Cold War Philosophy of Science, Chirimuuta and the ‘Icy Slopes Thesis’ (with some David Lewis thrown in)
One of the joys of blogging is that it leads me to unexpected conversations. A few weeks ago, I posted a digression on how conservatives’ attitudes toward social science may explain the intensity of the fight over their place in the humanities (recall here). Justin Weinberg kindly boosted it in his Heap of links at Dailynous. Subsequently, Mazviita Chirimuuta (Edinburgh) wrote me to alert me to her paper (here), “Critical Realism and Technocracy – RW Sellars’ Radical Philosophy in its Context” published in a recent issue in Topoi.
I was about to be in Glasgow to give the Stevenson Trust for Citizenship Lecture at Glasgow University, "On Adam Smith on the Origin of Liberalism." It's available on video (here): (It's expanded version of the paper I gave at Cep in Santiago, in case you saw that.) So that was a great opportunity to meet Chirimuuta for a long lunch to discuss our shared intellectual interests. Since, Justin has also (here) generated discussion about the methodology of her paper, which offers a so-called externalist explanation for the rise of ‘realism’ in the philosophy of science in the twentieth century. So much for set up. My interest in what follows is not methodological, but substantial.
Chirumuuta’s argument targets “the ‘Icy Slopes Thesis’ – the view put forward by Reisch (2005) that while the empiricist philosophy of science of the Vienna Circle was overtly progressivist and politically engaged, in the context of Cold War America philosophy of science became arcane and apolitical in order to survive.” A subset of the ‘Icy Slopes Thesis’ is that (again quoting Chirumuuta) “philosophy of science became so abstract and disconnected from social issues that it lost all wider political significance.”
Both aspects of The Icy Slopes thesis are incredibly influential. For, they motivate two kinds of (related) criticisms against contemporary analytic philosophy (of science). First, among nostalgics toward Red Vienna within contemporary analytic/formal philosophy, they motivate a recovery of the true intellectual impetus and animating (socialist) spirit behind formal philosophy today. (I tend to think of Liam Kofi Bright as an especially articulate spokesperson of this view.)
Second, there are critics of analytic philosophy (sometimes these are to be found among so-called continental philosophy), who claim that contemporary analytic philosophy is fatally shaped and neutered by McCarthyism. See, here, for example Schuringa writing in Jacobin, but John McCumber has articulated it in Time in the Ditch: American Philosophy and the McCarthy Era.
Now, Mazviita Chirimuuta is interested in the rise of scientific realism. The success of this position within philosophy of science and analytic metaphysics more widely is itself quite fascinating. For, one can find a great variety of relativisms in the ‘golden age’ of Carnap, Quine, Goodman, Putnam, and Dummett, etc. And yet, today, to say that one has relativist sensibilities is often the occasion to be treated as an especially unpromising undergraduate—unless one quickly mentions familiarity with John MacFarlane’s technical work. (I hasten to add that my regular readers know I lack relativist sympathies, but I do have (horrors!) skeptical ones.)
Chirimuuta’s argument, which is focused on R.W. Sellars (a man from the socialist left) and, to a lesser extent, Maurice Conforth (a Marxist) is that the arguments for realism and against logical empiricism and pragmatism had a political element. In fact, both had a built in “inability to establish science as an authority to guide both action and our general worldview.” (Chirimuuta is quoting from Cornforth on logical empiricism.) In addition, critics of progress (from the Right) need to be silenced. That is to say, there was a political demand for a philosophy of science that could make science, including social science, authoritative in social life. Only a realist philosophy of science could supply this.
Interestingly enough, as Chirimuuta notes, the realist philosophy of science is in the service of the social authority of technocracy. Importantly, technocracy is not, appearances to the contrary, unpolitical, but rather contributes to a “politics of depoliticization” (Chirimuuta summarizing Habermas).
The attraction that progressive scholars on the left felt toward depoliticized accounts of the sciences (including social sciences) was widespread. We see this also in Jan Tinbergen (the first Nobel in economics), as can be read in Erwin Dekker’s excellent biography (here). My own view is that the democratic rise of fascism contributed to this attraction. We also see it in the now largely forgotten analytic (Pre-Rawlsian) political philosophy (and philosophy of social science) of Felix Oppenheim’s program of Conceptual Reconstruction that tried to create tools (say a lexicon) that are aimed at reducing social friction or are used to reduce conflict over the terms of a social bargain (see here for a forthcoming paper).
Now, back in 2021 I published “Philosophy of Science as First Philosophy: The Liberal Polemics of Ernest Nagel” (here). This essay also explicitly criticized the ‘Icy Slopes Thesis!’ For, in it, I showed that Ernest Nagel explicitly articulated the familiar methods of professional philosophy of science within an intellectual division of labor in terms of a political vision of fairly egalitarian, democratic society that rejected a hierarchical elite. And, in addition, that he defended the view in terms of the demands of responsible speech against people who in the 1950s saw in it a retreat into ivory tower with a focus on minutiae. Nagel’s pragmatism is a form of contextual naturalism one that resists imposing the unity of the world and treats all entities as embedded in a wider network of entities. (Nagel, thus, anticipates Latour.)
So, where are we? Chirimuuta and I, thus, agree that the ‘Icy Slopes Thesis’ fails to do justice to the historical phenomena. It should be amended in non-trivial ways. We also agree that cold war philosophy (of science) was shaped by self-consciously political visions that spoke to earnest desire to improve society through the application of scientific techniques of control and prediction. This fit wider currents in the Weberian state in which the authority of the state and science are mutually enabling without fully mutually determining the content of each. We also agree that the character of the resulting philosophy of science only seems depoliticized because apparently technocratic.
However, as the previous paragraph hints, Chirimuutaa and I disagree over to what degree this apparent victory of quasi-technocratic methods in philosophy over-determined the full content of the views that could be successful in it. While there is a popular teleological story that generates realism (through Kripke or Lewis) out of the practices of Quine-ean regimentation it does not follow that this story could not have been otherwise. One just has to look at Jody Azzouni’s or Howard Stein’s philosophy to see how an alternative versions of the story would look like.
This is all I wanted to say. But I do want to add two more thoughts. After I read Katrina Forrester In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy I had the same thought that I had after I read Mazviita Chirimuuta’s paper: it would be helpful if historians of philosophy could begin to figure out the considerations that entered into the appointment process of leading philosophers at influential PhD programs in philosophy (in the spirit of Katzav & Vaessen’s work on journal capture and the influence of NSF funding).
After all, and this is the second thought, it’s not as if doctrinal differences are altogether irrelevant to appointments in professional philosophy. In fact, I can cite the authority of David Lewis (of all people) on this score. In “Academic Appointments: Why Ignore the Advantage of Being Right?” David Lewis explicitly noted that some departments do try to pack themselves “with right-thinking colleagues.” The fact that Lewis felt the need to argue against this practice explicitly, suggests that it was not merely hypothetical.