Babette E. Babich
Against Analysis, Beyond Postmodernism: Parody and Pastiche
With Debra B. Bergoffen and Simon V. Glynn,Continental and Postmodern Perspectives in the Philosophy of Science. Avebury. Aldershot, UK/ Brookfield, USA. 1995.

In what follows I offer a parodic brief (you'll know it by the numbered paragraphs) against analytic style philosophy just as it is that style characteristic of professional philosophy of science. I discuss the ad hoc resilience and sophisticated disdain variously operative in analytic discourse, including reviews of the maverick rhetoricism of the late Paul Feyerabend and others towards a critique of the postmodern condition in science and philosophy. What I name continental style philosophical thinking primarily regards the historical and expressly hermeneutic style of thinking found in the reflections on science characteristic of Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger.(1) Other continental approaches to the philosophy of science growing out of the phenomenological critiques of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty may be expected to be more congenial to analytic sensibilities as suggested by the recent resurgence of interest in the common roots of continental and analytic style philosophic thinking in Husserl and Frege.(2) An approach combining both hermeneutic and phenomenological styles with a sensitivity to the themes of mainstream or analytic philosophy of science is characteristic of the essays and books of, for one important example, Patrick A. Heelan, but also Joseph Kockelmans and Ted Kisiel, Robert Crease and Joseph Rouse, and so on - among rather not a lot of others.

Although scholars advocating continental approaches to the philosophy of science routinely refer to traditional adherents of analytic style philosophy of science, there is no reciprocal recognition on the part of analytical philosophers of science. And as a result there is no received (i. e., there is no acknowledged or recognized) tradition of continental scholarship within the professional establishment of the philosophy of science.(3) Thus the philosophy of science remains an analytic discipline, with continental perspectives excluded by the sovereign expedient of disregard, an absence of critical reference which effects the professional annihilation of scholarship. It is this factor that accounts for - that commands - the mixed style of the present essay.

Beyond such a reflection on the consequences of political domination in academic affairs, I move to challenge the coherence of analytic style philosophy as a discipline, specifically as a discipline addressed to the philosophy of science. For if analysis as a style of philosophising has a variety of faults these are most evident in connection with the real-world reference seemingly essential for a discussion of such an empirical or worldly or practical thing as science.

If I begin with an overtly modernistic parody, I conclude with a casually postmodern pastische. Casual because the conclusion challenges not the therapeutic fact but merely raises a question against the redemptive power or advantage of the postmodern condition and the disqualified master-narrative. For if marginalized discourses are to be valorized as they are in the postmodern gambit, what else is that but a pluralism of drives/discourses, each of which, as Nietzsche criticized, seeks for its part to be master? To underwrite this pluralism is to undertake the postmodern move, but one must retain sufficient suspicion to ask, with Nietzsche, whose pluralism? It is essential to ask if it can be enough to be ironic, enough to be skeptical, enough to be "open" to pluralism and to the vision of the other? What exactly happens when the last shall be first - and knows this -, when the margin with righteous fanfare acquires the privilege previously granted to the center?(4) Is mastery altered or is the center simply displaced to the decentered subject, the dispossessed, the excluded in all their multifarious variety and multiplicity? That is: is marginality still left, untouched, unseen, unheard?

Do we, and this is the key question as we address injustice, as Horkheimer and Adorno warned, simply invent other Jews as we decry anti-Semitism? Is our denunciation our own and only reward? Why, if difference is to be celebrated, do all differences wind up each on the same level, gender, race, class? Are women the same as (have they the same needs, the same oppressions, are they a class the same throughout, a class at all any more than) blacks, are blacks the same as Jews, are gays the same as lesbians? If they are or can be or can be imagined identical, merely similar, or even said to be "in the 'same' boat," it is because of a polarization from a central reference, a referentiality unquestioned by every question raised against it. For if the other can be thought at all, if the other can be thought as Other, it is only because the centrality of the master signifier, the white, the anglo-saxon, Euro-ideal male, scholar and bourgeois representative is not and ultimately can never be in question. As alternative, as the other excluded, the center and the margin remain an issue to be decided one on one in an, ordinal binary opposition. And this is exactly not pluralism, where pluralism can only be thought in irretrievably perspectival terms, in all its complexity, where the truth of pluralism is exactly non-simplistic in its multiplicity and truth (in Nietzsche's terms) a lie in a lying dialectic of lies.

Thus I argue that the postmodern project reports the condition of knowledge, just as implied by the commissioned subtitle of Jean-François Lyotard's Postmodern Condition. It is not however a solution, if only because the thought of resolution is a singularly analytic, which is also to say, absolutely modern ideal.

22 Paragraphs Against Analysis: A Stylistic Propædeutic and Prospective

1. The project of analytic style philosophy, whether the analytic frame be that of ordinary language or logic, is clarity. By clarity is meant clarity of expression. For Wittgenstein who coined the effective Leitmotif of analytic style philosophy in his Tractatus, "everything that can be put into words can be put clearly." (Wittgenstein, 4.116) Thus, philosophy, "the critique of language," (4.112) is "the logical clarification of thoughts." This clarity may be attained by definition (or fiat), but a clearly expressed proposition is, even if a statement of a problem, surely less mysterious than an unclear statement of the same perplexity. And just as the name analysis suggests, the point is to reduce or dissolve philosophical problems.

1.1. Beyond an idealized articulative clarity, analytic style philosophy enjoys the streamlining images of two additional regulative ideals: inter-subjectivity and verification. Intersubjectivity eliminates mysticism, esotericism, private languages and inaugurates (as a solipsism writ as it were upon the world) the analytic problem of "other minds." And by the simple expedient of bringing the "charwoman" or the "man in the street" - however quaint, however rhetorical in intent and practice - into the hallowed circle of Robert Boyle's gentlemen observers and the noble assurance of objectivity, the intersubjective emphasis leads not to a circularity among elite subjects, but ordinary language philosophy instead.

1.2. For the second regulative ideal, as the question of the intersection between word and object, verification is an epistemological issue, an ontological question, and for analysts, a metaphysical quagmire. The statement, "The meaning of a proposition is its method of verification" leads in its Tarskian formation to nothing else again but the ideal of clarity. With a thus impoverished empirical ideal of presumedly unproblematic reference (observation "sentences") there are propositional objects in the world of the analyst but only patterns or atoms of experience: pink patches - or pink ice-cubes, a once-outré Sellarsism - or gruesome impressions.

2. The analytic ideal of the clarification of meaning is not only or ultimately a matter of the clarification of terms. Rather what is wanted is the reduction of problems, their revelation as pseudo- or as non-problems. All problems that cannot be clearly stated are problematic statements.(5) Hence all problems that can be counted as such are analytic and hence lysible.

3. The success of analytic philosophy is intrinsically destructive. By definition: the philosophic project itself is repudiated in its ambitions, reduced to trivialities, and thereby overcome. This is why Wittgenstein's ideal involves disposing of the ladder (of analytic method) after reaching the heights of clarity.

4. By success is meant nothing more than the application or employment of analytic philosophy in practice.

5. This is not true of all philosophic ventures (despite the Hegelian inclination to assert the contrary). Hence the success of the Heideggerian project of the destruction of metaphysics does not equal or reduce to the destruction of Heidegger's project. Nor indeed does the success of the more notorious and more likely instance of deconstruction conduce to its own end. To the contrary.

6. At issue in the analytic project is the end of philosophy - taken in decidedly non-structuralist guise. For analytic philosophy: all of metaphysics, together with the traditional problems of philosophy, is, as an accomplished and desired deed (philosophia perennis confunditur), already at an end and by definition (as meaningless or non-verifiable). What remains or is left over is to be resolved by analysis. Since traditional philosophy is set aside along with its perennial questions - these are philosophical questions disqualified as such because of their resistance to analysis/resolution - an end is also made of the tradition of philosophy. In the place of the tradition we find science. Science, for its part, is an empirical enterprise, but devoted to clarity and committed to intersubjectivity (coherence or making sense) and the logical problem of verification appears to be the principle or fundamental concern of logical analysis or (analytic) philosophy of science. Hence the received view in the philosophy of science is developed in the analysis of theories in the hypothetico-deductive programme.(6)

7. Science is a suitable subject for analysis proximally because it is itself a body (theoretically expressed) of clearly stated propositions or claims that describe for language users (intersubjectivity), the structure of the world and are either true or false in that connection (verifiability). Science itself, it is said, is empirical analysis, a prime example of the productivity of analysis. Circularities would seem to abound here, as cannot be helped when tautology is one's stock in trade, but if they are not affirmed as they are in hermeneutic "circles," they nonetheless provide the advantage of certainty. As Philipp Frank, one of the founding members of the Vienna Circle expressed the former virtue of scientific analyticity, in a statement combining the insights of Mach with the Kantian conventions of Duhem, "the principles of pure science, of which the most important is the law of causality, are certain because they are only disguised definitions."(7)

8. Empirical observation and experiment together with logical analysis is canonically held to decide the value of a claim or theory. Thus analytic philosophy of science has essentially been conducted within the spirit of the Vienna Circle. Despite Mach's "physicalism" the members of the Vienna Circle, in the words of one commentary, "wrote as though they believed science to be essentially a linguistic phenomenon."(8)This predilection for "language" be it ordinary or logical, together with a naïve view of direct observation (i. e., observation sentences) means that the analytic concern of the philosophy of science has been restricted to the analysis of theory, in a word the received view or hypothetico-deductive nomological ideal of science (theory).

8.1. Analytic statements are by definition tautologous and assert nothing about the world. This is their virtue and at the same time, this is their impotence. Empirical statements are what is wanted in science.

9. This focus on the elements of language - not Machian physical-physiological elements - dramatizes a rupture between language and world (the limits of language) which as the essence of tautology or logical linguistic self-reference is not problematic when what is analysed is language use, the game or its rules, but only when what is analysed are empirical matters.

10. The socio-historical turn in the philosophy of science, identified with, among others the otherwise analytically sensitive Hanson, Kuhn, and Feyerabend together with

(and this is what must be seen to be decisive) the so-called strong programme of the sociology of science (not knowledge) has yet to be accommodated in the philosophy of science. It is this that constitutes its continuing crisis. This crisis corresponds to its philosophical failure, a philosophical failure tied to the fundamental schizophrenia of its analytic origins. Despite a fascination with language, and thereby, in a kind of return of scholastic nominalism, with certainty and the idea of eliminating philosophical problems by the expedient of linguistic or logical clarification, a positive empirical reference remains relevant to science. This reference to empirical matters in the relevance of scientific practice is what analytic philosophers of science mean by naturalism.

11. Naturalism, which for Tom Sorell (1991) is itself a form of scientism, is not philosophically distinguishable from the normative or analytic issues of verification or legitimation. The ultimate reference of the philosophy of science remains "natural" or actual science. As Rom Harré observes, as disingenuously and as plainly as any analyst could wish, "the philosophy of science must be related to what scientists actually do, and how they actually think."(9) The imperative to express such a relation to actual scientific practice derives not from ascendent realism but rather from the socio-historical turn that comes after the linguistic turn.

12. The socio-historical turn seems unrelated to the analytic or linguistic turn. Yet the conviction held by philosophers of science from Carnap to Hempel to Suppe and beyond, that science is a formal, logical, or linguistic affair was not the result of a devotion to logic as such. Empiricism or positivism as it was understood by Auguste Comte - the first "positivist" - embraced a positive reference to facts. Thus Hacking recalls Comte's 'positivity' as "ways to have a positive truth value, to be up for grabs as true or false." (Hacking, 12) The ultimate appeal of Wittgenstein's logical programme of linguistic therapy (analytic clarity), combined with Mach's physical critical-empiricism for the members of the Vienna Circle was in the celebration of and application to practical, actual science. Only in the era of the triumph of scientific reason would such an analytic programme work as successfully and despite patent internal contradictions as long as it has without drawing undue attention to those same contradictions.

13. For even if the project of analytic philosophy had been shown to be bankrupt from a realist or empiricist or naturalist point of view, as long as science is associated with reason, and reason or rationality is equivalent to logical analysis, it will be analytic style which gives the imprimatur to proper philosophical approaches to the philosophy of science, no matter the actual success of analysis in offering an account or philosophy of science. For this reason Rudolf Haller points out, talk of verification - an analytic specialty - works as a Popperian "aqua fortis for separating good and bad talk in science and philosophy." (Haller, 266) Analytic talk remains the dominant strategy of legitimacy and distinction in the demand for clarity and coherence. And it is fundamentally flawed not just for the tastes of those who are not convinced of the salutary or edifying values of clarity and coherence but according to its own rationalistic terms as well. For there is no obvious connection between deductive (or inductive or abductive) logic (or grammar or language) and the world. Assuming without the metaphysical faith of a Mach or the teasing leap of a Feyerabend such an elemental or obvious connection as axiomatic or given, the analyst ends up so preoccupied with refining his or her logical tools, that he or she forgets having renounced contact with the world.

14. The history of scientific theory and experiment, popularly known as the "scientific revolution" is not the project of pure theory or metaphysical speculation. Instead, it is physical or "'physicalist." It is the history of factual observation (controlled experiment) and theoretical explanation. For analysts, the former are to be expressed as empirical statements and with the verification of such observations, converted into so-called protocol statements to which experimental or theoretical conclusions reduce now as theory with full-fledged (so analytic) propositional content. This is the ideal analytic recipe that guarantees scientific control (progress). This same programme frees humanity from its (self- or deity-imposed) bonds of superstition and inhibition.

15. Yet it is just as clear from the reference to observation and experience that the history of experiment is also the history of power, manipulation, illusion. The project of experimental progress is in short that of the history of technology.

16. Separating the theoretical ideal of Newton's hypothesis non fingo from Boyle's celebration of neutral and observationally-objective (subjectively-independent or intersubjective) experiment is the tacit and practical rôle of evidence. This introduces the realist question of what evidence? evincing what? and the naturalist's but still more relevant sociologist's question of evidence obtained by and for whom? The issue of evidence is to be contrasted with theoretical truth. The last remains a matter of configured, what Nietzsche would name fingirte, hypotheses.

17. More than a conceptual net, one has an array of hypotheses and praxes, so that the infamous impotence of the experimentum crucis to decisively refute a scientific hypothesis or theory blinds one to the already given and far more pernicious matter of focal, selective choice. A given conceptual net is woven out of if not whatever we please surely what we happen to have on hand. Moreover, there is no way to imagine, beyond Duhem-Quine, as Davidson points out in his essay "On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme," that this or any other conceptual scheme represents the way things are (or are not).(10) What once represented a psychological strategy, (proto-Piercian) quiescence of belief, ataraxia, or calming, Stoic equipollence, is today a feature of crisis. What works as therapy in one context is, as the ancient Greeks knew perhaps best of all, death in another.

18. More devastating than Duhem's instrumental critique of the use of experiment is that which follows from Mach's empiriokriticismus and in his view - a perspective shared by Polanyi, Hanson, and Fleck, and historically articulated by Kuhn - the ideal of a quasi-artistic invocation of research style and experimental tactic or technique or knack
(also to be heard in Mach's conviction that experimental practice could not be taught - just as artistic talent is not communicated by instruction) in the life of the researcher. The notion of scientific schools, "invisible colleges," Denkkollektiven, knowledge communities, and so on, offer particular inspiration for sociological studies and observations. The question of what, in Harré's words, "scientists actually do" remains in a scientific era the ultimate issue. It is this and the tracking of the question as a matter of a research discipline - not among philosophers, analytically or otherwise inclined but scientists, albeit scientists of a social kind pursuing a discipline focussed upon scientists themselves, - which may be said to have added a kind of last straw to the woes of analytic philosophy.

19. Ultimately, the method of analysis is philosophically and scientifically impotent. Analysis has as it goes along, and this by its own rights, "less and less of what to analyze."(Bar-On, 1990, 260) Note that reduction as such (the disgregational, dissolving, when not always dissolute gesture implied in the idea of analysis) was not opposed by Mach who was with Richard Avenarius an enthusiast of the ideal of a scheme he imagined reflected in nature itself. But in spite of this latter realist (and here: metaphysical) resonance, Mach's ideal of Denkökonomie preserved its methodic function: it was a tactical, heuristic ideal, not an analytic end that simply reduced a problem to its linguistic, logical components and left it at that as if solved, whereupon one could, as it were, throw away the ladder. For Mach, everything could be reduced if one could assume as he did and the Vienna Circle did not, that everything was convertibly elemental. The unified scheme of the received view of the philosophy of science reflected not Machian elements - constituting the physical, physiological, psychological world - but observation sentences linked by correspondence rules to theorems, beginning and ending with units of logic/language. The world here is what is symbolizable, coordinative, re-symbolizable; neither fact (Tatsachen) in the end (linked as these are with theory) nor thing (whatever a thing may be).

Against Analytic Philosophy: Disclaimers

After such a parodic feast, it seems plain and only fair to add that analytic philosophy, apart from the philosophy of science in any event, is much further evolved these days than once it was. One no longer spends the whole of one's analytic philosophic energies analysing (according to the exactitude and focus that is an irreducible part of such methodic precision) statements such as "The cat is on the mat," but one allows oneself the still unexhausted fit of fantasy indulged in by Tom Nagel who wondered "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" (with its predictable if not quite logical sequel: "The View From Nowhere"). Or, more appositely, one might follow David Lewis who very charmingly begins his "Attitudes 'De Dicto' and 'De Se'" with the observation against expectations - that is, ladies and gentlemen, just to be sure that you do not miss it - a joke, a piece of wit: "If I hear the patter of little feet around the house, I expect Bruce. What I expect is a cat, a particular cat." (Lewis, 133) Of course, to the point of punning, the patter of little feet, not to mention the talk of expectations, refers, for speakers of ordinary idiomatic English, to children. The joke brings in Bruce, the cat, and the reference to the cat takes us to the mat and the matter of reference. Lewis's observations are about Meinongian attitudes which is to say or to be read as shorthand identification for psychologism (a bad thing) or intentionality (possibly a good thing, provided the intended intentionality is not that of the late Husserl but rather the early, now redeemed as the Frege-like, and almost analytic Husserl). In this case the attitudes are explained as incomplete where such expectations may be diversely filled in divers houses (Lewis's specialty is possible worlds so an array of possible houses is no strain for him). These attitudes then are best rendered, so Lewis, as having "propositional objects." We recall that for analysts, propositions are technical devices, having, as sentences do not always have, logical objects.

Note the utility of the style of this kind of talk for analytic purposes. It is because we may be expected to be concerned with whether and what we mean with what we say (the allure of this concern is not least won from precisely that clean or neat reference and conceptual (if none too taxing) ideal of analytic clarity, which in turn consists in the play between notions of the expected and what is as such, in other words and in another sense, de dicto and de se) without at the same time and in fact actually meaning anything in particular by what we are saying. Thus we talk about cats, bats, and brains in vats. The result of this linguistic explosion of deliberately irrelevant reference permits us for the first time if also and admittedly only for the nonce to consider meaning as such.

All of this can make for very entertaining reading (especially when it is David Lewis one is reading) but this appeal does not go very far - and this returns us once again to the problem at hand - when what is at stake matters as much as science does. It is then that the analytic style, tactic and schematic, runs into the proverbial ground and it does so without necessarily drawing attention to this fact among practitioners of the philosophy of science.

The idea of "going to ground" or "to seed" or "to hell in a handbasket" or better, with reference to analysis, of disgregration - whereby the practice of analysis ends up with "less and less of what to analyze" - is manifest in the whimpering perpetuation of things as usual. This is the way the world ends in the face of everything: a kind of heat death which Nietzsche, a famously non-analytic philosopher, called nihilism.

Still, and yet, following the historical or interpretive (but not and the difference between terms is significant: hermeneutic) or sociological turns, it seems that no practitioner of the formerly recieved view in the philosophy of science can be found on the books. The problem is (in the parlance of informal fallacies) a straw man. Analysis, it would seem, has long since been overcome. Against analysis? Against method? Who - we might ask ourselves - isn't?

Indeed, some time ago a mainstream collection appeared with the title Post-Analytic Philosophy. Contributors (and putative post-analysts) included Putnam, Rorty, Nagel, Davidson, Kuhn, et al., all of whom were and still are said to have - and were accordingly lionized for their intellectual integrity for having done so - abjured analytic philosophy (and all its works). Yet it is evident enough, where what matters on the terms of analysis itself is style, analytic style and precisely not - such is the formal ideal - substance or content, that no one of the above is, in fact, anywhere near post-analytic.(11) It is important to note that one can persevere in one's allegiance to the analytic ideal and remain an analyst without the analytic program - an essential survival strategy when its traditional adherents (Putnam, Nagel, Davidson) concede the flaws of the program.

Such a righteous confidence is characteristic of established power elites and a typical retort ("argument") to a critique such as the foregoing need do no more than dispute the given definition. Thus one notes: X is averred (analysis is X). But (offhand), one avers to the contrary, analytic philosophy is in fact -X. Thus ostensibly analytic philosophy (-X) is actually some other thing (-X is pretty broad) or, if held to commonalities, some or other related notion.

These are analytic tactics: they sidestep the question, shifting debate to formal (analytic) grounds and they do so in perfectly good conscience (albeit perhaps not in perfect good faith). Like talk of full-fledged postmodern science or pushing it further, postmodern philosophy of science, talk of the end of philosophy, especially of analytic philosophy, is painfully inflated. For even if, politically and otherwise, these are lively times we live in at the end of this century: if we are ideologically bound, by at least popular convention, to be pluralistic, to be open to new ideas, to different perspectives on east-west, to other ideologies and if we are therefore whether we like it or not, living in a "postmodern" world, neither Richard Rorty nor Jacques Derrida nor the unnamed demon of irrelevance, irrationalism, or relativism have genuine influence in the still and yet analytic domain of the philosophy of science. Nor are specialists in "irrationalism" (read: continental-aka-hermeneutic-style philosophy) (12) hired at the university level for whatever few positions there are in philosophy. The dominant departments remain analytic and when they hire, even when they hire for positions specified as dealing with more or less continental thinkers (e. g., Husserl, perhaps Schutz, or Merleau-Ponty, hardly ever Heidegger, never exactly Nietzsche), hire retread analysts (UK phenomenologists or German trained analysts - the last even more fun than the former.) And if (of all philosophical subdisciplines) the philosophy of science is not non-analytic, neither can it be said that the philosophy of science is postmodern (either "already" or in nuce).

Against Analytic Philosophy of Science: Say! Didn't Feyerabend Do This?

The philosophy of science is soberly modern, by definition and design. In this way, too, discontent with the modern, or the cry for alternative approaches is rarely sounded in a discipline so literalistic that most of its practitioners are convinced that Paul Feyerabend (or even Thomas Kuhn) is a mortal enemy. This literalism (an exact tactical advantage among analysts) means that Feyerabend's book, which he did, after all, title Against Method, is taken as a treatise composed to methodically argue, as treatises argue, against method. Literally. And thus, metonymically (by sheer associative thinking), against science.

Where scientific knowledge is knowledge methodically obtained, an anarchistic project is ranged against scientific advance. But Feyerabend was actually, as he happily detailed again and again, arguing not in the manner of a treatise or for his own views but rather against alternate views or, later, the views of his critics or opponents.(13) Feyerabend's own views are (rather typically in this rhetorical context) elided by repudiation.(14) Feyerabend was arguing for a Machian physicist's or scientific practioner's concession to the aesthetic innovation actually characteristic of the scientist's application of method. Against Method was thus written for the sake of scientific invention, and although Feyerabend has no kind words for Rom Harre;, as a man,(15) he does share many of his ideas, especially Harré's dedication to the importance of giving a philosophic expression of "what scientists actually do." In Mach's case (Ernst Mach, we remember, was Feyerabend's all-time favourite non-philosopher; readers with other affectations may prefer to invoke Michael Polanyi's tacit dimension or else Ludwik Fleck's 'style'), this attention to practice involves adverting to that which "cannot be taught."(16) Even if Feyerabend's thought is astonishingly global enough and where Feyerabend himself was certainly generous enough to regard science as only one of many human endeavors, and even to argue against its primacy in today's societies, Western and other, Feyerabend was never for all his cosmopolitanism ("cultivation" or magnanimity) anything like an enemy of the ideals of the philosophy of science in any sense.(17)

"Anything goes" is the call to arms promoting nothing other than the ideal and project of science. Progress is not thereby devalued where method is denied in a canonic sense. Instead, given the advantages in practice of the ad hoc for jazz players and for experimental and theoretical scientists, the anarchic ideal in conjunction with efficacy is offered in the spirit and for the sake of progress. The world of art, of painting and theatre, so Feyerabend is convinced, is already complicit (if art is not "free-style" what is?) and Feyerabend invites the other realms of culture, science included, no better and no worse, to come along in the same spirit. Lyotard - and I will need to return to this point below - reasons similarly to find science, indeed information science (the exact cybernetics of Heidegger's longest nightmare) (18) playfully, redemptively postmodern. Feyerabend may be listed among analytic philosophers, for whom the logical (or linguistic including ordinary language) clarification of philosophic problems has special application to science. The ideal is to understand scientific progress, attributable, it is thought, to the special use of the scientific method.(19) That this method would seem for Feyerabend (and Norwood Russell Hanson and even, on the continental side of things, Patrick A. Heelan) to be a matter of improvisation is one of those complicating, confusing details anathema to the ideal of analysis and clear expression. It is not irrelevant that Feyerabend and Hanson and Heelan began their intellectual lives with studies in mathematics and physics without however as so many other physicists-cum-philosophers of science being lulled by the idols of the tribe. Note that Feyerabend's cutting or avant gardist edge against reactive analytic thinking derives from a praxical affinity to science as an experimental and hence provisional enterprise.

Beyond Analysis: Towards a Postmodern Critique

I claim that analytic philosophy fails as the ideal of logical positivism due to the dogmas of empiricism (however many), in particular, that it fails as analysis not by default but intrinsically as a circular, self-consuming philosophic style. Nonetheless, even so, I also maintain that the tradition remains the Anglo-American (i. e., the) style of doing philosophy. Just what it is that one is doing: analysing logic, ordinary language, or what have you is up for grabs. The question here might be, what has all this got to do with the philosophy of science? For if it is assured that science "works" - as a research enterprise - cannot it not also be said that the philosophy of science works?

The problem is that the philosophy of science does not work - not, that is, without qualification. Not if its object is to explain or to understand the success of science. And not if its object is to analyse the goals and methods of the sciences or if the philosophy of science is taken, once again recalling Harré's modest, naturalistic formulation, to refer to what "scientists actually do." For the practical success of the natural sciences is not its use of the (so-called) "scientific" method alone nor even its mathematization or formulization, although publication of the latter and assertions of the former enhance academic and political prestige.(20) The recent explosion of studies under the rubric of the sociology of knowledge/science, indicates that the progress and practice of science is rather like that of any other social activity. Science, if regarded as a privileged (putatively unique) cultural practice rather than a singular, singularising trans-cultural truth project, becomes a social, that is, all-too-human affair. Thus the issue is not simply epistemological or methodological but complex, practical and anthropological. As Bruno Latour expresses this with his usual anthropologist's (and very scientific) disciplinary hyperbole: "Suddenly, we look at our sciences, our technologies, our societies, and they are on a par with what anthropology has taught us of other cultures." (Latour, 288)

Classic continental approaches to the philosophy of science echo many postmodern critiques, where both approaches to science challenge the claim of science's very singular prerogative. The modern canon for legitimating discourse - that is, again: rationality, objectivity, truth, progress, the scientific schematism of limit and hierarchy - is called to account by both broadly continental and specifically postmodern critiques. Apart from an appeal to the unquestioned value of its own authority, science's response to such challenges is perforce limited: the very scientificity of science, the value (or values) of science, is called into question here. The neutrality (as well as the limits or even the ultimate "terminability") of experiment is questioned. The objectivity of the experimenter\observer is challenged. The morality of the project and procedure of science as such is scrutinized. In all, the hegemony of mathematical and physical science as the single best way of knowing is criticized and so undermined (as erstwhile axiom). Commitment to even the possibility of postmodern critique appears to end the undisputed authority of science.

Whether it also and necessarily means the end of science or its marginalization (i. e., dispersed within an array of pluralist economies of knowing) is not equally clear. For Lyotard (just as for Stephen Toulmin), where it is argued that science itself has taken the postmodern turn, science (and rational discourse) becomes itself a representative expression of the postmodern condition.(21) In this way, contemporary "post-modern" science continues as it always has,(22)i. e., as more or less modern (as post), recognizing, as Toulmin has it, that there is no pure starting point or "scratch line," and conceding - or affirming - as both Nietzsche and Wittgenstein have argued, the inevitability of certain ambiguities as a bar to ultimate logical transparency or clarity. The often touted transformation of the physical and information sciences under a newly minted concern for "chaos theory" and so-called fuzzy logic reveals a natural science attuned to integrational holistic visions, gender sensitivity, and environmental friendliness, in place of the the old modern scientific aims of explanation, prediction, and control. Yet we do well to avoid the glib security of those theorists of the postmodern who claim the redemptive power of these accomodations. It should be enough (but is not, such is the power of an associative connection) to note that the affirmation of fuzzy logic (or "chaos" theory) fuzzes or obscures the key conservative and hence predictive element in logic, reflecting the requisite conditions for measure and successful calculation rather than any departure from the modern Cartesian ethos of certainty in the service of control. Toulmin's reprise of Montaigne's sophisticated humanism in his Cosmopolis may be little more than a softer Cartesianism, a scientific humanism with all enlightenment ideals intact, refurbished for the new millennium.

(Toulmin, 1990)

Like Toulmin and Lyotard, Habermas and other critics argue that continental philosophical thought, including related postmodern critique is nothing but a further development of the modern philosophical tradition of critique and throughly modern demystification. As such, so-called postmodern critique is only an extension of and no break from the modern enlightenment project of demystification. Yet if Habermas and Co., including Richard Rorty, be right in this, they must find themselves willy-nilly aligned with postmodern authors, from Lyotard and Baudrillard to Toulmin and a host of others. In this description, postmodernism appears more friend than foe to the sciences and consequently, by extension, to the philosophy of science. Insisting that we question the traditions of science and exploring the ways in which science has become dogmatically authoritarian, postmodernism as a super-enlightenment, meta-meta-discourse thus poised against itself (as a claim concerning the impossibility of metadiscourse), can recall science to its original motives. In such a mega-modern fashion, postmodern critique might then be seen to be posed less as an attack on science (anti-science) than as an exposée of certain naïvetées.(23)

Yet exactly here it may be incumbent upon today's critic to suggest that a certain irony, a very postmodern incredulity be reserved for proposals concerning the postmodern status of knowledge, particularly science, certainly information science. For, apart from Lyotard's (or Baudrillard's or McLuhan's or any other media expert's) ecstatic enthusiasm for the liberating virtues of the information revolution, the idea itself is patently overblown.

Virtual reality by another name is the simulacrum. The thing about the simulacrum (a computer game, surround sound, multi-media computer graphics) is that it is very manifestly a substitute, like driving a play automobile at a video arcade.

The computer image is coded - read and interpreted with perfectly hermeneutic alacrity - as it is in every other sphere of "real world" perception, but coded as unreal, as an image. It takes away not at all from the realistic charge (or kick) of such virtual images that they are palpably inferior (impalpable) substitutes. For the kick is exactly that they be as good as they are. "Surround sound" sounds as if one might be in a live concert. To sound this way, of course, given the accoutrements of the ordinary living room, drapes, couches, carpets, and given the distractions of a picture window or a nearby kitchen conversation, it has to be, and it is, larger than life. It is in this overwhelming imaging that the realism of the substitute consists.

The interactive CD-ROM game, Myst is currently touted as the most imaginative and best "on the market."(24)What makes Myst best (at least at the time of this writing -- we already know this will not last) is firstly its imaginative conceit but more critically, as this is what makes the concept work as such, it is its density of graphics images, their sheer number, as stored and playable on CD-ROM. Thus the game plays - when played on computer monitors with the best video accelerators and graphics cards possible - like a film or better like an interactive computer graphics cartoon, which is what it is. The world of Myst is not in fact realistic (where "realism" in life and in artwork, please note, with a nod to Benjamin, is exactly photographic or filmic two-dimensional realism) but the bloated surrealistic, pixel-determined world of computer graphics games. From the opening scene of a male silhouette's plunge into a cartoonish rift of stars, to the landscapes and the interior and exterior architecture, Myst is comprised of computer graphic images of the cartoon-unreal caricaturing a sci-fantasy, deserted island retreat. It may seem surprising, though it ought not be, that the talismanic image is the book, and the game's high point-and-click achievement is that of taking a book down from the shelf, of turning its pages, one mouse movement at a time. The simulation (and hence the improved utility) of the book is the goal of CD-ROM as a medium. This goal is manifest enough in the complete CD-ROM research editions of the philosophic oeuvre of, say, Hobbes, just as it is manifest in a CD-ROM telephone book. What the CD-ROM version permits is not reading as such but the dispensation from the necessity of the same, finding given words in a global search or sweep.

The issue here does not concern the message but the medium and the consequences of an automatic credulity, better a belief not in metanarrative as such but in megabytes and still and yet in redemption through technology, ever more rarified to the internet, to email, to spreadsheets, to wordprocessing and the labile and virtual text.

Lyotard, Habermas, Rorty, Taylor and so many others tell us in very different ways that the current information age is the age of liberation. Liberation, for enlightenment thinking, is exactly progress. But the point is to press a question against our credulity in automation, as a credulity in the electronic order.(25)

What then? Then nothing. Like science, the modern project of the philosophy of science is willy nilly, like it or not, become a postmodern gambit. This is both more and less than Lyotard might have imagined. The postmodern is not a resolution of the modern, it is its current and just as paradoxically as Lyotard had imagined, its ennabling condition.

The task for the next millenium, at least at its start, is addressed to the failure of the modern as an imaginary fault; postmodern, if at all, by default. For we are hardly postmodern already - despite the assertions of Lyotard, Venturi, Eco, Jencks, and even the present author. We are not free from our once and former tutelage to the myth of the modern, the metanarrative of progress, of reason, and of science. At best unwittingly free from these same metanarratives, the liberation we have is that of anomie following distraction and disappointment. Human maturity that is not nihilism, that will mean rediscovering, as Nietzsche observed, "the seriousness one had as a child at play."(26) Because of the extreme mastery and exceeding delicacy involved in play (consider music but also any performance art, or sport but also chess or other competitive games), the challenge of the postmodern is an absurdly, impossibly innocent child's play.(27)

References

Babich, B. E. (1995), "Heidegger's Philosophy of Science: Calculation, Thought, and Gelassenheit," in Babich (ed.), Heidegger from Phenomenology to Thought, Errancy, and Desire, Kluwer, Dordrecht.

Babich, B. E. (1994), Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science: Reflecting Science on the Grounds of Art and Life, State University of New York Press, Albany.

Babich, B. E. (1994a), "Philosophy of Science and the Politics of Style: Beyond Making Sense," New Political Science, 30/31:99-114.

Babich B. E. (1993), "Continental Philosophy of Science: Mach, Duhem, and Bachelard" in Kearney, R. (ed.), Routledge History of Philosophy: Volume VIII,

Routledge, London, pp. 175-221.

Bar-On, A. Z. (1990), "Wittgenstein and Post-Analytic Philosophy" in Leinfellner, Haller, et al. (eds.) (1990) Wittgenstein. Eine Neuebewertung: Towards a New Revaluation II, Vienna, p. 260.

Davidson, D. (1980), Reference Truth and Reality: Essays on the Philosophy of Langauge, Routledge Kegan Paul, London.

Feyerabend, P. (1989), Farewell to Reason, Verso. London.

Feyerabend, P. (1981), Erkenntnis für freie Menschen, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a. M. English translation published (1987), Science in a Free Society, Verso, London.

Heelan, P. A. (1983), Space-Perception and the Philosophy of Science, University of California Press, Berkeley.

Hacking, I. (1992), "'Style' for Historians and Philosophers," Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science. 23/1:1-20.

Haller, R., Schurz, G., Dorn, G. (eds.), (1991), Advances in Scientific Philosphy, Rodopi, Amsterdam.

Harre;, R. (1972), The Philosophies of Science, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Latour, B. (1992), "One More Turn after the Social Turn . . ." in McMullin, E. (ed.), The Social Dimension of Science. University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame.

Lewis, D. (1979), "Attitudes 'De Dicto' and 'De Se'," in The Philosophical Review 1979 No. 9. Also in (1983), Philosophical Papers: Vol. 1, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

McGuinness, B. F. (1989), "Ernst Mach and His Influence on Austrian Thinkers," in Gombocz, W., et al. (eds.), Traditionen und Perspektiven der analytischen Philosophie, Hölder-Pichler-Tempsley, Vienna, pp. 149-156.

Nietzsche, F. (1980), Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe,. Vol. 1-15, de Gruyter, Berlin.

Maia Neto, J. R. (1991), "Feyerabend's Scepticism," Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 22/4:543-555.

Redner, H. (1987), The Ends of Science, Westview Press, Boulder, Co.

Richardson, W. J. (1968), "Heidegger's Critique of Science," The New Scholasticism, LXII: 511-536.

Rouse, J. (1991), "Philosophy of Science and the Persistent Narratives of Modernity," Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. 22/1:141-162. 1991.

Sorell, T. (1991), Scientism. Philosophy and the Infatuation with Science, Routledge, London.

Suppe, F. (ed.), (1974), The Structure of Scientific Theories, University of Illinois Press, Urbana.

Toulmin, S. (1990), Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Toulmin, S. (1974), "The Structure of Scientific Theories" in Suppe (1974).

Wittgenstein, L. (1974), Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus, Pears, D. F. & McGuiness, B. F. (trans.), Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.

Notes

1. 1. This essay is related to a series of essays which necessitates either redundancy or cross-reference. As the lesser evil, I have sought here and below to minimize the former. For a discussion of Nietzsche, see Babich (1994); for Heidegger, see Babich (1995).

2. 2. See references, Babich (1993). Citing a recent doctoral dissertation by Brian Mattingly, Patrick A. Heelan takes Mattingly's arguments to imply that continental style thinking includes the hermeneutic language phenomenology of the later Wittgenstein.

3. 3. Because none of the above mentioned names from Nietzsche and Heidegger to Husserl, Heelan and beyond are featured in discussions of or even included in bibliographies of the philosophy of science proper, it is as if continental style approaches to the philosophy of science did not actually exist. On this see, Babich (1994a) and (1993).

4. 4. This is the problem with many postmodern, pluralist, feminist moves, especially those made in the tradition of Foucault. On the advantages of the feminist postmodern critique, see Raphael Sassower's excellent discussion of Donna Haraway above (pp. 25 ff.). For a discussion of the limits of such automatic writing-in, as it were, of the disenfranchised other or position, see Babich (1994a).

5. 5. To vary David Lewis' expression in his "Attitudes 'De Dicto' and 'De Se'" of the implications of Wittgenstein's notion of expression and clarity: if it is possible to have unclarifiable (unanalytic) problems but no unanalysable propositions, anything propositionally articulated - which in this sense means clearly expressed - can be analysed. As David Lewis states the virtues of propositional knowledge, "... if it is possible to lack knowledge and not to lack any propositional knowledge, then the lacked knowledge must not be propositional." (Philosophical Papers: Vol. 1, p. 139).

6. 6. The received view has had an exceedingly short tenure for a defining philosophical structure: the Cartesian account of the role of the pineal gland could claim both a lengthier reign and greater fecundity. See Frederick Suppe's "The Search for Philosophic Understanding of Scientific Theories," in Suppe, pp. 3-232.

7. 7. Frank, "Kausalgesetz und Erfahrung," Annalen der Naturphilosophie, 6:443-450.

8. 8. Dilworth, Craig "Empiricism vs. Realism: High Points in the Debate During the Past 150 Years." Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science. 21/3:431-462. p. 224.

9. 9. Harré, p. 29. Emphasis added.

10. 10. Davidson, "On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme," pp. 183-98.

11. 11. Analytic style as such refers to little more than the ideal of expressive clarity.

12. 12. This is especially true of that kind of continental style philosophy associated not with the softer theories of ethics or the political world (critical theory and so on) but with analytic turf-encroaching topics such as epistemology, in Husserlian phenomenology and, via Nietzsche and Heidegger, hermeneutics.

13. 13. Thus when Ernst Gellner complains that Feyerabend "cannot lose," he is right. See Feyerabend, 1978, p. 142. Feyerabend does to Gellner what he does to all his critics, he holds them to critical standards from which he exempts himself. But it is his critical "turn" when he does this.

14. 14. To wit, Feyerabend's repeated (analytic style) declaration: "these are not my views..." This is an assertion one should know better than to take at face value even if Feyerabend's commentators are still assiduously engaged in word frequency counts of dadaism and anarchism and all references to voodoo and astrology in Feyerabend's earlier and later works) See, for example, Maia Neto, p. 544.

15. 15. Thus Feyerabend denounces Harré's perturbation concerning various "asides about women, about friends and colleagues" (Mind 1977, p. 259) by declaring in a special footnote written just for Harre in the English version of Erkenntnis für freie Menschen, Footnote Number Four: "I have spent quite some time looking for the comments 'about women...' that so upset Harré. I could not find them. Am I blind or is he hallucinating?" Feyerabend, 1978, p. 131. Feyerabend, it seems, may well have been blind enough to such issues; yet for his part, Harré was surely hallucinating a deliberate insult though not the offensive implications that tend to follow in the wake of genial enthusiasm. For on p. 185 of the same book, Feyerabend offers a precise "aside" to use Harré's word - if perhaps not a "comment" as Feyerabend might have countered - to the effect that Against Method was nothing more than a kind of extended letter to Imre Lakatos, musing that he had instead "considered dedicating the book to three alluring ladies who had almost prevented its completion." Such an aside isn't meant to mean much - that's why it's an aside - but it is difficult to overlook. Indeed, contemporary feminist sensibilities more than endorse Harre's scruples.

16. 16. Feyerabend (1989), p. 189, cites Mach's claim that research "cannot be taught" from Mach's Erkenntnis und Irrtum, Leipzig, 1917, p. 200.

17. 17. That is, apart from the cascades of rhetoric poured off to confuse his readers. When such tricks succeeded, Feyerabend, in middling Viennese caprice, dubbed his readers illiterate. See Feyerabend, 1981, 1987.

18. 18. See Richardson; for a recent review see Babich (1995).

19. 19. In a characteristically circular assertion, H. Maturana, a contemporary scientist, notes that such an assumption constrains the use of the word science: "das Wort Wissenschaft wird jetzt in der Regel nur noch auf Erkenntnisse angewandt, die mittels einer bestimmten Methode, nämlich der wissenschaftlichen, bestätigt wurden." in Watzlawick, P., Krieg, P. (eds.), (1991), Das Auge des Betrachters: Beiträge zum Konstruktivismus, Piper, Munich, p. 167.

20. 20. For an account of the functioning of the former, see Ian Hacking's two books on probability and statistics (particularly 1990, The Taming of Chance, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge). For the latter see almost any robust or strong study of the sociology of knowledge.

21. 21. For Toulmin, as a doctrine of systematic rationalism, that is, doctrinally "the trajectory of Modernity has closed back on itself, into an Omega; but experientially it has headed broadly upward." (Toulmin, 1990, 168) This parabolic reflex, a figure Toulmin employs to describe the harmonious tension of postmodern ambiguity, points to the increasingly essential growth of a "discriminating care for human interests" as distinguished from what Toulmin sees as the "scaffolding" of Modernity: namely its exclusively theoretical agenda. This is the hiddden agenda of modernity (at least one) and it is this theoretical project which entails the "separation of humanity from nature and [the] distrust of emotion" so characteristic of the phallogocentrism of received rational discourse of the sciences, of philosophy, and of theory in general.

22. 22. Likewise, the erstwhile emblems of high-modernism/capitalism, nations and corporations, contine in newly diversified incarnations.

23. 23. It is an apparently innocent and hence somehow winning conviction of many critical theorists that showing the modernist roots and modernizing vision and heart of postmodernism should somehow prove fatal to its exponents. This rhetorical faith tells us more about the conceptual limitations of routinely modern or enlightenment reasoning than it does about the genealogical limitations or core vulnerabilities of postmodern thinking. Beyond the clichéd charge of contradiction, the limits of postmodern thinking may be better traced by questioning the authenticity or good faith of its claims to playfulness, and further, as I propose at the conclusion of this essay, by examining the challenge of "regaining" what Nietzsche, as a test of maturity, called the seriousness of a child at play. See reference and full citation in note 26 below.

24. 24. Here we note the dovetailing of value judgments with an explicit reference to the market and hence a tacit qualification emblemmatic of a moribund capitalist economy, with no end, and no present alternative. Now an enthusiastically unqualified encomium, the saying 'the best money can buy' once might have suggested the limitation of market offerings together with a reference to the transcendent - qua that possibility that stands higher than actuality. This traditional reference to a transcendent involved an intangible handworking quality or contribution of the artisan's heart and dedication to other spiritual or personal values, underlining the distinction between the market and the soul. This quality of the soul, apostrophized not only by Kant as 'without price,' has been lost.

25. 25. And those of us who feel liberated by our word processing programs, by our spread sheets, have a number of problems not least of which is that we have forgotten the point of an old story which Plato told in the name of an Egyptian myth concerning the Ibis-headed god of technology (and of magical advantage), Theuth, and an Egyptian king, the god's human counter, Thamus.

26. 26." Reife des Mannes: das heisst den Ernst wiedergefunden haben, den man als Kind hatte, beim Spiel." Nietzsche, Vol. 5 Jenseits von Gut und Boese, "Sprueche und Zwischenspiele,"94, p. 90

27. 27. I thank Holger Schmid for discussing this Nietzschean point with me and for his remark that the child plays exactly without irony. It may be recalled here that Nietzsche's Zarathustra named the child "Innocence," ("Unschuld") but also "Vergessen, ein Neubeginnen, ein Spiel, ein aus sich rollendes Rad, eine erste Bewegung, ein heiliges Ja-sagen." Also Sprach Zarathustra, "Von den drei Verwandlungen." Nietzsche, Vol. 4, p. 31. Cf. "Von Kind und Ehe," p. 90. In the postmodern context it is important to reflect that both self-consciousness and self-assertiveness destroy innocence.