One of my favorite ponderers, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, died Monday. His essay “Thick Description” (collected in The Interpretation of Cultures, which I’ve named as one of the Stevens 100 Greatest Science Books) had a big effect on me when I read it in a lit-crit class in 1982. I was thus thrilled when Geertz agreed to let me interview him in person in 1989 and several times by phone thereafter. In The End of Science, I borrowed Geertz’s arguments to make the case that the social sciences will never achieve the precision and objectivity of, say, nuclear physics or molecular biology. Geertz proposed the term “faction,” which he defined as “imaginative writing about real people,” to describe anthropology. Here is an excerpt from my profile of Geertz in The End of Science:

 

Clifford Geertz is a shambling bear of a man, with shaggy, whitening hair and beard. When I first interviewed him one drizzly spring day at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, he fidgeted incessantly, pulling on his ear, pawing his cheek, slouching down in his chair and abruptly drawing himself up. Now and then, as he listened to me pose a question, he pulled the top of his sweater up over the tip of his nose, like a bandit trying to conceal his identity. His discourse, too, was elusive. It mimicked his writing: all stops and starts, headlong assertions punctuated by countless qualifications, and suffused with hypertrophic self-awareness.

Geertz was determined to correct what he felt was a common misimpression, that he is a universal skeptic, who does not believe that science can achieve any durable truths. Some fields, Geertz said, notably physics, obviously do have the capability to arrive at the truth. He also stressed that, contrary to what I might have heard, he did not consider anthropology to be "merely" an art form, devoid of any empirical content, and thus not a legitimate field of science. Anthropology is "empirical, responsive to evidence, it theorizes," Geertz said, and practitioners can sometimes achieve a "non-absolute" falsification of ideas. Hence it is a science, one that can achieve progress of a kind.

On the other hand, "nothing in anthropology has anything like the status of the harder parts of the hard sciences, and I don't think it ever will," Geertz said. "Some of the assumptions that [anthropologists] made about how easy it is to understand all this and what you need to do in order to do that are no longer really--well, nobody believes them anymore." He laughed. "It doesn't mean it's impossible to know anybody, either, or to do anthropological work. I don't think that at all. But it's not easy."

In modern anthropology, disagreement rather than consensus is the norm. "Things get more and more complicated, but they don't converge to a single point. They spread out and disperse in a very complex way. So I don't see everything heading toward some grand integration. I see it as much more pluralistic and differentiated."

As Geertz continued speaking, it seemed that the progress he envisioned was a kind of anti-progress, in which anthropologists eliminate, one by one, all the assumptions that make consensus possible; firm beliefs dwindle, and doubts multiply. He noted that few anthropologists still believe that they can extract universal truths about humanity from the study of "primitive" tribes, those supposedly existing in a pristine state, uncorrupted by modern culture; neither can anthropologists pretend to be purely objective data-gatherers, free of biasses and pre-conceptions.

Geertz found laughable the predictions of the sociobiologist Edward Wilson that the social sciences can eventually be rendered as rigorous as physics by grounding them in genetics and neuroscience. Would-be revolutionaries have always come forward with some grand idea that will unify the social sciences, Geertz recalled. Before sociobiology there was general systems theory, and cybernetics, and Marxism. "The notion that someone is going to come along and revolutionize everything overnight is a kind of academicians' disease," Geertz said.

At the Institute for Advanced Study, Geertz occasionally found himself approached by physicists or mathematicians who had developed highly mathematical models of racial relations and other sociological problems. "But they don't know anything about what goes on in the inner cities!" Geertz exclaimed. "They just have a mathematical model!" Physicists, he grumbled, would never stand for a theory of physics that lacks an empirical foundation. "But somehow or other social science doesn't count. And if you want to have a general theory of war and peace, all you have to do is to sit down and write an equation without having any knowledge of history or people."

Geertz was painfully aware that the introspective, literary style of science he had promulgated also had its pitfalls. It could lead to excessive self-consciousness, or "epistemological hypochondria" on the part of the practitioner. This trend, which Geertz dubbed "I-witnessing," had produced some interesting works but also some abysmal ones. Some anthropologists, Geertz noted, have become so determined to expose all their potential biasses, ideological or otherwise, that their writings resemble confessionals, revealing far more about the author than about the putative subject.

Geertz had recently revisited two regions he had studied early in his career, one in Morocco and the other in Indonesia. Both places had changed, drastically; he had also changed. As a result, he had become even more aware of just how hard it is for the anthropologist to discern truths that transcend their time, place, context. "I always felt it could end in total failure," he said. "I'm still reasonably optimistic, in the sense that I think it's doable, doable as long as you don't claim too much for it. Am I pessimistic? No, but I am chastened."

Anthropology is not the only field grappling with questions about its own limitations, Geertz pointed out. "I do sense the same mood in all kinds of fields"--even in particle physics, he said, which seemed to be reaching the limits of empirical verification. "The kind of simple self-confidence in science that there once was doesn't seem to me to be so pervasive. Which doesn't mean everybody is giving up hope and wringing their hands in anguish and so on. But it is extraordinarily difficult."

At the time of our meeting, Geertz was writing a book about his excursions into his past. When the book was published in 1995, its title neatly summarized Geertz's anxious attitude: After the Fact. Geertz peeled apart the title's multiple meanings in the book's final paragraph: Scientists like him are, of course, chasing after facts, but they can only capture facts, if at all, retrospectively; by the time they reach some understanding of what has taken place, the world has moved on, inscrutable as ever.

The phrase also referred, Geertz concluded, to the "post-positivist critique of empirical realism, the move away from simple correspondence theories of truth and knowledge which makes of the very term 'fact' a delicate matter. There is not much assurance or sense of closure, not even much of a sense of knowing what it is one precisely is after, in so indefinite a quest, amid such various people, over such a diversity of times. But it is an excellent way, interesting, dismaying, useful, and amusing, to spend a life." Ironic social science may not get us anywhere, but at least it can give us something to do, forever, if we like.

Comments

[de]

As pointed out, "Scientists like him are, of course, chasing after facts, but they can only capture facts, if at all, retrospectively; by the time they reach some understanding of what has taken place, the world has moved on, inscrutable as ever."

It seems to me that this "moving on," this constant, cutting-edge movement, is the essense of truth. For something to be true, it must be true NOW. We can say that something was true at one time, and we can predict that something might be true in the future, but if it isn't true now, it simply isn't true.

But here's where the water gets deep and science begins to finds the waves rough: What is the "now," this "now" where truth lives and the only place where truth can be found?

It appears to me that as soon as we are able to identify the "now" and recognize it, the "now" is already gone. Our procedures of identification and recognition are slow mental processes performed after the fact. The "now" appears to be a condition even before perception and thinking! This is what has--or should have--scientists tearing their hair.

The "now" is very real--it is the only truth there is and, obviously, it is where life is--just try "living" in the past or in the future.

It appears to me that he was off base quite a bit, but Julian Barbour in his THE END OF TIME at least took a look at this problem.