Appearing True in the social sciences

Seeming True

If the phenomenon of the academic hoax is to be seen as more than a move in an ideological battle, it is important to pay attention to the precise ways in which the hoax works. First, the intention of the hoaxer is a key feature of this kind of hoax. Apart from humiliating the victim, the hoaxer seeks to provoke a response in the audience – in this case, drawing their attention to ‘the hypocrisy of knowledge claims’ and prompting them to think about ‘standards of truth when anything is claimed in the name of ‘‘science”’ (Wilson, 2009a). It is intention that distinguishes a hoax from fraud. Windschuttle sought to obscure this distinction when he dismissed the article as merely ‘fraudulent journalism submitted under false pretences’ (Windschuttle, 2009).

Windschuttle’s attempt to shift the shame from himself to the perpetrator of the hoax is, however, an ultimately futile gesture, thanks to the theatrical element which adheres to the phenomenon of the hoax. The privacy that is necessary to fraud is anathema to the hoax, which has a distinctly public aim. The drama of the revelation ensures that the humiliation is felt most keenly by the victim; Wilson’s anonymity in the early stages of the hoax and the later revelation of her identity played an important role in this regard. The revelation of the deception performed by the hoax is thus a second important feature of the hoax as a form.

There is a third crucial feature to an academic hoax. Wilson (2009b) was well aware that, in order for the deception to work, her article needed to conform with the ‘reactionary ideology’ she identified as familiar to readers of Quadrant. More importantly for us, Wilson’s deception also depended on the imitation of the conventions of science, which lend legitimacy to academic scholarship. The deception – catching Windschuttle out – relied on the fact that the article seems true. For the victim of the academic hoax to be tricked into accepting and endorsing an article’s content, the hoaxer must convincingly mimic the stylistic and formal conventions of academic scholarship peculiar to the targeted discipline or journal.

It is this attempt to seem true that is of particular interest to us, given our claim that the appearance of truth is also a key concern for the social sciences. This is not the cynical claim that it may at first appear to be, nor is it a radical relativization of the social scientific enterprise. In arguing that the hoax and the social sciences share a preoccupation with seeming true, we find Heller’s (1989) deliberations on the character of the social sciences instructive. The language games of the social sciences, she suggests, are normatively oriented toward ‘verisimilitude’, most simply translated as ‘appearing to be true or real’ (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 1993; our emphasis). Heller herself has nothing to say about academic hoaxes. But she does offer some insights into the nature of social science, which enable us to analyze what the hoax shares with the social sciences and how it differs from them. We inflect Heller’s argument through Arendt’s (1978) reflections on the historical distinction between being and appearances, in order to demonstrate that a concern with the appearance of truth is a fitting preoccupation for social science.

Heller’s reference to the ‘language games’ of the social sciences conveys the Wittgensteinian (1958) sense of a distinct use, or particular class, of language, with its own principles, rules and linguistic community. This idea that the social sciences are language games is tied up with an appreciation of the historical character of knowledge (Schmidt, 2001). It is this sensitivity to the problem of their own historicity that is, for Heller, the distinguishing feature of the social sciences. According to Heller (1989), the social sciences represent varying responses to the constitutive epistemological paradox faced by modern knowledge. On the one hand, the modern era is uniquely characterized by a will to know, with all the transcendental and universalizing impulses that this seems to entail. In modernity, nothing is sacred as we embark on a progressive ‘disenchantment’ of the world (Weber, 1958). Yet, on the other hand, modernity is also inseparable from an historical consciousness, which effectively relativizes knowledge claims: in understanding modernity as ‘a product of world-historical progression’ we are faced with the problem of the historical (and thus non-universal) character of all knowledge (Heller, 1989: 291). As modern knowers, we invariably seek ‘an Archimedean point outside contemporaneity’, knowing all the while that escaping our own present is ‘exactly what cannot be done’ (Heller, 1989: 292).

To suggest that the social sciences are language games, variously negotiating the dilemma of modern truth, is not to imply that they are fraudulent. Our investment as social scientists in the value of truth is far more profound than that, which is why these academic hoaxes can produce such vociferous reactions. Through the kind of intentional departure from the rules of truth that Wilson undertakes, our very real commitment to the value of truth is affirmed. As we have suggested, the quite lively debates that arose from the Windschuttle hoax tended to be polarized between objectivist and constructionist perspectives on truth. This polarization of perspectives on truth in the aftermath of the hoax was no real surprise, given that Windschuttle had been such a vocal champion of what he saw as ‘properly objective’ science. As one delighted witness to the ‘delicious’ hoaxing of Windschuttle put it, ‘Windschuttle’s positioning of himself on the side of realism, and his opponents on the side of sophistry, is undone by this hoax’ (Faulkner, 2009). For her part, Wilson (2009a) claimed that ‘just as the famous Sokal hoax didn’t prove that constructionist critiques of science were wrong, nor did the Quadrant hoax prove that realist approaches are wrong’, though Wilson’s aim was certainly to question the legitimacy of Windschuttle’s position on truth.

The polarization of approaches to truth was famously pronounced in the aftermath of the Sokal hoax, and it could be argued that Wilson intentionally re-fuelled this contestation between objectivism and constructionism by her inclusion of a reference to the Sokal hoax in the opening paragraph of her hoax article. Her introduction recalled the affair to readers and lamented the fact that ‘Australia never had its own overt science wars, because the issues that raged in these wars weigh even more pressingly today in this country’ (Gould, 2009). While the paragraph remained in the published version, Windschuttle did express his concerns to Gould that the introduction might lull Quadrant’s readers into ‘thinking the whole article is another analysis of the follies of constructionism, whereas it is really much more interesting than that’ (cited by Wilson, 2009b). This evident polarity around the question of truth characterized the discourse between Windschuttle and Wilson, but also much of the analysis in journalistic circles and in the blogosphere.

These debates concerning the nature of truth give a dramatic form to the kinds of discourses that have characterized the social sciences in recent decades, which have themselves often been very polarized (see Gellner 1985; Rorty, 1991; Sayer 1992, 2000). In the history of the social sciences, the relationship to truth has at times taken extreme forms. The social sciences have, for example, had their champions of the more absolute forms of objectivism. In its ambition to really be true – to correspond with the reality of the world – much nomothetic social science has sought to ‘establish certain general historical-social laws or regularities that, once discovered can be applied to all histories and all societies’ (Heller, 1989: 292). In assuming that there is a single world ‘out there’ for knowledge to mirror, the correspondence view of truth grounding such objectivism universalizes human reality and thus effectively tries to overcome the problem of historical context and contingency (Fay, 1996).

Criticism of ‘naive objectivism’ (Sayer, 2000: 2) has often been seen as a threat to the very possibility of scientific knowledge. Windschuttle’s anxieties about the epistemological consequences of multiculturalism are exemplary here. For Windschuttle (1997: 311), postcolonial calls for an ‘epistemological liberation’ represent an ‘illegitimate’ extension of liberal egalitarian principles: ‘the liberal democratic notion that all people are equal means equal in a legal and political sense . . . it has never meant that all people have equality of knowledge, ability or understanding’. From the other side of the political spectrum, Sokal was equally anxious about the challenge to objectivism in social science. For his part, Bailey (2001: 170), claimed that hoaxes stand as a ‘vivid warning’ of how close social science is to becoming ‘little more than a forum for political whim and fancy’. What we need to do to remedy the situation, Bailey (2001: 159) suggested, is to meet this fear of truth head on, so that ‘researchers can stop worrying and start loving truth again’. It is notable that this call to return to the foundations of scientific inquiry remains one of the more common responses to critiques of strongly-objectivist traditions.

Heller’s analysis of the social sciences presents a corrective to absolute forms of objectivism. She shows that the foundations of the social scientific endeavor were much more complex than such nostalgic representations would allow. From the beginning, by virtue of their place as modern forms of knowledge, the social sciences have borne a ‘dual paradox’ – a quest for certitude combined with recognition of their own historicity. Once we attempt to ‘live with’ this paradox and to ‘bear it proudly’ we recognize that the norm of objectivity can only ever be met in a limited and relative way, since ‘human events and institutions are not simply “there” to be mirrored as a “true picture on the retina” (Heller, 1989: 298). Nonetheless, as we on go to explain, a form of objectivity remains crucial to the social scientific endeavor.

While Heller makes the case for a limited or relative objectivity as the most viable ambition for an age that recognizes itself as historical, she is also aware that extreme relativism is the ‘death wish’ of the social sciences: ‘one simply cannot participate in the language game of social science and simultaneously subscribe to total relativism’ (Heller, 1989: 315–16). Or, as Weber (1949: 60) insists, social science is not the place for ‘moral indifference’. ¹ From the stance of total relativism, we would have to say that the hoax and the social sciences could lay equal claim to ‘truth’. It would matter little that the evidence Wilson produced for her claims were deliberate misrepresentations, since all claims to truth would be seen as having equal validity.

If academic hoaxes can provide a dramatization of this contestation over the status of truth, there have also been times in which the social sciences have provided a sort of parody of themselves, through their arrogant claims to certitude or their equally-conceited pronouncements of the death of truth. For if faith in the capacity of the social sciences to reveal the mysteries of the social world seems today misguided, there is also an arrogance in the reduction of the world to human constructions of it, amongst which the social sciences would be merely the historically dominant claimants to truth. We have suggested that the more absolutist versions of objectivism deny our historical context and the contingency of our knowledge. Extreme relativism, on the other hand, denies our commitment as social scientists to the value of truth. The contestation arising from these differences in perspectives tends to give the impression that we must choose between two options – really being true (at the absolutist-objectivist pole) or merely seeming true (at the relativist-constructionist pole). Yet must the attempt to seem true be regarded as a degraded ambition?

Beyond Merely Seeming True

In Heller’s (1989: 294) claim that the ‘norm of verisimilitude . . . must be observed or else social science no longer exists’, we see a way of negotiating a path through these polar options of really being or merely seeming true, though this is ours rather than Heller’s concern. At first glance the idea of verisimilitude would seem to offer little to an attempt to differentiate social science and the hoax, since it suggests that which is similar to, or has the appearance of, truth. Arguing that the social sciences are oriented to the norm of verisimilitude would appear, at heart, to be a relativist gesture. Social scientists cannot help but shirk at the idea that they concern themselves with seeming true, given that they are the inheritors of a metaphysics of truth in which appearances are deemed mere chimera with respect to deep truth. From their origins the social sciences are implicated in the project of discerning, beneath the ‘bewildering surface complexity’ (Schmidt, 2001: 136), of things, the real, and previously hidden, truth of the matter. As Arendt (1978: 26–7) suggests, ‘modern science’s relentless search for the truth behind mere appearances’ has given new force to ‘the old metaphysical dichotomy of (true) Being and (mere) Appearance’. Given such a history, the claim that the social sciences are language games concerned with verisimilitude appears scandalous or degrading.

Heller herself explores only indirectly what she understands by the idea of ‘verisimilitude’, but the word has fertile implications for the analysis of the hoax that are worthy of greater attention. Etymologically, verisimilitude comes from the Latin verum, meaning truth, and similis meaning similar. In its evolution and in contemporary uses, it implies a likeness to reality or to truth. Verisimilitude describes ‘the quality of a representation that causes it to appear true’ (Ballard, 2009: 223). This definition highlights well the slipperiness of the term, according to the emphasis one gives to various meanings and (related to this) the perspective from which one approaches the word. A more realist interpretation would emphasize the capacity of a representation to approximate reality, to capture its essence. A more constructionist interpretation might focus on its capacity to convey a sense of reality, its ‘truthlikeness’ (Heller, 1989). Seen from the point of view of extreme constructionism or absolute relativism, verisimilitude can imply fakery, a simulacral representation, with a reality-effect that is internal to a given form, rather than judged by reference to any exterior reality. This is the manner in which verisimilitude is often judged in the arts and in literature, where the focus is on the use of persuasion and rhetorical device to produce a work that has realistic qualities (Jakobson, 1971). Here ‘verisimilitude’ functions both as an effect to be achieved (as when storytellers use tricks to achieve realism) and a judgment made (what degree of authenticity has been achieved?). In the philosophy of science, verisimilitude commonly refers to a judgment of theoretical validity, as in Popper’s (1963) famous claim that a good theory has a higher degree of verisimilitude than rival theories.

For us, the ambiguity of this term is its fertility, enabling us to explore both the proximity of the hoax to social science and also the crucial differences between them. While we claim that the hoax and the social sciences share an orientation toward seeming true, we go on to show why this does not compromise the capacity of the social sciences to say something meaningful, nor make them second fiddle to the natural sciences (which alone would access, rather than mimic, truth). For the moment we can note that, following Heller, the observation of the norm of verisimilitude in the social sciences involves a particular kind of commitment to the interpretation and reconstruction of the materials at hand. If their task is to give meaning to that which has meaning for social beings, the social sciences must do so in a plausible way (Heller, 1989).

The idea of plausibility would certainly seem more appropriate than that of certitude for knowledge that accepts, rather than seeking to sublate, its historicity. Yet the rejection of certitude as a guiding norm is not akin to an acceptance of an attitude of tentativeness (Rosenau, 1992: 8), nor of the equality of all truth claims. Appearing true requires a commitment to the rules and norms by which authenticity and believability are established. This means that there are certain criteria of plausibility that those who claim to practice social science must meet. There is, for example, an expectation that social scientific knowledge comprises core interpreted facts, which, while still open to falsification, constitute ‘a core of knowledge that we would expect anyone to arrive it if he or she thoroughly studied the issues’ (Macklin, 2005: 296). Many of Sharon Gould’s claims clearly did not pass this criterion of plausibility. For example, the fabricated claim that The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) ‘had previously abandoned plans to commercialize two other projects which involved modifying organisms with an array of human gene sequences’ would not have passed the test of plausibility implied in Heller’s definition of core knowledge (Gould, 2009). According to Heller:

Core knowledge is knowledge of a type that one has good reason to believe that any person would arrive at, if this person studied all the available sources, thoroughly observed the relevant phenomena and entered into discussion with members of the scientific community familiar with the matter under scrutiny, and undertook these things from any perspective whatsoever. (1989: 299, original emphasis)

Such core knowledge is distinct from the more fully-perspectival ‘ring knowledge’, which includes ‘knowledge (insight, theory, interpretation, understanding) of a kind one arrives at from a particular standpoint, perspective or cultural interest’ (Heller, 1989: 299). This is knowledge that is ‘not shared with others’, but is formed ‘against the backdrop of certain life experiences, individual or collective’ (Heller, 1989: 299). The establishment of a proper balance between core and ring knowledge is especially important in the production of plausible knowledge. An excess of core knowledge will result in something that, while ‘informative’, is ‘unimportant’ and ‘if the ring is too wide, too thick, the work in question will be more a work of fiction or ideology than one of social science proper’ (Heller, 1989: 299).

We shall return to the question of how the social scientist makes judgments about what constitutes a proper balance between core and ring knowledge, as this is another important crucial feature between the language game played by the hoaxer and that engaged in by the social scientist. For the moment, however, we can note that another criterion of plausibility involves a certain normative commitment to objectivity. It is already clear that this need not imply a correspondence view of truth and nor does it imply value-free research. Rather, objectivity is about giving all witnesses and aspects of an issue a ‘fair hearing’ (Heller, 1989). Again, it is through the exercise of judgment that we know when we have ‘enough’ witnesses, enough aspects of a problem, to produce plausible knowledge.

Translatability is another norm to which social science aspires and, while perfect translatability can never be achieved, plausible knowledge is oriented to clarity of explication and understanding (Heller, 1989). This is not to say that social scientific knowledge must speak to us in a way that we already recognize and, in this respect, it differentiates itself sharply from common sense. In sociology this means that one must observe ‘rigorous rules of responsible speech’, whilst asking questions that will ‘render the evident a puzzle’ (Bauman, 1990: 9–10). Another of these norms ‘can be formulated as follows: social science should not use the addressee as a means to achieve certain goals of the social scientist’ (Heller, 1989: 297). The social scientist observes, at least as a principle, an interdiction against manipulating the emotions and interests of those to whom an argument is addressed.

When Windschuttle, as editor of a ‘reputable’ journal, is hoaxed by an article which flouts this commitment to plausibility, he loses credibility. We may not apply the same criterion of judgment to Wilson, for, without the hoaxer’s transgression of the rules, there would be no hoax, nor the social critique that the hoax seeks to make. So, for example, the hoaxer must use the addressee as a means to achieve certain goals (Windschuttle must be fooled for the stunt to work) and Wilson’s appeals to Windschuttle’s ideological predispositions indicate her awareness of this. Similarly, Wilson needed only to observe the norm of translatability to make her article appear a convincing work of social science. It is producing something passable, rather than genuinely plausible, which is the issue for the hoaxer.

To argue that the social sciences must meet certain criteria of plausibility is thus to suggest that the social sciences are not identical with rhetoric, which may be plausible but does not produce what we would commonly consider to be ‘true knowledge’ (Heller, 1989). From the point of view of the author of the hoax, seeming true is a question of mere trickery, of making the ‘textual dynamics’ of the hoax invisible enough to keep the reader focused on its ‘contextual aspects’ (Secor and Walsh, 2004: 71). It is not, we have suggested, that the hoax has no commitment to the value of truth. It may have the effect, and even the intention, of affirming that commitment. This is one of the reasons that the moment of revelation is so important: the potentially unethical nature of the deception is countered in the uncovering of its moral intention (Secor and Walsh, 2004). Nonetheless, the hoax does seek to pull off the appearance of truth (to seem true) without regard for the process that lends weight to that appearance.

The point is that the social scientist, unlike ‘Sharon Gould’, must observe the procedural rules which bestow the right to be taken seriously. In the social sciences, being plausible requires more than presenting an argument with ‘reasonable logical integrity’ (Davies, 2009: 94). The Windschuttle hoax sought to raise questions about the processes and standards by which some claims are attributed legitimacy. Following Heller, we stress that producing knowledge capable of claiming scientific legitimacy involves certain obligations and rights on the part of the researcher. It is a question of playing the game of science, observing – and being seen to observe – its procedural rules and committing to its norms. Once these obligations are fulfilled, the social scientist can lay claim to the rights of procedural or formal, though not substantive, consensus: he/she deserves to be listened to because he/she has played the game. While the implications of Heller’s analysis of the social sciences are certainly not identical with Lyotard’s (1984: 10) reflections on science, she does share the sense of a game whose rules ‘do not carry within themselves their own legitimation, but are the object of a contract, explicit or not, between players’. It is through a certain fidelity to the game that this implicit contract is kept and legitimacy is granted.

We have argued that the legitimacy of social science derives in large part from fidelity to the language game of science. Yet, while we have pointed out that this involves an observation of certain rules, social science is also clearly more than a formulaic adherence to rule. In spelling out the criteria of plausibility for social scientific work, Heller registers the importance of phronesis, best translated as the exercise of prudential judgment. Knowing how many perspectives constitute ‘objective’ knowledge, when to stop the hermeneutic cycle or when a proper balance of core and ring knowledge has been reached – all of these are exercises of judgment, which the social scientist must practice without objective criteria or guarantees of getting it right (Heller, 1989).

Distinct from episteme and from techne, phronesis is the activity by which instrumental rationality is balanced by value-rationality (Flyvbjerg, 2001). What is important for us is that this evaluative dimension of social science is not easily mimicked. It involves a certain affective commitment to the game, which the hoaxer need not possess. This is not to say that the hoaxer’s imitation of social science is itself thoroughly formulaic. Wilson had clearly made judgments about how to present an argument that would be adequately convincing and ideologically appealing. But these are much more in the order of technical judgments, made with a particular objective in mind. There is also a teleology built into the hoax’s judgment; most often the hoaxer knows where he/she is going and the success of the hoax relies on the capacity to get there. At the very least, the hoaxer knows that he/she is the promulgator of a lie and, as Arendt (1972) points out, the act of lying rests on a confidence that one knows the truth from which one is consciously departing. The same cannot be said for the social scientist, who should anticipate – even hope for – surprise as an outcome of his/her enquiries, if only because contingency and surprise are so crucial a part of the social world that is the object of study (Maier, 2009).

We have argued that an academic hoax such as Wilson’s has a merely imitative relationship to the language games of the social sciences, without the same commitment to the production of plausible knowledge. If this is the case, in what sense is our claim that both are concerned with ‘seeming true’ to be understood? To suggest that the appearance of truth is the stuff of the social sciences is not, it should by now be clear, an announcement of their redundancy as claimants to truth. It is, rather, a statement about the phenomenal nature of social reality. Arendt (1978: 21) explains this when she writes that we cannot, as living beings, separate ‘the world’ from the world as ‘it-seems-to-me’. This is not akin to the claim that reality is nothing more than our constructions of it. Human beings are neither masters of their own representations nor the mere recipients of the world’s appearances, for humans ‘are themselves also appearances’ (Arendt, 1978: 19). Human beings ‘are not just in the world, they are of the world’, which means that they are ‘subjects and objects – perceiving and being perceived – at the same time’ (Arendt, 1978: 20, original emphasis).

The idea that the social sciences are concerned with seeming true readily accords with what we might regard as the interpretative ‘ring’ aspect of knowledge. Yet we are arguing that ‘core’ knowledge, which undoubtedly possesses a certain ‘facticity’ (Arendt) or ‘thusness’ (Heller), also remains implicated in this problem of seeming true. For even at the level of claims that can be widely agreed upon (which are not entirely perspective dependent), we are still faced with the priority of appearances. Even the most consensual claims about social reality are based on the fact that the world appears to us. As Arendt points out, ancient philosophy and modern science have both ‘known’ in their own way that it is, in the first place, at the level of appearances that we apprehend, and belong to, the world. Even if the philosopher must escape the cares of the world to find a ‘true home’ in being, or the scientist must strip appearances away to uncover the reality they hide, it is appearances that are our first point of encounter (Arendt, 1978: 15).

Conclusion: The Value of Seeming True

As a kind of ‘social breaching experiment’ (Garfinkel, 1967), the Windschuttle hoax gives us an occasion to examine how we feel about the violation of norms that we might otherwise have unquestionably accepted (as Windschuttle and other objectivists do) or dismissed as antiquated (as the relativist does). In this way the hoax draws our attention to the norm of verisimilitude and the complexity of the claims it makes upon us. In suggesting that there is a place for social science between the denial of knowledge’s historical context and the denial of truth, we have argued that the ambition of seeming true need not be seen as an impoverished one for the social sciences. Indeed, an implication of the argument we have pursued in this paper is that appearing true is a thoroughly appropriate ambition for knowledge that recognizes itself as historical. While we may need to give up the hope of a direct correspondence between the being of the human world and the being of knowledge, we do not thereby need to deem the social sciences mere tricks. Modern social sciences, like all cultural products, are expressions of desires and anxieties, yet this does not make them illusions or delusions. They are more than ‘sham inquiry’ to the extent that they earn their legitimacy – by attempting to satisfy precise criteria of plausibility, by exercising prudent, as opposed to merely instrumental, judgment and by doing so in good faith. Oriented toward these aims, social science can fairly and proudly claim that it has done its best to appear true.

Wilson’s stunt attracted public attention, yet it had neither the legitimacy, nor the durability, of what are considered the great works of the social sciences, the ‘treasure troves’ that are visited and revisited. The claims to truth that such works make have passed the test of time because they seek to be more than fiction, yet something other than merely factual. Nonetheless we have argued that, above and beyond the validity of the social critique intended by the gesture, the hoax can offer something to the self-understanding of the social sciences. Appreciating this involves refusing to reduce the hoax to a symptom of a deeper ideological battle or perhaps a crisis in the status of truth. This would be to fail to take the hoax seriously at the level of appearances. While we need not equate ‘true knowledge’ with depth, we can nonetheless strive to produce a knowledge that is adequate to the richness of the problems we study. Observing the norm of verisimilitude, in this sense, involves attempting to achieve ‘the maximum faithfulness to life’ (Jakobson, 1971: 40), a demand that is clearly not made on the hoaxer, whose imitation is much more driven and much less troubled.