FROM METAPHYSICS TO LANGUAGE PHILOSOPHY
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say, the relevance of feminism to philosophy of science, the probability
rises that the conclusion that will be reached is that feminism requires us,
as Sandra Harding preposterously puts it, to "reinvent science and theoriz–
ing." (Challenged, nearly a decade later, by skeptics wanting to know what
breakthroughs feminist science had achieved, Harding told us that, thanks
to feminist scientists, we now know that menstruation, pregnancy and
menopause aren't diseases. Gosh.) No one is so naive as to imagine that
large grants might be forthcoming to show that cognitive science
has no
bearing on those long-standing epistemological questions, or even that its
bearing is (as I believe) though real enough, oblique and undramatic; or to
show that (as I believe) feminism
has no
relevance to the theory of scien–
tific knowledge.
The psychological mechanisms involved are quite subtle. Simple,
downright dishonesty is the exception; some degree of self-deception is
the rule. And this is likely, naturally, to leave a residue of ambivalence, such
as one can hear in this plea for the psychologization of epistemology: a
return to a psychologistic conception of epistemology "is especially time–
ly now, when cognitive psychology has renewed prestige...."
Still, all this academic boosterism might be
only
a waste of time if,
eventually, it came out in the wash of mutual scrutiny and criticism. But
instead of efficient mechanisms of communication and mutual scrutiny,
what we have is a mind-numbing clamor of publications, conferences,
meetings, which makes it close to impossible to hear what is worthwhile.
The director of Rutgers University Press writes that "[w]e are ... part
of the university personnel system and ... often publish books whose pri–
mary reason for existence is the author's academic advancement, not the
advancement of knowledge." The new editor of the
American Philosophical
Quarterly
cheerfully acknowledges that publishing in the journals has
become less a way to communicate significant ideas than a form of profes–
sional certification, and that being adequately informed in one's field of
course no longer requires that one actually
read
all that stuff. He seems
blandly unaware how publication-as-professional-certification gets in the
way of the mutual scrutiny that might mitigate some of the worst damage
of sham and fake reasoning and separate the worthwhile from the dross.
As more and more is published in the journals, it has become impos-:
sible, except by sheer luck, to find the good stuff. For the more ambitious,
championship of a simple, startling idea-even, or perhaps especially, an
egregiously false or impressively obscure idea-has become a good route
to reputation. For the more modestly mediocre, the self-serving variation
on a fashionable party line has become a good route to security.
And inevitably, as it becomes harder
to
make oneself heard in the jour–
nals, one has to publish a book; and as that book-published-by–
a-reputable-academic-press becomes a requisite for tenure, we see ever
