Truth and methods Dasenbrock, Reed Way College English; Sep 1995; 57, 5; ProQuest Education Journals Truth

and methods Dasenbrock, Reed Way. College English57. 5 (Sep 1995): 546. With the hindsight afforded us by historical perspective, we can see that the emergence and hegemony of literary theory over the past generation has led to an attenuation of methodological debate. It's not that we have found common principles on which to agree; there has been no theoretical consensus about the role of evidence which has made such debate moot. Instead, convinced that no such consensus or common ground is attainable or even conceivable, we have agreed to disagree and to leave it there. Methods of literary study, like taste, have become something there is little point in disputing.

Gerald Graff has recently been lamenting the way the institutions of literary study have tended to accommodate conflicts instead of facing them, and the relative absence of debate over scholarly methodology despite the deep differences in methods in literary study strikes me as a comparable missed opportunity. Graff cautions anyone distressed by the incoherence of the contemporary critical scene against positing a golden age at some point in the past where coherence reigned. Likewise, I can find no point in the past when debate over scholarly methods and over what constituted evidence for an interpretation was unnecessary because everyone agreed. But if we have always disagreed, we have not always agreed as we now do about the meaning of that disagreement. What is new in the present situation is the collective sense that debate of this kind is unnecessary precisely because everyone disagrees. Surely, it was a given from the institutionalization of scholarly research in the humanities in universities just over a century ago until recently that questions of evidence were discussible and worth discussing, that methodological debate was both possible and desirable. The pedagogical concomitant of this consensus was the "methods" course, and it's a measure of the change in the profession that such a course has essentially disappeared and been replaced by an introduction to theory.

If we are going to open a productive new debate over method as well as over theories, we still need to look backwards for a moment, not to paint a paradise lost but to understand why methodological discussion has undergone such an attenuation. A useful point of departure is Harold Bloom's work on influence. Bloom suggested, in The Anxiety of Influence, A Map of Misreading, and other broadly influential studies of the early 1970s, that we needed to rethink our theories or models of the way poets related to each other and therefore the way poems connect to poems. Instead of T. S. Eliot's or Northrop Frye's notion of an enabling tradition in which the monuments of the past coexist peacefully, Bloom proposed that poets reenact essentially Freudian patterns in which competition and anxiety

are the hallmarks of influence. Poets still inherited the past in Bloom's vision, but the legacy was a burden, something to be overcome rather than something to be welcomed. There is nothing anti-methodological in this central point of Bloom's work, and indeed, Bloom did a great deal to reinvigorate and reformulate this area of literary study. But central to Freud is the notion of repression, the notion that we are often unable to articulate feelings of, say, hostility but our very inability to articulate such feelings may be evidence of their existence and depth. This of course makes Freudianism irrefutable as an interpretation of a person's feelings or motives, for the very move of proclaiming that Freudian categories do not apply in a given case can in Freud's view be taken as evidence that they apply with special force.

Applied to literary history, this view certainly changes our notion of admissible evidence. In Bloom's model, each poet struggles with a precursor, a poetic father, and one of the signs of that struggle can be its successful repression, which means the absence of any explicit references to it. This dictum can be expressed in a soft and a hard form. The soft form, used by most Bloomian critics, suggests merely that, given the phenomenon of repression, we need to look carefully for signs of the struggle with the repressed precursor. Thus, the evidence is there, but we need to look for it. But according to Bloom, not only can the struggle with the precursor be so completely repressed that no textual trace exists, it can also be so repressed that the "belated poet" or "ephebe" may not even have read his precursor:

Antithetical criticism must begin by denying both tautology and reduction, a denial best delivered by the assertion that the meaning of a poem can only be a poem, but another poem--a poem not itself. And not a poem chosen with total arbitrariness, but any central poem by an indubitable precursor, even if the ephebe never read that poem. Source study is wholly irrelevant here: we are dealing with primal words, but antithetical meanings, and an ephebe's best misinterpretations may well be of poems he has never read. (The Anxiety of Influence 70)

This does away with the possibility of any corroborating evidence whatsoever. For if the ephebe hasn't read his precursor (and it always is a he in Bloom's model), it is hard to imagine discernible traces of the influential non-reading in his work. Moreover, even though Bloom's own criticism tends to work with poetic relations in which it is clear that the "ephebe" has read the "precursor," this is not a prunable excrescence from Bloom's theory but its logical conclusion: if the poet is revealed to be strong by the way he interprets his precursor and such poetic strength makes every strong poet misinterpret his precursor, how better to misinterpret and repress than not to have read the poem in the first place?

Admittedly, there aren't as many Bloomians around nowadays as there once were, but Bloom's theory remains influential as a model of what a theory ought to be or, more

precisely, what it is by necessity. There is no way to argue with a Bloomian because whatever one produces as evidence against a Bloomian interpretation can be turned precisely into evidence for it. James Joyce never mentioned Henry James: palpable evidence for a Bloomian that James is Joyce's precursor. The older model based on ideas of the scientific method in which evidence is said to be introduced into the discussion from the outside in order to adjudicate between competing theories or interpretations is replaced by the notion that theories themselves produce or constitute the evidence in such a way that no adjudication between competing interpretations can take place. The theory itself defines what is to count as evidence for it.

In the years immediately after Bloom's work attracted most attention, Stanley Fish argued in an influential series of essays that what I have presented as a peculiar feature of Bloom's theory is in fact the essence of the nature of all theories. (That he does so without reference to Bloom is not in my view evidence for Bloom as a repressed precursor of Fish but rather of the typicality of Bloom's theory in this respect.) Theories work by designating in advance what will count as meaningful in the work being interpreted. Discussing competing interpretations of Milton's Samson Agonistes which disagree about whether Samson Agonistes should be read typologically as about Christ, Fish says,

Again it is important to see that the question of what is in the text cannot be settled by appealing to the evidence since the evidence will have become available only because some determination of what is in the text has already been made. ... Indeed the same piece of evidence will not be the same when it is cited in support of differing determinations of what is in the text. (Is There a Text in This Class? 274)

It is part both of Fish's candor and of his argument that he cheerfully admits that this is as true of his own theory, reader response criticism, as of any other. Reader response criticism finds patterns of expectation which are reversed or confirmed in complex ways because it looks for such things. And this is always going to be the case: what we see when we read depends directly and ineluctably upon what we expect to see. In short, theory does not describe; it prescribes. It does not explain phenomena; it creates the very phenomena it purports to describe and explain.

If Bloomians are impossible to argue with, Fish's work suggests that everyone else is too, and for exactly the same reason. We cannot meaningfully disagree about evidence because what we count as evidence is a function of our general theories about what constitutes evidence. We can only discuss such evidential claims if our theories coincide, but of course then we won't need to discuss evidence since we will see and count the same things as evidence. Meaningful methodological discussion is thus only possible where it is unnecessary. It would seem that this view makes theoretical disagreement just as impossible and unnecessary,

since it would seem as impossible to step outside our theories in order to assess their validity as it is to step outside our methods and evidential procedures. We are unable to demonstrate the truth of our interpretations since they depend on our methods, of our methods since they depend on our theories, or even of our theories since there is no genuinely neutral way to test them. Nonetheless, it is theoretical disputation which is marked as central, since everything else follows from it. Fish says that interpretation is "the only game in town," but it follows from his views that theory is really the only game in town since our theories concerning interpretation determine those interpretations and not the other way around.(1)

The change over the past decade from "pure" or "high" theory toward a more historically oriented criticism has changed some things but hasn't changed the basic balance of power between theoretical and methodological debate. One would have thought that a renewal of interest in the social and historical contexts of literature might lead to a renewed interest in methodological debate, but this has not (or at least not yet) come to pass. New Historicism, to take perhaps the most prominent "post-theoretical" movement, has shown remarkably little interest in defining or defending the method of inquiry it practices. The locus classicus of this indifference is the locus classicus of Renaissance New Historicism, Stephen Greenblatt's "Invisible Bullets." Greenblatt's essay is structured around an analogy between Thomas Harriot's A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia and Shakespeare's Henry IV plays. It hardly needs pointing out how characteristically New Historicist this way of proceeding is, to start with a text remote from our received attention, a "nonliterary text," and then argue for its relevance to a more canonical text the critic can assume greater knowledge of and interest in. The interesting moment in the essay for me is when Greenblatt begins to make analogies between the two. He imagines for a moment a reader objecting to the relation on the grounds that Harriot and Shakespeare were writing very different kinds of texts:

It may be objected that there is something slightly absurd in likening such moments to aspects of Harriot's text; 1 Henry IV is a play, not a tract for potential investors in a colonial scheme, and the only values we may be sure Shakespeare had in mind, the argument would go, are theatrical values. (45)

He answers this imagined objection by arguing in essence that the distinction between literary and nonliterary values is a theoretical distinction and that it is possible to have other theories about the relation between these two texts:

But theatrical values do not exist in a realm of privileged literariness, of textual or even institutional self-referentiality. Shakespeare's theater was not isolated by its wooden walls, nor did it merely reflect social and ideological forces that lay entirely outside it: rather the

Elizabethan and Jacobean theater was itself a social event in reciprocal contact with other social events. (45-46)

Few readers today would disagree with this statement. But if we nod our heads in agreement with this almost pat (and certainly easy) denunciation of formalism and go on with Greenblatt to his discussion of 1 Henry IV, we miss the interesting point, which is that this demonstration of the possibility of thinking in another way about this matter is all Greenblatt says in support of the connection he draws between Harriot's and Shakespeare's texts. The only argument advanced for the connection is this argument against a possible objection to it, as if the genre-based notion that Harriot and Shakespeare were writing in different genres was the only possible objection to seeing 1 Henry IV as thematically and ideologically comparable to Harriot's work.

What I find remarkable here is what I can only call the methodological insouciance. Greenblatt doesn't even bother to introduce any evidence in favor of the central assertion of his essay. Instead, he contents himself with dismissing an imagined counterargument because it is theoretical, or at least theory-dependent, and then simply proceeds with his discussion, confident that he has fenced off objections and therefore doesn't need to introduce any evidence for his argument at all. Moreover, if we judge by reference to the pragmatic consequences, this confidence is surely justified, since "Invisible Bullets" is probably his most widely celebrated and imitated essay. This is why I would call New Historicism (certainly as Greenblatt practices it, though I would consider him typical in this respect) a style rather than a method: a style shows others what can be done, a method suggests how things ought to be done.

My narrative to this point implies that I think something has gone astray, but I don't think that we've gotten to the cause yet. Greenblatt can so easily dismiss questions about method, it seems to me, because he believes with Fish and Bloom that the possibility of getting it right is an illusion. Theory produces method here, or at least an indifference to method, and the relevant theory is a skepticism about the possibility of historical accuracy or objectivity. The most cogent summary of this view as it applies to literary studies is Lee Patterson's essay, "Literary History," and I cite Patterson because though he has been critical of "New Historicism" he is one of the critics one might identify with Greenblatt as representing a new current of historicism in literary studies. Yet what a remarkable version of historicism we find when he tries to codify the current views on literary history in this essay.

Patterson, like Greenblatt, has a straw man in his essay, or rather a straw -ism, the old historicism which reigned before New Criticism and emphasized the importance of historical research in the development of valid interpretations:

However subjective might be one's understanding of a literary text, so ran the argument, history provided the facts that could control interpretation. ... Such a reconstruction [of historical events] could in turn govern the interpretation of literary texts by defining the parameters of possible significance, showing what texts could and could not mean. ("Literary History" 251)

In Patterson's view, this older historicism has been rendered untenable by our discovery that "every historical account is constructed only by recourse to practices that are themselves as thoroughly interpretive as those that characterize literary criticism" (256). The key word here is "only." We haven't needed Patterson or Fish or whomever to tell us that the writing of history requires interpretive practices; what is new here is the claim that history is constructed only by interpretive practices. Only with the addition of "only" are the truthclaims of historical discourse deflated and put on the same level as any other. In this view, there is no evidence out there--provided by historians or scholars--which can govern or regulate the scene of interpretation. As Patterson goes on to say,

it is no longer possible to believe that an objective realm of history can serve to measure the correctness of the interpretation of literary texts, since history is itself as much the product of interpretive practices as are the literary interpretations it is being used to check. (259)

Thus, if the older objectivist conception of historical truth played an important role in ruling interpretations in and out, the newer "post-objectivist" notion of truth can rule nothing in or out at all, except of course that the older objectivist model is firmly ruled out. It should be clear enough how this theoretical perspective leads to an attenuation of methodological debate. Debate is only possible where a given interpretive practice is shared, but in this view that is precisely where no debate is necessary:

the relation between language and the world is not that of correspondence--a statement is true when it conforms to the way the world is--but of convention: a statement is true when it conforms to certain norms that govern what a particular way of writing takes to be true. (257)

Correspondence to the facts or to the world gives way here to solidarity with the conventions of a group, and such solidarity is all the truth we can establish. Solidarity is truth, truth solidarity--that is all we know on earth and all we can know.

Patterson's arguments represent the essence of the anti-methodological position, a position generally not argued for in this way as much as assumed beyond question. We can see therefore that at the heart of the critique of method is a theory, a theory about truth, or to put it more precisely a theory which asserts that no objective truth is possible. In this model anyone who claims objectivity must be self-deluded, as well as possibly deluding others, and therefore there can be no principled discussion of truth-claims about methodology and evidence, since such claims are interpretive practices which are only intelligible within a set of norms or conventions and can claim no broader value or validity.

But there is something very odd about the way Patterson states his case which is worth a moment's reflection. Patterson's claim is that no one can make truth-claims which claim to describe how the world is because all such claims reflect norms or conventions held to be true, as Stanley Fish would put it, by an interpretive community. But does this claim claim to be true in just this conventional sense, true just for those who accept such conventionalist norms? Or does it claim to be true in the older, correspondence sense, a true description of how the world is? To be consistent, it cannot claim universal validity since its central assertion is that nothing can claim such universal validity. It must therefore not claim to represent how the world really is but rather how it is according to certain norms. The terms in which Patterson makes his case ("it is no longer possible to believe") suggest that Patterson does not regularly encounter anyone who does not assent to his views, but given his description of them as conventions or norms, he cannot claim without self-contradiction that they are anything more than the views of a particular community, and the community which holds this view is obviously not a universal one. But in that case, since no absolute validity can be claimed for these norms, we can if we wish claim allegiance to different norms, norms which assert--for example--that it is possible to claim universal validity for truth-claims. Therefore, the very terms of Patterson's theory of truth (and it is clear that he is putting forth such a theory) allow for the possibility of other theories about truth which do not conform to Patterson's views; nonetheless, these other views are "true" as he uses the word because they conform to a set of conventions held by a community. If he denies this possibility and insists that it is really the case that "the relation between language and the world is not that of correspondence," that his theory really describes the way things are, then he is clearly relying on the very idea of a truth corresponding to reality which he claims to be avoiding. The argument he makes seems therefore to be self-refuting. Either his arguments about truth remain the arguments of a given community, true only for those who believe them, or else there is at least one absolute and objective truth, the truth that there are no absolute or objective truths. If that truth is absolute and objective, then the argument self-destructs.

The fact that such an obviously incoherent position could become an unquestioned axiom of contemporary literary theory demands some explanation, it seems to me, and the explanation starts with an awareness that, at one level, Patterson is right inasmuch as his views on truth do represent a larger conventional wisdom about truth. There are two

somewhat distinct intellectual currents which have converged to give upholders of this view their sense that no serious challenges exist to it. One derives ultimately from Nietzsche but more proximately from Foucault, and this tradition's stress on how discursive systems formalize a will to power which claims truth-status as part of a strategy of power and domination is the major influence on Greenblatt and New Historicism. Patterson's way of putting the case reflects a different, more indigenous intellectual tradition, that represented by such figures is Thomas Kuhn, Richard Rorty, and Stanley Fish, and Patterson's focus on the role of evidence and historicity suggests that the central influence on his view is Thomas Kuhn. Though certainly a longer study of the place of the concept of truth in contemporary literary theory would have to examine Foucault and his work as well as Kuhn, I want to focus on Kuhn's theory here, not just because Kuhn's influence may be as persuasive as but less widely discussed than Foucault's but more importantly because the analytic tradition of inquiry out of which Kuhn's work springs also gives us arguments against Kuhn I want to develop, arguments which--so I would like to argue--could lead us to a more productive way of thinking about methodology and methodological debate. Moreover, the argument I want to develop against Kuhnianism in the humanities can without much difficulty be extended to Foucault; Charles Taylor has already begun to develop this line of argument.

The key text here is, of course, Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in Stanley Fish's words "arguably the most frequently cited work in the humanities and social sciences in the past twenty-five years" (Doing What Comes Naturally 486). Why Kuhn is a figure of such celebrity in a range of humanistic disciplines is not immediately obvious. As John Searle has recently and somewhat sardonically remarked, "the remarkable interest in the work of Thomas Kuhn on the part of literary critics did not derive from a sudden passion in English departments to understand the transition from Newtonian Mechanics to Relativity Theory" (71). As Searle indicates, Kuhn's work as a historian of science has focused on those moments which he calls revolutions, when one paradigm or systematic way of seeing the world overthrows another: Copernican astronomy replaces Ptolemaic, or Einsteinian physics replaces Newtonian. These are the moments where different scientific communities come into conflict, and Kuhn's most radical claim is that there is no way one community can demonstrate to another the truth of its paradigm. No appeal to nature or reality helps here because each community interprets nature or reality in different and--as Kuhn says-"incommensurable" ways. No appeal to observation or observation-statements establishes what the "truth" is because such observations are themselves theory-laden. Moreover, there are often multiple theories which explain the same observations; otherwise, there wouldn't be competing theories we need to decide between in the first place. What we see is therefore determined by what we believe as much as the other way around, so no appeal to perceptions or observations allows us to sort out which of our beliefs may be true. It is not just that our beliefs form a web, to use Quine's metaphor, it is that we are caught inextricably in the web.

The specific discourse or scientific community takes on a pivotal role here, for it is the community which creates the language in which any individual works and is understood; the community establishes the shared conventions or understandings about what counts as true within the community. Even if--as sometimes will happen in a scientific revolution--an individual scientist creates a new paradigm, this in turn becomes the basis for a new community and a new set of conventions. Being a scientist, thus, is a practice or form of life just as being a Roman Catholic is, except that the truths one is expected to believe change much more quickly in this form of life. No meta-language exists from which we can pronounce this practice to be grounded in the way things really are; all we can say is "this is the way we do it and have been taught to do it." Thus, in both cases, we are following a conventional procedure established by a community whose values have made us who we are. What we cannot do in this model is escape this realm of the socially contingent to assess the standards by which our behavior is assessed. Given the phenomenon of theorydependence, given the nonexistence of a neutral observation language, we cannot appeal to evidence in order to ascertain which of our theories are true since the evidence itself is created by the theory and we have no language to discuss the evidence which is not in itself imbued with theoretical terms and concepts. Thus, there are no transparadigmatic methods of adjudicating between competing paradigms, no rational ways to decide which is true or closer to the truth. There is no alternative to seeing the world through one's paradigm, and therefore no way to see past that paradigm to assess its validity.

Kuhn is a central figure for literary theorists who deny the possibility of objectivity because he is our premier theorist of theory-dependence. If scientific theories cannot claim objective truth-status but instead remain the practice of a given scientific community, many have drawn the conclusion that objective truth is just a mirage, given that science seems much the hardest, least interpretive part of our discursive system. As objectivity and objective truth go out the window, so too at the same time does the idea of method. For Kuhn (as well as--more explicitly--for Paul Feyerabend in Against Method), the notion that there is a scientific method is an illusion fostered by the rather Orwellian way the reigning paradigm always rewrites the history of science to make it seem like a unilateral progression toward the current paradigm. Every paradigm advances a method, but methods are as paradigm- or community-specific as everything else.

But how does Thomas Kuhn know this? How does he know that no appeal to the evidence solves a clash between competing paradigms because each paradigm constructs the evidence in accordance with what it believes? How does he know that successful paradigms rewrite the history of the science which preceded them? Kuhn himself confidently supports his case by pointing to his observations of science, particularly of the history of science, as if he can directly observe science even though no scientist can directly observe nature. He dismisses the theories of Karl Popper in a single sentence precisely by appealing to his observations: "No process yet disclosed by the historical study of scientific development at all resembles the methodological stereotype of falsification by direct comparison with

nature" (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions 77). But how is it that Thomas Kuhn can directly compare Popper's theories with the nature of scientific practice? It seems as if there is one person with access to a neutral, theory-free observation language, at least of the history of science, and that person is Thomas Kuhn.

At the very least, therefore, there is a dissonance between Kuhn's stated position on scientific knowledge and his own practice as a historian of science. The discipline of the history of science seems bedeviled by none of the epistemological complications which bedevil the sciences themselves. Kuhn does not present his observations of the history of science as ineluctably determined by his theories concerning scientific development; instead, he acts as if historical evidence is independently available and can be brought into the discussion in order to support his historical interpretations. In short, when observing scientific history he sounds and acts like one of Patterson's old historicists even though his theories are the primary support for Patterson's dismissal of such old historicism as naive in its belief in theory-independent evidence. Given his theoretical position, how can Thomas Kuhn claim to be able to step outside of scientific practice in order to describe it? How can he claim to see science as it really is when the substance of what he sees is that scientists do not in fact see things as they really are?

There are a number of ways to react to this seeming contradiction between what Kuhn says and what he does, but all of them lead us to reexamine the current Kuhnian position that because of theory-dependence, there can be no useful transparadigmatic discussion of methods and evidential procedures in literary studies, The first is to take Kuhn as offering a global or universal theory of truth. Kuhn's work has not become paradigmatic for philosophers of science and knowledge in the way it has for literary theorists, and the dominant response of analytic philosophers to Kuhn's work has been to see Kuhn as offering such a global theory but a self-contradictory and self-refuting one. My analysis of the incoherence of Patterson's theory of truth reflects this critique of Kuhn, found most extensively in the work of Hilary Putnam. Putnam's critique of Kuhn centers on Kuhn's claim that there is nothing outside of local systems of justification or local points of view. The claim itself, however, assumes precisely the transparadigmatic or "God's eye" view Kuhn claims no one can have. If Kuhn is right, he shouldn't be able to see and say the things he does.

Another way of putting this is that for a theory which has its starting point in the diversity of human communities and the diversity of what we hold to be true, Kuhn's theory has remarkably little room in it for communities which do not hold Kuhn's theory to be true. Putnam has commented in various places "how very positivist" Kuhn's view is (Realism with a Human Face 106), which though not an argument for or against it does blunt some of the claims made for its originality. What is positivist is precisely the turn to human institutions such as scientific communities to provide the justification criteria relied on in the practice

under scrutiny. However, if we grant to human institutions the right or power to choose their own justification procedures, do we grant that same right or power to human institutions which claim a deeper grounding? Putnam makes this point in the following way:

Alan Garfinkel has put the point very wittily. In talking to his California students he once said, aping their locutions: "You may not be coming from where I'm coming from, but I know relativism isn't true for me."...If any point of view is as good as any other, then why isn't the point of view that relativism is false as good as any other? (Reason, Truth and History 119; emphases Putnam's)

This returns us to Patterson's "it is no longer possible to believe"; if we take this not as an absolute claim but more provisionally as a description of the beliefs of Patterson's community, Putnam allows us to respond, yes, it is possible to believe in the objectivity of certain forms of historical knowledge, since significant other communities in contemporary academia disagree with Patterson and Kuhn. Kuhnianism may have become a dominant paradigm for literary theorists and others in the humanities, but, despite its emphasis on the role of consensus and convention, there is no consensus even (or especially) in Kuhn's own discipline that his views are correct. To return to Putnam's analysis:

It is a fact about our present culture that there is no philosophical unanimity in it: we do not accept any one philosophy, and certainly we are not all relativists...if, as a matter of empirical fact, the statement "the majority of my cultural peers would not agree that relativism is correct" is true, then, according to the relativist's own criterion of truth, relativism is not true! (Renewing Philosophy 71)

Thus, Kuhn ought according to his own views to consider those views untrue, given their failure to win the assent of the relevant community. But Putnam's deeper point is that we never proceed in this way. To argue in favor of a position on the grounds that most people think it is true or that it is the convention to think this way is not an argument, at least not something that people today would recognize as an argument. It is certainly not part of any explicit argument found in the works of Thomas Kuhn. Kuhn has never argued that his views are correct because they have been so well received; he simply argues that they are right. Community assent does not factor into his argumentation for his theses at all and he has not won the assent of the most relevant communities in philosophy and history of science, and for these reasons it is rather odd that such assent plays such an important role in those theses.

Moreover, if the individual or community which chooses its norms for truth-claims is truly free to choose, then we are free to choose as a norm if we wish the belief that historical objectivity is possible. If the response to this were that a belief in objectivity is simply not justified, then, as Putnam's anecdote about Garfinkel slyly implies, we must finally understand that behind this apparently procedural definition of truth hides a substantive view of truth, a view of how things really are underneath the claim that we can have no such global view. Description slides back into prescription, and the position slides into incoherence. Thus, no conventionalist account of truth can argue against an objectivist account without falling into self-contradiction, since it is the very heart of conventionalism that truth-theories are community-specific. Given Kuhn's stress on the community-specific nature of truth and knowledge, he cannot argue against a community which has other community-specific beliefs, including the belief that truth is not community-specific. There can be no principled rejection of a belief in objectivity since such a principled rejection implies a belief in the very transparadigmatic standards of discussion and inquiry which it rejects. Any principled argument against objectivity presupposes it.

But there is another way of taking the dissonance between Kuhn's philosophy of science and his practice as a historian of science. Those in the humanities have taken it as a given that Kuhn's critique of scientific objectivity and of notions of scientific method extends to the humanities, and the implications of Kuhn's work have been taken by Rorty, Fish, and many others as weakening or even eliminating the demarcations between scientific and nonscientific practices, as putting the two on an ontological par. But it's possible that we may have jumped to conclusions and that Kuhn's work may not be as self-contradictory as his analytic critics such as Putnam and Searle have found him to be. Kuhn may think theorydependence is a problem for the objectivity of scientific investigation but not for the objectivity of historical investigation. In other words, he could think that the evidence advanced by a scientist in favor of his or her paradigm or theory is necessarily theorydependent, but that he, Thomas Kuhn, can observe what really happened in the history of science. This would indeed be a surprising conclusion to come to, since it would suggest that objectivity, far from being restricted to the natural sciences, is in contrast restricted to the human sciences. However, though surprising, this would not be utterly unprecedented. Giambattista Vico, writing in the early eighteenth century, argued in Scienza nuova that human knowledge could only be certain concerning things humans had made. Scientific propositions about nature in this view can only be highly probable, not absolutely true, but we can know the truth about human institutions and achievements. And it is possible to read the dissonance between Kuhn's theory of scientific knowledge and his own methods as a historian of science as a somewhat displaced version of this principle, generally referred to as the verum-factum principle.

I can present no direct evidence in favor of this way of reading Kuhn, no explicit statements by Kuhn to this effect, but it is worth pointing out that after a period in which Kuhn--like others--tended to try to separate his work from the use that had been made of it, he has

recently restated his original positions with renewed clarity and vigor. Specifically, his recent essay, "Afterwords," argues with exemplary clarity at "I aim to deny all meaning to claims that successive scientific beliefs become more and more probable or better and better approximations to the truth" (336). The reason remains "incommensurability": "It follows that no shared metric is available to compare our assertions about force and motion with Aristotle's and thus to provide a basis for a claim that ours (or, for that matter, his) are closer to the truth" (330). The apparent self-contradiction in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions remains here despite thirty intervening years in which Kuhn's position has undergone challenge: the truth as to whether our theories or Aristotle's are closer to the way nature is is unknowable but the truth about Aristotle's theories and ours is not. Putnam would be quick to point out the self-contradiction here, and he is right to find self-contradiction if Kuhn thinks his theories about scientific knowledge are global ones, that they apply to historical knowledge. Clearly, anyone applying Kuhn to issues in the humanities such as Rorty or Patterson is caught in this self-contradiction because such an application presupposes that Kuhn's work applies to questions of historical knowledge. However, the very confidence with which Kuhn asserts that we can know the truth about Aristotle's theories even if we cannot know the truth about what those theories are about suggests that the Vichian principle sketched above is at work, that Kuhn may simply have never regarded his skepticism about objectivity in the sciences to apply to historical knowledge at all.

Thus, however we read Kuhn, his work fails to support skeptical conclusions about methodology, evidence, and truth in the humanities. If we attend to what Kuhn does as opposed to what he says, we find a careful historian attentive to the problems of historical representation but firmly committed to the notion that, because historical evidence is not viciously theory-dependent, historical objectivity is attainable by historians such as himself. Putnam's critique of Kuhn explains this apparent paradox much more successfully than Kuhn can. As Putnam has argued, when we engage in argument or when we point to evidence as support for our position, when we advance any substantive position whatsoever, the very act of engaging in that activity commits us to a belief in truth beyond simply the views our community accepts. For if my interlocutor doesn't agree with me, then theory-dependence suggests that he or she holds a different theory; otherwise, we would already agree. It therefore makes no sense to try to argue for my views in the presence of disagreement or to introduce evidence supporting my view. If I give reasons or present evidence for my position, I must think that my reasons and evidence transcend my specific position and can convince others who do not share it; otherwise my task would be a hopeless one.

Thomas Kuhn surely must think so, for he has tenaciously argued for and introduced historical evidence in support of his position for more than thirty years. So, too, does Lee Patterson, as we can quickly see when we turn from his theoretical writings to his practical criticism. Despite his theoretical claims to the contrary, Patterson constantly appeals to historical evidence and presents this evidence as if its truth or falsity were ascertainable by

empirical means. He tells us, for example, in his recent Chaucer and the Subject of History, that "to see Chaucer as somehow caught between two worlds and therefore free of both is both to misunderstand the structure of late medieval English society and to underestimate the strength of the poet's political commitments" (122-23). Hence, a correct understanding of history, an understanding somehow available to Lee Patterson, does enable us to "govern the interpretation of literary texts," precisely by defining "parameters of possible significance." Several pages later, Patterson begins his discussion of the role of the Miller in The Canterbury Tales by discussing the role of millers in medieval England, by saying that "in fact millers played a crucial if still somewhat obscure role in the medieval rural economy" (125). It is when we encounter the phrase "in fact" that we feel the cognitive dissonance familiar from reading Kuhn, for this is the moment at which a conventional theory of truth falls back on the very notions of objectivity it claims are naive and outmoded. If it's a matter of (ascertainable) fact what role millers played in the medieval rural economy, then Patterson's statement would seem to be true not because "it conforms to certain norms" but because "it corresponds to the way the world is."

Putnam would insist that this contradiction I have just located in Patterson, exactly what he finds in Kuhn and Rorty, is unavoidable in any argument for community-centered or criterial-as Putnam calls them--notions of truth and argument. Though the forms of life or institutions or paradigms or interpretive communities which have helped to shape us are undoubtedly important influences on what we hold to be true, the very activities of speaking and arguing for substantive positions contradict any criterial notion of truth, the notion that truth is simply a matter of fidelity to the norms or conventions of a community. Argument itself in Putnam's view presupposes a notion of truth and methods or practices of justification which "are not themselves defined by any single paradigm" (Realism with a Human Face 125) or community. And the attempt to claim that nonetheless this view is true-since our attempt to escape our community is in this view a deluded one--implies exactly the kind of transparadigmatic perspective it denies.

If we grant this point--and the examples of Kuhn and Patterson suggest that actual argumentative practices may at times tacitly concede it whether or not it is explicitly granted--then the questions of evidence and method are reopened in all the ways one could wish. I say opened, not settled, because noting in Putnam's critique of Kuhn and nothing I have said here commits one to any specific position concerning methods or evidential procedures. The Putnamian argument I have outlined securing the legitimacy of a belief in historical objectivity and in evidential procedures designed to secure such objectivity should not be taken as an argument to the effect that any particular set of arguments or evidential procedures is truly objective. What I have been outlining is not a position in a debate about evidence but rather a position about such a debate. To put this another way, I have not been putting forward an argument in favor of objectivism as much as an argument against the arguments against objectivism. But I think I have demonstrated that no one can coherently deny the possibility of objective truth in the categorical way Patterson does.

What is the point or consequence of this demonstration? Stanley Fish has argued that theory has no consequences, and one way of reading the preceding argument--particularly the tension between what Kuhn and Patterson say and what they do--would be to find more support for Fish in my story. No matter what theories we hold, we inevitably argue for our positions in much the same sort of way. In contrast, I think that a demonstration that the arguments against the possibility of objective truth which have seemed so convincing over the past generation nonetheless presuppose the very notion of truth they have worked so hard to dislodge is an argument with potential consequences. We read evidential claims very differently depending upon whether our theories include or preclude the possibility of theory-independent evidence. The relevant difference is between critics with a commitment to truth and to the notion that evidential procedures can get us closer to the truth (and Kuhn and Patterson, despite their theories, demonstrate such a commitment in their research) and those whose actual practice as well as their theories demonstrate no such commitment.

It seems to me that the major consequence of accepting Putnam's argument that truth and objectivity cannot be dismissed as categorical impossibilities is the attitude which then follows toward evidence and method. If truth is a possibility, then we may wish to discuss which of our competing interpretive methods strike us as bringing us closer to the truth. Even if the choice between methods remains a choice between competing communities, it seems to me altogether to the good to have those communities actually compete. Our tacit agreement to disagree because of the theory which has assured us that methodological debate is pointless is itself theoretically untenable and ultimately pointless. If we must choose and if we can choose, I would prefer the give and take of methodological and theoretical debate to the cozy communal solipsism which denies the possibility of intelligent disputation with others who do not agree with us. That has become a self-fulfilling prophecy over the past generation, but literary studies may be in the process of awakening from this dogmatic slumber.

NOTE

1. Fish has gone on in subsequent essays collected in Doing What Comes Naturally to argue that theory is impossible and should disappear, but given that what he means by theory in this argument is a successful reduction of the different ways we interpret to one true description, the construction of one grand theory, what Fish's argument means in practice is that because theory in this sense is impossible, theoretical discussion or "theory-talk" will never disappear. Fish's model of different communities perceiving the world and the text in incommensurable ways leaves the possibility of those different communities comparing their methods, as opposed to their theories, as remote as ever.

WORKS CITED

Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence. New York: Oxford UP, 1973.

Feyerabend, Paul. Against Method. Rev. ed. London: Verso, 1988.

Fish, Stanley. Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies. Durham: Duke UP, 1989.

--. Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1980.

Graff, Gerald. Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education. New York: Norton, 1992.

Greenblatt, Stephen. "Invisible Bullets." In Shakespearean Negotiations. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. 21-65.

Kuhn, Thomas S. "Afterwords." In World Changes: Thomas Kuhn and the Nature of Science. Ed. Paul Horvich. Cambridge: MIT P, 1993. 311-41.

--. The Structure of Scientific Revolution. 2d ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1970.

Patterson, Lee. Chaucer and the Subject of History. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1991.

--. "Literary History." In Critical Terms for Literary Study. Ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990. 250-62.

Putnam, Hilary. Realism with a Human Face. Ed. James Conant. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990.

--. Reason, Truth and History. New York: Cambridge UP, 1981.

--. Renewing Philosophy. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992.

Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1979.

Searle, John R. "Rationality and Realism, What is at Stake?" Daedalus 122, No. 4 (Fall 1993): 55-83.

Taylor, Charles. "Foucault on Freedom and Truth." In Philosophy and the Human Sciences. Philosophical Papers Volume 2. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985. 152-84.

Vico, Giambattista. The New, Science. 3d ed. Trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch. Garden City: Anchor, 1961.

Reed Way Dasenbrock has taught since 1981 in the Department of English at New Mexico State University, where he is now Professor of English and Department Head. His previous publications in College English include "Do We Write the Text We Read?" (January 1991) and "Taking It Personally: Reading Derrida's Responses" (March 1994). Both of these articles and the present one sketch out parts of the argument of a manuscript now nearing completion which has the working title of From Conventions to Intentions: The Pursuit of Truth in Literary Studies.

Word count: 8096 Copyright National Council of Teachers of English Conference on College Composition and Communication Sep 1995

Indexing (details) Cite

Subject Literary criticism; Interpersonal communication; Intellectuals Title Truth and methods Author Dasenbrock, Reed Way Publication title College English Volume 57 Issue 5 Pages 546 Number of pages 16 Publication year 1995 Publication date Sep 1995 Year 1995 Publisher National Council of Teachers of English Conference on College Composition and Communication Place of publication Urbana Country of publication United States Publication subject Education--Higher Education, Literature ISSN 00100994 CODEN CENGBY Source type Scholarly Journals Language of publication English Document type Feature Accession number 02495231 ProQuest document ID 236923185 Document URL http://search.proquest.com.newdc.oum.edu.my/docview/236923185?accountid=48462 Copyright Copyright National Council of Teachers of English Conference on College Composition and Communication Sep 1995

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