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Philosopher Paul Boghossian provides a “precis,” and reply to critics, of the “Boghossian Report”…

Brian Leiter

…at The Philosopher’s Magazine. (A relevant earlier post on this blog here.) I call particular attention to these remarks near the end of Professor Boghossian’s essay:

According to the standard diagnosis, the humanities have been captured by the ideological left leading to an unacceptable viewpoint homogeneity that needs to be remedied by appointments, to be enforced from above, of faculty who represent the ideological right. ‘Viewpoint diversity’ and ‘ideological balance’ are the buzzwords of this way of framing the issue.

We believe that this constitutes a catastrophic misdiagnosis of what ails universities nowadays. The last thing we should want to do is try to balance the political distortion of scholarship from the left by political distortion from the right. What we need to do is to restore a conception of the justification of scholarly claims that is as unabashedly about following the evidence wherever it may lead as it is possible to get. This should not, of course, be heard as a plea to revert to an outdated positivist conception of scientific inquiry. There are many respects in which inquiry is legitimately shaped by non-epistemic values: which projects we engage in, which words we use, how we refine the meanings of vague words, what standards we bring to bear in designing institutions and so on.

Our preoccupation in the report is exclusively with the standards for assessing scholarly claims and not with any of these other matters. And a desire to promote our alternative view of the problems universities face motivated our difficult decision to release the report at this time.

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3 responses to “Philosopher Paul Boghossian provides a “precis,” and reply to critics, of the “Boghossian Report”…”

  1. Patrick M., (Doctoral Researcher, Psychological Authoritarianism)

    The way I read this is that Professor Boghossian is trying to ease the waters a little bit by removing blame from “the left”, but in doing so he sacrifices precision. His strategy is to unjustifiedly conjoin the diagnosis with the antidote, and then rejecting the diagnosis by rejecting the antidote.

    This is evidenced here: “According to the standard DIAGNOSIS, the humanities have been captured by the ideological left leading to an unacceptable viewpoint homogeneity that [ANTIDOTE:] needs to be remedied by appointments, to be enforced from above, of faculty who represent the ideological right. […] We believe that this constitutes a catastrophic MISDIAGNOSIS of what ails universities nowadays. The last thing we should want to do is try to [ANTIDOTE:] balance the political distortion of scholarship from the left by political distortion from the right.” (emphases added)

    I agree that the proposed antidote should be rejected, and strongly so, but he should also provide reasons why this implies we should reject the proposed diagnosis. It is possible to acknowledge that radical progressive [sic?] politics has caused some of the recent failures in academic scholarship, while rejecting that we need to inject right-wing politics into wissenschaft. I see a responsibility to do so, but at the very least, I hope it can be a serious discussion. Denying it without argument is exactly the type of political illness we do do not want.

    I know many academics that are politically left leaning and do not think this to be a “catastrophic misdiagnosis” of the state of the humanities. If religious conservatives would somehow succeed in deplatforming progressive or even moderate scientists, redacting their publications, etc., I reckon we would be much more willing to accept the equivalent “catastrophic misdiagnosis”.

    Boghossian’s reply is, for my taste, too much concerned with removing blame on a certain type of progressive politics, and not enough with engaging in serious thought. I wonder if the type of pressure — to not criticise certain progressive strands –, that presumably has not “ailed universities” in the last 10 years, is precisely what moved him to write a reply like that.

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  2. LFC

    Boghossian writes:
    “What we need to do is to restore a conception of the justification of scholarly claims that is as unabashedly about following the evidence wherever it may lead as it is possible to get.”

    In history and the qualitative social sciences, it’s often not obvious or clear that “the evidence” leads in one particular direction rather than another, or it is, any rate, debatable. Moreover, when it comes to many questions there’s simply too much “evidence” for any single person to assimilate, so the question of which pieces of evidence to emphasize becomes important. And while scholars can try to divest themselves of preconceptions and just “follow the evidence,” everyone will be influenced to some extent by the circumstances of their training and prior inclinations, including their methodological inclinations about how to do research, how to weigh claims, how to draw inferences, how to test different arguments, etc. As a distinguished historical sociologist observed roughly 50 years ago, “we are all irremediably the products of our background, our training, our personality and social role, and the structured pressures within which we operate.” Those factors will necessarily exert *some* influence on how people go about conducting their inquiries even if one consciously tries to minimize that influence.

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  3. Richard Moran

    In accusing me of a fondness for ad hominem arguments, Prof. Boghossian confuses a few distinct matters. There is nothing ad hominem in my Boston Review article. There is no mention of Daniel Diermeier or Peter Thiel, etc., as I did not know anything about Diermeier at the time I wrote my piece, which only focused on the report. I only followed up on that later. And to raise questions about the process and the constitution of the committee is not to engage in ad hominem argument either. This is a committee that purports to speak on the condition of a broad range of disciplines and so the presence of a diversity of perspectives should matter.
    The more serious misrepresentation is to suggest there is something ad hominem in the Boston Review piece by making reference to something else, a later Facebook post in which I paste several links concerning Daniel Diermeier, one of the two chancellors who commissioned the report. The Boston Review piece stands on its own, but the links posted on Facebook are not an example of ad hominem argument either. To suggest otherwise is simply to rule out any attention to the context of the report and its possible political implications.

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