One of the more annoying Mormon examples of this is Alan Goff's sustained campaign against Dan Vogel in the FARMS Review. I intend comment briefly here on a few of Goff's remarks from his review of Dan's Joseph Smith biography, Making of a Prophet. Before getting around to the content of Dan's biography, Goff spends a significant chunk of his 80 pages (yes, an eighty-page book review) labeling Dan Vogel a "positivist". This is basically an ad hominem strategy designed to discredit Dan by dumping him into a "discredited" epistemological category.
The problem is that Goff's definition of positivism just isn't all that precise. Goff basically treats positivism as a synonym for naturalism. Although some other scholars use the terms with equal sloppiness, their meanings are not identical. Positivism refers to the view that something must be proven before we can accept it-- that is, verificationism. Karl Popper countered this with his falsificationist epistemology-- that is, that we accept hypotheses and then try to disprove them. Critics of positivism have pointed out that falsificationism can and sometimes does mask a kind of positivism. And they're right about that, though in failing to specify precisely when and how this occurs they leave their readers to make more of this caveat than is warranted.
There's a difference between, on the one hand, a naturalist who has arrived at that position because he feels that most of the claims we call "supernatural" have been falsified and, on the other hand, a naturalist who has arrived at that position because he has arbitrarily excluded the possibility that there could exist anything beyond what he can see, touch, or observe. The latter is positivism. The former is not. The truth is that we are all guilty of positivism to a certain extent, since there are claims and possibilities that we all arbitrarily exclude on the grounds that they are not part of our experiences. But for someone to decide that he does not believe in a particular god or sacred text because he feels that he has tested the claims of the god or text and found them to be untrue-- as I think Vogel believes he has-- is not positivism.
In my experience, even those who make positivistic claims-- that is, who explicitly deny that there can exist anything beyond what we can see, touch, and observe-- do not follow this principle all the time and do not use this as their sole justification for rejecting specific supernatural claims. They may even have adopted this as a methodological shortcut only after testing a variety of supernatural claims and finding them wanting. So even an explicit positivist cannot be entirely dismissed on account of his positivism, because positivism does not exhaust his character or reasoning. But so far as I know, Dan does not make positivistic claims.
Another component of Goff's critique appears to be that positivists assume they are without bias, and so since Vogel is a positivist (according to Goff) he must assume he is without bias. Despite admitting that Dan "makes a generic acknowledgment that all biographers have biases [... and] makes no attempt to conceal his ideological presuppositions," Goff concludes that Vogel is a positivist because his "acknowledgment of biases is too generic to be helpful."
This obscures the fact that Vogel goes into significantly more detail about his naturalistic presuppositions than a mere "generic" acknowledgment. Pages xii-xvii in Dan's book explain in detail his presuppositions and his reasons for them. Dan writes, "I do not claim that the supernatural does not exist, for it is impossible to prove a negative. I maintain only that the evidence upon which such claims rest is unconvincing to me." He goes on to describe how his exposure to the use of deception and trickery in magic caused him gradually to doubt allegedly "real" forms of magic, and how his historical studies led him to doubt many strains of magic and religion. He also says that since supernaturalism is not part of his everyday experience he feels justified in approaching it skeptically. I think one might certainly be justified in disagreeing with Dan's conclusions, but to lump him in with people who exhibit a "deliberate refusal to scrutinize the metaphysical and ideological interests that inform their readings" as Goff does is downright unfair.
Goff also writes,
Vogel claims that he is not a positivist, just a naturalist. 'A rejection of the supernatural does not automatically make one a positivist. It only means that one is a naturalist. The two positions are philosophically distinct.' Let's be more accurate about this assertion because the two positions are not at all distinct and the positivism common among historians has been broadly discredited for more than thirty years: while naturalism and positivism can be theoretically distinguished, in the real world they tend to overlap and are often used synonymously.It's interesting how Goff contradicts himself here. He claims that naturalism and positivism are "not at all distinct" but then admits not only that there is a theoretical distinction but also that the real-world overlap is merely a tendency and something that something that often appears in the literature. This sort of self-contradiction recurs repeatedly throughout the essay. Goff quotes more precise definitions of positivism but in practice reverts to polemical, umbrella definitions that better accommodate his negative view of Vogel.
Believe it or not, I have disagreements with Vogel. I think in some respects his interpretations go beyond his evidence, and in others he goes too far in excluding the supernatural. If Goff limited himself to dealing with the content of Vogel's work he could have made a real contribution. Instead, he went and ticked me off with a bunch of really badly-done epistemological polemic. Why??? Not only is it obnoxious, it's wrong.
54 comments:
Isn't your main complaint here that Goff has not offered a positivist explanation of positivism?
hehe ;)
My main complaint is that he has offered a wrong explanation of positivism. But nice try. :-P
But that's an argument that may be expecting something different than what Goff is arguing, hence my tease! Hope you're doing well in warmer weather than I am experiencing.
Expecting him to get it right is too high a standard, eh? *grin*
The weather's not bad here, although it's a little gray outside today. Where are you at these days?
This is Alan Goff. I composed a long response (Chris can complain about the 80 pages again), Google won't permit more than about 4000 characters per response. So I am going to cut and past so I can fit the whole thing here in multiple responses.
Christopher, you have charged me initially with a number of offenses: being imprecise (which by the end of the entry makes the logical leap into being wrong), being annoying, and doing “really badly-done epistemological polemic.” Let me respond to some of these accusations.
I follow Wittgenstein in believing one of the best ways to define a word is to find its use in the language. So I have been collecting examples of the use of the word positivism for more than twenty years. After you collect the first 500 or so uses of the word with some verification assertion, you tend to stop gathering more. Here I am advancing an ethos argument, to establish my credentials for discussing positivism. You narrow the definition of positivism to just one area: “Positivism refers to the view that something must be proven before we can accept it—that is, verificationism.” Even this very narrow definition of positivism is a bit to imprecise for me. The mode of verification positivists usually insist on is empirical evidence (or synthetic claims, which don’t seem to be at issue here). But, Chris, you are engaging in a common rhetorical strategy here. You narrow positivism down to just one of its complexly-layered assertions, note that the person under discussion (Vogel) doesn’t make that claim, and therefore conclude that the person isn’t a positivist. I think both parts of this strategy are mistaken.
Does Vogel make the empiricist assertion? You claim, “So far as I know, Dan does not make positivistic claims.” But he does in his essay in American Apocrypha: “Despite the use of naturalistic language in the Testimony of Three Witnesses—particularly the emphasis on seeing the plates with their ‘eyes’ as well as the failure to mention the angel’s glory—subsequent statements by Harris and Whitmer point to the visionary aspects of the their experience. In other words, the event was internal and subjective in the fullest sense of a vision.” In his biography and other essays, Vogel has to invent convoluted explanations of the Three Witness experience to make the event not amenable to the senses (empirical evidence then it would be), so he has to label it subjective or mystical—something that just happened in the mind or imagination. If the evidence were empirically verifiable, Vogel would have to permit the accounts as historically valid—veridical in some way according to a mistaken positivistic epistemological view; his entire discussion of the Three Witnesses is driven by the positivistic distinction between forms of knowledge gained empirically and those noncognitive forms of knowledge without a foundation of empirical observation. But, Vogel says later in that essay, “The real question is not the trustworthiness of the witnesses but whether testimony resulting from visions of hallucinations is reliable.” For Vogel the evidence for religious experience must by validated by the senses, and he uses that terminology in his biography of Joseph Smith (442-443, 445, 446, 467). If I have made a mistake in reading Vogel’s assertions about what kind of evidence is verifiable for the historian, then I would appreciate your correcting me before I say something similar in print again. But keep in mind, I have hundreds of examples ready to hand of similar assertions and definitions with slight variations from what I have laid out here.
What I have done here is open an area of common ground between the two of us. Historians who insist that historical evidence must be empirically verifiable are positivists; we may still disagree about whether or not Vogel makes that claim, but I would like to see you address the passages I have cited. The evidence seems straightforward to me, so perhaps I am missing something in your argument. The classic claim for this position was made by A.J. Ayer in his Language, Truth, and Logic: for Ayer, claims to having religious experiences are interesting only for what they reveal about the psychology of the believer, “but it does not in any way imply that there is such a thing as religious knowledge,” for unless the theist “can formulate his ‘knowledge’ in propositions that are empirically verifiable, we may be sure that he is deceiving himself.” I take it that Ayer’s definition is positivistic and that Vogel’s assertions mirror Ayer’s. Vogel just frames the evidence of witnesses to deny that the propositions are empirically measurable.
Chris, the problem with your definition is that it does what a symposium of New Mormon Historians do when they deny they or anyone they know is a positivist. They narrow the definition to just one of the host of claims with a family resemblance that positivists make. And since this person isn’t guilty of that one claim, so the assertion goes, this person isn’t a positivist. But the hidden assumption in this subterfuge is that in order to be called a positivist, the researcher must make this very specific claim (the individual positivistic claims, I assert, are sufficient although not necessary). Vogel is guilty of the very positivistic assertion you define as positivistic.
A disagreement between us is that you assert I am (needlessly and ideologically) imprecise in my definition of positivism. I think you are too simplistic in yours and ideological in the process of being artless. There is no reason you should have known that I have addressed the larger issues, because I have done so in rather obscure places, but in my essay in Smith Institute collection, Telling the Story of Mormon History I laid out six different but related claims that are commonly and properly called positivistic. I did six then because I was limited by time in the speech and space in the proceedings volume. Let me lay out the ten different positivistic claims: (1) Sergeant Joe Friday, or Brute Fact, Positivism asserts that the historian can find facts free of all interpretation (often in the archives or in archaeological digs); (2) Empiricist Positivism believes the only valid historical facts must empirically verifiable in some way; (3) Preconceptionless Positivism asserts the historian must clear his or her mind of all biases, preconceptions, and particularities; (4) Anti-metaphysical Positivism claims the historian shouldn’t used metaphysics or philosophy but should just use the facts free of all conceptual apparatuses and theoretical constructs; (5) Scientistic Positivism asserts the only valid logical structure or method is one based on the physical sciences (this is the unity-of-science thesis); (6) Methodist Positivism idealizes the scientific method and claims that through the use of a particular method the researcher can free him or herself from bias and historical particularity; (7) Archival Positivism asserts that by resort to archival data the historian can gain access to the past as it actually happened, free of contemporary concerns and ideologies; (8) Value-free Positivism believes that the researcher must free him or herself from all values and other contaminants; (9) Anti-particularity Positivism believes the researcher must and can be free of all historical and cultural conditions such as gender, nationality, religious commitment, and others; (10) Anti-poetic Positivism asserts that fiction and history are entirely separate and the narrative structure of one can be freed from the narrative devices of the other. These positivistic claims often overlap, and when a positivist makes one of these claims, he or she is prone to making related ones.
So, when you accuse me of imprecision, then my response is that imprecision is exactly what a notion such as positivism calls for. It has spread out like butter left out on the kitchen counter to encompass larger and grander territory. Positivism became the unexamined commonsense of all the disciplines and we have to do careful work to separate its useful inheritances from its harmful ones, but that work has to deal with all the varieties of positivism, not just one of them. Let me be more blunt. Imprecision in defining positivism is required because it is an imprecise phenomenon. To be too precise is to engage in simplistic thinking. Not only is positivism the uncritical foundation of most modern historical thinking, it has also become a term of abuse that one hurls at one’s opponent even if the hurler doesn’t understand what it means. Apologists for positivism almost always absolve themselves of the charge by narrowing the meaning to one of these ten elements, then saying, “but I don’t do that nor does anyone whom I know, except my opponents.”
Vogel himself tries to narrow the definition of positivism to just one or two variants so he is free to make other positivistic claims (as I quote him from another online discussion): “I think the introduction to my biography makes it abundantly clear that I’m not a positivist. Positivist historians would not attempt an interpretive biography, nor would they draw on psychology and sociology. They certainly would not describe themselves as “ontological naturalists.” Whereas a positivist seeks to establish history on positive grounds, I’m comfortable with interpretations that carry various degrees of probability. Hence, I would describe my position as basically a post-positivist ontological naturalist.” I think it is clear that not only does Vogel make positivistic assertions, but he also doesn’t understand what positivism is and therefore has a much more difficult task to avoid it. Chris, I think your position is different from Vogel’s in that you do indeed understand at least a few varieties of positivism. Quite naturally I disagree with you when you claim that my strategy is to “discredit Dan by dumping him into a ‘discredited’ epistemological category”; well, not actually, I do intend to discredit him by applying an epistemological label to him that is philosophically appropriate. You may believe I am trying to saddle him with an inappropriate category, but my intention is to point out that his intellectual framework is a discredited one and his conclusions are dominated by his positivistic presuppositions. Vogel saddles the dead horse of positivism himself and claims to have been riding it around town the past few years. The dead horse needs a bit more beating only because its riders claim it isn’t dead yet, and by the way its name isn’t Positivism anyway but something else.
I am more than happy to have this conversation. You can be angry and annoyed (and it may just be the blog format that spurs a superficial review of complex ideas [now, positivism is one of the most straightforward of philosophical positions I know, but it is complex not in its examination of ideas or reality but in its permutations and connections between those varieties]), but I spent the good part of 80 pages exploring the varieties of just two versions of positivism and in a narrowly focused area of Mormon history. You don’t really think you are going to do justice to the history of the concept in just 1,043 words, do you? I have been gathering this material since 1987, so I have a twenty-year head start on this project. I have a book-length manuscript of over 93,000 words under review on the very topic of Mormon history and historical positivism. In fact, I just walked out to my garage where I have thousands of photocopied articles on file. Your intemperate response about imprecision reminded me of one definition of positivism in those files. This is in the article written by John Searle called “The World Turned Upside Down” (1983) about deconstruction. There Searle notes: “When I have lectured to audiences of literary critics, I have found two pervasive philosophical presuppositions in the discussions of literary theory, both oddly enough derived from logical positivism. First there is the assumption that unless a distinction can be made rigorous and precise it isn’t really a distinction at all . . . . It is a condition of the adequacy of a precise theory of an indeterminate phenomenon that it should precisely characterize that phenomenon as indeterminate; and a distinction is no less a distinction for allowing for a family of related, marginal, diverging cases.” When I sat down to write this response I was consciously echoing Searle from memory. Partway through writing I decided to quote him directly, so I went out to the garage. Now, am I calling you a positivist? No, I have seen no evidence so far that that is the case; I do think your foray into the discussion makes you an apologist for positivism. Searle’s definition is an outlier so I am not willing to apply the label to you.
Going back to the last paragraph of your blog entry, I think your comments on positivism are “a bunch of really badly-done epistemological polemic,” inadequately informed about the history of this idea or the current discussion going on in historiography, sociology, political science, and philosophy. And I think your entry into this discussion about positivism is both obnoxious and wrong. But you see, I can back my position up with more than two decades of research and publication on these matters. I can see being a loose cannon, but do you need to be such an angry loose cannon?
In a round about way, Alan, have you just explained that Christopher's main complaint seems to be that you have not offered a positivist explanation of positivism? :)
Alan,
Thank you for your temperate reply to my intemperate post. My intemperance, for what it's worth, springs from two factors.
The first is that I am (perhaps unfairly) mentally lumping you together with a variety of other characters who have used postmodern modes of thought as a weapon to assault those who produce unbelieving scholarship. In some cases-- Alister McGrath and David Bohn come to mind-- their attacks are based on serious distortions of the philosophies they claim to hold. In other cases-- some of Louis Midgley's work, for example-- the attacks are a little more philosophically sophisticated, but nevertheless downright offensive in their language. Both these groups of people seem to think that a scholar who holds positivist assumptions is incapable of producing valuable historical research, and can be ignored. I consider this assumption to be fallacious. What you call positivism may limit a researcher in significant ways, but it does not necessarily invalidate his work. In short, the weaponization of postmodern epistemology has made me a bit overly sensitive to essays like the one you published in the FR. My suggestion, for future reviews, would be that if the author makes a naive epistemological claim then you simply briefly cite the claim and then show the specific ways that it limits or taints specific aspects of the work. This is more useful than an extended philosophical critique, and it does not come across as an ad hominem attempt to discredit the author in toto.
The second cause of my intemperance was that Dan Vogel is a personal friend, and I feel that your essay treated him unfairly. I hope you can understand and forgive me for the emotional response that inevitably arises when an injustice seems to have been done to a friend.
With respect to your comments on defining positivism I have just a few things to say in reply.
1) I suspect that I could find 500 examples of the word "Christian" being used in a way that excludes Mormons. That does not mean that this is the most common or most useful way to use that term. I think that if we are going to make a word's usage the arbiter of its meaning, then we must acknowledge the many shades of its usage and specify the one we have in mind, taking care not to impute characteristics of other definitions onto the one we have chosen. So, for example, if you want to define positivism as equivalent to naturalism (i.e. the exclusion of supernatural experiences as a reliable way of knowing), then I think you should be careful to note that naturalism entails neither verificationism nor any of the other ten points you listed, and thus that the definition of positivism you are using is not the one that has been "discredited".
2) I have not seen Dan Vogel make claims similar to any of the ten you listed. As for the claim you cited vis-a-vis the witnesses' experience, I think we could very fairly take issue with his use of the term "subjective," which implies that there is some "objective" category of experience to contrast subjective ones with. But that strikes me as simply a careless use of language. I actually have to agree with Dan that there seems to be a difference in reliability between visionary experiences and our usual, day-to-day sensory ones. Sensory experience is not perfectly reliable, by any stretch, but with proper methodological controls and interpretive strategies it has produced useful, practical results. Visionary experiences, on the other hand, often contradict not only each other but also the results of historical and scientific investigation. So I don't think we are making a naive methodological error in treating them as less reliable. (Now, I'd certainly agree that identifying the boundaries of sensory vs. visionary experience is nowhere near as clear-cut as naturalists make it out to be. But that's a somewhat different issue.)
[to be continued]
3) And this brings me to my next point, which is that you and other critics of so-called "positivism" seem to assume that naturalism is an assumption with which people begin, rather than a conclusion at which people arrive. In Dan's case, however, he began as a Mormon and arrived at his atheist views after encountering evidence that seemed to falsify his former supernatural beliefs. It is therefore not a matter of excluding the possibility of supernaturalism a priori, but rather of coming to exclude them after investigating a number of supernatural claims and finding them wanting. My own experience is similar. I was raised Pentecostal, and had what I interpreted to be supernatural experiences. Later I concluded that these were in fact natural experiences, not because I was brainwashed to make that assumption, but because I encountered information that seemed to falsify my experiences. This distinction between a priori naturalism-- naturalism that is treated as a self-evident fact-- and practical naturalism-- naturalism that is treated as a methodological shortcut with demonstrated usefulness-- strikes me as an important one. The former kind of naturalism is naive and intellectually lazy. The latter is a necessary shortcut to be able to live in and make sense of the world, because the truth is that none of us have time to investigate every single "supernatural" claim, and based on past experience we have good reasons to doubt most of them.
4) Is such shortcutting invalid? I'd argue that everyone, including supernaturalists, engages in this sort of shortcutting to some degree. Dan is fond of saying that supernaturalists are naturalists with respect to those religious claims in which they do not believe. He's mostly right about that. Most Christians, for example, never bother investigating the evidence for reincarnation, UFO abduction, or ouija boards, because they simply do not consider it likely that these kinds of "New Age" claims could be true. The premises on which they exclude them may be false premises, but in that case we should critique the premises rather than simply labeling them and their shortcut as "discredited".
Anyway Alan, I've rambled enough. I hope that this helps you understand where I'm coming from, and I thank you again for your irenic reply.
Peace,
-Chris
Both these groups of people seem to think that a scholar who holds positivist assumptions is incapable of producing valuable historical research, and can be ignored.
I can't speak for the former writers, but I can recognize Lou's penchant for aggression. At the same time, I think Lou's individual arguments ought to be discussed with a little more depth than a conceptual labeling and dismissal. Isn't that similar to what you're complaining happens to Vogel? If Midgley thought such work ought to be ignored maybe he would ignore it, right?
This is more useful than an extended philosophical critique, and it does not come across as an ad hominem attempt to discredit the author in toto.
If the error pervades the work, even undergirds it, the work "in toto" should be addressed, though. I've enjoyed reading Goff's articles in various FARMS Reviews. He has made me reexamine the way I think more than he has discredited Vogel in my eyes.
Does your rankling result from sharing similar beliefs as Vogel in terms of spiritual experiences and "naturalism"?
One more point: I am not sure that the comparison of the terms Mormon and Christian to positivism is entirely pursuasive. For one, the recent denial of the label to Mormons (who were originally called atheists by some, just like the ancient Christians!) is a rhetorical strategy by certain fundamentalists. The term "Christian" is much older than "positivist" or "post-modernist," and I don't think the analogy holds up well for that reason, namely: there is much more precedent for the "Christian" label to apply to Mormons than your comparison would allow.
If you are simply saying definitions aren't made by majority, I would generally agree, Goff's description is still persuasive nonetheless.
Hope school is fun! This semester is a big bore for me. :(
Ah, forget my question about where the rankling comes from, it seems you answered it already in your point 3.
"In Dan's case, however, he began as a Mormon and arrived at his atheist views after encountering evidence that seemed to falsify his former supernatural beliefs....My own experience is similar."
Hi Blair,
I'd argue that just as denying Mormons inclusion in the term "Christian" is a polemical strategy, so is equating naturalism with positivism. There may indeed be precedent for doing so, but it isn't the most usual or useful meaning of the term. Notice that naturalism is not even among the ten points Goff listed as his definition of positivism, let alone part of the more formal philosophy-of-science definition that I argued for in the OP.
As for Midgley: I don't dismiss him in toto. He's a capable thinker. But I also don't read him very often, because it's just not pleasant reading.
>>He has made me reexamine the way I think more than he has discredited Vogel in my eyes.
If Goff were writing about positivism as a general topic, it wouldn't bother me. It's the targeted and polemical use of it to which I object.
It's a rhetorical strategy that must be analyzed on its own merits according to the definitions given, etc. Rhetorical strategies aren't bad. They can be logical or illogical. They can be based on emotion or reason, or some combination of both. The "Mormons aren't Christian" nonsense simply doesn't hold up to a responsible historical analysis of the term, whereas Goff's definition and explanations comes off rather well.
PS- the target, Dan, is a great test subject for analysis. I don't fault Goff for not writing a fictional account of some writer/historian instead of actually engaging real arguments from a real writer.
Blair,
In what sense does Goff's equation of positivism with naturalism "come off rather well"? I'd suggest to you that all positivists are naturalists, but the reverse is not at all true. Please show how the tenets of historic positivism-- we can start with verificationism and the ten points Goff listed in this thread-- necessarily follow from naturalism.
As for engaging a specific writer-- using a writer to make a point about positivism is a different matter from using the positivist label to discredit a writer.
Peace,
-Chris
Just calling Dan a "naturalist" doesn't make it so. Goff explains what he means by positivist and gives examples from Vogel's writings that comport. I don't have to show how anything "follows from naturalism," I haven't claimed anything does. If you disagree with him I hope you'll explain why, and I hope he can help clarify; they're his claims, after all. From what I have read I believe he makes a persuasive case.
Hi Blair, which quote from Dan's work do you believe goes beyond mere naturalism into the realm of positivism?
You'll need to define both terms to make your question meaningful to me.
Use Goff's ten-point definition, and/or my verificationist one. I actually don't disagree with his ten points. I think those things can justly be classed as discredited "positivist" tenets.
But what puzzles me is when Goff quotes Dan with respect to visionary experience being less reliable than other kinds of experience, and concludes that this is clearly a "positivist" claim. Certainly it is a naturalist claim, but I cannot see how it entails any of the ten beliefs Goff lists in his definition of positivism. This is precisely the problem I saw in his paper and outlined in the OP above. He gives fairly precise and accurate definitions in some places, but then when he starts applying the label to Vogel, precision goes out the window and the term is suddenly indistinguishable from mere naturalism.
Chris, I apologize for not having more time this week to engage more. A few weeks ago I plowed through the following thread and recommend it to you. By the end of the discussion it was clear to me that Dan has a loose grasp on epistemological issues generally, and at that time didn't understand the implications of his claims. Enjoy! (Yes I read the whole thing)
http://www.libertypages.com/clark/10110.html
Hi Blair,
Thanks for the pointer to that thread. I probably will not have time to read the whole thing, but I read through the OP and the first page of comments. I did find it illuminating, though probably not for the same reasons you did. Alas, I fear our differing presuppositions are leading us to different readings of the same text. ;)
Peace,
-Chris
Chris, I think you are engaging in a bit of revisionism to try to massage Vogel’s claims back on the far side of the (indistinct) boundary between naturalism and positivism. Wasn’t it in my review of Vogel that I indeed made the distinction between naturalism and positivism? Sometimes writers view naturalism as the larger category and positivism as the bigger bucket. I might have done it in my book manuscript, but I am sure I also ran through that distinction in the review. In any case, what I see you as doing is trying to walk Vogel back to safer philosophical territory. Inside the Beltway they define a gaffe as when a politician, to his or her great embarrassment, says publicly what he or she really thinks. So the press secretary has to come before the cameras and say, “when the candidate said q, what he really meant was the opposite of q. The candidate really meant that he has great respect for people’s religious commitment and choices to own guns.” Now I am not trying to blame Vogel for what Brent Metcalfe said, but when the latter said “because they experienced the plates in a religiously ecstatic context, the experience is best approached from within a visionary tradition. Such a testimonial vision from God is not designed to address the empirical world of its human participants and cannot lend itself to historical-critical assessment,” isn’t Vogel’s claim much more like Metcalfe’s (do you and I agree that this claim is indeed positivistic?) than your spin on Vogel? Like Harry Reid’s recently revealed talk about light skin and Negroes, isn’t this kind of claim an embarrassment that now needs to be reexplained or put into context in order to avoid further problems?
This is a continuation of the last comment.
When James Clayton said the following (about the divinity of Christ, but in the larger context of Mormon history) much the same thing about religious claims in opposition to empirical evidence, isn’t this a positivistic claim: “That is a theological statement, not a historical statement. Historians can say very little about the actual relationship between God and Christ, since there is virtually no historical evidence to deal with. All historians can do is to analyze what people say they think of that relationship. The same problem exists in the quotations from Herbert Butterfield. When Butterfield mentions the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection, he is in the realm of metaphysics and well beyond the realm of history. One deals with these sorts of things on the basis of faith, not on the basis of empirical data. One asserts their ultimate truth, one does not calculate their probabilities.” My view is that historians have been making these kinds of assertions for generations, but they have become embarrassing in the past few decades, so those who want to resuscitate them have to go back and reinterpret them.
Chris, you refer to my equation of positivism and naturalism. That is a straw man and not my position. I posted my last comment then went for a bike ride, but something was bothering me; eight miles into the ride it finally came to me. You are establishing a pattern now of insisting on a precise definition or boundary between concepts. The world of thought is too messy for such sharp divisions. For me the difference between positivism and naturalism isn’t an either/or, but it can be a both/and. I quite happily agree that Vogel is a naturalist. He is a positivist. He happens to inhabit that huge area of overlap between the two concepts. I can easily think of situations where someone is a naturalist but not a positivist and a few in which a positivist wouldn’t be a naturalist. Both Metcalfe and Clayton use keywords to indicate their thought is positivistic: especially the word empirical. For Vogel the key clue is the word you had the hardest time explaining away: subjective. Positivists usually divide the world into two types of knowledge claims: (1) those that are objective because they are based on empirical evidence and (2) those that are subjective because based on religious experience, emotion, or some other form of noncognitive activity. To paraphrase Emerson, I believe a foolish precision is the hobgoblin of small minds. I think the borderline between positivism and naturalism is like the frontier between Pakistan and Afghanistan—usually imperceptible and often arbitrary. Now, I believe everybody is a rhetorician, so when I say that your distinctions are part of the rhetoric surrounding positivism, that isn’t a putdown. I too engage in rhetoric: I too am an apologist for an ideology. But that charge loses its force if being an apologist or rhetorician is inevitable. But I think your attempt to rescue Vogel from his own positivism is an exercise in saving the appearances of a position whose foundations were excessively weak when they were articulated, but you are attempting to go in and shore them up by redescribing them in a philosophically-sophisticated way when they were first articulated in a philosophically-naïve way.
>>Wasn’t it in my review of Vogel that I indeed made the distinction between naturalism and positivism?
In your review you said of positivism and naturalism, "the two positions are not at all distinct." Now, maybe what you meant by that was that one can hold both, and many people do hold both. But that's not at all how it came across. You seemed to be treating the two positions as functionally equivalent.
With respect to your quote from Brent (and one that you have elsewhere lifted from Philip Barlow), I think it's helpful to realize that there are other motives at work here than mere philosophical naivete. Historians of religion are in the peculiar position of trying to be acceptable to everyone-- religious and nonreligious alike-- while telling stories about past events about which people have strong beliefs. Usually when historians say things along the lines of, "history can't access religious truths because there's no empirical evidence," this is a sort of coping strategy. It is code for, "I'm going to default to a non-religious narrative, but I'll try not to exclude a religious interpretation so that religious people can fill in the blanks." The same is true of Richard Bushman's equally naive claim to be telling the story of Joseph Smith "as he thought of himself." What he really means is, "I'm going to default to a religious narrative, but I'll try not to exclude a non-religious interpretation so that non-religious people can fill in the blanks." Without coping strategies like these, believing and non-believing historians would end up in two separate sub-disciplines, sealed off from each other. And that people feel the need to justify their coping strategies-- even with philosophically naive statements-- is not at all surprising to me. To do so is a treasured convention in the field.
I actually thought that Vogel's biography, however, was a rather standout work in that regard. He stated his beliefs quite explicitly up front, and spent several pages explaining those beliefs and how he arrived at them. Now, he did not always frame his views in perfectly unobjectionable language. But I think it was clear from his introduction that he was engaging in an interpretive biography of Joseph Smith based on his own non-religious convictions. What more do you want from a man, really?
Your criticisms are helpful to me not just in clarifying my wording but also my thinking on these issues. So thank you. But when I said that positivism and naturalism aren’t at all distinct from each other, isn’t that what I have said here that drawing too precise a boundary between the two isn’t helpful? Insisting on a sharp distinction is too simple. Vogel calls himself a naturalist in order to assert that he isn’t a positivist, assuming that the two are mutually exclusive. I showed in the review how many people who have taken up the issue see positivism as a sub-category of naturalism and some take naturalism to be a sub-category of positivism. I imagine that by now Vogel understands positivism better than then, but back then his grasp of the definition of positivism was fragile.
Part of the disagreement between you and me is that I see positivism as discredited among philosophically-sophisticated theorists of all disciplines (but history here) but still ardently believed in by the overwhelming consensus of practitioners. “While at one time I had thought movement away from positivism might be possible, it now seemed that if indeed this could be achieved, it would a relatively hollow victory. Positivism is, after all, part of the language we all speak, both commonsensically and anthropologically,” said George Steinmetz in 2005. Disciplinary theorists know that positivistic claims can no longer be defended, but the practitioners just know that the assertions are somehow problematical, but unable to figure out how to stop making them, they lash out at being called positivists: “The legacy of positivism as I define and describe it in this book is a mode of thought so widely pervasive as to pass generally unremarked. . . . However, this legacy is not a consequence, direct or indirect, of consciously adopting positivism, as a theory or otherwise. Rather, it is the substance of certain positivist ideas as they have become pervasively woven into modern thought, whether we are mindful of them or not” (Michael Singer, 2005). Vogel just makes standard positivistic claims that historians have been making for 100 years when discussing religion, and I don’t see them as merely softening the material so religious believers don’t take offense at the researcher’s secularism. I see them as what the positivist takes for granted as the only way to do valid historical methodology. I take them as substantive claims, “why you should believe my interpretation of history rather than those religious believers’,” where—if I understand you correctly—you see them as largely rhetorical.
I posted my last comment then went out on my bike ride. This time I didn’t get a quarter of a mile before I realized that my comment about substance versus rhetoric didn’t quite express what I meant. I am astonished Chris that you think Vogel (and other historians) is writing in what you call code. They have an exoteric message intended for common religious believers and an exoteric message for historians, who know what they are really saying. You are their Leo Strauss who interprets through the allegorical message to the hidden message beneath. So historians can make all the positivistic claims they want, but you are going to tell us that they meant the opposite of what they said. What are the four senses of Mormon history? The Song of Solomon isn’t really erotic poetry but is really about God’s love for the church? I find this highly implausible. You want me to believe that Mormon historians don’t believe their surface meaning? I like reading Leo Strauss and even many of his disciples; are you telling me I need to do something similar with historians in general and Mormon historians in particular. You could attribute any meaning to any text by using this method.
Historians express positivism for the masses and antipositivism for secularists. I said that stuff about gaffes and press secretaries partly in jest, but it appears you are indeed applying for the job in public relations. The problem with your reading of their positivistic claims is that it adds complexity on complexity. Occam’s razor points us to a literal reading of their claims. I find it much more plausible to believe that you are jesting than to believe in this exoteric/esoteric reading. Historians are famous for their simple documentary and literalistic readings of sources, and you are telling me they are really creating sophisticated subtexts when they address epistemological issues?
Hi Alan,
When I highlight your careless use of language in saying that positivism and naturalism are "not at all distinct," you object that that's not really what you meant. Yet when I suggest that you are being too strongly literal in reading other historians' claims, you object that I am trying to be their press secretary, and violating Occam's razor. I think we have to be consistent, however, and allow people on both sides of this debate to use language in careless or reflexive ways that do not reflect what they really mean or how they really operate. (I half-expected you at the end of that last comment to say that you reject my reading of Vogel because it doesn't meet your standard of empirical evidence! :-P)
Last semester, a student in my Life and Thought of Joseph Smith class argued for methodological atheism, in precisely the same way that Metcalfe and Barlow do: by saying that as historians, we can only comment on claims that are empirically supportable. I strongly disagreed with him in class. After class I approached him to apologize if I had been too pointed in my disagreement. He thanked me for my comments, which had clarified some things for him, and proceeded to explain that the reason he practices methodological atheism is because his field (biblical studies) is such a contested field that "we have to have some way to talk to each other." Some kind of lowest-common-denominator narrative seemed, to him, the best way to communicate across narrative paradigms.
I tell you this story because I think it illustrates the pressures in the discipline, and the way that historians may be trained to encode their motives without really even being aware they're doing it. When Barlow talks about which kinds of claims historians "can" and "can't" talk about, for example, he may well be giving an empiricist/positivist explanation for this, but I feel quite confident that what he's really doing is expressing the detente among historians-of-religions in the language that we have been taught to express that detente. That is, "we can't deal with supernatural claims because practitioners of the discipline have agreed not to." We have agreed that when there is a strong community of belief in some set of supernatural claims, those claims are to be classed as "non-empirical" and avoided like the plague. Even philosophically sophisticated historians may reflexively do this because it's so conventional.
If you look at the ways people like Vogel or Barlow really do history, though, I don't think they behave like positivists. And that's why I don't think it really does justice to them to slap a label on them and say they are positivists. If you want to say that they make positivistic claims, that's fine with me. But I hope you'll be careful not to claim too much, and you won't treat naturalism and positivism as equivalent terms. I think that if you explained to most "positivists" how they could be a naturalist without being a positivist, they'd say, "Well, yes, that's me. I just never had the language to express that before." And then they'd be more receptive to listen to your other points on the subject of epistemology and how we do history. But as long as it sounds like you're saying, "one cannot disbelieve Joseph Smith's visionary claims unless one is a positivist," you're going to get a lot of visceral negative reactions, and the positivists are going to assume you're loony and go on being positivists.
Anyway, thanks for the clarifications and the good discussion. I don't think we disagree on all that much, really, and I hope again that you can forgive my somewhat acerbic tone in the OP.
Peace,
-Chris
For clarification's sake, I've not read anything Goff has written as arguing, in code or otherwise, that "one cannot disbelieve Joseph Smith's visionary claims unless one is a positivist."
Blair,
I don't think Goff would say that, either. But that is the implication if we fail to maintain a sufficient distinction between the terms "naturalism" and "positivism". (Goff is correct that the categories sometimes have overlapping constituencies, and naturalism may in some cases be predicated on positivistic assumptions. But the constituencies do not always overlap, and so the terminological distinction is still important.) By insufficiently distinguishing between these categories, Goff runs the risk of being misunderstood and thus of being ignored. That's all I'm saying.
Peace,
-Chris
Chris, you sound like you want to wind this conversation down. That is fine. I just got word this morning, by the way, that I will be presenting a paper at Claremont in May at the Mormon Scholars in the Humanities conference. Perhaps I’ll see you there. You seem to have one other main objection to my criticisms of Vogel, let me briefly address it. What more could I ask from someone, you ask? Vogel proclaims his biases in his introduction, you say. You have not raised an objection that I haven’t already anticipated. This one I have responded in an article under review at a journal. This is my second criticism of Vogel (how he ends up being a positivist). It is true that he states in his introduction that every historian has biases. Historians and researchers have learned that they can no longer use the word objectivity for fear of looking naïve, but they make the claim in other ways. I call this preface talk versus book talk. You make a general confession of bias in the preface of the book, then in the chapters you ignore that concession and go about claiming that your opponents are apologists for an ideology or that those who disagree with you are committed to a faith tradition or have an agenda, the implication being you have escaped that general condition. Vogel does this with his use of the word apologist to characterize his opponents. We are all apologists, but Vogel is merely an apologist for a version of modernity that he isn’t aware is a faith commitment. Claims to objectivity (whatever their forms) are attempts to increase the credibility of the researcher. If your reader agrees that you aren’t an apologist for an ideology or that you are detached from intellectual politics, then your ideology will work much more effectively.
Some researchers assert that religious commitment is a much more dangerous ideological infectious agent than, say, modernity is. I don’t think so; it is just one particularistic commitment among others, with both positions having their fundamentalists. Alan Padgett refers to this as the “neutrality two-step” by which biases are admitted then some dance is performed to “try and step around it back into scientific neutrality.” That is what Vogel is doing with his preface talk versus his book talk. “Although the majority of modern historians would insist that they have long broken with nineteenth-century positivism, the objections, sometimes rather violent, to the ‘specter of relativism’ raise doubts about the degree to which this has occurred. Recognizing this, Linda Orr feels that anti-positivistic statements are simply rhetoric expressed in the preface, ‘while the truth-teleology resurrects itself in the body of the monograph’” (I am citing Karin J. MacHardy here). I believe that ideology is interpellative: that is, it is necessary for the production of a belief about history; it is a necessary building material. One doesn’t have a reading of history unless one begins with an ideology about the past. Positivism makes for a weak construction substance.
I could answer more of your objections to my position, but I think this is enough. The problem here is not with my meanness (as you interpret it) nor with Midgley and Bohn. The trouble is that Vogel and the New Mormon Historians adhere to an outdated positivism that they won’t surrender as long as they have people like you who are still in denial about their positivism (and as long as they themselves don’t understand positivism); you could perform heroic service here, but you would have to bite down on the rope and agree with me on some issues. NMHistorians could have surrendered their positivism three decades ago when it first came under fire. But they are trying to save the appearances of whatever remnants can be salvaged. I think you suffer from an excess of charity. You want me to desist from calling those who make positivistic claims positivists. Your position would mean there are no positivists in the world, just people who don’t understand their own epistemology very well. You would let mercy rob justice—and accuracy. Since Midgley, Bohn, and Bushman have been criticizing the NMH for thirty years about their commitment to positivism, those believers have not yielded an inch in their commitment to positivism (outside the necessary rhetorical flourishes). A little tough love is necessary, and the only way forward (as I see it) is to point out how far historiography is from the position adhered to by these positivists. Such an approach involves taking bitter medicine, for it would require an admission that Midgley and Bohn were right two decades ago. The time for a more gradual descent from positivism was the 1980s when the trail was a gentler slope to rejoin where historiography is; that path wasn’t taken, so they are now at heights where the cliffs are much steeper and more dangerous. Going back isn’t possible if catching up with the historiographical profession is the objective. Rock climbers are needed for the trip ahead, not recreational hikers. But the dangers ahead are a consequence of decisions made in Mormon history three decades ago. We can’t always choose our own path but have to begin from where we are now. You can’t just talk positivists down from where they are, but you can climb up and descend with them. I will join you if you want, but at the least it will require that they stop throwing boulders down the mountain at their rescuers. We can do a good cop, bad cop routine if it helps (I'll even let you be the good cop); soft words won’t work because they are too far up the mountain to hear gentle whispers. I think you have already traveled a fair distance from where you were when you started this blog entry, but these researchers still don’t know the way forward from the cliffs above you. They need a rescue patrol, and no soft landing is in sight. I’ll bring the carabiners, the water, and the stick while you can bring the carrots and the granola. The rescue isn neither certain nor easy, but it is possible.
Alan,
The new dance step by critics of Midgley, Bohn, and you, is that you are throwing Mormonism to the postmodern wolves, bringing in a relativism that destroys all other LDS faith claims in an attempt to defeat the NMHistorians. What's your take on that accusation?
Relativism looks like relativism only from with positivism. Once you shatter those modernist windows, you are no longer frightened by relativist bogeymen. We still talk about truth and evidence; they no longer mean what positivists mean, but we can still talk about science and method without irony and equivocation. The problem is that positivists insist on a false dichotomy: either our version of truth or complete relativism. I just don't buy into the binary opposition. I still assert that my readings of the Book of Mormon are vastly superior to those of the revisionists, but on ground different from saying that "my readings are more objective because I don't believe in the book."
Where would you point a reader who wanted to see an expansion of the discussion of the space between a false dichotomy of positivism or relativism?
Alan,
Would you agree that some people allow their ideology to be too determinative? As an example, let's say your religious belief tells you that I was in a particular place in Dallas last night at midnight. But I have 100 witnesses placing me in Claremont last night at midnight, and we have video footage of the place in Dallas and I'm not there. So, you construct a narrative in which I paid off a hundred people and falsified the timestamp on the video tape. Your interpretation is not impossible, but is it plausible? Is it even remotely probable? This is one of the ways I usually distinguish between what I call Mormon "scholars" and what I call Mormon "apologists": Mormon scholars construct religious narratives, but Mormon apologists construct religious narratives that fly in the face of evidence-based historical analysis. I realize that technically all of us are "apologists", but it seems to me that we have to have some term to identify those who are willing to reexamine their presuppositions, and those for whom those presuppositions are totally determinative and immune to falsification.
I'm glad to hear you're coming to Claremont! I look forward to meeting you.
Peace,
-Chris
By the way, I don't think you're "mean".
Blair,
I have several books on my shelf specifically about relativism (James Harris’s Against Relativism and Martin Hollis’s Rationality and Relativism), but I can’t recommend them; I find arguments from the analytic tradition to be rather sterile. Most philosophical explorations on truth deal with relativism: Fernandez-Armesto’s Truth I find shallow (he is a historian rather than a philosopher). I find Simon Blackburn’s Truth: A Guide to be helpful. I hear great things about Nancy Pearcey’s Total Truth; it is on my shelf, but I haven’t read it yet. Some of the essays in Walter Truett Anderson’s The Truth about the Truth are good, especially his own contributions. I think Douglas Groothius (Truth Decay commits the very mistakes I have argued against briefly about relativism. Christian philosophers such as James K. A. Smith (Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? and Crystal Downing (How Postmodernism Serves (My) Faith are directly on target. I like Christopher Norris on Postmodernism (What’s Wrong with Postmodernism and The Truth about Postmodernism probably because he can’t decide between his Janus-faced commitments to modernity and postmodernism.
Chris, you ask about apologetics and note that some people are much more open to their fundamental belief’s being challenged than others are. Some people’s ideology is much more pervasive than other people’s. There is something to this observation. I have written an entire essay (unpublished) in which this is a major theme, so I don’t think I can replicate in this discussion board the complexity of my argument, but I can give a flavor of it.
Liberalism (here I am talking about philosophical liberalism, not political liberalism; political liberalism and political conservativism are equally indebted to philosophical liberalism) is the modern ideology which places above all other commitments two: (1) individualism and (2) openness to revision. The relevant thinkers here in the criticism of liberalism’s claim to openness are Stanley Fish (especially in Doing What Comes Naturally and The Trouble with Principle) and a series of communitarian thinkers. Liberalism claims that to enter the public square one must be willing to change one’s core commitments if the evidence demands it. But liberalism is awfully illiberal in this claim, since this is one of liberalism’s core commitments; the liberal ends up insisting that others who disagree must accept that fundamental value just to enter the debate. In other words, liberalism is illiberal in insisting that its own principles be the arbitrator of what counts as evidence and proper foundational assumptions. Liberalism is contradictory in its commitment to openness. It is close-minded in the very act of insisting on openness. Liberalism and positivism share a common desire to avoid particularity, and therefore need to been seen as sisterly ideologies.
So yes, I too am liberal in this sense because I see fundamentalists all around who are too dogmatic for my taste. But I see them among New Mormon Historians, secularists, and Religious Studies types as well as among Pentecostals, Mormons, and Orthodox Jews. In fact, I find within myself a good deal of division, some parts of me are less willing to accept contrary evidence than others. Chris, I think you too exhibit some of these characteristics, because your immediate reaction to my calling your friends positivists was to come up with what appeared to me to an elaborate idea that okay, these people say positivistic things, but it is only because they don’t understand a more philosophically-acceptable way to express what they really mean. Your assumptions incorporate all sorts of commitments to modern ideas, and you will reinterpret the evidence in order not to face the cognitive dissonance that some people you admire and agree with are positivists.
Once you make the concession that everybody has biases (an ideology) as Vogel does, you can’t prevent the extensive fallout from that admission. You can’t limit the damage to the preface of the book; ideology has its impact at the arterial level (the level most positivists are stuck in their analysis) but the larger impact is at the capillary level. You distinguish between Mormon scholars and Mormon apologists, the latter “construct religious narratives that fly in the face of evidence-based historical analysis.” But ideology is also involved (often deeply involved) in determining what counts as evidence. So once you make this concession, then you have to admit that there are apologists of all types: NMH apologists, positivistic apologists, apologists of modernity, as well as Mormon apologists. This is why people such as Vogel attempt that two-step, preface-talk strategy—admit you have an ideology but then attempt to withdraw that concession and claim some form of superior objectivity that distinguished your ideological commitments from your opponent’s.
Continuing from the previous comment:
All of us are willing to examine some of our presuppositions, but liberals are more committed to the idea of openness so they have to construct elaborate strategies to go back and protect their presuppositions from challenge because they have professed the desirability of such openness. We always protect some presuppositions with much more stout defense than others. I don’t think “Mormon apologists” are any different on this score than their critics (I am convinced by the postmodern argument on this score that universalizing statements aren’t helpful but each ideologue’s commitments need to be analyzed in their specificity). They just don’t have an expressed commitment to openness that requires an extra layer of double-talk to reconcile their liberal commitments with their other ideological ones. Once you reveal liberalism as ideology (as I am attempting to do), it works much less effectively in the buffering role to protect dogmatic assumptions, which we all have.
Hi Alan,
I readily acknowledge that the methods by which we determine what happened in the past are themselves ideological. Even a commitment to the validity of syllogistic reasoning can be described as ideological, although something like syllogistic reasoning would seem to be part of our biological hard-wiring. A thoroughgoing relativist could certainly say, "my commitment to certain religious propositions is no different from your commitment to syllogistic and probabilistic reasoning." And at one level they would be right about that. Both are ideological beliefs.
At another level, however, there is a substantive difference between religious propositions and rational methods. Rational methods are at the root of nearly all human thinking, and are almost universally accepted as valid and necessary ways of knowing. Without them, in fact, meaningful communication would be virtually impossible. Presumably by the time someone sits down to write a work of history, they should already share a commitment to the validity of the kinds of reasoning historians (and other humans) have collectively agreed to engage in. If they are not committed to these kinds of reasoning, then the most charitable and least confusing thing for them to do would be to call it something other than history (i.e. theology, or theological history).
Now, once one gets beyond these basic lower-order rational-methodological commitments, higher-order ideologies will still significantly shape one's narratives. But I would suggest that where these higher-order ideological commitments come into conflict with the lower-order ones, the latter should be given priority. Most historians would agree with me. If that makes me a "liberal", then fine, I am a liberal. But that does not change the fact that non-liberals are conducting their enterprise in a fundamentally different way. My experience tells me that the liberal approach produces useful results, whereas the non-liberal approach does not. I think that most other people-- and certainly most other historians-- would agree with me. So I don't think it's invalid to apply some differentiating label (such as "apologist") to those who adopt a non-liberal approach.
And now on to my "elaborate idea that okay, these people say positivistic things, but it is only because they don’t understand a more philosophically-acceptable way to express what they really mean." I find it baffling that you continue to insist that "positivism" is a hard and well-defined category, and that anyone who says something positivistic unquestionably is a positivist. This strikes me as not only irrational, but also decidedly un-postmodern. I highly doubt that there are many people who fall into the "positivist" category in a clear-cut way. Rather, people may think and act positivistically sometimes, but not other times. The claim that Dan Vogel fundamentally is a positivist because he supposedly sometimes says things that are positivistic (though you've not yet quoted a convincing example of such a positivistic statement from Vogel himself) simply does not bear scrutiny. When one examines Dan's historical inferences and conclusions, one is hard-pressed to find any sign of positivistic reasoning.
Peace,
-Chris
Hi again Alan,
FWIW, we in religious history have different terms for what you call "liberals" and what I above called "non-liberals". We call the former "rationalists" and the latter "confessionalists". These terms refer basically to what each side prioritizes when reason and confession come into conflict. Confessionalists are committed to reason only within the bounds set for it by the confession, whereas rationalists acquiesce to confessions only insofar as they are not contradicted by reason.
Peace,
-Chris
I find the force of your replies puzzling, as if you are taking personal umbrage when I charge Vogel or other associated with the New Mormon History with being positivists. I have been thinking for the past week why, when we seem to agree on what positivism is, you don’t accept that these people are positivists. I think I have thought through one fundamental disagreement between us. For you positivism seems to be an aberration, an anomaly. So when somebody makes positivistic claims, their assertions need to be explained away as a misunderstanding, a lack of philosophical sophistication; if we just explained to them the problems with their claims, they would gladly say, “You’re right. I didn’t really mean what I said.” What they really need to do is say, “You’re right. I was a positivist, but now I have become convinced of my errors. I have changed.”
I view positivism as the very core of their claims. Historians as a discipline (as well as all other disciplines) trained their practitioners from about the 1880s to the 1970s to think in positivistic terms. Positivism is what is taken for granted among historians, what doesn’t need further explanation, the way of thought that characterizes all good historical research. Here is Elvi Whittaker: “While at one time I had thought movement away from positivism might be possible, it now seemed that if indeed this could be achieved, it would a relatively hollow victory. Positivism is, after all, part of the language we all speak, both commonsensically and anthropologically.” Here is Michael Singer making a similar point: “The legacy of positivism as I define and describe it in this book is a mode of thought so widely pervasive as to pass generally unremarked. . . . However, this legacy is not a consequence, direct or indirect, of consciously adopting positivism, as a theory or otherwise. Rather, it is the substance of certain positivist ideas as they have become pervasively woven into modern thought, whether we are mindful of them or not.”
No doubt these positivistic claims are an embarrassment now, but they provided cohesion and rhetorical traction to those who made them. They also provided a quick and dirty way to dismiss religious claims while just assuming the mantle of disciplinary consensus. Here is Michel-Rolph Trouillot on the historical discipline in particular: “The positivist position dominated Western scholarship enough to influence the vision of history among historians and philosophers who did not necessarily see themselves as positivists. Tenets of that vision still inform the public’s sense of history in most of Europe and North America: the role of the historian is to reveal the past, to discover or, at least approximate the truth.” Since positivism is the commonsense of theoretically-uninformed historians, NMHistorians have just taken it for granted. They know they can’t use the word objectivity anymore with a straight-but-puzzled face, but they still make the claims using other words. I see your attempt to rephrase Vogel and other NMHistorians as a defensive, after-the-fact apology to rescue the position from its own positivism. But at the time these researchers wrote their essays and books, they didn’t see the least problematical element about their claims because they assumed a disciplinary consensus stood behind their assertions. George Steinmetz says that all disciplines (not just history) suffer from a continuing uncritical allegiance to positivism: a “robust, if updated (and sometimes camouflaged or unconscious) positivism” still dominated among many social scientists, that positivism is a misunderstood but still influential “folk category among social scientists.”
I think it is better to take these writers at their word rather than trying to make their claims more respectable. I am willing to stop calling them positivists, but they will have to repent and forsake for it to happen, then they will be forgiven for their sins. The duplicitous discussions we have witnessed by apologists for the NMH will have to yield to a more accurate view of the current state of historiography. Your approach is just one step better than the weird definitions of positivism offered by Vogel, Alexander, Hill, Barlow, and others. Your position is well-informed philosophically but still doesn’t assign responsibility for the pervasive positivism in this sub-discipline to where it should reside.
Hi Alan,
I think there's a substantial difference between making some positivistic claims, and adopting a thoroughly positivistic approach to scholarship. By labeling these historians positivists and strongly rejecting any intimation to the contrary, you imply that their approach and epistemology is identical to the self-proclaimed positivists of the nineteenth century. I think there are substantial differences. In fact, if presented with your ten-point list, I suspect that the NMHistorians would deny belief in any of those propositions. I doubt they would understand the relationship between the claim that "historians can't talk about faith because it's non-empirical," and those positivistic epistemological claims. As I said before, as a practicing historian I understand very well the social pressures that the discipline places upon historians to not only make their narratives faith-neutral so as to appeal to everyone, but also to find a way to philosophically justify doing so. The claims you believe reveal the New Mormon Historians' deepest selves, I see in basically instrumental terms, as a response to the unique market forces of the discipline.
Anyway, that should probably be my final post for now. I'll let you have the last word if you like. Thanks for the interesting discussion!
-Chris
I'm late to this discussion. I would like to make some comments about the previous discussion. Anyone interested?
I’m less concerned about Alan calling me a positivist, than with his representing my position accurately. If he understands my position and still wants to call me a positivist, then he can knock himself out. Given Alan’s “umbrella” definition of positivism, I think it impossible for anyone except a thoroughgoing relativist to avoid his label. For those between the extremes of relativism and positivism—the fundamentalists, as Alan calls them—there is bound to be a mix of traits. Alan implies that he is also in the middle, and so I might suggest that he is just better at hiding his positivism. But for Alan, apparently, a little leaven leavens the whole lump. In my view, it’s a waste of time arguing about the definition of words. I’d rather talk about specific arguments and evidence in terms of strengths and weaknesses—not in terms of proof or verification. Experience has taught us what kinds of evidence to value over others. Alan mentions Occum’s Razor, so I take it that he shares, or at least is willing to appeal to that principle of accessing propositions. In fact, I see little difference in the marshalling of evidence between a so-called positivist and postmodernist.
I think Alan too easily overlays his highly specialized definitional language on what he reads. I use the term “subjective”, and that opens a whole discussion on what that implies about my beliefs in objectivity. I don’t think we have direct access to “reality,” but I think we can still talk about what is real and what is imagined. Alan thinks that I automatically discount visionary experience because I’m an empiricist. Given the human propensity for hallucination, and the myriad of failed religions that have started with visions, I think we are justified in being skeptical. The point of my essay on the BOM witnesses was to show that the experiences of both the three and eight witnesses were visionary and that the possibility of hallucination exists. The context of Alan’s quote was Richard Anderson’s assertion that the experience was a ‘natural-supernatural’ experience. In other words, the angel was objectively and literally in the woods. Using the witnesses own statements about their experiences, I showed that the vision of the angel and plates was not an external event, but was internal and subjective (which does not necessarily mean unreal, but non-sensory)--a vision in the fullest sense. In this regard, I believe my marshalling of the evidence is superior to Anderson’s. Once this is admitted, the possibility of hallucination can’t be ruled out. If I were to argue that the witnesses hallucinated, rather than having a legitimate vision of a resurrected Nephite with gold plates, I would appeal to the likelihood that Joseph Smith wrote the Book of Mormon. If the BOM was written by JS, rather than ancient Nephites, then the three witnesses hallucinated.
Hi Dan,
Thanks for commenting here. Hopefully Alan will notice your comments and reply!
Peace,
-Chris
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