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Truth, bullshit and economics Samuel Brittan Financial Times 19/08/05  There have been two recent works by philosophers on Truth and On Bullshit. The first is by Simon Blackburn of Cambridge (published by Allen Lane) and the second by Harry G. Frankfurt of Princeton (published by Princeton University Press). Inevitably the bullshit book has attracted more popular attention, although the book on truth is more important.
"Bullshit" is a useful term of American slang. But I wonder if Frankfurt really gets to the bottom of it. He spends too much time equating it with "humbug", which he regards as "deceptive misrepresentation short of lying". A more interesting clue is contained in a quotation he gives from Ezra Pound, a poet much respected by TS Eliot, despite his peculiar demotic vocabulary :- Hey Snag wots in the Bibl’?The context of the poem is not of much help. But Pound clearly has in mind somebody who makes strong assertions about the Bible or any other subject which collapse on a request for specific backup.  "Bullshit" has a penumbra of further meanings. It might be a little harsh to say that the Budget Statements of the British Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown are full of bullshit. But when the same mixture of familiar assertions, propaganda and assorted statistics are repeated again and again in such a way as to drown the hard nuggets of relevant information, one is surely tempted to say "Whom are you trying to bullshit?"
The book on Truth is more ambitious. Professor Blackburn has attempted to explain why "postmodernists" who try to debunk subjects like history, which they accuse of being based on subjective and self-serving "narratives" are wrong. The novelty of his treatment is that he tries to do justice to the element of insight in these postmodern critiques; if you like paying attention to the bath water without throwing out the baby. For instance a German and a British soldier in the trenches might have given very different accounts of World War One; and both would have given different "narratives" compared with what a military historian or historical theorist might attempt. Nevertheless you cannot say that "anything goes”. There are innumerable perspectives for viewing any subject but you cannot say what you like and certain things are quite definitely false. Again the key saying comes from not any philosopher or historian, but the hard boiled French World One leader Clemenceau who declared that one thing future historians would not say was that "Belgium invaded Germany". Tolstoy’s close- up version of Napoleon’s march on Moscow was not the same as either the French or the Russian official accounts. But it is undeniable that Napoleon did reach Moscow, which he found burning, and beat a hasty retreat. Narratives, from however many different perspectives, which do not comprise such essential facts should go into the rubbish bin. Blackburn’s own favoured approach in the first part of his book is to go for a "minimalist" interpretation of truth. In other words, asserting that something is true adds little to the initial statement. To say "It is true that George W Bush won the 2000 US presidential election" adds nothing to the discussion of whether he "stole" it. So far so good. The later parts of Blackburn’s book, which are largely devoted to modern theories of knowledge ("epistemology") is more problematic. It is a useful survey, which as one would expect, comes out in favour of what Blackburn would probably call common sense realism and Bertrand Russell used to dismiss as "naive realism”. I am reminded of a review of a similar book by the late Sir Alfred Ayer, which remarked that the author took the sceptics for an outing, like an owner taking his dogs for a walk, only to bring them safely back to the kennel. I normally hate criticisms which take an author to task for choosing one subject rather than another. Nevertheless much of Blackburn’s analysis is, however interesting in its own right, unnecessary to rout the postmodernists, who are pursuing a pretty obvious political agenda. There is a risk that those who differ from Blackurn on some of the more technical aspects of his analysis will be diverted from their resolve to combat the nonsense with which we are surrounded. My own approach would be to emphasise different levels of discourse. You do not have to defeat philosophical scepticism or idealism to establish that certain assertions are definitely false and others are likely to be true. If you are making any observations at all, however radical or anti-capitalist, about the course of events, you are assuming that individuals exist, events occur and that there are elections, battles, booms and slumps and all the rest. It has long seemed to me that a great many perplexities begin to fade if one makes this distinction of levels and I am surprised that modern philosophers do not make more of it. What has all this got to do with political economy? More than some might think. In the 1930’s Lionel Robbins, then professor at the London School of Economics, caused a stir by "denying interpersonal comparisons". This led to a flurry of activity in which economists tried by tortuous means to arrive at welfare judgments without making such comparisons. We ended up with a vast mathematical industry, many learned papers and not a few Nobel prizes by intellects that could have been better employed. But it was all based on a misconception. All of us, whether a mother allocating goodies among her children, or a government making policies, compare the welfare of different people all the time. Such comparisons cannot be exact and have an inevitable subjective element. But you can only "deny" them altogether in the same frame of mind in which sceptics find a problem in the existence of "other minds" than their own. You do not have to knock down the sceptic to reject the Robbins denial. You merely have to point out that political economy exists on a different and more mundane level in which a common sense view of the external world is accepted for the purpose in hand. One of the few people to spot the philosophical confusion early on was the economist Ian Little in his 1950 Critique of Welfare Economics recently reissued by the Oxford University Press together with some further thoughts, Ethics, Economics and Politics. One might add that a denial of interpersonal comparisons was quite unnecessary to rebut the case for the compulsory equalisation of incomes which was one of the motivations behind the whole enterprise. The moral I would now draw is that is wise to avoid using a steam hammer to crush a nut. |
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