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Why practice doesn't make perfect . Simon Blackburn claims the foundations of truth lie in our everyday practices of judging and criticising. Edward Skidelsky is unconvinced by a very British assumption
Published 23 May 2005
Truth: a guide for the perplexed
Simon Blackburn Allen Lane, the Penguin Press, 238pp, £14.99
ISBN 0713997184
Simon Blackburn, professor of philosophy at Cambridge University, is feeling harassed. What troubles him is "the minds of other people". Astrology, feng shui, Christianity and other manifestations of mass irrationality are flourishing shamelessly. "If only people would be sensible. If only they would submit to the order of reason." However, what really irks Blackburn is not these popular aberrations, but that intellectual sophistry - variously labelled multiculturalism, postmodernism or relativism - which gives them licence and even encouragement. Truth is a riposte to such woolly-mindedness. Its urbane and witty prose belies a formidably austere rationalism.
Blackburn is not, mind you, one of those old-fashioned dons described by Hilaire Belloc, who "shout and bang and roar and bawl/The Absolute across the hall". His is a more subtle approach. He has no desire to resurrect the notion of the "one true world" lurking behind and validating our beliefs; he accepts the work of demolition carried out by such philosophers as Nietzsche and William James. His claim is rather that the cardinal concept of truth, and its companions reason and objectivity, survive this demolition intact. For their true foundations lie not in metaphysics or theology, but in our everyday practices of judging, criticising, measuring and assessing. Every time we engage in these practices, we extend an implicit endorsement to the values of truth. Trendy intellectual nostrums vanish like mist in the face of workaday success. "Even that great public sceptic about the value of science, Prince Charles, never flies a helicopter burning homoeopathically diluted petrol."
There is something very British about the confidence that Blackburn reposes in everyday belief and practice. The 18th-century sceptic David Hume found his doubts regarding the existence of the external world happily vanquished by a well-roast goose and a bottle of port. More recently, the Oxford philosopher Peter Strawson has argued that belief in human freedom, being implicit in our everyday practices of praise and blame, is immune to the onslaughts of psychology and sociology. Theory - so runs the general pattern of argument - can huff and puff as long as it likes, but it can never dislodge the granite of custom and habit. Mere cleverness is impotent against the deeper structures of human existence.
Blackburn is in this tradition. His tactic is to show how sceptics such as Richard Rorty unwittingly affirm the very concept of truth they seek to deny. Rorty is notorious for identifying truth with "what your contemporaries let you get away with". Yet he insists that this identification is not a licence to bullshit, because the contemporaries he has in mind are not just any old mob, but the most "enlightened" and "curious" of our "fellow enquirers". But his position is now practically indistinguishable from that of his opponents, because "enlightened", "curious" and "enquirers" are simply the epithets we give to those who possess, or seek to possess, the truth. Similarly, Nietzsche's declaration that "there is only a perspective seeing" inadvertently rehabilitates the very objectivism it is designed to debunk, for a perspective is necessarily a perspective "on" an independent reality. The concept of truth is, it seems, inescapable. Rorty and Nietzsche shrug it off only to find themselves once again enmeshed in its coils.
The implication of these and other passages is that we should all just simmer down. What looks at first glance like a momentous struggle, with repercussions for all our intellectual practices, fizzles out on analysis into a purely technical controversy. Such differences as remain between "realists" and "anti-realists" are of concern only to professional philosophers. The rest of us can safely ignore them and carry on interpreting and experimenting as we have always done. We must not let our confidence be sapped by the "apres-truth chit-chat" of coffee-house intellectuals.
I sympathise with Blackburn's stress on confidence. Too much self-consciousness is the death of any intellectual enterprise; it diverts attention away from the issue at hand and into fruitless methodological perplexities. But where Blackburn strikes me as over-optimistic is in his assumption that our intellectual practices are in themselves perfectly healthy, that the virus of doubt enters only from without. "Our words may sound insecure, but our practice is as robust as may be." Honest toilers in laboratory and library need only insulate themselves against the hypochondria of the coffee-house chatterers and everything will be OK. But what if the germs of intellectual self-doubt are incubated not in the coffee house, but in the laboratory and library? What if practice contains the seeds of its own disintegration?
Blackburn himself provides an amusing example of the disintegration of a practice. When the celebrity artist Tracey Emin lost her cat and put up "lost cat" notices around her London neighbourhood, these were immediately taken down and treasured as valuable works of art. Had she prefixed them with the words "This is not a work of art" they would have been viewed as still more valuable works of art. Emin can do nothing but produce works of art: and this only means that the whole notion of a "work of art" has lost its meaning. Emin is, in Blackburn's analogy, like an archer who fires arrows randomly into a barn door and then draws targets around them. What looks at first glance like a 100 per cent success rate is, in fact, the collapse of any independent standard of success or failure. Conceptual art exists in a normative vacuum. And what fills the vacuum is not creativity, as its apologists would have us believe, but money, fashion and celebrity.
I don't know exactly why aesthetic standards have so disintegrated, but I am sure it is less a consequence of external philosophical influences than of internal developments in the world of art. One would have to look at the curricula of art schools, at the dynamics of the art market and at the roles of curators, collectors and critics. The point is that the collapse of artistic norms is an institutional fact, not the projection of a group of malicious coffee-house intellectuals. Everyday practice is not the secure bedrock that philosophers such as Blackburn take it to be; it is perpetually on the brink of subsidence.
Art does not aim at truth - at least not in the ordinary sense of the term. Yet why shouldn't more strictly intellectual pursuits suffer the same collapse exemplified by Tracey Emin and her cat? Here, too, a combination of institutional and popular pressures can easily overwhelm the finely balanced structures of mutual respect that sustain any rigorous, norm-governed activity. Flattery, whether by the state or by the market, always menaces truth. No practice is so "robust" that it can be left to fend for itself. Even natural science, the most self-assured of the intellectual disciplines, could easily succumb - perhaps, indeed, already has succumbed - to the blandishments of commerce. The investigation of the deep structures of physical reality would then give way to a kind of avaricious tinkering. Science would become what its critics have always accused it of being: an instrument of exploitation, with no claim to represent the world "as it really is".
Thus while Blackburn is right to shift the focus of debate away from theory and on to practice, he is wrong to assume - and it is a very British assumption - that practice can look after itself. Truth calls out for a sequel, more sociological than philosophical, outlining the institutional conditions of serious, disciplined inquiry. Rorty and his ilk are not the problem. It is the quiet hollowing-out of our own intellectual practices that should instead be arousing our concern.
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