Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy [Paperback]

Barbara Herrnstein Smith (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0674064925 | ISBN-13: 978-0674064928 | Publication Date: April 30, 1997

Truth, reason, and objectivity--can we survive without them? What happens to law, science, and the pursuit of social justice when such ideas and ideals are rejected? These questions are at the heart of the controversies between traditionalists and "postmodernists" that Barbara Herrnstein Smith examines in her wide-ranging book, which also offers an original perspective on the perennial--perhaps eternal--clash of belief and skepticism, on our need for intellectual stability and our experience of its inevitable disruption.

Focusing on the mutually frustrating impasses to which these controversies often lead and on the charges--"absurdity," "irrationalism," "complicity," "blindness," "stubbornness"--that typically accompany them, Smith stresses our tendency to give self-flattering reasons for our own beliefs and to discount or demonize the motives of those who disagree with us. Her account of the resulting cognitive and rhetorical dynamics of intellectual conflict draws on recent research and theory in evolutionary biology, neuroscience, developmental psychology, and the history and sociology of science, as well as on contemporary philosophy and language theory.

Smith's analyses take her into important ongoing debates over the possibility of an objective grounding of legal and political judgments, the continuing value of Enlightenment rationalism, significant challenges to dominant ideas of scientific truth, and proper responses to denials of the factuality of the Holocaust. As she explores these and other controversies, Smith develops fresh ways to understand their motives and energies, and more positive ways to see the operations of intellectual conflict more generally.

Editorial Reviews

Review

It is typical of Smith that she can accommodate such questions of reality and truth, without self-contradiction, in the course of a defence and explication of what is variously called scepticism, perspectivism, constructivism or postmodernism, but for which relativism seems a perfectly good term. Belief and Resistance is not only a substantively powerful book; its conscientious approach and restrained style are equally welcome. Indeed, its only possible rivals are the work of Joseph Margolis...and the late, unjustly neglected Paul Feyerabend...Smith's point is not that there is anything wrong about objectivity in the classic sense of 'justifiable in a context-transcendent and subject-independent way'. It is, rather, that whether legal, scientific, or political, such evaluation--'as distinct from judgments that are good under certain (perhaps quite broad) conditions and from the perspectives of certain (perhaps especially relevant) people'--never occurs. In epistemology and axiology, there are 'no touchstones of truth, no automatic refutations of error, no ready-made exposures of deception'. In rich and subtle detail, Smith explores the implications of this view in relation to (among other things) Holocaust denial and the 'Science Wars'. Proceeding from the view that what we variously call nature, reality, or truth is the result of ongoing material, cognitive, conceptual and social interactions (but not social or linguistic alone), she offers some fascinating speculations on the general dynamics of belief and resistance. Their overall context is the project of a naturalized but non-reductive evolutionary epistemology, very much in the spirit of Gregory Bateson. Barbara Hernnstein Smith's book, however, sets a new standard.
--Patrick Curry (Times Literary Supplement )

Smith's analyses of recent controversies about objectivity are unusually subtle, and very helpful indeed.
--Richard Rorty, University of Virginia

Barbara Herrnstein Smith is not the UN peace-keeping forces intervening in the Science and Moral Wars. Rather, she does an ecological study of many entangled controversies, paying due attention to all the camps while not pretending to be above any of them--thus exemplifying the fact that relativism leads not, as many believe, to a lake of fire in which illegitimate scholars are inevitably fried, but to the open seas on which it is possible to travel much further than on the supposed solid ground of 'firm foundations,' if only we have ship!
--Bruno Latour, Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines, Paris

Sober and wise, engaged yet tolerant, this book offers--for those who really want one--an antidote to the absolutism and the incivility of our present controversies.
--Steven Shapin, University of California at San Diego

Review

Smith's analyses of recent controversies about objectivity are unusually subtle, and very helpful indeed. (Richard Rorty, University of Virginia ) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 250 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (April 30, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674064925
• ISBN-13: 978-0674064928
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 5.8 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,040,271 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Careful exploration of relativism and its consequences, May 27, 1999

By 

David Kellogg - See all my reviews

This review is from: Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy (Paperback)

The previous (hostile) reviewer noted that this was his "first and last" reading in postmodernism.

It shows.

In fact, his objections to Belief and Resistance are entirely anticipated in the book itself.

In this book, Herrnstein Smith extends the arguments in her earlier _Contingencies of Value_, showing how belief patterns can be sustained and effective without reference to "objective" truth. It _does_ take a certain patience to get used to her style, which here, even more than in her earlier books, is qualified sometimes nearly to the point of disappearing. But in fact, the particular idiom she has developed is a consequence of her intellectual journey, and the book is a serious defence of a serious philosophical position.

Another potential problem is the "occasional" nature of some of the pieces. Unlike her earlier works, Belief and Resistance collects pieces originally written for various forums, and often in response to critiques of her earlier formulations. Because of this, the opening and closing chapters (especially the material on Habermas) seem not to fit fully with the central argument. But that argument, particularly in the title chapter and the chapter entitled "Doing without Meaning," is presented brilliantly and (despite the wilful misunderstanding of the earlier reviewer) clearly.

17 of 60 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Unimportant by its own (postmodern) standards., May 24, 1999

By 

Archimedes Tritium - See all my reviews

This review is from: Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy (Paperback)

As my first and last reading in postmodernism, what immediately stood out was the turgid obscurity of the writing. Random page:

"Apel's rebuttal of Albert's anti-foundationalist argument via the charge of performative contradiction assumes that the a priori validity of logical rules must be assumed". Example would be nice, but definitions and examples are scarce and would cramp the author's style.

After a few pages, a greater realization: one can read for pages and not encounter an actual idea. Words, chosen for ambiguity, arranged on paper so as to have no meaning when considered in sequence.

The book is unimportant in two ways: it is hypocritical and has no utility. It is an abstract game in which the author depends on 3rd-order natural-language word definitions to avoid committing to anything specific. Well, almost.

ON IT'S OWN TERMS, the book is necessarily a final (meta)attempt to provide the universal mechanism to avoid "cognitive dissonance", the discomfort felt when exposed to another viewpoint. But that assumes that cognitive dissonace is something all seek to avoid. Thus, there is the rejection of absolutes, itself based on a specific assertion -- the assumed universal/absolute desire to resolve cognitive dissonance.

Given the record of intellectuals and academia in jumping on-board intellectual frauds from Marxism to Keynesian economics to Freudian psychology to Kinsey sexuality (See "Degenerate Moderns" by Jones) only to see them collapse in ruins of error after thousands of Ph.D's and careers were built around them, post-modernism can be seen as a self-defense mechanism for academia. An attempt to declare that all human reason is inadequate, there being no truth. "We could only have failed so monstrously if human reason itself is unreal".

Self-centered arrogance. Human reason is fine, albeit finite. It is demonstrably irrational assumptions of academic elites that are unreal:

1. "There are no absolutes".Comment: The statement claims absolute knowledge, thus contradicts itself. (There is the temperature absolute zero. Has much to do with entropy, thus the cause-effect direction of time, with all THOSE consequences). Question: Do you suppose there are no absolutes or there are people who PREFER there are no absolutes, so they can do what they want?

2. "Everything is relative". Comment: Contradicts itself, being another absolute assertion of truth even as it claims there are none. Meaningless.

3. "We can't know anything with certainty". Comment: Except, it seems, this one belief. Which, being an example, is thus self-refuting and meaningless. It asserts an absolute truth as it claims one is not possible.

4. "What a person believes is the result of social, psychological or chemical conditioning" Comment: Then this belief is also the result of such conditioning, invalidating its significance to an equal extent.

5. "There is no truth". Comment: If true, the statement is an example contradicting it's assertion. Another impossible statement that excludes itself.

6. "Only empirically verifiable or falsifiable statements have any meaning". Comment: This idea cannot be verified and prohibits itself from being simply assumed true. It is thus impossible.

Post-modernism was invented to protect elites from the cognitive dissonance that comes with recognizing the irrationality of the assumed "enlightened" beliefs above. (That, and to amuse the French: "Jacques, I can't believe the Americans bought into us AGAIN...finally, revenge for all those 'I Love Lucy' reruns.")

Once these beliefs are recognized and eliminated, human reason does well. The reasoning that requires the above to be self-refuting statements allows one to construct the mathematics to send a spacecraft 30 million miles to another planet and arrive within 100 meters. Human reason does well if started from a certain point.

The author, of course, doesn't deny any of this (and cannot), just constructs a preemptive defensive fog of imprecise words so as to cover all bases simultaneously. This fog is dependent on using implied but less common alternate word definitions. For example, when trying to address the charge of self-refutation, it turns out the charge must be "unloaded".

"Refutation" has too precise a meaning, thus the post-modernist has to "unload" the charge of self-refutation instead of "refuting" the charge of self-refutation. "Unload" is typically used with respect to physical labor. By switching it to refer to a logical operation, the author creates a vagueness of meaning that allows the reader to fill with imagination or assumption. Deeply dishonest, intentional miscommunication.

She writes "for the self-refutation charge to have logical force (as officially measured), the mirror-reversal it indicates must be exact". First, I wonder how, ON HER TERMS, she can know this. Second, I wonder what "mirror-reversal" logic is. Third, on her own terms, how and who "officially measures" logical force"?

There may be a suggestive parallel to post-modernism in science. Mathematical reasoning often contains infinite series summations, or sometimes, additional small terms in the expressions. For computational reasons, these expressions are often truncated to an approximation. Thus the spacecraft arrives 100 meters off target after 30 million miles. The error has little to do with the arbitrariness of human reason. 3rd order and higher terms were deliberately neglected, not worth carrying.

I think post-modernists fixate on these infinite series (without knowing about them, being verbalists), missing the bigger picture that to put a spacecraft down within 100 meters conclusively demonstrates successful reasoning of high order, including the precise boundaries of what one doesn't know. I suppose covariance mapping would be shocking revelation to a post-modernist.

While the book is UNimportant ON ITS OWN TERMS with respect to reason, it is very significant for academia. It promotes intellectual suicide of the current ruling elite that has failed so badly. Even as modern academics eat this stuff up to protect themselves from facing the awful recognition of the concretely false assumptions of humanism that frame their lives, it nullifies their intellectual existence and prepares for the collapse of degenerate institutions, making way for the new. Thus, some hope; the dead-wood is clearing itself. If it doesn't go fascist, universities might be in good shape in 20-30 years.