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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ Wehry (00:02.766)
Hello and welcome to Chasing the Viathan. I'm your host, PJ Weary, and I'm here today with Dr. Carolyn Culbertson, Acting Chair, the Department of Communication and Philosophy at Florida Gulf Coast University. She's also the president of the North American Society for Philosophical Hermeneutics. And we're here today to talk about her book, Godemer and the social turn in epistemology. Already remarked on it once, love the cover. Dr. Culbertson, wonderful to have you on today.
Carolyn Culbertson (00:28.654)
Great to be here, thank you.
PJ Wehry (00:34.771)
So, Dr. Culbertson, why this book?
Carolyn Culbertson (00:40.716)
Yeah, good question. So I think I had been noticing for a while, two ways in which we're accustomed to talking about knowing. On the one hand, thinking about knowing as requiring that we transcend our social and historical conditions in order to achieve this kind of neutral standpoint.
what Lorraine code calls the view from nowhere and kind of heroizing those who achieve that kind of neutrality. And then on the other hand, it had become more more popular to talk about our knowing is inevitably hindered by social and historical context such that we shouldn't aspire to knowledge or
robust justification or any of the traditional epistemic ideals because of our situatedness as knowers. And it seemed like culturally we were kind of stuck with both of those competing paradigms for knowing. And so I became very interested in philosophical resources that provided an alternative to that. And for me,
First and foremost, it's been Gottemers, Hermeneutics, where Gottemer, I think, is one of the philosophers in the 20th century who maybe is most associated with this idea that we are inevitably historically situated as knowers. We begin with these four conceptions, but that's not the end of the process of thinking for him.
He takes the very doctrine of the Four Conceptions, the Four Big Riffa from Heidegger, and has a lot of interesting things to say about what we might say is our responsibility as thinkers to try to square those Four Conceptions with the subject matter itself. And then the other tradition that I have found myself coming back to again and again for that alternative is the social epistemological tradition, broadly construed, which is
Carolyn Culbertson (03:06.836)
more recent movement in epistemology, inclusive of analytic epistemology, but probably my way of getting into that analytic tradition has been through feminist epistemology. So yeah, that would be the kind of problematic that really set it going.
PJ Wehry (03:24.226)
Are there any names that you can throw out for the feminist epistemology just to kind of orient us, know, if people want to look up me, if I want to look up books later to read on feminist social epistemology?
Carolyn Culbertson (03:35.639)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, so it's interesting. Some histories of social epistemology that you read will kind of mark the beginning of that tradition with folks like Alvin Goodman. Philip Kitcher, for example, says a better way of kind of marking the beginning of that tradition would be with feminist epistemology with folks like Sandra Harding, Donna Haraway, Lorraine Code.
starting the late 1970s, 1980s through the 1990s, where if you take that tradition of feminist epistemology seriously, what they're doing is social epistemology. And so they take very seriously the situatedness of the knower. Larenne Code writes extensively upon that. But what really fascinated me when I started to look at that literature,
is the debate about the normativity. In other words, everyone would agree that feminist epistemologists posit that the knower is situated, what Dana Haraway calls the situated knowledge doctrine. However, what then becomes of our kind of traditional normative epistemological questions? Can we make
meaningful distinctions between knowing and the mere illusion of knowing? Can we make meaningful distinctions between robust justification and weak justification? Between responsible epistemic practice and intellectual vice? These kinds of normative distinctions. And so, yeah, that's what interested me is the problem of how to square
Carolyn Culbertson (05:34.126)
the situatedness with, for me, what is a continuing need for those kinds of normative distinctions.
PJ Wehry (05:49.006)
Thank you. I love the way that you've situated that. Before we get into the feminist epistemology, because it's just kind of following the framework of your book, you first kind of situate Gotham or himself. And I think this will also situate us for the feminist epistemology to follow. think there's some chronological stuff going on there. Between enlightenment and romantic epistemologies, that he kind of is trying to find at in between.
or a synthesis of the two, if that's maybe that's too strong of a term.
Carolyn Culbertson (06:26.38)
Yeah, thanks for pointing that out. so, Thotamer is probably well known for his critique of Enlightenment epistemology. So, the Truth and Method, he has this famous discussion of the Enlightenment's prejudice against prejudice. By that, he means that Enlightenment epistemology often just takes for granted from the beginning that
Proper knowing would mean getting rid of prejudice, transcending it, bracketing it. And Gottemir is well known for the idea that maybe that's not necessary. Now I'm using the term knowing. I will say one of the most controversial things about the book is that there are plenty of Gottemirians that would say, you're crazy, why are you talking about Gottemir? It's having an epistemology, it's an ontology.
PJ Wehry (07:14.99)
You
Carolyn Culbertson (07:25.07)
an ontology of understanding. But I think that he does take recourse to normative distinctions throughout the book, and there some discussions of what it means to be a more responsible person engaged in understanding. I think he has a kind of early sketch of what
intellectual virtue is something that I think contemporary scholars are trying to kind of flesh out in terms of hermeneutic virtue, perhaps following Miranda Fricker's work. But anyway, he's well known for that critique of enlightenment epistemology. But immediately after that discussion in Truth and Method, he goes on to critique what he calls this romantic conception of epistemology, which emerges as a
negation of the Enlightenment paradigm. Okay. I don't know if... I always find myself a little confused by why he uses the term romantic there in my book. say I think what he means here is a kind of neo-traditionalist, and so I think he has in mind people like Jacobi and Novalis, kind of a counter-Enlightenment group.
PJ Wehry (08:45.366)
Okay.
Not hurt her?
Carolyn Culbertson (08:51.66)
Yeah, so Herder as well. But the move that he, like the account that he gives there is, he says, okay, enlightenment, epistemology, it hinges on this abstract opposition, the abstract of Gegensatz between reason and tradition. And so then you have this kind of new paradigm that comes in and says,
Well, we're just going to argue that knowing is grounded in tradition and right jettison reason. And he says, so it's the other side of the coin. It's there are two sides of the same coin. And instead, we need to think about how a knower who is grounded in particular historical traditions can nevertheless be said to be engaging in reason.
or to put that another way, to put it in a way that Goddomer doesn't put it, how can they be exercising epistemic agency even though they're within tradition?
So yeah, that's again, something that social epistemologists have been super interested in over in recent decades. Someone like Catherine Elgin, more in the analytic tradition, is really interested in that idea of what does it mean to exercise epistemic agency even while we always exist within this.
web of kind of socially extended cognition, right? This community of knowers.
PJ Wehry (10:38.562)
And my apologies. It has been 15 years since I've read this. So I didn't remember him referencing. He probably does reference. mean, Nivalis and Jacoby, I've just been recently working through Herder, and that's why I thought we were going when you said romantic. If you don't mind my asking and if you you want to skip this question, feel free, because I realize this is really getting in the weeds. But you're when you're talking about other Gadamerian scholars.
Carolyn Culbertson (10:44.222)
Hahaha.
Carolyn Culbertson (11:01.494)
you
PJ Wehry (11:06.584)
that they're talking about an ontology of understanding versus an epistemology of understanding, what would be the distinction between those two things?
Carolyn Culbertson (11:14.456)
Yeah, great question. So I don't dispute that Gadamer's philosophy is an ontology of understanding. Absolutely. And that's, I think, really significant to insist upon that precisely because within the field of epistemology broadly construed,
ontology is usually underdeveloped, like the ontology of truth is underdeveloped. So it's one of the feathers in Gottemir's cap that he does provide us with, an ontology of truth, an ontology of the event of understanding. Why I think folks sometimes have an allergy to describing what Gottemir is up to in terms of an epistemology is because, well, Gottemir is very clear.
that he doesn't intend truth and method as a kind of set of prescriptive rules for how to think. He doesn't want to do that. lots of philosophers do want to do that. Yeah, yeah, so that's a legitimate pursuit as a philosopher, but Gahnmer says, I'm not interested in that because I'm interested in
looking at understanding as this, and he'll get a little Heideggerian here, as this kind of event that happens to us, this event that unfolds independently of the will of a subject. And again, analogous to, I think, how Heidegger will describe kind of the event of being.
And so you see there's a tension between a project that's interested in that, a kind of phenomenology of understanding of Verstehen, and any kind of prescriptive project. And so usually by epistemology, people think we mean, okay, just the prescriptive rules for how to be a good thinker or how to achieve knowing.
Carolyn Culbertson (13:26.222)
The other thing that this relates to is, you know, I think there's a lot to be gained by following Gottemir in his use of the term understanding in German and for Steyn. Because when we speak about understanding, we do usually mean the kind of thinking that
process of reasoning that occurs internal to a subject.
there's a tendency within epistemology, especially on the externalist side to say, okay, well that we can call that understanding, but that's not knowing. We may maybe call that responsible epistemic practice, but that's not getting at the truth. And so for example, the problem that internalists often have to, the objection that they have to respond to is how does that guarantee that we're getting to the truth?
But here, know, Gadamer has, again, a very special ontology of truth to offer here. And so in some, for Gadamer, the event of understanding is an event of truth.
PJ Wehry (14:51.726)
Thank you. know that was like, here, let me ask a very specific question, but that was just really fascinating as we talk about like epistemology versus ontology. So thank you. really appreciate it. That was a very careful and helpful answer.
Carolyn Culbertson (14:58.07)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (15:11.246)
So, have a, oh man, there's so many things. So one of the things I did want to ask, when you're talking about four conceptions, and this is just like an aside here real quick. read, this is 15 years ago, so I read the Continuum edition, and is four conceptions the same? Is that a translation of the same word as pre-understanding? Or is that a different thing?
Carolyn Culbertson (15:15.416)
Yeah.
Carolyn Culbertson (15:27.149)
Yeah.
Carolyn Culbertson (15:41.324)
Well, when congratulations for remembering these things 15 years later. So no, and it's actually not surprising that one would be hung up on the language there because in Heidegger's discussion, it's in being in time, but it's also somewhere in the earlier Heidegger as well. And I'm forgetting that this discussion of the four structure of the understanding.
PJ Wehry (15:48.959)
no, it's so bad. I'm so sorry.
Carolyn Culbertson (16:10.99)
Heidegger says there's this four structure of the understanding and the elements of that four structure he provides this typology here he says there's the four conceptions, the four meanings, and like the four sight, the four begrifah, four haban, four zikten. And Gadamer uses this doctrine of the four structure of the understanding.
To be precise, one should probably not just refer to all of those pieces as four begripha, four conceptions, because let me step back for a second. So for me, I always like to translate that idea into kind of like anticipatory meanings, anticipatory concepts. So when we go to understand something,
we're bringing something with us. There's an anticipatory structure there, such that when we understand that thing, it's never simply neutral of that context. Moreover, and this is where it gets complicated for Gadamer, it's not just a epistemological or subjective point about the mind, but that object,
the zaka, the subject matter, it doesn't appear except mediated through those four structures. Yeah, so it's easy if you, you know, coming out of a context where you're used to thinking about the process of thinking almost like psychologically to say, okay, we have these anticipatory structures. I mean, in the social sciences, we would say these are like implicit biases. And that part is
easy enough to get in Gottemoer. The radical and contentious part comes when we say, and you know what, the very thing that we were trying to understand to begin with, its reality is tied up with this mediation by these historical four structures. That's the part that's the harder sell.
PJ Wehry (18:26.092)
Yeah. and, so, maybe this would be a useful example. we had some friends of ours, got tickets to go see, the Orlando shakes, how did the Baskervilles, they couldn't make it. And so they gave us the tickets and partly because I mentioned that we'd been watching Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes, which is phenomenal by the way. and so my son is loving Sherlock Holmes.
And we watch the Hound of the Baskervilles. It's very scary. I mean, he's 10 years old, so, you know, it's, not like insidious or, you know, some like Freddy Krueger scary or something like that, but it's scary. The guy like, well, are there really spoiler alerts for Sherlock Holmes at this point? I don't know. and so we had a Hound of the Baskervilles. He's like, I hope it's not too scary. I hope when the Hound comes on, it doesn't scare me too bad. And when we get there, I noticed the
Carolyn Culbertson (19:01.006)
Mm.
Carolyn Culbertson (19:12.45)
Good question.
PJ Wehry (19:23.79)
The poster looks a little funny and like the dog looks a little silly on the poster there. So we just got this like a couple days beforehand. I wasn't entirely sure what was going on. We get there, we sit down and they come out and we start, like everyone starts laughing. The guy does an initial monologue that's really funny. And we find out that it is in fact a satire on the Hound of the Baskervilles. It is not the original.
Carolyn Culbertson (19:52.956)
Okay.
PJ Wehry (19:53.75)
I'm watching, so I'm watching, so Finn turns and looks at me, my oldest boy, and he goes, so it's funny. that's nice. I don't have to worry about being scared. And he doesn't know what comedy is. mean, he doesn't have like, you we're not talking, he hasn't read Aristotle's poetics. I haven't talked to him about that. I know that's lacking on my part, but, know, and he doesn't know what satire is really. He does, but he doesn't know what those words are.
Carolyn Culbertson (20:01.827)
food.
Carolyn Culbertson (20:12.494)
Thank
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (20:20.878)
But he carries those kind of pre-understandings with him. He's immediately like, oh, they're playing with the structure of it. He's seen that enough to, so he came in expecting it to be scary. And, but he immediately, because of the way that he's been formed, he's been shaped. He has an understanding of how satire works and he could immediately fold that into and make understanding possible. Is that, I know that was a little bit of a longer, but is that a good example of what we're talking about here?
Carolyn Culbertson (20:30.979)
Yeah.
Carolyn Culbertson (20:47.18)
Yeah!
PJ Wehry (20:50.742)
Or does that include the historical side or what would the historical side matter?
Carolyn Culbertson (20:52.366)
I think.
Okay, so I think that is a good example of the four conceptions that not only we do bring to understand experience, but that are totally necessary for understanding experience. We can kind of circle back to the question of to what extent that's a historical for understanding that your son had there.
But one thing that your example brings out that I want to just touch upon is I think
Studies in developmental psychology really help to kind of support the Gottemers point on the four structure of the understanding. Of course, I mean, so you had five children. you, yeah, you know, taking them step by step by step into new knowledge, don't, you know, despite Mino's paradox.
we don't go from not knowing to knowing all at once. Right, so there's this process of integration of the new into the familiar, integrating what is unfamiliar into the familiar. That is a necessary aspect of learning. And so I do think that, yeah, that
Carolyn Culbertson (22:31.105)
findings in developmental psychology, but also probably just the everyday experience of parents trying to rear children would help us understand Gadamer's point there. Now it's true that when I said that for Gadamer, yeah, go ahead.
PJ Wehry (22:44.216)
Real quick.
Apologies. So, Godomer, for that kind of uses Vico, right? Would that be kind of, but maybe that's more the historical side. And so I'm curious about that. You know, the census communists and the way that that kind of gets transmitted along. the, I've actually been reading Vygotsky. So as soon as you said, I was like, as I was reading Vygotsky, was like, this feels like, I was like, this feels like Godomer. Like that's, so that's really, anyways, I, that was a kind of a cool connection point there. Anyways.
Carolyn Culbertson (22:54.721)
Mm-hmm.
Carolyn Culbertson (23:07.021)
I'm off here.
Carolyn Culbertson (23:13.91)
Young man.
PJ Wehry (23:17.398)
It very much is exactly what you're talking about. Vygotsi calls it the zone of proximal development. Yes, yes. Where it's like there's the familiar, there's the really unfamiliar, and then there's that zone of like, I can do this with help. Right? And that's an important concept.
Carolyn Culbertson (23:18.507)
Yeah.
Carolyn Culbertson (23:22.549)
Is Vygonsky's zone of proximal development, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Carolyn Culbertson (23:38.55)
Yeah.
It isn't, yeah. And I actually think that, no, no, bringing in that concept from learning theory and developmental theory is also really helpful for cashing out Gottemoer's claim that although we always have to rely on what is familiar when we go to understand the unfamiliar, doesn't, it doesn't mean we're just always stuck within this limited conception.
PJ Wehry (23:42.318)
Apologies, yeah, yeah, go ahead.
Carolyn Culbertson (24:11.517)
this is one of the things that really attracted me to Gadamer's philosophy as well, is I think there are lots of versions of, right, like that kind of implicit bias discourse where it's like here are your biases and you're just stuck with those. And then we don't talk enough about how do we engage in some kind of process of self-development such that we aren't stuck with those, but we learn. And
Yeah, you have to take that seriously if you're reading a Vygotsky zone of proximal development for sure. But yeah, Gadamer has tons to say about that. And sometimes that's, I think, overlooked when folks talk about Gadamer as we think of him as this philosopher of the finitude of one's horizons.
But right, one of perhaps his most famous doctrine from Truth and Method is the fusion of horizons where I bring my limited horizon with me, I encounter another horizon and it's in the play that unfolds between those things that some new Gestalt emerges. And that's the event of understanding.
Carolyn Culbertson (25:39.426)
Yeah, but with respect to the historicality, yeah, I think what we've been talking about works really well as a kind of psychological theory about learning if we just focus on the four structures that are particular to the individual. But it becomes implausible to think that the mediations that happen there
PJ Wehry (25:40.141)
I think.
Carolyn Culbertson (26:08.329)
of set forth the truth of things. For that we need to think about how many of those four structures are really representative of a historical milieu that we belong to. And so there we can say, okay, when I'm relying on my four structures to read Shakespeare, they're not just my own four structures, they're
the four structures of someone who belongs to a modern liberal society in the 21st century with such and such features and those things I have in common with millions of other people.
PJ Wehry (26:54.446)
And so, this is probably the reason I asked you about it. There's this, this movement going into the Hound of Baskervilles, you know, we understand how Sherlock Holmes story works and then all of a to have it turned on its head, there's an understanding of genre that's not only necessary from a psychological standpoint, but that to the meaning of the play, the truth of the play is historical.
Is that, is the, with the genres, the, play on genres, would that be a part of that historical conditioning of the truth?
Carolyn Culbertson (27:36.142)
I'm not sure about the play on genres, but it's definitely true that it's Skottemer's observations on what happens with art that are most influential for him in his theory of truth. The first third of truth and method is focused on an aesthetic theory that's supposed to provide a clue to ontology. And so,
There, Gadamer is reflecting on the fact that when you see a theatrical production, or you see a portrait, or read a poem, or hear a poem recited,
He says the experience of that is a subject matter coming to presentation. It's not, if I see a theatrical production and all I can think of is what the actor or the production staff is kind of doing to bring out Hamlet or whatever, then Hamlet hasn't like come to presentation, right?
But if I see that production, say, now that's Hamlet. Now I understand the play. and I mean, I always go back to that thought because it just seems so right, you know? I mean, a film is a great example. Think about a great historical film where after watching it, you think, yeah, now I understand the Irish Revolution or whatever it was, you And so, yeah, I was really fascinated with that moment.
PJ Wehry (28:59.106)
Yeah.
Carolyn Culbertson (29:24.493)
and how Gadamer thinks of that is a clue to truth in a certain sense. And why that's really important to talk about today is because if Gadamer is right, then that is the sense of truth that the humanities disciplines are always engaged in. And one of the ways that Gadamer frames truth and method is as a defense of
the humanities as knowledge producing disciplines. But we need to understand, we need a theory of truth and a theory of knowing that's going to capture what that work is.
PJ Wehry (30:11.448)
Thank you. You've been very patient. I really appreciate it. with that background, and I know that was quite a bit, how would you tie that in then? And you've kind of mentioned this earlier with feminist epistemologies. Where do you see those strongest threads and links?
Carolyn Culbertson (30:29.707)
Yeah. mean, I began talking about the situated knowing doctrine, as Donna Harroway describes it. It may seem that that's far away from the question of what the humanities do, but I think that there's an intrinsic connection between those things. I think feminist epistemology
it has to talk about the situatedness of the knower because it emerges in response to the problems of positivism and the problems of leaving out any consideration of the subjects of knowing. And again, that's the position of the humanities today is will we be able to articulate
account of what we do that doesn't just repeat the paradigm of positivism, which does us no favors. Okay, so another way of putting that is we're all interested in talking about the value of thinking that begins with a social historical context, whether within feminist philosophy it's thinking about, say, the
plight of marginalized knowers and what is to be gained from correcting, say, the testimonial and hermeneutic injustices that those marginalized knowers deal with. What is to be gained for us epistemologically from that? Or in the humanities, when we say it's really important to understand the
historical mil- or to- may step back for a second- to to understand that when we read the ancients we do we do so from the historical milieu of the of modernity and therefore you know another famous doctrine of godamers we don't the task is not just to reconstruct the ancient world but to
Carolyn Culbertson (32:55.992)
try to figure out what the ancient world says to us today as we engage with it from our own position. Does that make sense? Those connections?
PJ Wehry (33:05.314)
Yeah, and I, yeah, yeah, it's really, cause I think you do, when we talk about the feminist epistemology, think too that like Goddner provides this theoretical framework and maybe I'm wrong in saying this, but would you say that like he provides a theoretical framework without actually, I mean, he doesn't really talk about gender that was not really on his radar per se. So, but he, but his framework was,
capable of accepting that kind of horizon? that be like that it was able to I mean, positivism doesn't necessarily isn't exactly open to a feminist epistemology if I understand what we're talking about. So I kind of disinterested. mean, the quest for enlightenment disinterested. Wow. OK. If you're going to be disinterested like the Enlightenment, let's just do that.
Carolyn Culbertson (33:41.559)
Yeah.
Carolyn Culbertson (33:54.028)
Yeah.
Carolyn Culbertson (34:02.38)
Thank you.
PJ Wehry (34:06.136)
then you are going to have to have tons and tons of free time. I've actually been reading some Pierre Bordeaux and this is his big point with sociology is like, if you're going to do sociology, you need to understand that it takes an enormous amount of privilege to be able to go and be a static observer and be paid to be a static observer of like a tribe somewhere. You know, so he would go to, into Africa and he would watch and he's like, okay,
Carolyn Culbertson (34:13.368)
Bye bye.
PJ Wehry (34:35.052)
I have to understand the situation I'm coming from as well because to them, this is their life. To me, I get to have a lot of money to come and be, not a lot of money, but it's not like the humanities are brimming with cash, but that he's able to see that he himself, that's particular stance, right?
And it's the stance, it's a privilege stance to have enough money to sit around. I mean, I've made this point on this podcast before we talk about Socrates and it's like, it's amazing, you know, for his time, what he was doing, but it does, there is a certain amount of money involved in being able to walk around and ask annoying questions all day. Like, don't, I don't have time. I mean, I have about an hour a day to do it. Obviously I could say here to ask annoying questions, but I did go around all day and do that.
Free time does it, and I think this ties into the feminist epistemology is a lot of these like marginalized knowers don't have hours and hours and hours to ask like, is there a demon, you know, who's like deceiving me or, know, like all these other sorts of philosophical questions. Is that a fair way to think about it?
Carolyn Culbertson (35:35.085)
Yeah.
Carolyn Culbertson (35:47.563)
Okay, yeah. Well, I mean, I think that what you've said is complementary to the feminist epistemological project for sure. I don't go into that exact point in the book. But maybe analogous to that is just this idea that I do spend some time talking about in the book, which is feminist epistemologists tendency to
show that inquiry is rarely, you know, value neutral. So it's a way of unpacking what we mean by the critique of positivism. Positivism would suggest that we should aspire to forms of inquiry that are value neutral. And people like Sandra Harding, think are excellent, or Helen Longino, are excellent at
talking about the problems that can arise when we preclude reflection on the values that are implicit in the inquiries that we're engaged in or values implicit in, or even the experimental design of a particular research project or something. And I think, yeah, Gadamer, he,
doesn't necessarily talk about, well, he very much is responding to positivism. He doesn't necessarily put it in terms of the need to reflect on values. And interestingly, within feminist epistemology, that's kind of a debate, say, between Alcoff and Harding. Okay, so what do we do with that? We say there are values in inquiry. This goes back to what I was saying earlier about the
normativity problem. Okay, so if we're just going to stop at the critical moment, we just say, and that's it, now we've demythologized neutral inquiry, and we can just say there are values, and I think, let's see, who was I reading recently on this? Alcoff, Linda Martine Alcoff talks about that as the first step to kind of epistemological nihilism, you know, giving up that
Carolyn Culbertson (38:12.886)
moment of normativity. So yeah, that's where the hard work is, think, is saying, where are we going to get the new kind of normativity from that can guide us as we make assessments and distinctions about different practices of reasoning other than value neutrality?
historical and social neutrality. That can't be the answer, but we still need an answer.
PJ Wehry (38:46.188)
Yes. and we almost fall into a new kind of neutrality. we say we're whatever values go, right? Like if all values are the same, it's kind of, it's a new kind of, I actually, I don't know if you saw, had Dr. Alkoff on, the podcast. So anyways, I really enjoyed having her on. So she was, it's fun to hear her. I was not expecting you to reference her. So that's, that's a added bonus.
PJ Wehry (39:16.12)
So how does that leave us with, so when we talk about the status, status, wow, excuse me, when we talk about the status of truth and knowledge, then you kind of end with like, this is really important. can't, with our cultural historical baggage, we can't jettison these terms, right? And I think what, with what you were just talking about, that's kind of where this naturally leads.
Carolyn Culbertson (39:38.136)
Mm-hmm.
PJ Wehry (39:44.91)
What are the next steps then? What does it look like to hash out what these values are, what truth is, and what knowledge is? I just thought I'd end on a really light question.
Carolyn Culbertson (39:53.007)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, you know. Well, that's where all the fun is, I think. It is. It's exhilarating because it's like a new frontier, right? If we agreed that maybe some of the old forms of foundationalism have just kind of run aground, then it's a brave new world for epistemologists.
PJ Wehry (40:01.972)
Yeah.
Carolyn Culbertson (40:22.99)
And there have been lots of different leads. Okay, so one thing I've been interested in a lot the past year or so is virtue epistemology tradition, which essentially says we ought to be focused on the most important epistemological distinctions that can help us.
with these normative distinctions have to do with essentially intellectual virtue and intellectual vice. And maybe the job is to articulate what the intellectual virtues are, make sure we understand what the intellectual vices are. Plenty of people doing that kind of work now. A very dominant paradigm. She does, you know, yeah, so oftentimes when we think of fricari we just think epistemic.
PJ Wehry (41:07.982)
Is that Miranda Fricker you were mentioning earlier?
Carolyn Culbertson (41:16.362)
injustice theory, but she actually presents it as just a contribution to virtue epistemology. And again, I think it's really interesting. Why do we, at least in the continental tradition, we tend to talk about that aspect a little bit less because we're really good on the critical part, epistemic injustice, and perhaps less interested in what she has to say positively about like how to understand hermeneutic virtue or testimonial virtue.
So I've been now looking back through Gadamer's work to try to see to what extent he's engaged in a kind of virtue theory, because I do think scholars of Gadamer sometimes talk about charitable dialogue, open-mindedness, things like this as a Gadamerian virtues, hermeneutic virtues.
And maybe that's the answer to what he has to offer normative epistemology is an articulation of those kinds. But that being said, I think one of those interesting questions is how do we understand the goodness of those virtues? Now, analytic philosophers will say, well, you've got two options, Responsibilism or Reliabilism. And there are problems with Reliabilism.
We don't necessarily want to say that what is essentially good about, say, open-mindedness is just that it's always going to reliably get us to truth. I prefer responsibleism, but I actually think that even then we can never get out of the task of that ontology of truth, so even if we say,
Open-mindedness is good because it's what the responsible epistemic subject does. this exercise of this responsible virtue is going to, I don't know, is truth conducive or something. We're still working with like a conception of truth that would have been unrecognizable to Gottemer. And so we need, and also it's not been helpful for humanity.
Carolyn Culbertson (43:45.847)
Okay, if I need to justify my job as a philosophy professor, I'm probably not going to do a very good job if I just say, well, everything I teach the students makes them better scientists. I'm training them to have virtues that make them truth conducive. There's something different. There's something different, right? So anyway, that's why I say there's a lot of
good opportunities here to just reflect on the big questions. Like, why did we care about talking about knowledge to begin with? As philosophers, why did we continue to think there's something worthwhile in making a distinction between
say knowledge and true belief or something like this.
PJ Wehry (44:50.51)
And I think he's quoting, I want to say Holderlin, but it's always the phrase has always stuck with me, but Goddomer quotes a poet talking about the iron law of the heavens. so that it's the is out of our reach, right? Like that kind of like the iron law of the heavens is out of our reach, but that we can still see it. so I'm.
stumbling for words here, but as we're talking about Goddard's conception of truth, he does seem to think that there is like, actually, maybe this is a good time to ask you about hermeneutic realism, but I also want to be respectful of your time. Do you have time to talk a little bit about hermeneutic realism? Because I feel as we're talking about like this, this Goddard's conception of truth, he thinks that we're actually like when he talks about truth, we're actually like
Carolyn Culbertson (45:29.122)
Yeah.
Carolyn Culbertson (45:39.586)
Yeah. Yeah.
PJ Wehry (45:48.748)
learning something, right? It's not...
Carolyn Culbertson (45:53.539)
Yes. Yeah, so that's a good way to think about it is, okay, when you are engaged in a very efficacious interpretation of a text, for example, or even we haven't spoken much about it, but he has so much to say about conversation. If I'm understanding you in conversation, okay, there's an accomplished, something's accomplished there. And
PJ Wehry (46:14.573)
Yes.
Carolyn Culbertson (46:22.826)
He is interested in that event, let's just say, as a kind of objective event. Something is accomplished there. It's not just in my head that I understand you. It's not just in my head that my interpretation of that text is compelling. Something happens in the world that's tracked by this concept of the event of understanding.
So yeah, you asked about a connection to hermeneutic realism. Hermeneutic realism is a relatively new school within hermeneutics, especially God-Omerian hermeneutics, and essentially it's a reaction to the way that for many folks in philosophy, when they think of hermeneutics, they think just like phenomenology. that's just
subjective understanding. Oh, Gadamer is interested in interpretation. He must not be interested in truth. He might not, he must not be interested in the object. He's just interested in the subject. So as I understand it, hermeneutic realism kind of emerges in response to that to say, no, no, no, you've misunderstood the efficacious interpretation. It, it
It does respond to a zaka, a subject matter, that is irreducible to my subjective impressions or my four conceptions. And then the debate is how do we understand the objectivity? Gunter Fiegel has this book, Gegenständlichkeit, that's translated as objectivity.
but it's not objektivitate, it's gegenschtendlichkeit. Anyway, so there's a whole then discourse about how do we understand, okay, so he's interested in the object, but the object in what sense? It can't be, so to switch over to kind of more analytic terms now, it can't be an object that's just independent of mind, language, culture.
Carolyn Culbertson (48:48.92)
the object of naive realism. But it certainly isn't, we're not back in the paradigm of a pretty critical idealism either. And interestingly, we haven't talked much about Goddard's biography, but in his early student years, he was kind of surrounded by neo-Kantianism and very much was aware of kind of the limits of neo-Kantianism. And I think that's why he wouldn't, his philosophy can never be.
reducible to that kind of idealism.
PJ Wehry (49:26.712)
Thank you. I really appreciate it. And I think that that idea of the event happening and also just staying away. And I think this goes back to our earlier conversation where it's not just a psychological event, right? And the harder sell is the historical conditions of knowledge that really kind of make knowledge possible, if I'm saying that right. And so...
But I want to be respectful of your time. And my head is buzzing with so many thoughts right now. And I want to say thank you. I've really appreciated it. It's always a joy. I feel inspired to go back and reread and to grow and to learn. But just kind of as a last question, Dr. Culbertson, besides buying and reading your excellent book, which everyone should do, obviously.
What is something that you would recommend to people who have listened to the last 50 minutes of this podcast to either meditate on or do over the next week in response to this?
Carolyn Culbertson (50:35.203)
Hmm.
Carolyn Culbertson (50:38.831)
I would just say, you know, I've talked about that tension in different ways of thinking about knowing that motivated this book. The tension between thinking that proper knowing is value neutral, subject neutral, transcendent of any social historical situation.
And then on the other hand, thinking, nope, we're always imprisoned within those contexts and we can't think outside of them. And I think it's, for me, it's been very fruitful to really have the patience to just kind of sit with.
Carolyn Culbertson (51:29.229)
that tension and specifically to just accept that if we're going to kind of see a way out of that tension, knew we need to be willing to embrace new paradigms for knowing. And if I can add just a little part B, you know, something that hasn't come up in this
PJ Wehry (51:52.856)
Yeah, go for it.
Carolyn Culbertson (51:58.692)
conversation is we can read these traditions together. I'm someone who is very much trained in the continental philosophy tradition, pretty standard continental philosophy training, but through these problematics, I've come to appreciate the contributions of folks in analytic tradition and many of the feminist epistemologists come out of that tradition. And so, yeah, my other, my other.
PJ Wehry (52:03.768)
Hmm.
Carolyn Culbertson (52:26.829)
suggestion for something to meditate on is just to kind of embrace the fact that there are lots of different people who can contribute to this this problematic.
PJ Wehry (52:40.344)
Well, I can't think of a better way to end an episode on Goddmer than being like, hey, don't just stay inside your own bubble. and... That's a great... Man, it almost seems like that's an... You'd be an intellectual virtue or something. Dr. Colbertson, wonderful to have you on today. It was an absolute joy talking to you.
Carolyn Culbertson (52:47.649)
you
Carolyn Culbertson (52:55.705)
Thank
Carolyn Culbertson (53:01.284)
You too. Yeah, was a pleasure. Thanks for having me.