Gellner’s case against cognitive relativism

Moral relativism

The problem of moral relativism is that good conduct in one human group may be (and often is) criminal behavior in another, and no morality on record enjoys universal acceptance. Three brazen statesmen made notorious public statements that throw lurid light on the issue.

When the conqueror of Sind in 1843 debated Brahmins who upheld sati – immolating widows on their husband’s funeral pyre – as Hindu custom, he said ‘we’ British also have a custom: ‘When men burn women alive, we hang them’ (in Moore, 1966: 351). When the Governor-General of Bengal stood trial in 1788 for running the colony as an extortion racket, he said British norms do not apply where coercion pays and governors have to be gangsters to get the job done:

I had an arbitrary power to exercise: I exercised it. Slaves I found the people: slaves they are.… I was unfortunately bound to exercise this arbitrary power.… It was disagreeable to me, but I did exercise it; and no other power can be exercised in that country. (in O’Brien, 1993 [1992]: 370)

One – only one – of the three statesmen heard a counterargument that historiography records: the Governor-General. His prosecutor, Edmund Burke, denounced moral relativism as ‘geographical morality’, insisting the ‘laws of morality are the same everywhere’ and ‘there is no action which would pass for an act of extortion, of peculation, of bribery, and of oppression in England, that is not an act of extortion, of peculation, of bribery, and oppression in Europe, Asia, Africa, and all the world over’ (in O’Brien, 1993 [1992]: 370).

International war crimes tribunals echo Burke, but anthropology and historiography echo the Governor-General, who was acquitted in 1795 and got an annuity that paid three times as much as Burke’s pension (O’Brien, 1993 [1992]: 359–384, 503–509, 579). Anthropology and historiography show not only that morality differs from group to group, but also that it is null and void without sanctions. And sanctions need power – the limits of power are the limits of morality as a founding father of modern anthropology points up through ironic example. Debriefing informants during the First World War – informants who took Christian charity preached by missionaries and Pax Britannica imposed by colonials at face value – he saw them ‘really puzzled at hearing that in one day white men were wiping out as many of their own kind as would make up several of the biggest Melanesian tribes’. They ‘forcibly concluded that the White Man was a tremendous liar’ but were uncertain whether the lie was moral pretense or military braggadocio (Malinowski, 1926: 83).

The white lie was moral not military. Nine million combatants perished in the First World War – six thousand a day – one of every eight who fought. A million were killed or wounded at the Somme in 1916 – seventy thousand the first day alone (Ferguson, 1999: 436, 293–294).

Anthropology and historiography bear out Thrasymachus the Sophist, who said justice is the interest of the stronger. ⁴ No moral code enjoys universal acceptance and where moral disputes arise between alien groups, power decides. Acceptance of alien morality condones its violence and cruelty; imposing own morality entails coercion and hypocrisy. If morality is nothing but group values and norms – which enjoin cannibalism, headhunting, human sacrifice, slavery, castration, clitoridectomy, infibulation, terrorism, torture, ‘cruel and unusual punishments’, ethnic cleansing, or genocide – who are you to contravene local custom? To condemn as crime what the Other considers good conduct is not only gratuitous – it is cultural imperialism.

So there you are. If you accept moral relativism you accept the Other’s cruelty and violence. If you deny it, however, you can settle moral disputes with the Other only by coercion. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t – either way the prospects are bleak. ⁵

Cognitive relativism

Cognitive relativism is a different problem. If there is no objective knowledge tested by fact hence no objective truth and ‘knowledge is a social construction’ so truth is not correspondence with fact but coherence with culture, ideology, or ‘discourse’, then a statement true in one group – whether culture, society, or ‘discourse community’ – can be false in another and vice versa. ‘Witches injure and kill their neighbors’, for example, is true where people believe it but false where they do not. As a commendably lucid high priest of cognitive relativism says:

To be a social construction is simply to be the intentional object of a certain set of sentences – sentences used in some societies and not in others.… To say that everything is a social construction is to say that…our descriptions of nature, as well as of ourselves, will always be a function of our social needs.… Once we give up the idea that the point of discourse is to represent reality accurately, we will have no interest in distinguishing social constructs from other things. (Rorty, 1999: 85, 48, 85–86)

Truth is relative to group consensus, but no group is privileged – the ‘visions’, ‘stories’, or ‘narratives’ different groups subscribe to are separate but equal alias ‘incommensurable’. As another high priest of cognitive relativism says, the issue of

commensurability of conceptual structures from one discourse community to the next…has led some inquirers…out of relativism and others,…myself for example, more complexly into it. (Geertz, 1983: 148, 151)

Gellner’s case against cognitive relativism comprises three arguments, namely, that it is illogical, absurd, and insidious. Consider these arguments each in turn.

Cognitive relativism is illogical

Cognitive-relativist social theory bristles with claims like ‘there are only cultural constructions of reality’ (in Kuper, 1999: 122); ‘any science is social through and through’ (in Sokal and Bricmont, 1998: 115); ‘all cultural and historical accounts are partial’ (Moore, 1994: 107–108); ‘there are only partial truths shared by a larger or smaller number of people’ (in Sokal and Bricmont, 1998: 91); ‘the truths any of us find compelling will all be partial, which is to say they will all be political’ (in D’Souza, 1995: 344); ‘truth’ is a ‘discursive strategy’ – the ‘will to power within discourse’ (in Appleby et al., 1994: 213); ‘feminist objectivity means quite simply situated knowledges’ (Haraway, 1996: 253); ‘we need…to accept partial perspectives – and to make do with them’ (Braidotti, 1994: 176); ‘nor can we even cling to the residual notion that there is a “historical” truth to events independent of our descriptions of them’ (Carroll and Prickett, 1997: xlv). And so on.

Gellner notes that cognitive relativism resembles the liar paradox – the Cretan who says all Cretans lie:

The relativist affirms his own position. Thereby…he asserts the falsehood of the rival position, which denies and contradicts his own.… Thus in the act of formulating his own position, he also exemplifies his own commitment to at least one exception to relativism, namely the nonrelative, absolute truth of relativism. (1979: 135)

The point does need pressing, however – logical inconsistency lets you think whatever you like, no matter what (Russell, 1945: 93). Cognitive relativism resembles the liar paradox but is really a self-contradiction. In the liar paradox someone says ‘I am lying’. If that statement is true it is a lie and therefore false, but if it is false it is not a lie and therefore true – if it is true it is false and if it is false it is true (Russell, 1940: 62).

But in the relativist paradox someone says ‘truth is relative’. If that statement is true it is relative – it is not true but false. But if it is false it is false: the statement ‘truth is not relative’ is no paradox. Some statements are true though ‘truth is relative’ is not one of them. The Epimenides paradox where the Cretan says ‘all Cretans lie’ is no paradox but a contradiction (Popper, 2002: 824–826). If it is true it is false all right, but if it is false it is false. ⁶

Asserting its own relativity, then, cognitive relativism denies its own truth and by the law of the excluded middle affirms its own falsehood. Affirming its own falsehood, moreover, it contradicts itself and by the law of contradiction is logically false. ⁷

The argument that cognitive relativism asserts its own relativity – its own falsehood – so it contradicts itself and is therefore false – is nothing new. But it bears repeating: the anthropologists who deny objective truth and say ethnography is fiction yet expect to have their work believed recall the logician who professed to be a solipsist and was surprised that no one else was too (Russell, 1948: 196).

Cognitive relativism is absurd

Gellner says cognitive relativism conjures up a dream world of separate but equal ‘visions’ between which choice is arbitrary – if ‘there are only cultural constructions of reality’ then the cognitive ideas different groups maintain are all equally true. This mosaic world of separate but equal ‘visions’ existed once upon a time. It is the world we have lost – the world before modern science. To imagine it, read the parts on religion and cosmology in anthropology and history books and pretend that neither modern science nor the technology, organization, and commerce that go with it exist.

But the world we have lost is long gone. Relativist cognitive equality is beyond fantasy – it is absurdity.

Science as a mode of cognition is unique in history because it really works, and the scientific revolution has totally transformed society. Unlike other modes of cognition – revelation or ideology generally – science gets testable, cumulative, applicable results that show real progress not mere changes of fashion – it discovers new explanatory theories that stand up to observational and experimental tests that defeat older theories, and it has applications in high tech, which cannot be faked. Societies that enjoy science are rich and powerful; societies that do not are poor and weak – those that have it prosper, those that lack it suffer.

Before the 17th century things were not so. Back then the social world map showed a vast archipelago of extremely diverse cultural groups: most scored low on wealth and power, a tiny few scored high, but none overwhelmed all others. Then something happened – the Scientific Revolution – which soon fed the military technology that let the West win the world through ‘organized violence’ (Huntington, 1996: 51). ⁸ Others took up science to get the technology, whereupon transcultural, universal objective knowledge was a global social fact. Any social theory that ignores, denies, or obscures this fact and says science is ‘just one of many ways of knowing the world’ or ‘one more belief system’ (in Sokal and Bricmont, 1998: 184) is a fairy tale.

Science is the same worldwide: the results it gets – empirical findings and theoretical explanations – are transcultural objective knowledge, which via technology is the ‘most important fact governing our social life’ (Gellner, 1996: 681–682). Gellner reanalyzes the cognitive predicament, therefore, not as one choice but three: (1) choice between science and revelation, (2) choice between scientific theories, and (3) choice between revelations. Framed as three choices not one, the cognitive predicament is no relativist dilemma – it is already solved. People do overcome cognitive relativism; the question is how. Gellner frames the three choices as follows:

Science and revelation are discontinuous – between scientific and prescientific cognition lies the great divide that philosophers of science call the demarcation between science and metaphysics and Gellner calls the Big Ditch. Cognition on one side of the Big Ditch is testable, noncircular, cumulative, and progressive while on the other side it is untestable, circular, recapitulative, and stagnant.

Why people jump the Big Ditch (or else hire experts to jump it) is no wonder – they want wealth and power that depend on technology that depends on science. But why science works is a mystery: it has no secrets – discoveries get out – yet no one knows the secret of its success. While science is consensual philosophy of science is contentious like the 30-odd Mona Lisas a Hapsburg emperor allegedly beheld at Prague, musing that if we knew the real one we could sell all the fakes (Gellner, 1985: 126).

Gellner’s Mona Lisa of choice is empiricism – the ethic of cognition where outside logic and mathematics facts decide arguments. Empiricism is two methodological rules. Rule one is admit falsifiable explanations only. Rule two is no circular explanations allowed. Rule one demands theories that forbid facts that might be observed – theories that prohibit logically possible events. Rule two demands theories that predict facts beyond those to be explained – theories that are independently testable. Empiricist methodological rules prefer high-risk explanatory theories that brave execution by evidence and survive.

To see how the rules of methodological empiricism mark the Big Ditch watch how prescientific cognition flouts them. Pace Quine who says science faces the tribunal of experience as a corporate body (1980: 41) – meaning if observed facts contradict predictions derived from theory all premises involved are at risk – Gellner says revelation evades falsification as a corporate body (1992a: 167) – all premises involved are safe.

The best illustration of Gellner’s argument here is Evans-Pritchard’s classic account of Zande metaphysics. Unlike many ethnographers today who write up informant pronouncements verbatim in the belief that logical coherence smacks of Western imperialism, Evans-Pritchard finds Zande revelation cogent enough to be worth disagreeing with – hence the beautiful lucidity of Zande thought in translation:

Witchcraft, oracles, and magic form an intellectually coherent system. Each explains and proves the others. Death is proof of witchcraft. It is avenged by magic. The achievement of vengeance-magic is proved by the poison oracle. The accuracy of the poison oracle is determined by the king’s oracle, which is above suspicion. (Evans-Pritchard, 1937: 475)

Now remember rule two – no ad hoc, circular explanations. Popper typifies the explanatory arguments rule two proscribes as follows:

‘Why is the sea so rough today?’ – ‘Because Neptune is very angry.’ – ‘By what evidence can you support your statement that Neptune is very angry?’ – ‘Oh, don’t you see how very rough the sea is? And is it not always rough when Neptune is angry?’ (Popper, 1979: 192)

These two empiricist rules constitute an ethic of cognition that helps people get across the Big Ditch – it enjoins falsifiable, noncircular explanations that typify science. As Gellner says, the demand that we learn from experience is trite – but the demand that ‘we learn in no other way totally transforms the world’ (1988: 124).

The Big Ditch crossed, the choice is between scientific theories or explanations. Gellner is an unreconstructed falsificationist – no empiricist cult of independent fact to start with, no scientific miracle ever – much less scientific progress including a few revolutions meanwhile. Science is an endless argument where facts never prove theories true and facts always involve theories, all right, but not a circular argument where facts never prove theories false. If facts never falsify theories that explain facts, science is moonshine (1985: 31–34, 57–61).

Here cognitive relativism switches the frame of reference from group consensus to paradigm after Kuhn’s theory of science where like Frazer’s priest kings at Nemi one paradigm reigns until another (incommensurable) paradigm usurps it. Gellner’s strategy of argument is divide et impera – he concedes the primacy of paradigms but rejects incommensurability.

Gellner calls Kuhn the Hobbes of science – a paradigm rules research like a sovereign rules society (1974: 179). Before a paradigm reigns warring schools dispute fundamentals, getting nowhere. But once a paradigm reigns it yields cumulative research that discovers anomalies – facts the paradigm does not predict. A paradigm guides the investigation that destroys its credibility; dogmatic research subverts dominant dogma. Hobbes says a sovereign goes down that fails to protect subjects; Kuhn says a paradigm goes down that fails to explain anomalies. Then pretenders do battle until one wins out. Science only falsifies paradigms through revolutions where an incumbent’s anomalies are among the pretender’s predictions. ⁹

Gellner agrees that if science falsified all the time chaos would reign: theories would not last long enough to be worth refuting. Science would be like social science where the life of ideas is often solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. What the English Civil War did for Hobbes the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences did for Kuhn (Gellner, 1974: 178–179).

As for incommensurability – facts cannot falsify paradigms because facts owe to observations made in light of paradigms – Gellner sides with the unnamed female colleague Kuhn quotes: ‘Well, Tom, it seems to me that your biggest problem now is showing in what sense science can be empirical’ (1974: 263). Empiricism as an ethic of cognition prefers the most testable, best-tested theory, but if facts cannot contradict paradigms because paradigms determine facts, preference is arbitrary and progress is inscrutable.

Thus one Mona Lisa can be sold – the incommensurability thesis. It turns two patent facts into miracles: scientific consensus occurs without thought control – evidence decides arguments – and applied science yields high tech (Gellner, 1996: 674).

Note that Kuhn indignantly denies the conclusion social scientists often draw:

Members of a scientific community can…believe anything they please if only they will first decide what they agree about and then enforce it both on their colleagues and on nature.… Neither logic nor observation nor good reason is implicated in theory-choice. Whatever scientific truth may be, it is through-and-through relativistic. (1974: 260)

On the far side of the Big Ditch people overcome relativism in a different way – they convene ecumenical councils, proselytize, or fight holy wars. Gellner sees no point in ranking revelations or preaching across cultures but says cognitive relativism obscures two other patent facts: multicultural Babel and intercultural militancy.

Where no bounded Rome exists only Babel, the relativist maxim ‘when in Rome’ is a broken road sign pointing nowhere. Some revelations are militant as well as absolutist, moreover, though pragmatic toward science – they mean what they say and practice what they preach with an assist from high tech. Go tell fundamentalist IT virtuosi and nuclear bomb engineers that placing morality beyond culture and knowledge beyond both is no longer possible according to avant-garde academics at leading Western universities. Relativism insults the ‘communities’ it defers to.

Cognitive relativism is insidious

Cognitive relativism is not just illogical and absurd – it is insidious. Gellner describes latter-day relativist scholarship as a ‘hysteria of subjectivism’ where ‘expiation of colonialism’ entails ‘repudiation of clarity’, and ‘muddled, unintelligible and, above all, narcissistic prose’ proves both ‘political purity’ and ‘methodological sophistication’ (1998: 176–177). The methodological issues are clear-cut and simple:

Are conclusions to be consistent with premises (maybe even follow from them)? Do facts matter? Or can we string together thoughts as we like, calling it an ‘argument’, and make up facts as we please, taking one story to be as good as another? (Chomsky, 1992: 52)

Relativist methodology no doubt makes ‘people in many disciplines more relaxed’ (Rorty, 1999: 181) – also because freedom to ignore logic and facts lets them say whatever they like. Where ‘consistency and responsibility to fact’ (Chomsky, 1992: 52) are a dead letter, mummery reigns. No wonder the relativist journal that ran Sokal’s hoax ran an article in the same number that says prayer as well as physics explains why airplanes fly (Weinberg, 2001: 151). No need to ‘argue with opponents on intellectual grounds’ either – just dismiss them as ‘politically suspect’ (Lasch, 1995: 13).

Gellner stands accused of not keeping up with a vertiginous literature and of lampooning ephemera that caught his attention (Ryan, 2007). The issue, however, is not academic ephemera but cognitive relativism, and there Gellner is right – it is illogical, absurd, and insidious. But he is wrong to think of it as a passing academic fad whose ‘obsolescence is built into it’ (1998: 177). It is as big as ever and shows no signs of abating.

Consider its latest morph – the ‘ontological turn’ whereby socially constructed ‘objects’ are all equally real. A leading anthropologist and 2012 winner of a €2.5 million Spinoza Prize writes with authority:

There are not just many ways of knowing ‘an object’, but rather many ways of practising it. Each way of practising stages – performs, does, enacts – a different version of ‘the’ object. Hence, it is not ‘an object’, but more than one. An object multiple. That reality might be multiple goes head on against the Euroamerican tradition in which different people may each have their own perspective on reality, while there is only one reality – singular, coherent, elusive – to have ‘perspectives’ on. To underline our break with this monorealist heritage of monotheism, we imported the old fashioned philosophical term of ontology and put it in the plural. Ontologies. That was – at the time – an unheard of oxymoron. (Mol, 2014; emphasis in original)

Enemies of cognitive relativism cite latent functions (Merton, 1968) it serves that include power and privilege for those who are in with the in-crowd; affirmative action for those who cannot win arguments unless ‘power produces knowledge’ and identity is infallibility; curing physics envy for those who find jargon as impressive as quantum mechanics and equate fashion with progress; reenchantment of the world for those who think science is ‘politics by other means’ or just another point of view; and expiation for those who feel guilty about world history since 1492.

True, but enemies of cognitive relativism underestimate its staying power because they ignore the manifest function the latent functions depend on, namely, winning the battle Marxism lost (Elton, 1991: 36). Marxist theoreticians blamed proletarian political passivity since the First World War on bourgeois cultural hegemony (Anderson, 1976). This ‘collective brain damage’ theory (Parkin, 1979: 81) implied that to dispel false consciousness and alert the working class to its true interests, Marxists had to debunk bourgeois ideology – hence the shift of Marxist theory from political economy to cultural studies (Anderson, 1976). With the eclipse of Marxism between 1975 and 1989, cognitive relativism took command, switching focus from class to identity so the chosen people are now ‘marginalized’ groups. And since ‘discursive practices’ constitute the ‘objects’ talked about, deconstruction is ‘demarginalization’. That way academic radicals ‘liberate the voices of silenced groups’ (Dean, 1994: 205) by talking verbiage and giving students what Sahlins calls a ‘frontal lobotomy’ (in Calvao and Chance, n.d.).