Reply

In Grammar of Assent (1870), which I treat in Victorian Relativity as a signal text of modernistic relativistic skepticism (despite its determined assertion of the reality of "objective truth" and "absolute and unconditional" certitude [293, 47]), John Henry Newman illustrates his thesis about the inefficacy of logical reasoning and the indeterminacy of factual evidence with reference to nineteenth-century scholarly controversies about the historicity of the Trojan War and the interpretation of notorious textual cruxes in Shakespeare. It is an illusion to suppose that learned disputes like these, not to mention more momentous ones, are resolvable by means of scholarly examination of evidence, declares Newman. This is because "each of us looks at the world in his own way" (291), a principle that the creed of analytic logic seeks but fails to transcend. Thus in any significant scholarly matter, experts are bound to come to conflicting conclusions no matter how rigorously and fair-mindedly they study the evidence; "the conclusions vary with the particular writer, for each writes from his own point of view and with his own principles, and these admit of no common measure" (287). "Hence the categorical contradictions between one writer and another, which abound" (288). This early exposition of what T. S. Kuhn was later to speak of as the incommensurability of "paradigms" in science finds its most recent illustration in the reviews of my book by Bernard Lightman and Suzy Anger.

Thus Lightman, for instance, praises it for proposing a model of nineteenth-century intellectual history that "places old figures in a strange, new light" (496); Anger takes it to task for essentially this same reason—for not adequately grounding its discussion of issues and authors in "the standard understandings" (491) of them. What seems a strength to one seems a defect to the other. To some extent, the divergence of judgments in these reviews may reflect a merely pedagogical rather than a substantial disagreement, but it appears to rest, as Newman schools us to expect, on the reviewers' differing attitudes toward the heterodox and iconoclastic materials that form the book's subject. Lightman evidently welcomes the attempt of Victorian Relativity to trouble standard narratives of nineteenth-century speculation by bringing into prominence a tradition of avant-garde skepticism largely absent from these narratives; Anger argues that the book both exaggerates the importance and the radical character of Victorian relativity thinking and, in particular, that it fails to show adequate regard for that segment of nineteenth-century intellectual history which plainly appeals to her more, the one defined, in her phrase, by "well-developed arguments for certainty or objective truth" (489). The short reply to her objection is that the chosen subject of the book is not the Victorian defense of certainty and objective truth but, rather, the relativistic critique which I argue largely provoked it (the idea of "objective truth" being to this extent not a timeless given but a polemical formation of a particular historical moment), and that it focuses consequently on the latter rather than on the former. But Anger's evident dislike of the book cannot be shrugged off quite so briskly. Since Victorian Relativity gives very sympathetic attention to a lineage of writers who move strongly, if by no means monolithically or in every case intentionally, toward a critique of the category of "truth" itself as a vacuous one serving polemical, political, and ideological usages but possessing no scientific meaning, in fact as one fundamentally alien to scientific rationality, Anger's displeasure is from her point of view well founded.

I do not wish to devote this space to the dreary exercise of defending my book against each of her complaints, some of which seem to me to highlight accurately the pitfalls of the kind of cultural and intellectual history I...