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T HE ARCHAEOLOGICAL V IRTUOSO: FILLING THE EPISTEMIC VOID IN ARCHAEOLOGICAL THEORY WITH A CONCEPTION OF THE EXPERT PRACTITIONER
For the excellent person judges each sort of thing correctly..., being a standard and measure. What is really so appears so to the excellent person: the good person, the virtuoso, is the measure. –Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics No genuine Kuhnian analysis of the history of any area of inquiry is possible now, since inquirers have been reading Kuhn and routinely invoke the term “paradigm”. Any group of inquirers self-conscious enough to describe themselves as undergoing a “paradigm shift” will fail to exhibit the requisite lack of self-consciousness characteristic of the history of science which Kuhn described. Nevertheless, one aspect of Kuhn’s account is precisely descriptive of the recent history of Syro-Palestinian archaeology: when a long-standing and settled consensus on shared fundamentals is upset, the result is a loss of epistemic confidence (Kuhn’s term is “crisis”), and explicit appeals to philosophy will be made by inquirers in order to restore that confidence. In the last three to four decades, Syro-Palestinian1 archaeology has indeed undergone a crisis in confidence, corresponding to the upset of a business-as-usual approach in which the epistemic standards of practice remained tacit, unarticulated, doing their work in the background...as they should. With the crisis of confidence which the breakdown of the biblical archaeology model engendered, Syro-Palestinian archaeology has been casting about for a new epistemology, some turning to neo-positivist philosophy of science on the one hand, others to a postmodern hermeneutic of suspicion on the other. These appeals, by most accounts, have failed, and it is easy to see why they had to fail: they
1
Even naming conventions, “Syro-Palestinian”, etc..... illustrate the crisis.
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bake no archaeological bread. Hempelian neo-positivism never did any physics, much less archaeology. A Ricoeurian hermeneutics of suspicion, while marginally successful at deconstructing texts, equally never dug a site. Each, while perhaps on the one hand descriptive of a hard-nosed and straightforward ideal of rationality, on the other critical of that very ideal in its application to meaning, has its roots outside of the practices of inquiry to which it has been applied. Each appeals to values resident in the practices of philosophy where it is at home, not to values resident in the practice of archaeology. Even Kuhn himself noted that these explicit appeals to philosophy were ineffectual. But his subsequent account of the unreflective emergence of a new paradigm will not help us here: Syro-Palestinian archaeology, perhaps even archaeology in general, needs a reflective way out of the current epistemic impasse.2 Let’s back up for a moment and ask: even at the height of the epistemic crisis (say, the early 90s), didn’t the practice still yield results? To be sure, the nature of the results, exactly what they said, was in doubt. But absent that heightened suspicion which the epistemic crisis engendered, the nature of the results was no more in doubt, that is, was no more fallible, than ordinarily so: ordinarily, we could always be wrong. In a confident mode, that fallibilism never undercuts what we take to be the best account so far. The best account is always open to revision, always the subject of
2
That the search for the silver bullet which will rescue archaeology from impasse is ongoing is nicely illustrated by the current large scale project “Reconstructing Ancient (Biblical) Israel: The Exact and Life Sciences Perspective”. In a call for cooperation, Israel Finkelstein says: The study of Ancient Israel's texts (the Hebrew Bible), material culture and history has been a keystone of European scholarship since the Enlightenment. Biblical exegesis and archaeology contributed impressively to our understanding of Ancient Israel. Yet, in certain areas conventional research has reached a stalemate. With very few real-time historical records, with the biblical testimony written a long time after the events described (if not mythical) took place, and with the strong theological agenda of both the original authors and some modern scholars, reconstructing the world of Ancient Israel is a complex matter. The exact and life sciences are not restricted by these preconceptions and are able to reveal data that is not visible to the naked eye. Advances made in the last decade in archaeological science show that this is the wave of the future.
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vigorous debate, but is at the same time always open precisely because we are confident of our best efforts. Lack of confidence breeds not only Ricouerian suspicion, but its opposite, neo-positivist fundamentalism about the “Scientific”. Fundamentalism and hyper-skepticism are two sides of the same coin. A restoration of confidence requires not that we ask “What do professional philosophers think of our epistemology...and by the way, what is our epistemology? Let’s ask the pros.”3 Rather, it requires that we ask “Are we successful at reaching our goals? And by the way, what are our goals? Let’s ask the pros – ourselves.” As opposed to the former methodological/epistemological questions, the latter set are teleological4. And as opposed to the externality implicit in the former set, asking for an epistemological template to be imposed from the outside to ensure that the practices of Syro-Palestinian archaeology conform to external canons of philosophical or scientific correctness, the latter teleological set can only be answered from the inside, the pros in question being not experts in philosophy or “science”, but experts in archaeology. And once that exercise is done...it’s back to the practice of archaeology.5 The catch is that this set of teleological questions asks archaeologists to engage in philosophy, something for which they’re typically not trained or prepared, nor indeed for which they
3
Nor does it require an appeal to “Science”
4
All we mean by “teleological” at this point is “of or having to do with ends, goals, aims or purposes”. In the next section, we discuss types of ends and why this is important to properly understanding the character of expertise in archaeology. 5
Of course, it is entirely possible that such an internal teleological exercise could result in the dissolution of the practice, and this in two ways. Syro-Palestinian archaeology could discover that it's not, in the end, worth doing, and practitioners would die off, retire, or shift to other areas, say anthropology or history. Or it could discover that the differences among experts are too great: rather than the ordinary vehement disagreement over the significance of results and methods, the disagreement could be too deep, and parties to the dispute simply not be able either to agree about aims or even to understand one another. This latter schism may well be underway, and biblical archaeologists in the apologetic mode may be retrenching.
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typically have a taste. Does this then throw us back on the external impose-a-favored-epistemology model? We hope not. In what follows, what we hope to do is restore epistemic confidence in the practice of Syro-Palestinian archaeology by illustrating that the requisite elements of a flourishing and specifically archaeological practice are largely intact. This will require a certain philosophical refocusing and correspondent redescription of key elements of the practice of archaeology, and for that we will need the conceptual resources and correspondent vocabulary of a neo-Aristotelianism. For Aristotle is the first and best expositor of the nature of expertise as it is internally manifested in variety of practices. Accordingly, our focus will not be on theory or methodology, nor will it resemble a standard epistemology.6 Rather, we will focus on Aristotle’s account of expertise and its emphasis on the development of character and intellect, using it’s conceptual resources to redescribe the appropriate elements in Syro-Palestinian archaeology. We will discover that, to the extent which SyroPalestinian archaeology was and is flourishing, robust neo-Aristotelian modes of rationality have been operative all along, underlying and driving explicit and discursive theorizing. If we succeed, we will have articulated what, in some sense, we already “knew”. We hope that to some it will seem that we have pointed out what should have been obvious: that an honest, courageous, wise and imaginative inquirer is not just a better person, but a better inquirer, than a dishonest, cowardly, foolish and dull-witted inquirer. But however obvious these claims about character and intellect, this account entails a very
6
Some readers may be aware of a recent trend in philosophical circles called “virtue epistemology”. Although apparently inspired by an ancient focus on character, much of contemporary virtue epistemology has been stuck in the same philosophical scheme and problematic as modern traditional epistemology, failing to offer a genuine alternative. So we will avoid the term “virtue” and introduce its substitute in a moment.
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different and non-obvious conception of rationality. On this neo-Aristotelian view of the expert inquirer, reason is personal rather than impersonal, opportunistic rather than methodical, unprincipled rather than principled, and therefore anomic rather than rule-governed. In section 1 below, we lay out the elements of our neo-Aristotelian account, with special attention to the teleological structure of archaeological inquiry and those excellences of character and intellect which are salient in archaeology. In section 2, we articulate an alternative ideal of rationality which helps to diagnose some of the mistakes we see in recent discussions of archaeological methodology.
1. Aristotle: teleology and excellence. 1.1 Teleology, its types, and the individuation of practices. Having a teleological structure makes a human activity intelligible; lacking such structure, human activity is unintelligible, is surd. Thus, says Aristotle in the opening lines of the Nicomachean Ethics, every practice aims at something taken to be good.7 Though the good envisioned may sometimes be a product beyond the activity, sometimes simply the activity itself
7
The Aristotle scholar will quickly recognize in these pages that we privilege the Nicomachean Ethics in epistemological matters, making the Prior and Posterior Analytics, the Topics, and to some extent the Metaphysics subsidiary to the Nicomachean Ethics. Briefly, we mean to privilege Aristotle’s account of paradigmatic reason in the Ethics (embodied, anomic, and personal), and make subordinate the settled linguistic issue of that reason, i.e., a theory (disembodied, nomic, and impersonal). This entails that Aristotle’s psychological works – De Anima, De Motu Animalium, where many, notably Aquinas, locate Aristotle’s epistemology – are mostly irrelevant, being accounts of “normal” psychic function. The distinctive interpretation of Aristotle which we will present here and in the next section emphasizes elements which are often obscured by modern translation into English (similar remarks apply to medieval Latin, and thus to modern romance languages which draw heavily on the Latin tradition). Note that Ross’s still ubiquitous (via the Internet) English translation, Rackham’s Loeb translation, as well as Irwin’s 2nd edition revisions (done after he spent a decade studying Aquinas), are positively misleading on our view, since they use the English term “principle”, an overly discursive and logical notion, to indicate the substance of paradigmatic reason. On our view, the virtuosic reasoner – the wise person – is unprincipled. This will be clearer as we work through the elements below. For English translations which avoid, at least in part, these unfortunate views of logos and arche, see Irwin 1984 (1st ed.) Broadie and Rowe, 2010, Brown’s 2009 emendation of Ross, Taylor’s 2006 translation (but not his notes on logos)
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done well, nevertheless the activity must have some end recognizable or apparent (to some) as a good thing, otherwise it is strictly pointless and therefore unintelligible. We can bring this point home by putting it as a question to practitioners. “Why do you play football (American soccer) ?”, we may ask. Intelligible answers include “to make money”, “to win”, “to bring honor to my home”, “because it’s what I do best”, “because my parents make me”. All of these answers point to something apparently good, though perhaps not genuinely good.8 By contrast, “No reason” as an answer, without some explanatory suffix such as “I just like it”, renders the agent’s activity pointless and therefore surd, so much so that even describing his activity as “playing football” is questionable, since he would just be going through the motions. Thus we can say that teleology is a necessary condition of intelligibility in human activity. Aristotle distinguishes between goods internal to practices and goods external to practices. Internal goods are those which cannot be had except by engaging in the practice, and are barred to the uninitiated; external goods are those which can be had by other means than by engaging in the practice in question. For example, there are many ways of making money (an external good) other than playing football, but only by playing football can one bend a shot around the goalkeeper to score.9 Internal goods are what drive a flourishing practice, characterized overall as “doing _______ well”, where we fill in the blank with any characteristically human practice. By contrast,
8
Aristotle’s own distinction between apparent and genuine goods is complex. Initially, something (an object, a practice, a person) can both seem and be good, can be good and not seem so, can seem to be good but not be so, and can both seem not and not be good. But this must be complicated by considering the character of the person whose appearances we are discussing, and embedded in Aristotle’s developmental conception of human character and his analogous developmental conception of expertise. Thus what seems good to the adult is more likely to be a genuine good than what seems so to the child. But mere adulthood is not criterial: what seems good to the expert is criterial of genuine goodness. For example, being able to kick a football a long way may seem good to the novice, but the expert will not see that as a good unless it can be controlled and deployed on the right occasions. 9 But notice that analogues of this internal good exist in several other ball sports, notably baseball (throwing a right-handed curve), and golf (shaping a draw).
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when external goods drive a practice, it systematically becomes corrupt. For example, if one plays football primarily in order to make money, cheating is fine, as long as it makes money. Now there is nothing wrong with making money per se, from Aristotle’s point of view. What’s wrong is mistaking an external aim for an internal one, and in so doing barring yourself (and others) from the achievement of internal goods. We can bring this point home with an example involving excavation methodologies. One may ask, “Why do you leave balks standing between excavation units?” Intelligible answers may include, inter alia: “It’s the way I was taught”, “Its created grid gives the air of the ‘scientific’ thereby bringing legitimacy to my excavation in the eyes of my peers and granting institutions”, or “To create raised paths for the removal of earth.” All of these answers point to something apparently good and perhaps genuinely good...but all of these goods are external to doing archaeology well. If one simply leaves balks between units to blindly follow some pedagogue, or to impress one’s peers, or to receive grants, or to facilitate wheel barrow rolling, they (balks) may be ignored with regard to the internal good they provide in rendering an understanding of the deposition history and vertical relationships of archaeological layers. Systematically pursuing these external goods in leaving balk debris bars one from achievements gained through use of the balk debris in reconstructing the best account of what went on at a site through time. This is not to say, of course, that we may not achieve several aims, both internal and external, in leaving balk debris. Rather, it is to say that the internal aim of doing archaeology well by leaving a contiguous undisturbed stratification next to excavated areas should take precedence over external aims such as ease in earth removal. Just this much has large implications for the practice of archaeology. Suppose that the archaeologist typically has as his proximate internal aim constructing the best account of what went on at this site(s) in this period(s), or to best say how this site developed over time, recognizing the Hardin and Holt, 7
artifactual and pre-historical constraints. This is what Schiffer, among others, calls an idiographic approach.10 To subordinate this internal idiographic aim to a neo-positivist view of science (an external aim) would be (in part) to show how such a site illustrates a nomothetic, or law-governed, account of how all human societies develop over time. But the nomothetic model has a large potential for corrupting the best archaeological account of the particular site, from ignoring counter evidence or anomic elements to tendentious interpretation; the nomothetic model is a Procrustean bed. In Aristotelian terms, it is a mistake to do archaeology primarily in order to be a scientist, a mistake just as potentially corrupting as playing football primarily in order to be a money-maker. Worse, suppose that the neo-positivist view of science, which crept into archaeology in the 1960s, is just wrong (as most philosophers of science indeed now think): then not only would Syro-Palestinian archaeology have mistaken an external aim for an internal aim, it would have aimed at a philosophical fiction. Aristotle claims that the higher the level of generality in a teleological taxonomy, the emptier the specification of ends. For instance, one can say that all practices aim at some end: excellent practice. But unless we forcibly impose an external end upon all practices (say, everybody works for money) , one cannot say what excellent practice amounts to except by giving an internal specification, fully understandable only to practitioners. There is no single, overarching Good at which all practices aim.11
10
Schiffer citation
11
Readers of Aristotle in English may retort that on the contrary, that is precisely what Aristotle says in the first book of the Nicomachean Ethics, i.e., that there is such a single, monopolistic end. In large part, this is simply an artifact of translation, since Aristotle is clearly in the hypothetical mode: if goods were ordered in a single hierarchy, there would be such a good. As it turns out, eudaimonia, or human flourishing, is not such a good, even though it answers to the epithet “the good and the best”. Human flourishing is itself homonymous: functionally equivalent, but picking out different combinations of practice for different individuals.
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Just as importantly, Aristotle goes on to say that we needn’t have come to a complete and final specification of “the” end internal to a practice in order for that practice to flourish. Part of any flourishing practice, for example a flourishing archaeology, is a changing and fuller understanding of what it is to do archaeology well. The practice which has achieved a full and noncontroversial understanding of its overall aim and what that entails is moribund, as Paul Feyerabend once pointed out.12 1.2 Virtuoso epistemology: Excellence and expertise FOOTNOTE FOLLOWING SOMEWHERE IN HERE
NEW BEGINNING OF SECTION The central and distinctive feature of Aristotle’s own account of inquiry is the ideal inquirer, the person who both possesses and practices the developed excellences (aretai) of character and intellect such as honesty, courage, wisdom and perception.13 Whatever the canonical list of these
12
See the first footnote in chapter one of the third edition of Against Method, (New York: Verso), 1993. He elaborates on inconsistency as progressive device in chapter 3. 13
Perhaps the single largest obstacle faced by those who would acquire Aristotle’s distinctive contribution to understanding inquiry is that his works are systematically and anachronistically mis-categorized. His so-called “epistemological” works, so called because they resemble elements of modern and contemporary theory of knowledge, are where most look. There, the contemporary reader will indeed find (in the Prior and Posterior
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excellences, whatever the content, however they may need to be modified or the list augmented or diminished to fit into contemporary contexts, the emphasis on the excellent person, as opposed to methodology, distinguishes Aristotle’s account from contemporary philosophical methodologies.14 A second and consequent distinctive feature is that these excellences are rare: so rare, in fact, that the recent usage of “excellence” in English does not convey the force of arete, nor, still worse, does the standard English translation of arete, “virtue”. “Virtuosity”, in recent English, better captures that force.15 Thus, in direct contrast to contemporary philosophical epistemologies which presume no relevant differences in “knowers” not reducible to impersonal conditions, Aristotle himself explicitly attributes “knowing” differences to differences in the character and intellect of persons. For instance, in the passage from which we take our epigraph, Aristotle raises the question of how we determine a genuine good from merely apparent goods.16 His response explicitly departs from Plato’s own solution, which is to distinguish ontologically between appearance and reality, and then say that the virtuousic person sees reality, while others see appearances. By contrast, Aristotle
Analytics and the Topics) a familiar propositional account of knowledge, replete with discussions of the problems of induction, deduction, and the regress problem for first principles. But few are reading the Nicomachean Ethics outside of undergraduate courses on ethical theory. Yet only in that work, particularly Book VI, Aristotle gives his fullest and most distinctive account of successful inquiry. For the scholarly details of our approach, see Author 1999, 2002, 2013. 14
It is distinctive for us; for Aristotle’s own contemporaries, it was more an articulation of a widespread commonplace. 15
Part of the problem in contemporary Anglophone philosophy is the use of the English word "virtue" as the standard translation of the Attic arete. So we here choose an alternative rendering of arete which alludes, in contemporary English, to Aristotle's distinctive emphases: “virtuosity”.“Virtuosity” thus exploits the connection between the Latin virtus and the Italian virtuoso, and preserves a certain linguistic continuity with medieval Latin renderings of arete by virtus. Though the English “virtuoso” changes quickly from a 17th century term of praise to an 18th century term of derogation, by way of musical usage in 19th century English it returns in the mid-20th century to a term of praise. 16
NE 1113a15-1114b25
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makes a distinction not between types of things, but between ways of seeing.17 The Aristotelian virtuoso has no access to a reality which is not also present to others. Rather, he says that each state of character has its own appertinent way of seeing the same things, and it is the excellent person who sees things correctly. Crucially, there is no impersonal epistemic standard to which the virtuoso appeals, nor is there any neutral way of seeing “the facts” to which we could compare any person’s own seemings.18 The virtuoso is the standard and measure, and the way things appear to him is the best way to see them so far.19 This is not a skeptical point, though it was taken to be so when it achieved prominence in mid 20th century Anglophone philosophy of science with writers as otherwise different as Hanson, Kuhn, and Feyerabend.20 In fact, both supporters and critics of these writers saw it as a skeptical point: supporters in a giddy let-a-thousand-flowers-bloom irrational mood, critics in a somber deathof-western-civilization mood. Both were wrong, because they failed to see that it implied a very different view of rationality than the one by which both critics and supporters were possessed. And lacking the neo-Aristotelian conceptual resources which we provide here, they were barred from
17 Phainomenon, a perfect middle/passive participle from the verb phaino, means literally “being appeared to”, and is routinely translated (correctly) as a substantive: an appearance. In the passage below, the passive form phainetai is the governing verb, and is best translated as “appears, seems” with an indirect object in the dative. 18
Kuhn, betraying the mid-1960s Anglophone context in which he wrote, put this points in linguistic terms, that there is no neutral observation language. 19
This point is made in a number of other passages in NE, notably 1144a30-35 and 1176a15-20. Seen in this way, the point is reinforced by Metaphysics Book 4, on the unintelligibility of self-contradiction from the point of view of Aristotle himself. He twice there jokes that it would take another form of life to understand: a person who contradicts himself is no better than a vegetable. But precisely because Aristotle previously has said that this work, ta meta ta phusika, is how we should see things from the point of view of wisdom, and every point of view, if really inhabited, contains both things which seem utterly obvious and things which seem utterly absurd, then Book 4 is a report on how utterly absurd self-contradiction seems...from the point of view of someone who sees everything else as Aristotle himself does. 20 Hanson’s famous term is “theory-laden” observation. Note Scheffler’s “mob psychology”, tendency on the part of both critics and supporters of standard view of rationality to run with it.
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seeing this episode as anything else but a clash between the forces of reason and unreason, this failure of seeing being an object lesson in our own account. So far, all we have is that an honest, courageous, wise and perceptive inquirer is a better inquirer. This should seem obvious except for two things: the idea that these qualities are hallmarks of superiority, or indeed are achievements, and the insufficiency of these qualities to guarantee truth. Surely, it may be objected, someone who tells the truth, stands up for what he believes, sees the big picture and sees things that others miss...surely such a person is a baseline commodity, the “virtues” in question being minimum qualifications. Moreover, the possession and exercise of these so-called excellences does not guarantee that a person will reach the truth.21 Let’s do a bit more analysis to overcome these two initial objections. First, none of the descriptions given above would count as virtuosic, being oversimple and failing to see that the excellences are intertwined. Take honesty: for Aristotle, honesty is telling the truth in the right way, at the right time, for the right reasons, to the right people, in the right amount, where each of these “rights” is only determinable in specific circumstances. “Always tell the truth” is the ham-fisted general rule one gives to children on the idea that though they can go wrong (“You’re fat and smelly, Aunt Myrtle”), they will err on the side of too much, rather than too little (“I didn’t take it”). Notice that the typical failures of children given above would be rectified by perception, wisdom (“she may be fat and smell bad, but this reunion is not the right time or place to tell her, nor am I the right person to do so”) and courage (“I did take it, and then I didn’t realize
21
We here depart from Aristotle’s own view. Aristotle is clear that to have genuinely achieved any of the intellectual excellences is, a fortiori, to have grasped the truth (NE 1139b10-20). But instead of anything mysterious, we take him to mean that the success condition for someone to have achieved intellectual virtuosity tout court (not merely relative to ability and circumstance) is to have grasped the truth, and anything else is not quite virtuosic. We would rather allow for fallibility in genuine expertise and be able to call someone perceptive without attaching a guarantee of truth, partly for the reason that, since no independent way exists of checking up on whether a putatively wise or perceptive person has indeed grasped the truth, no humanly accessible guarantee of virtuosity exists.
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how quickly it would squeeze out, and I covered the mess with a towel, we might need to clean it up quick... even though I know I’ll be punished”). Things only get more complex in the adult world, and as this complexity grows, the number of people who get it right shrinks. How many people do we know who, time after time, tell the right amount, at the right time, to the right people, in the right way, etc? Honesty, on this view, is indeed an achievement, and so are all the other excellences. Moreover, in order to develop honesty, one must develop the other excellences in concert: no one can be honest except that he is also wise, perceptive, and courageous. An honest inquirer, therefore
RETURN TO INSUFFICIENCY, ATTACKTHE PRESUPPOSITION THAT WHAT WE WANTED WAS A GUARANTEE, SIMPLE-MINDED CONNECTION WITH RULES THEN FOCUS ON INTELLECTUAL EXCELLENCES AND INQUIRY, INJECT TERM “EXPERT”
We don’t have anything mysterious in mind. A discussion of the development of virtuosity in an individual is the best way to explain this virtuoso-as-epistemic-standard point, and it is also the best way to set up the alternative view of rationality we spell out in section 2. And perhaps if we substitute the blander term “expert” for “virtuoso”, and talk about apprenticeship, this point will seem more plausible.
NOW TALK ABOUT EXPERT AND NOVICE SEEMINGS, USE A’S OWN DIAGONAL EXAMPLE. THEN TALK ABOUT HOW INTELLECTUAL EXCELLENCES Hardin and Holt, 13
REQUIRES HONESTY AND COURAGE, AND YOU’RE DOWN TO IMAGINATION, PERCEPTION, AND PRACTICAL WISDOM.
INTRODUCE (MODIFIED) AFTER VIRTUOSITY MORE GENERALLY We find in the Ethics that the goal of inquiry for Aristotle is the formation of a dynamic set of interrelated dispositions to see things in the best way so far.22 These achieved dispositions constitute intellectual virtuosity. They may be collectively known as the excellences of thought or the intellectual excellences, and are differentiated by their object and their means of development. Wisdom (sophia), for instance, is a grasp of how things hang together; understanding (nous) is a grasp of universals in isolation. In order to make this clear, let us broaden the discussion for a moment and talk about the development of virtuosity more generally, and then slide almost imperceptibly into a discussion of the excellences of thought. Virtuosity tout court is an achieved excellence of function in some sphere of activity: thought, feeling, action or combination of these three. These excellences are achieved by some combination of experience, habituation, and formal education. The excellences are both intrinsically good and instrumental to flourishing as part of the best life. Virtuosity is first an end in itself: understanding, perception, wisdom, these are achievements regardless of their usefulness.23
22
Aristotle uses both visual and tactile metaphors in describing the intellectual excellences. Elsewhere we have used the term “apprehension” to capture their generic function (Author, 2002). Alasdair MacIntyre coined the phrase “best so far” to capture the temporal aspect of achievement embedded in the Aristotelian excellences and thus to avoid hypostatization (see MacIntyre 1984). 23 Think here of Aristotle’s own example of a fine and noble action done for its own sake: the Spartans combing their hair before they were sure to die in the battle of Thermopylae.
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But just because virtuosity of intellect and character is constituted by excellence of function in particular areas of activity, and living is constituted by the activities one engages in, then virtuosity partly constitutes living excellently, the remaining portions having to do with elements farther outside one’s control, such as sufficient material wealth, leisure, and good fortune with respect to opportunities and natural or man-made disasters. The excellences are indeed both means and ends, but not with respect to their areas of function. In its proper area of function, an excellence is the end to be achieved. And so intellectual virtuosity is superordinate to everything in the sphere of thought. Outside the sphere of thought, it is subordinate only to a conception of overall flourishing. But again, that conception of flourishing is not independent of nor is it produced by the excellences. Virtuosity is the central and stable achievement of the flourishing life. There is no such thing as a disembodied excellence, except as an abstraction. Excellences are not themselves particular existents, they are modes of the existence of particular individuals. This conception of virtuosity requires a double distinction between potential (what is possible, what we can become) and actuality (what we make of that possibility, what we in fact become): between the capacity for acquiring virtuosic dispositions and their actual acquisition, and between the possession of these dispositions and their exercise on particular occasions. We are fitted by nature, says Aristotle, with the potential to achieve virtuosity, but its achievement is hard work, not a natural part of aging. Moreover the excellences themselves are potentials to think/feel/act on the occasion when opportunity presents itself.24 Put more plainly, the achievement of excellence is the making
24
In terminology familiar to Aristotle scholars, a first actualization therefore is a virtuoso person (in disposition); a second actualization is also a virtuoso person (in action/feeling/thought). Metonymic shorthand will allow us to say that a first actualization is a disposition to virtuosity, a second actualization is the activity thereof.
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of a person who thinks, acts, and feels better (in some area) than those who have not so achieved. How does one learn to be a virtuoso? By apprenticeship. The elements we listed above are essential to apprenticeship: formal education (reading books), dialectical interchange between apprentice and master, practical (think praxis) experience under corrective supervision, the formation of excellent habits, and induction on the part of the apprentice spanning each of the other four elements. All these elements are inseparable in situ. The student begins by studying paradigm cases of virtuous behavior, both from books and from the master, learning which elements are generic, which specific to the occasion. The generic elements are abstracted, from paradigms, often through dialectical interchanges, and may be formulated as principles; the particular elements too are often presented as specifications of principles.25 But in apprenticeship principles are heuristics.26 What is crucial is honing the inductive process by learning to abstract the correct universal from paradigms, developing the excellence of perception by seeing particulars as characterized by universals, developing the excellence of understanding by learning to grasp universals (or “concepts”) in isolation, developing wisdom by learning to see how all the elements hang together, and so on for the other intellectual excellences.27 Virtuosity is thus developed by apprenticeship. The process is not piecemeal, but an organic whole, where the lack of one element
25
When the educational milieu “forgets” both that principles came from past achievements and that apprenticeship is about the formation of character, then principles become the focus of education and the acquisition of such principles becomes the aim. This, as we will note later, is a recipe for mediocrity. 26
Note the ironic reversal of the standard view in which examples are thought of as heuristic explanatory devices to learn principles. 27
The heuristic device for the excellence of understanding is definition. The phrase “in isolation” is somewhat misleading, however, since it seems to imply that a universal such as “good” can be understood antecedently to seeing how it might be related to other universals and how it can be instantiated in particulars in nonreductive, again homonymous, ways. On Aristotle’s view, however, a fully developed understanding of any universal is precisely a grasp of just those forms of interrelatedness, to be contrasted with the novice’s grasp of a simple but impoverished textbook definition.
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negatively affects the rest. That is, if one genuinely learns/develops honesty, she will at the same time learn/develop perception, wisdom, understanding, et al. The student then must practice under supervision in simple situations tightly analogous to paradigm cases, reinforcing and slightly extending the range of his potentially virtuous dispositions. Finally, and only if she does not wash out, she must take these dispositions and extend them to every area of activity, where her (and others) experience in exercising her further-along-but-not-yetvirtuous dispositions forms a source of future induction and perception. We note three crucial points. First, no one acquires virtuosity naturally or by accident. It results, if it does result, from many years of hard work within and informed by a tradition which supplies both the content of the excellences (via paradigms) and the social support necessary for apprenticeship (complete with a reward and punishment system for those whose desires have yet to be transformed, or never will be transformed). The excellences are thus artifacts resting upon artifacts. Second, virtuosity will not be widespread. There are many novices, fewer journeymen, and even fewer masters. Thus the fact that we rarely meet virtuosi is to be expected: epistemic and moral failure is the rule, not the exception. Third, the possession of virtuosity need not imply loquacity. For the possession of the excellences of thought is not the possession of a theory, nor is the exercise of virtuosity (except in writing or speaking) the production of sentences. The soldier who perceives that here is the place and now is the time to lob a grenade, and subsequently does so with just the right trajectory and timing, has possessed and exercised virtuosity in the absence of any explicitly linguistic elements. This last point opens up a large and complex topic, and Aristotle has some very interesting things to say on it, under the heading of practical reasoning (syllogismos tou praktikou and its variants). Though the arguments are involved, let me simply assert here that for Aristotle practical Hardin and Holt, 17
reasoning involves reasoning aimed at, and whose conclusion is, activity. Aristotle envisions a deductive logical structure (enthymematic chains of practical syllogisms) which is the settled linguistic expression, after the fact, of past successful virtuosic activity, and which very much resembles what we moderns call a theory. But whereas it seems to us that the point of much research and inquiry is to produce theories, for Aristotle such deductive linguistic structures are post hoc reconstructions, exercises in the communication of one’s apprehension: the linguistic expression of virtuoso judgements, and thus derivative and secondary. Put another way, a theory is the byproduct of successful practice. As Aristotle himself notes, the linguistic expression is always partial and systematically ambiguous. In Book I of the Metaphysics, for instance, Aristotle explicitly says that he is attempting to describe how things look from the vantage point of wisdom, on the assumption that he himself has achieved wisdom, or the best approximation thereof so far. And so when in Book IV he discusses the famous “principle” of non-contradiction, he emphasizes once again that it is not the linguistic expression which is the “first principle”, but the understanding of being which that expression attempts to capture.28 Where do we find practices or traditions in which intellectual virtuosity is nourished? What we have written so far seems to suggest that we should find epistemic guilds whose explicit aim is to foster intellectual virtuosity, and in which the Aristotelian tradition is alive and well. But this common misunderstanding, and misinterpretation of Aristotle, is easily rectified. Aristotle draws a distinction between philosophical practice, one of whose explicit aims is the study of the excellences, and the development and use of the excellences in other practices. The master carpenter, for 28
This opens up another topic beyond the scope of this paper: how we are to understand archai, the origins from which the virtuoso reasons. We simply assert here, without argument, that the arche of a sound piece of practical reasoning is not a necessarily true or self-evident principle, but an intellectually virtuosic person, to whom, because of her expertise, certain things have become obvious. If put into propositional form, this arche is an expression of the way things seem to the virtuosic person. This is true of so-called theoretical reasoning as well.
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instance, exercises imagination to see what might be done with what rough pieces of wood: what joints will hold for this type of wood and where they should be located, what shapes can be hewn, what textures can be achieved.29 But in order to exercise imagination he must first understand a whole range of small scale universals and their relations. Consider joinery: he must understand not just the rudiments of each type of joint (butt, mortise and tenon, dovetail, etc.) but the relative merits of each in relation to function (drawer, frame, roof truss, load-bearing, lateral stress, etc.) and material (hardwood, softwood, moisture content, grain). And just as Aristotle noted, the carpenter cannot fully possess the excellence of understanding unless he possesses practical wisdom, seeing how each joint, in its proper relations, contributes to the goods of carpentry. And so on for the other excellences. Intellectual virtuosity is thus acquired – if it is indeed acquired – in the process of becoming expert at some practice. Its acquisition is typically tacit, and if the practice is in a confident mode, it remains tacit. Notice that although the term virtuosity, being a success term, should properly be restricted to experts, nevertheless the intellectual excellences are not restricted to professional inquirers. Every practice, properly constituted with goods internal to that practice, is at its cutting edge a form of inquiry, an extension of its characteristic modes of thought and behavior into the unknown. As the legendary golfer Jack Nicklaus, toward the end of his career, said of the virtuosity of the young Tiger Woods, “He plays a game with which I am not familiar.”30 This does not entail that virtuosity is transferable from domain to domain, even though
29
Aristotle does not explicitly mention imagination as an intellectual excellence, but given his overall scheme, there must be something like it. Imagination as virtuosity, and not a mere flight of fancy, is a combination of wisdom and perception in the optative mood: the ability to see how things might, really, be. In the absence of imagination, practices from physics to carpentry stagnate. 30 This phrase was originally coined by the equally legendary Bobby Jones to describe the young Jack Nicklaus. The point is that virtuoso practice and imagination extends our other modes of apprehension.
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there is analogy and functional equivalence: having an analog in multiple practices does not entail that the analogs have some core which can exist and be acquired outside of any practice. E.g., let us say, with Aristotle, that justice is desert in merit. Justice in baseball is partially constituted by having each player do what he does best; justice in the molecular biology lab is analogous. But the stuff and substance of what each person does best is not the same. The virtuosic shortstop will not, qua shortstop, be expert in recombinant DNA techniques. Thus the virtuosity which the shortstop displays in baseball will net him no desert in the lab. This is our guarantor that an Aristotelian approach is not the imposition of a philosophic schema on archaeology from the outside: only apprenticeship into archaeology will result, if it does, in archaeological expertise. By the same token, to the extent that archaeological practice is idiographic, only apprenticeship into SyroPalestinian archaeology will yield the Syro-Palestinian archeological expert. So virtuosity must be taught tacitly, in the course of explicitly seeking other aims. Notice, by the way, that if there were such second order epistemic guilds explicitly teaching virtuosity, as we suggested a moment ago, they would be found in philosophy departments. But the fact that such guilds are not widespread, though it indeed hampers the first order cultivation of virtuosity by depriving initiates of an explicit theoretical education into the excellences, does not entail that virtuosity cannot be taught.31 Thus the person who both possesses and exercises intellectual virtuosity is one who flourishes in the activity of thought, and whose intellectual flourishing contributes to her flourishing overall. And this person is the end we seek in inquiry. We mistake our end if we aim at disembodied principles or the production of theory. Persons, not principles, are the goals of
31 This suggests one of several roles for epistemic principles to play in the education of potential virtuosi, roles which we will sketch in a moment.
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inquiry. Virtuosity is a form of excellence, an achievement. Every person, so far as she is able, should strive for excellence in the areas of endeavor open to her by individual potential and circumstance. So every person, insofar as he is able, should strive for virtuosity of thought. For anyone to achieve this, relative to ability and circumstance, is to achieve a mastery of thought. For anyone to achieve this absolutely, better than anyone else, is for that person to be a virtuoso. Hence wisdom, considered not merely relative to ability and circumstance but absolutely, is a form of virtuosity. And so all the other intellectual excellences, as well as the moral excellences, are forms of virtuosity as well. Thus the virtuosic person, having really achieved excellence, is quite by definition a virtuoso.32 In the practice of archaeology, three intellectual excellences stand out: •
perception (seeing an object as something)
•
imagination (constructing how it might have been from necessarily partial and perspectival artifacts and their contexts)
•
practical wisdom (seeing how whole discipline/practice hangs together).
Notable examples of these three are abundant in other areas: Alfred Wegener sees that the coastline of Africa is a good fit with the coastline of South America; Copernicus re-imagines how the observed astronomic phenomena could be accommodated by a heliocentric universe at least as well as by a geocentric one; Wilhelm Röntgen knew the field of electromagnetism well enough to recognize a significant anomaly as a cardboard screen glowed when it should not. Examples from archaeology abound as well. What the undergraduate excavator sees as a 32
Though we haven’t the space to develop it here, we note that just as the moral excellences transform the desires of their possessors, so do the intellectual excellences. Indeed, the transformation of desire in moral virtuosity cannot be accomplished apart from a concomitant intellectual transformation. The cowardly avoid conflict at all costs because they see it as a bad thing and therefore are averse to it. The courageous see some of the same conflicts as good, and desire them.
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thin white rock, the Syro-Palestinian archaeologist sees as a sherd of a Cypriot milk bowl. King and Stager (2001) imagine a detailed reconstruction and location of Solomon’s legendary temple, even though no structural remains of this edifice have ever been located archaeologically. Olga Tufnell recognized that the exclusive appearance of lmlk stamps, jars and other ceramic forms, as well as the absence of rosettes inter alia in Lachish level III was inconsistent with what at the time was the canonical Iron II chronology. “But” it will be objected, “how are we to recognize genuine virtuosity – wisdom, understanding, imagination, perception? Don’t we need an impersonal criterion to judge?” If we had such an impersonal criterion, of course, there would be no need for experts; it is precisely the search for such an impersonal criterion of success in inquiry which has eluded the history of philosophy and science, and subsequently engendered the impasse in Syro-Palestinian archaeology. So the search for an impersonal criterion is misguided. Still, it seems reasonable to ask for public marks of virtuosity. After all, no one sees the excellences directly. Thus each excellence should and does have recognizable characteristics. We recognize imagination by innovation, by the introduction of a new way of seeing things. We recognize practical wisdom by its scope: does this perspective take all the relevant factors (data, rival viewpoints) into account in showing how things hang together? The public mark of understanding is the ability to produce a good definition. The public mark of perception is the ability to recognize a gate where others see an artifact of excavation. But we hasten to add that these are merely the characteristic signs of virtuosity, not the thing itself. To reify the excellences into impersonal criteria, to transform practical wisdom into adequacy of scope, to reduce understanding to definition, is to make the same mistake behaviorists of all stripes make when, having found something measurable, they transform the measurable into the fundamental. Hardin and Holt, 22
Moreover, although it should be obvious at this point, it bears repeating that virtuosity is as much moral as intellectual. The honest, just and courageous investigator is a better investigator, as well as a better person, than the dishonest, cowardly, and unjust. To sum up this section we emphasize 4 key points: Intellectual virtuosity is an achievement, available only to a few. Aristotelianism is strongly elitist. Where modern epistemology is reflexively egalitarian, focused upon ordinary cognition, Aristotelianism (and ancient philosophy in general) focuses upon extraordinary cognition, the best thinking so far. Virtuosity is barred from all but a few, for strictly because of differential ability, opportunity, experience, and luck, very few will achieve excellence in any area. Now it is true that in Aristotle we find a distinction between virtuosity relative to ability and circumstance and virtuosity simpliciter, but even though the former achievement may be more widespread, it still represents a small fraction of the general populace. How many people do we know who have become the best that they can be? Intellectual virtuosity is a form of apprehension. The virtuoso sees things differently than others. The excellences of thought are all developed forms of apprehension, usually expressed in Aristotle by visual and tactile metaphors: seeing, grasping, appearing, taking. Each specific form of virtuosity is differentiated by its function. This has important implications for the very idea of reason and rationality which we discuss in section 2. Expertise is internal to practices, not transferable. Though analogues of each global intellectual excellence will exist in every practice of inquiry, the stuff of these excellences will differ. Thus only the Syro-Palestinian archaeological expert will be in a position to see how things stand in her field, though experts in other fields may see analogies in SPA to their own fields. Interestingly, this means that extending analogies to other fields of inquiry may open up fruitful avenues of Hardin and Holt, 23
research in one’s own. Expertise is not a matter of principles, but of persons. The priority of person over principle is a hallmark of Aristotelian inquiry. This will become more clear in the next section as we discuss two ideals of rationality and the very idea of scientific method. But what should be clear now is that the best understanding of any area so far, the upshot of Aristotelian inquiry, is not an impersonal theory, but a personal perspective.
2. Rationality: competing ideals 2.1 The alternatives. We are now in a position to see what we take to be the most crucial, if tacit, issue in the current impasse: the entrenchment of a failed ideal of reason and rationality coupled with a lack, as yet, of an articulated alternative ideal. Let us be clear: we are not offering the all too common failure-of-rationality-in-the-sciences thesis with it’s apparently inevitable conclusion that important parts of scientific practice are nonrational or even irrational. Rather, we are saying that the currently entrenched ideal of rationality is misguided as an ideal, and that we have an alternative ideal which not only shows how the apparently nonrational (from the point of view of the entrenched ideal) elements of practices of inquiry are (or can be) indeed rational, but also can explain why the entrenched ideal was bound to fail. This, of course, is a much stronger thesis; let’s see if we can substantiate it. The entrenched ideal is what we’ll call the logical ideal. In broad outline, the logical ideal says that reason, when doing its best, when rational, is like a logic: it is a discursive, inferential, and impartial arbiter of truth. Neither bound by time, place, circumstance or person, nor respecting these distinctions, the logical ideal is an objective decision procedure both for full-scale theories and individual hypotheses. Moreover, the logical ideal purports to exhaust the very idea of reason.
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Reason is nothing more than formulating and drawing inferences from propositions, whether these propositions are low-level empirical hypotheses or high-level principles. Viewed thus broadly, it encompasses both deduction and induction: judging inferences valid or invalid on the one hand, probable or improbable on the other. In this light, scientific method would be the height of achievement of the logical ideal. Indeed, science has come to be seen as the exemplar of rationality in the modern world, precisely because of its alleged method. This is what accounts for the honorific use of the term “science” so ubiquitous these days.33 This is what accounts for the topos of “let’s make ____ scientific” in the last 2-3 centuries. And of course, the honorific sense of science as the exemplar of rationality is what drove and continues to drive those who would make archaeology “scientific”. Our alternative ideal is what we’ll call the apprehensive ideal. Again in broad outline, the apprehensive ideal is neither discursive, inferential, nor impartial. It is a developed form of seeing, taking, grasping, interpreting, based upon education, training, and experience. Given the account of expertise or virtuosity we’ve sketched above, it should be clear that the apprehensive ideal is not often satisfied: far more inquirers fall short of the ideal than achieve it.34 Notice that the apprehensive ideal is partial, and that the criteria are embodied. Perhaps we should substitute the term “judge” for “criterion”, since the experts are the criteria, they themselves being the results of their education, training, and experience. It is no objection to this view that experts can be mistaken, and that they can disagree. Fallibility, competition, and embeddedness in a tradition are inherent features of this view, as is a temporal element: to echo Imre Lakatos, there is no instant 33
Consider a single example: “political science”. We discuss the honorific sense of “science” and its function in a moment. 34 This suggests at least two roles for rules of inference and method: correctives and guides for those who fail to achieve expertise. We discuss this and other roles in 2.1
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rationality. Articulating rationality-in-archaeology is the central and often tacit issue driving the last half century’s worth of methodological debate in archaeology (and the last thirty year’s worth in SyroPalestinian archaeology). The explicit terms of the debate vary, sometimes mask the issues about rationality, sometimes are a level removed, but all are driven by tacit or partially explicit ideas about what it is to be rational in archaeology.35 Even those who have derided methodological debate and the correspondent intrusion of philosophy and science, opting for an apparent pragmatic stance, do so precisely because it has seemed unreasonable for archaeologists to engage in epistemological speculation when there’s so much material to dig. It would be hard enough to articulate the ideal of reason in archaeology, presupposing only one. However, we wish to articulate two ideals, and our problem is complicated by the fact that virtually all parties to the debates, philosophers included, make the mistake of presupposing the entrenched logical ideal of reason as the only concept of reason, indeed as reason itself. Many readers will already have recognized that this mistake is the intellectual historical analogue of ethnocentrism, and it cuts both ways. Just as parochial tribes will think of themselves as the people,
35
•
•
•
• •
Individual diagnoses: conservatives Dunnel et al and even Finkelstein, wanting archaeology to be rational, on the logicist view rightly mistaking the scientific for the rational and opting for scientism, since rational is good, thus science is good liberals like Shanks and McGuire mistaking scientific for the rational and, since scientific reason (on the logical ideal) is rule-governed and rules are constraints and constraints are by definition bad for a liberal, the opt for the touchy-feely “craft” Thompson, recognizing rightly that no valid form of inference captures successful archaeological practice, but lacking a non-inferential conception of reason, says there’s an ineliminable element of subjectivity, by definition (on the logicist view) non-rational. Still, he thinks its educated, trained, experienced, so his article very useful Schiffer, conflating nomological content with nomological (nomic) practice, as everyone does who thinks there is a scientific method. Wylie, correctly recognizing the holistic element, lacking resources, latches onto “model”, but still insists, on the logicist view, that these models are chosen by inference from “evidence”. She misinterprets Thompson, uses the term “intuition”, thus symptomatic for us of someone in the grip of logicism.
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mistaking pervasive features of their local culture for timeless universals, parochial scholars will mistake pervasive features of their intellectual milieu for timeless universals. The logical ideal of reason has been so pervasive in the last 4 centuries that most have come to think of it as reason tout court. And it is practically impossible to recognize, let alone unearth, one’s deepest presuppositions until confronted with an alternative which may seem, initially, to be preposterous. Thus the standard dilemma is seen, by those who think the very idea of reason is exhausted by the logical ideal, to be between reason and unreason. That is, when scientific method, the avatar of reason, is criticized, it seems that reason itself is under attack, and that the critics are calling for an unreasoned, an irrational, practice of archaeology. Indeed, those critics who are possessed of the logical ideal of rationality do at times seem to be advocating this. But most of the time, they themselves shrink from the apparent implication of irrationality. However, lacking anything like a robust alternative, the net effect is something like an intellectual shrug. Correspondingly, every dichotomous methodological debate in archaeology which proposes a tertium quid inarticulately realizes that something is amiss, but because lacking the conceptual resources to break free of the entrenched ideal and lacking the historical awareness of the rise of the logical ideal, they fall back on characterizing the rational element in archaeology as some form of inference, conservatives minimizing the apparently non-rational (because nonlogical) elements of “insight”, “imagination” and “intuition”, liberals emphasizing the allegedly non-rational elements. So perhaps the most important challenge faced by our view is to explain why the avatar of the logical ideal, scientific method, is misguided as an ideal, and had to fail. We now turn to that task.
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2.1 Virtuosity and method, expertise and rules 3 6 Had it not been for the many attempts to defend scientific method, no one would ever have doubted it. The very idea of a scientific method is one of the most extraordinary and useful fictions ever devised. As with all useful fictions, its official function is not its real one. The original and robust official function of a method in science was clearly and succinctly put by Rene Descartes in his Regulae: By “a method” I mean reliable rules which are easy to apply, and such that if one follows them exactly one will never take what is false to be true...but will gradually and constantly increase one’s knowledge....”37 Whatever their proposed candidates – induction, deduction, hypothetico-deduction, abduction – early modern and contemporary methodists assert that scientific method is the only reliable path to the truth. And early modern thinkers like Descartes and Francis Bacon, representing as they do the brash young beginnings of an intellectual tradition which purports to tear down the old intellectual edifices and erect new ones, give the clearest and most robust articulations of the very idea of a scientific method. Bacon, arguing for the institution of an entirely new order in the sciences in the Novum Organum, writes: There remains one hope of salvation, one way to good health: that the entire work of the mind be started over again; and from the very start the mind should not be left to itself, but be constantly
36
For a fuller treatment, see Holt 2002, Holt and Norwood 2013.
37
Descartes, Regulae ad Directionem Ingenii, p. 16 in Cottingham.
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controlled; and the business done (if I may put it this way) by machines.38 The idea is simple: follow the correct set of rules and you will reach the truth. And let us not diminish the attractions of this idea. Robustly envisioned, scientific method is precise and infallible so long as the rules are followed exactly. Method is also thematically consistent with early modern individualism. It is egalitarian to the core, and has a levelling effect: great minds and weak minds are equal, so long as they follow the rules. Bacon notes this approvingly: “Our method of discovery in the sciences is designed not to leave much to the sharpness and strength of the individual talent; it more or less equalises talent and intellects...”39 Method, conceived as a set of rules or principles which lead mechanically and infallibly to the truth, is uniquely democratic. Anyone, or at least any normal person with fully functioning equipment, can follow the rules. Descartes writes that his method is simple and easy to use, “...so that anyone who has mastered the whole method, however mediocre his intelligence, may see that there are no paths closed to him that are open to others....”40 It is, or rather ought to be, an historical and philosophical commonplace that there is no robust, global scientific method: that is, every proposed candidate fails, and fails at a very early stage. This much is clear from the history of failed attempts to say exactly what it amounts to; and one must say exactly what it is, or it does not exist, since to exist as a method it must be an explicit set of rules to follow . Each attempt has failed spectacularly by its own standards. We do not need
38
Francis Bacon, The New Organon, 1620, translated by Michael Silverthorne, edited by Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 28. 39
Book 1, aphorism 61. I am using Lisa Jardine’s new translation in Bacon, The New Organon
40
Descarte, p. 32 in cottingham
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an argument to the effect that there could be no scientific method, as if we could produce one; the history of failures is sufficient for our purposes.41 But what about the scientific method as an ideal, a lofty goal which, though we may never reach it, is nevertheless worth striving for? On the contrary, it is a misguided ideal. While we may praise the effect of a method in raising the inability of the novice to competence, the levelling effect cuts both ways: restrict the expert to following the rules, and you lower her ability to mediocrity. Science, nor inquiry in general, is not done by recipe, as the abundant counterexamples to every proposed candidate for scientific method show. And the robust conception of scientific method is indeed a recipe. As recipes will raise the level of novice cooks to adequacy, it will lower the level of expert chefs to mediocrity. Worse, no new cakes will ever be baked. Who writes recipes for the first time? Expert chefs...after the fact. Recipes are of necessity post hoc, retrospective. This is fine and well for the undergraduate lab, where the point is for novices to recapitulate past successes (find the specific gravity of lead). But the undergraduate lab presupposes that the answer to every lab question exists and is well defined, precisely because the lab instructor already knows exactly what the answer is. “A set of rules which, if followed exactly, will lead to the truth” is an excellent description of the undergraduate lab manual, which is necessarily post hoc : it leads to a truth already known. But in real inquiry, we do not know what the discovery is ... until it is discovered. After the discovery, we may write up the precedent as a set of rules, but following those rules will only get you to the previously discovered, not to the new. That we may retrospectively describe some practice with a set of rules does not mean that the original practice was arrived at by following a set of rules: the rules come after the fact.
41 Suppose I need a footnote here, though I can tell the history as well as anyone, actually, maybe I have somewhere....
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What, then, explains the extraordinary staying power of the idea of a scientific method? Five functional elements: 1.
Prestige. The very term “scientific” is used largely in the English language as an honorific. Precisely because nothing substantive ties plant ecology with particle physics, the honorific sense of the term is the only meaningful usage. But get to the term, and it confers instant prestige, as departments of political science, weed science, and human sciences will attest. It also functions to mask the imprecise and unpredictable elements of scientific discovery with the veneer of precision and accuracy.
2.
Routine. Once something useful has been discovered, we may need to get to that element again and again, and thus arise local scientific methods: routine and efficient ways of arriving at the same end. These routines of efficiency – recombinant techniques in DNA analysis and development, C14 techniques of dating – abound, and at the level of the technician, or the graduate students and undergraduate students recruited to dig on site, they function as rules, since the technician very often doesn’t see the whole enterprise and how his techniques are teleologically subordinate to an overall end.
3.
Memorandum. Closely allied to the routinization of past successful techniques, local methods can serve as memoranda. If you’ve ever asked yourself “Now how did I do that?”, you recognize the need for writing down recipes for all sorts of necessary components of field research.
4.
Training device. The transition from novice to journeyman is most often accomplished in graduate school. And graduate education is often mis-characterized Hardin and Holt, 31
as learning the principles of some discipline. We are accustomed to think of principled positions, principled distinctions, principled objections as paradigmatic. We instruct our graduate students that the giving of reasons is paramount, where the giving of reasons is equivalent to a referral to relatively basic principles. Even the negative objection which charges inconsistency appeals to a principle of noncontradiction. On this view the expert is, par excellence, a person of principle. But as we noted earlier, this mistakes the heuristic device for the goal. Rules and principles do have an important educational functions: as summary reductions of past virtuosic performance – as recipes – they serve as ersatz apprenticeships for novices. Think for a moment of the kind of education, experience and habituation Aristotle has in mind for the development of honesty. We start with simple rules for children, because they have simple minds: “Always tell the truth.” As (if) we grow smarter, we progress to study past examples, past paradigms, of honest behavior, and get experience in situations calling for the truth (or not), learning the relevant similarities and dissimilarities between paradigm cases and new cases, and practicing. But we only know after the fact, as the best example so far, what constitutes honesty in some particular case: how much truth to tell, to whom, in what way, at what time, etc. Since each new occasion potentially presents a novel situation, we cannot specify in advance a principle expressing honesty other than the very general and systematically ambiguous “Honesty is telling the truth in the right way at the right time to the right people in the right amount for the right reasons.” And we take it that no one will argue that our education into honesty consists in the accumulation of an infinite number of situation specific principles for situations Hardin and Holt, 32
which we have yet to encounter, principles which we carry around with us fully formed until we need them. To be sure, after the fact we can partially summarize past successful practice in some general rules of thumb (e.g. “Rarely, if ever, speak the truth about your great aunt’s latest hairdo.”), but these rules are shorthand guides to a platform of moral mediocrity, and cannot tell you exactly what to say when the occasion presents itself. For superior performance, a quick wit, a perceptive eye, a good memory and a good vocabulary are all necessary. It may be objected here that honesty is a moral, not an intellectual, excellence. But “right” in the general principle above is (to paraphrase Aristotle) to be specified by reason as the reasonable person specifies.42 This would be empty and question begging if Aristotle did not give an account of the role of the intellectual excellences in the development and exercise of the moral excellences, but of course he does. If we are to flourish, we must be honest. But the development of honesty is partly constituted by the development of intellectual excellences such as perception, imagination, and wisdom. And you cannot have any without having all, you cannot develop any without developing all. So there is no recourse to a specification of “right” than the judgements of the expert. 5.
Correctives for the inexpert. As Aristotle originally envisioned the role of law in the political community, so scientific methods function in the notional communities
42
1107a, a famously frustrating passage for the propositionalist in the Nicomachean Ethics. But it is only frustrating if the reader is looking either for the wrong thing or in the wrong place. If one is looking, like W.D. Ross, for a principle or a rule of reason, one will not find it in anywhere, for logos is simply a placeholder for the more specific excellent functions of reason like practical wisdom, perception, and understanding, as Aristotle makes clear in his brief introduction to Book 6, explicitly citing the previous passage. Aristotle does not make good on that promissory note anywhere else.
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of inquiry: for those who will not or are incapable of achieving virtuosity, the best we can hope for is that they will not violate the rules of competency, of minimally adequate behavior. In this way, egregious mistakes, moral or intellectual, can be avoided by following the rules, obviating weakness of character and intellect.
Kuhn, of course, was one of the first to note how throughly lacking in method scientific inquiry was, but then wondered how paradigms could guide research in the absence of rules. Aristotle, by contrast, wondered how rules could ever guide research. Kuhn, lacking the conceptual resources of Aristotelianism, settled on shared values as the guiding elements. With the resources of Aristotelianism, we can say that it is a successful apprenticeship into virtuosity which allows researchers to see new directions for inquiry. The search for a set of rules has always been a mistaken ideal: a political democracy may be the least worst option, but an intellectual democracy is simply a recipe for mediocre research. 3. The virtuoso archaeologist The neo-Aristotelian ideal which we have offered embraces the situatedness of inquirers, the idiosyncrasy of subject matter, the inescapable and necessary connection of reasoning with the particular details of the character of the reasoner, the often passionate attachment of the inquirer to the goals, the teleology, of his inquiry...embraces all of these elements, not as impediments to rationality and successful inquiry, but as constitutive of successful inquiry, provided these elements themselves are excellences. It counters the post-modernist critique by co-opting that critique and recognizing that all inquiry is historically and culturally situated, that reason doesn’t take the high road of content neutrality, that success in one area does not guarantee success in another, that there are no recipes ...embracing, in short, what both post-modernists and Enlightenment fundamentalists Hardin and Holt, 34
think of as irrationality, and instead making the distinction between rationality and irrationality a matter of degree, not kind: a matter of good practice versus bad practice, excellence versus poor performance. Armed with this alternative ideal, the teleological question which we raised early on, the question of what goals Syro-Palestinian archaeology should aim at, becomes a personal matter. The several questions each archaeologist should ask, answer, and then get on with it are these: am I good enough, smart enough, informed enough, honest, and have I the courage of my convictions? Because at any given juncture, all anyone can do is her best by her own lights: time, specifically the future direction and verdicts of the practice, will judge if that personal best is the best on offer... for a time. Rather than mere reflection on standards of practice, which brings practice to a standstill, reflective employment of those standards thought best is the best procedure for testing which rivals will persist, and which will die out. The overarching teleological question will de facto have been answered by experts doing their best.
But can we move beyond the simple example of excavation methods given in 1.1 to the more complex issues in Syro-Palestinian archaeology? If not, it would seem, our approach yields vanishingly small results. Let’s try. The key is to recognize that we have no impersonal criteria to apply; rather, we have to ask, of extant approaches, which approach better exhibits the central excellences we identified earlier: imagination, perception, and practical wisdom. Hardin and Holt, 35
This is nowhere better exemplified than in t the dating of Kh. En Nahas’ copper industry the two (or one) gates at Qeiyafa the epigraphical materials from Qeiyafa, Zeitah, Izbeth Sartah contemporary texts such as Pharaoh Sheshonq I’s victory accounts at the Karnack temple complex or the historical Aramean campaigns of Bir Hadad Hazael of the 9th century BCE the historicity of the biblical texts and the absolute chronological significance of the Iron IIA material culture (red-slipped, hand-burnished pottery; destruction strata at Qasile X, Megiddo VI, Hazor XI; six-chambered gates at Gezer VIII, Megiddo VA-IVB, and Hazor X; fortress enclosures in the Beer Sheva basin, etc.,) Carbon 14 and the ________ event changing settlement patterns from Iron I to Iron II
Early in this paper, we suggested that the outcome would be something like the assertion of common sense, what we always knew: that the wise, honest, just, perceptive and courageous archaeologist is a better archaeologist than the unwise, dishonest, unjust, blind, and cowardly archaeologist. And now it’s time to get back to work.
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Hardin and Holt, 37
