The kind of faulty reasoning that Stanley Fish writes about so incisively in the New York Times ("So's Your Old Man") derails meaningful discussions in politics and film criticism all the time, and it's so transparently bogus that I wonder how people keep getting away with it. I've railed against it in Scanners many times over the years, but Fish dissects it beautifully here:
We saw it in spades a while ago when Democrats lamented the incivility of public discourse and blamed right-wingers for proclaiming over and over that President Obama was a foreign Islamic usurper working to undermine American values. The right replied by rehearsing the litany of things said by democrats about George Bush -- he was a tool of corporate interests, a warmonger and an enemy of civil liberties. So what gives you the high moral ground, those on the right asked, when you were equally vile in your accusations?
I want to say that this is a bad move (and a cheap trick) because it deflects attention from the substantive claims being made and puts the spotlight instead on propositional consistency. The better move (by either party) would have been to insist that Obama or Bush was in fact those things and to back up the assertion with the marshaling of evidence. The better move, in short, would have been to take a stand on truth rather than shifting the focus to a calculation of reciprocal fairness. What gives someone the high moral ground is that he or she is right, not that he or she is fair.
This reminds me of the persistent myth of "objectivity" as applied to public discourse of all kinds -- which, I think, often involves a misunderstanding of what that word means. Fish continues:
Back in the heyday of the culture wars, conference organizers were often faulted if those invited to participate did not represent the full variety of views in the field. Many responded by adding a token something or other to every panel. Again the better move would have been just to say that we've gathered here to elaborate what we believe to be the right position, and to require us to give time and space to positions we reject and think worthless is to require us to value process over substance; and we won't do that.
In 2004 I wrote a piece ("Politics, celebs and movie critics") about complaints that certain documentaries (for example: "The Corporation," "Control Room," "Fahrenheit 9/11," "Going Upriver," "The Yes Men," "Hijacking Catastrophe"...) were not "objective" but were, in fact, "biased" toward one argument or another:
It's worth remembering that all of the docs mentioned above have been offered as commentary on, and counter-arguments to, prevailing biases (and myths) in contemporary American journalism and culture -- the "conventional wisdom," you might say, whether it's the pervasive advertising and public relations efforts of multi-million-dollar corporations or official statements from the White House. They are meant to be seen in that context -- as counter-arguments. They encourage debate; they don't seek to stifle it.
As [Jamie] Whyte writes in Crimes Against Logic: "You are entitled to an opinion, in [the] epistemic sense, only when you have good reasons for holding it: evidence, sound arguments, and so on. Far from being universal, this epistemic entitlement is the kind you earn.... If someone is interested in believing the truth, then she will not take the presentation of contrary evidence and argument as some kind of injury." [O, the unfairness of the truth!]
[...] The filmmakers are building a case -- and raising questions they feel need to be asked, even if the answers are still unknown....
There's a misconception that "objectivity" means reporting "both sides" of an issue (and perhaps the worst misconception is that there can be only two sides -- black or white). "Objectivity" does not mean he said/she said reporting without good, old-fashioned fact-checking -- which is where the major news organizations have failed us so badly in recent years. If somebody says, "It's 72 degrees Fahrenheit in this room," and his opponent says, "No, it's 43 degrees Fahrenheit in this room," you don't just report each statement and leave it at that. You check a thermometer.
Whenever I see phrases like "equal-opportunity offender" or "skewers all sides" or "something to offend everyone" in a movie review, I fear what it really means is that the filmmakers are spineless flip-floppers, pandering to the audience with desperate attempts to please everybody by insulting everybody.
Or that they're afraid to take a stand. Or that they haven't bothered to think something through very thoroughly.
Which is not to say that there isn't enough criticism to go around, only that saying so does not constitute "fairness" or any kind of valid counter-argument. ("Oh, and some people who agree with me about this are also wrong about other things, too...")
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Jim, normally I agree with you when you argue against equivalence, but this is a case that I think you have absolutely wrong.
What's at issue in this particular argument is the question of what sort of behavior deserves to be denounced. Barbour sidesteps that neatly by challenging his audience's neighborliness and civility, saying that “I don’t go around denouncing people.” The implication, presumably, is that he leaves the denouncing to gossips and backstabbers.
Of course, that's an oversimplification of things. Some actions deserve to be denounced; this was the point of Pitts' article, and he made his case that co-founding the Klan qualifies as such an action. And yet, Fish reinterprets Pitts' article, based on the mention of bin Laden, as an argument that all morally-objectional actions must be denounced. Really, Fish reads Pitts' article as a restatement of Barbour's deflection, which ignores all but a few words of it.
I intentionally did not bring up those examples because I don't know enough about what Barbour or Pitt said. I just wanted to concentrate on the paragraphs I quoted and the idea that responding to criticism with criticism is not necessarily a valid way to rebut the original argument.
Side note- that Stanley Fish piece brings up Nathan Bedford Forrest. The Ken Burns Civil War documentary is airing nationally Sunday, April 3 – Thursday, April 7 from 8:00 to 10:00 p.m and if you haven't seen it.... I just watched the whole thing on DVD and it's an experience worth having.
As for Forrest, well Fish says he founded the KKK. Forrest did not actually found the KKK.
Regarding "racism". One thing I've learned about the 1800s (and most of human history)is that pretty much everybody was what we now call "racist". Look up Lincoln quotes on "the darkies".
Unfortunately, the phenomenon that Mr. Fish complains about is both ubiquitous and insidious. The final outcome of this flawed logic is as simple as it is depressing: there are certain accusations that you are not allowed to make, regardless of whether they are justifiable.
The tortured logic which leads us to this sad state of affairs seems to be as follows:
Step 1: Assume that everyone is basically a decent human being.
Step 2: Observe any accusation which implies that the opposition is less than a decent human being.
Step 3: Conclude that such an accusation must be false, due to the premise established in step #1.
Step 4: Conclude that the accuser must not be a decent human being, for making such an accusation.
In short, if you make a particularly harsh accusation, you will quickly find yourself on the defensive, and people won't even care whether you can marshal evidence to support your claim.
What got a lot of this sort of thing started (at least that I can remember) was 45-50 years ago, when the conventional wisdom was that women were hysterical (in several senses), "negroes" were stereotypical in other ways, and so on.
People became certain these views were wrong, and ignored the opposition, whether the opposition had well-reasoned arguments or not.
Nowadays, you can look on the internet, tv, etc., and fine people very articulately arguing what you do not and never will believe. It's understandable that you reject their arguments even if you can't explain where you think those arguments are flawed.
No, I don't have a solution, just wanted to present an observation.
Race is a good example of an argument you're simply not allowed to make, regardless of its rational merits. Is it possible that asians really do have a genetic predisposition to be good at math? It might be (there's certainly plenty of statistical evidence to suggest that this might be the case). Is that a mere stereotype? Is it due to culture bias or pressure? Or is it actually a genetic variation, no more profound or Earth-shaking than the fact that black people seem to be superior sprinters (just witness the Olympic 100 metre dash, which might as well be renamed "five black men racing every 4 years")?
I'm not going to pronounce judgement on that contentious question (and if I did, people would immediately accuse me of racial self-interest, since my surname obviously indicates that I'm Asian). I'm just going to point out that anyone who even asks that question or give any credence to the third possibility is immediately attacked. You are simply not allowed to even consider it, regardless of whether you can marshal empirical evidence in its defense.
The argument that certain conclusions are inadmissible on the ground that they make you a bad person is pervasive enough to be inescapable. It's totally understandable where this attitude comes from (after all, to take an extreme example, anyone who says "the Nazis had some good ideas" is quite justifiably going to be placed under extreme suspicion), but it can also put a serious damper on otherwise potentially legitimate political or scientific discourse.
@Michael Wong
Heinlein observed, in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", that in North America people care about race, and show it by working very hard to show that they don't care about race.
Or something like that.
What I find even worse is people who take a controversial and wrong headed stance, but encode within their argument a martyrdom against the supposedly pervasive "political correctness" of our time, in effect dismissing all criticism as some kind of witch hunt before the fact.
Me, too. We all know that sometimes we have emotional biases that we later support with the evidence we've gathered to support those biases. That's the way we're wired. But at least have enough respect for reality to marshall that evidence when challenged. Certain public figures (SP, for example) express opinions that get a lot of media attention -- and yet they don't appear to know how they reached those opinions or why they hold them. In which case, why should we care about their opinions?
"Political correctness" is DoubleSpeak anyway. The people who sling that term invariably have their own sensitive issues where they can get offended. They just mock issues where OTHER people take offense.
Definition of "Politically Incorrect": when other people are offended by something you say.
Definition of "Offensive": when you are offended by something other people say.
I'm only half-joking; I think this is actually a pretty accurate description of the way these terms are used in practice.
Oh, dear. It appears that new rules are necessary in establishing an orderly argument in debates on how to fairly equaninimize biased opinions.
1. It is fair game to quote oneself. But to quote oneself quoting somebody else, scholars may be found to agree, is Barthelmeish.
2. Scholars may also be found to agree that rule number 1. is potentially too confusing a basis on which to create a rule number 2.
The bigger problem is not the manner in which people quote, but the kind of quote they choose. When people use quotes in an argument, they usually select a quote which merely expresses their own opinion more eloquently than they could themselves. It's the written equivalent of patting oneself on the back, with some name-dropping thrown in for good measure.
Ideally, a quote is used because it contains an argument or logical proposition which can be discussed, not just an opinion which happens to mesh with your own. Otherwise, quotes are a waste of time: a facile method of increasing one's perceived credibility without doing any of the necessary legwork to actually demonstrate understanding of the issues.
Yes, yes, but what you're forgetting is that Stanley Fish is an incredible a**hole.
I admit I know nothing about him except for what I read in this NYT column.
Jim, you have a Dan Dennett quote above. I've wondered how much philosophy you read or have read.
Anyway, Fish is a controversial figure as OMG's post indicates. Don't know about "a**hole" or why they say that. Fish was/is labeled a "postmodern" writer and if one thing is clear about that word it's that it means controversial...
An interesting (and scathing) review/attack of Fish's book "The Trouble with Principle" by literary critic Terry Eagleton is worth reading. (free online from London Review of Books).
Thanks for the info. Apart from a couple philosophy courses in college (and quite a few psychology courses -- I was an English Lit major), I haven't read much philosophy -- but in the years since I've read some Becker, Dennett, Dawkins, Damasio... the usual popular suspects (and skeptics). I'm particularly interested in neuroscience and history of religion, so I've approached a lot of it from those angles. (Hence my fondness for, say, Jonah Lehrer and early Karen Armstrong.) And beyond a little Foucault I've done very little formal reading on postmodernism -- other than absorbing its ubiquitous presence in pop culture, especially in the 1980s. So I guess that's why I didn't know about Stanley Fish and his controversial reputation! Nevertheless, I think the paragraphs I quote hold up.
His assholishness and solipsism are legendary among people who know him from within academia. He coined some famous phrases in the 70's and helped to translated continental theory into literary theory for the American academy (good, important work that anybody in an English department is very familiar with), but then became celebrity scholar who's credited with completely wrecking one department and with arguing for nihilistic philosophical positions.
His most famous literary theory remains important, and I rather like that stuff. (I'm not a Milton Scholar, but his work on that is widely understood to be landmark stuff also.) But he's not someone who's famous for being ethical or reasonable, either in terms of professional conduct or rhetoric.
I'm actually not particularly interested in denouncing him, as I rather do like a couple of his essays that are cannonnical stuff. But if you articulate even reasonable sounding arguments he makes (like the one you are talking about here) to his larger body of work and see where he's coming from, I'm not sure you'd be so enthusiastic about him. He's a very controversial figure who a lot of smart people from both the left and the right dislike intensely. He is, more or less, the ultimate equal opportunity offender.
(And I'm actually very sympathetic to the postmodern kind of thought that is the bugaboo that so many people get mad at him about. He's a bad ambassador for it though.)
I'm sympathetic to the postmodern kind of thought that so many get mad at Fish about too, but you mention him arguing for nihilistic positions and I'd assume you're referring to postmodern positions.
I admire Richard Rorty first and foremost because like Harold Bloom famously said Rorty is really interesting. And a wonderful writer. While sympathetic to pomo rhetoric/thought -not hostile- I still don't agree with Rorty on epistemology. I tried to make myself but find it strikes me repeatedly as insane.
Trout, I love me some Rorty.
I don't think that postmosdern thought is essentially nihilistic at all, but some of the positions Fish has taken are, and he has a history of co-opting opponent's arguments in a way that is pretty disingenuous.
The nihilistic part of Fish are his refusal to disavow what is essentially an a proi idea about epistomology, and his refusal to more or less admit that ideas and reality interact. Those positions don't characterize all of what we might call "postmodern thought." It's Cartesian dualism taken to an extreme. That's certainly a problem for some of the megastars of postmodern theory, but there is a much more practical strain of thought in there too, like Rorty or Feyeraband. (Says me anyway.)
I'm in the unusual position of really liking postmodern thought, but really disliking Stanley Fish. He gets bashed unfairly for being the American postmodern English department rock star. That IS unfair, when there are better reasons that one could bash him. It's one of those "nothing irritates me more than doing a bad job of arguing for my position" kinda deals. I'd recommend Rorty to anybody.
But again, I'm not really interested in bashing him. I just want to point out that he's a controversial figure who has become famous for being an intellectual gadfly more than for anything else. (Well, except for queer theorists who take Edie Sedgwick's word that his English department at Duke was homophobic or more or less everybody else's word that the department was unprofessionally run.) I'm just reporting. His legacy is secure, but his reputation is what it is.
It is sadly ironic that, in a discussion about the tendency to ignore the substance of an argument in favour of attacking its author's biases, so many people are choosing to discuss the character flaws of Stanley Fish.
That's a bingo!
Cute. This is old news, but if you read carefully, you'll note that I'm attacking the larger project to which this editorial is articulated. You are reading Fish out of context. Forget all the personal stuff, and pay attention to the critiques of his ideas. It's not difficult to explain how his editorials are consistent with a really asinine philosophical project. I'm not sure your acknowledging "where he's coming from" in your celebration of him. If you want to annoy English professors, ask them about Stanley Fish's latest editorial, and they'll start ranting about the axes he's grinding. It's dog whistles that not everybody cares about, but come on Jim. Don't be all junior high on us. Nobody's being unfair.
Hmmmm I confess to completely ignoring the entire argument, not merely whatever is substantial to it. I'm not interested in the character flaws of Fish too much. The flaws some claim to be present in his work in general do interest me but this shouldn't affect my assessment of the argument. This being an argument clinic entry I was reminded of my curiosity about Hans' philosophical background because he is very clever and interesting.
That's fair enough. I do agree with those paragraphs. It's the overall argument in his article that I have a problem with: the reframing of Pitts' article as taking a position on a reasonably-clear-cut question ("Should we censure all morally questionable behavior equally?"). In fact, Fish's argument against Pitts is a fantastic example of dissembling-as-rebuttal, and basically the same sort of thing he decries in the passage you quoted.
"So what gives you the high moral ground, those on the right asked, when you were equally vile in your accusations?"
To which the proper response is:
"So what? If Johnny were to jump off the Empire State Building, would you jump off the Empire State Building?"
I swear -- some people's children.
I think THIS response is why you are wrong to praise Fish. Go read the original articles he's talking about and then decide how fair and reasonable Fish is being. He's loaded the dice so that he can make a clear cut point about a situation that is not clear cut, and he's making a counter-intuitive argument about the facts of the case by basically misrepresenting everyone involved. Pulling paragraphs out of the context of an article that pulls ideas out of the context of a debate isn't particularly reasonable.
Again, old news, but come on. It gets my goat to see anyone as intellectually irresponsible as Fish being held up as a standard of reasonableness. It's not that I dislike Fish (I don't respect him personally, but all appearances here aside, I don't really have a particular grudge against him, and I tend to take his side of some of the more public debates he's gotten involved in about philosophy), but it's that you are saying he is the opposite of what he explicitly claims to be.
It's not that you are characterizing him in a way that argues against his opponents, it's that you are arguing a position that is counter to his stated philosophical beliefs. (This is what's annoying.) I'm kind of a "Fish insider" since I have an intellectual interest in him, and it's frustrating to watch you glibly ignore what he's about, which isn't fair and reasonable debate. (He explicitly says that about himself. I'm not being pejorative. I have a lot of respect for the project he's a part of. But he's a complicated, thorny figure.)
You can spot the exact moment that American journalism began to die: Point/Counterpoint on Sixty Minutes. It created the illusion that there are two sides to every story and that they are both worthy of equal time.
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