Defending Liberty: Essays in Honor of David Gordon

CHAPTER 4

Liberals Need More and Better Cognition Theory

Stephen R. C. Hicks

First the Buddhist talked of the ways to calm, the mastery of desire, the path of enlightenment. The panelists all said “Wow, terrific, if that works for you that’s great.’ Then the Hindu talked of the cycles of suffering and birth and rebirth, the teachings of Krishna and the way to release, and they all said “Wow, terrific, if that works for you that’s great.”

And so on, until the Catholic priest talked of the message of Jesus Christ, the promise of salvation and the way to life eternal, and they all said “Wow, terrific, if that works for you that’s great.”

And he thumped the table and shouted: “No! It’s not a question of if it works for me! It’s the true word of the living God, and if you don’t believe it you’re all damned to Hell!”

And they all said: “Wow, terrific, if that works for you that’s great.”

—Simon Blackburn, “Relatively Speaking,”1

Thus is the challenge for making the case for liberalism in a skeptical or post-truth age. By liberalism I mean the social philosophy that makes foundational the liberty of the individual in all areas of life—artistic, religious, economic, sexual, political, familial, scientific, and so on. By skeptical and posttruth I mean the view that on principle nothing can be known and/or that cognitive success concepts such as truth, objectivity, and certainty should be abandoned.

So what of the claim that Free-market liberalism is best?

As with the insistent religious panelist, the liberal faces a double challenge. One is that socially liberalism resists imposing itself on others, valorizing individual judgment as the final court of appeal for each. So it makes room within itself for diversity of belief and urges tolerance—both of which make for a temptation not to pass cognitive judgment upon illiberal beliefs. I think liberalism is best but maybe illiberalism works for you. The second challenge is that establishing the truth and objectivity of such constituent general and abstract beliefs as liberalism requires—Individual rights are universal, Constitutional principles should be absolute, Free markets are win-win for all participants, and so on—is not only a difficult positive cognitive achievement on its own but also requires an effective response to negative attacks on every element that goes into complicated cognitive achievement: perception, data gathering, conceptualization, proposition-formation, and the analytic and synthetic tools of mathematics and logic.

So: When I say that Free-market liberalism is best, am I speaking the truth? Do the facts and the evidence and the arguments make my assertion justified? Consequently, is my belief objective—or subjective? Do I know it, or is mine just another opinion? Is it all just semantics—or do concepts have real meanings? Do statistics lie or capture probabilities? Is history written by the winners and so dismissible bias, or can we all genuinely learn from it?

The cognitive territory is rich and complicated, and liberalism needs good cognitive theory as much as it needs good value theory, good economic theory, and good political theory.

THE PLAN

In this essay I plan to respond to two mistakes that regularly plague objectivity. One is the mistake of seeing two options only when in fact there are three. A comedian once said he felt guilty about his girlfriend’s death because they were at a party and she’d had too much to drink. She wanted to leave and asked him to drive her home, but he was having great fun and wanted to stay. She insisted, and they got into an argument. He really didn’t want to leave, he said—so he shot her. In logic we call this the fallacy of False Alternative, though in philosophy the fallacy is rarely committed crudely.

In the case of objectivity, the fallacy is committed in holding that the only alternative to a naïve intrinsicism about knowledge is some kind of philosophical subjectivism.

The second mistake is not to spot an assumption that in fact drives the whole argument. In philosophy, hidden premises are often killers. Another comedienne quipped, Of course he’s a chauvinist pig. He’s a male, isn’t he? In logic we call this the fallacy of Implicit Denial—it’s the false implicit premise that needs to be made explicit and challenged—though again it’s rarely committed crudely. It is, though, committed in dozens of particular ways, when a fact that gives rise to the need for objectivity is implicitly taken as making objectivity impossible.

For example, one reason we need objectivity is that our cognitive processes are not automatic. We make choices about how to process information, so we need to attend to how we are making those choices. But an implicit dismissal argument will say We make individual choices when thinking so it’s all subjective. The killer assumption is that choice makes objectivity impossible.

So I will give a range of examples and analyses of the two mistakes, along with quotations from representatives. Then with the ground cleared, I will sketch a positive account of objectivity with special attention to its role in the case for liberalism.

The short statement of the problem is: If we abandon reason and objectivity, we get subjectivism; and if we get subjectivism, then we get relativism; and if we get relativism without recourse to reason, then we get brutality. Since brutality is incompatible with liberal society, it is morally imperative for liberals to seek and preserve objectivity.

But that’s a long philosophical road compactly stated. Further, that long philosophical road needs a map of its highways and byways. So let’s go over the territory by putting ourselves in the position of a skeptic against the claims of liberalism. We’d speak as follows:

THE LIBERALISM-AS-MERELY SUBJECTIVE ARGUMENT

Liberals often claim that their social philosophy is based upon compelling empirical and theoretical argument. They also claim that liberalism should be applied to all human beings. That is, they present their case as if objectivity and universality were possible to achieve.

Liberalism also seems to require much confidence in the power of reason. It leaves common citizens free to make their own major life choices about friendships, marriage, and religion. Economically, it leaves them alone to make their own transactions in a free market, and politically it urges them to participate in some sort of a democratic republic. The assumption is that in all of those areas of life individuals are capable of assessing their circumstances objectively and so on balance making good decisions.

Liberalism also requires much confidence in the more sophisticated reason of its theorists. It presupposes that they can assess the historical and contemporary evidence accurately, that it can use the tools of mathematics and the scientific method more generally, and that it can logically integrate all of that into an objective theory that is universally true and good.

The “truth,” though, is that objectivity and universality are myths. All claims to evidence, logic, and rational argument are shot through with subjectivity and relativity.

For centuries, many of our strongest religious thinkers have argued that reason is incompetent. Reason, they concluded, fails to prove the existence of God and even purports to show that religion is inconsistent or worse. Reliance upon reason thus leads people away from God. St. Augustine berated the sin of intellectual pride of those who learn natural philosophy: “they that know it, exult, and are puffed up; and by an ungodly pride departing from Thee, and failing of Thy light, they foresee a failure of the sun’s light, which shall be, so long before, but see not their own, which is.”2 And John Calvin argued that “[o]ur reason is overwhelmed by so many forms of deceptions, is subject to so many errors, dashes against so many obstacles, is caught in so many difficulties, that it is far from directing us aright.”3 So if people turn away from God, the weakness of their own reason will lead them to nihilism. Liberalism depends upon reason, but reason leads to subjectivism, which leads to relativism, which leads to nihilism.

So, they concluded, to avoid nihilism, we must commit to a strong faith in higher authority. Human beings need the submission and obedience of faith, not hubristic independence and confidence in the power of reason. But that defense of faith in God first requires an offensive against reason.4 Søren Kierkegaard for example, asserted that faith requires “a crucifixion of the understanding.”5

Yet such faith involves a subjective leap, and many intellectuals are unable to make themselves commit to it. Even so, many will continue to advocate religion publicly for political reasons. While they personally do not need to believe, they judge that most people cannot get through life without some sort of religion. Religion is the common person’s philosophy, giving them personal structure and a reason to follow society’s rules. So on prudential grounds a society’s intellectual leaders should encourage widespread belief in the gods or a God. Even if a religion is not true, it is better for society that most people believe that it is true.6

Of course, apologists for faith and “noble lie” theorists are merely expressing their subjective preferences for a certain kind of society. Even so, but a wide variety of considerations support the belief in deep subjectivity.

One is the distinction between fact and value, is and ought, descriptive and normative, a commonplace in modern philosophy. From any set of factual statements no value statements follow. Purportedly objective truths about how the world is do not imply any conclusions about how the world ought to be.7 Values are only subjective preferences.8 Even propositions of logic and mathematics are empty and merely reflect subjective choices.9 As a result, no amount of objective data, hard mathematics, and logical argument about liberalism can support the view that liberalism is good or desirable.

Further, human beings’ perceptual capacities are subject to occasional illusions and regular relativities—what is sweet to you is bland to me, and what is appealing to eat when one is healthy is repulsive when one is sick.10 So there is never any guarantee that even our basic observational data are objective or even mutually consistent.

Further still, all interpretations of the data are shaped by prior theoretical commitments. Anyone’s theory about the world or a part of it has built into it assumptions about what is real and what is not, what is possible and what is not, what to look for and what to ignore. Necessarily, therefore, our ideological priors infect our interpretations with bias. Even our basic perceptions of the world are laden with theory and so subjective.11

Further yet still, human beings are emotional as well as rational. We often see and hear only what we want to hear, and the deepest sources of our wants are often unknown to us. Consequently, our beliefs and our value decisions are largely passion-driven rather than the result of reason.12

And further yet still, human beings are social beings, and they acquire beliefs and values and the very language they think in from their society. What is “rational” is socially conditioned, and since societies vary widely, what is rational is also socially relative.13

The point is that any theory that bills itself as objective and true is a non-starter,14 and any political theory that requires a general rationality of its members is naïve.

Instead, we face only a variety of arbitrary subjective options.15

Liberals will sometimes grant that everything is subjective and relative—but argue that in order to make social living possible we should all agree to disagree when necessary. That is to say, we should accept toleration as our governing principle. We cannot expect or demand that everyone agree on substantive values, but we can push for a universal procedural principle: Live, and let live. That is admittedly to make an exception by insisting that we treat one principle as generally and objectively true. But in the interest of social peace, the principle of tolerance is the minimally necessary and achievable social objective.

Or if we are of a Pragmatic disposition, we will reject robust liberalism as being too absolutist about its principles. Instead, the best we can do is make case-by-case judgments about what works rather than expecting universal principles to apply in all cases. Even toleration may work in some circumstances but not in others. We need flexibility rather than mechanical rules, and we need to understand that individuals, societies, and the world at large evolve over time. What works therefore itself evolves, and we should not be bound by allegedly timeless principles. Admittedly, “what works” is a subjective and relative criterion, but that is our human condition.

Or if we are a Conservative of a religious temperament, we will agree that the failures of reason make critical our need for faith in a set of absolute, timeless principles. Some beliefs and actions cannot be tolerated socially. And giving ourselves and our political leaders license to do whatever whoever thinks “works” is to abandon society to a free-for-all of depravity and decay. Faith does admittedly require a subjective leap, but perhaps it is our only escape from nihilism.

Or we can, as Postmoderns do, feel that the above choices and others are conditioned by our racial, gender, class, and ethnic origins. Advocates of liberal capitalism in particular are very often white, male, prosperous, and of European background. So their liberalism is merely an expression of their socially-subjective conditioning. But if we are of some other culture or subculture, then we are under no universalist imperative to suppress or give up the values that shape our social identities and replace them with liberal ones. Such social subjectivism does admittedly lead to a harsher and unending conflict of cultures, but at least we are not pretending that objective universality is possible.

At most, consequently, liberalism is merely one more subjective option to be considered in the mix of possible systems, and anyone’s choice among the possibilities is itself a subjective preference.16

STARTING OVER ON OBJECTS AND SUBJECTS

Against such corrosive skepticism and its collapse of the case for liberalism into mere personal preference, let’s clear the field and begin again.

We use objective and subjective in two different but related ways. One is to distinguish what is out there from what is in here. Out there is objective reality, made up of rocks and rivers, planets and people, and much more. In here is subjective reality, made up of perceptions and memories and concepts and more. In this usage, subjective is a metaphysical concept, denoting a certain type of being. Reality is made up of many objects, and some of them are objects that are subjects. So we can speak of subjective as meaning anything that subjects are and do.

The second way we use objective and subjective, though, is narrower and focuses on what subjects do during their cognitive activities. Is the subject trying (and hopefully succeeding) at keeping his or her cognition in relation to objective reality by attending to the evidence and argument? If so, the subject’s cognitive process is objective. Or is the subject not attending to the evidence and argument and, perhaps, actively ignoring evidence, sabotaging argument, and letting emotion alone decide? If so, the subject’s process is subjective. Here objective and subjective are used as epistemological concepts.

So subjective has two meanings. In one meaning, the metaphysical one, it is merely to say that a subject is involved. In the other meaning, the epistemological one, it is to say that the subject is out of relation cognitively to objective reality and is making itself primarily or solely determining of its content.

Objective has two parallel meanings. In one meaning, the metaphysical one, it is to designate some aspect of reality. In the other, the epistemological, it is to designate what subjects do cognitively to form and maintain their connection to reality. Using one’s mind objectively is a description of the process, and objective belief describes the result.

So subjective belief could mean two different things. It could mean merely that any belief is a property or state of a subject. Or it could mean that the belief in question is disconnected from reality, i.e., that objective processes were not followed in arriving at or holding the belief.

The next issue is the big one: Is epistemological objectivity even possible? Human cognition is an extraordinarily complicated process, and psychology, linguistics, neurology, and cognitive science more broadly are still in their infancy. Even so, some quick-and-dirty philosophical temptations are to be resisted. One is a fast flight to the most difficult cases in cognition and taking confusion there as showing general impossibility. For example, it is still a complicated and ongoing project to discover what objectivity entails in complicated and cutting-edge science or in interpreting literary texts with multiple layers of meaning and thematic richness. So we should start with simpler cases to work out the criteria of objectivity and then scale up to the complicated cases. By analogy, if we’re looking at robins and chickens and hawks and defining the concept of bird but we immediately jump to What about penguins!?!–then we’re setting ourselves up for frustration. A variant temptation is the philosopher’s sin of taking the lack of a good theory as implying the phenomenon we’re trying to explain does not exist. Objectivity can be complex, but not right now being able to come up with a cognitive theory that explains it all should not lead one to set aside its reality. Mary Kay Ash makes the point pithily: “Aerodynamically, the bumble bee shouldn’t be able to fly, but the bumble bee doesn’t know it so it goes on flying anyway.” The same holds for objectivity: We are and can be much more objective than much philosophical theorizing gives us credit for.

In the bulk of this essay, though, I will focus on two widespread and seductive challenges to objectivity. One is taking some form of intrinsicism—i.e., the view that for knowledge objective reality alone should be operative and stamp itself upon a passive subject’s mind—as one’s standard for objectivity, and when that intrinsicist view fails (as it must) to conclude that only subjectivism is the alternative. Objectivity is a third alternative and distinct from both intrinsicism and subjectivism.

The second challenge is the common practice of taking facts that give rise to the need for objectivity—e.g., finite awareness, perspective, choice, background influence, bias, emotions, etc.—and using them to conclude objectivity is impossible. The reasons why humans need objectivity should not be disqualifiers of objectivity.

THE ONLY-TWO-ALTERNATIVES PROBLEM

In short, the problem arises for those who have difficulty integrating the two facts: Both a subject and an object are involved in cognition. Consciousness is a relational phenomenon. One of the only-two-alternatives sides wants to reduce knowledge to the object-side only (intrinsicism); the other wants to reduce it to the subject only (subjectivism).

Objectivity is the practice of maintaining the relationship between consciousness and reality, with reality setting the basic terms. Consciousness has an active role to play in gathering and processing data about reality, but that consciousness doesn’t get to make up the terms. Consciousness is first a response-to-reality or in-relation-to-reality phenomenon. Objectivity thus is in broad contrast to two other metaphysical-epistemological positions in the history of philosophy, intrinsicism and subjectivism.17

Intrinsicism holds that reality alone sets the terms, that consciousness is such a passive and derivative phenomenon that when we want to talk about the nature of reality, or knowledge of reality, we should understand consciousness as some sort of a mirror held up to nature such that reality writes upon it or that all consciousness does is reflects things that nature shines upon it. To change metaphors, consciousness is like a lump of plasticine upon which reality stamps its identity. A standard interpretation of Plato, for example, takes him to be a kind of intrinsicist: knowledge is a matter of one’s mind passively receiving impressions from the perfect Forms.

Subjectivism is the other option, which holds that consciousness alone sets the terms for knowledge. This position sees the subject’s consciousness as active-processing phenomenon, but sees consciousness’s active processing as making reality’s input diminished or non-existent. Our minds are seen as adding or subtracting or altering features of reality’s data-input to the point that as conscious beings we cannot tell what is real from what has been subjectively made up.

So we face a hard alternative: Either we try to minimize entirely the subject’s identity and activity so as to maximize intrinsic reality’s input. Or we accept that reality is merely a product of our subjective consciousness—because we cannot from our personal conscious perspective separate out what we’ve added from that which comes from reality itself.

Friedrich Nietzsche gives us a clear statement of both: “The objective human is indeed a mirror: he is accustomed to submit before whatever wants to be known.” He is “only a delicate, carefully dusted, fine, mobile pot for forms that still has to wait for some content and substance in order to ‘shape’ itself accordingly—for the most part, a man without substance and content, a ‘selfless’ man.”18 That is, to be objective only what is intrinsically out there in reality could be operative. Yet, Nietzsche easily points out, subjects are operative in cognition. Consequently, he swings to the opposite extreme and embraces a subject-alone subjectivism: “Genuine philosophers, however, are commanders and legislators: they say, ‘thus it shall be!’ …. Their ‘knowing’ is creating, their creating is a legislation, their will to truth is—will to power.”19

But objectivity means that neither reality alone nor subjects alone yield cognition. Reality sets the terms but consciousness is active in gathering the data, manipulating the data in various ways in order to reach conclusions. And as long as that consciousness keeps its reality orientation, objectivity as possible. We can make many sorts of mistakes in processing the data, so the concepts and criteria of truth and falsity become important. But if we use our conscious apparatus properly, objective knowledge is possible.

EXAMPLE: GRADING STUDENT ESSAYS

Consider the difference between objective and subjective grading. Three positions develop.

The intrinsicist disposition holds that if I am a professor who’s reading and evaluating a student’s work, then the nature and worth of the student’s essay should all by itself impress itself upon my mind. If it really is a B+ paper, the B+-ness of the paper will be obvious and reveal itself to my mind. And the role of the professor is merely to register the B+ quality of the paper and acknowledge it. Sometimes intrinsicists will contrast machine grading to human grading. The idea is that if we take the human being out of it—obviously a simple machine doesn’t have consciousness—we get the intrinsic value of the student’s work.

Contrast the subjective grading we may have experienced (or perpetrated), in which cases the grade says more about what is going on in the professor’s mind than about the actual qualities of the student’s work. Rather than attending to the points that the essay is making and noticing how the argument is constructed, or how the rhetoric flows or doesn’t—the professor has biases, preconceptions about the student, or disagrees with the content of the paper, and so down-grades—or perhaps up-grades—the essay independently of its actual merits. So, while the failure of subjective grading is to make only the mind of the professor decisive in determining the grade, the hope of intrinsic grading is to take the professor’s consciousness out of the process entirely.

To draw this analogy for objectivity: the professor is a necessary part of the process in assigning a grade, but the professor’s commitment is to evaluating the actual qualities of the paper. Both reality and consciousness are involved, and objective grading is the professor’s maintaining his or her consciousness’s connection to reality so that the judgment of grade fits the facts of the essay. He or she reads the essay carefully, attends to the points that are being made, assesses the arguments, evaluates the quality of the sources, and so forth. The reality is that some essays make points that other papers do not make. Some are structured in ways that are different from the way other papers are structured. The essays have actual features and the professor becomes aware of them. Objectivity in grading is an active process of a professor’s consciousness directed toward the actually existing features embodied in the essay and yielding a judgment about the essay that acknowledges those features.

To generalize from this example: We need to get past the historical divide that has often plagued aspects of the history of philosophy: between those who see reality itself as stamping itself on passive minds and minds as having to be passive if knowledge is to be possible versus those who see the actions of consciousness as necessary to the whole knowledge process and so see reality as necessary dropping out of it. Yet objectivity is a third option distinct from intrinsicism and subjectivism: consciousness is a relational phenomenon, and objectivity is about using our consciousness to maintain our reality orientation.20

It is one thing macroscopically to conceptualize objectivity as a third alternative to intrinsicism and subjectivism, but the devil is in the details of cognition. As one scales down microscopically to each of the many conscious processes—sensation, perception, conception, memory, emotion, and so on—maintaining the awareness of the three alternatives’ implications for cognition is an ongoing challenge. The challenge is heightened by an additional problem.

THE IMPLICIT-PREMISE PROBLEM

It is normal in ordinary and uncontroversial situations not to state much background knowledge and to rely upon it as unspoken assumption. We’ll argue that All humans are mortal, so Socrates is mortal and leave implicit the knowledge that Socrates is human. Or in everyday example: You should take your umbrella today because it might rain. That works with a series of implicit premises: Rain makes you wet, You don’t want to get wet, Umbrellas prevent rain from making you wet. But one need not labor those points unless one is teaching a child.

Implicit premises also work well as comedic devices, as in Of course he’s a chauvinist pig—he’s a male, isn’t he? Making the assumption explicit both kills the humor and reveals the false premise:

Explicit premise: He is male.

Implicit Premise: All males are chauvinist pigs.

Conclusion: He is a chauvinist pig.

As matters become more serious and complicated, the logical technique of making all implicit premises explicit becomes invaluable in avoiding the many errors that can follow from a mistaken assumption. Though sometimes difficult due to the subtlety of the assumption, it is essential to make the hidden assumption explicit and ask: Is it true?

EXAMPLES OF MAKING OBJECTIVITY IMPOSSIBLE BY IMPLICIT DEFINITION

Here is a set of a dozen ways in which implicit premises are taken to rule out objectivity. The set includes exemplars from a variety of fields. In each case, a fact about human cognition that either enables or gives rise to the need for objectivity is taken as the enemy of objectivity.

1. The human cognitive apparatus has structure. A neo-Kantian argues: “The mind has a structure, and that structure means the mind can never objectively grasp reality.”21

Explicit premise: The mind has a structure.

Implicit Premise: Only a structure-less mind could objectively grasp reality.

Conclusion: The mind can never objectively grasp reality.

To see the falseness of the implicit premise—or at least how the argument would be challenged—note the grasp metaphor, which suggests a parallel absurdity: “A human hand has a structure, and that structure means the hand can never really grasp objects in reality.” The implicit assumption would be that only a structure-less hand would be able truly to grasp, which is absurd. In both cases, the argument takes a fact—structure—that makes an action possible—grasping—but turns the fact into the enemy of the action.

2. Human minds think in abstraction: Entrepreneur Gabriel Scheare: “Rights are just abstractions (thoughts in people’s heads) so they cannot possibly be objective. You choose to respect the property of all other peaceful humans and so you say that we have property rights but we don’t actually ‘have’ anything. It’s just a policy in your mind.”22 Assumption: To be objective, rights would have to be concrete possessions not in your mind. In this case, the cognitive need that humans have—to identify conceptual principles upon which to act and to formulate them in abstract terms—is assumed to disqualify such principles from being objective.

3. We use language: Economist Steve Horwitz: “I see it as a focus more on language than concepts per se. We can’t ever get ‘behind’ language to some objective reality, so we must use conversation and persuasion to understand the world. The question is whether we can reach intersubjective understanding (the more hopeful version) or whether power dynamics and what Will calls ‘identity-relative discourse’ mean such understanding is impossible (the later, more pessimistic version).”

Explicit premise: Our minds use language.

Implicit premise: Only a language-less mind could get to objective reality.

Conclusion: Our minds can never get behind language to objective reality.

Rather than seeing language as the tool our minds use in conceptual awareness of reality, language is seen as a barrier between our minds and reality.

4. Humans have social identities: Connor Wood diagnosing postmodernism’s social subjectivity and its rejection of objectivity: “all strains of postmodern thought insist that knowledge is really a function of social identity and location; that it’s impossible to separate a speaker’s point of view from her beliefs.”23 Assumption: To be objective, one would have to have no social identity.

5. We make selections. A graduate student in a Media Studies class arguing that documentaries are not objective: for any documentary, “whoever is choosing what they’re putting in and what order they’re putting everything. So you can’t take away human involvement from the process.”24 Assumption: Only if no there were no human involvement could there be objectivity. This is a huge one: Objectivity is a commitment and a method precisely of human beings, yet the mere fact of humans doing something is taken to rule out objectivity.

6. Human subjects make decisions: A professor of education, Ohmer Milton: “Cease using the term ‘objective.’ M-c [multiple-choice] questions are not objective. Those questions do not come from thin air—especially those in manuals accompanying textbooks. A person decides to question this rather than that and then writes—subjective processes. The term ‘objective’ misleads both students and the public. Correct students when they use ‘objective.’”25

Explicit premise: Questions do not come from thin air.

Implicit premise: Only questions that came from thin air would be objective.

Conclusion: Questions are not objective.

The “thin air” metaphor is a version of intrinsicism, with its assumption that the cognitive item would have to be arrived at by methods that involve nothing on the part of the subject. Again, rather than seeing objectivity as a type of process that knowing subjects engage in, objectivity is assumed to be an entirely subject-less happening.

7. Interpretation is involved. Historian Ole Bornedal: “History is not a fact. There is always going to be an interpretation of what history is.”

Explicit premise: History is always interpretation.

Implicit premise: Anything that involves interpretation cannot be a fact.

Conclusion: History is not factual.

8. Construction is involved. Historian Hayden White deconstructing history: “Many historians continue to treat their ‘facts’ as though they were ‘given’ and refuse to recognize, unlike most scientists, that they are not so much ‘found’ as ‘constructed’ by the kinds of questions which the investigator asks of the phenomena before him.”26 Consequently, White argues, the “objectivity” standard of the “empiricist paradigm” does not exist—and so history should be reconceived as the telling of stories based on subjective interests.

Explicit premise: Facts are constructed only on the basis of questions raised by the investigator.

Implicit premise: Objective facts would be unconstructed and prior to questions raised by the investigator.

Conclusion: Objective facts do not exist.

9. Humans change their minds individually and across time: Paraphrasing libertarian historian Thaddeus Russell from a debate: We can’t say any view is objectively true because people have changed their minds about it over the years and centuries.27

Explicit premise: Humans have changed their minds.

Implicit premise: A belief would be objectively true only if all humans at all times have believed it.

Conclusion: No belief is objectively true.

In this case, rather than seeing objectivity as a self-correcting process we must engage in—and that acknowledging errors despite past best efforts is part of being objective—that fact of cognitive change is taken as ruling out objectivity.

10. We use conceptual schemes. Philosopher D.W. Hamlyn: “We can raise the question of what is objective or otherwise only within the conceptual scheme that we have, given our form of life, since to ask whether something is objective is to ask whether it is objective as a such-and-such. To have classified something as a such-and-such is already to have invoked and applied a set of concepts; we cannot get outside these concepts altogether to raise questions about objectivity independent of them. … [Consequently] there are no standards of objectivity but all is subjective or a matter of human convention.”28

Explicit premise: The human form of life uses classifications that invoke a set of concepts.

Explicit premise: Humans cannot get outside these concepts to independent objectivity.

Implicit premise: Only an independent-of-human-concepts standard could be objective.

Conclusion: There is no objective standard.

11. We have opinions. An art historian critiquing another art historian: “Objectivity is a cardinal rule in the discipline of art history. Mr. Johnson’s book, by contrast, abounds in strong opinions.”29

Assumption: Opinions cannot be objective.

Instead of seeing opinions as views held by individuals about which there is real controversy and about which the individual recognizes that the evidence and argumentation may not yet be conclusive—i.e., an objective assessment of the partial state of knowledge—the partial and/or contested state of knowledge is removed from the realm of objectivity.

12. Humans have a brain. Economist Jeffrey Sachs: “If psychology has any core premise, it is that we do not observe or make sense of the world unmediated. Our brains ‘get in the way’, both for good and for ill. Our biases, habits, and biologies shape what we’re willing to do, say, or believe.”30 Reconstructing this to draw out the full argument, we get:

Explicit premise: Humans have brains.

Explicit premise: A brain has biologies, habits, and biases.

Implicit premise: Only a brainless being could have unmediated observation.

Intermediate conclusion: Humans cannot observe the world unmediated.

Implicit premise: Only unmediated observation could be objective.

Implicit conclusion: Humans cannot know the world objectively.

In this case, rather than seeing brains as a human’s means of observing and making sense of the world, brains “get in the way” of doing so. If only we didn’t have a brain! Then maybe we could access reality!

That of course makes the position seem ridiculous—and that will be my point. Seductive and easy-to-make but ultimately ridiculous assumptions do lead to absurdity.

Other variations of the same general pattern are ubiquitous:

• Humans have values, so they can’t be objective. Assumption: Only non-valuing beings could be objective.
• Humans have limited awareness, so they’re un-objective. Assumption: Only a being with unlimited awareness could be objective.
• Humans view the world from a perspective, so they’re necessarily subjective. Assumption: Only a perspective-less being or one with a “view from nowhere” could be objective.
• Human cognition is always bounded. Therefore, cognition is subjective. Assumption: Only unbounded cognition is or could be objective.
• As a human, I see the reality I see. Therefore, I don’t see reality objectively. Assumption: Only cognition not involving an I could see reality objectively.
• Human beings are emotional creations and so not objective. Assumption: Only emotionless beings can be objective.

If we put all of the above together, we get an account of what objectivity would have to be if it were to exist.

Objectivity is possible for a being that (1) has no values, (2 has unbounded, unlimited awareness, (3) is beyond perspectives, (4) has no opinions, (5) uses no language, (6) uses no abstractions, (6) has no conceptual schemes, (7) does not make choices or (8) engage in selectivity or (9) construct anything, (10) has a brain or mind with no structure, (11) never interprets, (12) never has to change its mind, (13) has no I, (14) has no emotions, and (15) has no social identity.

Now come the big questions: Why on earth assume that this is what objectivity would require? From where or whence was such a conception derived? Why set a standard for objectivity that is obviously impossible for humans beings to achieve?31

That set of implicit premises, individually and collectively, simply sets humans up for failure at the outset, as well as for one of the great dualities that has plagued the history of ideas. If in our pursuit of objectivity we are to conceive of a being that is beyond perspectives, has unlimited awareness, never needs to change its mind, and so on, then clearly we’re talking about a god-like being. And the thrust of the above analysis is that only a god-like being could have objective knowledge—never humans. The religiously minded then say: Yes! We are inadequate and so must rely upon a god-like being to dispense knowledge to us. By contrast, the skeptically minded then say: No gods exist! And we’re only human, so no knowledge exists. Yet both accept the same standard for what would count as objectivity—even though that standard from the get-go assumes objectivity into impossibility.

That is precisely the assumption that should be rejected and replaced with a new standard—what I think of as objectivity for actual human beings. Rather than setting an impossible standard and dismissing humans as contenders, we should start with human beings as they are and work out how their cognitive capacities work and why objectivity arises as a need for them to strive for.

OBJECTIVITY FOR ACTUAL HUMAN BEINGS

We have lots of knowledge. We don’t necessarily yet have a good theory of knowledge. Yet we shouldn’t let the current lack of a good theory of knowledge imply that we don’t have knowledge. Suppose I know that Smathers killed Biff, and you ask me how I know. I say I saw him do it with my own eyes. But you’ve read some philosophy books and point out to me that eyes can be subject to illusions and hallucinations and ask how I know I wasn’t experiencing an illusion at the time. I don’t have a good response. Should I conclude that I don’t know that Smathers killed Biff? I have a justification for my belief, but I don’t have a justification for my justification. While such philosophical skepticism is very old and cognitive science is a young discipline, we should take the skeptical arguments as a set of challenges to be met in developing a positive account of cognition.

The positive account of objectivity should begin by observing actual humans and asking what gives rise to their need for objectivity.

A primary reason is that human cognitive processing is not automatic and can go awry. Consequently, humans need to attend to their cognitive processes and commit to procedures. A useful contrast to cognition is to another human need: digestion. Digestive processing sorts the nutritious from useless and dangerous stuff. Cognitive processing sorts the informative from useless and false stuff. But while digestion is unlearned and automated, cognition is learned and volitional. Objective processes are what each human needs to learn and process to sort the informative from the useless and the false.

All of the other facts cited above about human cognition also give rise to the need for objectivity.

Humans have cognitive faculties with limitations. One sees within color ranges and at a distance and from an angle. One can hold in one’s mind a limited number of items at a time. And so on. At the same time, one learns about one’s cognitive limitations. So one learns that to make a judgment about something beyond one’s immediate cognitive limit one needs to do extra work—to see an object from different angles and distances and under different lighting conditions before making a judgment about its features. One can form snap judgments, but one can also recognize and pursue the objective principle of taking as many perspectives as is necessary.

Humans have intellectual commitments, and those can lead one to ignore new data and counter-arguments. At the same time, one can learn that new data and arguments can bear upon one’s existing beliefs and so commit to being open to new data and arguments. Further, as in the above grading example, a professor can believe that what a student is arguing in an essay is false but nonetheless choose to see that the student has researched and marshalled facts and claims into arguments worthy of a high grade. Objectivity’s open-mindedness when appropriate takes effort but is possible.

Humans have emotional commitments, and those can make one want to ignore undesirable facts and imagine fantasies to be true. At the same time, one can learn that one’s emotions can lead one into temptation and that one needs to learn to use emotions rather than be used by them. I can, for example, be emotionally invested in my sports team and let my desire for them to win cloud my judgment. But I can also put my emotions in abeyance and objectively assess their rival team and, say, place a bet on the rivals to win. I can be in love and so blind to faults in my paramour—but I can also learn that love has that effect and correct for it by looking explicitly for red flags and, if they appear, choosing to assess them and perhaps to end the relationship.

Humans can make mistakes. At the same time, they can learn what those mistakes are and what processes led to them. They can then change their cognitive processes so as not to make those mistakes again. Objectivity is a self-correcting commitment.

In complex situations, humans can select elements and put them together in different ways. At the same time, they can recognize that they have many selection options and that the first way they try to put the elements together is not necessarily the best. Hence they learn the need to devise tests for which packaged selections are better. Jigsaw puzzle pieces, for example, can be put together many ways and one always has many options about where to begin, but the picture on the front of the box sets the standard and objectivity includes the trial-and-error selection-and-testing process of assembling the pieces in a way that matches the cover picture.

And so on.

Put negatively: objectivity means not engaging in wishful thinking or rationalization or evasion or dogmatism or hasty judgment or laziness. All of those are possible for us, and all of them contribute to our need for objectivity—precisely for us to learn of those negative possibilities and how to avoid them. Objectivity is both a commitment to reality-connection processes and a realistic goal to achieve. Just as digestion can fail but can also succeed, cognition can fail or succeed. The difference is that our stomachs and intestines do what they do automatically and so “objective” digestion does not happen, while objective cognition is a result of learning and commitment.

One final comment about the epistemology: Objectivity is not a guaranty of success and objectivity is one success concept only along with knowledge, truth, and certainty, each of which picks out a different aspect of cognition. Being objective is necessary for knowledge, truth, and certainty, but objective individuals can remain ignorant about many things, make mistakes, and achieve probabilistic degrees of justification less than certainty. The cognitive terrain is rich, and more specification is needed to determine when objective processes yield knowledge, when they yield truth, and where upon the possibility-probability-certainty spectrum one’s judgment lies.

The concluding point for liberalism is that just as economic theory, value theory, and political theory are both difficult and necessary to making the case, so is cognitive theory. A complete case for liberty will integrate all of them, i.e., it will be a full philosophical justification that both makes the positive case and insulates it from the negatives of skepticism, relativism, and philosophical subjectivism.

EPIGRAPH: ON “INTERSUBJECTIVITY”

“Objectivity … is now conceived as inter-subjectivity. Inter-subjective norms are not agreed to by the members of a society because they are objective, but, in effect, become objective because they are jointly accepted.”

—Henry D. Aiken, The Age of Ideology

Inter-subjective is a halfway house between the failure of old-fashioned theories of objectivity as kind of naïve realism and a consequent feared slide into absolute skepticism and hence solipsism.

The process starts with a philosophical concept of truth as knowledge of reality, such knowledge being arrived at by objective means and justified by those means. And since all humans presumably have the same cognitive equipment, the truth is in principle universal.

But what happens when one comes to have serious doubts about objectivity? One learns the skeptical objections to successfully connecting mind and reality. That raises the specter of solipsism: Maybe what I call reality is only a subjective creation of my mind independently of any outside-existing reality.

There is the just-plain weirdness of the individual assertion of subjectivity: Reality is whatever I will it to be. And that in turn leads to some strange moral and political consequences: What if everybody believes and acts as if they are their own creator-of-reality gods? Some such god-wannabes are rather dark and disturbed individuals.

So can we effect a compromise? What if we grant the need to abandon old-fashioned objectivity but retain the assumption of universality? If all humans have the same equipment and we combine that with subjectivity, we get: Reality is whatever we will it to be.

The claim then is that collective subjectivity—re-labeled as “new-fashioned objectivity”—gives us both a shared framework of beliefs and a check on the weirdo individuals among us.

Such a halfway house is unstable and ultimately a failure.

How does anyone know that all human beings have the same cognitive equipment? To establish that universally presupposes that one can establish it as an objective fact about reality. But the intersubjectivists have rejected that possibility on principle. Hence universality can for them be only an article of faith.

And who are the members of society collectively authorized to generated the acceptable norms? If we (arbitrarily) include some people in the collective but exclude others, then generate a group relativism, as the excluded others can form their own group with their own norms. Who is then to say which group’s is truer or better?

Further: Within any (arbitrarily) decided group, what of the dissenter individuals? Are they to be pressured to believe and do as does the majority—thus preserving the society’s universalism but making it tend to conformism? Or are the dissenters to be excommunicated from the group—again preserving the remaining members’ universalism but shrinking its own scope and increasing the size of out-groups with their own rivalrous “truths.”

So we are left with the challenge of re-thinking the corrosive skepticisms that undercut objectivity in the first place.

1Simon Blackburn. “Relatively Speaking,” Think 1 (2): 83–88 (2002).

2St. Augustine, Confessions, 397–400 CE, Book 5, 3.3.

3John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1536, 2:2:25.

4Immanuel Kant on the value of showing reason incapable of knowing reality: “But, above all, there is the inestimable benefit, that all objections to morality and religion will be forever silenced, and this in Socratic fashion, namely, by the clearest proof of the ignorance of the objectors.” (Critique of Pure Reason, 1781/1787, Bxxxi).

5Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, 1846, translated by H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong (Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 564.

6Plato suggests that a society’s guardians are justified in noble lies: “The rulers then of the city may, if anybody, fitly lie on account of enemies or citizens for the benefit of the state.” (The Republic, 389b).

Alexis de Tocqueville argues that citizens of a democracy need dogmatism in religion even if the religion is not true: “I have laid it down in a preceding chapter that men cannot do without dogmatical belief; and even that it is very much to be desired that such belief should exist amongst them. I now add, that of all the kinds of dogmatical belief the most desirable appears to me to be dogmatical belief in matters of religion.” (Democracy in America, 1835, “Of the Manner in Which Religion in the United States Avails Itself of Democratic Tendencies,” 2.1.5).

Sigmund Freud is an atheist who is contemptuous of religion—“the whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality”—but he argues that the common man needs religion as he is not sophisticated to seek a meaningful life through the more demanding pursuits of art and science. (Civilization and Its Discontents, 1927, Chapter 2).

7David Hume notes wryly about those who make this mistake: “In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surprized to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not.” (“Moral Distinctions Not Derived from Reason,” A Treatise of Human Nature, 1738, 3.1.1).

8Professor C. L. Stevenson: “‘This is good’ means I approve of this; do so as well.” (“The Emotive Meaning of Ethical Terms,” 1937, in A. J. Ayer, editor, Logical Positivism, The Free Press, 1959, pp. 264–281).

9Ludwig Wittgenstein: “Theories which make a proposition of logic appear substantial are always false.” (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1922, 6.111).

A. J. Ayer: “The principles of logic and mathematics are true universally simply because we never allow them to be anything else” Language, Truth, and Logic (1936, Dover edition), p. 77).

10Heraclitus: “The sea is the purest and the impurest water. Fish can drink it, and it is good for them; to men it is undrinkable and destructive.” (Fragments, B61).

11Professor N. R. Hanson: “theories and interpretations are ‘there’ in the seeing from the outset.” (“Observation,” Chapter 1 of Patterns of Discovery, Cambridge University Press, 1958).

Karl Popper: “there is no sense organ in which anticipatory theories are not genetically incorporated.” And: sense organs “incorporate, more especially, theory-like expectations. Sense organs, such as the eye, are prepared to react to certain selected environmental events—to those events which they ‘expect’, and only to those events. Like theories (and prejudices) they will in general be blind to others: to those which they do not understand, which they cannot interpret (because they do not correspond to any specific problem which the organism is trying to solve.)” (Objective Knowledge, Oxford University Press, 1972, pp. 72 and 145).

12Blaise Pascal: “The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.” (Pensées, 1670, p. 277).

Hume: “Reason is, and ought to be the slave of the passions.” (Treatise, 2.3.3.4).

Nietzsche: “It is our needs that interpret the world; our drives and their For and Against. Every drive is a kind of lust to rule; each one has its perspective that it would like to compel all the other drives to accept as a norm.” (The Will to Power, p. 481).

13Cass Sunstein: “For the individual agent, rationality is a function of social norms. A norm-free conception of rationality would have to depend on a conception of what peoples’ rational ‘interests’ are in a social vacuum. Since people never act in a social vacuum, such a conception would not be intelligible.” (Free Markets and Social Justice, Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 54).

Michel Foucault: “I claim that reason is a long narrative, which ends today and makes room for another, and makes no sense.” (Foucault Live, p. 251).

14Thomas Kuhn: “We may, to be more precise, have to relinquish the notion, explicit or implicit, that changes of paradigm carry scientists and those who learn from them closer and closer to the truth.” (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, University of Chicago Press, 1962, p. 170).

15Professor Brian Medlin: “it is now pretty generally accepted by professional philosophers that ultimate ethical principles must be arbitrary.” (“Ultimate Principles and Ethical Egoism,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 35:2. 1957, pp. 111–118).

16Joseph Schumpeter: “We may, indeed, prefer the world of modern dictatorial socialism to the world of Adam Smith, or vice versa, but any such preference comes within the same category of subjective evaluation as does a man’s preference for blondes over brunettes.” (A History of Economic Analysis, 1954.)

17Recommended much fuller development of these issues is David Kelley, Lectures on Epistemology, The Atlas Society, 2015. Accessed online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVBgfamJxFk&list=PLnHOyZsmJrozETJ9zzryDhW0kliZkbIsu.

18Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (Stanford University Press, 2014), section 207.

19Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, section 211.

20A near-contemporary of Nietzsche’s, philosopher W. P. Montague of Columbia University, articulated a relational theory of consciousness: “Recently, several philosophers have independently suggested that the relational category should be applied in the study of consciousness as well as in the study of its objects, that the phenomenon of consciousness, of awareness, should be correlated with such relations between other phenomena as will best explain its function and its origin. The relational theory of consciousness, however, implies a realistic theory of sensible qualities, both primary and secondary. And, conversely, when once this realism is recognized, there is no temptation to relapse into either of the idealistic or non-relational conceptions of consciousness.”

21“Kant persuasively argued that the human inquisitor’s mind is not a see-through structure with a mere reflective function. Rather the human process of knowing the external world is through the senses and these senses themselves have impactful structures and causal processes. Thus, reason can only be presented with an internal representation of external reality. Direct experience of the material word is impossible to the subjective effect of the knower’s essentially sequential and influential operations.” (John Brown, “Post-Postmodernism,” Lies, Trickery, Obfuscation, 2021 ms.)

22Gabriel Scheare, Tweet accessed online at: https://twitter.com/scheare?lang=en.

23Connor Wood, “Why Postmodernism and Science Can’t Stand Each Other,” Patheos, November 29, 2018. Accessed online at: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/scienceonreligion/2018/11/postmodernism-science-cant-stand-each-other/.

24Unknown graduate student. Accessed online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=86&v=mJ109-BvQV4. See time stamp 18:00 minutes.

25Ohmer Milton, “Course Tests: Integral Features of Instruction.” The Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education, Vol. 2, No. 5, 1990–1991.

26Hayden White, “The Burden of History,” History and Theory 5:2 (1966), p. 127.

27Thaddeus Russell, SoHo Forum debate with Stephen R. C. Hicks, New York City, July 2019. Accessed online here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loGG5nrVIsM. See timestamp 1:18:00.

28D. W. Hamlyn, The Theory of Knowledge (Garden City, N.Y,: Anchor books, 1970), pp. 720–73.

29Eric Gibson, “Bold Strokes, Strong Opinions,” The Wall Street Journal, October 3, 2003. Accessed online at: http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110004095.

30Jeffrey Sachs, November 2, 2018. Tweet accessed online at: https://twitter.com/JeffreyASachs/status/1058412303727685632/.

31Paul Feyerabend notes the impossible standard for objectivity that has been urged by many philosophers and concludes that only a “miracle” could enable the “abyss” between intrinsic reality and subjectivity to be bridged: “For while the earlier concepts took dependencies for granted and expressed them in various ways, the concepts of the ‘philosophers’ (as the first theoretical scientists called themselves) and their seventeenth-century refinements were ‘objective’—that is, detached from those who produced them and from the situations in which they were produced and therefore in principle incapable of doing justice to the rich pattern of interactions that is the world. It needs a miracle to bridge the abyss between subject and object, man and nature, experience and reality that is the result of these conceptual ‘revolutions’—and creativity leading to wonderful castles of (philosophical and/or scientific) thought is supposed to be that miracle. Thus the allegedly most rational view of the world yet in existence can function only when combined with the most irrational events there are, namely miracles.” Paul Feyerabend. “Creativity—A Dangerous Myth.” Critical Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 709.