Bunge - in Praise of Intolerance To Charlatanism in Academia - Annals of The New York Academy of Sciences 1995
Bunge - in Praise of Intolerance To Charlatanism in Academia - Annals of The New York Academy of Sciences 1995
CHARLATANISM I N ACADEMIA“
MARIO BUNGE
Foundations and Philosophy of Science Unil
McGill University
Montrkal, Canada H 3 A 1W7
U
P UNTIL T H E M I D - 1 9 6 0 s whoever wished to engage in mysti-
cism or freewheeling, intellectual deceit or antiintellectualism had to
do so outside the hallowed groves of academe. For nearly two cen-
turies before that time the university had been an institution of higher
learning, where people cultivated the intellect, engaged in rational discus-
sion, searched for the truth, applied it, or taught it to the best of their abilities.
To be sure once in a while a traitor to one of these values was discovered, but
he was promptly ostracized. And here and there a professor, once tenured,
refused to learn anything new and thus became quickly obsolete. But he
seldom lagged more than a couple of decades, was still able to engage in ra-
tional argument as well as to distinguish genuine knowledge from bunk, and
did not proclaim the superiority of guts over brains or of instinct over reason-
unless, of course, he happened to be an irrationalist philosopher.
This is no longer the case. Over the past three decades or so very many
universities have been infiltrated, though not yet seized, by the enemies of
learning, rigor, and empirical evidence: those who proclaim that there is no
objective truth, whence “anything goes,” those who pass off political opinion
as science and engage in bogus scholarship. These are not unorthodox orig-
inal thinkers; they ignore or even scorn rigorous thinking and experimenting
altogether. Nor are they misunderstood Galileos punished by the powers that
be for proposing daring new truths or methods. On the contrary, nowadays
many intellectual slobs and frauds have been given tenured jobs, are allowed
to teach garbage in the name of academic freedom, and see their obnoxious
writings published by scholarly journals and university presses. Moreover,
many of them have acquired enough power to censor genuine scholarship.
They have mounted a Trojan horse inside the academic citadel with the inten-
tion of destroying higher culture from within.
a The research leading to this paper was supported in part by the Humanities and
Social Sciences Research Council of Canada. Some paragraphs of this paper have been
taken from M . Bunge, Finding Philosophy in Social Science and Social Science under
Debate.
96
Charlatanism in Academia BUNGE 97
The academic enemies of the very raison d’Ctre of the university can be
grouped into two bands: the antiscientists, who often call themselves “post-
modernists,” and the pseudoscientists. The former teach that there are no ob-
jective and universal truths, whereas the academic pseudoscientists smuggle
fuzzy concepts, wild conjectures, or even ideology as scientific findings. Both
gangs operate under the protection of academic freedom, and often at the
taxpayer’s expense, too. Should they continue to use these privileges, mis-
leading countless students and misusing public funds in defaming the search
for truth, or should they be expelled from the temple of higher learning? This
is the main problem to be tackled in the present paper. But first let us sample
the production of the academic antiscientists and pseudoscientists, restricting
ourselves to the humanities and social studies.
ACADEMIC ANTISCIENCE
Academic antiscience is part of the counterculture movement. It can be
found in nearly all departments of any contemporary faculty of arts, partic-
ularly in the advanced countries. Let us take a look at a small sample of the
antiscientific reaction inside the gates of Academia: existentialism, phenom-
enology, phenomenological sociology, ethnomethodology, and radical femi-
nist theory.
Example 1: Existentialism
Existentialism is a jumble of nonsense, falsity, and platitude. Let the reader
judge by himself from the following sample of Heidegger’s celebrated Sein
und Zeit, dedicated to Edmund Husserl, his teacher and the founder of phe-
nomenology. On human existence or being-there (Dasein): “Das Sein des
Daseins besagt: Sich-vorweg-schon-sein-in-(der Welt-)als Sein-bei(innerweltlich
begegnendem Seienden).” On time: “Zeit ist urspriinglich als Zeitigung der
Zeitlichkeit, als welche sie die Konstitution der Sorgestruktur ermoglicht.”2
I dare anyone to make sense of these wordplays, or even to translate them
into standard German. Other famous formulas of Heidegger’s, such as Die
Welt weltet (“The world worlds”), Das Nichts nicbtet (“Nothingness noth-
ings”), Die Spracbe spricht (“Language speaks”), and Die Werte gelten
(“Values are valuable”), have the virtue of brevity but are just as nonsensical
as the former.
Not content with writing nonsense and torturing the German language,
Heidegger heaped scorn on “mere science” for being allegedly incapable of
“awakening the spirit.”3 He also denigrated logic, “an invention of school-
teachers, not of philosophers.”* Last, but not least, Heidegger was a Nazi
ideologist and militant, and remained unrepentant until the end.5 (No mere
coincidence here: the training of obedient soldiers ready to die for an insane
criminal cause starts by discouraging clear critical thinking.) In short, existen-
tialism is no ordinary garbage: it is unrecyclable rubbish. Its study in academic
courses is justified only as an illustration of, and warning against, irrational-
ism, academic imposture, gobbledygook, and subservience to reactionary
ideology.
98 ANNA Ls New York Academy of Sciences
Example 2: Phenomenology
This school, the parent of existentialism, is characterized by opaqueness.
Let the reader judge from this sample of its founder’s celebrated attack upon
the exact and natural sciences: “I as primaeval I [Ur-lch] construct [konsti-
tuire] my horizon of transcendental others as cosubjects of the transcendental
intersubjectivity that constructs the world.”6 Phenomenology is also a mod-
ern paragon of subjectivism. In fact, according to its founder the gist of phe-
nomenology is that it is a “pure egology,” a “science of the concrete transcen-
dental s~bjectivity.”~ As such, it is “in utmost opposition to the sciences as
they have been conceived up until now, i.e., as objective sciences.”s The very
first move of the phenomenologist is the “phenomenological reduction” or
“bracketing out” (dpochd) of the external world. “One must lose the world
through e‘pochk in order to regain it through universal self-examination.”9 He
must do this because his “universal task” is the discovery of himself as tran-
scendental (i.e., nonempirical) ego. lo
Having feigned that real things such as chairs and colleagues d o not exist,
the phenomenologist proceeds to uncover their essences. To this end he
makes use of a special intuition called “vision of essences” (Wesensschau),the
nature of which is not explained, and for which no evidence at all is offered.
The result is an a priori and intuitive science.” This “science” proves to be
nothing but transcendental idealism. This subjectivism is not only episte-
mological but also ontological: “the world itself is an infinite idea.”Ij
How could anyone think that this wild fantasy could shed any light on any-
thing except the decadence of German philosophy? This extravagance can
only have at least one of two negative effects on social studies. One is to focus
on individual behavior and deny the real existence of social systems and
macrosocial facts; these would be the products of such intellectual procedures
as aggregation and “interpretation” (guessing). The other possible negative ef-
fect is to alienate students from empirical research, thus turning the clock
back to the times of armchair (“humanistic”) social studies. The effect of the
former move is that social science is impossible; that of the second is that so-
cial science is impossible. Either or both of these effects are apparent in the
two schools to be examined next.
Example 4: Ethnomethodology‘5
This is the offspring of the union of phenomenology with symbolic inter-
actionism. The members of this school practice what phenomenological so-
ciologists preach: they observe at first hand and record trivial events in the
Lebenswelt or everyday life, focus on symbols and communication, and skirt
any important activities, processes, and issues, particularly large-scale social
conflicts and changes. They engage in participant (short-range) observation
but shun experimentation, which they disapprove of on philosophical
grounds. Lacking theories of their own, the ethnomethodologists invoke the
murky pronouncements of hermeneutics, phenomenology, and even existen-
tialism-all of them declared enemies of science. Obviously an antiscientific
philosophy that opposes the search for objective truth could hardly inspire
scientific research. Mercifully the ethnomethodologists make no use of these
doctrines in their empirical work. As a matter of fact, in field work they behave
as positivists-even while vehemently denouncing positivism-inasmuch as
they spend most of their time collecting data, which they are unable to inter-
pret correctly for want of theory.
In fact, the ethnomethodologist audiotapes and videotapes “the detailed
and observable practices which make the incarnate [?] production of ordinary
social facts, for example, order of service in a queue, sequential order in a con-
versation, and the order of skillfully embodied [?] improvised conduct.”1G
Possible English translation: “The ethnomethodologists record observable or-
dinary life events.” The data thus collected are audible or visible traces left
by people who presumably behave purposefully and intelligently. These
traces are the only clues the ethnomethodologists can go by, for, lacking a
theory, they cannot tell us what makes people tick-i.e., they cannot explain
the behavior they observe and record. Their practice does not differ from that
of the empiricist and, in particular, the behaviorist-as even Atkinson, a sym-
pathizer of the school, has admitted. ‘7 In short, they behave like positivists
even while engaging in positivism bashing-actually a devious way of at-
tacking the scientific approach.
Only the ethnomethodologists’ convoluted lingo suggests intimate contact
with their philosophical mentors. For example, Garfinkel starts one of his
books by stating that ethnomethodology “recommends” that “the activities
whereby members [of a group?]produce and manage settings [?] of organized
everyday affairs are identical with members’ procedures for making those set-
tings ‘account-able’[?]. The ‘reflexive’[?] or ‘incarnate’[?] character of ac-
counting [?I practices and accounts makes up the crux of that recommen-
100 A N N A LS New York Academy of Sciences
mate part of the known”-just because some of the women they interviewed
felt so.21Sandra Harding goes as far as to assert that it would be “illuminating
and honest” to call Newton’s laws of motion “Newton’s rape manual.”22(The
rape victim would be Mother Nature, which of course is feminine.) Moreover,
basic science would be indistinguishable from technology, and the search for
scientific knowledge would be just a disguise for the struggle for power-as
Herbert Marcuse23and Michel Foucault2*had claimed earlier o n the strength
of the same empirical evidence, namely none. The radical feminist philoso-
phers are interested in power, not in truth. They want to undermine science,
not to advance it. In this way they d o a double disservice to the cause of femi-
nine emancipation: they discredit feminism by making it appear to be bar-
baric, and they deprive it of a strong lever-namely the scientific research of
the spurious causes and the pernicious effects of gender discrimination. More-
over, their attack on science alienates women from scientific studies and thus
reinforces their subordinate position in modern society.25
To sum up, our antiscience colleagues are characterized by their appalling
ignorance of the very object of their attack, namely scienwZ6Lacking intel-
lectual discipline and rigor, they have been utterly barren. This has not pre-
vented them from misleading countless students, encouraging them to choose
the wide door, incapacitating them to think straight and get their facts right,
and in many cases even write intelligibly.2’ Why should any serious and so-
cially responsible scholar tolerate barbarians intent on discrediting genuine
scholarly pursuits and even destroying modern culture?
ACADEMIC PSEUDOSCIENCE
To paraphrase Grouch0 Marx: the trademark of modern culture is science;
if you can fake this, you’ve got it made. Hence the drive to clothe groundless
speculations, and even old superstitions, with the gown of science. The popu-
lar pseudosciences, such as astrology, pyramidology, graphology, UFOlogy,
“scientific” creationism, parapsychology, and psychoanalysis, are easy to spot,
for they are obviously at variance with what is being taught at the science
faculties. (Psychoanalysis would seem to refute this assertion, but it does not.
Indeed, nowadays psychoanalysis is taught in only some psychiatry depart-
ments, which are part of medical schools, not of science faculties.) On the
other hand, the academic pseudosciences are harder to spot partly because
they are taught at university departments the world over. A second reason is
that these pseudosciences abide by reason, or at least seem at first sight to d o
so. Their main flaws are that their constructions are fuzzy and do not match
reality. (Some of them, such as neo-Austrian economics, even claim that their
theories are true a priori.) Let us take a small sample, restricting our discussion
to two trends: the love of spurious precision (in particular, pseudoquantifica-
tion) and the post-Mertonian sociology of science.
than words. Thus, in his massive and famous Trattato di sociologia generale
Pareto listed a number of “residues” or “forces,” among them sentiments, abil-
ities, dispositions, and mythsz8He assumed tacitly that the “residues” are nu-
merical variables. But, since he failed to define them, the symbols he used are
mere abbreviations for intuitive notions. Unaware of this confusion between
arbitrary symbols and symbols designating mathematical concepts, he wrote
about the composition of such “f0rces.”~9Further down he introduced the
formula “q = A/B,” where A stands for “the force of class I residues,” and B
for “the force of class I1 residues” in a given social group or nation.3O
Roughly, q would be the ratio of progressivism to conservatism. Since Pareto
made no attempt to define any of these “magnitudes,” he had no right to di-
vide them or to assert that they increased or decreased quantitatively over
time in any group or nation. Ironically, earlier in the same work @. 509) he
had warned that “Residues correspond to certain instincts in human beings,
and for that reason they are usually wanting in definiteness, in exact delimi-
tation.”3I And even earlier in the same work he had devoted an entire chapter
to characterizing and criticizing pseudoscientific the0ries.3~Likewise Pitirim
Sorokin, one of the founders of American sociology and an early critic of
what he called “quantophrenia,” sometimes indulged in the latter.33 For ex-
ample, he defined the freedom of an individual as the quotient of the sum of
his wishes by the sum of his means for gratifying them.3* But since he did
not bother to define wishes and means in a mathematically correct way, he
“divided” words. In sum, the symbols he used in this case were mere short-
hand for intuitive notions.
Professor Samuel Huntington, the famous Harvard political scientist, was
far sloppier. In fact he proposed the following “equations” concerning the im-
pact of modernization in developing nations:
Social mobilization/Economic development = Social frustration,
Social frustrationlMobility opportunities = Political participation,
Political participation/Political institutionalization = Political instability.35
Huntington did not define any of these “variables,” he did not explain how
numerical values could be assigned to them, and he did not even bother to
tell us their dimensions and units. Obviously, he was unaware that he had
“divided” words, not numerical values of honest functions. This was pointed
out by the mathematician Neal Koblitz in a paper titled “Mathematics as
Propaganda,” which led Yale mathematician Serge Lang to campaign success-
fully against the induction of Professor Huntington into the United States
Academy of Sciences. Regrettably, many political scientists and sociologists de-
fended Huntington, thereby exhibiting their mathematical and methodologi-
cal naivete.36
Professor Gary Becker, a Nobel laureate at the University of Chicago, is fa-
mous for his economic approach to the study of human behavior. Unfortu-
nately he leans heavily on undefined utility functions and tends to pepper his
writings with symbols that do not always represent concepts. For example,
a key formula of his theory of social interactions reads thus: “R = DI + h.”3’
Here i labels an arbitrary individual, and R is supposed to stand for “the
Charlatanism in Academia 0UNGE 103
CONCLUSION
I submit that the academic charlatans have not earned the academic
freedom they enjoy nowadays. They have not earned it because they produce
or circulate cultural garbage, which is not just a nonacademic activity but an
antiacademic one. Let them d o that anywhere else they please, but not in
schools; for these are supposed to be places of learning. We should expel the
charlatans from the university before they deform it out of recognition and
crowd out the serious searchers for truth. They should be criticized, nay de-
nounced, with the same rigor and vigor that Julien Benda attacked the intel-
lectual mercenaries of his time (1927) in his memorable L a trahison des
clercs-which, incidentally, earned him the hatred of the so-called organic in-
tellectuals of all political hues. Spare the rod and spoil the charlatan. Spoil the
charlatan and put modern culture at risk. Jeopardize modern culture and
undermine modern civilization. Debilitate modern civilization and prepare
for a new Dark Age.
In former times higher learning was only a refined form of entertainment
and a tool of social control. Today it is all that and more: scientific knowledge,
science-based technology, and the rationalist humanities are not only intrin-
sically valuable public goods but also means of production and welfare, as
well as conditions of democratic debate and rational conflict resolution. The
search for authentic knowledge should therefore be protected from attack and
counterfeit both inside and outside Academia. To this end I propose the adop-
tion of the following Charter of Intellectual Academic Rights and Duties:
1. Every academic has the duty to search for the truth and the right to
teach it.
2. Every academic has the right and the duty to question anything that
interests him, provided he does it in a rational manner.
3. Every academic has the right to make mistakes and the duty to correct
them upon detecting them.
4. Every academic has the duty to expose bunk, whether popular or
academic.
5. Every academic has the duty to express himself in the clearest possible
way.
Charlatanism In Academia BUNGE 111
6 . Every academic has the right to discuss any unorthodox views that in-
terest him, provided those views are clear enough to be discussed
rationally.
7 . N o academic has the right to present as true ideas that he cannot jus-
tify in terms of either reason or experience.
8. Nobody has the right to engage knowingly in any academic industry.
9. Every academic body has the duty to adopt and enforce the most rig-
orous known standards of scholarship and learning.
10. Every academic body has the duty to be intolerant to both countercul-
ture and counterfeit culture.
To conclude. Let us tolerate, nay encourage, all search for truth, however
eccentric it may look, as long as it abides by reason or experience. But let us
fight all attempts to suppress, discredit, or fake this search. Let all genuine in-
tellectuals join the Truth Squad and help dismantle the “postmodern” Trojan
horse stabled in Academia before it destroys them.
NOTES
1 M. Heidegger, Sefn und Zeit, p. 192.
2 Ibid., p. 331.
3 Heidegger, Einfuhrung in die Metaphysik, pp. 20, 37.
4 Ibid., p. 92.
5 Ibid., p. 152.
6 E. Husserl, Die Krisis der europaischen Wfssenschaftgenund die tramendentate
Phanomenologie, p. 187.
7 Husserl, CarfesfanfscheMeditatfonen,p. 68.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid., p. 183.
10 Ibid., p. 76.
11 Ibid., section 34.
12 Ibid., p. 118.
13 Ibid., p. 97.
14 E.g.,A. Schu[e]tz, The Phenomenology of the Socfal World;and P. Berger & T. Luck-
mann, The Social Construction of Reality.
15 E.g., H. Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology; and E. Goffman, Behavior in
Public Places.
16 M. Lynch, E. Livingston & H. Garfinkel, “Temporal Order in Laboratory Work,”
p. 206.
17 P. Atkinson, “Ethnomethodology: A Critical Review.”
18 H.Garfinkel, Sfudfesf n Ethnomethodology, p. 1.
19 Ibid., p. 11.
20 R. Collins, “Interaction Ritual Chains, Power and Property.”
21 M. F. Belenky, B. M a . Clinchy, N. R. Goldberger & J. M. ’Farule, Women’s Ways of
Knowing. The Development of SeiJ Voice, and Mind. ,
22 Sandra Harding, The Scfence Question in Feminism, p. 113.
23 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Industrial
Society.
24 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish.
25 D. Patai & N. Koertge, Professing Feminism. Cautionary Talesf m m the Strange
World of Women’s Studfes, p. 157.
26 P. R.. Gross
.
& N. Levitt, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels
112 A N N A L S N e w York Academy of Sciences
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