Truth, reason, and objectivity--can we survive without them? What
happens to law, science, and the pursuit of social justice when
such ideas and ideals are rejected? These questions are at the
heart of the controversies between traditionalists and
"postmodernists" that Barbara Herrnstein Smith examines in her
wide-ranging book, which also offers an original perspective on the
perennial--perhaps eternal--clash of belief and skepticism, on our
need for intellectual stability and our experience of its
inevitable disruption.
Focusing on the mutually frustrating impasses to which these
controversies often lead and on the charges--"absurdity,"
"irrationalism," "complicity," "blindness," "stubbornness"--that
typically accompany them, Smith stresses our tendency to give
self-flattering reasons for our own beliefs and to discount or
demonize the motives of those who disagree with us. Her account of
the resulting cognitive and rhetorical dynamics of intellectual
conflict draws on recent research and theory in evolutionary
biology, neuroscience, developmental psychology, and the history
and sociology of science, as well as on contemporary philosophy and
language theory.
Smith's analyses take her into important ongoing debates over
the possibility of an objective grounding of legal and political
judgments, the continuing value of Enlightenment rationalism,
significant challenges to dominant ideas of scientific truth, and
proper responses to denials of the factuality of the Holocaust. As
she explores these and other controversies, Smith develops fresh
ways to understand their motives and energies, and more positive
ways to see the operations of intellectual conflict more
generally.
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