Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy (review)

[A] sense of intolerable wrongness in some journalist’s description or fellow academic’s analysis can set the mind’s teeth on edge and produce a frenzy of corrective intellectual and textual activity” (p. xv). It is precisely this “corrective” impulse, an impulse generated at its source by a “sense of intolerable wrongness,” that guides Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s instructive and intelligent new book, Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy. Philosophy of Science, to cite an example, has well understood, if not what it means to disagree concerning the tenets of a theoretical position, then at least the effect that such disagreement exerts upon both the scientific enterprise and the eminently human scientist: Alfred North Whitehead once observed that the “intolerable wrongness” that one so often experiences when confronted with anothertheoretical position can make it impossible to read beyond the first few pages of a treatise for which the offending set of assumptions serves as a preface (A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World [New York: Free Press, 1967], p. 23); Thomas Kuhn posited the necessity of a “conversion experience” before disagreeing parties could ever agree (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996], p. 151); Max Planck once suggested that the only way a new scientific truth can be generally received is if the party stubbornly resisting it literally dies (cited in Kuhn, pp. 33–35).

Smith, however, resists such fatalistic determinations of >intellectual resistance, attempting both practically and theoretically to engage the nature of debate itself. With this project always before her, she targets the current battle between “foundationalist” (objectivist, traditionalist, rationalist) and “antifoundationalist” (nonobjectivist, relativist, skeptic) epistemology, where the contested conceptual/rhetorical terrain of truth (encompassing rhetorics of objectivity, relativism, reality, rationalism, meaning, knowledge, constructivism) provides the necessary stake for the articulation of what it means to disagree across a wide range of intellectual disciplines—from law to cognitive psychology to evolutionary genetics—and across a wide range of intellectual consciousnesses: the discursive, the ethical, the political.

Insofar as foundationalist positions are at all points today confronted by antifoundationalist critiques, we might think this to be a highly overdetermined, even overwrought, battle. But the strength of Smith’s text is that she does not simply declare a kind of victory for postmodernism—indeed, the book in large part analyzes precisely why, both theoretically and practically, that victory never came. To that end, she does not devote her considerable critical skills to simply dismantling foundationalist belief structures, as is so often (and often tiredly) the case, but intelligently directs her inquiry to foundationalist critiques of the antifoundationalist critique—discerning in these critiques, through eight chapters, the reasons why the foundationalist seems so obstinate in resisting the advances of (our) postmodernist position. A chief point of contention throughout the book is the profoundly tautological structure of foundationalist critiques of antifoundationalism, a kind of “epistemic asymmetry” (or alternately, “cognitive circularity”) by which objectivist thinking can at once claim to refute relativist arguments without ever, in the end, actually addressing the grounds for relativist concerns regarding objectivism. (It is important to note that, for Smith, “relativism” is not a dirty word. To be sure, it is “extremely volatile,” but for her, it is also in a phase of semantic “expansion.”)

Chapter 1, then, begins by critiquing the charge of legal/moral “quietism” leveled against the (hypothetical) “nonobjectivist” judge whose ability to judge for the good is impaired, according to Robin West (p. 6), by lack of recourse to what is later termed by Smith “truly objective criteria” (p. 10). Smith deftly exposes the degree to which such a critique turns on its own circularity: “West seeks a principle that would guarantee the production and identification of only good judgements: that is, of only those judgements that she (and some set of other people) believe(s) are good or, as she (and they) might put it, only objectively good ones” (p. 22). To claim for the...