Alienation and Value-Neutrality

A.J Loughlin

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429860843
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 1998, Loughlin examines the conception of rationality through the gazes of science, philosophy and political philosophy to further explain the concept of rational reasoning, the effects it has on the development on natural and social science and its implications on how we think about morals and politics.

1 Destructive Conceptions of Rationality

1. Under-estimating the Rational Subject

This book is about a conception of rationality which is so pervasive that its profound influence is scarcely recognised. It determines the way we think about ourselves and our world, and what we mean by ‘knowledge’, ‘progress’, ‘science’ and ‘democracy’. Even those thinkers who, believing themselves to be saying something radical, reject or attempt to ‘problematise’ such notions as objectivity and rationality, are in fact thinking in terms dictated by the concept of reason whose logic I want to expose and reject. I will argue that this conception is alienating, meaning that it sets us apart, in a destructive way, from the world we know, and that it does so by causing us to ignore or devalue those subjective capacities which could enrich our awareness of that world. Thus it impoverishes both the rational subject and the world which the subject seeks to comprehend.

Its influence is by no means restricted to the fields of academic philosophy and science. The destructive concept of reason permeates individual consciousness and society at every level. It has profoundly affected the development of the modem, liberal democratic state. It is at the heart of the various, platitudinous expressions of moral relativism that are common place in contemporary societies, and it underlies the view, still popular in many quarters, that only value-neutral science can provide true knowledge. It frames the debate in all these areas, passing largely unnoticed and unexamined in the process. Even where it is subjected to criticism, the critics themselves will often seem not to have escaped its pervasive influence. In this work I attempt to explain this conception of reasoning, the effects it has had on the development of natural and social science, and its implications for our thinking about morals and politics.

Early twentieth century thought was dominated by a conception of rationality which sparked a re-evaluation of the nature and status of many traditional subjects. Even the traditional preserves of the philosopher – metaphysics and epistemology – were dismissed as consisting only of meaningless, irresolvable questions by strict empiricists seeking to sweep away all ‘nonsense’ from what they perceived to be the House of Reason. The conception of rationality at work during this period might well be labelled the ‘logical positivist’ (LP) conception and it consists in the restriction of what we can rationally claim to know to what can be derived from the empirically ascertainable data, including statements or theories founded on such data. Statements which are empirically verifiable provide the raw materials for science. Statements which are not verifiable are no more than sheer nonsense. Since the validity of the inductive principle itself cannot be established either through sense experience or by logic, the only reliable form of reasoning acknowledged by the strict empiricists was deductive reasoning. Thus, philosophers and scientists influenced by the ideas of David Hume concentrated on developing accounts of science (such as the Deductive-Nomological model, to be discussed below) which show that science does not depend essentially on what they deemed to be rationally indefensible inductive reasoning.

It is perhaps no surprise to us that logical positivists did not get very far in lending support to our ordinary common-sense statements about the world in which we live. Indeed, it must be clear that this was not their aim, for the Vienna Circle¹ did not take its lead from the ordinary individual but, on the contrary, sought to take the lead itself in offering what amounted to a manifesto for setting to rights a somewhat fractious and confused post-war world. Reason, as they conceived it, was to be the driving force behind empirical science, whilst science itself was to provide the material means for progress. Thus, whilst science was elevated in standing, many of our most common-place convictions were undermined. The logical positivist conception of rationality would not sanction the idea that reason could determine such things as right and wrong, that it could be employed to help distinguish a good way to live from a bad way, or help demonstrate God’s existence. Even the most common-place assumption that material objects are really ‘out there’, independent of our will and perceptions, turns out neither to be justified by the senses nor evident to reason. What this particular strain of positivism did was to undermine many of the layperson’s ordinary knowledge claims, denying that much of what many people tend to believe actually belongs to the class of rational (even meaningful) claims. In short, they sought to limit the contents of our world by casting out all beliefs that did not conform to one particular conception of the ‘rationally justifiable’.

Now, obviously, if it is the case that what we ordinarily believe is false, or unjustified, then in disabusing us of these errors the logical positivists would clearly be doing humanity a service. It is not enough to say ‘we do, as a matter of fact, believe this’ or ‘we want to believe that’, thereby dismissing all those who criticise our rationality. Equally, however, we can ask those who are doing the criticising to tell us what their conception of rationality does allow us to believe: what alternative picture of the world are they presenting us with and is it coherent? If a particular conception of what is rational rules out the possibility of rendering our world coherent using reason then we can be forgiven for not taking seriously any criticisms founded on that conception. We might opt, instead, to revise our understanding of the concept of rationality itself. This would represent the beginnings of a legitimate response to the criticisms offered by logical positivists of some of our most cherished beliefs.

What I wish to suggest in what follows is that if we continually underestimate what the rational subject as such can achieve we can render the task of making our world cohere an impossible one. This is essentially what the logical positivists have done and, with regard to developments in the philosophy of science, the long-term results are becoming evident. The rationality of science itself has been questioned (it cannot meet its own stringent criteria; it cannot eliminate from its own house what it has deemed ‘non-rational’) and, in so far as the world has coherence, it is often thought to be only at the expense of its independence and uniqueness². Given such a limiting view of rationality, the subject has been unable to leap the void which, it is imagined, separates it from an independent though ultimately knowable world - and thus the subject concludes that there can be no such world. This is a daring conclusion, but perhaps we should explore other, more generous accounts of the nature of rationality before we embrace what is possibly (if there really is a world out there) an alienating conclusion.

If we are going to define rationality, rather than simply give up on it, then we have to define it in such a way that there is at least some thing which is an instance of it; at least some beliefs must be capable of being rationally justified, and at least some action, in some respect, must be rationally defensible. If it were not so, the term would become vacuous and redundant. What I aim to show is that if we give an account of rationality which is overly limiting then ultimately there will be no genuine, non-arbitrarily selected instances of rationally-held belief or of rationally justifiable action. Rationality has to be defined adequately to counter irrationalism and scepticism or else there is little point defining it at all. An adequate definition is, as I will demonstrate (Chapter 3), what the logical positivists failed to provide, but they were by no means alone in adopting an overly limiting conception of rationality. This motif of under-estimating the powers of the rational subject runs throughout the history of philosophy, with logical positivism providing only a more recent instance.

In W.A Weisskopf s book, Alienation and Economics³, the author takes up this theme of the gradual undermining of the concept of rationality and, as the book’s title indicates, makes the link between contemporary human alienation and the limiting conception of rationality which he argues is apparent in positivist economic science. Weisskopf identifies the cause of present-day alienation with a pattern of thinking which is characteristic of the scientific, technological age. He calls this mode of reasoning ‘means-end’, ‘technical’ or ‘instrumental’ rationality and links it with a desire, motivating positivist philosophy of all types, to set science on firm philosophical foundations. Whatever cannot be reduced to, or derived from, the data of sensory experience does not belong to science, although there has been much disagreement within the positivist tradition about what sort of things this includes (logical positivists being by far the most stringent). The one thing agreed upon, however, is that the rationality of science requires the elimination of value judgments in order to maintain the claimed objectivity of research. This is where the ‘means-end’ tag associated with science-orientated conceptions of rationality comes into play. The ‘means’ can be determined in a value-free (and therefore rational) manner, whilst the ‘ends’ clearly cannot be. Rationality is limited to the sphere of determining fact and it thus becomes imperative to show that the facts, suggesting appropriate means, are indeed separable from the ends determined by nonrational valuations.

The role of Hume in shaping the ‘technical’ or ‘means-end’ conception of rationality which Weisskopf describes is evident. Hume tells us that we cannot logically derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. In other words, we cannot deduce from any number of purely factual statements, another statement which evaluates the state of affairs. This is because values, as expressed in moral judgments, are not derived from statements of fact, but rather they depend on a person’s attitude towards the stated facts. By implication, values are determined by the subject, facts are determined by the object, and a rationally defensible study of the facts will therefore exclude all subjective value judgments or else risk compromising the enquiry’s objectivity. The logical positivists’ conception of rationality described above is a species of ‘means-end’ or ‘technical’ rationality, though it is the one which takes Hume’s rigorous empiricism most seriously. Other adherents to the ‘means-end’ conception do not necessarily share the logical positivists’ profound mistrust of induction, though they all agree on the importance of value-neutrality in whatever passes as truly objective science.

Weisskopf suggests that the ‘means-end’ distinction which permeates both inductivist and deductivist traditions in science shapes not only the way we think about science, but the way we think about rationality as such. In addition, positivist science has determined the way we think about knowledge and our relationship to the world in which we use knowledge to govern action. The ‘means-end’ mode of thinking casts true knowledge in the light of that which helps us manipulate the world so as to achieve our arbitrarily selected goals.

The formulation of the ‘Deductive-Nomological’ (DN) model of scientific explanation illustrates well the manner in which we have come to equate knowledge with that which enables us to predict and manipulate the environment. The DN model equates the power of explanation with the possession of theoretical tools for yielding successful predictions such that, if a thing can be explained, it can be anticipated also. However, the predominance of this view of explanation has had far-reaching effects on other modes of explaining, or understanding, the world. Non-scientific modes of explanation have suffered a lowering of status in the public’s eyes, and even the social sciences, which cannot always adequately predict and yield tools for control, are deemed somehow inferior. In contrast, the natural, or ‘pure’, sciences have risen high in people’s estimation and even today people still look to science to solve humanity’s problems. Thus, the science-dominated view of knowledge and of rational enquiry has usurped the place of a fuller conception of rationality, one which would admit of the possibility of other modes of rational explanation and perhaps even suggest other ways of interacting with the world than that of driving it into the service of our apparently arbitrary whims. Weisskopf gives a name to this ‘fuller conception’: he calls it ‘encompassing’ or ‘ontological’ rationality, but we will return to an examination of this concept later (Chapters 2 and 3). First, I want to suggest that a limiting, and indeed alienating, conception of rationality is not unique to the many variants of positivism. The ultimate source of human alienation spans both empiricist and rationalist philosophical traditions.

The Age of Science is often said to have its origins, or at least to have drawn support in its infancy, from the writings of Descartes. Like the positivists, Descartes’ concern is to provide a sound methodology and firm philosophical foundations for the study of science, but his methodological scepticism betrays the fact that he too possesses only a limiting conception of rationality. He systematically questions all of our ordinary knowledge assumptions: the belief in external objects, in other minds, our belief that we can distinguish between illusion and reality, and finally, the conviction about the existence of our own bodies. Having thus removed all the contents from our world, he seeks to put everything back again, only this time justifying our common-sensical beliefs by reference to a rationalist proof of the existence of God and the argument that God cannot be a deceiver. Descartes tries to deduce from the supposedly indubitable premise that ‘I exist and have a conception of the Infinite Being’ that he cannot be deceived most of the time and is therefore justified in believing most of the things which he believes ordinarily.

Unfortunately, Descartes’ argument fails to reassure us because inherent in this approach is a view of rationality which can only serve to undermine many of our knowledge claims. In other words, he does not concede to the rational subject itself sufficient powers to repel scepticism. It is interesting to note however that ultimately Descartes has to appeal to God to provide the basis for refurbishing his world. His ontological argument (even if it were not itself open to criticism) fails to convince anyone who is not already a believer to believe in God. The ontological argument cannot instil faith and I suspect that Descartes himself was not much moved by it. (His faith doubtless preceded the formulation of the argument.) Thus, at the foundations of his attempt to justify ordinary knowledge claims we find a simple act of faith. This is not to say that his belief is therefore irrational. Quite the contrary. Assuming that Descartes is right and God does exist, then his act of faith represents the engagement of a rational subject with something beyond itself. It is an engagement of the whole self (a subject with a particular history and experiences, attempting to use its various capacities, including its imagination and creativity, to make sense of its life) and not merely an exercise in deductive logic. Real faith (as opposed to its mere expression in words) is likely to be inspired by some features of the subject’s experience, such that the belief in God makes sense within the context of that experience. In the same way, we have confidence in the existence of external objects and of other people because we experience them as an integral part of our lives and because our experiences would not make sense if we did not believe in such things. It is only this kind of experience which can inspire confidence. No purely logical argument can do so because such arguments do not engage the whole of the rational self.

I refer to Descartes at this point because I believe it shows how a limiting conception of rationality can lead to a dismantling of what we would wish to claim as our established body of knowledge. Once we set off down that road, as it seems Descartes does, we may find that we cannot get back again –or, at least, not without some sleight of hand⁴.1 do not wish to suggest, however, that we should refuse to go down the sceptic’s road simply as a matter of faith. Rather, I will argue that our faith in the external world is a form of knowledge, perfectly rational and legitimate, provided that we take a broader view of logical argument and of the nature of rationality itself.

It strikes me as a peculiarity within the Cartesian tradition that it seems to imply the possibility of understanding the world in a way untainted by the presence of the knower. It is imagined that if knowledge is from a distinctly individual perspective it is merely subjective in nature and therefore not really about anything ‘out there’ at all. The subject and object are isolated from one another in Descartes’ metaphysic: the study of the object is in the sphere of the sciences and is to be kept quite separate from the study of the subject (the self) which, if it is to be known as subject is accessible only to the faculty of introspection. Subject and object never merge. They co-exist, but are distinct and interact only in a relatively unsophisticated manner: objects seem to impose certain perceptions upon us, like their texture, solidity and weight, and these perceptions come to us unregulated by our uniquely individual pre-dispositions to perceive them. It follows that the Cartesian conception of science is an impersonal, mechanical one, granting ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1 Destructive Conceptions of Rationality
• 2 Knowledge and the Knowing Subject
• 3 Common-sense Realism and Rational Action
• 4 Alienation and the Social Scientist
• 5 Repercussions of a Science Dominated Conception of Reason
• 6 A Closer Look at Scientific Method
• 7 Ideology and Bias
• 8 Today’s Ideology
• Bibliography