Hi Justin:
>A lot of people take this attitude, but I follow the dangerous
>course of reading my adversaries and taking them seriously. I have
>read Sommers (I have in fact met her) and I think she is an idiot.
>But I also read Hayek and Mises, and, as you all know, I have
>learned from them. This just for starters. Among the writers on Marx
>I most respect is Scott Arnold, a right winger. _Smart_ and
>respectful enemies are our best critics; we owe it to ourselves to
>listen to them carefully. --jks
I do take the best & brightest of our enemies seriously, but taking
them seriously doesn't necessarily lead one to revise one's
convictions radically. The best & brightest of our enemies (from
ancients to moderns), for me, have a virtue of clarifying what we are
up against. They also give us a chance to force ourselves to
recognize explicitly what it is exactly we are prepared to hold as
truth, raising our inarticulate beliefs to the level of clearly
articulated knowledge. So, I agree with you that serious engagement
with our enemies has pedagogical values. Such process of education,
however, doesn't lead to the kind of "extreme uncertainty" that Doug
suggests. If anything, it makes us more, not less, certain of where
we stand. Most importantly, the best & brightest of our enemies tend
to allow us to see that our fundamental disagreements with them are
over not so much empirical findings as premises (political &
philosophical) from which we start our inquiries. To our enemies, we
find ourselves saying, "you are asking wrong questions," "assumptions
that govern your premises do not hold," etc.
When we have disagreements with our comrades (those who share more or
less similar political & philosophical premises), in contrast, we
instead quarrel over the relevance, meanings, etc. of certain
empirical findings in light of our shared premises.
Comrades operate in the same paradigm; enemies use not just different
but incompatible paradigms (and we are convinced that our paradigm is
superior to theirs and can rationally explain why with reference to
reality, so pace Thomas Kuhn, different paradigms are not
"incommensurable," strictly speaking), and we don't drop our paradigm
and adopt a new one, unless we become convinced (not just by
"internal" process of science but more fundamentally by changes in
social relations) that our paradigm cannot explain what we are
compelled to explain. This is normal in science. As Thomas Kuhn
notes, "the price of significant scientific advance is a commitment
that runs the risk of being wrong" (_The Structure of Scientific
Revolution_, p. 101). In other words, this is the risk that we must
& cannot but take.
While I find Kuhn's explanation of epistemological change
unsatisfactory (he conflates the *radical discontinuity* with the
worldviews of premodern societies brought about by the emergence of
capitalism & the invention of modern science with *minor breaks*
between different theories within modern science), I do think he
makes a good point in highlighting "the existence of this strong
network of commitments -- conceptual, theoretical, instrumental, and
methodological" (p. 42) in normal scientific inquiry.
Yoshie
