Sharing Realities:

TOWARD A PHILOSOPHY OF CONVERSATION

Richard Ostrofsky
Copyright © Richard Ostrofsky, 2000
ISBN:1-894537-00-9

9. Polyphonic Knowledge
Considering the mind-boggling scope and volume of what is known, and
the resources committed to learning more, the condition of knowledge is
paradoxical today. As the result, in part, of its quality and its sheer mass,
the foundations and moral authority of knowledge have never seemed
shakier. The knowledge in our libraries seems helpless to inform either
our public choices or our serious private ones. Outside the “hard”
sciences, the progress of knowledge seems to bring confusion rather than
certainty. It does not liberate us from superstition as the Enlightenment
philosophes had hoped; nor does it guide us toward wise and confident
choices. Rather, it seems to multiply the confusions and anxieties. “There
is an over-production of Truth that cannot be consumed”, as Otto Rank
once put it – and the literatures in every field have only swollen since
Rank’s time, while the tempo of knowledge production is many times
faster.
But volume and tempo are not the real problems. The whole idea
of knowledge involves a concept of intellectual authority that has become
politically suspect – even as our addiction to specialized knowledge has
continued to increase. In an increasingly technologized society with a
depleting environment that must be exploited ever more intensively and
with much more stewardship than in the past, we rely ever more heavily
on expert knowledge and on the good faith of experts. From a public
viewpoint, the case is worse: Non-sectarian education and rational,
democratic government and are not possible, not even intelligible, unless
policies and curriculum choices can be grounded in secure, impartial
knowledge. Without a valid concept of authoritative public knowledge,
notions of objective decision-making, impartial government, public
education, and even honest news reporting, are scarcely tenable.
Since a lifetime is not long enough to learn more than a fraction of
the skills and knowledge that actually run today’s society, we are
increasingly dependent on specialized experts, who advise and perform
their functions from within the paradigms and institutional frameworks of
their respective disciplines. Inevitably, these experts will be influenced by
the interests that fund their work, and by their own interests as well. Often
too, they become committed to one side or another in the political
conflicts of their time. Whether as draftees, mercenaries or true believers,
experts will find themselves pulled in different directions, and will rarely
advise on any issue with a single voice. Paradoxically, they become
increasingly less able to do so, the more they come to know.
Indeed, experts can always be found on every side of every
important question we put to it. This has become something of a joke to
the man-in-the-street; and for decision-makers, it is a source of frustration.
That, indeed, was the starting point of our discussion: We are forced to
grapple with the ambiguities of polyphonic knowledge because it is the
only honest knowledge we can hope for.

In its instrumental role, as background to the decision process, knowledge

plays, and must continue to play, a double role: On one hand, we collect
knowledge as an aid to planning; and what we plan are lines of action to
achieve our aims. The fact is that most people, most of the time, value
knowledge because it can help them get what they want.
On the other hand, and more subtly, knowledge also sets limits to
what we can do and want. To learn is to discover new possibilities for
action in the world, but also new sources of complication, limitation and
difficulty. All the great results of mathematics and physics are statements
of necessary relationship and constraint. In the realm of affairs, “the
facts”are what vying parties must accept, regardless of their interests. But
“speaking truth to power” is notoriously difficult; and unpleasant facts are
resisted as long as possible, and longer. King Canute could order the tide
to retreat. Governments of industrial states today pay lip service only – if
that – to what is known about degrading of the environment. The lesson
that knowledge is humility as well as power never came easily to rulers.
What we mean and have always meant by “knowledge” is a kind
of cognitive capital that individuals and groups must accumulate and
deploy intelligently as a pre-requisite to purposeful activity; and it is clear
that the “ownership” of this “capital” must be discussed on two levels: On
one level, we say that a person knows algebra, or knows how to repair
automobiles. In this sense, knowledge is conceived as a kind of personal
possession or achievement. On another level, we say that the charge of the
electron is known. Here what we mean is that the knowledge in question
is available to a whole conversation. Knowledge in this second sense is
public property. It need not belong, in the personal sense, to anyone at all
if it can be found in a library when needed.
So conceived, the fund of public knowledge has two crucial
properties: First, like a Swiss bank account, it has been purged of ethical
concerns. Packaged for convenient use by anyone with the necessary
intellectual background to acquire it, or the cash to hire pre-certified
experts who already possess it, it is neutral between its users and their
purposes. Second, and not at all like a Swiss bank account, it is not
depleted, but rather enhanced, when drawn upon.
Today, however, our public knowledge seems less like a fund in a
Swiss bank than like a whole economy of competing business firms. In
most areas we care about, where differences of value and interpretation are
rife, we do not arrive at a body of true statements, but at a tensegrity of
opinions and arguments advanced by various knowledge cultures. As we
have seen, this sort of knowledge is less easily packaged, and its
application less straightforward than the classical kind. But there is no
going back: The classical, “universalist” knowledge, when taught or
applied coercively as the Truth, forfeits both moral and intellectual
authority – there being no very good reason why people should buy into
interpretations that set them up for a screwing. At the very least, if
knowledge is to be public in any authentic sense, integrity requires that it
fairly reflect the diversity of viewpoint and opinion at the table.
More generally, in a diverse, global society we are forced to a
distinction between the privately-held knowledge of individuals and like-
minded groups, as against the publicly-held knowledge of the world’s
libraries, and other knowledge systems. These represent such different
phenomena that it is confusing to use the same word for both. Let’s use
the slang word savvy for the sort of knowing that individual people have,
and reserve the term knowledge for the codified, artifactualized
representations that we find all around us in our abodes and workplaces
and cities, but primarily in books, libraries, universities, and so on. Savvy
is a matter of personal cognitive competence, comprised of experience,
skill, insight and memory. Knowledge, by contrast, is represented
externally, in the artifacts of a culture, including its language and its
books. Savvy is some person’s achievement and possession. Knowledge
is impersonal, held collectively, and demanded sometimes of individual
persons by the conversations to which they belong.
We can put it this way: Savvy is what you know. Knowledge is
what will make you look like a fool if you don’t know.
Language and discourse now, are domains where savvy and
knowledge overlap. Thus, I – the writer of this book – might be said to
have, a degree of savvy about epistemological philosophy, as you do after
reading it. But the book’s status as an artifact of knowledge, is a policy
question for certain pragmatic conversations concerned with the
compilation of course reading lists, the training of civil servants, and
similar issues in the deployment of intellectual authority.
The distinction between savvy and knowledge has no meaning in a
classical epistemology, where the Truth must be true for everyone. But it
becomes indispensable, when we renounce the Platonic fantasy of
Absolute Truth, and accept truth’s polyphonic character. We need the
distinction if we are to think seriously about the role and prerogatives of
public knowledge as this informs but also imposes upon the autonomy of
individual knowers. Thus, it will be seen that epistemology, the
philosophy of knowledge, now divides into two branches: The
epistemology of savvy – personal knowledge – is concerned with the
warrant or “backing” for personal knowledge claims. Its basic questions
are: “What can I know?” and “What are sufficient grounds for my own, or
anyone’s claim to know something?” By contrast, the epistemology of
public knowledge becomes a crucially important aspect of political ethics:
Its central questions have to do with the authority of knowledge, with the
prerogatives of that authority, and with the grounds on which that
authority may be claimed and recognized.
9.1 Knowledge Cultures
Individuals, then, may have savvy of something, but knowledge in its
normative and disciplinary sense is held by specialized sub-cultures, each
with its trained and certified adepts, its “mysteries”, and its methods for
winning recruits and revenue from the world outside its discourse. Fields
like grain agriculture, high-energy physics, Chinese medicine, pottery,
deconstructionist criticism, and modern dance might serve as examples.
Each of these must be imagined as a self-sustaining “bubble” of discourse
and practice, an identifiable conversation, with its masters and novices and
clients, its practices and standards, its concepts and beliefs, and its
outstanding issues. Each derives from and is characterized by a seed idea
– building shelters, raising a crop, curing wounds and sickness, etc. Each
begins simply, but tends to become more complex and specialized with
time.
People who live, work, play a game together, already constitute the
beginnings of a small, specialized knowledge culture. We can speak of a
group’s lore whenever the savvy of its individual members is regularly
compared and shared. As soon as lore becomes a standard of competence
and acceptability, we can begin to speak of knowledge. Once it has been
externalized in artifacts and institutions, there is no longer any doubt. By
a kind of sedimentary chemistry, the accumulating expressions of savvy,
both tangible and intangible, become a pool of more or less obligatory
cultural knowledge.
Conversation is a unity in principle, but this unity is too large to
talk about except in the vaguest terms. In practice, we cannot help but
distinguish many distinctive conversational groupings, each with some
collective autonomy of its own – however much they overlap. In a
complex society, there will be many complementing and competing
knowledge cultures, and on no issue can it be expected that they will speak
unanimously. Each will have its own story to tell, and its own causes to
advance in the society as a whole. Thus, it is approximately correct to
think of each recognizably autonomous sub-conversation and knowledge
culture as an entity unto itself. We only need to remember that their
autonomy is imperfect – that all these sub-conversations bleed into one
another, so to speak.
For our purposes, each knowledge culture can be thought of as a
more or less encapsulated tradition of paradigm and practice, opening onto
the outside world for various purposes: for winning and serving clients;
obtaining needed supplies and equipment; arranging political protection
or toleration; recruiting and training apprentices to carry on its tradition.
Its autonomy is marked by an identifiable sphere of interest, by a domain
of competence, and by an episteme (as Foucault called it) – a meta-
cognitive schema for argument, inference and embarrassment, through
which each such culture determines its own canon of acceptable doctrine
and practice. Each knowledge culture talks principally to itself, and
secondarily to its patrons and clients, in a jargon of its own. Each scolds
and disciplines, and finally comes to terms with and makes room for its
own dissidents and heretics. Thus, all such cultures have in common a
self-preoccupied character of auto-stimulation and satisfaction, that can be
irritating to outsiders.
It is likely too that all such cultures have certain features in
common that follow from the necessities of their position in society and
from the necessity of training their neophytes into competent adepts. For
example, each will be defined by its centre of concern and by its posture
of response to that concern. The priest at his altar, the physicist in his
laboratory, the farmer in his field, the teamster in his truck, the musician in
a symphony orchestra have in common that they are responding to a some
particular human need (or complex of needs), from a certain definitive
stance or intention. The knowledge culture they belong to is defined by
those needs and that stance; from these evolve a repertoire of practice, a
rich body of lore and group knowledge – a shared understanding. All
these elements taken together are what we mean by a knowledge culture;
and the adept of any one of them is much like the adept of every other in
having achieved a certain standard of competence and consistency of
performance that makes him acceptable to his peers.
Now, perceiving that knowledge is organized primarily within such
“bubbles” of specialized culture is undoubtedly a useful insight, for it
helps us to understand why experts from different fields are so alike in
their performance as experts, why they often confuse policy makers with
radically conflicting advice, and why they sometimes fail to ask obvious
questions that would occur to any intelligent layman who does not share
their preconceptions. On the other hand, too much has made by Foucault
and other writers, of the incommensurability of knowledge cultures – of
the necessity of judging each on its own terms. In particular, Foucault’s
idea that differences of episteme make fields of knowledge wholly
incommensurable even with themselves at different points in time can be
pushed to absurd lengths. But then Foucault was intent on sabotaging
public knowledge as an instrument of coercive power; our purpose, by
contrast, is to think through how the knowledge project must reorganize
and reorient itself under post-modern conditions.
We have accepted the Nietzschean principle of interpretive
freedom: that each knowledge culture is entitled to its own concerns and
its own validation criteria. We accept the structuralist view that any
system can be viewed not only diachronically (as an historical process) but
also synchronically – as possessed of a certain structural integrity, at any
point in time. But it does not follow that each knowledge culture should
be judged exclusively according to its own criteria, nor that the concept of
advancing knowledge is meaningless because of radical discontinuities in
the objects and criteria of knowledge. A mistaken assumption that the
norms of distinctive cultures are sui generis, not subject to evolution and
comparison, has been inserted by rhetorical sleight-of-hand and is a gross
over-statement of such structural integrity and autonomy as such cultures
actually enjoy. Pace Foucault, it does not seem improper to draw
comparisons between knowledge cultures, and of a given knowledge
culture with itself over time. Knowledge cultures are only partly
constituted by their norms of validation. At least as much, they are
constituted by their spheres of interest, by those of their clients, and by
their relations with other cultures. Most of all, they are constituted by
their own histories.1
To illustrate both the relative autonomy of knowledge cultures and
also their availability to each other’s scrutiny and evaluation, the legend of
Saladin’s sword may bear retelling as a parable of the relation in which
knowledge cultures stand to each other. The story goes that sometime
during the Third Crusade, a truce was arranged for the great enemies,
Saladin and Richard Lionheart, to meet and negotiate. At one point in
these talks, to over-awe his opponent, Richard sent for an iron bar, placed
it across two blocks, and chopped it in half with his broadsword. In reply,
Saladin sent for a feather pillow, tossed it into the air, and sliced it through
with his scimitar.
Richard’s sword is good at what it was designed to do; Saladin’s is
good at what it was designed to do. The swords are products of different
knowledge cultures, operating with different design-criteria. As the
weapons of kings, each would surely be among the best of its kind. Thus,
on one level, Foucault has a point: There is a sense in which each sword
must be judged by the episteme of its own culture. Certainly, it would
seem unjust for either king to have his sword-smith chopped next day
because his weapon had proved inferior. Yet the point of the story is that
comparisons between the swords, and the cultures behind them are
possible. Indeed, that’s what the demonstrations, the negotiation and the
war itself were all about.
Between cultures that live by the same resources, competition is
inevitable; and the need to prevail – to at least hold one’s own – plays a
part in making value-argument possible to the extent that certain values
are all but obligatory. Among other things, it makes experts behave like
experts – creating the game of status and one-upmanship found
everywhere among persons who live by their mastery of any pursuit

1 Thus, we would disagree with the more extreme structuralists that a culture (or
language) is intelligible in purely synchronic terms, as a static framework of
ideas and symbols in relationship to one another. That the synchronic
viewpoint adds a dimension to the understanding of a culture or language, is not
denied. What is affirmed, however, is that the diachronic view also gives its
insights, and should not be rejected from political motives. Those who long for
the Revolution diminish its prospects greatly by ignoring the evolutionary
continuities of history in their wish to emphasize its moments of radical
displacement and change.
whatever.
The more symmetrical two knowledge cultures are in their
resource requirements and offerings, the sharper competition and
comparisons between them are likely to be. However, it is not true that
competition and comparison must lead to a convergence of differing
knowledge cultures. To be sure, there will be mutual emulation and
learning. But what seems to happen usually, is that one of the competing
cultures comes to dominate the field, while the others take refuge in
specialization, each adapting itself to some particular niche where it
enjoys competitive advantage.
No doubt, each culture should be appreciated in the light of its own
values. But refusal of invidious comparison among them can last no
longer than our academic detachment. If you are in the market for
something that two different knowledge cultures compete in providing, or
if you are thinking of making a career in one or the other, then some
comparisons will have to be made. Inevitably, we make our choices by
what these cultures mean to us, and not just by what they mean to
themselves2.
How then might the relationship amongst competing knowledge
cultures be characterized, granting both their intrinsic, inward-looking
aspects (what they mean to their own members), but also the face they
present to outsiders? I think we want to say that in their interaction and
dealings with their publics, they create what could be termed a context of
comparison between them.
The different styles of budo (martial arts) afford an interesting
example of such a context – each being, of course, a distinct knowledge
culture in its own right. Yet, in every major city today, instructors of these
styles are in competition for prestige and students. There is a common
public of potential beginners whose interest must be stimulated and whose
concerns and curiosity satisfied. There are military, police and private
security forces whose members are given some unarmed combat training
by their organizations, or are required to take such training on their own
time. There are media (movies, TV, magazines, etc.) which thrive by
collecting audiences. Taken together, all these provide a cross-cultural
context in which the character, strengths and weaknesses of the various
martial arts traditions are constantly subjected to comparison.
The last paragraph might just as well have been written about
dance, music, pottery-making, cuisine, or any other traditional art. In each
case we find a great many styles, each with its local episteme – its

2 Again, it is true that our perceptions and values are not entirely our own – that
they are subject to manipulation by skilful propaganda and advertising, i.e. to
specious forms of value-argument. But the possibility of such influence does
nothing to help the relativist case. It merely shifts the zone of competition to a
cognitive playing field. In their struggle for market-share, the contenders must
compete for position in people’s fields of attention, in their memories, in their
chains of association, in their loyalties; and their fitness for this competition
becomes just one more ground for comparison.
standard of value and competence, which can be viewed as autonomous
only so long as their masters are not in competition for customers and
pupils.

Now, having established that knowledge cultures compete, and that

comparisons between them are not only legitimate but inevitable, the
question before us is this: Among the diverse knowledge cultures that
might obtain in a given field, where should we look for the authentically
public knowledge?
Continuing with the example of martial arts: A plethora of styles
exist – from different cultures, developed for different purposes and
situations, with different concepts of the human mind and body, wielding
different weapons, and with different training values. Each of these styles
has its own body of theory and its forms of practice; and though there is
considerable overlap and agreement among these, there are also
contradictions, so that we can not just think of martial arts theory as a
structure of universal truths abstracted from and common to the various
styles. But, on the other hand, since concepts of strength, speed,
grounding, balance, centeredness, rhythm and focus are understood
everywhere, it seems the notion of public martial arts knowledge can’t be
wholly empty. What is this knowledge, then? Where would it be found?
9.2 The Idea of Public Knowledge
The need for trans-cultural or public knowledge arises when over-lapping
knowledge cultures come into competition for market-share. So long as
the various knowledge cultures are not in competition for clients or
apprentices, there is no need for anyone to judge between their claims, and
no need to re-formulate knowledge on an abstract, theoretical basis. Lore
and guild mystery are just what is meant by “knowledge” in every field of
endeavour. Medicine is what the healers do; metallurgy is what the
smiths do; mechanics is what the engineers do. Indeed, the idea of “book
knowledge” seems like a contradiction in terms. “The Tao that can be told
is not the true Tao; the names that can be named are not the right Names.”
Everyone knows that really worthwhile knowledge is tactile and empathic:
in the hands, belly and buttocks more than in eyes and brain. Book
learning is glib and illusory by contrast. Musicianship is in the fingers.
The bush pilot flies “by the seat of his pants” Only a fool could mistake
the scholar’s glib facility with words for craftsmanly familiarity with the
tools and the materials.
All this changes when over-lapping practice- and knowledge
cultures come into competition for business, as happens when the best
healers, sword-smiths and builders migrate to the metropolitan cities in
search of powerful clients and the highest fees. In these world-
marketplaces, different “schools” of healing, metal-work, and so forth,
come into contact and jostle each other. Practitioners from one city-state
must defend their reputations against those from another. Their adepts
learn from and imitate each other, but must also strive to distinguish
themselves and to differentiate their wares. Under these metropolitan
conditions, knowledge becomes more contentious – for the worse but also
the better – than it remains in provincial market-towns where each
practice-culture holds a monopoly in its respective field. At the
metropolitan centres, a word-game of claims and counter-claims gets
started, and skill at this game becomes a condition for successful practice.
At the same time, consumer skills are sharpened as customers learn to pick
their way among the rival wares. Where there is little choice available,
consumers have to take what is offered or go without; but in these
metropolitan cities where anyone with the price in his pocket confronts an
embarrassment of choice, a critical faculty is needed. What we call
“public knowledge” now emerges to provide just such a faculty.
The pupils who come – or are sent – to study, and then the new
class of shoppers and stewards that develops at court and in the rich
households require and therefore develop a new kind of knowledge, more
abstract, more eclectic and more verbal than the tactile, practical
knowledge of the crafts and trades. Where the old knowledge evolved
primarily in the dialogue of crafts persons – men and women – with their
materials, the new “theoretical” knowledge is a knowledge of onlookers
talking to one another and comparing notes. Indeed, the words themselves
point to the origin of this distinct kind of knowing: Our word “practical”
comes from the Greek word for doing: praxis. “Theory” comes from the
Greek theoros meaning “spectator.” Theoretical knowledge begins as a
lore of on-lookers in the crowded marketplace with its civil law, and
develops as the “law” of Nature itself.
The new, abstract knowledge is useful first to the persons who run
the city, and then to everyone prosperous enough to buy the goods and
services on offer there. Theory, in other words, is the special lore of a
governing class, concentrated at the sites of governing conversation: the
palace, the court of law, and the marketplace, where decisions to buy and
sell are made. For the governing elites and their trusted servants, it is a
means, and finally a whole support system, for picking one’s way among
the competing claims of rival knowledge cultures, and bestowing
patronage appropriately. With the advent of the professional “man of
taste”, critic and connoisseur – think of Petronius Arbiter in Quo Vadis?3 –
an abstract, “public” knowledge culture is off the ground, with a brilliant
career before it.
Public knowledge is itself a knowledge culture, evolving its own
language and methods and rules of play. But it is not on the same level as
the practical knowledge cultures in its purview. With respect to these, it is
a meta-culture: a culture about cultures. Also, it becomes a privileged
knowledge culture, as the knowledge of privileged people. Increasingly, it
sets the terms of inter-relationship amongst all the hands-on knowledge
cultures, as their customer, regulator and judge. Increasingly it will be
contemptuous of mere lore, and will see only the word-game as true

3 Sienkiewicz’ novel about Nero’s Rome.

knowledge,4 transcending its vulgar, practical origins.
We can imagine the “public,” theoretical knowledge as a Christmas
cake, in which component knowledge cultures are embedded like candied
fruits and nuts. It gets started as a thin connection amongst these cultures,
gaining in density as it evolves. At the outset, public knowledge places
scarcely any constraint on the autonomy of the traditional cultures. It
hangs sheerly around them as an abstract, appreciation and summary, and
does not interfere at all in their distinctive projects. But, as it thickens and
solidifies, it evolves projects of its own, and the knowledge cultures must
accommodate and submit themselves to its authority.
We may think of this “cake” as having four ingredients:
1) a shopper’s awareness of the offerings of the existing knowledge
cultures – what each has to sell, and what each is good for;
2) a repertoire of concepts and ideas derived from these cultures
(quoted out of context, as it were), and more or less misunderstood
as terms of everyday language;
3) an awareness of the structure of argument among certain
knowledge cultures as these collide over particular issues;
4) (eventually), a body of accepted theory, abstracted from the “rules-
of-thumb” of particular knowledge cultures and the less
controversial, more consensual features in their argument.
As the world of knowledge grows more complicated, competence in the
vocabulary, conceptual offerings and arguments of this theoretical meta-
culture as a whole become too much for any individual; and the “cake” of
theoretical knowledge must be cut into autonomous specialties, each with
a life of its own.
This polyphonic “cake” paradigm departs from the classical
“edifice” paradigm which saw public knowledge as a coherent structure of
theory and empirical fact, organized by subject matter. It departs too, from
the idea that a branch of knowledge may be considered public simply
because its results are consensual among persons trained in its accepted
methodology. Today, these requirements would limit the domain of public
knowledge to mathematics, and the “hardest” of the hard sciences. These
days, if we wish to conceive of public knowledge in fields that are
controversial or culture-relative, we must imagine it quite differently – as
a common environment allowing any number of disparate knowledge
cultures to flourish side by side, with no attempt at forced reconciliation
amongst them. Rather, the environment must aim to provide a context for
argument of substantial integrity amongst the disparate knowledge
cultures, as each pursues its self-defined agenda. This, perhaps, is the
utmost to which the post-modern university can aspire.
Traditionally, public knowledge tended to favour interpretations
comforting to the interests sponsoring it; and it tended to enshrine such
interpretations as “absolute truths.” The thrust of the post-modern critique
has been that knowledge of this kind is not authentically public. To

4 cf. Aristotle in the opening section of the Metaphysics.

become so, it must reject the notion of “absolute truth” in favour of some
polyphonic epistemology that leaves room for divergent understandings.
At the same time, to stand as worthwhile knowledge, it must retain its
faculties of critical judgment. As A. J. Ayer says, “ . . . we do not want to
be driven into admitting that “anything goes.”
The political role of polyphonic knowledge, as of the absolute
kind, is to mitigate the power struggle amongst divergent interests by
subordinating their conflicts to a base of shared understanding. My wife
and I may disagree about the household finances, but it helps if we have a
common idea of our bank balance, some joint understanding of the
concerns in play, and an awareness of each other’s interests, priorities and
arguments. Similarly in the world at large: Today, if we are to speak
honestly of public knowledge on some controversial matter, it can only be
the structure of argument around it that we have in mind.
9.3 Social Science
There can be no doubt in anyone’s mind that the under-ambition of the discipline of
anthropology has reaped, and continues to reap, great and necessary empirical fruit. It is
very probable that there was historically no alternative to this necessary development.
But the point of my critique is that the science of man, in losing its synthetic vision,
actually lost the three things that gave it such world-historical promise in the eyes of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And if we are again going to make the science of
man meaningful . . . , we must find some kind of conceptual framework which will
permit us to reintegrate these three things into a single scientific vision that includes 1)
the central problem of the science of man: How do we explain human differences? 2)
the large historical panorama of human development, which provides the background and
support for this explanation; 3) the superordinate value scale for judging the wisdom and
adequacy of man’s social arrangements.

The Lost Science of Man

Ernest Becker (1971)
The most significant test of conversational logic and epistemology lies in
the area of social science, where the realms of fact and value are
inseparable. Here is where the conundrum of human volition against
causal necessity is sharpest. Here, if anywhere, is where we need to admit
a whole range of complementary, even downright contradictory
understandings, without accepting that “anything goes.” If any branch of
knowledge has outgrown the classical tradition, it is the group of social
sciences. If any branch remains plagued by outstanding issues of
epistemology and inference, it is this one. Social science is the domain
where a perspectivist, polyphonic epistemology has to “make its bones,”
so to speak: actualize itself, and prove its worth.
Just one of the issues that blocks consensus in these fields is that of
explanation. How are human events, and the choices of individuals to be
explained? Focussing just on this issue, we find at least the following
strains of thought:
1) Common sense would have it that all social phenomena result from
the free choices of human agents. Things happen because we
make them happen, either individually or collectively; and we
attempt to make things happen because we believe it in our best
 interests to do so. For daily life, such a position is compelling. It
would be very difficult to get around in the world without the
working assumption that we and others are fairly coherent, moral
agents, making free choices as we see fit. Still, for a science of
psychology or the writing of history, a deeper account seems
needed.
2) Thus, it has long been known that people’s desires and choices are
shaped by their life histories, especially by their infancy and
childhood. Nor can we hold our parents responsible, since they
themselves were once children with parents. And so on. On this
telling, people are to be thought of as information processing
devices, more or less “programmed” by their cultures, upbringing
and past experience. We do things because they have become
habitual, or because we have been taught to want them, or to think
them the right thing to do.
3) For some religious people, both biography and history are
ultimately to be explained in teleological terms as the working out
of some divine or cosmic purpose. Things happen as they do
because God wills them so. But science too recognizes a kind of
predestination, when systems are said to tend toward an
equilibrium state where some parameter is minimized. Such
explanations correspond to Aristotle’s notion of final cause: All
things move toward the state at which they are most completely
and essentially themselves. Self-actualization, conceived in
various ways, is yet a third mode of explanation.
4) In particular, an explanation of individual and social behaviour
may be sought in the biology of the human animal. Thus, for
example, the origins of ethnic sentiment and warfare may be traced
to primate territoriality, status seeking and bonding. For any
individual, the evolutionary history of its species is a kind of
destiny.
5) Social activists, by contrast, find such biological explanations
unacceptable, as they seem to admit no room for improvement.
They point to the wide variation and plasticity in human behaviour,
and insist that when people do nasty things this is due to corrupted
values and habits of their existing environments that have
perverted their natural feelings and tendencies.
6) Finally, the structuralist school, building on a fruitful insight from
linguistics, points out that people and societies, like languages, can
be seen as coherent wholes, existing at some given point in time.
For these writers, the explanation of any personal or social fact is
to be sought in the structures of which they are a part, and into
which they are required to fit.
These differing styles of explanation point to very different causal
relationships, and suggest entirely different programs for research. Nor
are they merely complementary: For example, 4) and 5) directly
contradict each other as do 6) and 2), while 1) seems inconsistent with all
the others. In the social sciences, we nearly always find a structure of
argument among distinct schools of explanation, rarely a single theory that
everyone accepts.
Now, my question is this: Partly because people come to the social
sciences with different perspectives, partly because the social facts
themselves are over-determined and complex, it seems unlikely that
complete, univocal explanations for social phenomena could be given.
Why should this bother us? Why shouldn’t divergent, even contradictory
explanations be admitted?
The reason we prefer single explanation may be connected with
our habitual way of attributing agency and blame: Why did the vase
break? Because I carelessly knocked it over. Why did the car hit that
pedestrian? Because its driver was drunk. A whole body of law and
custom has developed to cope with the problem of responsibility in such
cases, where the (governing) question of who shall be punished or made to
pay for damage cannot be answered apart from the (epistemic) question of
who caused it. Often, however, it makes little sense to demand a single,
inculpating explanation of this kind because there is more than one way to
assign responsibilities, no clear way to resolve the argument amongst
alternative ways of doing so, and/or no strong motive to do so. Even with
the motive, a tensegrity of close argument may be the best we can do.
But in what sense can argument be an explanation? What we have
to say is that explanation is a matter of interpretation; and on such matters
a structure of argument will be the best explanation we can give. If
explaining an event means embedding it within some narrative and
paradigm that makes it appear intelligible and likely, then by extension it
can also mean embedding it within some argument amongst alternative
paradigms and narratives. It is not just that differing explanations may be
complementary. My point, rather, is that the structure of argument already
is the public explanation. The argument amongst alternative explanatory
paradigms for the French revolution seems to be the best public context
we can find to render that event intelligible.
On one hand, such an argument may collapse to triviality. Or it
may lose itself in endless detail, as when we attempt to predict the weather
more than a few days in advance. But finally, as with the French
revolution, the argument may settle down to a controversy with many
areas of basic agreement, and many of permanent dispute. When this has
happened, we know as much as we can know about “the cause” of the
event in question – barring the discovery of new evidence. This is a great
deal more than knowing nothing about the event’s causes, and a great deal
more than a factional brawl.
Thus, the history books tell us that the French revolution occurred
because of: 1) the Crown’s fiscal bankruptcy; 2) aristocratic and clerical
privilege; 3) the rise of industry, commerce and the bourgeoisie as loci of
power; 4) Enlightenment philosophy; 5) the sufferings of the peasants
and urban masses; 6) the unpopularity of Marie Antoinette; 7) the king’s
ill-judged flight from Versailles; and for other reasons as well. Similarly,
women’s spheres of activity tend to be restricted by their closer
involvement with the tasks of bearing and raising children, by a political-
economic system based on exploitation and violence, by the insecurity,
selfishness and brutality of men, and by what has usually been the path of
least resistance for women themselves. In each case, some explanations
are better than others, for reasons that emerge from reasoned argument.
No single explanation is definitive. Both scholars and ordinary people
weigh the suggested explanations as they please, and give more or less
convincing reasons for the way they do so. But finally, it is the pattern of
argument as a whole that comprises our public understanding of why the
revolution happened, why women are disadvantaged for public life, or
anything else we wish to explain.
In the social sciences, explanation will always remain somewhat a
matter of ingenuity and taste. Several or many explanatory strategies will
seem to have merit (at least to their own inventors and followers); and it
will seldom be possible to embarrass any one of these so thoroughly and
permanently that it is out of the running for good. As we’ve seen, this is
not to say that some may not be stronger than others, nor that reasoned
argument amongst them is impossible. Some explanations will be
strengthened and others embarrassed as new information turns up. But it
is to say that these fields remain domains of story-telling, whatever else
they are. In every case, the task in these fields is either to tell a good story,
or to encompass the current stories in some balanced way.
The conclusion I would draw is that social science is controversial
and polyphonic by nature. We cannot expect classical, univocal answers
to its great questions, since there is scarcely anything in its purview that
could qualify as raw fact. From beginning to end, in its choice of
concepts, its descriptions of particulars in its law-like generalizations, it is
a tissue of value-laden interpretations. Such rigour as it possesses, often
very considerable, is a matter of intellectual integrity: a diligence and
scrupulosity in the collection and interpretation of evidence, a willingness
to subject fond theories to critical embarrassment, a determination to treat
the individuals and cultures studied in a spirit of respect and human
solidarity.
Both social scientists and their clients are social animals who bring
their own vanities, economic interests and political loyalties to the
questions they ask. For this reason, the more positivist we try to make
these disciplines, the more we try to force them into the classical mould,
the more we turn them into political battlegrounds or else condemn them
to triviality. It will be more fruitful to encourage any number of distinct
knowledge cultures in the broad field of social science, and set these to
play against each other on terms of reason and civility. Then the answers
we can expect will be interpretative and plural: a public knowledge of
perspectives and patterns of understanding, not of definitive facts and
laws.
Finally then, we have an answer not only to Nietzsche, but also to
Hume: induction, causation, categorization are modes of understanding
involving leaps that reason alone cannot account for. Hume is right about
this. Empirical sense data alone do not afford an intelligible world. To
arrive at intelligibility, people must construe first according to the
structure of their minds (or nervous systems) as Kant saw, then according
to categories and values absorbed from their ambient cultures, and finally
idiosyncratically and willfully, according to their individual life histories,
and projects and vested interests. Nietzsche is right about that. But none
of this makes the world unintelligible, nor reasoned argument impossible.
9.4 Knowledge Institutions
The cause of reason faces one massive obstacle that has little to do with
the scandal of interpretations, and is therefore beyond our scope. Yet this
obstacle requires at least a mention here because of its consequences for
public knowledge.
In many respects, the Enlightenment project of using knowledge
and critical reason to improve the human condition succeeded beyond its
founders’ dreams. Nonetheless, this project is threatened today by a
massive and justified loss of public confidence in the legitimacy, integrity,
and sheer competence of knowledge-using institutions. This is not really a
philosophical problem, yet it bears on our discussion because it threatens
not so much the idea as the practicability of authentic public knowledge.
Where savvy belongs to individuals, knowledge is and must be
collected and deployed by corporate institutions, public or private. As this
happens, it inevitably takes on a corporate life of its own, developing in
response to political and institutional necessities, which often warp the
consciousness and judgment of its custodians – the “professors”of
knowledge, who hold and manage and apply it. In this way, the
institutional character of knowledge gives cause for epistemological
suspicion. Today, it is common knowledge that bureaucracies and senior
professionals tend to serve their own needs first, putting those of their
clients a long way second. In consequence, knowledge has been losing its
intellectual and moral authority, though our dependence on it continues to
grow.
Contemporary attitudes toward self-serving public institutions can
be traced back to the “Protestant” movement against the corruption of
Christ's church – and to Christ himself, scourging the money-changers
from the temple. In their contemporary, secular form these attitudes can
be traced at least to Rousseau who opposed the Judaeo-Christian doctrine
of sin with a new doctrine of the natural goodness of Man. According to
Rousseau, evil in the world is not the fault of human nature or Original
Sin: By nature, Man is born free and good. But everywhere he is
corrupted by society which teaches him to envy, to crave what he does not
need, and to exploit others to obtain it. And so he lives and dies in chains.
In the 60's, Rousseau's loathing for society and its institutions became
epidemic. Viet Nam was a large factor: In 1963, any college sophomore
who did a week's reading could predict that the United States would fight
there for a decade, and accomplish nothing but a squander of blood and
treasure and power. The key political question for the generation that
came of age in those years was one of practical epistemology: How was it
possible that sophomores could easily get right a judgment call that "the
best and the brightest" were getting disastrously wrong? The answer was,
and remains, obvious to everyone: In the college classroom or at home,
we can afford the luxury of private judgment; at work we are committed
to affirm the policies and organizational cultures of the institutions that
pay our salaries.
Newspaper headlines every day reinforce this lesson. Scarcely any
large institution – political, commercial, social, religious, or intellectual –
has kept a reputation for integrity among its clients. Public loathing and
rage continue to build, and no one knows where it will end. One point,
however, is clear enough: The vulnerability of expert knowledge to
corruption by mad or self-serving institutional logic is incomparably the
most serious of our epistemological problems. The "prison-house" of
language, and even the scandal of interpretations do not come close. For,
if the experts – the people who have spent their lives studying a field – are
not to be trusted, then who can be? If expert opinion is for sale, (and what
it means to be "a professional expert" on some matter is precisely that one
has developed one’s opinions about it into a marketable commodity), then
all knowledge claims are suspect. Given the sheer volume of knowledge
today, our dependence upon it, and its greatly varying quality and
reliability this situation is lethal.
Classically, knowledge meant something like “justified, true
belief.” All three conditions were necessary: You could not be said to
know a truth if you did not actually believe it. You could not be said to
know, or have known it if it turned out to be false. You could not be said
to know something if you could produce no valid argument in its favour.
Under the conditions we’ve been describing, every one of these
assumptions breaks down: Society as a whole clings to quite a few
cognitive commitments that very few persons could be said to believe, or
even understand. (Its commitment to economic science might be a case in
point.) It certainly clings to such commitments on grounds that many
people find unconvincing. Finally, its commitments are not truths in
anything like the classical sense; they are only interpretations – at best,
partial, limited understandings – as we have seen.
What we find is that the continuity between personal and public
knowledge, classically taken for granted, is broken beyond repair by the
institutional crisis just described and, beyond that, by the sheer complexity
and diversity of post-modern life. It is this fracturing of the cognitive
commitments of the individual from those of his society, that our word
“alienation” primarily signifies: to be doing things for reasons not our
own, from values and “beliefs” that we do not share. Indeed, we have
found that the phrase “personal knowledge” is an oxymoron, strictly
speaking: The individual has savvy of directly experienced people, things
and events, relative to a great many cognitive commitments acquired
second-hand from the groups to which he or she belongs. Such items of
knowledge, properly so called, are constructed in the conversation of
families, communities, nations and whole civilizations – and become more
or less obligatory for the individuals who comprise them. For the sake of
competent, comfortable participation, these cultural commitments are
taken over and internalized by individuals, but they are not truly personal
in nature. Rather, by accepting its knowledge, the individual “buys in” not
just to concepts and paradigms, but to the community itself. As a “social
animal,” he has little choice but to keep up certain memberships as best he
can – though he may well have reservations.
The knowledge-commitments of any institution (whether large and
diverse, or small and relatively homogeneous) ultimately represent
political choices of its pragmatic conversation. When a Board of
Education has to decide whether to commit the authority and resources of
a school system to Evolution Theory or Creation Science, it is not making
an epistemic choice between a sacred cosmos and a de-mythologised one,
but a political choice about what young people should be allowed,
encouraged or actually compelled to learn. Invariably, it makes the choice
based on political pressures from the various interest groups and
coalitions.
But, for the community as a whole there is a logically prior
question, also political in nature, whether it prefers to invest its authority,
resources and coercive power on one side of an issue or leave the matter
open; and unless the commitment is constitutive, as we may say, the
community will probably do better to avoid taking a stand. Thus, religious
freedom was invented precisely at the time when Faith had become (as it
remains) more divisive than constitutive for European societies. The
allegiance that mattered was to the state, and to an exalted conception of
property rights. Religious affiliation, precisely because it no longer
mattered greatly and was raising worse antagonisms than it soothed or
healed, came to be left to individual conscience.
On the other hand, some cognitive issues are constitutive for a
given community, in the sense that it cannot tolerate the presence of
members who have not resolved them in some particular way. For
example, one cannot be a practising engineer without substantial
commitments to Newtonian mechanics as a viable description of everyday
reality. One cannot be a Catholic priest without a comparable working
commitment to the divinity of Christ. These are commitments that an
engineer or a priest must hold officially in order to practice their
professions – though in private they are free to doubt, like everyone else.
Accordingly, communities and their spokesmen cultivate, and are
actually granted, considerable teaching authority. For most people, most
of the time, knowledge is just the opinion that their community endorses
or insists upon. Correspondingly, which uses of teaching authority are
appropriate is more than a question of epistemology. Above all, it is a
question of prudence and wisdom.
The connection between savvy and knowledge, and the notion of a
“personal epistemology” that inquires into the validity of cognitive
strategies for a particular, situated individual is a topic for the next chapter.
But I would like to frame that final segment of our discussion, and mark
the end of this one, by leaving the question of self-serving institutions and
the authority of public knowledge in the sharpest focus possible: Outside
their own areas of competence, the citizens of a complex society are
inexorably dependent on specialized knowledge in the hands of self-
serving institutions which can be expected to serve their own agendas,
whatever else they do. On one hand, we have no choice but to rely on
local (sub-cultural) and public knowledge. On the other, the institutions
that collect and dispense knowledge are proving unworthy of our trust.
That is the real epistemological crisis.