Constructivst v. Foundationalist Epistemology?

I just finished reading Scandalous Knowledge, a relentlessly snarky description of an apparently vicious conflict in academia between proponents of foundationalist/realist/positivist epistemolgy (and the disciplines and ideologies which follow) and constructivist epistemology (and the dieciplines etc. which follow from that.

The tone of the work is vicious, though witty, and being removed by decades from academic conflicts of any kind I was curious if the conflict Ms. Smith describes is real or just something on which to target her snark.

Is realist v. contructivist epistemology a real conflict, like with people losing their jobs if they're on the wrong side?

There is an "academic" conflict, yes: debate, argument, disagreement are more apt ways of characterizing the situation. Often, the characterization of a scholar as a "constructivist" or "foundationalist" can be the most superficial reading of whatever the person has to communicate. But often, critics of the academic world are most comfortable with superficialities and slogans, which are then wielded as slurs (what I believe Pierre Bourdieu characterized as the academic version of racism): emic! etic! materialist! idealist! objectivist! subjectivist!

I haven't read the book, but it sounds like others out there that announce the end of reason, standards, Western civilization, the world, etc. If the book's argument is built around anecdotes (such as the Sokal hoax) and cherry-picked quotes, then I think it is most likely an ax-grinding screed that can be laid to the side as another example of "crank lit" that claims to have uncovered a deep fraud or deep conspiracy against humanity from the side of constructivists, poststructuralists, materialists, feminists, etc. ad nauseum. For those who are comfortable mining both constructivism and realism (because the natural and social worlds are both constructed -- i.e., dependent on cognitive and/or interpretive categories not found in the things themselves -- and real -- i.e., independent of individual cognition), any account that sets up an apocalyptic clash between the two epistemological standpoints is too risible to be taken seriously.

Thanks, theoria, that helps a lot--especially "... which are then wielded as slurs (what I believe Pierre Bourdieu characterized as the academic version of racism): emic! etic! materialist! idealist! objectivist! subjectivist!" Thinking of "academic racism" makes a lot of sense and explains the apparently gratuitous viciousness.

The book was useful, for me, because I got an introduction to the vocabulary and who some of the players are and so lengthened my "To Read" list some, but I think thin in content. Unless you want to hear over and over how stupid evolutionary psychologists are.

Thinking about it, I'm not even sure the book MADE an argument at all, it was more like an intellectual version of Don Rickles' act. Someone recommended a newer book, Natural Reflections: Human Cognition at the Nexus of Science and Religion, which is more relevant to my main interests and I thought I'd pick up this from the library to get a taste of how she thought and wrote. It kind of scared me.

I am a confirmed constructivist myself - but in a nice way! A rather interesting but, perhaps, now somewhat dated outline of the debate from a realist perspective is given in Michael Devitt's 'Realism and Truth'. Also Chris Norris is good from a realist perspective. As to more sympathetic constructivist approaches, the later Putnam is useful if you want to avoid too much by way of the continental. As far as I know, the debate still goes on - I have been out of it for a few years myself, but keep in touch as it were.

For a smart and close-to-the-point essay, read Stanley Fish's "Rhetoric" in Doing What Comes Naturally. The debate is bigger than realist v constructivist, and it goes back a long long way. Start with Plato, an idealist, who believed there existed an absolute truth divinely given, and that the best human beings could do was imitate (the shoemaker, for example) and at the worst corrupt the ideal form (the artist who paints a portrait of the shoemaker but could not cobble his or her way out of a wet sack). But then Aristotle said Wait a minute, Teach, if human beings can't access the ideal truth, then they still need a way for deciding the best course of action in any circumstance (the Spartans are coming -- should Athens go to war or negotiate a settlement?). Aristotle said that rhetoric was the tool for reaching consensus, and that consensus on what to do was more useful that belief in an absolute truth that we can't ever know. Plato thought rhetoric was the worst kind of expression.

Constructivism is more recent, and I would likely locate its genesis in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: the language that we use determines the way we interpret reality; in other words, we construct our reality -- there is no ideal or absolute truth (but, we can use rhetoric to reach a consensual interpretation and go from there.

The American answer to this continental debate was pragmatism (John Dewey, William James, George Mead, and then contemporary thinkers like Fish, Richard Rorty, and Donald Davidson. I like what Kenneth Burke said about pragmatism: the pragmatist accepts that the universe IS, and so the question becomes what does it DO? In other words, we can't know the essence of the objects of our world -- only the names for what we call them. We are, after all, the language-making language-using species and we live much of our lives in a world of symbols. Nietzsche says plenty about that -- his "Truth and Lies in the Non-Moral Sense" is a brief and accessible representation of his argument.

The debate comes down to idealist (Plato and all that follow him) or materialist (Aristotle and the many branches that spring from there). I am a pragmatist, philosophically and materially. More important than any doctrine is a sense of how to get on with things. We know the objects of our world from the consequences of their actions on us. And all of it is enveloped in language games -- as Derrida teaches us, there is nothing outside of the text.

Sorry to go on so. Embrace the liberty of the antifoundationalist view. When you realize that all of our beliefs are of our own making, there is the possibility that we can hold common beliefs about a great many things. And with that perhaps just a chance we can quit killing each other and start sharing stories and developing answers for the problems we face.

This is a most interesting discussion, primarily because I don't have a clue what is going on in most of it, and I have a B.A. in Philosophy from a school that is generally well thought of in Philosophy. Admitted, of course, that B.A. was earned over 30 years ago, so I'm not surprised that things have changed. But apparently they've changed much more than I would have guessed.

In any case, let me "run on a bit" and then maybe someone will be willing to tell me where I've gone wrong.

I suppose, most fundamentally, I don't understand the distinction being made in epistemology. Back in the bad old days one distinguished between "rationalists" or "intuitionists" on the one hand, and "empiricists" or "positivists" on the other hand.

Plato, Descartes, Leibniz etc.were rationalists who believed that the well trained mind intuited essences which were the "really real" as opposed to mere appearances. The senses were deceptive, so looking to see was unreliable and probable the source of delusions.

Maybe Aristotle (more likely some of the Pre-Socratics), Berkeley, Hume, the Logical Positivists and, in a different way, Popper, were empiricists who believed that if you wanted to know what was true you "looked to see." Intuitions were no better than dreams. (Again, Popper is a bit of a misfit here, but I think it is fair to throw him mostly into this camp.)

Pragmatism was, I suppose, a form of empiricism, but a rather peculiar form that was mainly limited to Americans - Americans were generally held to be somewhat backward in matters of Philosophy. The real geographic divisions in Philosophy were between England and the Continent, with each side believing that the other was babbling nonsense (albeit the term non-sense is probably a bit biased and prejudicial to one side of this debate).

Linguistics was viewed as a curious diversion, but the sort of linguistics that claimed to be a science rather than a taxonomical study was viewed with a great deal of skepticism.

Now I am presuming that the debate between "foundationalism" and "constructivism" has to do with what constitutes Truth. But I'm not certain that one can get to that issue as frontally as most of the posts above appear to be doing. Surely, what constitutes Truth must have something to do with methodology? And I'm not at all certain that some methodologies allow for Final Truth or that most allow that such Final Truth has already been established. (After all, if we can close the book on Philosophy, then what is one to do for a doctoral dissertation topic?) Some views, of course, don't allow for anything like any sort of Truth, but epistemological nihilism has never been all that popular.

The book in the OP, especially as suspected for classification in #2, reminds me of The Liar's Tale, which I read and reviewed, but didn't end up thinking of highly enough to keep.

And not a single mention of Husserl or Heidegger..impressive!

Very interesting discussion. I've learned and been reminded of a lot, has me itching to get back to some solid philosophy texts.

I'd add that along with the divides mentioned above (foundationalist / constructivist or idealist / materialist, and the various permutations) I'd add realist as an important position. By realist I mean the metaphysical position holding that both ideas and matter are equally real, neither is an illusion with the other being "real" or the source of Truth.

In many cases this is a distinction of interest only to blathering academics. But I believe it has very practical consequences for social interaction and is a prerequisite to any healthy politics. John Chapman wrote a wonderfully dense and incisive essay on the requisite components of any politics which introduced me to this important distinction.

>7 paradoxosalpha:

Nice review, paradoxosalpha. Almost persuades me to read the book, but your assessment convinces me I'd be better off reading some of the primary sources. Again, that itch.