Sorry, I did it again--I keep hitting the 'reply' key to post instead of
the 'reply all', and as a result stuff that is supposed to be posted
keeps going to private mail. This is Dick Jacob's reply to my most
recent. --Jill
From: Jill Stuart [SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
>
>
> a) the credibility of intellectual work doesn't come from the ability
to
> claim
> having no stake or position in the issues at hand; it comes from the
> persuasiveness of one's arguments and reasoning to a 'discourse
> community'--that
> is, a group of people with an established set of practices who accept
> one's
> practices as legitimate. I derive this interpretation of "research"
from,
> among
> others, various writings of Stanley Fish, Thomas Kuhn, _The Structure
of
> Scientific Revolutions_, and Helen Longino, _Science as Social
Knowledge_.
> In
> fact, at this point I am surprised to find a challenge to
'objectivity'
> being
> controversial. Even the Heisenberg principle in physics asserts that
the
> 'observer' is integral to the 'observation'.
[DJ] Jill, I have the layman's disadvantage of not having read
or
even heard of the authors you mention (my apologies if any of them are
on
this list). "Research," as I used the term, meant scientific research,
in
which one comes up with conclusions or results that can be replicated
and
confirmed (or not) by others. I guess it's a subset of "intellectual
work"
(which probably includes everything except watching daytime television
and
listening to political speeches).
Clearly anyone in a given field has lots of subjective feelings
and
personal convictions about its issues. All I was trying to say is that
I
don't think objectivity--meaning the attempt to separate personal
convictions and feelings from results--should be rejected as a fiction.
As
a sporadic reader of academic "product," I need to be able to separate
what
the author says is true of the world from what she would like to be
true.
> b.)So part of what is relevant to this argument is, those communities
of
> intellectual workers (and I'm not using the word 'community' in a
utopian
> sense
> obviously! nor am I assuming the univocality or monolithic character
of
> said
> 'communities') have historically not represented or included the
interests
> and
> experiences of any number of marginalized people, and here we could
list
> intersecting groups including women, ethnic/racial minorities,
disabled
> people,
> and I could go on. So the 'placeless place' that this so-called
> objectivity
> came from (comes from) is in fact a very specific place that
universalizes
> knowledge by invalidating and extinguishing contrary knowledges.
[DJ] Wow, I guess I've been out of school too long. No
question
that disabled people and many others have been stereotyped,
marginalized,
and repressed for a very long time. I also don't doubt that the various
power structures have perpetuated points of view that served to support
them. However, that shameful history doesn't mean that anyone outside
of
these groups can have nothing useful or informative to contribute. Nor,
in
my opinion, is objectivity the culprit.
I have no idea what "contrary knowledges" are (apart from
beliefs
and feelings). If folk medicine is an example (and correct me if it's
not),
it doesn't seem that conventional scholarship has been very successful
at
invalidating or extinguishing it. In fact, society has benefited
significantly from conventional medicine's admittedly recent willingness
to
take its down-home counterpart more seriously.
> All this sounds like I'm making academe out to be irreducibly
problematic,
> but I
> am rather more optimistic than that. I don't see why the romance of
> foundationalism--of the existence of unvarnished truth, devoid of
social
> context--holds so much importance. If we all share the necessity of
> having to
> interpret the world to make sense of it, then at least we can talk it
> out/fight
> it out in the most equitable way possible. No need for me to be able
to
> make
> the last, best truth claim that will be unanswerable forevermore. God
> forbid I,
> or anyone else, should have 'the last word' on any issue that's of
real
> relevance to how we live our lives.
>
[DJ] Well, I'm not going to get into an ism-slinging contest.
I
have no insight into truth, varnished or otherwise, but I do subscribe
to
Browning's assertion that our reach should always exceed our grasp, that
the
real value lies in striving toward rather than achieving...your "last,
best
truth."
-Dick Jacobs
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