This is the pre-publication draft.

The original work can be found at

https://read.dukeupress.edu/public-culture/issue/30/2.

Retooling the Discourse of Objectivity:

Epistemic Postmodernism As Shared Public Life

J. Aaron Simmons
Brandon Inabinet

Introduction

If the science wars are over, then humanity lost. In an increasingly corporate and shrinking

university structure, what gets remembered in the gap between postmodernism and science is the

Sokal paper, the turn toward relativism and false equivalences in mainstream politics, and the

ability today for pop-culture scientists like Neil deGrasse Tyson and the New Atheists to discard

rich traditions of human action (like religion, philosophy, or the humanities) in an attack on

conservative anti-science thought. Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt’s shockingly polemical

essay against the excesses of scientistic objectivity in 1994 has done little to move the sciences

toward self-reflection, but gave vast credence to excusing relativism in public culture. Bruno

Latour, in a rich mea culpa for the humanities a decade later, even suggested:

I know full well that this is not enough because, no matter what we do, when we try to

reconnect scientific objects with their aura, their crown, their web of associations, when

we accompany them back to their gathering, we always appear to weaken them, not to

strengthen their claim to reality. I know, I know, we are acting with the best intentions in

the world, we want to add reality to scientific objects, but, inevitably, through a sort of

tragic bias, we seem always to be subtracting some bit from it. Like a clumsy waiter

setting plates on a slanted table, every nice dish slides down and crashes on the ground.

(Latour 2004: 237)

Such critiques of “objectivity” are familiar.1 Their remorse and public ramifications are newer.

What was once an almost trivial set of games between various areas of academe, has now

expanded into a “war” that joins culture, science, and nearly everything else in a weakening of

institutions and expertise, giving credence even to the conservative distrust of scientific findings

(Gauchat 2012) and the erosion of a culture of reasonableness more generally.

Our thesis is that a set of substantive changes to the way we deploy the notion of

postmodernism, and a major change to the way we understand and communicate it in public

controversy, might foster self-awareness of the current discourse surrounding “objectivity,” such

that science can more effectively fill its very necessary social function. Moreover, living itself

can become enriched when a conception of scientific labor and innovation participates in our

public discourses, as one possible mode of meaningful living. Objectivity would no longer need

to legitimate science as the only possible framework for determining what knowledge can mean

and what faith can involve.

1 Recently the move for the sciences to recognize the value of the humanities has become a

common theme in both scholarship and also broader culture. As just a few examples of this
trend, see Drakeman 2015; Smith 2014; and Skorton 2014. For an account of how the market
driven logic that often accompanies and even undergirds the scientistic commitment to
objectivity might stand as a threat to higher education, see Eagleton 2015. Importantly, the move
to bring the sciences and the humanities into a more productive conversation is not something
only occurring from one side. For examples of scientific attempts to bridge this potential cultural
divide, see Slingerland 2008; Slingerland and Collard 2012.
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In order to make this case, we uphold the long tradition of scholarship in the rhetoric of

science, which says that science must make sense of itself as a discourse, rather than as the

clearing-house for all Truth (Gross 1990). Science, stripped of reductive absolutism as proposed

by Michel Henry (2012) in Barbarism, could be viewed as a cultural tradition that is handed

down generationally within a particular community of practicing scientists (theoretical and

applied). Chantal Mouffe’s (2000) concept of discursive agonism characterizes how that cultural

tradition, as a game between the humanities and sciences, could shift communicative strategies,

so that we never risk misrepresenting both science and the humanities as inviting a relativistic or

nihilistic end to cultural and faith traditions.

We will proceed as follows. First, we will consider objectivist tendencies in modern

science and trace the existential threat that such objectivism represents, through the work of

Henry. Then, we argue that the two academic cultures of the humanities and sciences must

continue to compete in ways that do not eliminate the importance and distinctiveness of each.

Subsequently, we will posit that postmodernism is a striking, even if unexpected, resource for

retooling the idea of “objectivity” in ways that can invite dialogue across disciplines rather than

shutting it down in the name of a self-protective, and ultimately self-erasing, identity.

Postmodernism should be understood primarily as an epistemic thesis of competing truth rather

than a metaphysical thesis. In order for science to remain significant in public culture, and fill its

appropriate role as contributing to living well within that culture, the sciences and the humanities

need to be maintained in a productive tension that recognizes the competitive, communal

dimensions always operative in “objective” and “anti-objectivist” inquiry. In our conclusion, we

will offer suggestions for what such a retooled notion of objectivity, and also a reframed

conception of science, might involve as practiced in the lab, the classroom, and social life more

generally.

Michel Henry and the Existential Threat of Scientistic Objectivism

When C.P. Snow gave his 1959 lecture on “The Two Cultures” of the sciences and the

humanities, he hardly could have predicted the “marketplace” under which higher education

would now be positioned (1998). The disparities in social authority between the fields, the flashy

academics and pseudo-academics who flame the other disciplines, and the high-stakes games for

funding were nowhere in 1959. Many recent cultural theorists and social critics have challenged

objectivist, elite science and the technological society that it inaugurates. For example, Pierre

Bourdieu's (1980) notion of “habitus” stands as a reminder that inquiry is always grounded in

ideological frameworks that shape both our theory and practice. Similarly, Jacques Ellul (1964)

offers a robust challenge to the idea that technology can serve as a self-grounding narrative for

identity and social life. Race theorists, standpoint epistemologists, and feminists challenged any

weak form of objectivity that did not take into account multiple, recursive, and especially

marginal points of view (Harding 2004). According to many such thinkers, then, taken-for-

granted science as culturally practiced is highly suspect, as it undermines multiple,

humanistically-legitimated modes of knowing and reflection on those modes of knowing.

One of the most sustained and developed accounts in this vein is offered by Michel

Henry in his book Barbarism (2012). Henry takes Snow’s account of the culture-wars between

the humanities and the sciences much further and suggests that the reductive objectivism of the

sciences threatens to destroy culture, as such.2 Focusing specifically on the modernist inheritance

of Galileo,3 Henry explains the current high stakes game as a matter of the very possibility of

culture and human existence. Whereas civilizations past were “complex, multiple, and

irreducible” and lacked any external schema apart from birth, growth, decline, and death,

modernity after Galilean science is, for Henry,

a clearly formulated intellectual decision whose content is perfectly intelligible. It is the

decision to understand, in the light of geometric-mathematical knowledge, the universe as

reduced henceforth to an objective set of material phenomena. Moreover, it constructs

and organizes the world exclusively on the basis of this new knowledge and the inert

processes over which it provides mastery. (Henry 2012: xiii-xiv)

Henry suggests that all modern subjects are expected to stand in awe of a “geometrical

knowledge of material nature,” which can be mathematically expressed. The new knowledge

organized by such a principle and multiplied each day by the sheer volume of accumulated facts

“takes the place of all others and rejects them as insignificant” (Henry 2012: xiii). Non-rigorous,

subjective experience and “being” loses salience. Evidence, proofs, and experiments move from

the natural world, through the world of exchange (in economics) toward social and political

2 For more on new phenomenology and Henry’s relation to the broader philosophical trajectory,

see Simmons and Benson 2013. For more on Henry’s philosophy in general, and his
understanding of culture in particular, see Rebidoux 2012; Hanson and Kelly 2012; Audi 2006;
and Brohm 2006.
3 Nicholas Wolterstorff (1984) also takes Galileo as his starting point for thinking about the ways

in which reason and knowledge function in modernity. With Henry, he focuses on the
importance of historical rootedness in living, but stresses hermeneutics rather than
phenomenology as the most promising philosophical resource.
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knowing, and finally even take control of how we know ourselves (in the cognitive sciences).

“Unfortunately,” Henry explains, “this revolution is also a revolution of the human being”

(Henry 2012: 2). Hearkening back to Edmund Husserl’s (1970) notion of “The Crisis of

European Sciences,” and Martin Heidegger’s (1977) account of the dehumanizing tendencies of

modern technology, Henry asks, “If the increasingly comprehensive knowledge of the world is

undeniably good, why does it go hand in hand with the collapse of all other values, a collapse so

serious that it calls our own existence into question?” (Henry 2012: 2) Ultimately, stressing the

lived dimension of what it means to inhabit a world of meaning, Henry concludes that dismissive

scientism (he labels “barbarism”) amounts to the destruction of culture (Henry 2012: 2). A social

commitment to the exclusive legitimacy of science endangers and delegitimizes all other

approaches to human existence, social understanding, and cultural expression.

Henry may overstate the inevitability of his claims, but his account accurately reflects the

decline of discursive agonism between the fields in a broader public culture. Among the general

population, it no longer appears as a playful game of truth at all, but instead as a toxic death-

match. No longer is a friendly, albeit privileged, engagement possible. Instead, neoliberal

competition empowers speakers and leaders who have very little appreciation, let alone

understanding, of cultural traditions of incremental criticism and change through blind review.

Snow’s cultural difference gets replaced by a metaphysical indifference. Importantly, our use of

Chantal Mouffe’s (2000) conception of “agonism” here is intentional as distinguished from her

notion of “antagonism.” In agonistic discourse, the tension between different views is understood

as productive in relation to the shared commitment to truth. In an antagonistic engagement,

alternatively, the goal is to defeat the opponent, rather than to find a way in which to move

forward together despite continued reasonable differences.

In other words, in an antagonistic framework, the “two cultures” of the sciences and the

humanities get flattened into nothing more than a “choice” of whether or not to believe in

“science” as a body of facts—facts that are indifferent toward any particular culture or way of

living. Notice this expression indicts both the humanities (in bringing about relative

epistemologies without sufficient regard for the public culture it informs) and the sciences (for

presuming “to know” facts). Science enjoys presumption, with its modern commitments—viz.,

observable data, predictable results, mathematical precision, and freedom from ideological

corruption. These norms then get positioned and deployed in a capitalistic context that prizes the

products of inquiry that are maximally practical, efficient, and consumable, from smartphones to

self-driving cars. Science becomes simply a better tool for living, but one whose acceptance

means an erasure of meaningful living. Thus, many use its “products” but deny its aura or

authenticity as a life process and way of knowing.

By reframing things in an agonistic way, we are able to resist both Henry’s potential

overstatement and slippage between “science” and “scientism.” Each field of science and inquiry

has its own tools, methods, and assets that need to be privileged from time-to-time in the broader

public culture. Climate science and civic epistemology at this moment might be the two fields

most dire to our perverse reality. Therefore, the recent “March for Science” is not something

that should be read as “anti-humanities,” but instead as an opportunity for all concerned about

free inquiry to stand for values that define such inquiry and the society that fosters it. Similarly,

we all benefit when the humanities pull the sciences back to attending carefully to what counts as

meaningful processes for truth. As these examples show, productive agonism does not mean that

the fields are equal or that their importance to the public culture is the sole arbiter for which

should remain. Rather, conversations about that relationship serve as a meta-discourse that can

regulate the discourse, whether Henry’s critique, this essay, or others like it. Henry’s critique is

so powerful because he does not want to erase science as a human practice, but only to highlight

the epistemic, moral, and existential stakes of viewing science as the only practice that matters.

It is not obvious, however, what Henry’s notion of “culture” would involve such that it

allows for meaningful living in a way that supports subjectivity without falling into a

problematic epistemic subjectivism. In other words, a scientist might object that we lose the very

notion of “truth” based in the empirical reality that tethers all other values and beliefs around it.

As we see it, Henry merely focuses us on the way in which living, itself, frames all concern for

truth. Henry’s account is merely attempting to resist all reductionistic tendencies whereby

empirical data counts as the only data relevant to life itself. Instead, and we agree with him on

this point, life, as such, is the space in which data can emerge as meaningful at all.

If scientism is allowed to reign triumphantly as not only our methodological, but also our

moral, political, religious, and aesthetic touchstone, then distinguishing between technological

overreach and appropriately deploying technology for living well, say, becomes difficult.

Henry’s argument is not that we eliminate science (again, his is not an antagonistic account), but

that when science is allowed to march untrammelled into the future as determinate of that future,

and all other possible alternatives for it, then our very practice of scientific inquiry is no longer

connected to the act of meaning-making that arises for us from the deeper structures of living.

Ultimately, Henry does not offer a prescriptive moral view, but instead offers a

phenomenological account of how moral views are essential to humanistic existence. The very

sorts of beings that we are (culture as expressed, in the practice of living, most immediately

given in our religious, artistic, and moral sensibilities) underwrites the accounts we give in

inquiry that results in objects of advancement (whether historical, theoretical, or scientific).

For Henry, the cultures of intellectual life are foundationally relevant to the broader

public culture because such intellectual life attends to what life means when not reduced to a

biological category (and thus reducible to “organic compounds”), while still being responsive to

the changes wrought by scientific thinking and modernity. By acquiescing to the oppositional

understanding of the two cultures, human existence is threatened because culture, itself, becomes

oriented toward an indifference to life in the name of economic expediency, which then

reinforces those aspects of scientism that fit well with such a model. In this sense, the problem

for Henry, and for us, is scientistic objectivism and its humanistic critique communicated

outward toward publics, not science as a historical cultural discourse. That said, if we rethink

what objectivity should mean for science in a postmodern world, then perhaps we can find a way

for science to be a mode of engagement with life and not an erasure of it. In the next section, we

will suggest that Michael Polanyi offers resources toward this end.

Two Academic Cultures, and What we Know

If we understand this clash of academic cultures to be important on this broader cultural scale,

then the critique of objectivity in postmodern thought requires attention. To correct the

temptation toward “vulgar relativism,” we posit a phenomenological basis for both the

humanities and sciences, on which vulgar relativism finds its limit in lived subjectivity. As

Henry explains,

The life that we are speaking about cannot be confused with the object of scientific

knowledge, an object for which knowledge would be reserved to those who are in

possession of it and who have had to acquire it. Instead it is something that everyone

knows, as part of what we are. . . . This is life not in the biological sense but in the true

sense—the absolute phenomenological life whose essence consists in the very fact of

sensing or experiencing oneself and nothing else—of what we will call subjectivity.

(Henry 2012: 6)

The culture that is concerned with life, Henry contends, is ultimately a culture that “originally

and in itself has nothing to do with science and does not result from it in any way” (2012: 6).

Experience itself is not dependent on science, even if science fundamentally changes some of the

ways we then interpret the experience.

Henry’s insights about the primacy of experience can be expanded by turning to the work

of the mid-twentieth century chemist and anti-positivist philosopher, Michael Polanyi. Polanyi

posited “intuition” as the subjective sense of the world. His famous dictum was that “We know

more than we can say,” meaning that our experience of the world is no exact science, but is

instead a mix of sensory and extra-sensory perceptions—perhaps direct inputs, but also

ambiguous clues and illusions (Polanyi 1946: 38). What allows us to be human is our capacity to

inherit traditions that “up the game” of interpreting and contextualizing those experiences, rather

than merely using instinct to react. Most of this interpretation and contextualization, essential for

the humanities and sciences, is learned tacitly in communities, and requires faith that whatever

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authorities exist within those communities can be trusted. Not surprisingly, then, Polanyi

understands science as a cultural experience “embodied in practice alone” (Polanyi 1946: 33).

Anticipating Thomas Kuhn, Polanyi suggests that rather than coming up with eternal

answers in science, each generation is in charge of interpreting its own processes (Polanyi 1946:

16). But typically, these are not radical shifts, as the culture is guided by intelligent imitation of

past practices. In any particular situation, Polanyi mirrors the literature in the field on judgment

and prudence (Beiner 1984; Hariman 1993; Jasinski 1995), wherein a scientist’s mind struggles

between “intuitive speculation” acting as a generative impulse and rule-constraints as critical

caution. Rising above both of these, hopefully, is moral judgment determining personal

responsibilities that one holds toward a judging public. Such morality is always socially

determined, yet guided by a conscience that endures intergenerationally (Polanyi 1966: 86).

Polanyi hints that such faith and conscience are analogical to religion, as we “proceed by faith,

establishing rules of art and acting in chains of mutual appreciation, committed to the traditions

to which we are born and cultivating them to the best of our abilities” (Polanyi 1946: 83).

Science, from such a viewpoint, is not only like the modern humanistic inquiry from which it

comes and which it reproduces in universities in its image, but also the practices of knowing and

everyday experience that humanities and social sciences seek to study.

Notice that in such a framework the overriding features are the scientists’ inherited and

acquired (1) concern for the domain of study, (2) appreciation of its rules, and (3) courage to take

public responsibility for its communication. Polanyi goes as far as to remind scientists that not

only are they practicing a cultural tradition, but they are also taking part in an unpredictable and

contingent art (1946: 41). Rather than being determinative, scientists are involved in a careful

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public act of creating salience for some features of the world around them, while concealing

others—the choice of objects studied and questions asked constituting a very rhetorical and

decidedly value-laden process. Importantly, Polanyi was not trying to subvert science by

crowning humanities the “champion” in a war. Rather, as a scientist himself, he looks from the

agonistic lens of the humanities. Moreover, he evaluates modern science as a “noble vista”

compared to past faiths—a careful and precise look at the natural order inaccessible to centuries

of “magical thinking” about supernatural phenomena—and describes it as “decent” value system,

with “responsible” processes, and frequently deserving of broad public acceptance than other

modes of traditional faith.

Today it is clear that Polanyi’s vision did not take hold, and as described, the sciences

have largely ignored Polanyi’s insights. Scientism’s eliminative reductivism allows for research

presentations or teaching that still take the defense of “just presenting the facts” or “raw” data

(with the implication of zero interpretation or human-derived meaning). For scientism, in a

culture of indifference, subjectivity is understood as the unwelcome introduction of personal

feelings, tastes, or opinions into an otherwise value-free discourse of objective purity. In this

way, scientism relies on a representationalism or dualism that allows for a natural world that gets

studied as prior to, outside of, or in spite of the human experience of that world.

The issues get more entrenched when amplified by market and political forces—forces

that see progress in medical or economic terms as the ultimate end-goal, beyond contemplation

or even existence. Heidegger famously termed the shift in point of view as one of logistics—the

belief that a result can yield assured profits “for the construction of a technological universe”

(Heidegger 1968: 21). “New findings” contribute to such a world that can help a general public,

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to the point that we can now imagine every political question being satisfied with a

technological, data-driven cure (Packer 2013).

This vision endangers science in several senses. One is that the means-end rationale in an

economy structured by capitalism means that the private sector would be the “natural” home for

“real” science. If the goal is not the maintenance of a community and community norms, but new

products, then academic institutions and academic scientific organizations are woefully

inefficient. The second is that science (as eliminative reductivism) is at war rather than at play

with the humanities, yielding a segmented university that is easily penetrated by efficiency

rationales. Signs include the attack on mismatch between “STEM and non-STEM” institutions

(Schmidt 2015); the devaluation of argumentation and historical controversy to one day of a

science course rather than its mode of delivery, because tests dictate science as factual “content”;

when questions (such as intelligent design) can be answered with “because . . . science,” as if it is

purely another word for authoritative facts. Modern science as a cultural formation suggests that

these “problems for science” arise in society as a result of “politics,” and that resistance can be

traced back to a cultural turn that gets its justification from the humanities that refuses to admit a

final truth and reality.

We propose a reconsideration of the discourse. A full transition to the language of

“cultural traditions” is likely impossible from the position of scientists, who utilize vocabularies

of fact, objectivity, reality, and science as the basis for their social preeminence. But rather than

framing them as watchwords of humanities’ demise, as Henry is apt to do, we encourage re-

situating those terms as a matter of democratic pluralism. But, again, we must avoid any slide

toward antagonism here. “Science wars” were always a rigged game, and the humanities always

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lose in the double sense explored above: both in terms of public reception (without a “product”

for logistical thinking) and in terms of academic legitimacy (without a central discourse of

knowing). We turn to postmodernism for an answer.

Epistemology as a Passion for Existence

As suggested, the postmodern challenge to objectivity stresses perspectivalism and

contextualism. Its ultimate result is a robust epistemic humility that should accompany not only

inquiry, but also belief and action. When approached in this way, rather than as a very technical

cultural movement, or mere philosophical position, it becomes easier to understand Jean-

François Lyotard’s famous definition of the postmodern: “an incredulity toward metanarratives”

(Lyotard 1984: xxiv). This definition should be heard not as a call to relativism, but as an

epistemic thesis that stresses the locality of all knowing. Accordingly, postmodernism, in this

sense, should not be limited only to those thinkers working in the second half of the twentieth

century. Instead, it can be expanded to include thinkers throughout human history who resisted

forgetting one’s existential location. For example, critiquing the objectivist conception of history

and truth offered by Hegel, Søren Kierkegaard suggests that “the knowing spirit is an existing

spirit, and that every human being is such a spirit existing for himself, I cannot repeat often

enough, because the fantastical disregard of this has been the cause of much confusion”

(Kierkegaard 1992: 189).

Kierkegaard goes on to explain that even if presented with the opportunity to be purely

objective—to occupy the “view from nowhere,” as Thomas Nagel (1986) might say—that he

would choose to remain as he is, a “poor existing individual human being” (Kierkegaard 1992:

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190). Contending that too much focus has been given to “what” one believes, which comes at the

cost of attending to “how” one believes it, Kierkegaard suggests that the problem with

objectivity is that it tends to forget the subjective appropriation of whatever it is that one affirms.

The result, Kierkegaard claims, is that, “the way of objective reflection turns the subjective

individual into something accidental and thereby turns existence into an indifferent [ligegyldig],

vanishing something” (Kierkegaard 1992: 193). Kierkegaard’s point is that we decide what to

believe as a matter of passionate existence.4 As David Foster Wallace (2009) might say, the

obvious is never obvious enough to take it for granted.

Similar to Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche also stresses the importance of decision,

though he terms it “will” and develops it into a full-throated theory of human identity, meaning,

and value. Most relevant to our concerns here, though, is the way in which Nietzsche presents

the notion of the “death of God” as a task for human existence after the loss of objective

certainties (see Nietzsche 2001, §125: 119-20) and defines truth, in the well-known quotation, as

A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of

human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and

embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and

binding. (Nietzsche 2005: 17)

Although there are a variety of ways to interpret Nietzsche’s thought, minimally it is an

4 For excellent considerations of Kierkegaard’s views on this front, especially as developed by

Kierkegaard’s pseudonym, Johannes Climacus, see Furtak 2010; Westphal 1996; and Evans
1992 and 1989.
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encouragement to view inquiry as a human practice, with all the accompanying prejudices,

assumptions, and commitments that attend to it.5

More recently Richard Rorty is perhaps the most strident philosophical opponent to

objectivity as the criterion and goal of inquiry. Famously Rorty follows Nietzsche’s lead when it

comes to a social constructivist view of truth, but expresses it much more brashly, in line with

what he presents as the Deweyan conception that truth is “what our peers will, ceteris paribus, let

us get away with saying” (Rorty 1979: 176). In an essay titled, “Solidarity or Objectivity,” Rorty

makes the case that “reflective human beings try, by placing their lives in a larger context, to

give sense to those lives” (Rorty 1991: 21). Either they tell their story as a “contribution to a

community” or they “describe themselves as standing in immediate relation to a nonhuman

reality” (Rorty 1991: 21). Describing these options as solidarity and objectivity, respectively,

Rorty argues for solidarity as the best argument when the Western “metaphysico-

epistemological” program is failing (Rorty 1991: 33).6

We have reached a similar postmodern position of “science as solidarity” as these well-

known philosophers, but in view of the public distrust of science-as-authority and in hopes of a

discursive agonism within the academy. Specifically, we think this means that the humanities

will need to drop one of its discursive pastimes: using metaphysical claims as a rhetorical wedge

to browbeat the sciences (Johnstone 1990).

5 Accordingly, Gianni Vattimo (2004; 1997) argues that the inheritance that postmodernism has

received from Nietzsche is ultimately hermeneutic in orientation. For more on the way that
perspectivalism functions in Nietzsche’s thought, see Hales and Welshon 2000. Tamsin Shaw
(2007) and Daniel Conway (1997), among many others, have shown how Nietzsche’s
hermeneutic sensitivity leads to decisively political results.
6
See Simmons 2011 for an account of how Rorty and Kierkegaard can be productively read
together as concerns socio-political critique and religious life.
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Ultimately, two conceptions of postmodernism exist. Let’s distinguish these options as

epistemological postmodernism (EP) and metaphysical postmodernism (MP).7 EP simply states

that inquiry is always perspectival and so epistemic humility should characterize our claims. EP

does not, however, eliminate the possibility of having varying degrees of epistemic confidence,

but simply suggests that most claims to certainty should be viewed with suspicion. In this sense,

Lyotard’s claim that postmodernism amounts to an “incredulity toward metanarratives” can best

be understood as an epistemic thesis about inquiry rather than a metaphysical thesis about reality.

Alternatively, MP states that since there is no non-perspectival position from which

inquiry can be conducted and knowledge obtained, then (so far as we can know) there simply is

no non-social state of affairs about which one could inquire in the first place. At play in the

difference between EP and MP, then, is a difference between two different versions of anti-

realism. Epistemic anti-realism is a thesis about knowledge (we only ever know from

somewhere). Metaphysical anti-realism is a thesis about ontology (there is nothing

beyond/behind/transcendent to our discourse “out there” to be known). Notice that EP and the

anti-realism that accompanies it does not entail any thesis about what is the case, as such, but

simply a thesis about what is the case for us as knowers. Additionally, in line with Kierkegaard’s

distinction between objectivity and subjectivity, EP does not place a limit on what can be known,

but merely on how it can be known.

Importantly, it is very easy to read Nietzsche and Rorty, along with many other

postmodernists, as defenders of MP. Indeed, Nietzsche’s account of the death of God may not

simply be a claim about the necessity of decision in all meaning-making and the inescapability of

7
For an extended discussion of the varieties of postmodernism, see Simmons 2012.
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hermeneutics in all belief, but instead be a claim about the truth of atheism.8 Similarly, his

definition of truth can quite plausibly be read as a deflationary theory of truth itself, rather than

more modestly as a theory of how truths functions in social contexts. Moreover, Rorty’s

pragmatic conception of truth may be much more than merely a reminder about the social

contexts in which any such conception would arise and function, but actually a claim that there

simply is nothing beyond such contexts. 9 In light of such readings, worries about vulgar

relativism loom large.

Although many postmodernists can be read as defenders of MP, we propose that

postmodernism itself doesn’t need to be read that way, and it does great harm to discursive

agonism with the sciences for it to be. EP does not entail MP. Epistemic humility does not entail

a thick theory of ontological anti-realism. Here Merold Westphal’s (2001) distinction between

truth (without the capital-T) and Truth (with the capital-T) is especially helpful. For Westphal,

postmodernism simply requires that we realize that Truth or non-Truth are matters of truth. So,

for us embodied knowers, the best we say is either that “the truth is that there is Truth” or that

“the truth is that there is not Truth.” Of course, we can’t say this with certainty, since that would

require that we know the Truth of the matter about truth and Truth, but rather only with a high

degree of epistemic confidence given the embodied realities in which we find ourselves. Far

8 Bruce Ellis Benson (2008) contends that far from a straightforwardly atheistic proclaimation,

Nietzsche’s self-reflective awareness opens the door for Christian appropriations of the “death of
God” in ways that are perhaps more “pious” than might be otherwise thought (on this front, see
also Vattimo 2002).
9 So, one might plausibly suggest that Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989) is not

simply an account of the best we can do given our social location, but a thesis about who we are
as social. Similarly, in texts such as Take Care of Freedom and Truth will Take Care of Itself
(Rorty 2006), it is very plausible that the encouragement toward a “post-metaphysical culture”
(chapter 5) is not merely an epistemic thesis, but ultimately a metaphysical one all its own.
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from rejecting the possibility of some mind-independent, non-social, state of affairs, EP simply

says that the debate on the Truth of the matter continues in the domain of competing truths. But,

this should not worry us unless we think that a discourse’s utility is found exclusively in its

ability to access Truth as such.

Henry and Kierkegaard remind us of the stakes of objectivism: it literally costs us our

very subjectivity. We add here that inversely, the absolutist impossibility of a reality beyond us

might do the same in terms of public culture. In other words, the reductionism deployed both in

scientistic objectivism and also in the rejection of reality has existential ramifications. It is not

simply that different knowledge is produced, but that different selves are, in a culture that needs

to avoid being indifferent toward existence.

Alternatively, when we understand lived subjectivity to be the space in which scientific

objectivity is possible, although always as a construction, then we leave open the possibility of

seeking Truth and deciding in its favor (over non-Truth). But this possibility and this decision is

only something that is available for us “poor existing individuals.” It is this realization that the

oppositional war-like conception of “the two cultures” misses. Alternatively, when the two

cultures are understood as two different ways in which our subjectivity can orient itself within

the lived communities of discourse in which we are located, then both the sciences and the

humanities are appreciated as fundamental to humanity as concerned not only with truth, but

with living toward whatever truth we decide is worth the effort.

Because we understand scientism as an actually-existing discursive system, it is

important to consider these as a network of terms surrounding objectivity as a god term and

subjectivity as a devil term (Weaver 1985: 212-22). Under such a paradigm, Polanyi’s synthetic

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intervention remains sadly unappreciated.

Postmodernism as a Resource in Science

The answer in the humanities is relatively straightforward, since it is entirely within our own

discursive terrain: we stop holding out MP as a conversation-ending-maneuver in our dialogic

encounters with the sciences and as an unattainable ideal in our own fields (e.g., absolutist

atheisms and relativisms). How, then, can EP be a boon for retooling objectivity in science?

In a discussion of the “pragmatics of scientific knowledge,” Lyotard suggests,

Drawing a parallel between science and nonscientific (narrative) knowledge helps us

understand, or at least sense, that the former’s existence is no more—and no less—

necessary than the latter’s. . . . It is . . . impossible to judge the existence or validity of

narrative knowledge on the basis of scientific knowledge and vice versa: the relevant

criteria are different. (Lyotard 1984: 26)

So far so good. To this point all Lyotard has claimed is a version of Polanyi’s thesis regarding

science as a cultural tradition and a community of discourse. As such, his account is not

something that necessarily would call for a revision of the practice of science as a culturally

located discourse—he simply points out that it is one. He continues on, however, to diagnose a

problem that does call for a response from the scientific community. As Lyotard explains:

[The] incomprehension of the problems of scientific discourse is accompanied by a

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certain tolerance [from the nonscientific narratival discourse]: it approaches such

discourse primarily as a variant in the family of narrative cultures. The opposite is not

true. The scientist questions the validity of narrative statements and concludes that they

are never subject to argumentation or proof. He classifies them as belonging to a different

mentality: savage, primitive, underdeveloped, backward, alienated, composed of

opinions, customs, authority, prejudice, ignorance, ideology. Narratives [thinks the

scientist] are fables, myths, legends, fit only for women and children. At best, attempts

are made to throw some rays of light into this obscurantism, to civilize, educate, develop.

(Lyotard 1984: 27)

Notice that Lyotard paints a picture of a stark divide between the two approaches/cultures that

might seem to reinforce the antagonistic conception of “the two cultures.” On the one hand,

nonscience is interested in and open to science, but science is not interested in or open to

nonscience. Indeed, as Lyotard goes on to explain, the stakes of this divide are a matter of

legitimization: who will be authorized to speak as “expert” within public space?

MP would facilitate the idea that science is just one more discourse among others and

none are any more legitimate than any others. Such indifference, as Henry calls it, forgets that

different language games and discursive communities can very plausibly be more legitimate in

relation to some domains of inquiry than others. Rules and procedures that deliver accessibility

and responsibility (as well as forgiveness for error) are better in any sphere of human action,

whether it be public, technical or private (Arendt 1958; Goodnight 1982). Accordingly, agonistic

tension can still exist among the disciplinary cultures, as a result of different historical decisions

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about what creates better future action given the challenges at hand.

Rather than science being somehow demoted from its social position because it is no

longer able to claim to be objective, the humanities would work to critique “objectivity” only

insofar as it means indifference to the world, just as we (or the sciences) would critique MP as a

similar indifference. The languages of subjective phenomenology and scientific “objectivity”

could thus still exist, even with these critiques always close at hand.

The critique of both would happen at the level of discourse. Terms such as these function

as hubs for meaning that are themselves empty. “Objectivity” and “subjectivity” function, given

EP, as a truth about the world to which the domains of science and the humanities can always

struggle but never with certainty know as the Truth. As empty signifiers (Laclau 1996: 36), they

are not something to abandon, but instead to be ever aware of as a symbol of our situatedness. As

such, when a scientist says, “As a scientist, I am only interested in the objective fact of the

matter,” the humanist might respond, “of course, you are a scientist . . . but don’t forget that

being a scientist is a way of being-in-the-world, it is not the only option, and it comes with a set

of beliefs, values, and practices that actually articulate who you are and your existential context.”

Similarly, when a philosopher says, “In postmodernity, we have only relative notions of truth,”

the scientist might respond, “of course, that is convenient to a philosopher . . . but we are all

proceeding from a reality that cannot be known not to exist and thus impinges on us to know it

better in our respective fields.”

Discursive Implications

In our understanding, the special benefit of EP, rather than MP, is a renewed complementary

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conception of learning across the sciences and humanities in the short term and a more agonistic

academic culture and robustly charitable and scientifically-literate broader public culture in the

long term. In this section, we investigate the practical effects of this changed perspective on

community and narratives of trust. With the humility that comes from EP and the exclusion of

MP as the definitional component of postmodern practice, we can expect a number of positive

developments.

First, there would be some congruence between the humanities and sciences on the role

of “care” and “concern” for one’s discipline, the objects of study, and colleagues in one’s field(s)

of study. Currently, the primary culture of the humanities is to claim “advocacy” as the goal,

passionate players amidst a broader culture hostile to pluralism and equality. Meanwhile, in the

sciences, “advocacy” is the devil term from which researchers flee to do good work, as

“detached” observers. Indeed, the metaphors of space get used throughout the academy to carve

out separate territories of significance. But if our position is accepted, observational experiences

will be grounded in a set of shared emotions and practices throughout the academy since we are

all joined by the experience of lived phenomenon from which academic discourse and the

specific disciplines can emerge. All researchers would begin inquiry aware that phenomenal

experiences and life itself presumes that one should be invested in the world and the context in

which we find ourselves, so that any attempts at removal of that world through the indifference

of scientism would be dismissed as not true to the evidence of lived experience itself. Of course,

there might remain other attempts at removal and indifference—stoic restraint, meditation, or

simply apathy. The difference is that these are not affective positions that attempt to privilege

and separate academics from “the real world,” but are instead ways to reposition oneself relative

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to experiences—ones that can be described in narratival accounts that are not results of some

conception of the permanent, transcendental status of academic labor.

Let’s take the particular discourse of sustainability science, as an example. Among such

scholars, one frequently hears expressions of passionate concern about biodiversity loss, global

climate change, and the uneven social effects of local plagues of the commons (water, air, or soil

pollution, among others). In one sense, such scholars “just convey the data,” leaving the political

choices for others, while on the other hand, they find unique ways to communicate these

concerns to students, including personal inventories, community projects, and research surveys

and activities that foreground these questions. So what these researchers-as-teachers mean by

“objectivity” is that they do not engage publics other than students and those who seek out such

information (so no disrupting the efficient running of the systems they seek to critique with

contested occupation of spaces or other action perceived as hostile to the scientific effort).

However, it is not difficult to imagine a field of science in which such activity would not

compromise one’s research—this is exactly the position that many in the humanities take. Any

community norms like these could remain entirely unchanged if this is how “objectivity” and

“subjectivity” gets redefined, but at least researchers would be able to specify these norms rather

than pretend to have indifference toward the objects of study and the communities who seek to

publicly advocate for them.

Another important way in which experts in sustainability deploy the discourse of

objectivity is to say that the research(er) is separate from the domain of life. Some may in fact

participate in protests, but separate their research persona from such work, as they do not depend

on any “advocacy” to sustain themselves as scholars. Here, the EP/MP distinction could

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additionally help. If a researcher can believe both in one’s private and public life that some

things could be held as “Real” and “True,” and only the latter requires humility as to what truths

each community engages and holds, then we might again reemerge as whole persons to a judging

public, rather than split and fractured personas who seem indifferent to deep human traditions

like respect, faith, or family. Again, “objectivity” as defined by the community of fellow

scientists might indeed dictate that one not use their institutional affiliation when doing street

advocacy; there may be good reason for this, so that legislators and funders can see a public

performance of “researcher” that pleases them and protects institutional reputations. But the zone

of indifference cannot overwhelm us; rather, scholars can be more in touch with the experience

of multiple communities and the norms operational in multiple spheres of their life. Research and

writing would thus be another human experience extending from care for the world, even if only

a small part of it, rather than a moment of transcendence toward a plane of authority that

interacts with Reality and Truth.

This leads to a third dimension, which lies at the center of the discourse of objectivity: a

narratival account of peer review. This is the heart of the cultural tradition of science and the

humanities, borrowed and enhanced by modern sciences from the humanistic culture of letters.

Rather that holding sensory terms over one another, such as “seeing” the data when others cannot

(Bender and Wellbery 1990: 5), or letting the data “speak for itself,” we might revisit peer

review vocabulary for the core of discursive agonism. What are our norms of humility in revision

toward better knowledge? What are the terms of jargon by which we exclude the public culture,

and when is such exclusion unnecessary (Fish 1980: 343)? In all of these, how does expertise

function in peer review as being-in-the-world, rather than as an attempt for removal from it?

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Much of the war generated between the sciences and humanities exists before entering

the academy—viz., in the mode of K-12 education. A series of misrepresentations and

inequalities do great harm to the society and to the knowledge produced. Fields like philosophy

and argumentation are left out entirely of many curricula. Science is thus expressed as merely the

accumulation of facts to be learned for tests and privileged over other modes of knowing, and

figures in popular culture like Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson heighten that illusion.

Humility is a human characteristic, not an academic one. But humility can be put to better

use against scientism’s indifference, by locating it as the definitive quality for academic expertise

in an intergenerational commitment to deep thinking and openness to critique. Without the

maneuvers of MP and scientism’s absolutist knowledge, a public culture that enjoys complexity

of thought can emerge, without fear that it will lose what it holds most precious: enduring

connections to the past, close personal ties, and commitments to what individuals perceive as

authentic. EP provides a model in which the humanities are not always treated as the inferior to

science, and simultaneously does not present itself as simply a replacement for science (as MP

does).

Part of this work will necessitate the retelling of science’s emergence with philosophy

and rhetoric, in moments like sophistic and democratic culture (Johnstone 2009). As denoted by

fields of social study that took on the Greek suffix “-ology” or Latinate “Science,” structures of

human systems can be studied with similar methods of natural systems. Certainly, the elitism

dating to those times of who had the luxury to study rather than to labor needs to be part of that

telling, so that society becomes transparent about the privileges that earn researchers and

academic ways of knowing their public hostility.

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In doing so, this comes full circle back to how we reached this cultural moment: a public

culture that hates academic knowledge (for its elitism) but uses it constantly in ways that slowly

kill off humanistic value and foster a culture of indifference. Objectivity is 1) practiced as grant-

application and test-generating STEM accountability; 2) becomes tied with neoliberal need for

consumer satisfaction; and 3) ends with a culture of indifference toward the natural world, as

things “get studied” with the amoral, apolitical subjectivities of scientists. Subjectivity is 1)

practiced as a MP, a provocation that gets attention for philosophers and cultural pariahs in the

humanities; 2) becomes tied with the digital era’s penchant for “all opinions are equal, and my

(uninformed) truth is equivalent to all others (or is better, because at least its mine in a world that

is meaningless);” and 3) ends with a culture of indifference toward reality in which the public

finds its own enclaves for protecting anti-academic ideas it holds sacred.

Conclusion: An Academic Culture of Shared Meaning

In our first attempt to take up Henry’s indictment with scientists at our own university, in an

attempt at dialogic agonism, our friends in the sciences shut us down. An indictment of

“scientism” as culture-ending though of course drew ire from a profession weary with self-

critique and wanting a united front to persuade the public of its core human value. From that very

real moment, we have attempted to offer a broader set of propositions from which that dialogic

agonism might proceed.

We find ourselves in a situation where the question of legitimacy is already itself situated

in a broader public culture. Science should not be goaded to give up its central terms of

“objectivity,” but should instead be coaxed into an understanding that the discourse names a

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particular mode of engagement that occurs in a specific cultural history, as it yields much better

ways of knowing because of the dedication, transparency, responsibility, and humility borne of

that discourse and its norms, like peer review. By better appreciating the postmodern challenge

to objectivity, science itself can better be objective—in the only way that it possibly could . . . as

done by scientists doing science, who are, themselves, “poor existing individuals.”

Similarly, those of us in the humanities have to give up MP as a similar attempt to

position ourselves as elites over a world of public concerns. We cannot start from a premise of

reality’s uncertainty, as it denies not just our own Being but also better ways of knowing any

such reality. While perhaps interesting as a speculative logic, it grounds nothing in terms of

postmodernism, atheism, or a reduction of culture to “just atoms.” Those same ideas can be

offered up as alternative ways of knowing, or challenges toward better knowledge, but must

never be tendered as a way to outmaneuver scientism toward a culture of indifference.

Understood this way, work in the sciences and humanities are “life choices,” not in the

sense that conservatives deploy the term toward gender difference (as a flippant mode of Being

that is artificial and immoral), but in the sense that they push toward the fullest embodiment of

values that emerge from the fullest exploration of knowledge in their respective spheres. The

discursive agonism is still fruitful: we should challenge each other across disciplines and object

domains, for having different norms of research and living, different values, and different

institutional constraints. The discourse only needs to be framed publicly as just that: a discourse.

By letting neoliberal demands for economic logic and digital demands for selfhood determine

our academic culture, we risk promoting a widespread indifference.

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