Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy / Edition 1

Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy / Edition 1

by Barbara Herrnstein Smith
ISBN-10:
0674064925
ISBN-13:
9780674064928
Pub. Date:
04/30/1997
Publisher:
Harvard University Press
ISBN-10:
0674064925
ISBN-13:
9780674064928
Pub. Date:
04/30/1997
Publisher:
Harvard University Press
Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy / Edition 1

Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy / Edition 1

by Barbara Herrnstein Smith

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Overview

Truth, reason, and objectivity--can we survive without them? What happens to law, science, and the pursuit of social justice when such ideas and ideals are rejected? These questions are at the heart of the controversies between traditionalists and "postmodernists" that Barbara Herrnstein Smith examines in her wide-ranging book, which also offers an original perspective on the perennial--perhaps eternal--clash of belief and skepticism, on our need for intellectual stability and our experience of its inevitable disruption.

Focusing on the mutually frustrating impasses to which these controversies often lead and on the charges--"absurdity," "irrationalism," "complicity," "blindness," "stubbornness"--that typically accompany them, Smith stresses our tendency to give self-flattering reasons for our own beliefs and to discount or demonize the motives of those who disagree with us. Her account of the resulting cognitive and rhetorical dynamics of intellectual conflict draws on recent research and theory in evolutionary biology, neuroscience, developmental psychology, and the history and sociology of science, as well as on contemporary philosophy and language theory.

Smith's analyses take her into important ongoing debates over the possibility of an objective grounding of legal and political judgments, the continuing value of Enlightenment rationalism, significant challenges to dominant ideas of scientific truth, and proper responses to denials of the factuality of the Holocaust. As she explores these and other controversies, Smith develops fresh ways to understand their motives and energies, and more positive ways to see the operations of intellectual conflict more generally.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780674064928
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Publication date: 04/30/1997
Edition description: New Edition
Pages: 252
Product dimensions: 5.88(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Barbara Herrnstein Smith is Braxton Craven Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature and English at Duke University.

Table of Contents

Preface

The Unquiet Judge: Activism without Objectivism in Law and Politics

Making (Up) the Truth: Constructivist Contributions

Belief and Resistance: A Symmetrical Account

Doing without Meaning

Unloading the Self-Refutation Charge

The Skeptic's Turn: A Performance of Contradiction

Arguing with Reason

Appendix: Webs of Reason

Microdynamics of Incommensurability: Philosophy of Science Meets

Science Studies

Notes

Index

What People are Saying About This

Sober and wise, engaged yet tolerant, this book offers--for those who really want one--an antidote to the absolutism and the incivility of our present controversies.

Bruno Latour

Barbara Herrnstein Smith is not the UN peace-keeping forces intervening in the Science and Moral Wars. Rather, she does an ecological study of many entangled controversies, paying due attention to all the camps while not pretending to be above any of them--thus exemplifying the fact that relativism leads not, as many believe, to a lake of fire in which illegitimate scholars are inevitably fried, but to the open seas on which it is possible to travel much further than on the supposed solid ground of 'firm foundations,' if only we have ship!
Bruno Latour, Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines, Paris

Richard Rorty

Smith's analyses of recent controversies about objectivity are unusually subtle, and very helpful indeed.
Richard Rorty, University of Virginia

Steven Shapin

Sober and wise, engaged yet tolerant, this book offers--for those who really want one--an antidote to the absolutism and the incivility of our present controversies.
Steven Shapin, University of California at San Diego

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