In the course of a fascinating post in which he discusses Geoff Pullum’s claim that there is a kind of third way between linguistic descriptivism and prescriptivism, Glen Whitman wonders about the relative merits of internal versus external normative critique of systems of social rules. In the process, he quotes the ubiquitous Uncle Fritz (from LLL, vol. II), and then comments:
If we are to make full use of all the experience which has been transmitted only in the form of traditional rules, all criticism and efforts at improvement of particular rules must proceed within a framework of given values which for the purpose in hand must be accepted as not requiring justification. We shall call ‘immanent criticism’ this sort of criticism that moves within a given system of rules and judges particular rules in terms of their consistency or compatibility with all other recognized rules in inducing the formation of a certain kind of order of actions.
Hayek’s argument hinges on two aspects of his thought – first, his severe doubts about the ability of human beings to fully comprehend the functionality of their social norms (an epistemological position); and second, his belief in an imperfect but usually beneficial process of cultural evolution. If one doubts either of these positions, external critique might seem more sensible.
I agree with Glen, but there’s more to the point of internal critique than just this, I think.
Hayekian immanent criticism bears a close resemblance to Rawlsian reflective equilibrium (RE). I believe the most overlooked aspect of Rawls account of RE is that the raw material for reflective moral deliberation flows from from the same capacity that accounts for moral motivation. If we use commitment A to criticize commitment B, and vice versa, and end up with a new commitment C, we can marshall the motivation associated with our initial commitments into the service of C. The problem with external criteria of the right is that they may have no connection to the commitments that govern our moral motivation. The external criterion may tell us that we ought to have commitment D. But there may be no plausible psychological path from here to there. So a system of rules constructed according to an external criterion (the principle of utility is an excellent example) will be regarded by actual people as alien and offensive to their moral sensibility, and will not gain their willing compliance. A system of rules arrived at through a process of reflective equilibrium or immanent criticism will generally have a connection to our prior tendencies of judgment and motivation, and will therefore be more likely to gain willing compliance, and will therefore more likely be stable and viable as a system of rules for real people.
Reliance on immanent criticism is, I believe, a hallmark of a genuinely liberal, non-utopian cast of mind. Because people don’t like to comply with rules generated by external criteria — because we don’t recognize them as binding — those committed to these criteria may get it in their heads that the little people need to be forced to follow the rules, or have their moral sensibility “re-educated.” For their own good, of course. In this respect Rawls and Hayek are very much on the same liberal team against socialists too much in the grip of an external theory about an optimal order.
NB: the line between a highly refined and developed internal critique and an external one is fine indeed.
Wow, I tried to look up linguistic descriptivism in the dictionary, no go. I googled it and only got 25 hits. Fortunately, Johns Hopkins had this helpful guide:
Linguistics is torn, as any discipline is, by internal disagreements: structuralists versus transformational-generativists, prescriptivists versus descriptivists, empiricists versus rationalists, formalists (phonologists, morphologists, syntacticians, semanticians, textlinguists) versus contextualists (sociolinguists, psycholinguists, geolinguists, social semioticians, pragmaticians, discourse analysts).
That’s pretty clear, hehe. It takes more than big words to turn a pseudoscience into a real science. Eventually, it has to produce something of actual value to humans…
Reliance on immanent criticism is, I believe, a hallmark of a genuinely liberal, non-utopian cast of mind.
Maybe, although Marx and Hegel were both on the immanent criticism team.(They may, actually have been more on the liberal team than their friends and enemies have tended to think, but that’s another tale.)
I can see how you might say this about Hegel, sort of, but not about Marx. What I’m talking about is criticizing one’s belief system from within the same belief system. Marx’s theory of class consciousness provides a reason for refusing to work thiings out within, or even respect, standing belief systems. The Marxist beef against Rawls was partly that the process of reflective equilibrium could do nothing but make little adjustments within the system of bourgeouis morality.
The question of Marx’s ideas about the validity of moral beliefs is a hard one. All we really have are jibes, but they make it clear that Marx was on the immanentist side (unless you interpret him as a complete moral skeptic or nihilist, which I think is wrong).
Marx thought our beliefs, including our moral beliefs, arise out of the conditions of life, which are historically determined. So, Aristotle’s theory of the virtues could not have occurred to anyone before the development of a leisure class based on slavery, and Kantian and utilitarian abstractions depend on highly developed commodity production.
But for Marx, you can’t get “outside” class society, so you can’t criticize this, except from within capitalist society. He is willing to say that a more highly productive society in the future will develop different (and, he thinks, better) norms, but he isn’t prepared to say what they will be, except in a negative way. He makes fun of socialists who tried to do that, from his early attacks on Proudhon to the Critique of the Gotha Program.
So, he is really like Hayek and the later Rawls on this. You can’t get outside your historical situation: at most, you can reflect on it critically. The metaphysics is that working class activity will generate a new culture, superior to the old one. But it isn’t superior judged form some external standpoint, but superior because it solves the problems capitalism posed.
Lenin, on the other hand, hypothesized that certain bourgeois intellectuals could, with the use of “science”, obtain a knowledge of history from the outside.
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Wow, I tried to look up linguistic descriptivism in the dictionary, no go. I googled it and only got 25 hits. Fortunately, Johns Hopkins had this helpful guide:
Linguistics is torn, as any discipline is, by internal disagreements: structuralists versus transformational-generativists, prescriptivists versus descriptivists, empiricists versus rationalists, formalists (phonologists, morphologists, syntacticians, semanticians, textlinguists) versus contextualists (sociolinguists, psycholinguists, geolinguists, social semioticians, pragmaticians, discourse analysts).
That’s pretty clear, hehe. It takes more than big words to turn a pseudoscience into a real science. Eventually, it has to produce something of actual value to humans…
Reliance on immanent criticism is, I believe, a hallmark of a genuinely liberal, non-utopian cast of mind.
Maybe, although Marx and Hegel were both on the immanent criticism team.(They may, actually have been more on the liberal team than their friends and enemies have tended to think, but that’s another tale.)
I can see how you might say this about Hegel, sort of, but not about Marx. What I’m talking about is criticizing one’s belief system from within the same belief system. Marx’s theory of class consciousness provides a reason for refusing to work thiings out within, or even respect, standing belief systems. The Marxist beef against Rawls was partly that the process of reflective equilibrium could do nothing but make little adjustments within the system of bourgeouis morality.
The question of Marx’s ideas about the validity of moral beliefs is a hard one. All we really have are jibes, but they make it clear that Marx was on the immanentist side (unless you interpret him as a complete moral skeptic or nihilist, which I think is wrong).
Marx thought our beliefs, including our moral beliefs, arise out of the conditions of life, which are historically determined. So, Aristotle’s theory of the virtues could not have occurred to anyone before the development of a leisure class based on slavery, and Kantian and utilitarian abstractions depend on highly developed commodity production.
But for Marx, you can’t get “outside” class society, so you can’t criticize this, except from within capitalist society. He is willing to say that a more highly productive society in the future will develop different (and, he thinks, better) norms, but he isn’t prepared to say what they will be, except in a negative way. He makes fun of socialists who tried to do that, from his early attacks on Proudhon to the Critique of the Gotha Program.
So, he is really like Hayek and the later Rawls on this. You can’t get outside your historical situation: at most, you can reflect on it critically. The metaphysics is that working class activity will generate a new culture, superior to the old one. But it isn’t superior judged form some external standpoint, but superior because it solves the problems capitalism posed.
Lenin, on the other hand, hypothesized that certain bourgeois intellectuals could, with the use of “science”, obtain a knowledge of history from the outside.
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