"What Are the Questions That Fascinate You?" "What Do You Want to Know?

"

Christopher Norris

SubStance, Vol. 32, No. 1, Celebrating Issue # 100. (2003), pp. 44-49.

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"What are the questions that fascinate you?"

"What do you want to know?"

(A roundabout answer to some straightforward queries)

Christopher Norris

It is a good while now-some five years-since I last published an article

in Substance so I am grateful to the editors for this chance to reminisce and
air a few bees in my bonnet. As it happens, that article was a piece on the
realism versus anti-realism debate in philosophy of quantum mechanics, and
must have struck them at the time as a bit far removed from the interests of
most readers. Still, it included some lengthy passages about Derrida and a
certain reading of Derrida that brought him out (wrongly, I argued) in
agreement with the anti-realist position. Most likely this was why the piece
went in, or perhaps just as a striking example of how erstwhile literary
theorists-such as myself-were in the process of challenging orthodox ideas
of disciplinary competence and scope. Anyway, it marked something of a
turning-point in my own interests, which have since then focused
increasingly on issues in epistemology, philosophy of science, and
philosophical semantics. I have also written about philosophy of logic and,
in particular, those varieties of "deviant" (or non-bivalent) logic that have
been proposed as-among other things-a means of accommodating
quantum phenomena such as wave/particle dualism. So probably the best I
can do here is offer some account of why my thinking has moved in this
more "philosophical" direction, but also some attempt to explain why it
doesn't, after all, feel like such a drastic change of interests.
One thing that has remained pretty constant since the mid-1980s is a
commitment to defending realism in various forms against the range of anti-
realist (or cultural-relativist)positions that have claimed the high ground in
cultural theory, ethnography, the sociology of knowledge, "science studies,"
and other lately emergent fields of thought. Before that-in treating of
deconstruction and Derrida's work especially-I had taken what strikes me
now as a somewhat facile and overly "postmodernist" line, falling in with
the then-fashionable textualist rhetoric about philosophy as just another
"kind of writing," concepts as just a species of sublimated metaphor, truth
as just a product of the epistemic will-to-power, and so forth. If anyone is
interested in dating the change, it occurred between The Deconstructive Turn
(1983), where I pushed this notion pretty hard in various contexts, and The

44 Substance # 100, Vol. 32, no. 1, 2003

Christopher Norris 45

Contest of Faculties (1985),where I entered some-at that stage-fairly mild

caveats with regard to its philosophic shortcomings and its dubious ethico-
political consequences. This sense of unease was considerably sharpened
by the advent of a full-fledged postmodernist doxa-the term seems only
appropriate-according to which it is the merest of delusions to display any
lingering attachment to "Enlightenment" values such as truth and falsehood,
or any realist idea that those values apply to a world that exists (or historically
existed) quite apart from our beliefs, hypotheses, descriptions, language-
games, or discourses concerning it. So I wrote several books that went on at
great (perhaps tedious) length about the sources of this reactive counter-
Enlightenment trend, its relationship to the so-called "linguistic turn" across
various disciplines, and what I saw as the best-most philosophically
compelling-arguments against it.
Then came the Gulf War and Baudrillard's notorious pair of articles
claiming that the whole thing was such a pseudo-event-such a "hyperreal"
spectacle or product of mass-induced media simulation-that the only
dissident stance worth taking was one that adopted an outlook of wholesale
postmodern skepticism and thereby called the bluff of those (the politicians,
military strategists, media pundits, etc.) who would have us believe in the
"reality" of war. This sparked a response-Uncritical Theory: Postmodernism,
Intellectuals and the Gulf War (1992)-which I wrote at white heat over a couple
of months and which was mostly received with frigid disdain by cultural
theorists, not to mention a motley assortment of responses from outraged
US citizens. All the same I made a point--one that has become a regular
(maybe too predictable) feature of my work since then-of distinguishing
between this postmodernist cult of unreason and what I saw as Derrida's
albeit highly complex and ambivalent relation to Enlightenment values and
the "unfinished project of modernity." This was largely a matter of tracing
his engagement with Kantian epistemological and ethical themes, an
engagement more critical but also-I would argue-more faithful and
responsive than that undertaken by "strong" revisionist readers of Kant such
as Foucault, Lyotard, and Deleuze.
Thereafter I became involved with teaching and writing about Derrida's
work in the context of an effort to straddle the divide between "continental"
(i.e., post-Kantian mainland-European) and "analytic" (i.e., twentieth-
century, chiefly Anglophone) philosophy of language and logic. Thus I have
tried to put the case--chiefly with reference to his "early" texts, from the
studies of Husserl, through Of Grammatology and Writing and Difference,to
Margins of Philosophy-that Derrida is, among other things, a highly original
thinker about issues in modal, many-valued, or "deviant" logic whose
Substance # 100, Vol. 32, no. 1,2003
46 Christopher Norris

approach to these issues via the deconstructive strategy of textual close-

reading detracts not at all from the rigor and precision of his thought.
More than that: I have argued (contra just about every other
commentator)that Derrida is a realist where it counts, i.e., when it comes to
acknowledging that there are-indeed must be-a great range of objective
(recognition-transcendent)truths that lie beyond our present or even, quite
possibly, our best-attainable methods of verification. I think that this is the
really significant line of division among present-day philosophers-i.e.,
whether or not they accept the existence of such truths-rather than the
vague and exception-prone geographico-cultural-linguistic line that
supposedly distinguishes "continental" from "analytic" types. Thus an anti-
realist like Michael Dummett may arrive at his position on the basis of
arguments from philosophy of mathematics;,logic and language-arguments
influenced chiefly by Frege and Wittgenstein-which seem worlds apart
from post-structuralist ideas about the discursive construction of "reality"
or postmodernist ideas about the "precession of the simulacrum." Still, there
is a marked convergence at the point where Dummett denies that it could
ever make sense to assert the existence of objective truth-values in the case
of statements-mathematical, astronomical, historical, or whatever-for
which we possess no evidence either way or that we cannot prove (or
disprove) by the best means at our disposal. For one thing this leads-as
Dummett rather fretfully accepts-to the claim that any "gaps in our
knowledge" are also "gaps in reality," from which it follows that the truth of
past events must in some sense depend upon-be determined by-the scope
and limits of our evidence concerning them. And it is then a short distance,
though one that Dummett (alongwith skeptical postmodern historiographers
like Hayden White) would surely be loath to travel, to the strong-revisionist
idea that history is nothing more than a construct of our preferential
narratives, discourses, modes of rhetorical emplotment, or whatever.
Anyway, these are some of the topics that I have been writing about
during the past few years, most recently in two books (TruthMatters: Realism,
Anti-realism and Response-dependence, and Hilary Putnam: Realism, Reason and
the Uses of Uncertainty) where they play a prominent role. I suppose that I
would have to place them high on the list of things to which I would most
like an answer.
More self-indulgently, I should like to know how far it is valid-or
maybe just a matter of wishful thinking on my part-to suppose that a
concern with such relatively technical issues in philosophy of language and
logic can be taken to connect with issues of ethical and socio-political concern.
That they do so connect is a case that I have argued in various ways, not least
Substance # 100, Vol. 32, no. 1, 2003
Christopher Norris 47

with regard to the response-dependence thesis that truth, moral good, and
the interests of social justice may often be equated with the deliverance of
"best opinion" among those best qualified to judge. In my view this is either
trivially true (where "best opinion" is equated tout court with the infallible
capacity to get things right) or manifestly false (where what counts as "best
opinion" on the highest authority can always differ from what is truly the
case or morally justifiable). After all, such a theory might very well lead us
to conclude that the "election" of President George W. Bush was perfectly
fair and proper, since it resulted from a verdict handed down by the highest
constitutional authority-the Republican-packed US Supreme Court-which
upheld the decision of Bush's brother, the Governor of Florida, to halt the
counting of votes in a key constituency that would otherwise, most likely,
have produced a different overall outcome. My book takes issue with
response-dependence theory on a range of philosophic grounds, some of
them admittedly quite technical, such as its failure to account for the existence
of recognition-transcendent truths in mathematics, logic, and the formal
sciences. But I should also want to claim that these issues are well within
reach of socio-politicalconcerns such as the appeal to a realist conception of
natural justice that would view the Bush victory as a corporately managed
and judicially connived-at coup d'e'tat rather than the upshot of a just and
duly accountable democratic process.
No doubt this claim is open to a number of objections, among them one
that I find philosophically compelling, namely the need to distinguish
between motivating interests (such as, arguably, the concern for natural
justice) and issues of objective (non-interest-relative) truth and falsehood.
In philosophy of science it works out as the distinction between "context of
discovery" and "context of justification," the former having to do with all
manner of cultural, social, and political factors while the latter pertains to
those methods and procedures for testing scientific truth-claims that in
principle seek to discount for such extraneous (pre-scientific)motives. I have
argued at length for the validity of this distinction as against various cultural-
relativist or "strong" sociological approaches that count it merely a quaint
survival of the old objectivist paradigm. Yet in some contexts-including (I
would maintain) that of orthodox quantum theory-the case for realism
may involve a sociological explanation of the various ideological motives
that have led theorists to adopt an anti-realist position. (My book, Quantum
Theory and the Flightfrom Realism [2000], presents the arguments in detail for
anyone wishing to follow them up.) Of course, there are different problems
to be faced in defending an ethical-realist outlook grounded in principles of
natural justice and the objective, non-dispositional status of certain moral
Substance # 100, Vol. 32, no. 1, 2003
48 Christovher Norris

and political judgements, such as "slavery is wrong," "capital punishment

is cruel and inhumane," or "the Bush administration came to power through
a flagrant abuse of various electoral procedures and therefore possesses no
democratic mandate." As concerns the latter, this issue comes down to the
question of just what is meant by "constitutional warrant" and whether such
de jure ethico-political appeals can be thought to transcend the de facto
authority-the ultimate power to decide-vested in a body like the US
Supreme Court.
I must admit that Derrida's more recent work on ethics, politics, and
the idea of "infinite justice" seems oddly detached from these pressing
concerns and often strikes me as going too far in an anti-realist or even (at
times) a quasi-mystical direction. Over the past few years I have found myself
increasingly in the awkward position of urging that we ought to go back
and re-read "early" Derrida--essays like "Violence and Metaphysics," his
critique of Levinasian ethics-as an antidote to some of the claims put
forward on his behalf (not without late-Derridean warrant) by proponents
of an "ethics of deconstruction" based on the idea of radical alterity or
absolute Otherness. This way of thinking is the last thing we need-so it
seems to me-in a world where the most barbarous crimes are being daily
committed by ethnic or religious groups whose motivation and capacity to
carry them out results very often from a blank refusal to recognize the claims
of shared humanity across such otherwise large cultural differences. Indeed,
the whole postmodernist lexicon of difference, alterity, heterogeneneity,
incommensurability,and so forth is one major source of that cultural-relativist
doxa-in a range of "discourses" from ethics to politics, history, epistemology,
and science-which strikes me as having produced some highly damaging
confusions of thought. So I would want to say--echoing William Empson in
a postscript he wrote for my book about him way back in 1978-that there is
a deeper continuity behind all these periodic switches of focus and that
basically I have just continued to do "the most important work that came to
hand." What seemed most important twenty years ago-when I published
my little "New Accents" volume on deconstruction-was to spread the word
about some exciting developments that were still little known outside the
specialized enclaves of Francophile literary theory. What seems more
important now is to enter some cautions concerning the more facile (e.g.,
postmodernist) spin-off movements that have since settled down into a new
orthodoxy with, on occasion, punitive sanctions attached for students so
rash as to question the received wisdom.
Let me make one last, more disciplined shot at responding directly to
the editors' request. The questions that currently fascinate me most have to
Substance # 100, Vol. 32, no. 1, 2003
Christopher Norris 49

do with the status of truth-claims in mathematics, science, philosophy, and

history, and also with the prospect for raising such claims despite and against
the prevailing trend toward various forms of skeptical-relativist or cultural-
constructivist argument. Hence my latest book on Hilary Putnam, since he-
more than anyone-has devoted a lifetime's intellectual effort to thinking
these issues through, even if his long trek from causal realism, via a scheme-
relative conception of "internal realism," to a broadly pragmatist
("naturalized" or "commonsense") line of approach makes me wish that
the film could be run backwards and bring him out at last in the right position.
What I most want to know is whether there is some hope of transforming
the present dire situation in world politics, with a brutal, bellicose and deeply
corrupt US government bent upon achieving global economic, strategic, and
military domination. I should also like to know just how long the British
parliamentary and extra-parliamentary Left will put up with a "New
Labour" government that has silenced debate, displayed the most abject
compliance with every last dictate of US policy, and shown itself a worthy
successor to previous collaborationist regimes, such as that in Vichy France
during World War 11. At the moment1we are witnessing yet another large-
scale assault by Israeli troops on Palestinian citizens, the latter (some of them)
driven to individual acts of appalling violence out of sheer desperation,
while the former pursue their state-sponsoredcampaign of systematic terror
and harassment with vast amounts of heavy weaponry provided by their
US allies.
I should also like to know-while we're on this topic-by just what
kind of twisted moral logic I am required (alongwith everyone else) to choose
between being "on the side" of the murderous lunatic Bin Laden or being
"on the side" of the doltish warmonger George W. Bush and his iniquitous
regime. And I should like to know finally-perhaps through reading other
contributions to the Substance symposium-how far it is possible for specialist
intellectuals (critical and cultural theorists) to raise such questions in the
public domain and actually get themselves heard. Anyway, I hope that
readers will perceive a connectingthread of argument running through these
otherwise rather scattered remarks. I congratulate the journal on the
appearance of its 100th issue and-having spent the past few days browsing
through a pile of back-numbers-trust that it will long continue to maintain
a policy of open-minded hospitality to views well outside whatever is
dictated by mainstream academic fashion.
University of Cardiff
1. This was written in April 2002 and updated in January 2003, when, unfortunately, very
few changes were necessary.

Substance # 100, Vol. 32, no. 1, 2003