Postmodernism and truth
By Daniel Dennett
Here is a story you probably haven't heard, about how a team of
American researchers inadvertently introduced a virus into a third
world country they were studying.(1) They were experts in their
field, and they had the best intentions; they thought they were
helping the people they were studying, but in fact they had never
really seriously considered whether what they were doing might
have ill effects. It had not occurred to them that a side-effect of
their research might be damaging to the fragile ecology of the
country they were studying. The virus they introduced had some
dire effects indeed: it raised infant mortality rates, led to a general
decline in the health and wellbeing of women and children, and,
perhaps worst of all, indirectly undermined the only effective
political force for democracy in the country, strengthening the
hand of the traditional despot who ruled the nation. These
American researchers had something to answer for, surely, but
when confronted with the devastation they had wrought, their
response was frustrating, to say the least: they still thought that
what they were doing was, all things considered, in the interests of
the people, and declared that the standards by which this so-called
devastation was being measured were simply not appropriate.
Their critics, they contended, were trying to impose "Western"
standards in a cultural environment that had no use for such
standards. In this strange defense they were warmly supported by
the country's leaders--not surprisingly--and little was heard--not
surprisingly--from those who might have been said, by Western
standards, to have suffered as a result of their activities.
These researchers were not biologists intent on introducing new
strains of rice, nor were they agri-business chemists testing new
pesticides, or doctors trying out vaccines that couldn't legally be
tested in the U.S.A. They were postmodernist science critics and
other multiculturalists who were arguing, in the course of their
professional researches on the culture and traditional "science" of
this country, that Western science was just one among many
equally valid narratives, not to be "privileged" in its competition
with native traditions which other researchers--biologists,
chemists, doctors and others--were eager to supplant. The virus
they introduced was not a macromolecule but a meme (a
replicating idea): the idea that science was a "colonial"
imposition, not a worthy substitute for the practices and beliefs
that had carried the third-world country to its current condition.
And the reason you have not heard of this particular incident is
that I made it up, to dramatize the issue and to try to unsettle what
seems to be current orthodoxy among the literati about such
matters. But it is inspired by real incidents--that is to say, true
reports. Events of just this sort have occurred in India and
elsewhere, reported, movingly, by a number of writers, among
them:
Meera Nanda, "The Epistemic Charity of the Social Constructivist
Critics of Science and Why the Third World Should Refuse the
Offer," in N. Koertge, ed., A House Built on Sand: Exposing
Postmodernist Myths about Science, Oxford University Press,
1998, pp286-311
Reza Afshari, "An Essay on Islamic Cultural Relativism in the
Discourse of Human Rights," in Human Rights Quarterly, 16,
1994, pp.235-76.
Susan Okin, "Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?" Boston
Review, October/November, 1997, pp 25-28.
Pervez Hoodbhoy, Islam and Science: Religious Orthodoxy and
the Battle for Rationality, London and New Jersey, Zed Books
Ltd. 1991.
My little fable is also inspired by a wonderful remark of E. O.
Wilson, in Atlantic Monthly a few months ago: "Scientists, being
held responsible for what they say, have not found postmodernism
useful." Actually, of course, we are all held responsible for what
we say. The laws of libel and slander, for instance, exempt none
of us, but most of us--including scientists in many or even most
fields--do not typically make assertions that, independently of
libel and slander considerations, might bring harm to others, even
indirectly. A handy measure of this fact is the evident
ridiculousness we discover in the idea of malpractice insurance
for . . . . literary critics, philosophers, mathematicians, historians,
cosmologists. What on earth could a mathematician or literary
critic do, in the course of executing her profession duties, that
might need the security blanket of malpractice insurance? She
might inadvertently trip a student in the corridor, or drop a book
on somebody's head, but aside from such outré side-effects, our
activities are paradigmatically innocuous. One would think. But in
those fields where the stakes are higher--and more direct--there is
a longstanding tradition of being especially cautious, and of taking
particular responsibility for ensuring that no harm results (as
explicitly honored in the Hippocratic Oath). Engineers, knowing
that thousands of people's safety may depend on the bridge they
design, engage in focussed exercises with specified constraints
designed to determine that, according to all current knowledge,
their designs are safe and sound. Even economists--often derided
for the risks they take with other people's livelihoods--when they
find themselves in positions to endorse specific economic
measures considered by government bodies or by their private
clients, are known to attempt to put a salutary strain on their
underlying assumptions, just to be safe. They are used to asking
themselves, and to being expected to ask themselves: "What if I'm
wrong?" We others seldom ask ourselves this question, since we
have spent our student and professional lives working on topics
that are, according both to tradition and common sense, incapable
of affecting any lives in ways worth worrying about. If my topic is
whether or not Vlastos had the best interpretation of Plato's
Parmenides or how the wool trade affected imagery in Tudor
poetry, or what the best version of string theory says about time,
or how to recast proofs in topology in some new formalism, if I
am wrong, dead wrong, in what I say, the only damage I am likely
to do is to my own scholarly reputation. But when we aspire to
have a greater impact on the "real" (as opposed to "academic")
world-- and many philosophers do aspire to this today--we need to
adopt the attitudes and habits of these more applied disciplines.
We need to hold ourselves responsible for what we say,
recognizing that our words, if believed, can have profound effects
for good or ill.
When I was a young untenured professor of philosophy, I once
received a visit from a colleague from the Comparative Literature
Department, an eminent and fashionable literary theorist, who
wanted some help from me. I was flattered to be asked, and did
my best to oblige, but the drift of his questions about various
philosophical topics was strangely perplexing to me. For quite a
while we were getting nowhere, until finally he managed to make
clear to me what he had come for. He wanted "an epistemology,"
he said. An epistemology. Every self-respecting literary theorist
had to sport an epistemology that season, it seems, and without
one he felt naked, so he had come to me for an epistemology to
wear--it was the very next fashion, he was sure, and he wanted the
dernier cri in epistemologies. It didn't matter to him that it be
sound, or defensible, or (as one might as well say) true; it just had
to be new and different and stylish. Accessorize, my good fellow,
or be overlooked at the party.
At that moment I perceived a gulf between us that I had only
dimly seen before. It struck me at first as simply the gulf between
being serious and being frivolous. But that initial surge of self-
righteousness on my part was, in fact, a naive reaction. My sense
of outrage, my sense that my time had been wasted by this man's
bizarre project, was in its own way as unsophisticated as the
reaction of the first-time theater-goer who leaps on the stage to
protect the heroine from the villain. "Don't you understand?" we
ask incredulously. "It's make believe. It's art. It isn't supposed to be
taken literally!" Put in that context, perhaps this man's quest was
not so disreputable after all. I would not have been offended,
would I, if a colleague in the Drama Department had come by and
asked if he could borrow a few yards of my books to put on the
shelves of the set for his production of Tom Stoppard's play,
Jumpers. What if anything would be wrong in outfitting this
fellow with a snazzy set of outrageous epistemological doctrines
with which he could titillate or confound his colleagues?
What would be wrong would be that since this man didn't
acknowledge the gulf, didn't even recognize that it existed, my
acquiescence in his shopping spree would have contributed to the
debasement of a precious commodity, the erosion of a valuable
distinction. Many people, including both onlookers and
participants, don't see this gulf, or actively deny its existence, and
therein lies the problem. The sad fact is that in some intellectual
circles, inhabited by some of our more advanced thinkers in the
arts and humanities, this attitude passes as a sophisticated
appreciation of the futility of proof and the relativity of all
knowledge claims. In fact this opinion, far from being
sophisticated, is the height of sheltered naiveté, made possible
only by flatfooted ignorance of the proven methods of scientific
truth-seeking and their power. Like many another naif, these
thinkers, reflecting on the manifest inability of their methods of
truth-seeking to achieve stable and valuable results, innocently
generalize from their own cases and conclude that nobody else
knows how to discover the truth either.
Among those who contribute to this problem, I am sorry to say, is,
my good friend Dick Rorty. Richard Rorty and I have been
constructively disagreeing with each other for over a quarter of a
century now. Each of us has taught the other a great deal, I
believe, in the reciprocal process of chipping away at our residual
points of disagreement. I can't name a living philosopher from
whom I have learned more. Rorty has opened up the horizons of
contemporary philosophy, shrewdly showing us philosophers
many things about how our own projects have grown out of the
philosophical projects of the distant and recent past, while boldly
describing and prescribing future paths for us to take. But there is
one point over which he and I do not agree at all--not yet--and that
concerns his attempt over the years to show that philosophers'
debates about Truth and Reality really do erase the gulf, really do
license a slide into some form of relativism. In the end, Rorty tells
us, it is all just "conversations," and there are only political or
historical or aesthetic grounds for taking one role or another in an
ongoing conversation.
Rorty has often tried to enlist me in his campaign, declaring that
he could find in my own work one explosive insight or another
that would help him with his project of destroying the illusory
edifice of objectivity. One of his favorite passages is the one with
which I ended my book Consciousness Explained (1991):
It's just a war of metaphors, you say--but metaphors are not "just"
metaphors; metaphors are the tools of thought. No one can think
about consciousness without them, so it is important to equip
yourself with the best set of tools available. Look what we have
built with our tools. Could you have imagined it without them?
[p.455]
"I wish," Rorty says, "he had taken one step further, and had added
that such tools are all that inquiry can ever provide, because
inquiry is never 'pure' in the sense of [Bernard] Williams' 'project
of pure inquiry.' It is always a matter of getting us something we
want." ("Holism, Intrinsicality, Transcendence," in Dahlbom, ed.,
Dennett and his Critics. 1993.) But I would never take that step,
for although metaphors are indeed irreplaceable tools of thought,
they are not the only such tools. Microscopes and mathematics
and MRI scanners are among the others. Yes, any inquiry is a
matter of getting us something we want: the truth about something
that matters to us, if all goes as it should.
When philosophers argue about truth, they are arguing about how
not to inflate the truth about truth into the Truth about Truth,
some absolutistic doctrine that makes indefensible demands on
our systems of thought. It is in this regard similar to debates
about, say, the reality of time, or the reality of the past. There are
some deep, sophisticated, worthy philosophical investigations into
whether, properly speaking, the past is real. Opinion is divided,
but you entirely misunderstand the point of these disagreements if
you suppose that they undercut claims such as the following:
Life first emerged on this planet more than three thousand million
years ago.
The Holocaust happened during World War II.
Jack Ruby shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald at 11:21 am, Dallas
time, November 24, 1963.
These are truths about events that really happened. Their denials
are falsehoods. No sane philosopher has ever thought otherwise,
though in the heat of battle, they have sometimes made claims
that could be so interpreted.
Richard Rorty deserves his large and enthralled readership in the
arts and humanities, and in the "humanistic" social sciences, but
when his readers enthusiastically interpret him as encouraging
their postmodernist skepticism about truth, they trundle down
paths he himself has refrained from traveling. When I press him
on these points, he concedes that there is indeed a useful concept
of truth that survives intact after all the corrosive philosophical
objections have been duly entered. This serviceable, modest
concept of truth, Rorty acknowledges, has its uses: when we want
to compare two maps of the countryside for reliability, for
instance, or when the issue is whether the accused did or did not
commit the crime as charged.
Even Richard Rorty, then, acknowledges the gap, and the
importance of the gap, between appearance and reality, between
those theatrical exercises that may entertain us without pretence
of truth-telling, and those that aim for, and often hit, the truth. He
calls it a "vegetarian" concept of truth. Very well, then, let's all be
vegetarians about the truth. Scientists never wanted to go the
whole hog anyway.
So now, let's ask about the sources or foundations of this mild,
uncontroversial, vegetarian concept of truth.
Right now, as I speak, billions of organisms on this planet are
engaged in a game of hide and seek. It is not just a game for them.
It is a matter of life and death. Getting it right, not making
mistakes, has been of paramount importance to every living thing
on this planet for more than three billion years, and so these
organisms have evolved thousands of different ways of finding out
about the world they live in, discriminating friends from foes,
meals from mates, and ignoring the rest for the most part. It
matters to them that they not be misinformed about these matters-
-indeed nothing matters more--but they don't, as a rule, appreciate
this. They are the beneficiaries of equipment exquisitely designed
to get what matters right but when their equipment malfunctions
and gets matters wrong, they have no resources, as a rule, for
noticing this, let alone deploring it. They soldier on, unwittingly.
The difference between how things seem and how things really
are is just as fatal a gap for them as it can be for us, but they are
largely oblivious to it. The recognition of the difference between
appearance and reality is a human discovery. A few other species-
-some primates, some cetaceans, maybe even some birds--shows
signs of appreciating the phenomenon of "false belief"--getting it
wrong. They exhibit sensitivity to the errors of others, and perhaps
even some sensitivity to their own errors as errors, but they lack
the capacity for the reflection required to dwell on this possibility,
and so they cannot use this sensitivity in the deliberate design of
repairs or improvements of their own seeking gear or hiding gear.
That sort of bridging of the gap between appearance and reality is
a wrinkle that we human beings alone have mastered.
We are the species that discovered doubt. Is there enough food
laid by for winter? Have I miscalculated? Is my mate cheating on
me? Should we have moved south? Is it safe to enter this cave?
Other creatures are often visibly agitated by their own
uncertainties about just such questions, but because they cannot
actually ask themselves these questions, they cannot articulate
their predicaments for themselves or take steps to improve their
grip on the truth. They are stuck in a world of appearances,
making the best they can of how things seem and seldom if ever
worrying about whether how things seem is how they truly are.
We alone can be wracked with doubt, and we alone have been
provoked by that epistemic itch to seek a remedy: better truth-
seeking methods. Wanting to keep better track of our food
supplies, our territories, our families, our enemies, we discovered
the benefits of talking it over with others, asking questions,
passing on lore. We invented culture. Then we invented
measuring, and arithmetic, and maps, and writing. These
communicative and recording innovations come with a built-in
ideal: truth. The point of asking questions is to find true answers;
the point of measuring is to measure accurately; the point of
making maps is to find your way to your destination. There may
be an Island of the Colour-blind (allowing Oliver Sacks his usual
large dose of poetic license), but no Island of the People Who Do
Not Recognize Their Own Children. The Land of the Liars could
exist only in philosophers' puzzles; there are no traditions of False
Calendar Systems for mis-recording the passage of time. In short,
the goal of truth goes without saying, in every human culture.
We human beings use our communicative skills not just for truth-
telling, but also for promise-making, threatening, bargaining,
story-telling, entertaining, mystifying, inducing hypnotic trances,
and just plain kidding around, but prince of these activities is
truth-telling, and for this activity we have invented ever better
tools. Alongside our tools for agriculture, building, warfare, and
transportation, we have created a technology of truth: science. Try
to draw a straight line, or a circle, "freehand." Unless you have
considerable artistic talent, the result will not be impressive. With
a straight edge and a compass, on the other hand, you can
practically eliminate the sources of human variability and get a
nice clean, objective result, the same every time.
Is the line really straight? How straight is it? In response to these
questions, we develop ever finer tests, and then tests of the
accuracy of those tests, and so forth, bootstrapping our way to
ever greater accuracy and objectivity. Scientists are just as
vulnerable to wishful thinking, just as likely to be tempted by base
motives, just as venal and gullible and forgetful as the rest of
humankind. Scientists don't consider themselves to be saints; they
don't even pretend to be priests (who according to tradition are
supposed to do a better job than the rest of us at fighting off
human temptation and frailty). Scientists take themselves to be
just as weak and fallible as anybody else, but recognizing those
very sources of error in themselves and in the groups to which
they belong, they have devised elaborate systems to tie their own
hands, forcibly preventing their frailties and prejudices from
infecting their results.
It is not just the implements, the physical tools of the trade, that
are designed to be resistant to human error. The organization of
methods is also under severe selection pressure for improved
reliability and objectivity. The classic example is the double blind
experiment, in which, for instance, neither the human subjects nor
the experimenters themselves are permitted to know which
subjects get the test drug and which the placebo, so that nobody's
subliminal hankerings and hunches can influence the perception
of the results. The statistical design of both individual
experiments and suites of experiments, is then embedded in the
larger practice of routine attempts at replication by independent
investigators, which is further embedded in a tradition--flawed,
but recognized--of publication of both positive and negative
results.
What inspires faith in arithmetic is the fact that hundreds of
scribblers, working independently on the same problem, will all
arrive at the same answer (except for those negligible few whose
errors can be found and identified to the mutual satisfaction of
all). This unrivalled objectivity is also found in geometry and the
other branches of mathematics, which since antiquity have been
the very model of certain knowledge set against the world of flux
and controversy. In Plato's early dialogue, the Meno, Socrates and
the slave boy work out together a special case of the Pythagorean
theorem. Plato's example expresses the frank recognition of a
standard of truth to be aspired to by all truth-seekers, a standard
that has not only never been seriously challenged, but that has
been tacitly accepted--indeed heavily relied upon, even in matters
of life and death--by the most vigorous opponents of science. (Or
do you know a church that keeps track of its flock, and their
donations, without benefit of arithmetic?)
Yes, but science almost never looks as uncontroversial, as cut-
and-dried, as arithmetic. Indeed rival scientific factions often
engage in propaganda battles as ferocious as anything to be found
in politics, or even in religious conflict. The fury with which the
defenders of scientific orthodoxy often defend their doctrines
against the heretics is probably unmatched in other arenas of
human rhetorical combat. These competitions for allegiance--and,
of course, funding--are designed to capture attention, and being
well-designed, they typically succeed. This has the side effect that
the warfare on the cutting edge of any science draws attention
away from the huge uncontested background, the dull metal heft
of the axe that gives the cutting edge its power. What goes without
saying, during these heated disagreements, is an organized,
encyclopedic collection of agreed-upon, humdrum scientific fact.
Robert Proctor usefully draws our attention to a distinction
between neutrality and objectivity.(2) Geologists, he notes, know a
lot more about oil-bearing shales than about other rocks--for the
obvious economic and political reasons--but they do know
objectively about oil bearing shales. And much of what they learn
about oil-bearing shales can be generalized to other, less favored
rocks. We want science to be objective; we should not want
science to be neutral. Biologists know a lot more about the fruit-
fly, Drosophila, than they do about other insects--not because you
can get rich off fruit flies, but because you can get knowledge out
of fruit flies easier than you can get it out of most other species.
Biologists also know a lot more about mosquitoes than about
other insects, and here it is because mosquitoes are more harmful
to people than other species that might be much easier to study.
Many are the reasons for concentrating attention in science, and
they all conspire to making the paths of investigation far from
neutral; they do not, in general, make those paths any less
objective. Sometimes, to be sure, one bias or another leads to a
violation of the canons of scientific method. Studying the pattern
of a disease in men, for instance, while neglecting to gather the
data on the same disease in women, is not just not neutral; it is
bad science, as indefensible in scientific terms as it is in political
terms.
It is true that past scientific orthodoxies have themselves inspired
policies that hindsight reveals to be seriously flawed. One can
sympathize, for instance, with Ashis Nandy, editor of the
passionately anti-scientific anthology, Science, Hegemony and
Violence: A Requiem for Modernity, Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press,
1988. Having lived through Atoms for Peace, and the Green
Revolution, to name two of the most ballyhooed scientific
juggernauts that have seriously disrupted third world societies, he
sees how "the adaptation in India of decades-old western
technologies are advertised and purchased as great leaps forward
in science, even when such adaptations turn entire disciplines or
areas of knowledge into mere intellectual machines for the
adaptation, replication and testing of shop-worn western models
which have often been given up in the west itself as too dangerous
or as ecologically non-viable." (p8) But we should recognize this
as a political misuse of science, not as a fundamental flaw in
science itself.
The methods of science aren't foolproof, but they are indefinitely
perfectible. Just as important: there is a tradition of criticism that
enforces improvement whenever and wherever flaws are
discovered. The methods of science, like everything else under the
sun, are themselves objects of scientific scrutiny, as method
becomes methodology, the analysis of methods. Methodology in
turn falls under the gaze of epistemology, the investigation of
investigation itself--nothing is off limits to scientific questioning.
The irony is that these fruits of scientific reflection, showing us
the ineliminable smudges of imperfection, are sometimes used by
those who are suspicious of science as their grounds for denying it
a privileged status in the truth-seeking department--as if the
institutions and practices they see competing with it were no
worse off in these regards. But where are the examples of
religious orthodoxy being simply abandoned in the face of
irresistible evidence? Again and again in science, yesterday's
heresies have become today's new orthodoxies. No religion
exhibits that pattern in its history.
1. Portions of this paper are derived from "Faith in the Truth," my
Amnesty Lecture, Oxford, February 17, 1997.
2. Value-Free Science?, Harvard Univ. Press, 1991.
This is the final draft of a paper given at the 1998 World
Congress of Philosophy. Daniel Dennett's most recent book,
Freedom Evolves, has just been published by Viking Press.

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