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APA, Aztec, Bernard Lonergan, conferences, Korea, Matthew Yglesias, Mexico, race, United States
The Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association held its 2021 annual meeting last winter. It could not meet in person, of course. I forget where it was originally scheduled to meet, but that hardly matters now. Rather: since attending philosophy conferences is usually not related to my day job, I need to use my own money and precious vacation time to travel there, so under normal circumstances I wouldn’t have attended. This year, though, since it was virtual (and spread over two weekends), I had a chance to participate and see several of the sessions.
What immediately struck me on perusing the meeting program was how drastically different the meeting’s content was from previous years. It seemed barely recognizable as the same organization. On the kinds of abstract analytical topics that are the APA’s traditional bread and butter – epistemology, philosophy of language, meta-ethics – there were surprisingly slim pickings. The sessions I’d found most valuable in past years were on interpreting and applying philosophers of the Western canon – Aristotle, Hume, Hegel – and this year, those too were in short supply. Neither kind of session was gone, their numbers were just notably smaller, at least in proportion.
A major reason for this change surely has to do with what Matthew Yglesias has called the Great Awokening: among the educated white Americans who still constitute the vast majority of the APA’s membership, there has been a massive shift toward demanding major changes for the sake of racial equality. I identify the Awokening as a key reason for the change because of the two kinds of panels that did dominate the program.
A large number of these panels had to do with social justice of some variety or another: papers on “the moral obligation to resist complacency with respect to one’s own oppression”, “disrupting dominant narratives through material formations of difference in public space”, and the like. I didn’t attend any of these, for a number of reasons. The largest is that I think Americans have a strong tendency to view such issues in a narrowly parochial American way, especially assimilating all racial issues to black and white – and the methodology of analytic philosophy is such, in my view, that it tends to exacerbate such parochialism. Analytic philosophy is a way of clarifying one’s thought in detail on a very specific topic given an enormous number of assumptions that one takes for granted on all the other issues that are not being investigated so closely. When the assumptions themselves are problematic, I think the analytic method hinders rather than helps philosophy’s approach of getting beyond the prejudices of one’s own time.
Fortunately, the exact opposite was true of the other kind of panels that were prominent throughout the program: namely, panels on philosophy outside the West, or at least outside the Western mainstream. These are a wonderful way of expanding our minds, and the Eastern APA had a magnificent variety of them: a phrase I don’t think I ever expected to say. The conference’s digital format was surely a great help in this, allowing greater attendance from faraway places. Thus a particularly welcome development was that the panels went well beyond the usual suspects of India, China and Japan: I attended a panel on modern political philosophy in Korea from Wang Yang-Ming neo-Confucianism to social Darwinism, and another on aesthetics in Mexico from the Aztecs through Sor Juana to José Vasconcelos.
Those Korea and Mexico panels were, unfortunately, not very well attended. Some of that surely also had to do with the virtual format of the conference reducing attendance. But I imagine a part of it has to do with a deeper problem: our standards for assessing new philosophies are, and must be, rooted in what we already know. It is hard to think philosophically with traditions that are far outside our comfort zone; we encounter them first as intriguing curiosities more than as candidates for truth. That can change with time, and when cross-cultural philosophy is done well, it does. But even for me as a Buddhist, there is a great deal in a traditional Buddhist worldview that is alien and hard to think with; far more is alien in the thought of the Aztecs.
I find a helpful way to think about all this in the thought of the Canadian theologian Bernard Lonergan. Lonergan, as I understand him, classifies ideas into two categories based on their relation to our preexisting thought. (I’m not sure how much Lonergan was influenced by Gadamer, but their ideas seem to complement each other very well.) Ideas that “secure gains”, help us be more confident in our existing ideas, Lonergan calls integrators; ideas that help us look beyond those ideas and “open the door to a better system”, he calls operators.
The social-justice panels, for those who attended them, would have been integrators, and I think analytic philosophy generally tends to work as an integrator, as does scholasticism in general. In my case, it happens to be that the presuppositions those panels worked to clarify and extend would likely have been ones I do not share, such as the assumption that every human being has a duty to work for political change. So they would not have been integrators for me – but they likely were integrators for the conference’s white American mainstream, convinced of recent social-justice views that they are now looking to justify. (Better integrators for me were previous years’ panels on Aristotle and Hegel, thinkers whose views deeply inform mine – as are panels on Buddhism.) Panels on very distant traditions, by contrast, are operators; they help us see beyond the limits of our current horizon. We need both.
This post touches on a conversation I was having just yesterday with an editor at Tricycle magazine: What allows (some) people (some of the time) to be open to initially alien ideas that are incompatible with their lived sense of the world—what are the preconditions for acceptance of elements of new and radically different viewpoints? Some of it, I think, has to do with the personality variable psychologists call “openness to experience.” Some has to do with relationship—having a close personal relationship with someone who has different views. Some of it has to do with a kind of Deweyian pragmatic attitude towards inquiry. Still, I think there is more involved—the new idea has to be encountered at some point where there is already some opportunity for it to land—some readiness because of a new crisis or unresolved problem or a change in some other aspects of our felt sense of the world that allows a new kind of carrying forward.
I was thinking about how the Quaker anti-slave trade movement in England needed certain preconditions before public sentiment could move in its direction—there had to be the movement from a mercantilist economy to a capitalist/industrialist one so that the English economy no longer depended so much on the slave trade, and then there were the Napoleonic Wars that made cutting off slaves to French colonies an attractive idea, the admitance of several new Irish MPs to parliament, and the continuing spread of the ideas sparked by the American and French revolutions—so much had to happen first before people could think differently. Anyway, I am interested in whether you or your readers have any more developed ideas on this subject.
Seth, regarding your second paragraph (and to some extent your first paragraph as well), one very general model is sociologist Everett Rogers’s innovation adoption model in his book Diffusion of Innovations (5th edition, Free Press, 2003). Rogers himself wrote that he considered this model to be closely analogous to another model that you are probably familiar with, the clinical stages of change in the transtheoretical model of change by James O. Prochaska, Carlo DiClemente, et al. These models are contentious, and of course they often won’t fit a given situation well or at all, but I find the models to be quite compelling as an abstraction or idealization of the messy reality.
Yeah, that’s a really big question that goes well beyond Lonergan, I think. It is particularly interesting in the current context, because some things I would have thought – like, that the new views have to be close enough to the old ones – often seem not to be the case. A view that women’s sports should be limited to those with female biology, for example, has gone from mostly unquestioned norm to taboo in the space of less than a decade. I can’t think of any other historical contexts in which that happened, and I am still trying to figure out how it happened. It is a fascinating sociological question, and one which so far seems to be receiving startlingly little sociological attention. Social media is unquestionably one part of the answer to it, but it hardly answers everything.
My first thought upon reading this post was that Lonergan’s integrator/operator distinction reminded me of Piaget’s assimilation/accommodation. I’ve never read Lonergan, so I asked Dr. Google if there is any connection between Piaget’s and Lonergan’s distinctions, and the good doctor pointed me to Chris Friel’s article “What can Piaget offer Lonergan’s philosophy of biology?” (Zygon 50(3), 2015, 692–710), which informed me that Lonergan’s works “from 1959 onwards” cited Piaget, and Friel quoted a later text by Lonergan that summarized Piaget’s terms:
“[C]ommon sense does not syllogize; it argues from analogy; but its analogies resemble, not those constructed by logicians in which the analogue is partly similar and partly dissimilar, but Piaget’s adaptations which consist of two parts: an assimilation that calls on the insights relevant to somewhat similar situations; and an adjustment that adds insights relevant to the peculiarities of the present situation.” (Lonergan [1982] 1985, 241)
An illustration would be: A child who can grasp with two hands a cup without a handle, and who is given a cup with a handle, and who proceeds to grasp it in the same way as before has assimilated the new cup to the prior cup-grasping schema. When the child discovers (or is taught) how to grasp the new cup by its handle, the child has accommodated the prior cup-grasping schema to the novel feature of the new cup. This is basically analogous to confirmation and disconfirmation/reformulation of theories/models in philosophy of science (philosopher-psychologist Alison Gopnik has pointed out this analogy, as have, I imagine, other philosophers), not to mention many other ideas in epistemology (Piaget’s own description of himself could be called, using more current language, “developmental epistemologist”).
What strikes me about Amod’s attitude toward the conference panels that he decided he didn’t want to attend is that it seems that he assimilated those panels to his “Great Awokening” schema. (He can, of course, disconfirm this if I’m wrong.) The alternative would have been to attend one of those panels with the aim of trying to disconfirm that assimilation, perhaps resulting in some accommodation of new features (as Lonergan put it above: “an adjustment that adds insights relevant to the peculiarities of the present situation”). Or perhaps Amod could have contributed something to the discussion that would have resulted in some accommodation by others. On the other hand, both in personal choices at conferences and in the practice of science there is always the issue of cognitive economy: some tests of our schemas or theories just aren’t worth their cost (in time, money, or other resources).
Yes, the “cognitive economy” is exactly it. In general, those views which we are surrounded by, and yet find wanting, are probably those on which our time is least well spent: since they are outside our own system they do not serve as integrators that deepen, but we hear enough of them already that we are less likely to find them operators from which we can learn something new. The likelihood is not zero – it never is – but it is smaller.
At the upcoming in-person AAR I’m going to be presenting on a panel with “social justice” in the title, one at which I expect mainstream woke perspectives will be well represented. I’ll be presenting a view – a defence of Śāntideva’s critique of anger – which is somewhat at odds with the prevailing wisdom in social-justice circles. Because of that, I think the dialogue with the more mainstream perspective will be more interesting than in panels that take that perspective for granted.
Your mention of a critique of anger “which is somewhat at odds with the prevailing wisdom in social-justice circles” reminds me of a paper I read by the Buddhist-influenced law professor Deborah Cantrell, “Re-problematizing anger in domestic violence advocacy” (American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law 21(4), 2013, 837–951), the intro to which says, in part:
“I hope to re-problematize anger by arguing that one can be respectful of the experiences of a woman subjected to abuse, including her experience of anger, while at the same time insisting that acting out of anger is ineffective. My approach to anger is intentionally pragmatic and instrumental. I embrace feminism’s insistence that real experiences matter. However, I illuminate how the rush from emotion to action is deeply problematic, and particularly so in the case of anger. While feminist discourse about anger has not been nuanced, I suggest that feminist domestic violence practice already contains within it the seeds of a productive solution, and that the productive solution is to craft space so that the arising of the experience or emotion of anger is disrupted and separated from action driven by that experience.”
I see that Cantrell has more recently published a paper that appears to include a similar argument: “Love, anger, and social change” (Drexel Law Review 12, 2019, 47–92). The intro includes:
“This Article explores the problematic consequences of that oversubscription to hot, reflexive emotions. First, it is not clear empirically that hot emotions produce more social change or faster social change. Next, it is normatively fraught to base social change on anger. A constitutive feature of anger is its ‘payback wish.’ As political philosopher Martha Nussbaum has articulated, anger’s payback wish means that change happens by one side denigrating the other rather than all sides finding a way to improve everyone’s lot. Dignity is better enhanced when all sides rise.”
I was impressed by her earlier article’s diplomatic attempt to convince her activist colleagues that anger is ineffective.
I hadn’t heard of Lonergan, but I’d be curious what he or you would have to say about the problems of confirmation bias and cognitive tribalism. These problems make me – ceteris paribus – skeptical of integrators and strongly favor operators. Should we really seek to be “more confident in our own ideas”? Shouldn’t we instead seek out information and ideas that might challenge our views? As we all know, this is very hard to do as an individual – the pull of confirmation bias is too strong. Under many circumstances, groups may make this problem worse. But I would argue (drawing on Robert Merton, David Hull, Robert McCauley, and others) that the key to the successes of modern science has been that it has institutionalized open access, attempted disconfirmation, and perpetual revision of theories. In these ways, it goes against the grain of human nature, as McCauley has argued.
I’d be curious to hear what you think of this, and whether science’s success in this regard has any bearing on your project of culling the world’s traditions for wisdom.
David, the term “confirmation bias” came to my mind as well when I was writing my comment above about Piaget. I noted above that Alison Gopnik pointed out the analogy between Piaget’s assimilation/accommodation and experimental confirmation/disconfirmation of models or theories. Decades ago Piaget argued that people can over-assimilate and over-accommodate, but an equilibrium between them (“equilibration” he called it) facilitates “development of intelligence in the child as well as in scientific thought”, but “this fundamental equilibrium between assimilation and accommodation is more or less difficult to attain and to maintain depending on the level of intellectual development and the new problems encountered” (Jean Piaget, “Piaget’s theory”, in Piaget and His School: A Reader in Developmental Psychology, Springer-Verlag, 1976, p. 20).
Although “confirmation bias” has become an extremely famous term, it has a much lesser known doppelgänger: “disconfirmation bias”. I learned this term from Ross Cheit’s writings about career skeptics and defense attorneys who sought to disconfirm evidence of child sexual abuse. Whether Cheit was right or not about the cases he investigated, the term points to a really interesting problem in adversarial systems that institutionalize confirmation and disconfirmation in the job description of competing sides. True, both sides are just subspecies of “myside bias”, but the prevalence of the problem of miscarriages of justice shows that it’s not epistemically sufficient merely to institutionalize disconfirmation-seeking alongside confirmation-seeking. “Equilibration” is not automatic. There has to be a variety of norms guiding the inquiry, similar to what was emphasized by Robert Merton, whom you mentioned.
Should we really seek to be “more confident in our own ideas”? Yes, there is role for confirmation in science. For example, before you take a drug, you want the US Food and Drug Administration (or equivalent institution) to confirm its safety and efficacy for its intended purpose before approving its use. However, the confirmations should be the result of sufficiently severe testing that could result in disconfirmations. This is one of the aforementioned scientific norms. And I expect Piaget was right when he said that the difficulty of the task will depend on “the new problems encountered” and “the level of intellectual development”, which I interpret as the degree of systematization of knowledge.
Amod would have more to say about how this relates to culling the world’s traditions for wisdom, but I’m reminded of a passage I recently read from Barry Allen’s article “Pragmatism and Confucian empiricism”, in Confucianism and Deweyan Pragmatism: Resources for a New Geopolitics of Interdependence (University of Hawaii Press, 2021):
“The experience that matters most [for Confucians] is the experience of the past conveyed to the heart through the medium of the Classics. Confucians believed that by respectful ceremony and sincere learning they could cultivate an intuitive continuity between that experience and our own. Empiricism typically repudiates classical learning, desiring to learn from nature, not from books. The difference is less vivid to the Confucians than it was to Bacon and Galileo. When the books are historical records of the historical experience of historical sages—as, of course, Confucians were convinced their classics were—then book learning is learning from experience, vicarious experience, perhaps, but still an ultimately empirical legacy… Is Confucianism unduly optimistic? It can seem that way from the outside. The Confucian idea seems to be that the harmony of the future is hidden in the past. It does not require experimentation, innovation, invention, or discoveries. The whole idea of testing is inappropriate. In any trial the Classics always win. Of course modern people may not share this faith in the Chinese Classics, and not just because they are not Chinese.”
Nathan, a book on Confucianism and Dewey? Wow! Right up my alley. Who knew? Thanks for pointing me to this book!