in a very big way. Science is the process of trying to correct for subjective error. Postmodernism is, in many ways, an immune system reaction against this process\u2019s attempt to colonize the entirety of life.**** Like it or not, we\u2019re subjective creatures \u2013 each one of us has an inner life and can only see things from one point of view. That\u2019s an impolite thing to mention among scientists, a bit like burping loudly at a formal black-tie dinner, but it\u2019s true. Science is an attempt to epistemically correct for subjectivity, but real life is lived in the subjective mode<\/a>. We are subjects. When science becomes an ideology that tries to conquer everything, it makes us into objects. Postmodernism results.<\/p>\n This was part one. Again, I\u2019m not trying to paint postmodernists, advocates of science (or even Science\u2122), or anyone else as the bad guy here. I\u2019m only trying to explore how we came to the point in our history as a civilization in which nobody seems to know what\u2019s true and what isn\u2019t. Deconstructive critiques against science are one of the main reasons, but Science\u2122 has helped evoke those critiques. In the next post, I\u2019ll explore the mutually strained relationship of both scientism and postmodernism to religious traditionalism, and religion\u2019s relationship to them. Stay tuned.<\/p>\n _____<\/p>\n * Although it\u2019s not impossible. There are clear hierarchical implications in deciding to single out some stars as \u201cnormal\u201d while relegating others to alternative designations such as \u201cbrown dwarf\u201d or \u201cred supergiant.\u201d If your politics is opposed to any kind of social hierarchy, you might balk at any such categorization schemes, because they seem \u201cprivilege\u201d one kind of entity over others. Seriously. I mean, consider the claim \u2013 attributed to feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray<\/a> \u2013 that E = MC2<\/sup> is \u201ca sexed equation\u201d because \u201cit privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us.\u201d\u2020 In some corners of the activist\/postmodern intellectual world, people are so allergic to any form of power or inequality that basic cognitive processes such as the attribution of different levels of salience to distinct patterns in data can seem problematic, because calling one class of data \u201cnormal\u201d or \u201cimportant\u201d and another \u201cmarginal\u201d or \u201cirrelevant\u201d is a form of epistemic discrimination <\/i>that reflects inequalities in the social environment. Of course, the way we understand and live in the world is by selecting what to pay attention to and what to ignore \u2013 in fact, that\u2019s how visual processing itself works. If we tried to pay equal attention to every single detail in our field of vision, every bit of information we encountered, we\u2019d be cognitively helpless. Thinking is a hierarchical process. So at its worst, postmodern anti-hierarchical activism can actually impede thinking itself.<\/p>\n ** More on this in another post.<\/p>\n *** This is not actually what Haslanger thinks. In fact, Sally Haslanger is a good illustration of the way that our ways of categorizing people, including scholars, are often overly simple. Despite the fact that she\u2019s a feminist who focuses on social construction, Haslanger also defends realism and works very carefully to show why we shouldn\u2019t conclude that all of reality is socially constructed. So is she a \u201cpostmodernist?\u201d I would say no, but most critics<\/i> of postmodernism (especially Science\u2122 advocates who had only heard of Haslanger, but hadn\u2019t read her) would say \u201cyes.\u201d Maybe I just like her work better than some other social constructionists\u2019 because she\u2019s an analytic philosopher rather than a continental one, and so she feels an obligation to ensure that her ideas are coherently written. But even this goes to show that lumping everyone who\u2019s skeptical of scientism into a \u201cpostmodern\u201d or \u201cwoo-woo\u201d category is a mistake. Analytical philosophers, for all their other failings, are the opposite of woo-woo.<\/p>\nNatural Kinds Vs. Social Kinds<\/h4>\n
Postmodernism, Social Construction, and Social\u00a0Deconstruction<\/em><\/h4>\n
Science and the Search for Capital-T \u201cTruth\u201d<\/h4>\n
The Identity Vortex<\/h4>\n
Daniel Dennett Gets Irked<\/h4>\n