Specific Scepticism: How the Enlightenment Learned to Doubt Without Giving Up on Truth
A talk delivered at Philosophy of Science and Beyond, marking Alan Sokal's 70th birthday
(Note: This is the unedited text of the talk)
Alan has told me firmly, on no fewer than three occasions, that my talk does not need to refer to his work at all — that it can be entirely about my own. I have confirmed, three times, that I understand this. At no point did I commit to complying.
I have spent the last seventeen years tracing the evolution of postmodern thought into what contemporary theorists call Critical Social Justice and the majority of people refer to as ‘woke.’ I went to university as a mature student in 2009. Before that, my writing had been done largely as a sceptic and a critic of religion and faith-based epistemology. My concerns with religion were primarily epistemological and ethical. I could see no good reason to believe that claims about a god or an afterlife were true, and that seemed to me to matter. Furthermore, many religious doctrines appeared illiberal — they provided little basis for individual liberty, equality, tolerance, or autonomy.
I was a liberal humanist, an empiricist and a rationalist.
When I joined an undergrad programme as a literature student and later specialised in Late Medieval to Early Modern Studies, it had never occurred to me that those subjects might be opposed in any way to science, evidence, or reason. Yet postmodernism appeared in my very first semester, along with various “ways of reading” — theoretical lenses, which functioned as structured introductions to confirmation bias and motivated reasoning. I quickly became concerned.
I was informed that we should, in fact, abandon the very idea that objective truth could ever be established. What we regard as truth, I was told, is merely a product of white, Western, masculinist ways of thinking. Science was a central target of this critique and was held to be deeply complicit in racism, colonialism, sexism, and homophobia.
My first exam required me to demonstrate that I understood why liberal humanism had failed and why critical theories were superior.
When asked to write a paper demonstrating how postmodern theory could illuminate literary texts, I asked — rather desperately — whether I might instead write a critique of postmodernism. We reached a compromise. Half the paper could be a critique; the other half could demonstrate the theory in practice. So I set out to find the best critiques of postmodernism I could. The first half of my paper was essentially a protest explaining why everything that followed would, unfortunately, be nonsense.
The second half focused on the work of Jean Baudrillard and Jean-François Lyotard. The first half relied heavily on Jean Bricmont and Alan Sokal. The latter gentlemen saved my sanity from the former.
I then switched my attention from the epistemological and ethical problems in religion to those in postmodernism. Intellectual Impostures was my starting point. It was particularly valuable to me because it was written by left-wing, materialist liberals. Like me.
One passage proved especially valuable, and it is the one I have cited frequently in the seventeen years since:
Specific scepticism should not be confused with radical scepticism. It is important to distinguish carefully between two different types of critiques of the sciences: those that are opposed to a particular theory and are based on specific arguments, and those that repeat in one form or another the traditional arguments of radical scepticism. The former critiques can be interesting but can also be refuted, while the latter are irrefutable but uninteresting — because of their universality. And it is crucial not to mix the two sorts of arguments: for if one wants to contribute to science, be it natural or social, one must abandon radical doubts concerning the viability of logic or the possibility of knowing the world through observation and/or experiment.
That distinction — between specific and radical scepticism — I would argue maps directly onto the fault line at the heart of everything I want to talk about.
The methods of science and the stance of the postmodernists begin from the same fundamental premise. Both accept that we cannot, and should not, ever be entirely certain that we have obtained objective truth. It is what they do next that differs fundamentally.
In science, the warning against certainty is rooted in the principle of fallibility: the importance of always remembering that we might be wrong. This, of course, relies on the assumption that it is possible — and indeed desirable — to be right. Science therefore develops methods for minimising wrongness: reducing human bias and error, testing hypotheses, attempting falsification, requiring replication. Science takes the warning about certainty very seriously. But it does not dwell in uncertainty. It accepts that we cannot ever be absolutely sure that anything is true — we could all be brains in jars — and then it gets on with trying to find out what is true anyway. As Sokal and Bricmont put it: accepting that reality exists is a perfectly reasonable hypothesis.
Postmodernists take the same premise in the opposite direction. We cannot be certain of having obtained objective truth. Therefore, trying to ascertain it is futile, naïve, and itself evidence of being trapped within white, Western, imperialist, masculinist ways of knowing. Instead, we should embrace uncertainty. We should wallow around in it. Deconstruct everything.
What interests postmodern theorists is taking the radically skeptical stance that objective knowledge is unobtainable and then theorising about how the knowledge we assume we possess came to be socially constructed in the first place. Which power structures does it serve? Who decided that certain ways of knowing and certain truth claims count as legitimate?
At the root of the postmodern framework — which can appear extraordinarily sophisticated, thanks largely to its obscure language — is a remarkably simple set of assumptions about knowledge, power, and language. Knowledge is a construct of oppressive power, perpetuated through language. The powerful create categories and concepts which serve their own interests, encode them in language, and then, through their use by everyday people, they are used to oppress others. To become aware of this process and dismantle the underlying power structures is what it means to be Critical — with a capital C.
In Cynical Theories, we broke this down into two core principles. The postmodern knowledge principle: radical scepticism about whether objective knowledge or truth is obtainable, combined with a commitment to cultural constructivism. And the postmodern political principle: the belief that society is formed of systems of power and hierarchies which determine what can be known and how.
Running through both are four major themes. The blurring of boundaries — radical scepticism that any categories or concepts we hold convey anything real. The power of language — the idea that everything is ultimately constructed in language, so that control of language can control reality. Cultural relativism — the view that we are all products of our culture and cannot analyse one from the standpoint of another. And the loss of the individual and the universal — we are not individuals evaluating things for ourselves; we are mediated through culture in ways determined by our position in relation to power.
A useful example comes from David Detmer’s book Challenging Postmodernism. He describes asking a postmodern theorist, Laurie Calhoun, whether we could at least agree that giraffes are bigger than ants. She replied that we could not and that this is an article of areligious faith in our culture.. What she meant was that the statement depends upon culturally constructed understandings of what “bigger” means. If size were conceptualised differently — not primarily about mass — then ants might be considered bigger than giraffes. Nor can we resolve the matter by asking whether giraffes have greater mass than ants, because that too depends upon culturally contingent categories and concepts.
This really is radical scepticism. It does, however, tend to falter when confronted with reality. We all know which one we would rather have step on our foot.
This deconstructive approach could not continue indefinitely. Around 1989, a new generation of theorists emerged across a range of disciplines. They argued that while postmodernism had been useful in demonstrating that everything was socially constructed, simply deconstructing everything was not especially useful if one wanted to bring about social change. It was no good for activism.
In postcolonial theory, Linda Hutcheon argued that deconstruction alone was insufficient. If anything was to be achieved, concepts of knowledge, history, and truth had to be reconstructed in the voice of the subaltern. In queer theory, Judith Butler embraced the poststructuralist dissolution of categories but transformed this into a form of positive activism — the constructs remained socially produced, but the imperative was to subvert them. Similarly, Kimberlé Crenshaw argued within Critical Race Theory that although postmodernism was useful for revealing the socially constructed nature of identity categories, systems of oppression were real. If concepts of oppression were themselves only social constructs, how could oppression ever be challenged?
We called this development Applied Postmodernism. This new wave further justified a return to accepting some things as true by adapting Gayatri Spivak’s concept of strategic essentialism for the purposes of identity politics.
This enabled theorists to walk a careful line. Essentialism — the belief that categories such as sex, race, and sexuality possess some inherent and stable meaning — remained suspect. But if those categories were employed strategically and politically, they could be used to claim an authentic voice and a form of identity-based knowledge: standpoint epistemology. Activists could thereby have both radical social constructivism and an apparently objective foundation from which to pursue activism. We could consider this a shift from radical skepticism to strategic skepticism.
This, of course, means that the authentic voices of any group deemed marginalised are those which adhere to critical theory. Those who disagree, and most members of any such group do disagree, are simply not yet awakened to the discourses of oppressive power they have bought into. Some of the most incredulous and indignant people I have spoken to over the years have been Indian, Nigerian, and Pakistani mathematicians, scientists, doctors, and engineers who travelled to the UK to fill a STEM skills gap, only to be told that science is a white, Western, imperialist way of knowing and not for them. I have spoken to so many of them that I eventually wrote a template letter to enable them to request clarification that they, as migrants, are expected to assimilate to this decidedly Western ideology. Trying to thread that needle tends to make DEI departments’ heads explode.
Once identity and power had been rendered objectively real and subjected to simplified postmodern analysis, these theories rapidly escaped the confines of academia. They became user-friendly. Because Applied Postmodern Theory explicitly applied postmodern ideas to identity politics, it was soon adopted by scholars interested in a wide range of identities — race, sex, gender, sexuality, religion, immigration status, physical or mental ability, and body size.
The opposition to science and material reality in these theories becomes most concretely alarming in disability activism and fat activism. Both have been integrated into the intersectional framework and adopted much of the Applied Postmodern approach, according to which disabled people and fat people who adhere to the theories possess forms of embodied knowledge more valuable than scientific knowledge. Scholars and activists in these fields argue that understanding disability or obesity as physical conditions to be treated or corrected is itself a social construct — produced by systemic ableism and fatphobia.
I recently recorded a podcast with James Morris of the ReNeural Project. Profoundly impacted by cerebral palsy, which requires him to use a wheelchair and communicate via a voice app, James has campaigned for biomedical advances that could potentially cure cerebral palsy in future generations. He was found by disability activists who informed him that his socialisation into ableist discourses made him believe it would have been better not to have cerebral palsy and his campaigns amounted to advocacy to genocide. So vitriolic were the attacks on him that he was quite shaken. Nevertheless, he persists. Other non-CSJ disability campaigners have been intimidated out of advocating for scientific research.
At the same time as these ideas became user friendly the expressions of them were also hardening into absolute certainty. The belief that we have all been socialised into unconsciously accepting white supremacist, patriarchal, imperialistic, cisheteronormative, ableist, and fatphobic narratives — and are constantly perpetuating oppression by the way we think and speak unless we do the work of dismantling these biases — is simply regarded as a reality. It is imperative that we all decolonise our epistemology, dismantle our whiteness, detoxify our masculinity, and queer our concepts of sex, gender, and sexuality.
A tradition that began by rejecting grand narratives ultimately produced one of its own: an overarching account of how society works, how knowledge is produced, why injustice persists, and how to address it. The parallel with religion can be made too much of. But there do seem to be very similar social and psychological drivers at play. The authoritarian impulse from both can, I think, be best understood as what tends to happen when a group of humans become convinced that they can see an important truth that most people cannot, and that making them see it is for their own good and the good of all society.
This reification of postmodern concepts — from largely aimless deconstructive methods into a strategic essentialism and then into the unapologetic essentialism of identity politics and the absolute certainty of Critical Social Justice — is perhaps most clearly illustrated by what happened in queer theory. Gender, sexuality, and even sex are all social constructs whose boundaries need to be blurred to liberate the same-sex attracted and the gender non-conforming. But a self-professed gender identity is simultaneously one hundred percent authoritative and metaphysically solid — because trans-identified individuals are the most marginalised. If you don’t accept that, it is because you have accepted knowledge provided to you from ‘biopower’ — meaning biology — and you must now submit to the retraining of your unconscious biases and adjust your language accordingly. This strand of activism has produced the most high-profile justifications for no-platforming, disciplinary action, and explicit threats of violence for non-compliance, on the grounds that to allow dissenting positions to exist and be spoken is to maintain systems of oppressive power that deny trans people the right to exist. We again hear references to genocide.
The postmodernists were not wrong to say that uncritical acceptance of metanarratives is bad. They were wrong to speak as though they were the first to recognise this, and wrong to believe that their methods offered anything useful in addressing it. Pointing out that humans are prone to narrative and motivated reasoning is not a novel insight. What is novel — and genuinely revolutionary — is finding methods that systematically work against that tendency. What is it that can mitigate our tendency to create narratives and then try to live in them and instead actually discover what is true? History is quite clear on this. It is not radical skepticism, or strategic skepticism but specific scepticism accompanied by an expectation that arguments will be evidenced and reasoned and arguers will be open to critique and correction. It is the fruits of the Enlightenent: empiricism, reason, liberalism.
As someone who studied England from 1300 to 1700, I am not supposed to use the term ‘the dark ages’ or describe them as dark and if I do some medievalist will point me indignantly at ploughs and watermills. But comparatively speaking on the level of advancing methods of critical inquiry or moral philosophy, things were pretty dark well into the high and late medieval period. The combined forces of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment resulted in what can only be described as a revolution in how we acquire knowledge and an explosion of what we know.
I undertook one project examining the evolution of the understanding of female anatomy. From the time of Galen in the second century until the arrival of Vesalius and the empirical revolution in the mid-seventeenth century, there was almost no evolution at all in Europe. University-trained physicians were still understanding female reproductive anatomy according to the theorising of a man who had, 1500 years earlier, once dissected a female dog. The Muslim world had been doing rather better than Christendom during the high medieval period, and I had the pleasure of reading a wonderful exchange between Muslim and Christian scholars in which the former attempted to convince the latter that the clitoris probably exists to make women want to have sex and produce children. The Christian scholars refuted this indignantly, because they knew that lust was a sin and God would not have created an organ for this purpose. They concluded that women peed through it. This was not a sound epistemology.
By the fifteenth century, it was starting to be recognised that largely illiterate barber-surgeons were producing better outcomes for their patients than university-trained physicians, and the reasons for this were starting to be discussed. It was because they were not bound by received wisdom and had the freedom to experiment by trial and error and pass on information about what worked. I produced an edition of a 1540 anatomy sheet, created right at the beginning of the revolution that would explode in that decade. At the start of that period it was still believed that menstrual blood came from the liver and that women had sperm. A year later, Dr Gabriele Falloppio would remedy this by discovering the tubes that would forever bear his name and accurately hypothesising their function.
We were now marching toward the Enlightenment. And the development of human rights and individual liberty was not separable from that epistemological revolution. The methods that told us to look at the world as it actually is, rather than as authority or tradition or ideology told us it must be, were the same methods that ultimately told us that women were not intellectually inferior, that homosexuality was not a disorder, that there are no superior and inferior races. This happened slowly, fitfully, and imperfectly. But it happened.
One of the things I find least forgivable in the postmodern tradition is the insistence that belief in Enlightenment rationalism and the development of liberalism is naïve and idealistic. It is not. The method used to discredit it is consistent: take science, and liberalism at their origins and insist that those origins define them, while entirely ignoring what happens when their methods are actually applied. Isaac Newton spent a considerable amount of time studying alchemy. Why does this not trouble us more? Because the physics he also spent considerable time pioneering has told us there is no basis for alchemy. He could not have known that at the start — he helped create the framework that would later allow us to know it. Darwin believed that women were intellectually inferior, a hypothesis drawn from the society he lived in. Science disproves that. The first sexologists classified homosexuality as a disorder — a considerable improvement on treating it as a sin deserving punishment, but obviously not good enough. After nearly four thousand years of negative views of homosexuality within the Judeo-Christian tradition, science and liberal culture arrived at a consensus, within decades, that homosexual is simply something some people are, and that anyone with a problem with this should get over it.
If we want to talk about what has most effectively dismantled metanarratives, we cannot find anything more powerful than the development of science, reason and a liberal culture which enabled the critique of all by all. Specific scepticism.
For a long time, counter-Enlightenment forces came primarily from the reactionary right — traditionalists who wanted to hold on to faith and tradition-based ways of knowing. We might call them the pre-modernists: those who want to turn the clock back to a time before all of this happened and inhabit a fantasy world that never existed.
Left-wing intellectuals and progressives were, mostly, the defenders of the Enlightenment. Marxists tried — wrongly, and sometimes catastrophically — to be scientific. They were modernists. It has been said that Marxists are wrong while postmodernists are not even wrong. They refute the epistemic criteria by which things can be wrong.
To support liberalism, science, empiricism, and rationalism is, in one very fundamental sense, to be progressive. It is to wish to see progress in knowledge, ethics, and individual liberty as something to strive for. It is also conservative in that it seeks to conserve the epistemology and principles that enable that. Progressives on the left who embraced postmodernism should now be recognised as deeply regressive. It is not progressive to argue, as postmodern postcolonial scholars do, that science and reason are ways of knowing that belong to white, Western men, while black and brown people from the East have their own ways of knowing rooted in storytelling, myth, tradition, and superstition. That is a colonialist narrative that empirical and liberal ways of knowing were making genuine progress in overcoming. Nor is it progressive to argue that having a work ethic, being literate, and arriving on time are white cultural impositions that should not be expected of black people, as some alleged anti-racists have indeed argued. Nor is it progressive when queer theory activists proclaim that anyone who is feminine is a woman — a direct inversion of the ‘women must be feminine’ essentialism they claimed to be dismantling.
This is all deeply regressive. And it also dropped the ball on holding back the counter-Enlightenment right.
There are some who argue that the post-truth MAGA right is directly intellectually influenced by postmodernism. I am not convinced. Admittedly the Christian Nationalist, Stephen Wolfe, has explicitly borrowed ideas from critical race theory but the illiberal right tends, when it borrows from theory at all, to reach for the Frankfurt School rather than for Foucault and Derrida. Chris Rufo has unapologetically published a book arguing for the use of Gramscian cultural strategy to control narratives and embed conservative narratives in institutions — which is at least intellectually honest, if alarming. But what the postmodern left has primarily done is not to create the post-truth right. What it has done is weaken the defences against it.
When the left attacks science, it does its own harm and it also makes science vulnerable to attacks from the right — whether that is creationism, vaccine denial, or the terrifying spectacle of MAHA health policy. When lived experience is established as a legitimate epistemological category that overrides evidence, it becomes available to everyone. I can now be told, with equal confidence, that lived experience confirms that police are systematically lynching black Americans on a daily basis, and that lived experience confirms that immigration has made London far more dangerous now than it was in the 1990s. Both claims are false. Both are asserted with the confidence of the oppressed speaking truth to power. The methodology is identical. The content is simply tailored to the preferred political narrative of the speaker.
This is what strategic skepticism produceswhen it escapes academic theory and becomes the default epistemology of political culture. Not liberation. Not the dismantling of oppressive metanarratives. But a world in which reality is decided by whoever shouts their narrative loudest, and in which the tools for adjudicating between claims have been deliberately dismantled.
We need another Enlightenment. Or, more precisely, we need to defend the one we have.
We need liberals, empiricists, and rationalists on the right to push back the post-truth pre-modernists on their own side. And we need liberals, empiricists, and rationalists on the left to push back the postmodernists on theirs. Above all, we need to recognise that science, evidence, and reason, the fruits of the Enlightenment, and the corresponding project of liberal democracy, are a higher-order value than any particular political positioning, and that defending them is likewise both conservative and progressive.
I don’t know anyone who has done this better, more consistently, or with greater intellectual integrity than Alan Sokal. I began my intellectual journey, as an undergraduate, by reading his work. I would have been astonished and delighted then to know I would one day call him both mentor and friend.
Well that rocks!