On the Philosophical Muddle that is The Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences
Protecting robust and free inquiry from poorly reasoned and ideologically motivated attack
(This essay is far more in the academic weeds than is typical for my Substack. It nevertheless squarely fits into the broader ambit of my work defending the university from politically destructive attacks)
On June 5, the Chronicle of Higher Education announced the publication of a report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences with the provocative yet utterly predictable headline, “Has the Left Ruined the Humanities?” In fact, the report makes no claim of this form. But commissioned and published during the regime of Donald Trump, it, it fits alongside a report published by Yale University authored by a group of faculty appointed by the new President of Yale, as well as Yale’s decision to narrow its mission statement to remove reference to “improving the world today. It is yet another problematic example of ignoring the dialectical context of the moment. Despite its heavily hedged claims, this report cannot help but lend fuel to the anti-intellectual forces that threaten robust and free academic inquiry today.
Whatever cautionary notes such statements contain, they are emerging into a dialectical context where those in power are searching for justifications for the decades long right-wing attack on universities. With the help of the mainstream media, this attack on universities has grown increasingly harsher since 2015. The present background of a clearly anti-intellectual climate cannot have escaped the recognition of some of the scholars who authored the State of Scholarship Report and the Yale Report.
The unquestionably distinguished scholars who have authored these reports have abdicated their responsibility to defend the university at a time of existential crisis for academia, taking advantage of the current moment to advance their own methodological and political agendas within the university. But this not why I am writing this response. I have chosen to reply to the “State of Scholarship” document because it contains glaring philosophical inconsistencies. Administrators and corporate boards will no doubt be using this document as an excuse for cowardice in the face of attacks from the Trump regime and its present and past enablers. So, it is important to point out these errors in reasoning. It is simply not an honest piece of work.
Before I begin with its problems, I want to share some points of clear agreement with the report. Like 40% of the authors of the report, I am a member of the miniscule group of humanists who are trained analytic philosophers. In addition to my continued work in analytic philosophy (such as a 2023 book in the fields of Semantics and Philosophy of Language), I publish trade books and contribute to mainstream media discourse. The virtues of jargon free writing, and clarity and rigor in argument that the report rightly elevates were inculcated in me by this training. My success as a public intellectual is in large part due to it. And I have been deeply immersed in debates in analytic philosophy my entire adult life.
Now to the report’s problems.
The second section of the report, “The Sources of Politicized Scholarship”, lists three purported problems with the humanities:
On the first track, scholarly claims are constrained by the requirement that they cohere with an antecedently accepted political goal, although this is not how the constraint is explicitly described. Rather, unwelcome results or debates are dismissed as having been rendered moot by “settled science.”
On the second track, the scholarly goal of understanding the world is displaced by, or supplemented with, the aim of telling stories that serve a pragmatic purpose. On this track, the existence of discourse-independent facts is not denied. Rather, it is claimed that, for epistemological reasons, our scholarly representations can only be partially constrained by such facts, the rest of the slack being taken up by the practical purposes that we allegedly have in devising these accounts.
On the third track, the idea that there are genuine facts about the world or about what the evidence supports independently of our political commitments is rejected. On this view, good scholarship cannot be distorted by political values because it is, at bottom, irredeemably constituted by such values.
On the first point, I am in full agreement: it is a significant problem when legitimate views are “dismissed as having been rendered moot by ‘settled science.’” However, I reject the second and third “sources of the problem.” More importantly, listing them as sources of the problem is in clear contradiction with the first listed source of the problem – which, recall, is dismissing legitimate views as having been rendered moot by “settled science.”
The authors of this report maintain that it is (essentially) settled science in philosophy that the second two “tracks” are false. But even if we restrict their claim about settled science to settled science in analytic philosophy, this is false. I will illustrate this by focusing on the third track, because to me it is a bit clearer what is at issue here.
According to the authors, it is settled science in analytic philosophy that “what the evidence supports” is “not irredeemably constituted” by political values. This was news to me. In 2005, I published a book called Knowledge and Practical Interests. In it, I argued that what the evidence supports is irredeemably constituted by interests, including political interests (the specific case of political interests I defend in a subsequent 2015 book, but it is an obvious part of the earlier claim). My conclusions have certainly not been universally accepted. But since the book did win the 2007 American Philosophical Book Prize for the best book in the field of philosophy by a scholar within a decade of their PhD, I assume it is at least not “settled science” that what the evidence supports is independent of interests.
The vein of work that was initiated in part by my 2005 book (as well as contemporaneous work by John Hawthorne, Matthew McGrath, and Jeremy Fantl) has hardly died off (indeed, one paper picked somewhat at random from this by now vast literature in analytic epistemology is cited in footnote 26 of the report). Since then, leading analytic philosophers have mounted persuasive cases that “what the evidence supports” is affected by moral considerations, for example, in work by Rima Basu, Mark Schroeder, and University of Michigan philosopher Sarah Moss (e.g. in her influential 2018 paper, “Moral Encroachment.”) Moss is also the winner of the 2022 American Philosophical Association Award for the best article in philosophy written by a philosopher within a decade of their PhD, which happens to be an article in this very tradition. In short, it is very far from settled science in analytic philosophy that what the evidence supports is metaphysically independent from practical, moral, and political values.
Perhaps the authors of the report wish to separate the sense that in which they mean by ‘dependence of what the evidence supports on interests’ from this by now vast 21st century literature in analytic philosophy – but who is to say that the work they criticize cannot be supported by this work? Certainly I wrote my first book intending to support the presuppositions of the very work the authors of the report wish administrators to exclude.
What about “genuine facts about the world”? Is it settled science that “genuine facts about the world” are independent of moral and political concerns? In some of the most influential work on vagueness in the 21st century, the Princeton philosopher Delia Graff Fara argued that all properties (and hence all facts) about which we ordinarily speak are irredeemably constituted by interests. Graff Fara calls her view “interest-relativity”, since according to it. genuine facts about the world are irredeemably constituted by interests (this article has been cited 684 times by other analytic philosophers, which is a very large number of citations in analytic philosophy, certainly more than most articles written by the authors of this report). And with entirely different arguments, in a forthcoming article in The Journal of Philosophy, Yale philosopher Lily Hu argues “for a dependency of the causal order of things on the moral and political.” If it is settled science that “genuine facts about the world” are independent of moral and political concerns, then analytic philosophers have yet to hear this news.
More generally, thanks to the influential work of Berkeley philosopher John MacFarlane, one of the most fecund areas in analytic philosophy over the last two decades has concerned the topic of relativism about truth, which MacFarlane has over the course of many papers and a book argued to be coherent. Perhaps the sense of “relativism” that is at issue in these debates about relativism about truth is different from the sense of relativism that is decried in the Report. But this too is far from settled science.
Administrators who seek to employ this report to denigrate work in the humanities are relying on false claims about my field of analytic philosophy. According to the very logic of the authors of this report, such behavior would be an egregious violation of academic norms.
While they do not rise to the level of inconsistencies, there are other issues with the report. The report decries literature that employs “an extensive abstract jargon”, that abjures “the ideal of plain and unambiguous assertion.” But as anyone who opens the pages of a major journal of analytic philosophy today can see, analytic philosophy is replete with “extensive abstract jargon” that deviates from “the ideal of plain and unambiguous assertion.”
Analytic philosophy has, within the span of my professional career, gone from being relatively clear and jargon free, to becoming opaque not only to anyone not in analytic philosophy, but even to analytic philosophers who are not specialists in a specific subdiscipline. To be sure, much hyper specialized scholarship in analytic philosophy retains often exceptional rigor. But a good deal of it is simply formal modelling in search of a subject matter. As a result, the standards of scholarship in analytic philosophy have become thoroughly inaccessible to other academics.
As result, too much of analytic philosophy consists essentially of private clubs, the work of whose members is only accessible to one another. Success in analytic philosophy is often measured by sub-disciplinary loyalties, rather by standards that lead to impactful and long-lasting scholarship. A problematic amount of analytic philosophy now, even by those in leading departments, has little impact and has (at best) a short shelf life (unlike, say, Delia Graff Fara’s work arguing for the dependence of facts on interests, John MacFarlane’s work arguing for relativism about truth, or the vein of analytic epistemology according to which what the evidence supports is dependent on interests).
The report ends by asserting that the raison d’être of a university is that it should engage in disinterested inquiry. But the very idea that there is such a thing as disinterested inquiry is, even within analytic philosophy, very far from settled science. Many analytic philosophers in philosophy of science and epistemology believe that all inquiry is shaped and constrained by interests (and among such interests, values). It is impossible to consider every possibility; some possibilities must be closed off in advance in order to enable inquiry to proceed. Some of the considerations involve interests and values.
Even the most rigorous and scientific inquiries are shaped by interests that are, narrowly conceived, political – for example, making a novel contribution to a subfield, or getting a tenure-track job. Perhaps the interests that shape inquiry (and close off even legitimate possibilities) could be political in a broader sense – political interests narrowly conceived are intertwined in complex ways with political interests more broadly conceived (and if one can even draw a distinction between political interests narrowly conceived and such interests broadly conceived is itself far from settled science). To aim at disinterested inquiry is to aim at an impossible goal.
Perhaps some ideals are impossible but can be approximated to greater or lesser degree. But to favor inquiry that is less affected by interest over inquiry that is more affected by inquiry should not be a goal of administrators; after all, subdisciplines that are very affected by interests can be rigorous, clear, and worthwhile. It is far from settled science that inquiry that is less affected by interest is more epistemically valuable than inquiry that is more affected by interest, just because of that fact (in fact, I doubt this is even true).
There are different ways of being political. Political fights can occur between liberals and conservatives. But they can also occur between people espousing different methodologies, between practitioners of different disciplines, or different areas in one and the same discipline. Importantly, political fights can also happen over resources. In appointing a committee 40% of whose members belong to a tiny subgroup of humanists, analytic philosophers, in a time of resource scarcity in the university, the report risks blurring the distinctions between these different kinds of struggles.