Social scientists against the Truth!

However, in an alternative postmodern worldview, the concept of an objective reality against which knowledge can be validated is discarded and with it the ‘correspondence theory’ of truth as the basis for understanding validity. [Paterson & Duxbury 2007: 536]

Why do social scientists not like the correspondence theory of truth? Both the paper I read last week and a conversation I had with Harry Collins’ colleague Rob Evans a couple of years ago are instances of this hostility. But I wonder whether it is a correctly directed.

I assume that the correspondence theory is something on the following lines.

• ‘S’ is true if and only if ‘S’ corresponds to a fact (the fact that S).

It contrasts with other substantial theories such as the coherence theory (where truth consist in membership of a maximally coherent set of beliefs) and insubstantial theories such as the redundancy or deflationary theory. It addresses an intuition that when a belief or sentence/utterance is true it is so in virtue of something, something to which the belief or sentence/utterance answers. Something makes it true.

Why should one be suspicious of the correspondence theory? I think that it is helpful to distinguish between two things: correspondence slogans and correspondence theories. The former are innocent. Following the convention of using a ‘snowbound triviality’ then if one thinks that ‘S’ is true then one might assert:

• S. (Snow is white)
• ‘S’ is true. (‘Snow is white’ is true.)
• It is true that S. (It is true that snow is white.)
• It is a fact that S. (It is a fact that snow is white.)
• ‘S’ states a fact. (‘Snow is white’ states a fact.)

and hence perhaps

• ‘S’ corresponds to a fact. (‘Snow is white’ corresponds to a fact.)

That last case may sound stilted but it does not seem to introduce anything beyond what the others involve. Perhaps it could be introduced first via a notion of fitting a fact. (Or one can imagine it being used in a language class. Sentences in the language being taught might be left in a jumble and the task would be to match them to corresponding facts, either stated in English or depicted in pictures.) We can learn what facts are, and how to speak about them, in just this way. That is, assuming that Little Ludwig has mastered asserting that snow is white, I can teach him these other complexities on that basis. If he is prepared to claim that snow is white then he should also be prepared to accept that that sentence (or the utterance made using it) is true and that it is a fact that...

So far, so innocent. What is not innocent is attempting to use the correspondence slogan to explain truth and hence use it as the basis for a correspondence theory, a theory of the nature of truth. That is, one uses the right hand side of:

‘S’ is true if and only if ‘S’ corresponds to a fact (the fact that S)

to shed light on the left. But this faces two obvious and familiar problems. It requires both that one can explicate the correspondence relation and the relevant fact which makes the sentence true in terms initially independent of the left hand side invocation of ‘S’ being true. Sadly, it is far from clear that this can be done. Without using the sentence (or one like it), how can one articulate the sentence-shaped chunk of reality to which it answers? And how can a sentence correspond to that fact, independently picked out, in any other way than the truistic grammatical connection that depends on already knowing how and when to use the sentence?

The problems do not stem from merely talking of ‘correspondence’ and ‘facts’. That can be quite innocent. They stem from attempting to explain truth in these terms, when truth seems the more basic notion.

But if one does not distinguish between these two things (the slogan and the theory) then the rejection of an explanatory connection can escalate into rejection of the very idea of aiming to get the facts right. Then, given the close connection between it is a fact that S, it is true that S, ‘S’ is true and, just, S then the rejection of one can have some wild consequences when one is obliged to reject the others.

The temptation is often then to think that in the absence of full-blown world-involving truth-is-out-there truth, one can still have, and make do with, something like justification. Justification seems homely and modest. It is within our ken (it depends on no favour from the world). Invoking truth, facts and the nature of the world seems hubristic and something outside our ability to ensure (it depends on a favour from the world). But the problem is that once those have gone, reconstructing a form of justification worth its salt looks to be impossible since justification’s purpose is to increase the likelihood of truth. Without that, what makes a putative justificatory move justificatory? What does it mean to say that it is justificatory if one cannot explain justification by invoking truth? One cannot just make do with justification and give up on truth.

Why are social scientists dismissive of correspondence slogans and hence of truth itself? I suspect that it follows from a misreading of what even an explanatory correspondence theorist (let alone the mere use of a correspondence slogan) aims to do. It aims to say in what truth consists, or what it comprises. It does not aim to provide practical guidance to getting to the truth. My suspicion is that social scientists are very well aware of the complex social processes by which knowledge of truth is arrived at, for example in the sciences and science-guided social practices (such as medical care). But they assume that a correspondence theory naively assumes that the facts, to which true beliefs or sentences/utterances answer, just sit around patiently waiting to be vacuumed up. Since they eschew such naive inductivism (or a particularly stupid form of positivism) they reject the appeal to facts so understood in characterising truth (both when used as a theory but also as a mere slogan). But in fact, what they reject is a myth. There is no reason to assume that the facts are like that or that they must be thought of like that when saying that truths correspond to them. The reasons for dismissing a correspondence theory are quite other.

My hunch is thus that the target of their scepticism is wrong. It shouldn’t be truth and the innocent aim of trying to get the facts right. Truth is a friend to academics. It may be dull but it serves as a short-hand for normative standards. What the social scientists should target (what they should be sceptical of) are their particular (object) facts. Social constructionists of science should target the particular (usually physical) scientific facts they wish to explain in other terms. Social constructionists of mental illness should target the putative facts about illness they wish to question or explain away. Leave truth in general out of it.

More than just good films

I am, I suppose, pleased that The King’s Speech did well in the Oscars last night. It is not, for example, Titanic. It seemed, when I saw it a few weeks ago, a well crafted film with good performances and emotionally engaging. Discussing it with Ian Lyne a week ago (who suggested a ‘resolute reading’ of There Will Be Blood a year ago), having just seen True Grit, he took that last aspect to be good enough. A film might be well crafted but that would not make it a good film. Add in emotional connection and that, he argued, was what made it a properly good film. That is what one hopes for. But I disagree. A film can have that as well as good crafting and yet still leave me wanting something more.

The word I seem to reach for is ‘transformatory’. I want films not just to get things right but also to have something like a further aspect. The problem, though, is working out what that might mean. I don’t just mean: changing my state. Two Tarantino films did that. Many years ago, after seeing Reservoir Dogs, I realised that I’d need more than just polite post-film chat to recover my sang-froid (pints of strong beer). More recently I felt that watching Inglourious Basterds somehow left me a worse person than I’d been a couple of hours before. Merely watching it made me implicated and culpable.

The sense of ‘transformatory’ I’m reaching for includes some sort of interpretative demand made on the viewer by the film. Not just the decoding of complexity but something more affective. But not just affective (that way leads to Reservoir Dogs which I admire but it’s not great). A really good film demands a response in which the affective and cognitive co-mingle.

I don’t think that I’ve seen any such film recently. The King’s Speech was perfectly formed but small scale. True Grit wasn’t great either but there at least, and much to my surprise, I have not been able quite to forget, to put to one side, the arresting interplay of the formality of the language with primitive nature of the moral story.

Narrative researchers' views of narratives

I have an interest in narrative understanding via the question: is it a form of understanding fundamentally distinct from criteriological diagnosis in psychiatry (hence papers here, here and here)? Were it so, then calls for an addition to conventional psychiatric diagnosis could have a particular focus. Even better if, as well as being distinct, it had a connection to the idea of charting the individuality of psychiatric patients, often thought to go missing in the diagnostic process. And thus my interest stems from the development of person centred care in psychiatry.

Given that starting question, it is unsurprising, if not very laudable, that I have generally simply helped myself to familiar work on other distinctions which are clearly in the same general area - eg. the space of reasons vs the realm of law; or the manifest image versus scientific image etc - and assumed that one can use ‘narrative’ for one side of them too: the side governed by the constitutive principle of rationality. (That is, I have assumed that the kind of rational understanding that contrasts with subsumption under laws of nature lies at the heart of narrative understanding. Mere generality or regularity is not enough to count as narrative. And thus physics does not offer narrative accounts of planetary motion, for example.)

But it would be sensible to see whether this approach does violence to the notion of narrative used by those social scientists who call themselves ‘narrative researchers’ and actually do work with it (rather than talking about it from the sidelines). And hence, today, I made time to listen to Bernie Carter (pictured) giving an introduction to it for nursing graduate students.

As a keen user of the approach she was obviously going to describe it in positive and intuitive terms. So first she stressed its general application by arguing that its basic ontological units – stories – were ubiquitous. They comprise, or structure, everyday social interactions, encounters with clinicians, recreation and much child rearing. Since stories are ubiquitous, it is unsurprising if focusing on them is potentially revelatory of much of the social world.

But she also offered a representative sample of claims made by narrative theorists for the nature of stories or narratives (including Arthur Frank). Such approaches typically articulate components or aspects of narratives and appear to do this in different, rival ways, albeit with some significant overlap. (For example: abstract, orientation, complicating action, evaluation, resolution and coda. Or: temporality, people, action, certainty (or not) and context.) By decomposing a whole story into such elements one can arrive – as a narrative researcher – at a sub-structure which still stop short of a positivist or reductionist analysis (although she later suggested that whether it really stopped short was a bone of contention).

This presents a prima facie tension, however, between the claim as to ubiquity of stories and the specific and apparently falsifiable claims as to how they are structured. It is by no means obvious that items with specific (and rather plodding, it seemed to me, no cut up technique or Nouveau-Roman approach here!) six-fold internal structure are to be found in every human vocal interaction.

Interestingly Bernie suggested the following reading of the situation. Researchers were able to recognise stories with the same pre-reflexive ease of the rest of us. The rival frameworks were not making – or should not make – constitutive claims about the nature of narrative. They were rather mere heuristic devices to help the analysis. It is worth looking at character and suspense, for example or noting the evaluation and uncertainty involved.

But this does then leave an issue. Not, epistemologically, how are we guided to recognise stories? But, constitutively, if not the frameworks, what does mark out what is and isn’t to be counted a story? If the approach is genuinely distinct as far as social science goes, how is its basic method distinct from any other chunking of responses to questions?

Not that that question need seem pressing for narrative researchers. Perhaps there is no great need to maintain tribal distinctions and thus to be able to argue that the results of semi-structured interviews are not narratives. But even though the question need not be pressing, I can imagine that it might still press. After all, if the various heuristic structures do work then surely a self-conscious narrative researcher will want to know why? Do they reflect some necessary and / or sufficient features of stories? Are they contingent but mark deep structures of Western thought, eg? Are they simply this year’s fashion for, like, presenting oneself? One consequence of interesting and substantial answers to these questions might be that it requires the researchers to bite the bullet and say that what makes narratives interesting, by contrast with other ways of presenting ourselves, is that they are not ubiquitous. After all, as the Incredibles taught us, if everyone is special, no one is.

Adding philosophy to mental health research

I read today one of the many papers by my new line manager in the School of Health: the gifted and hard working Joy Duxbury, School lead on mental health research. It’s a co-authored piece looking at the defence of restraint and the rationale for training in methods of restraint in mental healthcare [Paterson & Duxbury 2007]. The main storyline, justified by a review of zillions of pieces of research, is that things are rather complicated. Thus, for example:

Training staff in restraint procedures can have a role to play in improving staff and service user safety, but only when used as part of broader integrated approaches that incorporate specific reference to the issues of power and inequality, and address the root causes of aggression and violence in how organizations provide services. [ibid: 542]

The paper is clear and persuasive in the view it takes, based on the literature reviewed, and I will add it to my masters programme reading list.

It is thus odd that it adds a philosophical manifesto at the start which runs thus:

There is ... a potential conflict between those advocating restraint reduction and those calling for staff to be trained in restraint. The seeming contradiction reflects, however, an underlying question that can usefully be construed to involve the ‘validity’ of physical restraint as an intervention. Validity as a concept has several dimensions, including those central to the positivist research tradition, particularly in the behavioural sciences, namely ‘content’, ‘construct’ and ‘predictive’ validity. This approach to validity reflects a modernist worldview in which the purpose of knowledge is to provide a map of an objective reality, and validity provides a measure of truth in terms of the correspondence of the map provided with that reality. However, in an alternative postmodern worldview, the concept of an objective reality against which knowledge can be validated is discarded and with it the ‘correspondence theory’ of truth as the basis for understanding validity. The quest for certainty in knowledge is abandoned, replaced instead by defensible knowledge claims. Validation becomes the issue of choosing among competing interpretations framed as potentially falsifiable and of critically exploring the relative credibility of differing claims regarding knowledge. [ibid: 536]

This is heady stuff. Validity is not to be understood on the model of aiming to get an objective reality right but rather as choosing among competing interpretations and exploring the relative credibility of differing claims, but not, presumably, as credible with reference to their descriptive accuracy since that notion goes with (and is rejected with the rejection of) objectivity and world-mapping. There are a couple of further positive clues about validity. It is, with shades of pragmatism, linked to what works (although that is scare quoted to sever, I suspect, an objectivist notion of what really works). And: ‘In this postmodern discourse, validity is a ‘linguistically, politically, economically, socially, culturally and professionally relative’ concept whose meanings are multiple and flexible rather then fixed.’

There are a couple of distractions. Aiming to get reality right need not involve a commitment to certainty (although it would be nice) so the latter’s rejection is common and is distinct from the main radical claim. And the mention that rival interpretations are ‘potentially falsifiable’ might suggest falsifiable against observations of an objective reality. (That is what most of the staid and steady modernist Popperian scientists I meet would mean when they too endorse this view.) But in this case, it must mean reject-able in PoMo terms.

What is surprising, though, is that this radical claim plays no role, as far as I can tell, in what follows. The flavour of that is indicated in how the main argument begins:

If restraint as an intervention is to be considered valid from a pragmatic perspective it must be able to demonstrate that it ‘works’. However, the present literature largely precludes any safe answer to this question because the evidence base is, with limited exceptions, of very poor quality. [ibid: 537]

What then follows is a very helpful and plausible investigation of the evidence about the benefits of restraint. Poor quality seems to mean: quite likely not to be true. A typically balanced passage runs:

There are potentially strong arguments in favour of training in restraint as part of wider training in the prevention of violence. Fisher has argued that restraint can prevent imminent harm to self or others, substantial damage to the physical environment and the serious disruption of treatment programmes, and can decrease stimulation. He has also raised the issue that it may be valuable when implemented in response to service user requests... Reductions in the use of restraint following training have also been reported. Unfortunately, as Allen observes, negative outcomes have also been found in respect of these measures in some studies. In the UK, one explanation offered for the negative results sometimes associated with training has been that the ‘importing’ of training models from non-health services (prison) led to a widespread and persistent overemphasis on physical intervention during training in the prevention and management of violence in some programmes. [ibid: 538]

What strikes me in this is that the claims made (I’ve removed the supporting footnotes) function in pretty much the way you’d expect a ‘modernist’ argument to function. There’s no reliance on arguing over the credibility, understood in novel non-world revealing terms, of competing interpretations. The interpretations are lined up against the evidence and given an old fashioned modernist biffing.

Now one might say that, in that passage, there’s no appeal to truth so that’s obviously already radical. But, no, that is just what we’d expect in a dull modernist conversation. One need not say: the sky is blue because it’s true that sunlight undergoes electron scattering. One can just say: the sky is blue because sunlight undergoes electron scattering. Still, in making that assertion, one undertakes to be disciplined in a particular way: aiming at truth. (To put this point the other way, one could take the ground level claim and add in the it is true that operator. But it would add nothing not already implicit in the ground level claim. That is why one could always add it. If one could not, one would have to withdraw the ground level claim as well. So the explicit avoidance of truth in the ground level claim tells us nothing.)

I am not at all disappointed that the philosophy drops out of this paper. If it didn’t, I wouldn’t recommend it to students. It would be a pity if the only way to advance the key claim were to water down the standards of truth and objectivity to which the authors aspire. “We don’t care about truth and objectivity so now we can say whatever we want!” No, that’s a shiny ball just to attract the reader before the sober analysis begins.

I comment on this minor aspect of a substantial paper because I have long been interested in the way philosophy becomes combined with empirical results in thinking about mental healthcare (we have a module on such philosophically based research methods in our masters programme on Philosophy and Mental Health). At its best it is a natural and organic development from reflexive thinking about the conceptual complications of mental healthcare. In this particular case there are obvious and key philosophical issues raised, and calling for analysis, without the need to propose a new theory of truth. One is surely this: even when we know, through the kind of analysis that Brodie Paterson and Joy Duxbury offer, the extent to which restraint and restraint-training have the effects they do on mental healthcare, we will still face the question of whether those effects are desirable and / or justifiable. That is not an empirical question.

For information on the philosophy and mental health look here.

For further thoughts on social science and correspondence theories of truth see here.

Paterson B & Duxbury J (2007) Restraint and the question of validity, Nursing Ethics, 14 (4), pp. 535-545

The value of what's local #2 and NIMBY-ism

My parents kindly bought Lois and me a painting of Scout Scar by Ian Fryers to mark an anniversary. I’d seen a photograph (above) of the painting on the web when looking for a photo of Scout Scar and realised I’d like to own it / an instance of it.

Now I could offer some sort of general reasons for liking it starting with its balance of realism and abstraction, the way its form appears to be normatively determined whilst its content is playfully not so, and so on. But fairly soon I’d be faced with something which is not at all general but specific.

It’s also a picture of a place whose own aesthetic value I could also begin to sketch in general terms perhaps through the contrast of its humble stumbly rocky blobbiness with the majestic views it gives of the shapely central fells a dozen miles away, like an aged, bowed retainer waiting on his employers at a modest remove. But again, such general reasons would soon give way to something specific.

That is: it’s local to me. And the picture, whatever its general merits, depicts where I escape to to run whenever I can. It is this which really underpins my particular interest in both the place and the picture. Whatever the general reasons available, my own reasons are quite specific. However, when Wilhelm Windelband says:

[E]very interest and judgment, every ascription of human value is based upon the singular and the unique… Every dynamic and authentic human value judgment is dependent upon the uniqueness of its object.

and then goes on to say:

Is it not an unbearable idea that yet another identical exemplar of a beloved or admired person exists? Is it not terrifying and inconceivable that we might have a second exemplar in reality with our own individual peculiarities? This is the source of horror and mystery in the idea of the Doppelganger. [Windelband 1980: 181-2]

it seems to me that he is missing the point. I would find it spooky but delightful to find a twin-Scout Scar somewhere in New Zealand. (I would, rather more mundanely, be interested even to find a copy of Thornton Towers elsewhere in Kendal: it seems that my very generic modern house is, by chance, unique.) The relevant idea is not the uniqueness of not being copied but rather the singularity of the individual, copied or not.

Given the naturalness of such an attachment, it thus seems unreasonable to criticise NIMBY-ism. We cannot help forming attachments to the local and particular. My own NIMBY-ism includes sadness that Cubbington Woods some 150 miles away will be completely destroyed for the high speed rail link HS2. I don’t live nearby any more and would probably never walk through them again, anyway. I suspect that there are other equally pretty woods with no less aesthetic value. But Cubbington Woods are part of what has been particular and local to me and it would be odd if that specific knowledge did not affect my judgement.

Windelband, W. (1980) ‘History and natural science’ History and Theory & Psychology 19: 169-85.

International Network for Philosophy and Psychiatry INPP 2012 New Zealand

I know that it feels a long way off but the 2012 15th INPP International Conference will be held at the University of Otago, Dunedin, South Island, New Zealand with the title:

Culture and Mental Health

with, at the moment, four preliminary themes:

• Culture, identity and the brain
• Mental disorder and displaced peoples – being strange in strange places
• Culture and forensic psychiatry
• Cultural maladies of the soul

It will be between 5-7th (Thursday-Saturday) July 2012

Local organisers include: Professor Grant Gillett, Dr Neil Pickering, Dr Judy Trevena, and Dr Richard Mullen

The website is here.

Abstracts must be submitted on the Abstract Submission Form (Oral Presentation / Poster, or Workshop) below. They must be submitted by Wednesday 7 December 2011.

There are also websites for the University of Otago PPP group and for the bioethics centre.

A first attempt on Wittgenstein

I was asked by a student yesterday what to suggest he read given the first inklings of an interest in Wittgenstein. What to suggest by way of a short manageable set of readings?

Here’s my initial idea (but I would welcome suggestions emailed to me).

Wittgenstein’s texts

I suggest three texts are key. (And for a first approach, I would ignore the Tractatus and the resolute reading, therefore.)

Wittgenstein, L. (1958) The Blue and Brown Books, Oxford: Blackwell.
- Just the Blue Book, read all the way through, with some pause for thought, obviously. This gives both a clear sense of Wittgenstein’s approach to philosophy but also a sense of the key issue - it seems to me - of the relation of thought and the world.
Wittgenstein, L. (1953) Philosophical Investigations, Oxford: Blackwell.
- Obviously the key text. But I would not suggest anyone read it without guidance. So I suggest a project of working through it with a good secondary text alongside it. I will list such texts below.
Wittgenstein, L. (1969) On Certainty, Oxford: Blackwell
- A less key text but the same rule applies as for the Investigations.

A small number of key papers all about rule following in the Investigations

Obviously, the discussion in the Investigations, goes criss cross in every direction. But a key theme is how thought can stand in a relation to the world. I think that Wittgenstein’s key insight is that this relationship is normative and that accounting for that prompts confusion.

Arrington, R.L. (1991) ‘Making contact in language: the harmony between thought and reality’ in Arrington, R.L. and Glock, H-J. (eds) (1991) Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, London: Routledge
- to be read alongside the relevant paragraphs from the Investigations. A good if not finally satisfactory discussion of LW’s account of the relation of thought and world in the §§400s.

Kripke, S. (1982) Wittgenstein on rules and private language, Oxford: Blackwell chapter 2.
- brilliantly wrong about rule following and meaning (ie §§139-239). A key text in its own right.

Lear, J. (1986) ‘Transcendental anthropology’ in Pettit, P. and McDowell, J. (eds) (1986) Subject Thought and Context, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
- quirky! How can we cope with both the critique of a platonistic foundation for rules and meaning whilst respecting - contra Kripke - its genuine normativity?

McDowell, J. (1984b) ‘Wittgenstein on following a rule’ Synthese 58.
- the perfect antidote to Kripke and so helpful in reading the Investigations more generally. McDowell provides the best account of rule following which respects Wittgenstein’s therapeutic injunction to leave everything as it is.

Wright, C. (1991) ‘Wittgenstein’s later philosophy of mind: sensation, privacy and intention’ in Puhl, K. (ed) (1991) Meaning Scepticism, Berlin: de Gruyter.
- helpful to understand what (seems to me to) a wrong but still deep response to the Investigations. If so, the antidote is:
McDowell, J. (1991) ‘Intentionality and interiority in Wittgenstein’ in Puhl, K. (ed) (1991) Meaning Scepticism, Berlin: de Gruyter

Secondary texts

On the Investigations:
McGinn, M. (1997) Wittgenstein and the Philosophical Investigations, London: Routledge.

On On Certainty:
McGinn, M. (1989) Sense and Certainty, Oxford: Blackwell.
Moyal-Sharrock, D (2007) Understanding Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

More general resources:
Glock, H-J. (1996b) A Wittgenstein dictionary, Oxford: Blackwell.
 - a dictionary of Wittgensteinian terms and ideas.

Baker, G.P. and Hacker, P.M.S. (1980) Wittgenstein: Understanding and Meaning, Oxford: Blackwell.
Baker, G.P. and Hacker, P.M.S. (1983) Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, Oxford: Blackwell.
Baker, G.P. and Hacker, P.M.S. (1985) Wittgenstein: Rules, Grammar and Necessity, Oxford: Blackwell.
Hacker, P.M.S. (1990) Wittgenstein: Meaning and Mind, Oxford: Blackwell.
Hacker, P.M.S. (1996) Wittgenstein: Mind and Will, Oxford: Blackwell.
- taken together, an amazingly thorough account of the Investigations paragraph by paragraph

Recreation

Monk, R. (1991) Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, London: Vintage
- a decent biography.
Duffy. B. (1987) The World as I Found It, New York: Ticknor & Fields
- an odd but enjoyable novelisation of LW’s life.
Bernhardt, T. (2003) Correction, London: Vintage
-bloody brilliant. Wittgenstein with the volume turned to 11.