Articles by Barbara Herrnstein Smith
Common Knowledge, 2022
On Richard Rorty's *Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature* and the pragmatist and constructivist tr... more On Richard Rorty's *Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature* and the pragmatist and constructivist traditions of antirepresentationalist thought. The article examines Rorty’s complex and ambivalent relation to those traditions, particularly to the work of his American pragmatist predecessors, William James and John Dewey, and to subsequent pragmatist‐constructivist thought in contemporary science and technology studies (STS) and “4e” (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive) cognitive theory.
New Formations, 2023
A review-article on Latour's *Down to Earth* and *After Lockdown*
New Literary History, 2016
A central motivating force in Bruno Latour’s work appears to have been an effort to frame an acco... more A central motivating force in Bruno Latour’s work appears to have been an effort to frame an account of religion, specifically of Christianity, that was simultaneously intellectually sophisticated and theologically proper. To that end, he tied together a radically constructivist account of scientific knowledge with a rhetorically deft Christian apologetics to produce an original and in many ways compelling but also deeply equivocal anthropotheology.
South Atlantic Quarterly, Jan 1, 2002
The strenuous disavowal of an elusively defined “relativism" by sophisticated theorists even as t... more The strenuous disavowal of an elusively defined “relativism" by sophisticated theorists even as they question (or alternately question and affirm) objectivist, absolutist, universalist views of truth or scientific validity.
The article served philosopher Paul Boghossian as an occasion for a purported exposure of what he calls the “unpalatable relativism” of what he understands as "constructivism” (SAQ 2002).For my reply, see “Reply to an Analytic Philosopher” (SAQ 2002), posted here below.
South Atlantic Quarterly, Jan 1, 2002
I reply here to philosopher Paul Boghossian’s purported exposure and refutation of the alleged "u... more I reply here to philosopher Paul Boghossian’s purported exposure and refutation of the alleged "unpalatable relativism" of what he understands as the constructivism of contemporary sociology of science as supposedly illustrated by my article, “Cutting-edge Equivocation:: Conceptual Moves and Rhetorical Strategies in Contemporary Anti-Epistemology..”
Entry for *The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics*, 2nd ed., 2015
*The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics*, 2nd ed., 2015
EVALUATION Cultural Evaluation. Evaluation can be understood generally as any or all of the more ... more EVALUATION Cultural Evaluation. Evaluation can be understood generally as any or all of the more or less complex processes of sampling, discriminating, comparing, assessing, and selecting that constitute the ongoing activities of responsive creatures in their interactions with their environments. So understood, evaluative behavior is not confined to human beings and is not necessarily deliberative, conscious, rational, verbal, overt, or intentionally communicative-though it can, of course, be all these as well. With respect to art and other cultural productions, evaluation can be understood to embrace a quite extensive array of value-(re)marking practices. These include: 1. the innumerable acts of trial and revision, approval and rejection that make up the process of artistic creation or cultural production itself; 2. the acts of ongoing discrimination and covert or implicit preference performed by any of those who engage responsively with an artwork or cultural artifact at any time, whether to view, read, or listen to it, or to display, produce, print, perform, quote, cite, translate, purchase, preserve, parody, imitate, discard, or destroy it; 3. the more explicit and specifically verbal but still relatively casual judgments framed, debated, and negotiated in informal social contexts by and among those for whom the artwork or cultural production figures in some (not necessarily conventionally aesthetic) way; and 4. the various more or less specialized activities of professional and institutionally authorized evaluators (academic, curatorial, journalistic, and so forth): not only their explicit ratings, rankings, reviews, and appraisals, but also the anthologies they compile, the catalogs they compose, the prizes they award, the conferences they convene, the classroom readings they assign, and the less professionally expert judgments they endorse or reject. With respect to specifically verbal evaluations, the longstanding philosophical preoccupation with their logical or epistemic status has perpetuated a number of questionable dichotomies and contrasts, for example, emotive utterances versus genuine propositions, value judgments versus pure descriptions, and mere expressions of personal preference versus judgments of objective value. It has also obscured both the wide variety
Minnesota Review, 2016
The article is concerned with the history of “close reading,” understood as a practice crucial to... more The article is concerned with the history of “close reading,” understood as a practice crucial to the field of literary studies, vis-à-vis “distant reading,” a range of computational methods identified with the digital humanities. I look at some early controversies regarding close reading and “the New Criticism,” the movement associated with it, and at how the practice has figured in Anglo-American literary studies over the course of the past century. I turn then to how a certain idea of “close reading” has come to figure in the discourses of the digital humanities. At the end, I offer some general reflections on methods, past and possibly future, in literary studies.
Common Knowledge, Sep 2016
Advocates of literary Darwinism, cognitive cultural studies, neuroaesthetics, digital humanities,... more Advocates of literary Darwinism, cognitive cultural studies, neuroaesthetics, digital humanities, and other such hybrid fields now seek explicitly to make the aims and methods of one or another humanities discipline approximate more closely the aims and methods of science, and at their most visionary, they urge as well the overall integration of the humanities and natural sciences. This essay indicates some major considerations—historical, conceptual, and pragmatic—that may be useful for assessing these efforts and predicting their future. Arguments promoting integration often involve dubious teleological models of intellectual history and betray limited understandings of the distinctive epistemic orientations and cultural functions of the humanities vis-à-vis the sciences. Recurrent institutional difficulties encountered by scholars and/or scientists in hybrid fields reflect steep prestige differentials between the humanities and sciences, along with significant differences of training, experience, style, and temperament. Meanwhile, both the sciences and humanities are being shaken up by technological and related intellectual developments. Though worrisome, the new disciplinary configurations are thus likely to play out in surprising and, not inconceivably, positive ways.
Common Knowledge , 2011
In most invocations of the term, "relativism" is a chimera: half straw man, half red herring. Whe... more In most invocations of the term, "relativism" is a chimera: half straw man, half red herring. When accurately spelled out, a range of important, actually existing relativistic views can be recognized as logically proper and ethically desirable.
The essay is reprinted in *Practicing Relativism in the Anthropocene* Open Humanities Press, 2018.
differences, Jan 1, 2004
A consideration of two sets of difficulties: those that arise chronically from our psychological... more A consideration of two sets of difficulties: those that arise chronically from our psychologically complex and often ambivalent relations to animals and those that reflect he intellectually and ideologically criss-crossed connections among the various discourses currently concerned with those relations. The latter include the movement for animal rights, ecological ethics, “posthumanist” theory, primatology, and evolutionary psychology.
Critical Inquiry, Jan 1, 1980
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
Critical Inquiry, Jan 1, 1991
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
Common Knowledge, 2019
A critical examination of the charge of self-refutation, particularly as leveled by orthodoxy-def... more A critical examination of the charge of self-refutation, particularly as leveled by orthodoxy-defending philosophers against those maintaining epistemologically unorthodox, especially relativistic or skeptical, views. Beginning with an analysis of its classic illustration in Plato’s *Theaetetus* as leveled against Protagoras’s “Man is the measure ...,” I consider various aspects of the charge, including logical, rhetorical, pedagogic, affective, and cognitive.
The essay, originally published in *Common Knowledge* in 1993, is reprinted as Chapter 5 in *Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy* (Harvard UP).
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Books by Barbara Herrnstein Smith
On the intellectual and practical value of constructivist views of knowledge, reality, truth, an... more On the intellectual and practical value of constructivist views of knowledge, reality, truth, and belief and the emptiness or irrelevance of common notions and charges of ‘relativism.’ Issues and developments examined here include climate denialism, digital humanities, science and technology studies, cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, and literary Darwinism, Figures whose work is discussed include Ludwig Fleck, N. Katherine Hayles, Franco Moretti, and Bruno Latour.
Chapters from my Books by Barbara Herrnstein Smith
An account of the dynamic system of reciprocally effective social interactions through which, wit... more An account of the dynamic system of reciprocally effective social interactions through which, without "meaning” in any classic sense of the term, verbal communication seems to occur. A related analysis of linguistic normativity: that is, how, without appeals to determinate meanings or other putatively objective constraints, we can explain why speakers and listeners generally behave as law-abiding citizens of their verbal communities.
Published in *Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy* (Harvard UP 1997)
An examination of recurrent but strained logical and rhetorical strategies in rationalist argumen... more An examination of recurrent but strained logical and rhetorical strategies in rationalist argumentation. An example is provided by Jürgen Habermas's efforts to rehabilitate the central claims and concepts of rationalist moral theory in the face of skepticism by a number of late-20th-century philosophers.
Published in *Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy* (Harvard UP, 1997).
The psychological and sociological dynamics of intellectual conflict. An illustration is provided... more The psychological and sociological dynamics of intellectual conflict. An illustration is provided by the resistance of mainstream philosophers of science to the accounts of scientific truth, evidence, and progress that emerged from the history and sociology of science in the late 20th century.
Published in *Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy (Harvard UP, 1997).
An earlier version appeared in *Einstein Meets Magritte: An Interdisciplinary Reflection* eds. Diederik Aerts, Jan Broekaert, and Ernest Mathijs (Springer 1995), expanded from a talk originally delivered at a conference held at the Brussels Free University..
An introduction to some current (and chronic) epistemological controversies: notably, the develop... more An introduction to some current (and chronic) epistemological controversies: notably, the development of pragmatist, historicist, and constructivist conceptions of knowledge and science in the 20th century and the scandalized responses to them by defenders of traditional rationalist, objectivist, and realist conceptions.
Published as the first chapter of *Scandalous Knowledge: Science, Truth and the Human* (Edinburgh UP/Duke UP, 2005/6)
An account of relativistic ideas in Modernist thought and an analysis of the intellectual context... more An account of relativistic ideas in Modernist thought and an analysis of the intellectual contexts and rhetorical operations of common charges of “relativism”and “postmodernism" in contemporary academic and journalistic discourse.
Published in Scandalous Knowledge: Science, Truth and the Human (Edinburgh UP/Duke UP, 2005/6).
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Articles by Barbara Herrnstein Smith
The article served philosopher Paul Boghossian as an occasion for a purported exposure of what he calls the “unpalatable relativism” of what he understands as "constructivism” (SAQ 2002).For my reply, see “Reply to an Analytic Philosopher” (SAQ 2002), posted here below.
The essay is reprinted in *Practicing Relativism in the Anthropocene* Open Humanities Press, 2018.
The essay, originally published in *Common Knowledge* in 1993, is reprinted as Chapter 5 in *Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy* (Harvard UP).
.
Books by Barbara Herrnstein Smith
Chapters from my Books by Barbara Herrnstein Smith
Published in *Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy* (Harvard UP 1997)
Published in *Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy* (Harvard UP, 1997).
Published in *Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy (Harvard UP, 1997).
An earlier version appeared in *Einstein Meets Magritte: An Interdisciplinary Reflection* eds. Diederik Aerts, Jan Broekaert, and Ernest Mathijs (Springer 1995), expanded from a talk originally delivered at a conference held at the Brussels Free University..
Published as the first chapter of *Scandalous Knowledge: Science, Truth and the Human* (Edinburgh UP/Duke UP, 2005/6)
Published in Scandalous Knowledge: Science, Truth and the Human (Edinburgh UP/Duke UP, 2005/6).
The article served philosopher Paul Boghossian as an occasion for a purported exposure of what he calls the “unpalatable relativism” of what he understands as "constructivism” (SAQ 2002).For my reply, see “Reply to an Analytic Philosopher” (SAQ 2002), posted here below.
The essay is reprinted in *Practicing Relativism in the Anthropocene* Open Humanities Press, 2018.
The essay, originally published in *Common Knowledge* in 1993, is reprinted as Chapter 5 in *Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy* (Harvard UP).
.
Published in *Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy* (Harvard UP 1997)
Published in *Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy* (Harvard UP, 1997).
Published in *Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy (Harvard UP, 1997).
An earlier version appeared in *Einstein Meets Magritte: An Interdisciplinary Reflection* eds. Diederik Aerts, Jan Broekaert, and Ernest Mathijs (Springer 1995), expanded from a talk originally delivered at a conference held at the Brussels Free University..
Published as the first chapter of *Scandalous Knowledge: Science, Truth and the Human* (Edinburgh UP/Duke UP, 2005/6)
Published in Scandalous Knowledge: Science, Truth and the Human (Edinburgh UP/Duke UP, 2005/6).
Published in *Scandalous Knowledge: Science, Truth, and the Human* (Edinburgh UP/Duke UP, 2005/6).
Published in *Scandalous Knowledge: Science, Truth and the Human* (Edinburgh UP/Duke UP, 2005/6).
Published in *Natural Reflections: Human Cognition at the Nexus of Science and Religion* (Yale UP 2010).
Published in *Natural Reflections: Human Cognition at the Nexus of Science and Religion* (Yale UP 2010)
Published in *Natural Reflections: Human Cognition at the Nexus of Science and Religion* (Yale UP 2010).
Published in *Natural Reflections: Human Cognition at the Nexus of Science and Religion* (Yale UP, 2010).
Published in *Natural Reflections: Human Cognition at the Nexus of Science and Religion* (Yale UP 2010).
Text of a talk delivered at a conference on Science and Method in the Humanities, Rutgers University, March 2, 2012.