Constructivist and Relativist Conceptions of Knowledge in Contemporary (Anti-) Epistemology: A Reply to Barbara Herrnstein Smith

This ought to be an exciting time for academic philosophy, for we are witnessing today a virtually unprecedented level of interest in philosophical issues across a virtually unprecedented range of academic disciplines. Why, then, instead of a sense of intellectual euphoria do we find academic philosophy experiencing an increasingly uneasy—some might even say, hostile—relationship vis-á-vis the rest of the humanities and social sciences?

When I was a graduate student in the early 1980s, the explanation that was most commonly offered was that academic philosophy, being primarily analytic in orientation, did not concern itself sufficiently with issues that really mattered, that it was overly preoccupied with the analysis of science, language, and knowledge and not concerned enough with literature, culture, and the life that most people lived.

It is rare to hear this complaint these days. As the philosophical interests of humanist scholars have turned increasingly to science itself and to the authority that it is accorded in contemporary society, the complaint most often heard is not that analytic philosophy is not interested in the right things, but that it is not interested in them in the right way. In particular, the most influential charge is the one that forms the backdrop to Barbara Herrnstein Smith's discussion in her essay—that analytic philosophy is in the grip of an inadequate conception of the nature of human knowledge, a conception that it cleaves to in the face of compelling objections that it resolutely ignores. As Smith puts it,

Clearly there are significant contemporary challenges to classical epistemology and mainstream philosophy of science: new ways of answering classic questions concerning the formation and validation (or is it contingent stabilization?) of belief, new questions about the nature and operations of scientific knowledge, and new assessments of the role of academic philosophy both in posing such questions and in grounding or adjudicating their answers. These challenges are by no means recent in origin. Some have been part of the philosophical tradition since Protagoras; . . . yet others have emerged during the course of the twentieth century from research and analysis in the scientific disciplines themselves, for example, in quantum theory and, more recently, in developmental biology and cognitive science. Work in all these fields has indicated the need to review and, to some degree, revise traditional ideas and conventional wisdom . . . about knowledge, science, and cognitive processes. At the same time theorists and scholars in various relatively new fields, including feminist epistemology and constructivist history and sociology of science, have pressed these challenges with especially aggressive energy and in quarters quite close to home—that is, in academic philosophy itself.

There can be little doubt that vast numbers of scholars in the humanities and social sciences feel that important discoveries about human knowledge have been made by recent thinkers, discoveries that mainstream analytic philosophy ignores at its peril. The putative discovery goes by a number of different labels. Sometimes it is described as the view that all knowledge is "situated"; sometimes, as the view that all knowledge is "socially constructed." I will refer to the family of views gestured at here as "constructivist" conceptions of knowledge. The core idea is that, in contrast with the traditional theory of knowledge—what Smith calls "classical epistemology"—knowledge is not thought of as detached from the contingent social, cultural, and political context in which it is produced.

Even the most cursory acquaintance with the literature to which Smith is alluding shows that, while the protest against classical epistemology has reached the level of a roar, analytic philosophy has, for the most part, turned it a deaf ear. Why?

The analytic version, if I may be permitted to generalize freely, is that we often do not understand what alternative to classical epistemology is being proposed, and that when we do understand what is being proposed, it...