Justin E. H. Smith recently authored a piece in the NYT Stone blog regarding cultural bias inherent in the teaching of Western philosophy. It hooks up nicely with his review of the experimental philosophy movement – dubbed x-phi – spearheaded by Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols. The debate, as Smith presents it, is largely about drawing the taxonomic history of philosophy – an ontological point about philosophy itself and its own history. In this sense, both pieces are making a similar argument that taxonomies frame our thinking in idiosyncratic ways, of which frequently we are unaware. As one commenter to Smith’s NYT piece notes, cultural bias in Western education is evident in the Dewey Decimal classification protocol for libraries:
Commenter Arun (New Jersey):
951 General history of Asia; China & adjacent areas
952 General history of Asia; Japan
953 General history of Asia; Arabian Peninsula & adjacent areas
954 General history of Asia; South Asia; India
955 General history of Asia; Iran
956 General history of Asia; Middle East (Near East)
957 General history of Asia; Siberia (Asiatic Russia)
958 General history of Asia; Central Asia
959 General history of Asia; Southeast Asiaand
973 General history of North America; United States
974 General history of North America; Northeastern United States
975 General history of North America; Southeastern United States
976 General history of North America; South central United States
977 General history of North America; North central United States
978 General history of North America; Western United States
979 General history of North America; Great Basin & Pacific Slope
And interesting point, I think, for two reasons: first, that is that the commenter is giving a kind of metric here; or rather, that the commenter has identified a relevant metric for thinking through the question of cultural bias in the practice of teaching philosophy. The categories for the history of Asia seem appropriately broad (though peculiar that Iran is given its own classification category), but those for North America are blatantly US-centric. Secondly, taxonomic classifications, as a kind of metric, shape the ways in which we think about particular problems – how they are framed and what kind of evidence or arguments are agreed upon as appropriate to advance with regard to that problem – just as much as they provide an aide for conceptualizing the dimensions and scope of a given problem. That is, metrics constitute our thinking just as much as our thinking creates or produces them.
And metrics are more than simply epistemic tools or technological aids to delimit what is relevant knowledge, or to influence how relevant knowledge is constructed and takes on new meaning; they also have ontological and metaphysical implications. Take, for instance, census data. Drawing a taxonomic classification scheme to document the many different kinds of human ethnic identification is a wonderful administrative aide. Now we have census data for the distribution and growth of minority populations independently and in relation to the majority ethnic population, which is vastly useful for tracking the changing cultural and and historical diversity of the nation, among other things. But terms such as Caucasian, Hispanic, South Pacific Islander, and (notoriously) Other conceal as much diversity of human kinds as they attempt to reveal. “Hispanic,” for instance, formally denotes those of Spanish or Portuguese heritage, but in the U.S. comes to encapsulate any native Spanish speaker, regardless of race or cultural heritage. The history behind the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking world is as diverse and complicated, if not more so, than the history of the settlement of North America, yet the majority of that rich history (everything that did not take place in North America) is lost in the single classificatory term “Hispanic.”
When do our taxonomies give us license to simplify and exclude whole swaths of socio-cultural history? When our education fails to correct for the flattening that takes place necessarily in the development and employment of those terms. That is, the point at which we cease thinking of taxonomies as useful terminologies and begin to ascribe to them actual ontological significance (i.e. that they legitimately map onto to the kinds of humans there are in the world) is the point at which our historical sense fails to act as a correction. Not unimportantly, this is also the point at which metrics cease to be simple inputs in judgment processes and begin instead to make judgments for us.
History, in this sense, is the more appropriate standard to which the metric ought to be compared, rather than taking the taxonomy at face value. Classifications of human beings, for instance, are about more than administrative number-crunching; they are attached to identities and individuals who deserve dignity and respect.
But what does this have to do with philosophy?
Smith seems to me to be making a similar point about the practice of teaching philosophy in the West. Cultural bias is more than simple ignorance of other cultures – although sometimes that is the most important factor – it is also heavily dependent on how educational (which in my mind includes professional) taxonomies are drawn and reinforced. Questioning philosophy’s cultural bias in sticking with teaching traditionally Western philosophy – beginning with the Greeks and tracing the development of European thought through the Middle Ages, Renaissance, Enlightenment, and modern period to contemporary Europe and North America – involves questioning the terms “Western” and its other-corollaries: “Eastern,” “Asian,” “African,” etc. Is it the case that these correspond to discrete philosophical trends among groups of people, or do the terms conceal more than they illuminate the traditions under investigation?
Likewise, Smith’s broader critique of x-phi is also that it draws a very peculiar taxonomy of the history of philosophy:
…from at least the Renaissance until sometime in the 18th century, philosophy really was everything, or at least everything that involved “inquiring into things below the earth and in the sky,” to cite the famous accusation against Socrates in the Apology. This is the meaning implied in the title of the journal of the Royal Society of London, the Philosophical Transactions, also founded in 1666, and featuring until this very day, under its now archaic title, articles on everything from the larynx of chimpanzees to the existence of God. So experimental philosophy is not new, even if “x-phi” is…
A sophisticated, new experimental philosophy will be one that understands the historical contingency of disciplinary self-conceptions, rather than supposing that there is a real and natural chasm between philosophy and psychology that x-phi is now boldly traversing.
Smith’s point in both of these pieces is that inattention to how profoundly ahistorical and unphilosophical it is to draw the history of philosophy in this fashion no only disrespects the history of the Western philosophical tradition – for it was always intimately bound up in “a global network through which ideas and things are always flowing,” and failure to acknowledge this engenders a misunderstanding of this history – but it also limits the possibility of radical questioning philosophy itself: what it is, its global historical import, its connection with human culture, its perennial significance for human existence. In other words, this kind of thinking abnegates the possibility of asking the kinds of questions that promote knowledge of ourselves, culturally and philosophically. What is implicit in these two works, for me, is a critique of technologizing self-knowledge and judgment.