Bayle's Probabilistic
Fideism and the Rhetoric of Ideology
This essay originally appeared,
under the title "Doubt, Certainty, Faith, and Ideology," in The
Flight from Science and Reason, ed. Paul R. Gross, Norman Levitt, and
Martin W. Lewis (New York: Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol.
775, 1996.) The volume was reissued under the imprint of The Johns Hopkins
University Press in 1997. Although the essay uses Bayle's fideism as a case
study of the ideological mutability of ideas, and was addressed to scientists
and humanists interested in the contemporary culture wars, I thought it
might be of special interest to Bayle scholars. Beyond having changed the
title, I have not tried to adapt the original essay for its new audience.
However, since it comes from my computer, rather than the end of the editorial
process, it will differ slightly from the printed version, particularly
with regard to style of annotation. I am grateful to the editors of the
Annals of the New York Academy of Science for permission to post the essay
on the Pierre Bayle Home Page.
(Oscar Kenshur)
Bayle's Probabilistic Fideism and the Rhetoric
of Ideology
I
In the current struggle over the status of science and reason, even if one
does not have a scorecard, one can tell which position a player plays merely
by listening to what he or she says about the Enlightenment. The party that
stands in defense of science and in opposition to irrational and anti-rational
beliefs presents itself as being on the side of the Enlightenment. It tends
to accept the Enlightenment's own characterization of itself as having achieved
the benign separation between knowledge and superstition through the techniques
of scientific rationalism. Unfounded traditional beliefs have been discarded
in favor of the responsible investigation of things that can be observed,
tested and verified.
The party associated with fashionable relativizing
theories challenges both the Enlightenment's claim to have found the way
to objective knowledge and its claim to be progressive or benign. These
theorists speak of the Enlightenment in terms of totalizing theories, foundationalism,
and hierarchical or oppressive structures.
These two opposing groups, despite their differences,
have certain things in common. In the first instance, both groups are, in
varying degrees, heirs of the skeptical tradition. The emergence of scientific
rationalism has been understood in terms of a kind of "mitigated skepticism,"
that employs techniques of skeptical doubt against certain kinds of knowledge
claims, and leaves the field to empiricist and experimental techniques.[1] The religious
skepticism that we associate with the Enlightenment is often linked to skepticism
regarding speculative philosophy--both being premised on the rejection of
claims about transcendent or otherwise unobservable reality--and this conjunction
may be seen as a characteristic expression of mitigated skepticism. The
anti-Enlightenment party, on the other hand, by dint of its refusal to allow
Enlightenment science and reason to escape from the scourge of skeptical
doubt has been seen to hearken back to a more thoroughgoing skepticism that
challenges all knowledge claims.
A second conspicuous similarity between the pro-Enlightenment
and anti-Enlightenment parties is that they tend to characterize the specific
epistemological stances that they favor as emancipatory. On the one side,
Enlightenment science and reason are seen as freeing us from religious superstition
or despotism, and providing us with knowledge and autonomy. On the other
side, science and reason are depicted as instruments of domination, and
the skeptical undermining of Enlightenment epistemologies is associated,
often only implicitly, with the potential emancipation from this domination.
Nor is this difference in the interpretation and valorization of Enlightenment
epistemologies merely symptomatic of the competing theoretical positions.
Rather, it might be seen as part of their etiologies. Defenders of science
and reason today trace their ancestry back to the Enlightenment, while those
who see our intellectual and political liberation in terms of the rejection
of modernity often see the Enlightenment heritage as precisely that which
must be overcome, and trace their own ancestry to the skeptical anti-Enlightenment
gestures of Nietzsche, Heidegger and their more recent acolytes.
Just as there are interesting similarities between
the two opposing camps, there is, I think, at least one important respect
in which both parties are wrong, namely, in the assumption that any given
epistemology is either intrinsically oppressive or intrinsically liberating.
I have argued elsewhere that early-modern thought was permeated by "intellectual
co-optation," a procedure that allowed thinkers to appropriate epistemological
positions that at first glance seemed alien to their own, and also to alter
the ideological valences of various epistemologies to suit their own purposes
(Kenshur, 1993). A particularly piquant example of the ideological mutability
of epistemologies is that of skepticism itself. Skepticism, which today
is often portrayed as an emancipatory antidote to oppressive rationalism,
,,,was often deployed as an argument for submission to secular or religious
authority (Kenshur, 1993: 102-111). For example, the demonstration that
fundamental tenets of Christianity cannot be philosophically defended against
the powerful techniques of skepticism could be presented as a pious and
humble activity. Fideists, those who held that faith, not reason or science,
was the appropriate source of religious belief, could embrace skepticism
by urging that the very incredibility of Christian doctrines, the ease with
which they can be demolished by rational critiques, pointed up the need
to abandon reason and submit ourselves to divine authority.
The very availability of a conservative justification
for employing skeptical techniques against religious beliefs also meant,
of course, that it would be possible to mock religious beliefs with the
utmost sincerity and then insincerely appeal to fideism as a way of deflecting
charges of impiety. This possibility, in turn, meant that pious appeals
to fideism could arouse deep suspicion among the defenders of orthodoxy,
and that one's skeptical critiques of Christian doctrines could be attacked
as impious despite the fact that one looked heavenward and claimed that
one's skepticism had been operating in the service of faith.
Once we recognize the difficulty of ascertaining
whether skepticism was destructive or pious in a given case, we might be
tempted to conclude that skepticism is unstable precisely to the extent
that it can be tied both to positions that are intrinsically radical and
iconoclastic and to positions, such as fideism, that are intrinsically conservative.
But such a conclusion stops short of a full understanding of the ideological
instability of competing justifications of belief. For fideism itself --
despite the fact that it traditionally stipulates that reason and science
should be ignored and that one should humbly submit to the authority of
God -- is also unstable, both epistemologically and ideologically, and no
more inherently emancipatory or conservative than skepticism itself. Indeed
a case study that showed the actual complexity of the interplay between
fideism and skepticism in the context of early modern epistemology might
help to demonstrate the wrongheadedness of contemporary debates about the
political implications of competing epistemologies. It is such a case study
that I will be presenting here.
II
In his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697), Pierre Bayle
masterfully applies skeptical techniques to various philosophical theories
as well as to fundamental tenets of Christianity. His project, however,
he assures his readers--in the best fideistic fashion--is not injurious
to religion. He wishes merely to show the impotence of reason and urge reliance
on faith.
This fideistic justification did not succeed in
disarming Bayle's critics; his powerful demonstration of the impotence of
reason looked--both to orthodox Christian critics and to later mockers of
Christianity such as Voltaire and Gibbon--for all the world like a demonstration
of the impotence of Christianity when exposed to reason.
In response to his various critics, Bayle appended
to the second edition of the Dictionnaire (1702), four Eclaircissements,
or Clarifications--the third of which specifically undertakes
to answer charges that Bayle's apparent embrace of the rigorous skeptical
position called Pyrrhonism had been injurious to religion.[2] Bayle here appeals to
very orthodox Christian notions that faith is meritorious precisely to the
degree to which it is different from and repugnant to reason. It is a certain
and incontestable maxim Bayle tells us at the beginning of the Third Clarification:
- that Christianity is of a supernatural order,
and that it [has to do with] God presenting us with mysteries not so that
we will comprehend them, but so that we will believe them with all the
humility that is owed to the Infinite Being... (Bayle, 1702: III: 3153)
Stated thus, Bayle's maxim allows him to treat
Christianity not simply as a set of beliefs that include certain mysteries,
but as a separate discourse that is wholly beyond rational comprehension,
and therefore wholly incommensurable with the language of philosophy. Accordingly,
Bayle soon moves from this maxim to an invocation of the authority of St.
Paul:
- [Christ] wanted his disciples and the wise men
of this world to be so diametrically at odds that they should consider
one another to be madmen; he wished that, just as his Gospel should seem
madness to the philosophers, their knowledge, in turn, should seem madness
to the Christians. (Bayle, 1702: III, 3154)[3]
What is most striking about Bayle's embrace of this Pauline conception of
the incommensurability of faith and reason is that it valorizes faith on
the ground that it requires adherence to beliefs that do not meet our ordinary
criteria for knowledge and that therefore require us to abandon those criteria
in favor of humble submission to divine authority:
- the moral worth of faith becomes greater to the
degree that the revealed truth that is its object surpasses all the powers
of our mind....[W]e show ourselves to be more submissive to God and to
give him stronger proof of our respect than we would if it were something
only moderately difficult to believe. (Bayle, 1702: III, 3156)
Faith is meritorious, in contrast to knowledge,
because knowledge requires no effort, while faith is a heroic act of submission
by virtue of which we believe what is otherwise unbelievable.
Bayle's invocation of St. Paul is only the beginning
of a series of appeals to authority. Indeed, the third clarification is
replete with citations and examples whose function is ostensibly to establish
Bayle's orthodoxy. All this would appear to underscore the traditional and
conservative nature of the discourse. But the examples do not always seem
in tune with the principle that faith is utterly different from demonstrative
knowledge.
Consider first Bayle's discussion of the English
physician Sir Thomas Browne. In his Religio Medici (1643), Browne
offers a vivid reformulation of the ancient fideistic position, complete
with the invocation of Tertullian's celebrated paradox, "Certum est
quia impossibile est" (It is certain because impossible). In a passage
that Bayle quotes immediately after quoting Browne's invocation of Tertullian,
Browne congratulates himself for lacking certain knowledge of the articles
of Christian belief, and for having to rely on faith:
- Some believe the better for seeing Christ's sepulchre;
and when they have seen the Red Sea, doubt not of the miracle. Now contrarily,
I bless myself, and am thankful that I lived not in the days of miracles...then
had my faith been thrust upon me, nor should I enjoy that greater blessing
pronounced to all that believe and saw not.[4]
Browne is alluding to Jesus' reproach to doubting
Thomas in John chapter 21, verse 29: "Have you believed because you
have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe."
Thus framed between the authority of Tertullian
and that of Jesus himself, Browne's fideism seems to fit nicely into the
tradition that Bayle is setting forth in the Third Clarification. But it
needs to be observed that Browne's distinction is not between faith and
reason, but between faith and direct sensory experience. His assumption
seems to be that those who witnessed the historical miracles of the resurrection
and the parting of the Red Sea deserve no credit for their beliefs because
the beliefs require no effort of faith. Indeed, in the passage from Browne
that Bayle goes on to quote (in Latin translation) Browne says 'Tis an easy
and necessary belief, to credit what our eye and sense hath examined. (Browne,
1964: 9-10). And in a passage that Bayle does not quote, Browne states,
"to credit ordinary and visible objects is not faith but persuasion"
(Browne, 1964: 9). Browne thus treats beliefs that arise from normal sensory
experience as outside the province of faith and as amounting to nothing
more than mere "persuasion." What is even more interesting for
our purposes is the possibility of reading Browne's position as implying
something other than an unbridgeable gulf between faith and ordinary knowledge.
For it might be possible to postulate an epistemological continuum along
which the same beliefs may, by degrees, be more or less meritorious to the
extent that they are farther from or closer to sensory knowledge.
Browne does not explicitly draw this implication,
but it might be said that John Craige, whom Bayle had introduced in tandem
with Browne and whom he discusses next, does precisely that. Craige's Theologiae
Christinae Principia Mathematica, published in1699, has generally been
considered an almost comical oddity in the early history of probability
theory (Hacking, 1975: 72).[5] But it begins with the notions about the credibility of
marvelous historical events that we have encountered in our discussion of
Browne. If we assume that extraordinary or miraculous events counted as
knowledge to those who witnessed them, but lose their credibility progressively
as time goes on, then it follows that we can say that the miraculous events
associated with the origins of Christianity are less credible now than they
were shortly after the events occurred, and will be even less credible in
the future. What Craige did was to try to express this notion in mathematical
terms, by computing the degree of probability for each point in time. Once
the probability of belief is quantified, then we can predict precisely when
the credibility of Christianity will disappear altogether, namely, in the
year 3150, and hence that the second coming of Christ will occur before
that date.
At first glance, however, Bayle's inclusion of Craige in the Third Clarification
seems to have nothing to do with the specifics of this bizarre mathematical
exercise. Rather it seems based on the fact that Craige had tried to ward
off charges of impiety by appealing to same fideistic conception of Christian
belief that Bayle is invoking on his own behalf. Craige, in his preface,
deems it necessary to deflect the objection that he is reducing Christian
belief to mere probability. Indeed, it is only from this exculpatory preface
that Bayle quotes, and at considerable length. Those who are prejudiced
against his undertaking, Craige is quoted as saying,
- have not yet examined carefully enough the foundations
of the religion they profess; and... they do not rightly understand the
nature of faith, which is so much praised in Holy Scripture. For faith
is nothing other than that persuasion of the mind, derived from an indeterminate
probability, by which we believe certain propositions to be true. If the
persuasion arises from certainty, then it is not faith that is being produced,
but knowledge. Probability generates faith, but destroys knowledge; certainty,
on the other hand, generates knowledge and destroys faith. (Bayle, 1702:
III, 3158)[6]
In appealing to the foundations of Christianity and to Scripture, Craige,
like Browne before him, is making a virtue of believing that of which he
does not have certain knowledge. But the content of the dichotomy in which
the meritoriousness of faith takes its place has been dramatically altered.
Faith is no longer being characterized as the submission to beliefs in impossible
events and concepts, in things that are repugnant to reason. Indeed, the
dichotomy that previously separated absolutely incommensurable sorts of
things is giving way to a kind of continuum, in which faith is understood
in terms of shifting degrees of probability. In order to understand the
significance of this change, we need to glance at aspects of the broader
context of probabilistic thinking in the late-seventeenth century.
III
We may profitably begin with John Locke, whose discussion of probability
and assent in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding includes the
following striking passage:
- any testimony, the further off it is from the
original truth, the less force and proof it has. The being and existence
of the thing itself is what I call the original truth. A credible man vouching
his knowledge of it is a good proof; but if another, equally credible,
do witness it from his report, the testimony is weaker; and a third, that
attests the hearsay of a hearsay, is yet less considerable. (Locke, [1690]
1964: IV,xvi,10)
Given Craige's general indebtedness to Locke,[7] and the specific
similarity between this passage and the premise of Craige's probabilistic
enterprise, one might well suppose that when Craige undertakes to compute
the waning credibility of the foundational miracles of Christianity, he
is giving mathematical expression to the Lockean observation just quoted.
Locke, after all, unlike Browne, postulates a lengthy process whereby events
lose their credibility step by step, through each new accretion of testimony.
But Locke is in no way suggesting that it is meritorious to accept improbable
beliefs because of their improbability. Far from giving us an opportunity
to demonstrate our faith, the increasing weakness of second and third and
fourth hand testimony is adduced by Locke as a way of counteracting those
who would valorize beliefs that are the products of a long tradition. Indeed
the passage just quoted is followed immediately by this one:
- This I thought necessary to take notice of, because
I find amongst some men the quite contrary commonly practiced, who look
on opinions to gain force by growing older; and what a thousand years since
would not, to a rational man contemporary with the first voucher, have
appeared at all probable, is now urged as certain beyond all question,
only because several have since, from him, said it one after another. Upon
this ground propositions, evidently false or doubtful enough in their first
beginning, come by an inverted rule of probability, to pass for authentic
truths.... (Locke, [1690] 1964: IV,xvi,10)
In deriding the "inverted rule of probability"
that gives venerable status to beliefs whose truth, when viewed rationally,
is very improbable, Locke is not addressing the subject of belief in miracles,
but is evidently weighing in on the Protestant side in the long polemical
battle against Catholic appeals to tradition as their special source of
doctrinal and exegetical authority. Whereas Protestants could claim that
the necessary truths of religion were directly available in the Bible, tradition
was a pillar of Catholic epistemology. Thus Locke's cultural situation allows
him to mount a rational attack on traditional beliefs based on a chain of
testimony, while impelling him discreetly to ignore the fact that the same
sort of critique of "the hearsay of a hearsay" could easily apply
to Protestant doctrines regarding biblical miracles.[8]
Craige, on the other hand, it would seem, was willing to take the next logical
step. Indeed, he was willing not only to apply to miracles the Lockean dictum
about the increasing diminution of credibility as testimony becomes more
and more mediated, but even to quantify the specific degrees of improbability.
Seen in this light, it might seem as if Craige's use of fideism is simply
a way to protect himself against the consequences of his own daring.
But we need to recall that in the self-justification quoted above from Craige's
preface, he not only departs from the ancient notion that the merit of faith
comes from the utter incompatibility between Christian beliefs and reason,
but he also departs from his own Lockean principle that faith in highly
attenuated testimony has a very low probability. Faith is characterized
as "that persuasion of the mind, derived from an indeterminate probability,
by which we believe certain propositions to be true"(Nash, 54). Both
faith and knowledge are persuasions of the mind, but faith is based on probability
rather than certainty. To help us see what is going on here, we might recall
that Browne's fideism had included the statement that "to credit ordinary
and visible objects is not faith but persuasion." For Browne, faith
was something beyond persuasion and beyond probability. In his preface,
by contrast, Craige seems to be invoking probability, not in order to separate
the realm of faith from that of knowledge, but to place the two upon a single
continuum.
This continuum links up with a significant seventeenth-century tendency
to try to ground knowledge claims on probability, instead of having to aspire
to the perhaps unattainable status of certainty. The extreme skeptics had
used certainty as the criterion of knowledge, and had assumed that the failure
to achieve certainty indicated the failure to achieve knowledge. Fideism,
as we have seen was one reaction to this skeptical tendency. The new interest
in probability was another. While fideism is commonly viewed as an extreme
reaction to skepticism, the early-modern rise of probability is seen as
an intermediate position between "fideist dogmatism on the one hand
and the most corrosive skepticism" on the other," an intermediate
position that insisted that probable knowledge was attainable, and that
"probable knowledge was indeed knowledge" (Gigerenzer, 1989: 5).
This intermediate position is associated with what I referred to above as
"mitigated skepticism," and hence with scientific epistemology.
What we have found in our discussion of Browne, Craige, and Bayle however,
is nothing like a clear separation between skeptical and fideistic extremes,
or between those extremes and an intermediate probabilism. Craige, after
all, is appealing to fideistic tradition to justify his probabilism, and
Bayle is appealing to Craige to justify his Pyrrhonian skepticism. In the
process, the content of the ancient dichotomy in which the meritoriousness
of faith was identified in opposition to worldly wisdom has been dramatically
altered. Faith is no longer being characterized as the submission to beliefs
in impossible events and concepts, in things that are repugnant to reason.
Instead faith is characterized in terms of probability rather than impossibility,
accepting the truth of testimony to remarkable events that one has not oneself
witnessed. Indeed, the dichotomy that separated absolutely distinct sorts
of things is giving way to a kind of continuum, in which faith is understood
in terms of shifting degrees of probability.
When we think of probability as an "intermediate position" between
skepticism and certainty, we tend think of it simply as providing a pragmatic
criterion of truth that allows us to get on with scientific work without
being plagued by epistemological doubts. But if we think of probability
in the terms enunciated by Locke and Craige, having to do with degrees of
credibility of testimonial evidence, then we can begin to see how the probability
of scientific truths and the probability of miracles can fall along the
same epistemological continuum. For although we are accustomed to thinking
of the scientific revolution as rejecting blind faith in ancient beliefs,
in favor of the fruits of our own experience and observation, we need to
recall that many of the great discoveries of early-modern science do not
necessarily confirm what we think we have learned from ordinary experience.
Rather the results are often surprising and incredible, and the acceptance
of experimental knowledge as true knowledge often depended upon the testimony
of a few trustworthy witnesses to marvelous events that occured in scientific
laboratories. Hence the recent scholarly interest in the relationship between
scientific marvels and miracles (Dear, 1990; Daston, 1991; Shapin, 1994).
According to Steven Shapin, one of the cultural factors that helped to give
probable eyewitness testimony its proper epistemological weight were accounts
of religious knowledge, since, according to Shapin, "much religious
knowledge manifestly had a historical character." Indeed, as he goes
on to observe:
- it was a central concern of Christian apologetics
to warrant scriptural testimony as reliable and to show that people might
as securely give their assent to it as to formally more certain types of
knowledge. This meant that it had to be shown that the probable quality
of properly testified matters substantially and practically overlapped
with the quality of both demonstrable matters and the facts accessible
to personal witness. (209)
Shapin seems to be suggesting that the new justificatory
protocols of empirical science are borrowing from the older resources of
religious epistemology. He presumably has in mind the sort of rationalist
theology that is piously echoed by Locke, when he refers to miracles, "which,
well attested, do not only find credit themselves, but give it also to other
truths which need such confirmation" (Locke, [1690] 1964: IV,xvi,13).
However, in Craige's fideistic defense of probabilism and in Bayle's fideistic
defense of skepticism, at least, I think we are seeing the reverse process:
a fideism that is being altered through the appropriation of the role of
probable testimony in the new scientific enterprise.
Bayle introduced Browne and Craige respectively
as a physician and mathematician, and explicitly suggested that their status
as men of science enhanced the force of their testimony. Their testimony,
he writes, "will carry more weight because their profession does not
pass for a school that teaches one to debase reason and to elevate faith"
(Bayle, 1702: III, 3157).
This would seem to imply that the two men's status
as scientists does not prevent them from being fideists. But there is further
sense in which Bayle wants to suggest that fideism is being enhanced by
scientific credentials of its adherents. In embracing their fideistic pronouncements
without calling attention to the fact they mark a shift from the meritoriousness
of believing the impossible to the alleged meritoriousness of believing
the probable, Bayle is trying, I think, to quietly merge the new epistemological
prestige of scientific probabilism with the moral prestige traditionally
attributed to faith as an act of humble submission.
Bayle's conflation of the divergent poles of a
fideistic tradition, in sum, allows him tacitly to uphold the moral approbation
earned by opting for Christian beliefs in the face of uncertainty, while
at the same time treating those beliefs as empirically justified. Thus to
accept the foundational events of Christianity is epistemologically valid
because the beliefs, like the belief in scientific marvels, are, in some
sense, probable; meanwhile the acceptance of these very beliefs is morally
meritorious because they are "merely" probable.
IV
I suggested at the outset that my historical case
study would have some bearing on contemporary debates regarding epistemology
and ideology. Specifically, I indicated that current tendencies to link
specific epistemological stances with specific political stances ran up
against the historical fact that ideas can be co-opted for various purposes.
I further suggested that this difficulty was exacerbated by the fact that
attempts to anchor one idea in the supposed ideological fixity of another
ran up against the capacity of the supposedly stable idea itself to experience
drift. I trust that this point has been demonstrated through our examination
of fideism, a doctrine, which--by dint of its appeal to the virtue of uncritical
submission to authority--had at first glance appeared to be a limiting case
of epistemological and ideological conservatism. If fideism can be transformed
into probabilism and cloak itself in the language of scientific rationalism,
then it is hard to imagine that any epistemological principle whatever can
retain a fixed ideological valence.
Nor does this amenability to transformation result
simply from the fact that the same theory can be put to different political
uses. It also results from the fact that the "same theory" can
take a different shape each time it is formulated. For theories are subject
to interpretation not only by distant commentators, but also by the historical
personages who embrace them.
The protean quality of fideism that we find exemplified
in Bayle's deployment of it, may be also found in his skepticism. I have
argued elsewhere that Bayle interprets Pyrrhonism not as a denial of the
possibility of certain knowledge, but as an open-ended search for truth,
a search, moreover, that seems to more hospitable to factual claims than
to metaphysical systems (Kenshur, 1988). The reason that someone can entertain
such a distinction between metaphysical claims and claims about observable
facts and nonetheless consider himself to be a rigorous skeptic is that
while the evidence on either side of metaphysical questions can shown to
be equally balanced--and hence as requiring the skeptical epoche,
or suspension of judgment--the evidence on either side of questions regarding
the objects of sensory perception is not so balanced. That is to say, although
the possibility that our sense perceptions may not be veridical prevents
us from being certain about them, it does not follow that the reasons for
doubting a given sense-impression are as strong as the reasons for believing
it to be probably correct (Striker, 1980: 59). This interpretation of the
process of skeptical doubt, according to which skepticism takes a pragmatic
and probabilistic turn, has been associated with the tradition of Academic
Skepticism rather than of Pyrrhonism. But it is entirely possible that Bayle
combined the two skeptical traditions in such a way as to empiricize and
probabilize skepticism in a manner that echoes the probabilistic treatment
of fideism that I have examined above.
I'm not concerned here with providing the correct
interpretation of Bayle's skepticism or with assaying the relative cogency
of competing versions of skepticism. I wish merely to show that the instability
of epistemological theories--both with respect to their fundamental postulates
and with respect to their ideological uses--makes a mockery of global generalizations
to the effect that one general sort of theory is, by its very nature, an
instrument of domination and that another sort, by its very nature, a means
of emancipation.
But as I have argued in my other essay in this
volume and elsewhere (Kenshur, 1993), none of this has the effect of undermining
the legitimacy of ideological analysis. Indeed the approach that I advocate
gives ideological analysis a much greater scope and much more subtlety.
Instead of forcing its practitioners to confirm ad infinitum an assumption
about the oppressive or emancipatory tendency of Theory A or Theory B, ideological
analysis should allow us to find surprising variations. Ideological analysis
is a humanistic enterprise that, by requiring the investigation of each
individual case, requires the practitioner to read texts carefully and to
be attentive to nuances and idiosyncracies. Those interested in ideas and
their ideological dimensions should not try to ape physics by discounting
variations in order to establish general laws. For what we know in the humanities,
we have learned from a painstaking version of empiricism, one that focuses
its energy and its care on the particular.
NOTES
1 . For the term, "mitigated
skepticism," and the early history of the interplay between skepticism
and scientific rationalism, see Popkin, 1979.
2 . Supposedly originated
by Pyrrho of Elis (c. 360 - c. 270 B.C.E.), but codified by Sextus Empiricus
(in the second or third century C.E.), Pyrrhonism presented itself as a
mode of inquiry that cultivated doubt by discovering equally powerful arguments
on either side of every issue, but that avoided all dogmatism, including
that which it attributed to the Academic Skeptics--whom it accused of dogmatically
claiming that nothing could be known. See Sextus Empiricus, 1933.
3 . Translations from the
French are my own.
4 . I cite Browne's English
original (Browne, [1643] 1964: 9). Bayle, not a reader of English, paraphrases
Browne in French, and quotes him in Latin translation (Bayle, 1702: III,
3157)
5 . Hacking discusses not
only the aspect of Craige's probability theory that I describe here, but
also an additional aspect that involves a mathematical version of Pascal's
famous wager.
6 . I give Nash's translation
of Craige's Latin (Nash, 1991: 53-54).
7 . For Locke's influence
on Craige's Theology, see Richard Nash's commentary, in Nash, 1991: 33-45.
8 . In his actual discussion
of the topic a few paragraphs later, Locke evaluates the truth of miracles
in terms of their consonance with our conception of the divine nature and
purpose, and hence their capacity to "procure belief" in Christianity
(Locke, [1690] 1964: IV,xvi,13). The criterion, thus, is once again a rational
one, but Locke does not concern himself with the reliability of testimony
regarding the actual occurrence of miraculous events.
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Daston, Lorraine. "Marvelous Facts and Miraculous
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Dear, Peter. 1990. "Miracles, Experiments,
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Gigerenzer, Gerd, et. al. 1989. The Empire of
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