The reflexivity of semantic constructivism

Recall that SC claims that meanings are socially constructed, i.e. meanings are a matter of social consensus. Since consensus is liable to change, meanings are unreliable creatures. Accordingly, the empirical content of sentences is also undetermined. Assume, for example, that hypothesis H has no determinate empirical content. If SC is true, then the sentence ‘H has no determinate empirical content’ has no determinate empirical content. So if we grant that SC

8Of course, it is important who asks the questions: if asked, the relativistic relativist cannot justify any of her answers, but this doesn’t mean that she cannot make claims justified according to non-relativist’s standards.

is true, it follows that it is undetermined whether SC is true. It is not quite clear what conclusion follows from this situation. This is why it is recommendable that we take a closer look at the argumentative capabilities of SC.

However eccentric, the claim that beliefs and sentences have no determinate empirical contents has been plentifully advocated by semantic constructivists.

Barnes (1982), Bloor (1983), and Collins (1985) embrace the slogan thatnature has no role to play in forming our beliefs.

Finitism and interest theory

SC takes its support from the doctrine of finitism, according to which the future applications of a concept are not determined by its use in the present.

According to Bloor, since these future applications can always be contested and negotiated, meanings have the ‘character of social institutions’ (Bloor 1991: 167), that is, they are always liable to social negotiations.

The doctrine of finitism stems from the Wittgensteinian sceptical paradox about meaning and rule following. Since Kripke (1982) offers the most lucid and complete treatment of this paradox, I’ll follow his argumentation. Let us first present Kripke’s argument and then see to what extent it really supports constructivism.

Kripke proceeds by means of an arithmetical example. He refers to the word

‘plus’ and to the symbol ‘+’ to denote the well-known mathematical function of addition, defined for all pairs of positive integers. Although I have computed only finitely many sums in the past, the rule of addition will determine my answers for infinitely many new sums. If 68 + 57 is a computation that I have never performed, I just follow the familiar rule and answer confidently 125.

Now a sceptic comes along and objects that according to the way I have used the term ‘plus’ in the past, the intended answer for 68 + 57 should have been 5! He insists that

perhaps in the past I used ‘plus’ and ‘+’ to denote a function which I call

‘quus’ and symbolize by ‘L

’. It is defined by:

xLy=x+y, ifx, y <57,

= 5, otherwise.

Who is to say that this is not the function I previously meant by ‘+’ ? (Kripke 1982: 8–9)

Kripke wonders what fact about my previous mental, behavioral or physical history makes it the case that I mean this particular time the familiar plus rather than the ridiculous quus. To make the issue clear, the question is not, how do I know that 68 plus 57 is 125?, which should be answered by performing

an arithmetical computation, but rather, how do I know that 68 plus 57, as I meant ‘plus’ in the past, should denote 125? (1982: 12). In other words, how do I know that in the past I meantaddition and notquaddition? The apparent problem is that I do not and cannot know. There is no fact about my history, as the sceptic maintains, that establishes that I meant ‘plus’ rather than ‘quus’.

Therefore, she argues that my answering 125 to the problem 68+57 is ‘a leap in the dark’.

After having explored several tentative responses – speakers have disposi-tionsto use words in particular ways, orirreducible experiences with their own qualia signaling the proper use; they appeal tosimplicityconsiderations which will presumably make speakers use ‘plus’ instead of ‘quus’; there are appropri-ate Platonic forms corresponding to the correct meanings – Kripke’s sceptic concludes that there are simply no facts of the matter concerning meaning.

The discouraging conclusion follows that there is nothing in the use of words in the past to determine their future use. As Kripke phrases it,

There can be no such thing as meaning anything by any word. Each new application we make is a leap in the dark; any present intention could be interpreted so as to accord with anything we may choose to do. So there be neither accord, nor conflict. This is what Wittgenstein said in §202.

(Kripke 1982: 55)

Nonetheless, Kripke also teaches us that we can live with this consequence.

Claims about what words mean indeed lack truth-conditions, yet as Kripke maintains, they have socially determined assertibility conditions. They have conditions under which we are prepared to asserts that someone is using a word in conformity with its meaning. Individuals cannot be said to follow rules for the use of words, since assertion-conditions require a consensus. Consensus is a community matter, and this fact rules out the possibility of a private language.

Several philosophers found Kripke’s solution deficient and aimed for more promising approaches.⁹ McDowell (1984) maintains that rules are simply en-shrined in our communal practices. No explanation, he claims, can be given for the significance of rules and none is needed – a position which came to be known asquietism. The extension-determining approach by Wright (1989) sets out to avoid giving up the objectivity of meaning while at the same time bring-ing it within epistemic reach. Wright’s point is that only those judgements that we make in the most propitious conditions for judging go into determining the right use of a term. Thus, our linguistic judgementsdetermine rather than re-flect the correct application of our terms. The major difficulty of this approach

9I am partly guided in the following brief review of arguments by Barry Smith’s (1998) account of the rule-following issue.

is the non-circular specification of the most propitious conditions. Boghossian (1989) general attack againstnonfactualism – the doctrine according of which ascriptions of meaning do not possess truth-conditions – argues that the above sceptical solution is incoherent. He argues, on the one hand, that nonfactualism presupposes a robust theory of truth, i.e. a theory “committed to holding that the predicate ‘true’ stands for some sort of language independent property”

(1989: 526). On the other hand, he argues that, by being committed to the inexistence of a substantive property corresponding to the predicate “is true”, nonfactualism also entails that truth is notrobust. Now one way to circumvent this incoherence would be to show that nonfactualism is as a matter of fact not committed to the view that truth is some substantive, language-independent property, as Jane Heal (1990) claims to have done.

Alexander Miller (1998: 172–5) aptly draws our attention to an objection that Wright (1984) and Zalobardo (1995) have independently raised against Kripke’s sceptical solution: the assertibility conditions to which Kripke turns need themselves to be accounted for their content, or else they will be of no avail in explaining our practice of ascribing meanings. Nonetheless, with respect to assertibility conditions associated to past sentences, the question pops up,

would not any truths concerning assertion conditions previously associ-ated by somebody with a particular sentence have to be constituted by aspects of his erstwhile behaviour and mental life? So the case appears no weaker than in the sceptical argument proper for the conclusion that thereare no such truths; whence, following the same routine, it speedily follows that there are no truths about the assertion conditions that any of us presently associates with a particular sentence, nor,a fortiori, any truths about a communal association. (Wright 1984: 770)

Thus if the ascriptions of meaning depend on assertibility conditions, the for-mer are themselves meaningless.

So much for the discussion of ‘Kripke’s Wittgenstein’ (KW). Returning to semantic constructivists, many of them are very fond of KW’s attack on meaning determinism. Barnes, Bloor, and Collins adopt and adapt Kripke’s solution: meaning is merely a matter of social negotiation. The claim is that meanings are byproducts of social interests reflected in negotiation processes, marked by social hierarchies and power relations. Indeed, the main concern of SC seems to be the elucidation of power and interest relations within the scientific establishment. The view in the Strong Programme’s interest theory is that the truth-conditions of scientific beliefs are determined by the interplay of social interests, not by any rational method.

But, of course, the Wright-Zalobardo objection against the sceptic solution will also affect its semantic constructivist formulation. We have seen that the

sceptical paradox turns upon itself to the effect that nothing can be meaning-fully said about assertion condition, to the effect that no meaning ascriptions can be fulfilled. Thus, the very formulation of the sceptic paradox verges on senselessness. Besides, by rejecting the capability of rational methods to as-cribe and fix meanings, SC reaches the brink of irrationalism. Accordingly, the question to be raised is, in how far can we take seriously the argumentation of SC. This straightforwardly leads us back to problem of epistemic construc-tivism, which has been seen in the previous subsection to be inconsistent.

Facts as hardened text pieces

A second line of argumentation for semantic constructivism comes from the celebratedLaboratory Life by Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar (1986). While the the Edinburgh School takes beliefs as the unit of analysis, Latour and Wool-gar focus on ‘scientific facts’. Thus the weight center shifts from knowledge¹⁰ as an intellectual possession of individuals to knowledge as acommodity.

Another difference from the constructivism of the Strong Programme is that Latour and Woolgar do not consider scientific knowledge determinable solely by social factors. As Latour (1987) argues, the social determinist thesis fails because we do not understand society any better than we do the natural world. He considers science as something to be studied as a connecting point between society and nature. To have a more precise understanding of the latter claim, let us take a look at Latour and Woolgar’s method and at their conception about the outcome of science.

Their study of scientific activity is based on an anthropological approach of the scientific community:

Whereas we have fairly detailed knowledge of the myths and circumcision ritual of exotic tribes, we remain relatively ignorant of the details of equivalent tribes of scientists. (Latour and Woolgar 1986: 17)

This ‘methodological’ separation from the object of study clearly attempts at lessening both the claims of scientists about the rationality of their activity, and the respect that science enjoys in society:

We take the apparent superiority of the members of our laboratory in technical matter to be insignificant. This is similar to an anthropologist’s refusal to bow before the knowledge of a primitive sorcerer. There are no a priori reasons for supposing that scientists’ practice is any more rational than that of the outsiders. (Latour and Woolgar 1986: 29)

10The concept of ‘knowledge’ in the analyses of social theorists is not taken as ‘true belief’, but as ‘whatever scientists agree that knowledge is’.

As Brown (1989) indicates, Latour and Woolgar describe scientists as a com-munity of graphomaniacs: Publication is the final goal of scientists and of science in its entirety. There seems to be nothing significant beyond the pro-duction, via large inscription devices, of texts. Here is another telling excerpt from Laboratory Life:

The problems for participants [scientists] was to persuade readers of pa-pers (and constituent diagrams) that its statements should be accepted as facts. To this end rats had been bled and beheaded, frogs had been flayed, chemicals consumed, time spent, careers had been made and broken, and inscription devices had been manufactured and accumulated within the laboratory. By remaining steadfastly obstinate, our anthropological ob-server resisted the tentation to be convinced by the facts. Instead, he was able to portray laboratory activity as the organization of persuasion through literary inscription. (Latour and Woolgar 1986: 88)

Scientific facts themselves are ‘hardened’ parts of texts, i.e. conjectures trans-formed into background knowledge. Latour (1987) refers to social facts as

‘black boxes’. These are inscriptions invested with so much authority that once established, they are never challenged or reinvestigated. They thus come to constitute bedrock knowledge for all participants in a research field. A central thesis of Latour and Woolgar is that the fundamental commodity in scientific activity is peer recognition. Scientists want the approval of other members of their tribe. No interest for truth or objectivity or empirical ade-quacy dominates. All that matters is gained credibility, which can be traded by the rules of a market-driven economy:

It would be wrong to regard the receipt of reward as the ultimate objec-tive of scientific activity. In fact, the receipt of reward is just one small portion of a large cycle of credibility investment. The essential feature of this cycle is the gain of credibility which enables reinvestment and further gain of credibility. Consequently, there is no ultimate objective to scien-tific investment other than the continual redeployment of accumulated resources. It is in this sense that we liken scientists’ credibility to a cycle of capital investment. (Latour and Woolgar: 1986: 198)

What would then be the point of all these incontinently produced scientific papers? How are we to understand their content? Answer: what scientists mean is determined by those who have the say – i.e., enough credibility – in science. The distribution of credibility and of scientific authority is an ongoing process. The owners of the largest credibility stocks will decide what is scientific fact and what is the meaning of a sentence. This takes us to the conclusion of Collins (1985: 172–3), who characterizes semantic constructivism

as leading to conventionalism. Therefore, the Collins and the Latour-Woolgar versions of SC join hands in an unrestrained conventionalism.

The problem is that a generalized conventionalism entails an absurd view of science. Undoubtedly, we all agree that progress is a very desirable, but also very strenuously achieved feature of science. Yet if conventionalism were true, why not just decree that progress is in place? One might remark that it is already fairly late to start worrying about SC’s absurdity. For what can be more absurd than the idea that facts are reified portions of text, that they can be constructed and de-constructed at the whim of science’s bosses, and that truth and falsity are negotiable? If the spheres of influence in the scientific establishment changed sufficiently, we might find out tomorrow that the moon is made of cheese.

Enough has been said about semantic constructivism for a conclusion to be drawn. I dismiss Strong Programme’s view of the social determination of meaning as being self-undermining and as leading to irrationalism. I also dis-miss Latour and Woolgar’s view about scientific facts as inscriptions invested with epistemic authority as being plainly absurd.

The overall balance of the reflexivity issue is as follows: epistemic construc-tivism is rejected as inconsistent, semantic construcconstruc-tivism is rejected as either meaningless or as leading to irrationalism, while metaphysical constructivism is still in the run. But the latter will suffer great losses from the following series of arguments.