Reply to an Analytic Philosopher

I reply here to an article by philosopher Paul Boghossian in which my article "Cutting-Edge Equivocation: Conceptual Moves and Rhetorical Strategies in Contemporary Anti-Epistemology" (Smith, *SAQ* 2002) provides him with an occasion for a supposed exposure and refutation of the alleged illogic of the "unpalatable relativism" of what Boghossian, at some distance from his topic, (mis)understands as the "constructivism" of contemporary sociology of science

Practicing Relativism in the Anthropocene: On Science, belief, and the Humanities

Contemporary issues involving knowledge and science examined from a constructivist-pragmatist perspective often labeled "relativism." Individual chapters include a review of the difference between constructivist-pragmatist epistemology and "social constructivism;" an examination of recent writings by Bruno Latour; a critique of computational methods in literary studies; a skeptical look at current efforts to "integrate" the humanities and the natural sciences; and reflections on the social dynamics of belief in relation to denials of climate change and to hopes expressed by environmentalists

Cutting-Edge Equivocation: Conceptual Moves and Rhetorical Strategies in Contemporary Anti-Epistemology"

An examination of conceptually and rhetorically equivocating positions among academic philosophers and other theorists who are sympathetic to constructivist epistemological developments but unwilling to relinquish key aspects of traditional understandings of truth and knowledge and/or anxious to avoid charges of relativism. A major problem with the resulting hybrid formulations is that, seeking, as they often claim, to “steer a course between Scylla and Charybdis” and being composed of essentially incompatible elements, they can do little theoretical work. While the personal-intellectual and professional-institutional pressures leading to such dubious navigations are substantial, so also, it is argued, are their intellectual costs

Chinese comparisons and questionable acts

In this response to comments on “The Chimera of Relativism,” her article in the same Common Knowledge issue, by cognitive neuroscientist Andreas Roepstorff, classicist G. E. R. Lloyd, and anthropologist Martin Holbraad, Smith begins by describing her experiences visiting China in 1983 as a scholar of comparative literature. This account is meant to illustrate and reinforce Lloyd's cautions regarding the hazards of intercultural—here, Chinese-Western—comparisons in studies of culture and cognition. Examination of a foundational study in East-West cultural/cognitive differences by psychologists Hazel Markus and Shinobu Kitayama, cited by Roepstorff, indicates extensive conceptual and methodological problems in that tradition of research. It also indicates that, contrary to Roepstorff's description of the new field of cultural neuroscience as a site of cultural-relativist energy, researchers in the field appear committed to the uncovering of psychological/cognitive universals. Although Smith writes that Holbraad champions a more radical relativism than that offered in her own work, she argues that the moves he urges have either been present in her work from the beginning or are, from her perspective, both dubiously radical and otherwise undesirable. She points out that the vulnerable positions, arguments, and views that Holbraad attributes to her are spuriously derived from the texts he cites and that, for this reason, his evident effort to duplicate certain philosophically creative intellectual acts by Gilles Deleuze fail of their desired effects and yield only “a litter of baby chimeras.”</jats:p