SANDRA HARDING

AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY AS A TECHNOTOTEM

ABSTRACT. John McCumbers Time in the Ditch: American Philosophy and the
McCarthy Era provides a compelling account of a repressed part of philosophys
history and its tragic consequences for subsequent decades of philosophic practice
in the U.S. Political values and interests originating in McCarthyism got encoded
within abstract conceptual frameworks, propelling analytic philosophy to an
undeserved position of authority while depriving it of critical self-understanding.
This comment identies residues of McCarthyism still playing out in the Science
Wars, and the career of critical philosophic projects in both other disciplines and
philosophys feminist and multicultural fringes.
John McCumber provides a fascinating and compelling analysis of
the effects of McCarthyism on American philosophy (McCumber,
2000). He describes how it shaped the lives of both individual
philosophers and philosophic institutions. He explores how the
goals, methods, and contents of philosophy have to this day been
distorted and impoverished by McCarthyism. Indeed, McCumber
delineates how and why the intellectual power of American philos-
ophy has suffered more than did the goals, methods and contents of
other disciplines where similar witch hunts occurred. McCarthyism,
and the complicity with McCarthyism adopted by the APA and
the AAUP especially, has deected American philosophy from that
important and distinctive of philosophic tasks: know thyself.
Accounts of McCarthyisms effects in other disciplines have been
available for some time. McCumber has plunged in to help us begin
to think our way through such issues for philosophy. We owe him
a debt not only for taking the plunge, but also for the way his
analysis expands the horizons of awareness about how political
values and interests get encoded within apparently culturally-neutral
and abstract conceptual frameworks and practices. Philosophy turns
out to be another technototem, as scholars in science and tech-
nology studies put the point, transporting historically-specic social
distinctions into our cultures most authoritative and purportedly
Philosophical Studies 108: 195201, 2002.
2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
196 SANDRA HARDING
objective accounts of reality and the structure of human thought
(Hess, 1995).
1. MAKING SENSE OF OUR HISTORIES
Personally I felt a growing sense of, well, relief as I was drawn
through McCumbers narrative. I had puzzled over the fact that the
hot new directions to which my professors in the 1950s and 60s
recruited me seemed to share a project in such disparate elds as
literary criticism, sociology, and philosophy. Was it purely an acci-
dent that all were preoccupied with the intellectual importance and
pleasures of walling off their purportedly culturally-neutral goals,
methods, and contents from consideration of the ways social, polit-
ical, and economic relations shape abstract, formal elements of the
thought of an era?
As an undergraduate English major in the 1950s, I had been
drawn into the new criticism. This approach insisted that the
only legitimate meanings of a literary text were those that could
be found in the texts formal structure. To interpret a poem in light
of its historical context was illicitly to import into the text intellec-
tually suspect information that was irrelevant to the true meaning
of the poem. A decade later, I started graduate school in sociology
because I wanted to explore social theory. It turned out there were
no graduate social theory course offered in the curriculum of the
respected but, nevertheless, only university to which I could reason-
ably attend while tied to domestic duties. Moreover, my advisor
found my request for such a course intellectually suspect, lent me
his Cliff Notes to Weber, Durkheim, Marx, and Parsons with the
comment that this was more than I would ever need to know about
theory, and told me that it didnt mater what I studied in sociology
as long as I learned how to quantify it properly. Fortunately, I
enjoyed both the statistics and methods courses I was required to
take. However, this pleasure alienated my fellow students from me.
This sojourn in sociology lasted a year (though I returned in
the late 1970s to hold a joint appointment in the graduate division
of a sociology department for 17 years), and I then moved to a
philosophy graduate program where I had the dubious pleasures of
Sidney Hooks last class, courses by William Barrett, and ordinary
AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY AS A TECHNOTOTEM 197
language courses of various sorts. Hooks and Barretts defenses
of McCarthyism, and the rise of ordinary language philosophy are
discussed by McCumber as part of McCarthyisms life in philos-
ophy. Fortunately, the pleasures of the formal led me to ll up my
course of study with logic and philosophy of science classes.
This is what I was doing in 1968 while many of my colleagues
today were then organizing the most inuential political revolu-
tion in the North of the last 50 years. However, improbable as
such a possibility initially appeared to me, this disciplinary location
has proved a rewarding one from which to think about feminism,
postcolonialism, and, the conceptual practices of power that are
enabled by different philosophic frameworks
1
that is for helping
Western epistemology and philosophy of science to know itself.
McCumbers account has helped me to make sense of my own
intellectual history, especially as it explores whether it would be
more accurate to regard analytic philosophy as a politics more than
as a philosophy, as McCumber puts the point (12). I would want
to avoid two assumptions one could attribute to McCumbers query
here, however. One is that there can in principle be any philosophy
which can escape cultural ngerprints. The second is that politics
can only be destructive of philosophy. I think McCumbers argu-
ment shows that the practices of analytic philosophy have been
co-constituted by different politics at different historic moments,
but that analytic philosophys undeserved high status in American
philosophy departments for the last half-century reects its unfortu-
nate resources both from and for the politics McCumber describes.
Here, I want briey to pursue this point with respect to two issues
McCumber raises.
2. ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY AND THE SCIENCE WARS
McCumber shows how neither the APA nor the AAUP would
protect the philosophers whom McCarthyism was attacking at
Temple University, the University of Washington, and elsewhere.
Philosophers accurately read this message about the limits of their
purported academic freedom.
2
In effect McCarthyism drove them
into scientistic claims about the nature of philosophy claims
that were ready and waiting for them from logical positivisms
198 SANDRA HARDING
conceptual projects. As McCumber points out, such scientistic
philosophic standards did not fade with the demise of McCarthyism,
but instead have steadily gained power and prestige in the discipline
in the subsequent half century such that political philosophy and,
especially, feminist philosophy are scarce in the leading graduate
institutions.
3
However, a funny thing has happened on analytic philosophys
journey to scientism. First post-Kuhnian, and more recently feminist
and postcolonial science and technology studies (STS), have under-
mined the notion of science upon which have depended the defenses
of McCarthyism and of the entitlements to unique authority of
analytic philosophy. This is too complex a matter to more than
gesture toward here. However, in these accounts, including at least
some of the postpositivist philosophic ones, the nature and very
best practices of the natural sciences have been demonstrated to
have, in Kuhns words, an integrity with their historic eras (Kuhn,
1970, p. 1; Hacking, 1983; Harding, 1998; Longino, 1990; Rouse,
1987) It is this historic integrity that is responsible for sciences
technototem effect that maps onto nature and research processes
in the form of fundamental distinctions often, dichotomies the
cultural values and interests of sciences creators, practitioners, and
beneciaries. The cognitive, technical core of science is permeated
by economic, political, social, aesthetic, and cultural values and
interests. Thus no element of science, its institutions or practices is
immune to cultural forces. This situation requires drastic revision in
mainstream philosophies of science, to which an increasing number
of philosophers are turning.
4
My point here is that analytic philos-
ophy remains a welcoming home for understandings of science that
no longer are state of the art in the elds responsible for producing
them.
Indeed, the so-called Science Wars, in which feminist and post-
modern tendencies in science studies have been demonized and
pilloried in the public media as the ight from reason, should be
understood as a particularly lively residue of McCarthyism (Gross
and Levitt, 1994). Such philosophies, charged with importing polit-
ical agendas into the practice and study of science, are presented as
threatening the foundations of Civilization. I think that the actual
target of these attacks is post-Kuhnian STS, on which feminist
AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY AS A TECHNOTOTEM 199
science studies overtly draws, and which shares important assump-
tions with poststructuralist approaches to scientic practices and
culture. The post-Kuhnian studies had remained largely invisible to
most practicing scientists and the general public until the Science
Warriors targeted its assumptions as they appeared in recent feminist
and postmodernist STS (Ross, 1996).
3. THE EMPIRE PHILOSOPHIZES BACK
The second point I want to make is that it is reasonable to
see contemporary philosophy as much livelier and hopeful than
McCumber suggests. Issues about the nature of philosophy and
about the role of public philosophy that could have been addressed
inside philosophy departments are being addressed in other disci-
plines and at the cultural peripheries of philosophy itself. We could
say that the empires over which late Twentieth Century philosophy
presumed it was the rightful ruler have revolted and absconded
with philosophic goals, methods, and topics that have become
immensely inuential, and that are threatening to displace the reigns
of both analytic and old- style Continental philosophy everywhere
but in the major graduate programs in philosophy departments.
These philosophic tendencies have taken on the tasks of produc-
ing the public philosophy and public intellectuals that the leading
graduate philosophy departments have successfully avoided.
McCumber points out that Continental philosophy, which he
thinks of as the main alternative to analytic philosophy in recent
decades and today, has been impoverished in some of the same
ways that have narrowed and distorted analytic philosophy. But he
does not see as distinctive philosophic movements the difference
philosophies that have emerged in feminism, race- and ethnicity-
based, and postcolonial movements, as well as their continuation in
older marxian analyses.
Moreover, while McCumber does point out that the rise of some
philosophic topics and debates in other disciplines can directly be
attributed to their invisibility in philosophy departments, I think
this is a much more extensive phenomenon than he suggests. We
can see such work not only in feminist studies, but also in Queer
and cultural studies, and in political theory, sociology of knowl-
200 SANDRA HARDING
edge, the history of science, and poststructuralist tendencies in many
other disciplines. Outside academia, such work is produced through
public policy, jurisprudence, and even now in international relations
and development planning.
5
4. PHILOSOPHY FROM MARGINS TO CENTER?
6
The effects of McCarthyism on the ofcial discipline of philos-
ophy have indeed been intellectually and institutionally regressive,
as well as tragic for many individuals. Yet, it seems to me that a
conuence of social processes are arising that promises to change
for the better if not the currently top-ranked graduate programs in
philosophy, at least the nature and status of most philosophic prac-
tice inside the rest of philosophy departments as well as in public
life more generally. I wonder if philosophys travels through other
disciplines and its own peripheries will have enabled it to grow and
ex newmuscles even more benecially than had the discipline been
able to produce within its borders the kinds of doing philosophy
McCarthyism led it to exile. Sometimes bad things have some good
effects. In particular, the exile of critical thought from the heart of
philosophy has encouraged examination of the way political codes
direct and infuse the apparently most abstract elements of thought,
for better as well as for worse, as these purportedly purely abstract
elements in turn direct political beliefs and practices. In its sojourn
at the peripheries of the discipline, philosophys Owl of Minerva
has had to learn to perform a double- day of work, ying by day
as well as by night. I, for one, hope it never retreats only to night
ights.
NOTES
1
This is Dorothy Smiths (1990) phrase. Identifying such practices is a main
goal of standpoint epistemologies.
2
See Michael Roots (1993, pp. 2328) interesting account of the impossibility
of academic freedomin institutions such as universities and disciplines that adopt
Liberal ideals of value-neutrality.
3
McCumbers list of senior feminist philosophers who have been exiled to
primary positions in non-philosophy departments can at this point be expanded to
AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY AS A TECHNOTOTEM 201
more than a dozen. I would add to this list of philosophic approaches exiled from
philosophy departments African American, Native American, and postcolonial
philosophies.
4
Indeed, the APA is currently running a NSF grant, managed by Robert Figueroa
and myself, which has generated some fty APA presentations and summer
research grants, and a forthcoming anthology on the topic of exploring diversity
in the philosophy of science and technology.
5
See, for example, the philosophic themes (and many philosophers) on the
program of the recent International Studies Association conference in Chicago
(February 2001), which took as its topic global inequaity.
6
I borrow here bell hooks (1983) famous phrase.
REFERENCES
Gross, P.R. and Levitt, N. (1994): Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its
Quarrels with Science, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Hacking, I. (1983): Representing and Intervening, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Harding, S. (1998): Is Science Multicultural? Postcolonialisms, Feminisms, and
Epistemologies, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Hess, D.J. (1995): Science and Technology in a Multicultural World: The Cultural
Politics of Facts and Artifacts, New York: Columbia University Press.
Hooks, B. (1983): Feiminist Theory: From Margin to Center, Boston: South End
Press.
Kuhn, T.S. [(1962) 1970]: The Structure of Scientic Revolutions, 2nd edn.,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Longino, H. (1990): Science as Social Knowledge, Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press.
McCumber, J. (2000): Time in the Ditch: American Philosophy and the McCarthy
Era.
Root, M. (1993): Philosophy of Social Science: The Methods, Ideals, and Politics
of Social Inquiry, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
Ross, A. (ed.) (1996): Science Wars, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Rouse, J. (1987): Knowledge and Power: Toward a Political Philosophy of
Science, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Smith, D. (1990): The Conceptual Practices of Power: A Feminist Sociology of
Knowledge, Boston: Northeastern University Press.
University of California
Los Angeles, CA, USA
E-mail: sharding@gseis.ucla.edu
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