Two editors at CHE have interviewed four of the authors of the “Boghossian Report” (including the NYU philosophers Paul Boghossian and Anthony Appiah). Professor Boghossian says in the interview, “We say how we are taking the term ‘relativism’ to mean the very narrow view that epistemic values are always relative to nonepistemic values, to moral or pragmatic values. Very, very narrow.” Fair enough, but that is exactly the view that philosophers like Jason Stanley and others defend, so saying, as the Report does, that, “the intellectual case against relativism about knowledge is overwhelming” is over-claiming, absent some reason for thinking the views of Stanley et al. have been refuted.

Professor Appiah’s response on this point is even odder: he says the Stanley view is “philosophically interesting, but I don’t think it’s relevant to the advice we offered.” Of course, it’s directly relevant given what Professor Boghossian says about the target. The mistake, as I said originally, was to write as if epistemic relativism had been decisively refuted. What is true, and which the Report could have limited itself to, is that it is very bad when fields of epistemic inquiry explicitly make their arguments and evidence subservient to stated political aims, full stop. The Report rightly criticizes that tendency.

Now to explain the joke in the title of this post. The interview continues:

Gutkin: One more criticism, this from Brian Leiter on his blog. He writes of “the rather surprising claims in the report, such as that ‘the intellectual case against relativism about knowledge is overwhelming’ … So much for Carnap’s ‘Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology’ and some ways of understanding Quine — not to mention Herder, F.C.S. Schiller, and many other serious humanists. (And what about Boghossian’s colleague Hartry Field?) The report would make itself less vulnerable to dismissal had it not taken that position.” Leiter, in other words, seems to be suggesting that the consensus in the field about relativism is not as settled as you make it out to be.

Boghossian: What we’re responding to are people who say it is established science, as it were, within philosophy that there is no distinction between epistemic reasons and nonepistemic reasons. They’ve been saying that it’s been established science for at least 60 years, based on work by Derrida and Foucault and so on. The vast majority of analytic philosophers find that very problematic. So it’s enough to say to the people that we’re criticizing that it is very, very far from settled within philosophy that all knowledge is political in that sense.

Leiter mentions Herder and Schiller. I didn’t see the relevance of that to the very narrow thing that we were disputing.

Herder is admittedly a stretch (but his view about the relativity of concepts has implications for epistemology), but Schiller is an actual defender of Protagorean relativism (not much read anymore). Professor Appiah’s response is, once again, odder:

Appiah: Carnap and Quine would be astonished to be told that they thought that epistemic reasons were relative to political reasons. And Hartry, who’s a friend and a colleague of ours, would collapse in shock.

Of course, I didn’t say they thought epistemic norms were relative to political ones, but I did say their views have implications for epistemic relativism. Indeed, Professor Appiah’s colleague Thomas Nagel spends some time critiquing the relativism he finds in Quine in The Last Word (one of the two books, besides Boghossian’s Fear of Knowledge, the Report cites as making the “overwhelming” case against relativism about knowledge), and Nagel is not alone in that regard. One need not get bogged down in the details of Quine interpretation to recognize that one of Quine’s most famous remarks (from “Two Dogmas”: “For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer’s gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind”) hints at a possible epistemic relativism. (I myself have written about why Quine is not a postmodernist, but it is not for reasons that put him on the Boghossian/Nagel side of the debate about epistemic relativism.)

Carnap thinks the question, “Do chairs exist?” is relative to a linguistic framework. He thinks frameworks are chosen on “pragmatic” not “epistemic” grounds. It is only a few short steps from this view about ontology to a kind of epistemic relativism (even if there might be ways to block those steps). As to Professor Field–who I very much hope has not “collapsed in shock”–one need only look at the abstract I referred readers to to see that Professor Appiah’s assurance should not be taken at face value. Here is Field:

The paper outlines a view of normativity that combines elements of relativism and expressivism, and applies it to normative concepts in epistemology. The result is a kind of epistemological anti-realism, which denies that epistemic norms can be (in any straightforward sense) correct or incorrect; it does allow some to be better than others, but takes this to be goal-relative and is skeptical of the existence of best norms. 

The target of the Report, according to Professor Boghossian, is that “epistemic values are always relative to nonepistemic values, to moral or pragmatic values.” Anti-realism about epistemic norms, which only permits their assessment relative to goals is rather obviously in the vicinity of the stated target.

What Professor Appiah’s non-responses, in particular, confirm is that it was, as I said originally a mistake to overclaim about relativism in the Report. One can have all kinds of meta-epistemic and meta-ontological views and still agree that a field of inquiry should answer to evidence and arguments, rather than making evidence and arguments secondary to a stated political objective.