A CHE editor asked me to redo this post as a “letter to the editor” which they have published here, and which I reprint below:

To the Editor:

In the interview with four authors of the “Report on the State of the Humanities and Humanistic Social Science” (hereafter “the Report”), New York University philosopher Paul Boghossian helpfully explains that in criticizing relativism, “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.” Many of Boghossian’s trenchant arguments in his book Fear of Knowledge (Oxford, 2006) reappear in the Report (disclosure: I was one of the referees for that book). Indeed, the Report cites Boghossian’s book and The Last Word (Oxford, 2007), by fellow NYU philosopher Thomas Nagel, for the proposition that “the intellectual case against relativism about knowledge is overwhelming.” Is it really?

As the philosopher Jason Stanley pointed out on his substack, the view that epistemic justification is relative to pragmatic interests is exactly the view that he and many other contemporary philosophers have defended, and there is no response at all to their views in the report. In the recent interview, another NYU philosopher and report co-author, K. Anthony Appiah, acknowledges that Stanley’s view is “philosophically interesting, but I don’t think it’s relevant to the advice we offered.” But if “the very narrow view that epistemic values are always relative to … moral or pragmatic values” is, as Boghossian says, the Report’s target, then the failure to even acknowledge these recent arguments is a serious omission (even if the views of Stanley et al. have not influenced recent relativism in the humanities).

Even stranger is Appiah’s response when asked in the interview about my blog observation that the views of two major figures in the history of analytic philosophy, Rudolf Carnap and W.V.O. Quine (whose views are still highly influential), as well as the recent work of yet another NYU philosopher, Hartry Field, would again suggest that it overstates things to say “the intellectual case against relativism about knowledge is overwhelming.” Appiah replies: “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 these philosophers thought epistemic norms were relative to specifically “political” values, but I did say their views have implications for epistemic relativism in Boghossian’s sense. Ironically, Appiah’s colleague Nagel agrees with me about Quine: He devotes a good bit of time to critiquing the relativism he finds in Quine in The Last Word, which given the prominence that book occupies in the Report, I would have expected Appiah to know. As Appiah should surely know, Quine famously quips that “in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and [the Homeric] gods differ only in degree not kind,” although Quine equally famously believes only in the physical objects not the gods — but for reasons many readers take to be pragmatic, not epistemic.

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 (within a framework, there is an epistemically objective answer to whether one knows chairs exist, but there is no epistemically objective answer to which framework to believe in). As to Appiah’s friend Hartry Field: I am optimistic that he has not “collapsed in shock,” since as I pointed out to readers, Field defends what he himself calls a kind of epistemological “relativism” “which denies that epistemic norms can be (in any straightforward sense) correct or incorrect,” although some can be better (e.g., more useful) than others depending on our (non-epistemic) goals. This view is clearly proximate to the target as Boghossian defines it.

Appiah’s disingenuous responses to being confronted with the evidence of serious philosophical arguments for varieties of epistemic relativism just confirms what I said originally: It was a mistake for the Report to make such strong claims about the prospects of epistemic relativism. Whatever one’s meta-epistemic or meta-ontological views, one can strongly agree, as I do, with the Report’s point that it is a corruption of an academic field if its conclusions are determined in advance by the politics of its practitioners, rather than by a disinterested application of the methods (the arguments, evidence etc.) that are supposed to characterize that scholarly discipline. How widespread that problem is the Report does not answer, but it is clearly the case that some humanistic scholars are guilty of this corruption.

Brian Leiter
Professor of jurisprudence
Director, Center for Law, Philosophy & Human Values

University of Chicago

UPDATE: Professor Boghossian replies to this letter here. He notes again that the relativism the Report criticizes is “the very narrow view that epistemic values always depend on background political or moral values,” and then adds a useful clarification: “Actually, in the case of most of the scholars we discuss, perhaps all, we could drop the word ‘moral’ since ‘political’ is their preferred term. (It may also have been unwise of us to occasionally use the term ‘pragmatic’ to stand for “political” as I expect that that is playing a role in Leiter continuing to read the target thesis more broadly than intended.)” Dropping “pragmatic” (which does not mean “political”) does, indeed, make a difference and does narrow the target further, and also makes the positions of Quine, Carnap, and Field irrelevant. (On the other hand, I do think Quine’s view, in particular, is open to the Theaetetus-style objection that Professor Boghossian describes in his letter and develops systematically in his Fear of Knowledge book. As Professor Siegel noted in the review of the latter book I linked to originally  it could be “relativism is true relative to a theory that it pays for us all to accept, relativists and non-relativists alike,” a view Professor Siegel rejects, but which may be closer to what Quine believes, where “pays for us all to accept” is given a pragmatic (but not political) gloss.

ANOTHER: Professor Stanley writes:

Pragmatic encroachment has very clear political consequences, ones that affect in straightforward ways the very examples the report uses. The belief that woman is a biological concept is a “serious practical question” in the sense of my 2005 book. After all, if the belief is true, it has real practical consequences for people’s lives. So, there are higher evidentiary standards for such claims, and work arguing for these conclusions has to meet these higher evidentiary standards for publication. Mutatis Mutandis for other claims with high stakes consequences. Given the practical consequences of its conclusions, you need a ton of especially good evidence to argue for scientific racism (and of course we just get the same terrible and ignorant arguments about how the environment couldn’t possibly be bad enough to explain disparities, so extent published arguments clearly do not reach these higher evidentiary standards).

Pragmatic encroachment vindicates the sense that when stakes are higher, publication standards should be as well. I’m not defending these conclusions about inquiry. I’m just pointing out that it straightforwardly follows from the thesis of pragmatic encroachment that there are political considerations you need to weigh in scholarly inquiry, and they are political considerations of the very sort the report argues are illegitimate. 

I’m not here endorsing these consequences, I’m just pointing out that they follow.