Raskin Responds
On Rationality

 

Given present and future conditions surely it is a paramount task to reconfigure rational inquiry so it can fulfill enlightenment hopes of human liberation. I have suggested that we be modest in what we think rational inquiry is, seeing it more as a "narrative" or story rather than the method for finding Truth. For these unexceptionable views our colleagues, the ACEs (Albert, Chomsky, and Ehrenreich), unleashed considerable emotion to reinforce their meaning of rational inquiry and science. Chomsky argues that the ground rules of rational inquiry can shift but apparently within very narrow constraints. I do not accept the constraint which he and the other ACEs set out. His constraints cause him and his colleagues to walk a tightrope that at this stage in history makes no practical operational sense. They seek to construct a wall which separates morals from science, values from fact. Thus, it seems that Chomsky concludes that certain sciences are predicated on rational inquiry even though they may be immoral. I argue that rational inquiry by its nature if it is to be deemed rational must include moral considerations at this stage in human history/herstory. Isn't that what environmental concerns are really about? I take it Chomsky would say preparing the technology and science of the atomic bomb is rational but immoral while including methods to convince the bomb makers in their own terms but using "non scientific argument" is irrational although they might be moral. But why would they? This curious contradiction leads directly to asking whether we need a moral epistemology which includes the type of questioning and discourse that brings together rather than separates the project of knowing including moral concerns with the project of empiricism. It is my contention that once we disrobe or deconstruct we see that, properly understood, this activity may be found among those who concern themselves with the moral sentiments that inhere in ecology. The inclusion of moral questions is linked to various questions of ecology, balance, and "harmony." From the point of view say, of American Indians, what people do in their corporate offices, state bureaucracies, and laboratories must appear to be wholly irrational given their principles and the rules of experience and tradition they use to define rationality.

Chomsky knows that the present rules of rational inquiry to the extent they exist are not rock hard provable. Instead they may be very shaky indeed. @at we accept as rational inquiry shifts as boundaries continue to shift whether political or scientific. Even meanings of logical proofs shift given their social context. Thus, even the law of the excluded middle, which Chomsky swears by, is under attack from those who have invented fuzzy logic, the logic of everyday life which asserts the principle of maybe. On another matter, if A=6 apples and B=5 apricots A, B, apricots, and apples are equal only on the basis of convention or political and economic power. Categories are socially derived as we have come to learn with regard to men, women, androgyny, etc. Categories of separation have a dangerous effect on human behavior.

That there is disagreement about what we mean by enlightenment, or whether there is an enlightenment project on the eve of the 21st century, is hardly surprising. Or that words and concepts such as "rational" change their meanings and their instrumental purposes in a period of profound political and social turbulence is no news. Further, that schools of philosophic and literary thought claim that their heads spin at new modes of description or at new ways of unpeeling the onion of reality even to the point where some say that there is no reality is no news either.

Professors invariably badmouth one mode of understanding from another school of thought as stupid or irrational. That the leading 20th century philosopher of language finds that his head spins because the deconstructionists come up with their own story of resituating reality and removing boundaries between subject matter should not be that upsetting given his closet affiliation with idealism. That rational inquiry in its advertised mode no longer has the magic its adherents once proclaimed is due to the narrowness of its meaning and its division into specializations, subspecializatlon, and micro divisions of labor. Rational inquiry pursued a wrong direction.

In its optimum sense rational inquiry must now play the linking and coordinating role, putting pieces together which show connections and outcomes that present science blinds itself from considering. The irony of science is that there is to be skepticism and doubt of the particular experiment or inquiry. But like other social institutions and dogmas which pride themselves on criticism of others, there is never to be doubt about their institution; in this case the enterprise or canons of science. That remains the altar to which one must genuflect. Its consequences are not to be considered in the enterprise. As Malraux put it about communism after he repudiated it, "Overthrowing the checkerboard is not another way of playing checkers." Put in its best light this is the political position of the ACEs vis a vis the activities of the scientific project in relation to its institutions. They accept as a given the foundational basis of the knowledge enterprise even as Chomsky, for example, covers his flanks by making clear that he is aware of the foundational contradictions in the most fundamental aspects of science. There is another way to understand the guardian I pose of the fundamentalist ACES.

Suppose in its actual operations the ACEs' position is meant as a means of exclusion and as a means of separating form from the content of rational inquiry thus robbing people of means to judge rotten content. Does it not seem obvious that we must find the intellectual path (because "historical necessity demands it") to bring together what has been rent asunder since the enlightenment, namely emphasis on understanding underlying value assumptions of knowledge workers, their labors, whether prescriptive, objective, or narrative?

Suppose that is what rational inquiry now is, namely the bringing together of all these aspects and seeing to the extent we can their relationship as part of a whole much in the way we think of an epochal story meant to carry a people forward. The reason is readily apparent as to why this could be a useful direction. Consequences, paths, and guides do emerge from their work. It is not always easy to know what to make of these consequences. One person's rational inquiry is another person's pap, foolishness, or downright evil. Even so, Chomsky's concern about the role intellectuals should play in relation to the needs of a humankind desperate to transcend its most pressing and urgent problems is correctly placed.

What is misplaced is the vehemence of the ACES, who become the Guardians at the I Gate against the barbarians who are attacking the Citadel with their other stories. The ACEs defend their version of I Truth with the burning devotion of inquisitors. But their notion of Truth lacks grandeur. In our age the discovery of patterns of behavior in cells and particles are what is meant by Truth. But coherence, induction, and patterns of behavior are not Truth. They are modes of description which we believe tell us something about the future. In other words, it is a (possibly) more refined means of fortune telling.

In his work as Guardian, Chomsky dons an Orkinman uniform to eliminate metaphor in all its guises. What a curious exercise. Metaphor is a central means for describing the unknown and yet to be uncovered. It is also the way we change that which is uncovered into normative purposes and it is in that process that we can most clearly explicate values embedded in our interpretation of "reality."

Chomsky knows well that the Cartesian notion of the world running like a clock is a metaphor. It is Descartes's and Chomsky's way of insisting on scientific purity and the scientist's project. "We use a billiard hall analogy to Voyagerís trips through the solar system, and we invent a solar system model of the atom. We liken DNA to a computer resembling a ladder, with genetic materials that plug into terminals." (Anthony Aveni, Conversing with the Planets) These metaphors are rhetorical tools.

Albert and Chomsky have taken on the mantle of Galileo and they are not about to cut any deal with those who they view to be the Bellarminos of their time. Bellarmino would have cut a deal for the church, but Galileo, true to his principles, had no interest in saying that science was just another story like religion. What is impressive politically about Galileo was that he was not about to give up any market share to the IBM of the time, the Church. He knew he had a growth industry and Bellarmino was on the way down. As Einstein said of Galileo in his forward to Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, "A man is here revealed who possesses the passionate will, the intelligence and the courage to stand up as the representative of rational thinking against the host of those who, relying on the ignorance of the people and the insolence of teachers in priest's and scholars' garb, maintain and defend their positions of authority?" Is it not more likely in our time that Science, especially in its relationship to the State, is the new religion, as Feyerabend has pointed out? And in the curious defense of MIT which Chomsky gives is he not really promulgating a mode of thought which ties itself to this religion which has its own dogma and its powerful ties to the national security state?

Albert is a brilliant rhetorician and writer, trained as a physicist, now an economist and publisher, and he knows that it is important to grab the conch of legitimacy while turning his "adversaries" into the illegitimate unwashed. Aristotle speaks of a form of rhetoric, the enthymeme, which presents the possible and the probable as reality and the "real" cause. Aristotle sought to separate out the sciences from rhetoric on the ground that rhetoric was non-specific and could be used to persuade in any given case.

Modern science is the new rhetoric, which convinces on the basis of probability and claims of verification. The scientific project has taken over the idea that its method can persuade the populace to any case. This mode of rhetoric is then conflated with rational thinking. Of course his words and the ACEs' conception of reality do not match up to the fuzzy world of nature and human judgment. That there are different rational ways of describing processes, relationships, causes, and accidents, that there are enormously different judgments which can be made whether with regard to methods, conclusions, what things are, what categories and labels we pin on things, ourselves, and other animals is too obvious to belabor.

Albert wants the monopoly of description of these processes etc. using his words of description as the result of rationality and rational inquiry. But that road leads to foolishness for it denies people their social identity. Let us say that there are many people in the world who describe an institution as X including those who live the X. Albert is one of those who says that X is not X. Christianity is not Christianity, the socialism of the Soviet Union was not socialist. When it comes to science that which Albert doesn't like he calls bad

science or non-scientific, although scientists have built their entire careers and developed "disciplines" of knowledge on what he terms unscientific, as for example the case of economics. He tells us that science is based on evidence, experiment, and experience and then tells us that the Nazis rejected Einstein's Jewish science. But surely he must know that the rejection of Einstein's relativity and quantum theory by the Nazi Nobelists Stark and Lienard was predicated on their assessment that Einstein's views were antiemperical, counter to evidence and experience. They challenged him by declaring that his views were intuitive. Jewish science, they claimed was theoretical and flew in the face of facts and experience.

Something should also be said about Lysenkoism, a term Albert and his colleagues chose to describe as my position. Here there is an almost willful misreading of what Stalin and Lysenko's purposes were and a refusal to see clearly that present scientific attempts at genetic engineering are part of the same tradition and habit of mind as those of Stalin and Lysenko. From Lysenko and i Michurin to Davenport to Watson all have sought a holy grail to accomplish the end of altering heredity. As Kevles said, "Eugenicists like Davenport knew little self doubt. Indeed, they displayed a high degree of scientific hubris that was compounded by a desire to be socially authoritative and useful." This belief in the project of science as a function of instrumental betterment informed and helped mold the policies of the Nazis, the endless frontier people reflected in the work of cold war American scientists and Stalinists. Give the Devils their due. Lysenko in his work on vernalization, grafting, and changes in the environment affected the direction of plant and animal life, according to Bernal. What is appalling is the unmitigated chutzpah which overtook scientists in their quest for a one dimensional form of rational inquiry through life they could reprogram.

I do not have to spell out how scientific knowledge is used in market systems. A new form of degradation seems to be making its way forward through the scientific laboratories. A fashionable design is now found in medical research. One wonders if the ACEs see a connection between the habits of mind that are eager to get third world people to sell their body parts as part of the experimental process. One might further wonder whether the attempts at creating new animals by mixing species is a problem and if they believe it to be a moral problem which might be included as part of scientific work and rational inquiry. Is it not clear that current actions in the sciences, from what is thought about and funded to what is researched and who it serves, cry out for a different kind of rational inquiry than the sort we have been burdened with through the modern rhetorical form science?

It is no wonder that there is a gathering storm in the universities and elsewhere which seek new knowledges and different forms of inquiry. This human storm is neither irrational nor anti rational. It is that people are scared and they are eager to save rational inquiry from its own degradation. They do not want to return to the old time religion in its various guises for fear that it will yield the terrifying rigid dogmatism of religious fundamentalism. And they are appalled at the direction that science without moral thought takes humanity.

There is a paradigm shift going on with regard to the nature of and construction of knowledge. The question of what is rationality is no longer obvious, of what reality is is no longer obvious, and whether what was once excluded from logic was itself logical or merely a huge avoidance. I have in mind the question of fuzzy logic. And as I said, I have in mind the contours of moral epistemology.

The character of scientific inquiry is thrown into question as a result of the types of experiments undertaken. We know that the foundational axioms of logic and mathematics are shaky just as the linkage between progress and well-being and types of knowledge developed are increasingly shaky. We also know that we need far better stories than the kind we get from a present day science which is inextricably linked to government. The state and science's answer to the better story is the genome project and the supercollider. Is that the ACEs' story as well? Poor Clinton could@t cut off the 10 billion dollar supercollider because of the linkage between big science and the state just as the genome mapping project goes forward as a means of satisfying the requirements of a new industry.

Is Chomsky looking for a better story like his colleagues at MIT? His interest in facts is instrumental, that is, not really as proofs for he doesnít believe that facts really establish "truths," but as rhetorical ornaments and tools that will fit with a priori beliefs. I don't see anything wrong with this approach. All I ask is that he cop to what he is doing. Thus, all we can do is offer insights and questions that might help Chomsky open up to another way towards the essence he wishes to find. But if that essence is not there, or if what he thinks does not connect up with what he feels, then he is trapped in the lower road of social honesty. He will have to live in the world of doubt and uncertainty and recognize his own story telling role.

Recognition of this world of doubt transforms boundaries. It does not assert that words are found in reality, but are constructed instruments to coordinate beliefs and similar but not the same experiences and data. Thus, truth is not a condition of nature. This means that we have to understand truth in another way. If this be so then we see truth as far more ambiguous and much more fuzzy. We might even see the search for Truth the way Mohammed tried, according to Hourani, or we might even reject Darwinian evolution in favor of Gamow's speculation about human creation. In the last analysis what we know and say scientifically is open to judgment and good faith. It is bound to social honesty, a critical element in human relationships and in interpretation of the world. However, honesty should not be mistaken for Truth.

Truth is often described as an essence much in the manner that we might think of God. On the other hand, it is honesty which we require. The third ACE Barbara Ehrenreich, molecular biologist, feminist, and writer, hedges correctly so speaking of provisional truth. What she is really describing is honesty between people about our portrayals (our individual but socially constructed pictures of the world). We want a plumber who is honest about what she thinks she knows and we expect her to present that knowledge and experience accurately. She might only be able to guess at where the leak is coming from or through, and we can only hope that her experience is helpful in taking care of the defective plumbing). On the other hand, we also know that scientists and theologians who claim Truth rather than the permissible conceit that they pursue Truth as against the rest of us. We all know the devastating effects when a particular group thinks it has found Truth.

Ehrenreich assures us that those who are rational can be wrong because of new evidence. Would it not follow that those who are "irrational" could be right as a result of new evidence honestly analyzed or inaccurately understood. And of course if there is always new evidence then the whole project of inquiry must continuously shift, related either to the goals and values of the project or to the institutions of domination which assert certain definitions of rationality, proof, and the phenomena deemed important. Is this not what Ehrenreich is really saying when she adverts to the foolishness of certain types of medicine as against folk medicine? And did she not begin to make the connection between health policy, hospitals, and medicine a generation ago in her book on the American Health Empire?

I was most interested in Ehrenreich's present view of medical education. It struck me that she wanted to return to the period in American medicine, pre Carnegie Flexner report, where everyone could practice medicine and make up his or her curriculum, pursuing homeopathy and other views of the body. At the least she owes us a description of what a medical curriculum should be and which licensing requirements should be moved aside. Where should medicine be taught? I wonder if she is saying that medical schools in their present form have outlived their usefulness and they should be turned into schools of ecology and environment. The unwitting patient is often caught in the web of the doctor's incomplete, statistical knowledge and social institutions that are often run on "rational" lines for the administrator and irrational lines for the patient. Is it not obvious how the uncovering of this social reality which has its own values and purposes need to be changed to another reality?

There is no question that power and knowledge, most clearly noticed in the social sciences, are linked. When this is pointed out and when we try to say this honestly about the natural sciences why is there such fear and dread, even from our most radical thinkers? They above all others surely must realize that there is no intellectual or moral safe haven which is indisputable for all time and all situations. This becomes obvious when we introduce the actualities of how ideas (really ) images are developed into knowledge including their history. For example, were Freud and Jung engaged in "rational inquiry" or were they story tellers? Was Kepler a story teller? Are people reduced to irrational story tellers when the particular time we live in comes up with a new language of description which we then choose to call rational inquiry? Thus, was Nietzsche the irrationalist engaged in rational inquiry or irrational speculation? Or was he merely introducing into the language of social thought new conceptions, including naming I them, thus making him a social philosopher who Bertrand Russell insisted was responsible for Hitlerian attitudes?

Ehrenreich points to those forms of rationality which bureaucracy carries out as crazy which are confused with "actual rationality." Albert clearly thinks that most economics undertaken by economists is obfuscation and nonsense. But I'll bet that's not what Harvard University's economics department thinks or most of the members of the American Economics Association think. I'll bet they think they are doing science. And they would probably have Hans Reichenbach, the great philosopher of science, to support them in their claims.

According to Albert, "Science's defining feature is its connection to experience, evidence, and experiment." But he and Chomsky beg the more fundamental question. What is the framework and who sets it up? How does that framework come into being for judging experience, evidence, and experiment? How does that framework interact with those human beings or machines made I by human beings?

That framework is provided through several directions such as funding, peer pressure, social structure of the laboratories, hierarchies within the scientific project, decisions about what is worth researching and uses of particular sorts of knowledge thought of as socially "clean" (objective tools) but in fact weighted down with judgments, equipment, and modes of presentation. As Pickering has shown, for example, in the case of the linear accelerator, the framework assumptions have been built into the hardware itself. Judgments etc. are all activities which burden every aspect of social existence. They cannot and are not excluded from any scientific project. All one can do is expose them and offer others to take their place, so long as rational inquiry is mediated through people and does not come from shadow Martians who "people" the earth.

There is another part of this argument that remains. It is to ascertain what we mean y evidence, experiment, and experience, and whose triple "e" are we to honor. It is in this context that the social and interactive relationship becomes critical. And it is here where, if one is to credit Polanyi, that the hidden or intuitive is more important than the experiential or evidentiary or experimental. Indeed, Polanyi points out cases where scientific criteria are met and scientists reject the evidence, and not for rational reasons. Yet, PolanyPs standard of intuition is the idea of the tacit agreement, sort of like a hidden handshake, a wink of the eye which members of the secret society emanate from one another (The ACEs no doubt would reject Milton Friedman's notion of economic man as their model but they are ready to embrace their view of scientific man. Like Friedman's economic man, Albert's scientific man rejects all other claims and challenges to his paper thin view of rationality).

Michael Albert assumes that by waving the flag of "rationality" all of us will immediately know what he means. Assume that he and his scientific method speak for total experience, evidence, and experiment which he has tested. Hardly a cautious and temperate view. Again it is important to state what Albert counts as true, and not just a story he wants to have as true.

Neither Albert nor anyone else is able to tell us why they believe that all people are rational in the same way because of their brain construction. There is no way to prove this claim for all time if for no other reason than we cannot enter the brains of all dead people, all living people, or all future people. Thus, we are left with a story, a myth of what people and their brains are. We accept what our social system tells us as what "works" and we organize knowledge factories (universities) to reinforce our dominant categories. Surely people from different cultures assign different values to actions which define what works and what is useful.

One can be rational in the self-interested sense, one can be rational in terms of perceived outcomes, and one can be rational in terms of finding means of persuading others to one's point of view. The scientific man [man) might say that there are six means of persuading another to his point of view in order to achieve her preferred outcome. From scientific manís point of view each might prove to be rational in terms of outcome. The means might be blackmail, bribe, physical coercion, dialogic persuasion, magic, and peer pressure based on the "facts." Would scientific man, a la Albert, be willing to use any of these methods to an end which he nominated as rational and which had the support of his fellow rationalists? Albert tells us that rationality is something different than "systematically different beliefs, experiences, values, priorities and even methods they use to arrive at hypotheses." Well, if rationality is not all of these together, what is it? Is rationality an incubus in the brain, a little Turing machine in our cells and brain? Or at this stage of human history is it something more than an inaccurate "map" of the brain or cell or anything which shifts with each person or each piece of land as it moves and changes shape? Or is it God's harmony? And if it is all of these why not show a bit of courage mixed with modesty and tell us that the meaning of rationality is not set in concrete and that each age will have to find its own meaning and language for it.

Not even the ACEs can tell us that rationality will always mean the same thing. Albert berates me for saying that instead of trying to eliminate socialization effects from the "Scientific method" we should decide what we should welcome in. Albert as purist is seeking a condition which cannot and probably should not exist because in the last analysis it is inhuman. It seeks a "neutral' science which by its purpose is unattainable and fraudulent. It refuses the major task of changing disciplines of knowledge into areas of inquiry that will and should be far different than anything we now know. As surprising as this may appear, we will find that other generations will concoct other rules of evidence, or they will say that there are, as Ehrenreich alludes, dialectical modes of logic which change the rules of evidence. Indeed, we may even find those who will say that they accept certain ways of seeing the world because they do not want to challenge the ongoing hegemony and that that story makes things comfortable for them. Thus, again as an example, the point which Chomsky raises about irrational numbers, namely that the square root of two and the indefiniteness of Goedel's theorem are situations of inability, do have profound local political effects.

The social process of rational thinking goes something like this: Approximations are the essence of the current scientific approach, which are indefinite, which are meant to give us a general understanding through symbols, which are then thought to be definite bivalent systems, and which are then described accordingly.

The admission of "fuzziness" and possible contradiction which would break out of the bivalent system would be good for the project of thinking because it could allow up front the question of value and likely consequences without them hiding behind the mask of logical certainty.

Two other questions remain that I'll touch upon. The question of astrology was raised by two of the ACES. It seems to me that the Gaia thesis of Lovelock is attractive as a story and serious astrologers of old would surely be comfortable with it because it includes ideas of governing the planets and the dire consequences which will flow on human beings if they pursue certain courses that screw up the planet.

The melding of social and ecological consciousness may indeed be the necessary story for the species of the earth to survive. It is approximate, not definite, it is fuzzy and multivalent, not certain.

Thales would indeed be comfortable with it as might other astrologer/scientists of the past. But curiously this understanding of the linkage between culture and nature through political and intellectual thought may be the story humanity craves. It may be the melding of a new conventions or "laws" of nature and the "natural law." Human and natural complementarity in forms of equality become the metaphors we need to formulate and live by.

We cannot get much of a hold on this new narrative line unless we recognize and understand the present role of colonizing knowledge in systems of oppression and domination as very grabby systems. Indeed much of rational inquiry is colonizing knowledge as it is practiced from the laboratory to the boardrooms of technological corporations and the National Academy of Science. Apparently the ACEs think that the latter two institutions don't really influence much of anything in terms of rational inquiry. If they don't, then what is the relationship between rational inquiry to the kinds of knowledges pursued through these institutions and guilds? Are we to conclude that the scientific enterprise has no relationship either to the direction the Corporation or the State takes or vice versa?

For our time rational inquiry must mean the pursuit of the connexion, the framework and shifting boundaries in relation to rebuttable moral axioms. If inquiry pursues this course we will research different questions and develop stories that are congruent with our most fundamental needs as a species. Such a definition of rational inquiry will help us transcend the ideology of the value free and the tragedy of the value laden.