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PARTISAN REVIEW
Knowing, or half-knowing, this, they become increasingly skeptical of what
they hear and read. Their confidence in what passes for true declines, and
with it their willingness to use the words "truth," "rationality," etc., with–
out the precaution of scare quotes. And as those scare quotes become
ubiquitous, people's confidence in the concepts of truth and reason falters,
and one begins to hear (from Richard Rorty): "I do not have much use for
notions like ... 'objective truth'," "'true' [is] a word which applies to those
beliefs upon which we are able to agree," or (from Bruno Latour and Steve
Woolgar): "a fact is nothing but a statement with no modality ... and no
trace of authorship," or (from Steve Fuller): "I don't see any clear distinc–
tion between 'good scholarship' and 'political relevance.'''
The inference from the true premise that what passes for truth, objec–
tive fact, rational argument, etc., is often no such thing, to the false
conclusion that the notions of truth, objective fact, rationality, etc., are
humbug, is manifestly invalid; I call it "the 'passes for' fallacy." Of course,
it is not only fallacious, but also self-defeating; for if the conclusion were
true, one could never have grounds for accepting the premise from which
it is supposedly derived. This argument is, nevertheless, ubiquitous, as
ubiquitous as the irrationalism it promotes.
Another paper might try comprehensively
to
classify the various styles
of irrationalism now in fashion, and to identify where each goes wrong–
except, of course, that to do that would require, not a slim paper, but a fat
book. Probably one could discern, in the wild kaleidoscope of contempo–
rary irrationalisms-relativis t, tribalist, irrealist, literary-theoretical,
political, post-modernist, multiculturalist, feminist, ethno-methodological,
social-constructivist, etc.-a recurring pattern of over-reaction to the sim–
plifications of Logical Positivism and its too-deferential attitude to the
sciences. And doubtless one would find oneself obliged to repeat to the
point of tedium that one cannot discover by genuine inquiry that there is
no such thing as genuine inquiry, that one cailliot have objective evidence
that there is no such thing as objective evidence, and so on.
But my goal has been, instead, to understand how difficult and how
demanding well-conducted inquiry is apt to be-difficult in requiring hard
work of the intellect, demanding in requiring its operation to be unham–
pered by one's wishes, fears, or hopes-and how this tempts us to
irrationalism. We humans are fallible creatures, our senses and cognitive
capacities limited and our intellectual integrity fragile; haste, sloppiness,
busy-work, wishful thinking, come more easily to us than the difficult and
demanding business of thorough, honest, creative inquiry. Pseudo-inquiry is
always easier, always a temptation-and always encourages that despair of the
possibility of the real thing which is a recurrent theme in philosophy today.
But this is a factitious despair, which is bound, as Francis Bacon elo–
quently put it long ago, to "cut the sinews and spurs of industry"; and, as
