None of Us Are Realists Anymore

And this is a problem

Dec 09, 2024

The first part in a series I'll be posting on how our culture's relationship to reality and knowledge is changing. -

Introduction

It was once said to me that political science is only ever a sub-field of history. It cannot comment on the future of a people, and its ability to even comment on the “now” is questionable. The reason for this is that it is a historical science, it must muster data, research designs, and standards of evidence that necessarily are backward-looking. Attempts to predict a future from these data may be informed by political science, but prediction itself is something less than a science precisely because the art of prediction is not a wholly scientific affair. Research has long shown that attempts of experts across fields to predict the future are woefully inaccurate and at times no better than chance or a lay person’s judgment.[1]

However, this should be seen as no loss, as predicting the future should never be our goal as a people. Our goal, and our responsibility as the beings that humans uniquely are, is to decide the future. To do this though, we still need to understand where we already are and how we got here. We need to understand the experiences of the past and the principles of reality discovered thus far. We have to know these things so that we know the nature of the road we are on, what this road has committed us to thus far, and what it would mean to choose to take a turn onto new paths – or even to return to old ones!

Political science and history though are limited in their ability to do this for us because of their limitation in explaining the nature of the now. History tells us the causes that led us to the now, but it necessarily stops short of telling us what it is like to be in the now. The question of what the “now” is requires us to know how people are presently responding to the drivers that led us here and how people interpret the boundary stones history have dropped into their world before their births. That will always be partly a question of interpretation because a people can respond to what has been brought by the antecedent causes of history in multiple ways. It is in this gap, where human volition collapses the chaotic interaction of events that aren’t yet within the macroscopic lens of history into one of several possible reactions to our current world that is the zeitgeist and the now.

It would seem the question of the now then is a question of presentist psychology and sociology. However, what should be re-introduced to our discourse is that it is rightly seen as a question of philosophy too. Foucault understood this when he talked of a philosophy seeking to understand the “question of the present” so as to present a “history of the present”.[2] [3]

This kind of philosophy shows us what is possible by showing us the fragility of the things we take for granted as the paved roads we must travel on. In this way, philosophy’s benefit is not just to tell us where we are by making us realize that where we are has been a choice of one set of options compared to others, but to take the first steps of sending scouts to walk off the road and form the desire paths that may later become new roads. This happens illegibly first in the minds of the public, with the Center and institutions not able to read what is going on because their synoptic frames and vocabulary make the complexity of the average person’s thought opaque to them. People’s acting outside the lines of the current system, creating tentative desire paths from the roads we’ve given them, are responded to by the Center as either an act of illegality, an act of willful disobedience or laziness, or a violation of the social contract. What these violations represent though are the possible other paths of the new and present that are in tension with our past. They represent hope.

What good is philosophy for politics then? It turns out the answer is to answer the charge provided by Foucault: to understand the phenomena of the now and consider the possible paths for a future implied. With this information, we can truly choose to vote with our feet as a people, rather than being shepherded along by paved roads that we had no say in building.

Where We Are

Doing the work of understanding the now will require us to take public life seriously and to take the un-serious serious. It will require us to see how people’s total actions and statements point to “structures of feeling” and assumed epistemologies that they do not consciously acknowledge, and which are responsive to trends in our society even when the public is not aware they are responding to something or in dialogue with something.[4] [5] In our current context, it requires treating the medium as being the message, treating technology as not a neutral thing but something that brings semantic content, and assuming rationality where others may simply see the irrational.

This type of work is best done when the gap between the official stated principles and order of a society and the expressed actions, beliefs, and desires of its people have become too large to ignore. We find ourselves in 2024 in America and much of the Western world at such a gap. Whether this gap will collapse into the reification of the current order, with the clock starting again on the new, or this gap will be a chance to observe something new, is unknown. What is clear is that this is a crossroads. Before we choose, we should understand the present. This article is the first in a series that will seek to do just that, looking at one structure of feeling that has defined our politics and society in recent years: an embrace in our society of logical coherence and closure over uncertainty and self-responsibility, the metaphysical and the subjective over the real, and the adoption of a public epistemology of coherentism as a response to the demands of a society that is increasingly removed from a relationship with reality.

The Duelists in Epistemology

Before we can begin understanding these state of affairs, we do have to somewhat awkwardly stop and discuss some philosophy so all can follow along. Namely, we need to discuss the concept of epistemology. Epistemology is the question roughly of “what is this thing called ‘knowledge’”? What does it mean to say we know something (what is knowledge), under what conditions do we obtain this thing (what counts as justification), and what does the structure of such conditions look like (how should our justifications be structured or ”hang together”). Most discussion of epistemology focuses on the last part, traditionally asking the question of whether “foundationalism” or “coherentism” is the right structure for knowledge claims.[6] What is meant by “structure” will be made clearer by talking about these two theories.

Foundationalism is the view that to know something requires us, at some point, to start with a belief whose epistemic status (i.e. do we know this?) does not depend on another belief. These “foundational” beliefs we simply know by way of it being self-evidently true, inconceivable for it to be otherwise, or axiomatically true. We then use these starting points to build all other beliefs, which are all dependent beliefs. What these foundational beliefs are is a matter of discussion beyond our scope here, but Roderick Chisholm, the “standard bearer” for foundationalism, believed that at least one of them is simply our sense data and experience of reality (absent good reasons to believe that our particular sense data is problematic in some way).[7] [8] As Chisholm says, channeling another philosopher G.E. Moore: “I know very well this is a hand, and so do you. If you come across some philosophical theory that implies that you and I cannot know that this is a hand, then so much the worse for the theory”.[9] Regardless of whether we think Chisholm is right about this (and we are glossing over much here), the point to be illustrated is the degree to which foundationalism typically relies on an experience with reality and observation. Our beliefs can be dependent on each other, but eventually they should be grounded by some self-evidently known thing, not merely another belief. Foundationalism’s primary objection has been the charge of the skeptic who points out that we cannot know our hand is really there, and that if we were to accept the strong constraints of a vulgar foundationalism, then we would be forced to agree with Descartes that all we can know is that we are a thinking being, but nothing else.[10]

Foundationalism’s chief opponent has been coherentism then, which argues that foundationalism is indeed too strict of a requirement on our justification structure and doesn’t really reflect the phenomenology of belief. For coherentists, belief dependency is embraced, with our justification structure coming from holding beliefs that are cohesive with each other, that form a coherent web of interconnected beliefs. If foundationalism’s problem was its strictness, then coherentism’s problem has been its uneasy relationship with the question of how well it possesses “truth conductivity”, which is to say that it would allow us to have epistemic justification for things that are true and not things that are untrue.[11] Put more simply: it is easy to imagine someone having a set of beliefs that paint a coherent picture of the world, but this picture nevertheless is false about how the world is in reality. This problem is known as the “isolation” or “input” problem:

“…how can the mere fact that a system is coherent, if the latter is understood as a purely system-internal matter, provide any guidance whatsoever to truth and reality? Since a coherence theory, in its basic form, does not assign any essential role to experience, there is little reason to think that a coherent system of belief will accurately reflect the external world.”[12]

Coherentism doesn’t answer how to judge, in isolation, any one of its particular inputs or nodes in its web. The result is it’s possible to paint an entirely coherent, but entirely false, picture of the world. This problem is closely related to a similar problem for coherentism, which is the “alternative systems” or “adjudication” problem:

“For each coherent system of beliefs there exist, conceivably, other systems that are equally coherent yet incompatible with the first system. If coherence is sufficient for justification, then all these incompatible systems would be justifiably held. But this observation, of course, thoroughly undermines any claim suggesting that coherence is indicative of truth.”[13]

In fact, this seems to be one of the problems of conspiracy theories. They provide us with ways to take a more cohesive picture of various occurrences and beliefs without any grounding justification for individual beliefs, and they compete with other cohesive pictures of the world on uneven footing: they can outcompete in cohesion other pictures that do limit themselves consciously to building on inputs they can verify.

Both of these schools of thought then in their classical or “vulgar” forms have problems. Sophisticated versions of these theories in philosophy address them. One response to the strictness charge by foundationalists – a response typical not just of foundationalism but many epistemic theories really– is to simply accept that if what one wants is absolute certainty, then we are indeed stuck at only knowing the inside of our own minds. As Bertrand Russell noted in Problems of Philosophy, if a philosopher takes certainty as their criterion to the extent that they deny such instinctual beliefs as their senses, then there is nothing we can talk about.[14] This though is a problem of general skepticism, not really a problem specific to foundationalism. Similarly, appeals to Nietzschean anxiety over the limits of human perspective can be met with the simple acknowledgement that if our “knowledge” turns out to be only the kind possessed at a human level of understanding, then so be it, as since we aim to discuss concepts of knowledge with other humans, this will suffice for now, and why be anxious about a question that, if we take seriously, presupposes we can never give anything it would accept as an answer, since everything we could say to this question would come from the mouth of a human?

For coherentism, early forms of coherentism were associated with an idealist view of the world and normally a coherence theory of truth as well, which made the input/isolation problem less of a problem, but only because they rejected a realist definition of truth.[15] For them, truth was not a matter of correspondence to an external, mind-independent world. Modern forms of coherentist epistemology meanwhile more so work under a correspondence theory of truth and so include some kind of coherence with sense data or some reality-grounding beliefs as part of their coherence requirements to address the isolation problem - although this may amount to turning coherentism into foundationalism.

Why Does This Matter?

All that needs to be known for now is that both these theories have sophisticated versions in philosophy to address their supposed flaws. For the purposes of this discussion though, we don’t need to discuss the sophisticated versions, since what we want to do is chart how the public’s phenomenology and experiences are leading them to rough intuitions in line with these systems in their basic forms. Since these are only rough intuitions, “structures of feeling” they do not map onto the sophisticated versions. Instead, we see people adopting the vulgar forms of these epistemologies. Namely, developments in our society have encouraged an adoption of coherentism, and with it, an increasing adoption of subjectivist and anti-realist stances on truth as a way to address the input/isolation problem, even by those that identify themselves as fighting for some traditional understanding of realist truth.

The philosophical upshot of this trend is that we have been running a naturalistic experiment in a public epistemology of coherentism over the past 20 years and the results of this study have been a disastrous exemplification of the isolation problem and untenability of coherentism as a public epistemology. The political upshot of these trends has been strengthening a dissociation from reality that prizes interests and ideologies that perform best in a context of subjectivism, vulgar pragmatism, and a politics that foregrounds the meta over material reality. These approaches have political implications in their connection to strands of conservative thought and communitarian critiques that exist in conflict with the assumptions of liberal modernity.[16] If these trends are not addressed by our system, it will continue to stress some of the fundamental assumptions of liberal democracy. Asking ourselves how to ease these trends may require believing it is possible again to follow a desire path instead of the paved road we have been on, embracing something other than the ease of the digital age and reclaiming a public good that has structuring material reality as part of our politics again, creating the conditions for self-governance by putting us in dialogue with the real again.

We will turn next to a sampling of the trends that have led to this age of coherence. None of these sampled trends provide a complete explanation of what is going on. All of them will be treated in a necessarily shallow way. The hope is that a certain picture starts to emerge and that this picture gives us a way to start thinking critically about the road we are on.

[1] Grossmann, I., Varnum, M. E. W., Hutcherson, C. A., & Mandel, D. R. (2024). When expert predictions fail. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 28(2), 113–123. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2023.10.005

[2] Liz, J. Foucault and the History of Our Present. Marx and Philosophy. Retrieved December 5, 2024, from https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/8180_foucault-and-the-history-of-our-present-review-by-jordan-liz/

[3] Garland, D. (2014). What is a “history of the present”? On Foucault’s genealogies and their critical preconditions. Punishment & Society, 16(4), 365–384. https://doi.org/10.1177/1462474514541711

[4] Structures of feeling. (n.d.). Oxford Reference. https://doi.org/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100538488

[5] Akker, T. V. & R. van den. (2015, August 24). Misunderstandings and clarifications—Notes on Metamodernism. Metamodernism. https://www.metamodernism.com/2015/06/03/misunderstandings-and-clarifications/

[6] Yes, there are more theories then these two. However, putting aside the recent reliablist revolution in epistemics, most of the discussion has been along these lines.

[7] Chisholm, R. M. (1977). Theory of knowledge (2. ed). Prentice Hall.

[8] Feldman, R., & Feldman, F. (2024). Roderick Chisholm. In E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelman (Eds.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2024). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2024/entries/chisholm/

[9] Chisholm, R. M. (1983). The foundations of knowing (2. ed). University of Minnesota Press. p.68-69.

[10] As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Foundationalism notes, it is not necessarily admitted to that this skepticism is what tends to be underneath the various arguments made against foundationalism. However, there is a case to be made this is the underlying argument. See Hasan, A., & Fumerton, R. (2022). Foundationalist Theories of Epistemic Justification. In E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelman (Eds.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2022). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2022/entries/justep-foundational/

[11] Coherentism in Epistemology | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (n.d.). Retrieved December 5, 2024, from https://iep.utm.edu/coherentism-in-epistemology/

[12] Olsson, E. (2023). Coherentist Theories of Epistemic Justification. In E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelman (Eds.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2023). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2023/entries/justep-coherence/

[13] Ibid.

[14] Russell, B. (1990). The problems of philosophy. Hackett. (Original work published 1912)

[15] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justep-coherence/; See https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/idealism/ for more on idealism.