The Socratic Turn
The Socratic Turn
Knowledge of Good and Evil in an Age of Science
Dustin Sebell
PENN
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
PHILADELPHIA
A volume in the Haney Foundation Series, established in
1961 with the generous support of Dr. John Louis Haney
Copyright © 2016 University of Pennsylvania Press
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
ISBN 978-0-8122-4780-0
To Florence and Leonard Sebell,Edith Tagrin and Marvin S. Kaplan, and Anne and Joel Youkeles
Contents
Chapter 1. The Problem of the Young Socrates
Chapter 3. The Prospects for Matter in Motion
Chapter 4. Noetic Heterogeneity
Chapter 6. Science and Society
As for any Obligations they owed to the Antients, they renounced them all. ’Tis true, said they, we are informed, some few of our Party have been so mean to borrow their Subsistence from You; But the rest, infinitely the greater Number … were so far from stooping to so base an Example, that there never passed, till this very hour, six Words between us. For, our Horses are of our own breeding, our Arms of our own forging, and our Cloaths of our own cutting out and sowing. Plato was by chance upon the next Shelf, and observing those that spoke to be in the ragged Plight, mentioned a while ago; their Jades lean and foundred, their Weapons of rotten Wood, their Armour rusty, and nothing but Raggs underneath; he laugh’d loud, and in his pleasant way, swore, By G——, he believ’d them.
—Jonathan Swift, A Full and True Accountof the Battel Fought Last Friday, &c.
Introduction
Over fifty years ago, Robert Dahl argued that the difficulty with “traditional” or “normative” political theory, what seems to make it more akin to literary criticism, for example, than scientific analysis (1958, 97–98), is that it can “rarely, if ever, meet rigorous criteria of truth” (95). Dahl’s main point was not that he himself knew the criteria in question and knew, as a result, that they could not be met by political theory (cf. 97); it was that, so far as he could see, political theorists themselves had not made a serious effort to spell out the kind of evidence from which they take their bearings or the criteria on the basis of which they evaluate it. And in the absence of a serious effort along those lines, political theory necessarily suffers from a degree and kind of “vagueness” hardly compatible with an aspiration to be counted among the (social) sciences (97). Dahl demanded, therefore, that political theorists say with some “high degree of precision what would constitute a fair test of a political theory” (95, 97, 98).
On the other hand, in a seminal work that, according to one later assessment of it, more than any other in the 1960s “summed up the frustrations and hopes of the contemporary political theorists” (Scaff 1980, 1155; Gunnell 2006, 772) in the face of the behavioralists’ objections, Sheldon Wolin made a case against truth that is “rigorous, precise, and quantifiable” in favor of “tacit political knowledge,” as Michael Polanyi first put it (1964), which is none of these things (1969, 1069–77, cf. 1063). By Wolin’s own account, tacit political knowledge and the criteria of evaluating it—that is, “[judgments] about the nature and perplexities of politics” and “judgments about the adequacy and value of theories and methods” (1077)—are indeed vague. Tacit political knowledge, he said, “is elusive and hence meaningful statements about it often have to be allusive and intimative. … Knowledge of this type tends, therefore, to be suggestive and illuminative rather than explicit and determinate” (1070). And the criteria of evaluating “the forms of theory built upon [tacit political knowledge]” (1071) are not less “elusive” than tacit political knowledge itself. “A certain sensibility is needed, qualities of thinking and feeling which are not readily formulable but pertain to a capacity for discriminative judgment” (1076, emphasis added). If tacit political knowledge is “elusive” and if, when it comes to the evaluation of it,
