[Originally published on June 8th, 2026, 9:02am. Reposted by request.]
“In our view there are several worrying tendencies in contemporary academic scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, all of which reflect, to varying degrees, a distinctive form of politicization in which the scholarly enterprise is taken to be subordinate to, or in the service of, political (social or moral) goals beyond the advancement of knowledge and understanding.”
That is from a recently released “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences.” The report is by a group led by Paul Boghossian (NYU), who was asked to produce the report by Daniel Diermeier, Chancellor of Vanderbilt University, and Andrew D. Martin, Chancellor of Washington University. The group includes ten scholars, including three other philosophers: Kwame Anthony Appiah (NYU), Kit Fine (NYU), and Gideon Rosen (Princeton).
The report is in response to complaints about politicization of scholarship in the humanities. But what, exactly, is the complaint?
The authors first distinguish the problem they think is worth considering from various non-problems:
The problem is not that scholars in these areas are significantly more liberal or progressive than the general public…
The problem is not that many scholars are politically active, or that they see their scholarly work as relevant to their activism…
The problem is not that political considerations have broadened the focus of scholarship away from the Western high art canon and other historically central topics towards work by and about members of marginalized groups — women, members of racial and ethnic minorities, and so on…
The problem is not that scholarship in these areas is often critical or oppositional, aiming to debunk or correct the presuppositions of previous scholarship and the wider set of established cultural norms that scholarship reflects.
Rather, the problem, they say, has to do with prioritizing politics over scholarship. They write:
In rare cases, individual scholars and groups of scholars explicitly repudiate the idea that scholarship aims at knowledge and understanding in favor of an overtly and exclusively political conception of the enterprise…
The most straightforward form of distortion arises when otherwise traditional scholarship is constrained by disciplinary norms to yield results that have been determined in advance to be required by a political or social project. If scholars committed to social justice believe that the cause can only be advanced by finding, for example, that there are no behavioral differences between men and women traceable to biology, they will be under enormous pressure from their own commitments and from their colleagues to find no such differences. Either the research will not be done, or if it is done and the results look bad, the finding will be suppressed or the evidence reinterpreted so as to obscure it. Distortions of this sort can be harmless if they are isolated, since the politically motivated blind spots of one researcher will be exposed by others. When whole disciplines or subdisciplines prejudge substantive questions on political grounds, on the other hand, the upshot can be a serious distortion of the scholarly enterprise.
The full report is here.
UPDATE 1: Comments on this post were initially closed because I was on vacation, and “moderating comments on politically-charged report” was not on the holiday itinerary. But now that the vacation is over, I thought I’d honor the several requests I received to open comments. Please keep in mind, though, that it is summertime. [June 16th: I must have not saved the change that opened the comments yesterday—-sorry. They’re open now.]
UPDATE 2: Here are some commentaries on the report:
- “Despite its heavily hedged claims, this report cannot help but lend fuel to the anti-intellectual forces that threaten robust and free academic inquiry today”; also, “it contains glaring philosophical inconsistencies.” — Jason Stanley at Front Left.
- “Most academic work is bad. (My own work included.) Most academics are left-wing. (Myself included.) Nothing about being left-wing especially prevents you from doing bad work or elevates your work’s average level of quality. So most of the bad work in academia is done by left-wing people with a left-wing slant. We could change that such that people would be more facially politically neutral or have a more right wing slant or have a variety of political slants in their work. That might well include getting them to change which epistemological views they say are best, since presently they’re endorsing those on grounds of their political vibe. But most work would still be bad, and that’s the real problem here.” — Liam Kofi Bright at The Sooty Empiric.
- “The authors appear not to have consulted the societies whose fields they criticize most sharply. Together with their anecdotal approach, this omission shows that the document should be understood not as a ‘report’ but as a philosophical essay.” — Joy Connolly at the ACLS site.
- “By falsely arguing that humanities and social science departments are in the throes of an epistemological crisis, the authors lay the groundwork for university administrators to intervene in faculty governance with a heavy hand.” — from the “Joint Statement on the ‘State of Scholarship’ Report” from the AAUP Chapters at Vanderbilt and Washington University.
- “Boghossian et al. are promising you that their report will provide ground for concluding that some fields in the humanities and humanistic social sciences ‘may be at risk’ of becoming the equivalent of departments of astrology. You would think that such an incendiary charge would be followed with clear, convincing, and damning evidence. You would be wrong.” — Michael Bérubé at Pittsburgh Review of Books.
- “The report raises questions worth asking about the relationship between scholarship and political commitments and then fails to address them with the kind of methodological rigor, disciplinary engagement, and intellectual humility that are essential to the scholarly enterprise itself.” — Carolyn Rouse at the American Anthropological Association site.
- “Our view is that when there are problems within the university, the right people to solve them are people in the university. We spent paragraphs in a not-huge document explaining why we don’t think the right solution is an external imposition by politicians of any stripe on the universities. This is a domain in which there’s huge amounts of bad faith. We’re trying to make good-faith arguments that reflect our sense that there are problems that we need to solve, and it’s our job to solve them. And when we say what chancellors should do with this, we say they should begin by paying careful attention to what’s going on in departments in their own universities. They should start with that, and they should begin internal dialogues in order to identify whether, in particular cases, some of the problems we identified are occurring, and to figure out what to do about them. I believe deeply in the importance of autonomy. We all do.” — Kwame Anthony Appiah in an interview with the authors of the report at the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Everyone should read Jason Stanley’s response. He shows that the authors have not bothered to keep up with the reading in their own philosophical subfields, let alone history, anthropology, and so on. I myself do not know how the report’s authors could with a straight face assert that it is “settled science” that no claims about evidence, justification, or knowledge even can partially depend for their truth on non-epistemic considerations unless they have not cracked open a book since Boghossian wrote Fear of Knowledge 20+ years ago. Boghossian himself has several colleagues that defend such claims!
I am sorry to be blunt but if the authors are going to rail against everyone for failing to be good scholars, I think it is fair game to point out that they themselves fail to live up to their own standards. I am embarrassed to be associated with it as a fellow philosopher.
Stanley also points out the following that it would be good for the discipline to reflect on:
“The report decries literature that employs “an extensive abstract jargon”, that abjures “the ideal of plain and unambiguous assertion.” But as anyone who opens the pages of a major journal of analytic philosophy today can see, analytic philosophy is replete with “extensive abstract jargon” that deviates from “the ideal of plain and unambiguous assertion.”[…]Analytic philosophy has, within the span of my professional career, gone from being relatively clear and jargon free, to becoming opaque not only to anyone not in analytic philosophy, but even to analytic philosophers who are not specialists in a specific subdiscipline.”
Fear of Knowledge was a very influential book for me. When I read it in 2010 it turned me into a relativist about almost everything, because it convinced me the main anti-relativism arguments were crummy.
I can understand why Boghossian is serving leftovers from that book heated up in the microwave: some people have personal bugbears that they’re forever hung up on. And I can understand how he got some philosophers to go along with him: relativisms of various stripes are among the most misunderstood and hence unfairly dismissed positions in analytic philosophy.
But, I’m no more impressed by Boghossian’s arguments this time around than I was in 2010, so I’m not sure the report is going to move the needle in any direction. He might as well have just pointed at his book and said “I still affirm this” and saved us (among many other things) the discipline-wide embarrassment that I think you are right to say this report is occasioning.
For (very) slightly more detail, see this Bluesky thread sharing similar sentiments vis a vis the Boghossian book from one of Boghossian’s former grad students, Josh Stein. I think it does a good job summing up some of the important points.
i’d argue that what’s shown in the bluesky thread is the actual problem: academics (regardless of discipline or field) that decide their views in the misty past and don’t bother to take seriously new scholarship. this is typically characterized by dismissiveness, misreadings, and lack of familiarity with ongoing conversations.
the issue isn’t that some scholars hold petrified views. it’s that they *teach* & publish their petrified views for decades, hold positions of power in their fields that allow them to gatekeep access to major journals, and so forth, essentially retarding conversations and work.
the argument of the report is that political convictions oughtn’t underlie scholarly work because this shapes results and fields in a way that is political rather than truth-seeking. but of course long-established prejudices and failure to take seriously major interventions do exactly the same thing, for reasons having more to do with ego and power than with politics.
in my roughly twenty years of involvement in higher ed (undergrad excepted), i’ve seen far more deleterious effects from these petrified professors than i have from the tenured radicals (not to say one can’t be both!).
(nb: not saying thread is an accurate representation of boghossian’s views or conduct.)
Stanley asks “Is it settled science that “genuine facts about the world” are independent of moral and political concerns?”
The answer is: Yes. There were genuine facts about the world before any humans existed. (I’m sure that the authors he cites have some clever replies to this—just like flat Earthers can produce clever replies to being presented photos of Earth.)
It doesn’t follow from the existence of some genuine facts about the world that are independent of moral and political concerns that all genuine facts about the world are independent of moral and political concerns.
The authors of the report do not assert that it is “settled science” that no claims about evidence, justification, or knowledge can partially depend for their truth on non-epistemic considerations. Rather, they defend the view that not every claim to knowledge depends on non-epistemic considerations.
Oh I thought the charitable read was that they weren’t arguing against a view that one person defended 47 years ago before they left the profession to enjoy some books.
I have read various opinions on this, but I still haven’t gotten to a point where I feel like I can make up my mind. Can anyone explain why this report exists? I do not really understand why people have acted in the way they have acted. Andrew Martin, chancellor at my undergraduate institution (who taught me statistics back when I was an undergrad), and Daniel Diermeier, chancellor at Vanderbilt (about whom I know nothing), woke up one day and decided to ask Paul Boghossian and 9 of his closest friends what was on their mind with respect to the humanities? Surely not. But then what exactly is going on here? Is there some sort of agenda being pushed? By whom and for what reasons?
At the very least this is a ploy by Vanderbilt and Wash U to get right wing donors to pen their wallets. But my suspicion is that it’s a way to dress up collaborating with the Trump regime as some sort of bit of principle rather than the crass sell out it is. It’s worth remembering that Vanderbilt was not only one of the very few schools not to refuse the compact Trump admin offered colleges but that they are currently collaborating with them to create a more cosmetically appealing version they can sign off on. Or to put it another way, the report is lipstick for the pig Vanderbilt wants to marry.
Why are these nefarious, hidden motivations a more likely explanation than that Martin, Diermeier, and many others just actually believe that the humanities are over-politicized?
The tendency to assume that disagreement is in bad faith is functionally dogmatic and is of a kind with the sorts of things the report criticizes.
As I said Vanderbilt not only did not refuse the Trump compact for higher education but they’ve spent the last year working the with the Trump regime to make the thing palatable enough they can sign it. This is not a matter of speculation by the way it’s public record:
https://vanderbilthustler.com/2026/01/27/vanderbilt-continues-to-provide-feedback-to-federal-government-as-new-higher-education-compact-is-drafted/
Willful ignorance is pretty much the definition of dogmatism
I’ll add that when you do get an academic job you are in for a very rude awakening if your default assumption is that university presidents’ motives are pure as the driven snow.
Here are three reasons I find your explanation difficult to accept.
1) This is not how university chancellors behave. When you’re leading a university with an endowment in excess of $13 billion, your personal beliefs about whether the humanities are over-politicized are irrelevant. To pursue something like this publicly you need an agenda more compelling that “I care!” You need to be doing it because it has some sort of upshot for how you’re running the university.
2) Assuming I’m wrong and these two buddies just woke up one day curious about this stuff and decided the best way to handle it was to commission a report, why ask *Boghossian* of all people? He only knows one tune, and the title is “Relativists have Rocks for Brains.” Why not ask someone who is an expert on this stuff?
3) Let’s say you messed up and asked Boghossian to write the report and he turns this thing in. Why in the world don’t you say “ah very interesting thanks, we’re going to collect some more data” rather than doing what they’ve in fact done, which is publicize the report with the imprimatur of these two universities? What chancellor in their right mind would declare war against half their university by endorsing a report that says a bunch of people should basically be fired because they’re not doing actual scholarship? Is any chancellor that incompetent?
Because this exact same thing happened 76 years ago during the Second Red Scare as McCumber details in his book
If I’m a chancellor and I want to collaborate with Trump, what use is this report? Don’t I just piss off the anthropologists etc. twice (once when I commission this report saying they suck, and again when I let Trump tell me to fire them all) rather than once? Why bother?
And don’t I open myself up to the (slight?) risk that one or more of the report authors didn’t realize this was paving the way for Trump, and turns out to care enough to publicly repudiate my making use of the report as a fig leaf for firing all the pinkos? Doesn’t that leave me (slightly?) worse off than if I had never commissioned the report in the first place?
I also am not certain why everyone is fired up about the Big Bosshoggian Report, but my guess is that it’s at least partly because people like to take shots at the Big Dog, and Boghossian is the, or at least a, Big Dog (NYU) or Fat Cat, or however you want to call it. He’s an “A-lister” Philosopher – and the report is very opinionated (both in terms of metaepistemology and more widely in metanormative theory) but also in its politics, and it’s framed in a “Let me tell you about the state of things today” manner — put all of this together, and you have a document that will piss off everyone.
Yes, undoubtedly some academics subordinate scholarship to politics, and that is bad for scholarship (and for politics). But I am much, much more concerned about those who, consciously or not, smuggle their politics into their scholarship under the guise of dispassionate neutrality. It is far more insidious and, I suspect, far more widespread.
Agreed. And considering the distribution of politics among faculty, it just adds even more pushing in the same direction as the “scholar-activists.” This is a major component of the case for viewpoint diversity.
I think we should perhaps read the Boghossian report more charitably. It was already pretty clear from Fear of Knowledge what Boghossian had in mind as his target: Rorty-style “anything goes” cultural relativism. I’m setting aside here his criticism of constructivism and focusing just on the criticism of relativism.
Now, there is something intellectually very flimsy about that kind of relativism, not least because it has disturbing implications for what we are even doing when we inquire. Boghossian is right that it would be a disgrace if the question “Is X true?” were something I could rightly try to settle by taking an opinion survey, where my aim would be to find out whether, in my culture, X is the popular view, at which point I would have an answer to whether “X is true according to system S, which I accept.” So Boghossian is right about that. He is also right that, insofar as views in the humanities take inquiry into a question to amount to nothing more than settling, descriptively, what people accept, those views are effectively sidestepping the kinds of questions we need to answer, as humanists as well as philosophers , when determining whether the positions some cultures accept are true, regardless of whether they are accepted or popular. James Rachels’ old criticism of moral relativism makes similar points.
Reducing philosophical questions about epistemic and other norms to descriptive questions about which opinions or rules are popular in which communities, with no aspiration to culture-independent adjudication, is intellectually flimsy.
That said, Boghossian was not careful enough, in the way he worded the report, to distinguish his target from subject-sensitive invariantism of the sort defended by Stanley and Hawthorne, which is not a Rorty-style position at all. So fair play to Stanley for pressing back. But I don’t think this mistake blunts Boghossian’s wider anti-relativistic point. I’m not commenting here on anything else in the report beyond that.
As an aside, it is unclear what to make of Boghossian’s report in connection with MacFarlane-style relativism, given that it is domain-limited. The assessment-sensitivity line is not, for MacFarlane, a general thesis, but a thesis about the semantics of certain kinds of discourse ( predicates of personal taste, for example, and not about everything.
I guess I would say that, personally, I hesitate to be overly charitable in response to a policy document with political undertones which does not care to apply the principle of charity to its targets. I understand the dialectical value of steel-manning, but at a certain point it starts to look a lot more like sanewashing.
I agree that we should not be overly charitable, or overly anything else. Aristotle said that. We should also not let whatever other quibbles we have about the Boghossian report cloud our recognition that insofar as the relativism he’s challenging is Rorty-style relativism, he’s right to challenge it. I said that.
Indeed, MacFarlane-style relativism does not imply that there are no facts about the world that are independent of moral and political concerns. In addition to mentioning MacFarlane in his response to the report, Stanley also mentions Delia Graff Fara and attributes to her the view that “all properties (and hence all facts) are irredeemably constituted by interests”. But the view of “interest-relative” properties that Graff Fara defends in her “Shifting Sands” paper is restricted to vague predicates like ‘tall’ and ‘bald’ and so it also does not imply that every fact about the world is interest-relative.
Delia Graff Fara’s view applies to all predicates that are Sorites susceptible, which is (needless to say) a lot of them.
You do see how you radically misrepresented her view, right?
To say this is true of all properties is a crazy view. To restrict it in the way you suggest is much less crazy.
I don’t really see this, actually. I represented her view correctly (more specifically, that a vast class of predicates express interest-relative properties). The idea that Sorites susceptible predicates form some kind of limited class is confused. Delia’s view is a serious challenge to any kind of robust realism, and she never denied this. Delia and I had multiple back and forths in the journals about this very issue, and she never shied away from these consequences. Instead, she tried to respond to them by suggesting that counterfactuals had a non-standard semantics, so when you elicit intuitions about modal profiles, you don’t get challenges to her interest-relative metaphysical claims:
https://academic.oup.com/analysis/article-abstract/68/4/326/2740544
Again, Delia never denied the radical metaphysical consequences of her views on vagueness. She altered the semantics of counterfactuals to avoid them (she argued that counterfactual evaluation rigidifies on interests).
(Of course it’s a view of the properties expressed by the predicates we use in conversation, including in scholarly discussion).
Shoot. I’m having trouble telling whether I should give any credence to Stanley’s and Moss’s views, because I’m having trouble telling precisely what moral and political harms would ensue if those views were false.
I hope the discipline-specific reports on which this higher-level report is based will be released soon. I suspect those reports will help dispel at least some of the conspiracy theorizing and ad hominem attacks, and they should also provide a clearer picture of the problem the higher-level report is diagnosing, so that whatever weaknesses there may be with the diagnosis aren’t mistaken for the absence of a problem.
I’m skeptical. If the reports were chock full of evidence, I’d bet they’d be released at the same time as the higher-level report. As it stands, Appiah complains that critics aren’t paying attention to the report’s purportedly rigorous arguments. But critics aren’t subscribing to the arguments because those arguments depend on empirical claims about the functioning of various disciplines that are controversial, to say the least. (For instance, I know a lot of people in cultural anthropology, and I do not recognize the picture of anthropology painted by the report.)
I’m not sure I understand your first point. Is the suggestion that they withheld the discipline-specific reports because these don’t support the higher-level report, but, nevertheless, they published the higher-level report, while falsely claiming it is supported by those discipline-specific reports?
I’m skeptical because if your goal is to convince people who disagree with you or are on the fence, rather than to mobilize folks with a similar axe to grind, you want to provide robust evidence for your empirical claims. Saying “trust me bro” doesn’t fly very far. None of the authors are stupid, so I doubt they are just forgetting this rather basic rhetorical point. Ultimately, I don’t know what to make of this. Perhaps there is some good reason for withholding the evidence–by “evidence” I mean well-researched disipline-specific reports–though I can’t imagine what it is. (Running out of time seems to me to be a bad reason, because it invites skepticism, or, in your words “conspiracy-theorizing.”)
It’s also possible the authors believe that the discipline-specific reports support the higher-level report while also believing that many others will disagree. In that case, it wouldn’t be false to claim the higher-level report is supported by the discipline-specific report. Time will tell, if, in fact, the specific reports are released. Was there a promise to do so?
In the Chronicle interview, Appiah says he’ll release his, thinks some others will release theirs, and we should see the sociology one soon, according to its author, here:
https://ashleytrubin.substack.com/p/report-reflections-part-1-general
Thanks, I read her post. Her takeaway 3b does not fill me with optimism, but we shall see.
From Rubin’s Substack:
Rubin is missing the point of much of the criticism the Report is receiving. In the first instance, many are gesturing at the rather obvious point that scholars who take themselves to be “standing up for scholarly rigor and not letting political goals corrupt the research enterprise” can (and often do) fail to be rigorous and/or have political goals of their own which can (and often do) “corrupt the research enterprise.” In other words, that “rigor” and “objectivity” can function as merely rhetorical, and that determinations as to whether something is actually rigorous or objective aren’t always cut-and-dried. In the second instance, the Report itself is criticized for lacking in the scholarly rigor that Rubin claims it advocates for. Justin has highlighted some of the key points in this vein above.
Statements like this aren’t helpful. It couldn’t be that people disagree on the standards; no, they must think that standards are unimportant!
I genuinely think it would be better (and more honest) for folks like Rubin to just say that the standards are wrong; that that’s what they disagree with in their disciplines/fields. That at least opens up a conversation about what the standards should be. Instead, we get this shallow nonsense about how one’s interlocutors (or, really, one’s targets) just don’t care about scholarly standards.
Rubin refers to those who “don’t agree that CERTAIN SCHOLARLY standards are important”
You quote this to accuse her of reference to people who “think that standards [per se] are unimportant”
It’s going to be hard for anyone to have a coherent conversation if this is the level of mutual intelligibility…
Given that Rubin doesn’t spell out what standards she is referring to, and at various points in the piece just vaguely gestures at “scholarly standards,” that doesn’t strike me as a particularly meaningful distinction for the purposes of understanding the piece.
Sounds like the usual axe-grinding from the usual suspects. If one’s theorizing a conspiracy, it doesn’t run very deep.
This is a good example of the kind of ad hominem I alluded to above.
There’s plenty of substantive critique to focus on (Justin links to some in the post above). So if you find my comments too “ad hominem”y (which, you’ll forgive me, but like many others I’m tired of the same brand-name “heterodoxy” redoing the same schtick every five years or so), you can engage with those instead.
“Sounds like the usual axe-grinding from the usual suspects”
That’s exactly how I would characterization the responses to the report as well.
The moment I saw this posted on DN, I immediately knew what the comment section would look like.
I don’t know about anthropology or whatever, but I have literally never met the kind of relativist that Boghossian et al. claim are plaguing academia in a philosophy department. So it’s hard for me to take the idea that they’re ruining higher education seriously.
The report states that in some fields, including philosophy, the “problems are largely confined to a single subfield focused on a charged topic.” So, the experience you report is consistent with what they say, at least on this point. And they advance no claims about the ruination of higher education, so you are right not to take that claim seriously if you encounter it elsewhere.
I’ve seen them. Many of them are fond of the French, such as Deleuze.
He said, having never read Deleuze.
Deleuze is readable?
I know you’re teasing me but here’s a fun rule of thumb to keep in mind: Whenever an anglophone philosopher complains about obscurantism, what they’re really upset about is that it’s not their kind of obscurantism.
If Deleuze is so readable, Bilingual, then can you help us all make sense of this Deleuzian jibber jabber? “To become imperceptible oneself, to have dismantled love in order to become capable of loving. To have dismantled one’s self in order finally to be alone and meet the true double at the other end of the line. A clandestine passenger on a motionless voyage. To become like everybody else; but this, precisely, is a becoming only for one who knows how to be nobody, to no longer be anybody. To paint oneself gray on gray.” That’s the kind of thing that makes ya say huhhhhh?
As a matter of fact, I can and will for your benefit (despite the manifest uncharitability of cherrypicking a citation and then denouncing it as unintelligible because they aren’t immediately transparent to you).
As you may have noticed, this passage is about “becoming-imperceptible,” which Deleuze and Guattari describe in ATP as the “end of all becoming” (or something like that, I don’t recall the precise wording).
Becoming in general, for D+G, can be at least partially glossed as a process whereby an extended body undergoes a change due to an interaction with another extended body. In articulating this concept of becoming, the authors are trying to do justice to what they understand to be the dynamism of matter in general, its potential to change, develop, and make new connections. This, they think, is at odds with the philosophical tradition’s main way of conceiving of identity as that of an “object of representation.” Rather than resting within rigidly-defined identities, bodies are always susceptible to processes becoming.
What DG mean by “loving” is one particular process of becoming. Loving, in the DGian sense, is to make a particular kind of connection with the beloved object.
Loving is not yet, however, becoming-imperceptible. To love is to connect with a beloved object, but this may involve a fairly high degree of identity-preservation on the part of the lover. To become-imperceptible is to eliminate all semblance of stable identity and become differentiated from one’s surroundings only “in terms of speed and slowness” (also from ATP). This is one of many Spinoza-inspired aspects of the Deleuzian system. This is what they mean when they say “to have dismantled love in order to become capable of loving”: to have eliminated any loving connections between stable identities so that one might fade into the universe in a more “general” style of loving/connection-making.
Additionally, although DG think becoming-imperceptible opens a window onto the Cosmos as it truly is, they do not recommend it as some kind of goal or healthy psychological headspace. In fact, they repeatedly caution against this.
There you go.
What are the premises of the argument? What is the conclusion? No mushmouthed blather please.
Does this randomly chosen excerpt from Deleuze *have* to be reconstructable into premise-conclusion form? Does it even have to be presenting an argument? I was on the “Deleuze is an obscurantist” train, but now this analytic pedantry is pushing me onto the tracks. Worst of both worlds, perhaps. Chapeau!
I guess it doesn’t have to be? Would be nice tho to be able to say in plainspeak what the Texas hell is going on though. I mean, Bilingual starts out by saying the passage is about “becoming-imperceptible”. What even is that? Well, people aren’t perceived if they aren’t looked at, smelled or touched or whatever (say, if someone’s hiding down in a storm cellar), but being ‘imperceptible’ really ain’t a thing, as a modal claim, given that for any person — it’s possibly you’re perceived. Everyone is trivially perceptible. So the very thing this passage is allegedly about isn’t really a thing. That being said, Bilingual says ” DG think becoming-imperceptible opens a window onto the Cosmos as it truly is” – where I’m from, when someone says something like that, it’s time to put away the hooka, call it a night, and put them to bed.
I don’t know, Bilingual very explicitly said that “becoming-imperceptible” means “eliminat[ing] all semblance of stable identity and become differentiated from one’s surroundings only ‘in terms of speed and slowness’ (also from ATP).” So, whatever exactly that means–I personally don’t care enough to figure it out right now–it seems like the literal (modal) reading is irrelevant in this context.
No one is saying Deleuze isn’t a challenging read or that you have to care what he thinks. But if you don’t care or aren’t interested in figuring him out then one should admit as much instead of casting aspersions at a figure that one self-admittedly hasn’t read and doesn’t understand. It seems to me fairly uncontroversial that comprehension should come before criticism. But analytic philosophers forget this when it comes to certain figures because they’re used to having their methodological preferences flattered in American academia.
Not only have I read Deleuze (my training began in continental philosophy), but I was trying to defend your point against Spangler’s “common sense meaning” objection. You took my aside about disinterest too seriously—I just meant that I’m not gonna address the definition you offered in my response to him, because I’m not that interested in this discussion right now.
Whining when the reading gets too hard is prwtty unphilosophical. There are plenty of commentaries and reader’s guides out there to help you work through the text, if you ever actually cared to figure Deleuze out instead of complaining that he didn’t write with your specific stylistic preferences in mind.
Still puzzling over what (or where) is Texas hell.
Especially since it’s redundant (ZING).
Yep, anything expressed in a way you don’t like is “mushmouthed blather.” Ladies and gentlemen, I give you an analytic philosopher
My lengthy explanation is on the way pending moderator review. Suffice it to say that I can indeed interpret this passage for you, as can many Deleuze scholars who (unlike you) actually know what they’re talking about.
My distaste for Deleuze’s writing aside, this actually does not seem like a particularly good example of unclear prose.
I happen to think that both Deleuze and many Anglophone philosophers are obscurantists, thank you very much!
This was like reading a blog from the early oughts! Or being at the smoker in the 80s and early 90s. Thanks for the flashback! Now, go and do the philosophy you like in the way you like to do it
Thank you, I will (but I hate all of it). Just a joke………(?)
I have met many of these relativists (no I will not use my real name).
Can you use an anagram of your real name or give other hints and clues
Of course, here’s an anagram: “Meme” (I switched around the m’s and e’s).
I think you forgot to swap them actually
Oh you’re right, my bad. Try this: meMe
for a real case of politics over scholarly interests see:
https://www.thegazette.com/news/divided-regents-vote-to-insert-themselves-in-university-searches-classrooms/article_6379fff3-9896-46cc-9148-0c86d1059fdd.html
Thanks for linking to this. I won’t offer an opinion about whether it’s in fact a case of “politics over scholarly interests.” But I will suggest that it’s a case — like what LLMs are now doing — in which the long-present structural deformities of higher education are simply made more visible.
Colleges and universities are state-sanctioned autocracies, in which educators have no formally recognized means of recourse in the face of decisions by boards of regents or trustees. In certain conditions, this structure causes no harm; in other conditions, it does. (Another case in which the ideal of liberty-as-non-interference proves more short-sighted than the ideal of liberty-as-non-domination.)
There are additional excellent responses to this report that readers might find helpful. I’ve hyperlinked them. Hopefully that works.
Jason Rhody (MLA) (from his LinkedIn account)
Nicholas Dirks (former chancellor of UC Berkeley)–CHE (could not find a way to do a gift link. This piece explicitly calls out the analytic-continental divide, which is only barely veiled.
John K. Wilson (from Inside Higher Ed)
Jeffrey Cohen (Dean of Humanities at Arizona State–has two pieces on his blog:
Blog 1
Blog 2
There is much that could be discussed about this report, and an open forum would be great. A comment thread is probably not the most productive space.
I’m going to include this passage from a 1997 essay by Hilary Putnam (full citation is below the passage). The excerpt is from a subsection entitled “The (Non-) Reception of Continental Philosophy”:
“I cannot close without mentioning a feature of Anglo-American analytic philosophy that will not have escaped the notice of even a minimally-informed observer: the exclusion of “continental philosophy.” (The leading Ph.D.-granting institutions rarely include texts by Foucault or Derrida in their courses, and the work of Jürgen Habermas has only begun to receive attention–and then usually only in ethics courses–fairly recently.) At first blush, this might seem astonishing; after all, philosophy is classified as one of the humanities, and French “theory” is taken very seriously indeed in the other humanities. This indifference of analytic philosophy departments to what interests the other humanities departments is not surprising, however, when one realizes that the self-image of analytic philosophy is scientific rather than humanistic. If one aspires to be a science (even if what one actually writes is closer to science fiction), then being different from the humanities will seem a positive virtue. Of course, not all philosophers in analytic departments are happy with this state of affairs. (A few respected figures, for instance, have studied and taught Husserl’s phenomenology, or Habermas’s philosophy, or even Heidegger’s philosophy for years.) However, most analytic philosophers justify excluding texts by the authors just mentioned on the ground that these authors are “not clear” or that the texts (which they may not actually have read) “do not contain arguments.” They do not admit that their own conception of philosophy is scientistic; usually, when analytic philosophy is criticized, its defenders equate their style of philosophy simply with “argument” and “clarity.” But the Tractarian doctrine that “whatever can be said at all can be said clearly” has become dogma; since the demise of the notion of “logical form” on which the Tractatus was based, I have never heard anyone actually offer an argument for it. Good prose, whatever its subject, must communicate something worth communicating to a sensitive reader. If it seeks to persuade, the persuasion must not be irrational (which does not exclude the possibility that what is involved may be an appeal to see something one is refusing to see–say, the appeal of a way of life, or what actually goes on in our linguistic, or scientific, or ethical, or political practices, and not simply a deduction from already accepted premises, or the presentation of evidence for an empirical hypothesis). The demand that we only say what can be said in the sort of prose that Bertrand Russell wrote, marvelous as that prose was, will, in fact, necessarily limit what one can talk about. (201–202)
Putnam, Hilary. 1997. “A Half Century of Philosophy, Viewed from Within.” Daedalus 126(1): 175–208
Great excerpt, he’s just the best.
I love that Putnam quote, and I understand why one might float the idea that the differences between analytic and continental philosophy are appearing in the different patterns of reception of (Boghossian’s contribution to) the report. I wonder, though, whether the patterns of reception are a manifestation of something else.
I wonder this because Stanley, not to mention Moss, whose work Stanley cites as evidence in favor of his reception of the report, fit pretty neatly into the category of analytic philosophers. And yet Moss, for one, argues, roughly, that some views are such that they don’t meet the standard of knowledge if their falsehood would lead to some significant harm. This can be captured with the (too-ambiguous) claim being thrown around that some knowledge “depends on” non-epistemic considerations.
Also captured with that claim is Carnap’s view. Another squarely analytic philosopher, he argues that frameworks in which, and only in which, questions of epistemic support get their purchase are not themselves evaluable by the standards of epistemic support they make possible — that, indeed, they are evaluable by what he calls “pragmatic” kinds of support.
Two analytic philosophers; two claims about the relevance of non-epistemic to epistemic reasons.
As one who is comfortable in both the analytic and continental traditions, who appreciates the significant differences where they exist, but who despairs of the lack of charity across those differences, I register my plea to look for the differences elsewhere. Perhaps the difference lies, as so many disagreements do, in the related but more general difference in pictures of philosophy: what it (ideally) is, what it (ideally) is for, and how it (ideally) is conducted. Is philosophy for turning souls? Influencing legislation? Grasping one’s time in thought? Does it leave the world as it is? Is it meant to contribute to a revolution? To produce activists?
Another example: I said above that Fear of Knowledge turned me into a relativist. In my memory it was step two, with step one having taken place in a Philosophy of Science course I took earlier, but I just checked my transcript and actually I read Fear of Knowledge a semester before Philosophy of Science, so who knows. (This should illustrate how spotty my memory is, so please take the following story with a grain of salt.) But anyways:
In Philosophy of Science we read Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” and I was having trouble understanding it. I went to office hours to get some help. To give you a sense of how unusual this was, I believe this is the only time during my four year degree that I went to office hours to get help understanding a reading. It’s not as if I was always talking about the readings with professors in office hours or whatever. I asked a question of the professor (Frederick Eberhardt) which encapsulated my failure to understand the article, and he pointed me towards this passage (which Leiter has also mentioned in his discussion of this report):
Having directed my attention to this passage, I responded “but that’s pragmatism!” to which Eberhardt responded “yes.” And this caused me to begin to seriously rethink a lot of things. Pragmatism (and hence relativism, for the purposes of this discussion – the report conjoins them on pages 19-20) had been categorized in my mind as a no-no, so to speak, and so I could not understand Quine because I was assuming he was not a pragmatist. Realizing that this was my mistake, and that pragmatism was a real position that real people actually held, shifted things quite a bit. (Or maybe it didn’t: again, I also recall having become a relativist about most stuff in the previous semester when I read Fear of Knowledge. Perhaps what shifted for me here was my view that I was the only one on Earth who was a relativist. I realized that there were analytic philosophers who might agree with me, perhaps.)
Thanks for this!
I certainly didn’t mean — and you certainly aren’t implying I meant — to ignore the wide range of possible views about the relationship between “epistemic” and “non-epistemic” values and standards.
A wide range of views, some of them perhaps even incoherent with each other, may be described as views according to which — in the words of the report — “the justification for a claim to knowledge always rests irremediably on some contingent non-epistemic value” or, alternatively, “a belief will count as knowledge only relative to some contingent set of non-epistemic values.” So much hangs on what “rests on” and “relative to” and “non-epistemic” entail here.
For my part, since we’re sharing, I was radicalized by the likes of Heidegger, Foucault, Kuhn, Wittgenstein, Hacking, and, in general, HPS, STS, and historical epistemology. Themes here include social construction, historicism, conceptual relativism, communitarian views of reason, historicized rationality, and so on. But the view, say, that criteria of objectivity are instituted, negotiable, and historically and materially conditioned is a far cry from Moss’s view that some opinions are such that they don’t meet the standard of knowledge if their falsehood would lead to some significant harm. (Which, by the way, I think is a claim of fairly limited scope that hasn’t been shown to be true of philosophical views, including itself — hence my snarky reply way up in the comments.) And yet both arguments would fall under the report’s description of “a belief will count as knowledge only relative to some contingent sent of non-epistemic values.”
Thanks for sharing this Quine quote. I’ve also long struggled coming to a clear understanding of him. For one, I struggle to see the daylight between understanding this passage as support for pragmatism or for realism. When he says “The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience” isn’t this precisely why realists conclude that their theoretical structures (Quine’s myths) are likely to exist? And Quine also concludes “For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects.”
Can you help me understand the difference between Quine’s “relativism” and a Boghossian realism?
(Note that we are, despite my confident claims earlier in this thread about my epistemological commitments, far outside my pay grade. My day job is as a humble ethicist and political philosopher. So take this all with a grain of salt…)
A realist says that we should believe in the myth of physical objects because there are such physical objects. (Indeed, according to the realist picture, Quine makes a pretty silly error by calling it a “myth.” It’s a true story! The Greek god story is, however, a myth, since there aren’t any such things. To confuse myth and reality as an adult is quite worrying, and Quine might need to see a psychiatrist if this keeps up…)
We find out the physical objects story is correct through practical investigation of the world. Among the evidence we have, some of it includes information about the practical consequences of the existence of one thing or another. But what makes the physical objects story better is not those practical consequences, but something that has nothing to do with us at all. The practical consequences are just evidence of the mind-independent reality, which is what our beliefs are meant to track.
Meanwhile the “relativist” has the arrow going in the other direction. The physical objects story is better because of the practical consequences it plays in our investigation of the world, not because of what really exists. What really exists may have implications about what practical consequences we encounter in the world. But what makes the physical objects story better is not the actual existence of the physical objects, but something having to do with their effects on our lives. Our beliefs are meant to track accounts that have certain consequences in our lives, not a mind-independent reality. For all the relativist cares, there could be no such thing as a mind-independent reality. They have no need of that hypothesis, epistemologically speaking.
Another way to think about it is what it would mean to be mistaken. For the realist, to be mistaken is for your beliefs about what exists to fail to match up with the best evidence you have about the mind-independent fact of the matter. For the relativist, to be mistaken is for your beliefs to be improperly responsive to the pragmatic norms that govern belief formation, which are not committed to any mind-independent reality at all. Meanwhile a realist can’t wake up in the morning and brush their teeth without a commitment to a mind-independent reality, let alone do any interesting epistemology!
I have no idea whether the report makes its case, ignores recent scholarship or whatever.
What I do find somewhat surprising is many seemingly going from, “This report is deeply flawed”, to “there is no problem here”.
Perhaps my academic experience is very peripheral, but the idea that many disciplines outside of philosophy have a hard left political bent and adopt an unreflective relativism that finds its way into the classroom is so obviously true as not to merit serious discussion.
My school had the habit of sending faculty on retreats, and the ones that I attended were exactly as above. One speaker, a sociologist from Temple led with, “I tell my students that there is no such thing as truth, but that there are facts”.
On another, we had several readings, including a couple pages from Aristotle’s NE, and another from Dewey. Aristotle got passed over in less than a minute, while we had an extended discussion on Dewey, championed,again, by a sociologist, this time from Chicago.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t real philosophical issues there. What was clear, though, is that, from conversations with them afterwards, they could not address the obvious challenges their positions faced, and worse, hadn’t even considered them.
And so on for umpteen faculty reading groups and on-campus trainings. My worry is in missing the forest for this one tree.
You say two things about many people in disciplines outside philosophy: they have a hard left political bent and they adopt an unreflective relativisim.
Not even the report attempts to say the hard left political bent is a problem, so I’m not sure why you’re mentioning it. Becoming a professor does not require you to take a vow to become apolitical.
As for the unreflective relativisim, I would say the problem is that it’s unreflective, not that it’s relativism. Unreflective realism would be no more attractive. Really you’re just claiming they’re bad philosophers, which sounds about right. Most people are bad at things they’re not experts about. You should hear what they say about our attempts at sociology, history, etc.
You’re correct of course that being a professor does not require being apolitical, nor should it. But adopting an unreflective relativism is a tool that can be used to immunize a position from any critique, including even internal contradiction. And that, combined with a desire to promote particular political positions in print and in the classroom, is a problem for large swathes of the academy.
What exactly is the problem? There’s a tendency to simply talk around it, without actually getting at what the problem is. But then how can it bear examination? This is why details matter; the description of something as “political” isn’t necessarily a neutral descriptor.
Having now got round to reading this document, as well as some of the objections and Boghossian’s response, it seems to me to be pretty clear that the authors were somewhat clumsy and injudicious in identifying ‘relativism’ with a particularly extreme and crude version of itself, and then taking it to be have been refuted, and should have been more careful and nuanced on this point. Given the obvious focus and criticism that the text was likely to receive, and the experience and sophistication of the authors, this is a surprising misjudgement.
But what seems to me to be the core point of the document, to repudiate and highlight the dangers of the idea – which does exist in some quarters – that epistemic norms are bogus and that what matters is a work’s contribution or alignment to ‘liberatory praxis’ or somesuch, is well made.
The Vanderbilt report quotes a passage by Derrida as an example of someone advocating obscurity in scholarly language. But the passage is not about scholarly language.