Smart Transcendentalism or Trained Incapacity? Response to Little

Abstract

This is a response to Daniel Little’s review of my recent book, To Judge and To Justify: Profiles of the Academic Vocation. While Little’s recognizes that the book’s contents reflect my academic formation, he is disappointed that it does not conform to a certain view of the sociology of knowledge. In response, I accuse him of “trained incapacity” as a reader and proceed to elaborate what I call in the book “smart transcendentalism,” which orients my general approach to the sociology of knowledge.

I should first thank Dan Little for his astute concluding observation in his review (Little 2025) of To Judge and To Justify: Profiles of the Academic Vocation (Fuller 2024). Indeed, the book is to a large extent centered on academics from the recent past who have contributed to my intellectual development, though these figures are embedded within the larger context of Western intellectual history, in which the figures of Plato, Augustine, Francis Bacon, and Kant loom large. My aim in the book, which Little seems to only dimly perceive, is to explore why judgement and justification have been deemed the core cognitive skills to be imparted in the modern reinvention of the university, starting with Wilhelm von Humboldt in early nineteenth century Berlin—but also with William Whewell in mid-nineteenth century Cambridge. And while the former focused on the humanities and the latter on the natural sciences, both shared Kant’s view that the cultivation of judgement and justification should be at the heart of any rational person’s education—and that philosophy is the discipline best equipped to deliver it.

And so, when I consider figures from the recent past such as Rawls and Nozick, Quine and Kuhn, Feyerabend and Rorty, I am generally more interested in the character of the judgements and justifications than their general theories of judgement and justification. Of course, I do not dismiss whatever theories they offered. Certainly, Rawls’s “Original Position” has set a standard for justification, even if one diverges from Rawls’s own judgements. However, I tend to treat the words of these philosophers as data points for what my book seeks to understand. Here it is worth recalling the book’s pretext, which is as a follow-up to Back to the University’s Future: The Second Coming of Humboldt (Fuller 2023). We live in a time when the “added value” of the university is an open question. Humboldt’s Kant-inspired move to reinvent the academic personality as someone who invites students on a journey to the frontiers of knowledge, which is at once a romantic quest of self-discovery (Bildung). The academic is someone who does not merely train the next generation in a profession or trade but who exemplifies a certain way of being in the world. The philosophers mentioned at the top of this paragraph were clearly engaged in such a project, and their rather different personas can be taken as evidence for that. Of course, there are many others I could have chosen, but as Little rightly says, I chose the ones who resonate most with me in terms of prompting an extended academic prose response, somewhat like a Rorschach inkblot. In that respect, Fuller (2024) can be usefully read as an exercise in my own sense of “judgement” toward those whom I regard as having exercised judgement well, even when I disagree with the specific judgements they took.

A theme that runs through Little’s review is his disappointment that while To Judge and To Justify develops themes that are familiar from my previous work in social epistemology, it does not dwell on what he understands as the “sociology of knowledge” relating to the philosophers I examine, let alone the philosophical profession or the university more generally. For example, in response to the philosopher to whom I devote the largest treatment, Richard Rorty, Little cites Gross (2008), an accomplished intellectual biography of Rorty as seen through a sociological lens, which I cite a few times in To Judge and To Justify. Published just a year after Rorty’s death, Gross (2008) treats Rorty as an object study in a broadly “role-position” approach to the sociology of knowledge that is associated with such figures as Pierre Bourdieu and Randall Collins. This approach basically sees social agents as seeking to convert their relative advantages into situations that make their own contributions distinctive. Rorty certainly fits this characterization, which explains how he was able to transition from being a non-analytic philosopher in the premier US analytic philosophy department to being the leading US non-analytic philosopher, if not the leading US public philosopher. The archival part of Gross (2008) ends in 1982, by which time Rorty’s life trajectory had proved the book’s thesis.

I felt no need to compete with Gross (2008), let alone acknowledge it more fulsomely, because To Judge and To Justify is doing something different. Something comparable to Gross (2008) was done for Jean-Paul Sartre in Baert (2015), my review of which was mixed because Sartre’s intellectual ambitions exceeded the sociological framework that Baert presumed in his otherwise very competent readings of Sartre’s post-war works (Fuller 2016). In the case of Rorty, I take his signature invocation of philosophy as the “conversation of mankind” to imply a sociology of knowledge that escapes the limited conceptual horizons of Gross, Baert, and other sociologists of knowledge. To Judge and To Justify tries to generalize this alternative sociology in chapter three as “smart transcendentalism.” It is worth dwelling briefly on the implied contrast.

Most sociologies of knowledge presume a “relativist” epistemology because they see the relevant intellectual agents as exclusively the products of their time and place. It follows that the discourse of these agents should be understood as addressing their contemporaries, rendering the meaning of what they say highly context-bound, and hence easily lost if one fails attend to their common discursive situation. Thus, sociology of knowledge treatments often appear to demystify, if not outright delegitimize, the thinkers under study—be they philosophers, scientists, or artists—because they reveal that their reputations rest on highly decontextualized understandings of their intellectual contributions, tantamount to “misreadings.” To be sure, the founder of the sociology of knowledge, Karl Mannheim had a more sophisticated, perhaps Einstein-inspired “relational” view, which replaced the idea of “contemporaneity” with that of “simultaneity,” implying that any “common discursive situation” in fact marks the coincidence of agents who occupy different spacetime trajectories and horizons; hence his pioneering exploration of the “problem of generations,” as people at different stages of their lives witness the same events and attend to the same discourses (Mannheim 1928 [1952]). It generates perspectival dissonance, which often assumes an ideological character (Stehr 2022). Mannheim spent much of later career struggling with the question of how such “simultaneity” can figure in societal governance, especially as modern societies seem to be at once increasing their appetite for democracy and central planning.

While Mannheim’s relational sociology of knowledge is clearly preferable to a vulgar relativism (even when it goes by the name of “contextualism”), both operate with a rather restricted conception of social agents’ spacetime horizons, effectively rendering them what Fuller (2024, chap. 3.1) calls “transcendental dopes.” I do not deny that agents are largely confined to discourses that are already equipped to convey certain meanings that will be familiar to their intended audiences. Nevertheless, these agents are often trying to communicate more than is normally captured by those linguistic means. Sometimes this is presented as the power of metaphor (Ortony 1979). Moreover, the rich modal structure of most languages—marked grammatically by the conditional and subjunctive moods—grants language users significant syntactic capacity to talk about things that transcend the bounds of their common experience. These points especially apply to the broad category of “intellectuals,” who typically address their audiences by invoking ideas that are not easily grasped and people and places not readily accessed. In the philosophy of language, such matters are discussed as concerning “reference,” or as Franz Brentano more metaphysically put it, “aboutness,” what gives thought its direction. Intuitions diverge over the extent to which our making sense hangs on knowing what would make what we say true or false. Put sharply, how much do we need to know to know what we are talking about (Yablo 2014)?

Interestingly, this entire problematic began at the end of the nineteenth century, when two maverick mathematicians, Gottlob Frege and Edmund Husserl, delved into the ontological foundations of their discipline. Such nineteenth century innovations as non-Euclidean geometry and non-natural number theory had demonstrated that mathematical objects constitute a domain open to exploration and discovery, even if they lack any obvious empirical instantiations. Whereas phenomenologists following Husserl (e.g., Kurt Gödel) tended toward a Plato-inflected “realms of being” ontology accessed by a special kind of intuition, analytic philosophers following Frege (e.g., W. V. O. Quine) tended to treat such mathematical objects as “unsatisfied” or “incomplete” statements about the empirical world. If we take the role that Minkowski’s and Riemann’s versions of non-Euclidean geometry played in Einstein’s special and general relativity, it is not clear which side has played the better hand, since objects that phenomenologists might accept as a priori real, analytics have come to accept over time as a posteriori real. Indeed, Bertrand Russell is one philosopher who transitioned from the former to the latter view (Russell 1927, chap. 17).

What I regard as the “smart transcendentalism” of Rorty’s “conversation of mankind” refers to the verbal version of this development. The difference is that instead projecting second-order versions of (non-Euclidean) space and (non-natural) numbers, which incorporate an understanding of the nature of space and number, Rorty’s conversation transpires in words treated as second-order signifiers for ideas that cut across time and space, resulting in an intellectual history that aims to provide a “topology” that enables different verbal expressions to be recognized as common thoughts. In Fuller (2024, chap. 4.5), this is discussed as introducing an “orthogonal” perspective—that of the eavesdropper—into the original conversation. It is a more formal—but also potentially more expansive—way of thinking about the “esoteric” tradition that stems from the Abrahamic religions, which involves our both having been created by the “Word” and having fallen because of our use of the word. It follows that communication is bound to be impeded, given what we are trying to say and the means available to say it. This line of thinking helps to explain the fascination with etymology, from the promotion of Hermes Trismegistus in the Renaissance to Heidegger’s deconstruction of modern philosophical discourse. There always seems to be a larger discourse into which our utterances feed incompletely, which amounts to a repatriation of the alienated parts to some original whole (Melzer 2014). A more individualistic version of this picture is provided in Eagleman (2009), which updates Plato’s anamnesis for a neuroscience generation.

Finally, my reference to “trained incapacity” in the title comes from political economist Thorstein Veblen’s (1914) astringent critique of early twentieth century US higher education, whereby the appearance of competence depends on systematically ignoring aspects of the domain over which one claims expertise, reducing it to a self-authorizing path-dependent way of thinking. I was reminded of this useful concept when considering Little’s manner of reading, which largely proceeds by questioning my defiance of his textual expectations, placing him endlessly on the backfoot. To my post-internet eyes, where Google and other search engines can easily supply “connections” that defy ordinary expectations, Little’s review reads like something that was executed on a slow-running Markov chain process, which is what often passes for “expertise”—and why its legitimacy is so easily questioned these days.