- Epistemology, History of Science, Philosophy of Science, History of Human Sciences, Ludwik Fleck, Bruno Latour, and 20 moreEmbodied and Enactive Cognition, Science and Technology Studies, Critical Theory, Philosophy of Biology, Metaphilosophy, Philosophy Of Language, Relativism, Constructivism, Science and Religion, Philosophical Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Culture and Cognition, Human Evolution, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Languages and Linguistics, Anthropology of Religion, Cultural Anthropology, Social Psychology, Environmental Humanities, and Climate Changeedit
Revised and expanded text of a talk delivered at the 2018 Conference on Political Concepts, Brown University, December 7-8, 2018. The paper traces usages of the term “scientism” from its initial appearance in mid nineteenth-century... more
Revised and expanded text of a talk delivered at the 2018 Conference on Political Concepts, Brown University, December 7-8, 2018.
The paper traces usages of the term “scientism” from its initial appearance in mid nineteenth-century France (as “scientisme”) to describe the ascendant positivism of the era through its twentieth-century theorizations in two politically complex essays, “Scientism and the Study of Society” by economist Friedrich Hayek and “The Origins of Scientism” by cultural and political theorist Eric Voegelin, to its variously directed current invocations by theologians, philosophers, humanities scholars, and social scientists seeking to protect existing claims to epistemic dignity from what are seen as improper, irrelevant, or overreaching invocations of the natural sciences. I draw some morals from the story, note some connections, distinctions and historical ironies, and offer some comments on contemporary usages of the term.
The paper traces usages of the term “scientism” from its initial appearance in mid nineteenth-century France (as “scientisme”) to describe the ascendant positivism of the era through its twentieth-century theorizations in two politically complex essays, “Scientism and the Study of Society” by economist Friedrich Hayek and “The Origins of Scientism” by cultural and political theorist Eric Voegelin, to its variously directed current invocations by theologians, philosophers, humanities scholars, and social scientists seeking to protect existing claims to epistemic dignity from what are seen as improper, irrelevant, or overreaching invocations of the natural sciences. I draw some morals from the story, note some connections, distinctions and historical ironies, and offer some comments on contemporary usages of the term.
Research Interests: Economics, Political Economy, Political Philosophy, Epistemology, Philosophy of Science, and 10 moreSocial Sciences, History of Science, Science and Religion, Neoliberalism, Eric Voegelin, History and Philosophy of the Human Sciences, science and technology studies (STS), Positivism, Friedrich Hayek, and Scientism
The article is concerned with the history of “close reading,” understood as a practice crucial to the field of literary studies, vis-à-vis “distant reading,” a range of computational methods identified with the digital humanities. I look... more
The article is concerned with the history of “close reading,” understood as a practice crucial to the field of literary studies, vis-à-vis “distant reading,” a range of computational methods identified with the digital humanities. I look at some early controversies regarding close reading and “the New Criticism,” the movement associated with it, and at how the practice has figured in Anglo-American literary studies over the course of the past century. I turn then to how a certain idea of “close reading” has come to figure in the discourses of the digital humanities. At the end, I offer some general reflections on methods, past and possibly future, in literary studies.
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A central motivating force in Bruno Latour's work for at least the past two decades--and perhaps from the beginning--has been his hope to frame a generally acceptable, intellectually sophisticated, and theologically proper account of... more
A central motivating force in Bruno Latour's work for at least the past two decades--and perhaps from the beginning--has been his hope to frame a generally acceptable, intellectually sophisticated, and theologically proper account of religion, specifically of Christianity. In his pursuit of these ends, Latour has tied together a constructivist-pragmatist account of scientific knowledge with a rhetorically deft Christian apologetics to produce a singular—bold, inventive, and in many ways compelling but also equivocal--anthropotheology.
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Advocates of literary Darwinism, cognitive cultural studies, neuroaesthetics, digital humanities, and other such hybrid fields now seek explicitly to make the aims and methods of one or another humanities discipline approximate more... more
Advocates of literary Darwinism, cognitive cultural studies, neuroaesthetics, digital humanities, and other such hybrid fields now seek explicitly to make the aims and methods of one or another humanities discipline approximate more closely the aims and methods of science, and at their most visionary, they urge as well the overall integration of the humanities and natural sciences. This essay indicates some major considerations—historical, conceptual, and pragmatic—that may be useful for assessing these efforts and predicting their future. Arguments promoting integration often involve dubious teleological models of intellectual history and betray limited understandings of the distinctive epistemic orientations and cultural functions of the humanities vis-à-vis the sciences. Recurrent institutional difficulties encountered by scholars and/or scientists in hybrid fields reflect steep prestige differentials between the humanities and sciences, along with significant differences of training, experience, style, and temperament. Meanwhile, both the sciences and humanities are being shaken up by technological and related intellectual developments. Though worrisome, the new disciplinary configurations are thus likely to play out in surprising and, not inconceivably, positive ways.
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Text of entry for *The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics*, 2nd ed., 2015
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The piece was published in the journal *Common Knowledge* in 2011 as a contribution to a symposium titled “Comparative Relativism.” Other participants included philosopher Isabel Stengers and anthropologists Marilyn Strathern and Eduardo... more
The piece was published in the journal *Common Knowledge* in 2011 as a contribution to a symposium titled “Comparative Relativism.” Other participants included philosopher Isabel Stengers and anthropologists Marilyn Strathern and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. In it, I argue that, in most philosophical usages and attacks over the past century, relativism is a chimera: half straw man, half red herring. Although there are signs that this tragicomic episode of intellectual history has run its course, two contemporary sites of antirelativist energy are worth noting. One is the claim (e.g., by anthropologist-psychologist Scott Atran), invoking cognitive-evolutionary science, that so-called cultural relativism is refuted by the existence of cognitive universals. The other is the fear on the part of some ethicists and politically engaged academics that evaluative symmetry leads to ethically or politically debilitating quietism (e.g., as in testimony on Intelligent Design by science-studies practitioner Steve Fuller and in a study of Muslim women by anthropologist Saba Mahmood). I argue (a) that the existence of cognitive universals does not contradict observations of the existence and significance of cultural variability and (b) that, when spelled out accurately, the ethical and political implications—attitudes and actions--of actually existing (vs. chimerical or sophomoric) relativistic views are duly subtle and sophisticated and highly desirable.
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Anxieties about being charged with relativism are hard to dispel, even among those otherwise intellectually unorthodox. Thus one finds major theorists issuing strenuous disavowals of relativism even as they question, or alternately... more
Anxieties about being charged with relativism are hard to dispel, even among those otherwise intellectually unorthodox. Thus one finds major theorists issuing strenuous disavowals of relativism even as they question, or alternately question and affirm, standard objectivist, absolutist, or universalist views of truth or validity, and even as they offer or appropriate selected elements of constructivist accounts of knowledge or science. In “Cutting-Edge Equivocation,” I examine the complex energies involved in the exhibition of these and other equivocating maneuvers.
Note: This essay was the occasion for a purported exposure of the “unpalatable relativism” of constructivism by philosopher Paul Boghossian. As indicated in my reply to him (“Reply to an Analytic Philosopher,” B. H. Smith, *SAQ,* 2002), his efforts on that occasion exposed very little about constructivism but a good bit about the quasi-logical machinery commonly deployed to those ends.
Note: This essay was the occasion for a purported exposure of the “unpalatable relativism” of constructivism by philosopher Paul Boghossian. As indicated in my reply to him (“Reply to an Analytic Philosopher,” B. H. Smith, *SAQ,* 2002), his efforts on that occasion exposed very little about constructivism but a good bit about the quasi-logical machinery commonly deployed to those ends.
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I reply here to an article by philosopher Paul Boghossian in which my article "Cutting-Edge Equivocation" (Smith, *SAQ* 2002) provides him with an occasion for a supposed exposure and refutation of the alleged "unpalatable relativism" of... more
I reply here to an article by philosopher Paul Boghossian in which my article "Cutting-Edge Equivocation" (Smith, *SAQ* 2002) provides him with an occasion for a supposed exposure and refutation of the alleged "unpalatable relativism" of what he understands as the constructivism of contemporary sociology of science.
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The essay considers two sets of interrelated difficulties that follow from our kinship to animals: those that arise chronically from our individual psychologically complex and often ambivalent relations to animals, and those that reflect... more
The essay considers two sets of interrelated difficulties that follow from our kinship to animals: those that arise chronically from our individual psychologically complex and often ambivalent relations to animals, and those that reflect he intellectually and ideologically criss-crossed connections among the various discourses currently concerned with those relations, including the movement for animal rights, ecological ethics, posthumanist theory, and such fields as primatology and evolutionary psychology. I begin with some general observations on classification and then turn to the increasingly complex play of claims and counter-claims regarding the so-called species barrier.
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2010 interview by Nathan Schneider posted on the blog *The Immanent Frame*
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Interviewer Janell Watson gives a brief account of Smith's early interests in philosophy and science, her career as a teacher of comparative literature, and her accomplishments as a scholar and theorist. The interview draws out Smith's... more
Interviewer Janell Watson gives a brief account of Smith's early interests in philosophy and science, her career as a teacher of comparative literature, and her accomplishments as a scholar and theorist. The interview draws out Smith's views on a wide range of issues relating to contemporary critical thought and changes in university life. Exchanges during the interview also touch on Smith's dismay at the increasing prominence of marketability as a concern of the academy; her advocacy, versus mainstream cognitive science, of an "ecological" or "dynamic" view of human cognition; and her efforts to challenge or complicate familiar but dubious conceptual dualisms, including, most recently, oversimplified views of the relations between science and religion.
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Text of a keynote talk delivered at a graduate-student conference on Science and Method in the Humanities, Rutgers University, March 2, 2012. There are ways in which the sciences and the humanities disciplines can be seen as... more
Text of a keynote talk delivered at a graduate-student conference on Science and Method in the Humanities, Rutgers University, March 2, 2012.
There are ways in which the sciences and the humanities disciplines can be seen as different "cultures," and the history of their relations—intellectual, institutional and inter-personal—has been marked by rivalry and antagonism. But I took this conference to reflect an optimistic spirit that I was happy to endorse. At the same time, I note here some ongoing problems and perhaps inevitable limits in their engagements with each other and also register my skepticism regarding the necessity, possibility or desirability of “closing the gap” between the humanities and the sciences or “integrating” them.
There are ways in which the sciences and the humanities disciplines can be seen as different "cultures," and the history of their relations—intellectual, institutional and inter-personal—has been marked by rivalry and antagonism. But I took this conference to reflect an optimistic spirit that I was happy to endorse. At the same time, I note here some ongoing problems and perhaps inevitable limits in their engagements with each other and also register my skepticism regarding the necessity, possibility or desirability of “closing the gap” between the humanities and the sciences or “integrating” them.
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The book addresses a set of contemporary issues involving the relations among science, belief, and the humanities from a constructivist-pragmatist perspective often labeled “relativism.” Practicing that relativism, I maintain, does not... more
The book addresses a set of contemporary issues involving the relations among science, belief, and the humanities from a constructivist-pragmatist perspective often labeled “relativism.” Practicing that relativism, I maintain, does not mean refusing judgment or asserting absurdities but being conscious of the existence and significance of contingency, complexity, and multiplicity. In an extended examination of recent writings by Bruno Latour, I indicate the increasing centrality of theological investments in his work. Discussing computational methods in literary studies and efforts to "integrate" the academic disciplines, I suggest that what distinguishes the humanities and the natural sciences are neither subject areas nor "methods" as such but fundamental epistemic orientations.. Finally, declining calls to reaffirm or rehabilitate philosophical realism in the face of denials of climate change, I suggest that the most illuminating perspectives for conceptualization and practice in the Anthropocene are precisely those labeled, but commonly mischaracterized as, “relativist.”
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Cognitive Science, Philosophy of Mind, Epistemology, Pragmatism, and 12 moreDigital Humanities, Climate Change, Environmental Psychology, Interdisciplinarity, Constructivism, Literary Criticism, Embodied Cognition, Science and Religion, Relativism, Bruno Latour, Environmental Humanities, and science and technology studies (STS)
An examination of conceptual problems and rhetorical strategies in recent theological efforts to demonstrate the compatibility of traditional Christian beliefs and current scientific accounts of the natural world,. Theologian John... more
An examination of conceptual problems and rhetorical strategies in recent theological efforts to demonstrate the compatibility of traditional Christian beliefs and current scientific accounts of the natural world,. Theologian John Haught's book, *Deeper than Darwin: The Prospect for Religion in the Age of Evolution,* serves as a central example.
The chapter also discusses recent theistic/theological responses to what I call the New Naturalism, that is, explanations of religious beliefs appealing to cognitive science and evolutionary theory.
The chapter also discusses recent theistic/theological responses to what I call the New Naturalism, that is, explanations of religious beliefs appealing to cognitive science and evolutionary theory.
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A consideration of efforts, past and current, to explain religion naturalistically, including a range of cognitive-evolutionary approaches. Extended attention is given to *Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought*... more
A consideration of efforts, past and current, to explain religion naturalistically, including a range of cognitive-evolutionary approaches. Extended attention is given to *Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought* (2001) by anthropologist Pascal Boyer and *Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religions* (1998) by classicist Walter Burkert.
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An examination of recent cognitive-evolutionary studies of religious belief and suggestions for less intellectually confined ways of understanding the phenomena studied.
Research Interests: Cognitive Psychology, Evolutionary Psychology, Human Evolution, Philosophy of Mind, Epistemology, and 11 morePhilosophy of Science, Philosophy of Biology, Cognition, Science and Religion, Cognitive Science of Religion, Naturalism, Rationalism, Culture and Cognition, Religious Studies, Beliefs and attitudes, and Embodied and Enactive Cognition
A critical examination of the charge of self-refutation, particularly as leveled by orthodoxy-defending philosophers against those maintaining epistemologically unorthodox, especially relativistic or skeptical, views. Beginning with an... more
A critical examination of the charge of self-refutation, particularly as leveled by orthodoxy-defending philosophers against those maintaining epistemologically unorthodox, especially relativistic or skeptical, views. Beginning with an analysis of its classic illustration in Plato’s Theaetetus as leveled against Protagoras’s “Man is the measure ...,” I consider various aspects of the charge, including logical, rhetorical, pedagogic, affective, and cognitive.
The essay was originally published in *Common Knowledge* in 1993.
The essay was originally published in *Common Knowledge* in 1993.
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An extended critique of claims, concepts, methods and arguments in evolutionary psychology, focusing on John Tooby and Leda Cosmides ,“The Psychological Foundations of Culture,” in *The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the... more
An extended critique of claims, concepts, methods and arguments in evolutionary psychology, focusing on John Tooby and Leda Cosmides ,“The Psychological Foundations of Culture,” in *The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture* (1992), and Steven Pinker, *How the Mind Works* (1997) and *The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature* (2002).
An earlier version of the essay was published in 2000 under the title "Sewing Up the Mind: The Claims of Evolutionary Psychology"
An earlier version of the essay was published in 2000 under the title "Sewing Up the Mind: The Claims of Evolutionary Psychology"
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The history and rhetorical operations of the charge of "postmodern relativism" in contemporary intellectual discourse. Focussing on the early 20th-century and both "modernist" and "postmodern" thought , the article historicizes... more
The history and rhetorical operations of the charge of "postmodern relativism" in contemporary intellectual discourse. Focussing on the early 20th-century and both "modernist" and "postmodern" thought , the article historicizes "relativism" as an elusive position but arguably important set of views and as a recurrent but commonly empty or incoherent charge.
Research Interests: Intellectual History, Cultural History, Epistemology, Constructivism, Historiography, and 13 moreLiterary Theory, Modernist Literature (Literary Modernism), Postmodernism, Relativism, 20th century (History), Modernism, 20th Century American, Skepticism, science and technology studies (STS), Ludwik Fleck, History of Philosophy, Rationalist Philosophy, and Carl Becker
Chapter 3 of *Scandalous Knowledge: Science, Truth, and the Human* (Edinburgh UP/Duke UP, 2005/6). I examine Fleck’s *Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact* as a major challenge to rationalist-realist philosophy of science, a key... more
Chapter 3 of *Scandalous Knowledge: Science, Truth, and the Human* (Edinburgh UP/Duke UP, 2005/6). I examine Fleck’s *Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact* as a major challenge to rationalist-realist philosophy of science, a key work in the development of constructivist epistemology and science and technology studies, and a continuing source of insight into the social and psychological dynamics of human cognition.
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Chapter 4 of *Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy.* An account of communication as a system (or circuit) of reciprocally effective social interactions.that suggests ways to understand the emergence... more
Chapter 4 of *Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy.* An account of communication as a system (or circuit) of reciprocally effective social interactions.that suggests ways to understand the emergence and operation of linguistic and, more generally, social norms.
Research Interests: Human Evolution, Philosophy Of Language, Ethics, Communication, Behavioral Sciences, and 9 moreLanguages and Linguistics, Sociolinguistics, Theories of Meaning, Jurgen Habermas, Communication Theory, Normativity, Cognitive Linguistics, Theoretical Linguistics, and Pragmatics, Philosophy of Language and communication
The text of chapter 7 of B. H. Smith, *Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy* (Harvard UP, 1997). "Arguing with Reason" examines certain recurrent features of intellectual controversy as illustrated by... more
The text of chapter 7 of B. H. Smith, *Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy* (Harvard UP, 1997). "Arguing with Reason" examines certain recurrent features of intellectual controversy as illustrated by Jürgen Habermas's efforts, in *Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action*, to rehabilitate the central claims and concepts of rationalist moral theory in the face of increasingly significant challenges from skeptics of various stripes. Of particular interest are, first, the recourse to cognitively stabilizing rhetorical and conceptual moves (such as equivocation and circularity) in arguments defending classical philosophical views and, second, the evidently fundamental tradeoff, in any moral theory, between practical utility and theoretical rigor. The chapter concludes with some genial speculations on the inevitability and value of conceptual “circularity” and the eternal dance or reciprocal relation between Belief and Skepticism, represented here by, respectively, orthodox rationalism (or, as it is sometimes seen, philosophy proper) and a variety of heterodox (or, accordingly, improper) philosophies.
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In this concluding chapter of the book, I examine the methodological and metaphysical position named “naturalism,” consider various ideas of the “natural” and the “unnatural,” discuss a number of recent works proposing strong contrasts... more
In this concluding chapter of the book, I examine the methodological and metaphysical position named “naturalism,” consider various ideas of the “natural” and the “unnatural,” discuss a number of recent works proposing strong contrasts between science and religion and, relatedly, between science and the humanities, and frame a view of these relations that recognizes the distinctive epistemic value of science but does not yield a dubious science-exceptionalism with regard to the more general intellectual efforts and cognitive achievements and liabilities of human beings.