1) Economic theory, political theory, & legal theory, along with the institutions that support them, are the main "enemies" of theory-skepticism and anti-theory critique.
Before I try to answer Robert's thoughtful comments I wanted to make one thing clear. I am not arguing against academics or professors or the university. The politics and economics of the university is part of any instituional critque of how humanist criticism and philosophical thought became various kinds of "theories" but the university itself is a subordinate institution and a late comer to this process.
I thought it would be obvious to leftist that the main enemy on this front is so-called "economic theory" (not "Critical Theory" or negligible pomo gibberish). Economic theory, political theory, legal theory, and psychological theory and their institutional supports in corporations, think-tanks, advertising firms, and variious state apparatus are the main aims of a critique of "the uses of theory." Many of these so-called "theories" are pseudo-thoeries developed to justify oppression and the status quo. None of these "theories" in each respective field of study has ever developed around it a scientific consensus. They often are not only various contradictory, one to the other within each field, but, as various critiques have pointed out, they are often self- contradictory.
Basically, I believe that economics, politics, history, law, literature, are humanistic endeavors and are not ready, and may never be ready, for scientific theory making. (Psychology (including the cognitive sciences) are in a pre-theoretical stage in my judgment.) The so-called theories in these areas are simply ideological justifications that have little to do with the attempt to produce knowledge. And to make clear again, my theory skepticism in these areas are not motivated by antipathy to the academy or with professors. Most of the (especially oppressive) effects of economic and legal theory do not come from the university and are not propagated by the university but by the state apparatus and allied institutions. These are material effects from the ideological level.
> Robert wrote: I'm not terribly sure what you mean by 'pre-theoretical" knowledge,
2) Historically, theories are relatively recent phenomena: So what was the situation of knowledge, and even science, before theories?
I mean by the notion "pre-theoretical" something historically specific, so in this case it is easiest to contrast pre-Newtonian physics with post-Newtonian science in general. Galileo (who I know most about) did not have a worked out theory. He had a general conceptual framework based on Copernicus and Kepler, and he had many hypotheses, most of them (inevitably) wrong.
But Galileo's observations were not "theory laden" in Hanson's sense of the term, nor were they within any specific paradigm in Kuhn's sense. What Galileo did have was his humanist and anti-Aristotilean thought ethos. If you look at what Galileo actually did you will find that most of his best arguments were based on thought-experiments and counterfactuals and not on physical experiments, which were mostly designed after the fact, to "prove" expected results. These experiments came in a cultural context of rebellion against Scholastic and Aristotle influenced theology. There is a sense in which the Catholic Church hiearchy was correct about Galileo, he was a heretic. If you look at Galileo's thought-experiments they were as much designed from a counter-ethos, mant to undermine a certain kind of theological thinking based on Aristotle as they were from any particular set of scientific questions.
I know it is not usual in the U.S., England and France to look at Galileo from a theological and philosophical context, but this is partially because of our fetishism of theory. Among Italian historians of science this context is well understood. If anything Galileo's insights were "theologically laden" and not "theory laden." But it is more accurate to say that Galileo's insight were pre-theoretical and that his anti-Aristotlean battles were part of a historical process to establish a theoretical basis for the physical sciences. In Althusser's terms this process would be called an "epistemological break." For an interesting take on some of these issues I would suggest "Galileo Heretic" by Pietro Redondi.
(N.B. In a note Chris Doss guesses that I have been reading Heidegger and he is correct, though I think Heidegger would not like the uses I put his thought through. Yet, it is very strange to me that both Heidegger and Althusser have better insight into this historical process than either Hanson or Kuhn. After all neither Heidegger nor Althusser were historians of science and both Hanson and Kuhn were historians. In Hanson's case he even had specific training in physics.
My guess is that both Hanson and Kuhn were too close to the blinding revolutions in physics represented by QM and Relativity Theory, to be sympathetic. to the non-theoretical aspects of physics pre-Newton, how governed by "ethos" and "culture" and not by "theory" or "paradigm" the science of the time was.)
Let me emphasize what should be obvious: "Ethos" and "culture" are not "theory", and in a proto-scientific culture like Galileo's where the main thought-problems are posed by theology one cannot say that "observations" are "theory laden" unless you expand the notion of "theory" to such an extent that it includes a theological problematic. I think that such an expansion would make the term "theory" meaningless. But even deeper than the _theological problematic_, in this case, is the human created "thought-world." It is out of this "thought-world," primarily, that the first theories arise, and are rooted. ( We can ask the further question of where this "thought-world" comes from but that is more complicated and not quite answerable, except to say, biology, ontology, social relations.) After theories arise, they tend to develop structures and processes of their own rooted in social institutions. It is these meta-theoretical structures and processes that are analyzed by Kuhn and Hanson. But the pre-theoretical understandings that are rooted in this "thought-world" still remain.
I also want to emphasize that historically, _the impulse to theory_ -- the Heideggerians call this impulse 'theoreticism' -- goes back to at least the Greeks and esp. Aristotle, in "our" tradition. But it took about 2000 years for an epistemological break to make itself felt in Newtonian Mechanics, when a theory for the first time took on an "independent" history of its own.
It is at this point that complications with theory come to the fore. Newtonian theory was so successful and powerful, that the dozen or so proto-theories to explain these physical phenomena, including Decartes', quickly disappeared. But a consequence of Newtonian success was a mistaken view that all science should like Newton's science. The immediate result was a battle within the emerging science of chemistry, where pro-Newtonians tried to impose a mechanical Newtonian view on chemistry, rejecting all efforts to develop the field along its own lines. Now the funny thing about chemistry is that it had developed its own pre-theoretical ethos and was still influenced by a "thought world" that did not impose a necessity for notions like "continuity" and "reductionism". This battle was not resolved in the anti-Newtonians favor until Linus Pauling and the development of Quantum Chemistry. (The story is well told by Arnold Thackery in "Atoms and Powers: An Essay on Newtonian Matter Theory and the Development of Chemistry.") I would like to point out that even in this case the history does not quite fit into either Hanson's or Kuhn's matrix. Theory was primary as a kind of negative force that anti-Newtonians continually fought against. By the turn of the 20th century the anti-Newtonian chemist comprised most chemists. The pro-Newtonians were mostly everybody else who continually proclaimed that chemistry research programs ("proto-theories" in my terminology) were something like magic tricks or crossword puzzles (the periodic table) and were not representing anything "real". But the fact is, as Arnold Thackery has shown, the chemical research programs that later bloomed into full blown theories were not rooted in some other kind of "theory" but in pre-theoretical" notions such as "reality can be non-continuous" or "jumpy." Further these notions were deeply rooted in pre-theoretical alchemical practice. Further the _supposed_ "Newtonian notions" that some tried to impose on chemistry were not "theoretical" but pre-theoretical, "such as reality does not jump".
For me the term "pre-theoretical" means an historical time period and/or structural notions that are not part of a theoretical concepts and often exists before theories develop. Such notions as "reality can be jumpy" are not theoretical but they influence where theories can go and what questions and answers that are considered appropriate or sometimes even thinkable. I use the term "pre-theoretical" for those notions that lead to _attempts_ at theory making. But there are some notions that do not and will not lead to attempts at theory making and these I would term non-theoretical. Further, there are practices that are non-theoretical. You don't need a theory to walk. If you did nobody would walk. You don't need a theory or proto-theory of language to talk, or a attempted theory of poetry to write or understand poetry, or a theory of pottery to engage in the craft of pottery making.
>
> Robert wrote: but it
> seems that it is indicating one is producing knowledge from a conceptual
> framework that one either does not recognize or has somehow obfuscated
> from oneself. But that knowledge needs a conceptual framework in order to
> be produced.
3) Distinction between "concepts" and "notions":
I think that when a "_conceptual_ framework" comes to sway our "thought-practices" (philosophy, theology, theory making, etc.) one has already entered a "thought-world" that attempts "theoretisation". I would say that all knowledge emerges from a thought world. Further I would substitute "notional framework" for "conceptual framework." Hegel in the Logic distinguishes "notions" from "concepts" and I would also like to do so for my purposes. (At the risk of being pedantic, but I think that when talking about these processes it is necessary to make distinctions.)
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> Robert wrote: This could be called common sense in the Gramscian sense.
I agree to a certain extent. But common sense is a much looser notion for me than it is for Gramsci.
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> Robert wrote: It is also 'theoretical' in the sense that it unknowingly engages in the
> production and reproduction of concepts.
4) Concepts and Notions in Institutional and non-Institutional settings:
Here again I think it is important to make distinctions. Concepts in scientific theory tend toward (without ever reaching) Fregean preciseness. That's the ideal for scientific concepts in working theories. The production and reproduction of concepts and notions in everyday life is less "set" and at base "ideological".
But I would also like to make a distinction between "the production and reproduction of concepts" and notions, that are ideological, intellectual, and institutional processes, and the emergence of concepts and notions from a "thought-world" or cultural ethos rooted in social relations. These are not unrelated processes, but they are different. Concepts and notions can emerge from a thought-world in societies without set ideological institutions, hunter-gatherer societies for example. They are in some sense pre-institutional though always "social" and "biological" because society and biology are our material base. The development of institutional processes (state, church, etc.) changes the mode of production and reproduction of concepts and notions. But it is also necessary to emphasize that pre-institutional modes of production of concepts and notions simply don't disappear when institutions come along. They continue in a different ways... But this process is beyond this post and I am not learned enough to cover it in much detail.
>
> Robert wrote: Probably the difference between
> what is consciously called theory and what is not, is that the
> 'theoretical' critically engages in those conceptual frameworks (either
> positively in the sense of what is X's conceptual framework or negatively,
> in the sense of what are the flaws in X's conceptual framework).
I am not sure I understand this, so I won't comment at the moment.
>
> Robert wrote: Ultimately, I feel that this 'scepticism' is ultimately an
> investment in the reification of language. Loosely speaking, the
> concept of 'critical theory' goes back to Kant or Hegel in their
> attempt to produce a philosophy that operates in the post-Newtonian
> universe. It is an attempt to produce a more rigorous and critical
> set of tools to produce concepts of the social.
5) Critique as methodology, not criticism as theory:
The above is a very good statement, up to this point, though I remain a "theory-skeptic." But I would add this addendum. Kant and Hegel (and later Heidegger) purposely distinguished what they were doing from theory because they knew that they were critical of theories. The need to call what we used to call "critique" "theory" is a late development, having to do with the specific situation of institutional conflicts. It was a knee jerk reaction. It is good enough just to call what you are doing "critique" or "interpretation" or history, no matter who is doing it. As I have asked before what is wrong with calling "critique" a philosophically based "methodology"? Isn't this more accurate?
>
> Robert wrote: In this sense, the
> term theory acts as a rough analogue to the processes in science.
> Since then it has taken on its own density and weight as a concept.
> The 'theory' of the various modes of critical theory has taken a
> life its own. I'm not sure what the problem is with that.
6) For the Humility of Knowledge:
No particular problem in itself, as an example of a local subculture, as with the term "opening theory" in my favorite local subculture of chess. (See previous post Miles.)
But theory are supposed to have consensus and not be contradictory and self-contradictory. Can you say this of the truly dangerous "theories" of economic theory, legal theory, and political theory?
But there is a bigger question here. And again it goes to the heart of what I am trying to do in a critique of the uses of theory. Above I quoted Bertrand Russell saying: ""To scientific common sense ... it is plain that only an infinitesimal part of the universe is known, that there were countless ages during which there was no knowledge, and that there will be countless ages without knowledge in the future. _Cosmically and causally, knowledge is an unimportant feature of the universe; a science which omitted to mention its occruence might, from an impersonal point of view, suffer only from a very trivial imperfection._" and then I paraphrased this by writing: "Socially and causally, theory is an unimportant feature of human culture; a way of thinking that omitted to mention 'theory' when studying human culture, might suffer only from a very trivial imperfection. Further, of all human knowledge, that part of human knowledge that we call theory is only a very small sliver of the life of the knowing mind. For practically all of human existence the phenomena that is "theory" did not exist"... This is the heart of my own "thought-world" that motivates my critique of theory.
Theoretical knowledge is relatively certain, extremely deep, but also very thin. There is very little theoretical knowledge that fits this description and is confined to a few areas. The rest of our knowledge is "certain" and "uncertain" all at once. It is experiential and often non-rational.
It is important for us, as intellectuals, as moral agents, to realize the limits of our knowledge, to realize how thin knowledge is, to realize how uncertain we are of most of our conclusions. To dress something up as a "theory" makes for "certainty" where there is none. To call something a "critique" does the opposite. It emphasizes the soft skepticism and humility that we have toward even the most certain areas of knowledge.
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> Robert wrote: There is also a question of language here. I know that the German
> 'Wissenschaft' and the French 'Science' have different meanings than
> the English 'science'. I would be curious if the analogues to theory
> have variances as well.
There's a little of this, yes. It is part of the transition from "natural philosophy" to "science." But most of my critique is aimed at Anglo-American uses.
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> Robert wrote: Ultimately, I would be curious if it precisely the undercutting of
> the liberal humanist I that is making you so uncomfortable.
I think that this is a good question.
My answer is "I don't know." It might be part of the old poet in me, that prefers to limit theory and claim poetry itself as a form of knowledge, for example. This might be a part of one of my "psychological assumptions" of my "thought-world" that I have left uncovered.
But, please read what I have written and see if I have at all raised questions or answered your questions.
Thank you by the way. This articulation of my reading has been very productive for me and was partially provoked by your arguments and questions.
Jerry
robert wood