The Curse of the Contestable

The Curse of the ContestableColin Bird

That political theorists disagree is no surprise. That the profession is currently self-consciously split between two very broad groups united only by mutual distrust is harder both to accept and to understand. The split I have in mind can be roughly characterized as follows: some of us despise ‘analytic philosophy’; others hate ‘postmodernism’. These two stances lack any canonical definition, but most would agree that the target of the former is a broadly Anglophone tradition that includes, among much else: the English social contract theorists of the 17th century (pre-eminently Locke and Hobbes); the utilitarian tradition that runs from Hume throughMill, Sidgwick and into the neoclassical economists; at least some strands of the Kantian tradition; and the enormous literature on justice and ethics more generally that has burgeoned since the publication ofRawls’s Theory of Justice. To identify all (or even any) ofthis with ‘analytic philosophy’ is both inaccurate and grossly anachronistic, but the label is by now sofirmly ensconced among political theorists that objecting to its use at this point would be both pedantic and anyway ineffective. The target of the latter stance are the various formsof political theory that claim the inspiration of several influential ‘continental’ figures and schools, including most obviously, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, at least some members of the Frankfurt School, and Foucault. Within recent political theory,the dominant figures have been Judith Butler, Wendy

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Brown, Richard Rorty, Stanley Fish, Stephen White andWilliam E. Connolly. As with the ‘analytic’ label, lumping these figures together as if they represent asingle (‘Continental’) tendency is to artificially emphasize loose affinities (to say nothing of the English Channel) and to ignore the far more fundamental (and interesting) differences between them. Yet the field has acquired the habit of doing just that, by presuming these two groups to occupy clashing tectonic plates.My concern here is not so much with the identification of these two ‘traditions’, if that is what they are, but with the implication that they stand in a relation of antagonism. I am, in fact, skeptical that the sort of work done by scholars conventionally classified under these labels is usefully characterized as ‘analytic’ or ‘Continental’simpliciter. While these scholars are certainly rarely doing the same sort of thing, trying to capture theirdifferences using such coarse-grained categories strikes me as simplistic and indiscriminate. However,my primary aim here is not to question those who think these are useful labels, or those who have proposed ways of justifying them. I question these proposals only insofar as they imply that those falling under one or the other labels (however construed) are fated to be implacable adversaries. Myconcern is with the development of an antagonistic dividearound these classifications.It is extremely hard to document the existence of this divide with the sort of tangible evidence that could be put in a footnote, yet anyone remotely familiar with the field as it has developed over the past few decades will immediately recognize it. Like a family secret, it manages paradoxically to be both tacit and explicit at the same time. No theorist who has served on an academic search committee, had a bruising encounter with someone from ‘the other side’

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during a job talk, been infuriated by a hostile referee report, or been met with the sort of smug dismissiveness that thrives, like a mold, on such divisions, can seriously doubt its existence. It willhave kept many of us up at night, seething. There areno formal membership criteria for each faction, although one is more male and more white, which in the present climate, inevitably introduces another layer of suspicion. Though frequently declared in the use of certain code words that identify members of each group in the manner of a masonic handshake (“Boo Johns Hopkins!” “Boo Princeton!”), allegiance is determined informally, and usually insidiously, inknowing nods, off camera looks, shaking heads, eyes raised to the ceiling. Only those with poker faces stand any chance of commanding the respect of both sides. Quite obviously, this split is undesirable, because it encourages negative stereotyping. It allows scholars to dismiss certain sorts of work as problematic without bothering to read it carefully, discern its actual properties, consider it on its ownterms, and so forth. This is not just a matter of ‘cocktail party’ politeness: people’s careers often turn on these snap judgments (subsequently rationalized). So we become like frustrated electronswho deserve to be recognized as particles in our own right, but who find that when they turn to the screenthey are assimilated once again into a seemingly inescapable interference pattern. Why does this divide persist so stubbornly? Why do we fail to detect each other?Temperamental, psychological, pedagogical and institutional factors surely play a large role. On these fronts, I have no remedy to offer. However, thephenomenon might be partly attributed to recurring and compounding errors in intellectual judgment that,once brought to consciousness, can be actively

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resisted. That, at any rate, is the hypothesis animating this essay. I want to expose the misguided prejudices that sustain this opposition, with a view to ridding ourselves of both. I take it that that is worth wanting. I have nothing to say to those who aren’t tired of striking these poses, and who want to go on with the slogans, the stereotyping, the willful cramping of the intellectual imagination, the lazy conceit of presumed insight into others’ deficiencies. This paper is for those who share my conviction that political theorists have enough worth disagreeing about without having to concoct artificial and mindless cold wars between those who engage Rawls, Dworkin, G. A. Cohen et al. on the one hand and thosewho engage Nietzsche, Foucault, Connolly et al. on the other. I should warn at the outset that my approach is not that of a diplomatic arbitrator trying to negotiate atruce. Seeking a truce typically involves finding an agreement to cease hostilities despite an expectationof ongoing conflict. But I am not interested in achieving a respectful modus vivendi between presumptively legitimate positions. I want to move past the whole dispute more decisively by diagnosing it as a pathogen to be purged. My goal is to expose the dispute itself as a spurious mystification, and moreover both an embarrassment and a danger to the discipline.In the nature of the affliction, that entails a degree of therapeutic confrontation and challenge. Few welcome such scrutiny, especially when it threatens ingrained habits of thought. So, I may as well admit at the start that the chances are that this paper will get up your nose, though different readers will doubtless be offended at different points in my argument. Effective therapies are however rarely painless, and unfortunately there’s no

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analgesic for the very particular type of mental painthat comes with acknowledging folly. However, my aim isn’t to please, but to rid.

A Comedy of Error(theorie)sSince I believe that the division that has developed is radically misconceived, my diagnosis cannot take the form: ‘here’s what’s really at stake in this fight– and here’s how far we’ve obfuscated that real issue.’ Still, although I deny the existence of any real frontline that divides the two parties roughly identified above, we need some working account of where the front is believed to lie. Consider (in no particular order) some of the most obvious areas of tension, using the unfortunately imprecise argot of the day:

Fig. 1

Moralism vs Realism(Ethical) objectivity Suspicion of

‘objectivity’Clarity and definition Ambiguity and anti-

essentialismFoundationalism Nonfoundationalism

Conceptual analysis Hermeneutics/historicalinterpretation

Knowledge>power Power>knowledgeIndividualism CommunityLiberalism NonliberalismModernism Postmodernism

Ideal-theory Nonideal theoryClosure Agonism

Universalism Particularism

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History as distraction History as essentialAbstract rights Concrete identities

Yay ‘EnlightenmentReason’, Kant,

Bentham, instrumentalrationality etc.

Boo ‘EnlightenmentReason’, yay Nietzsche

One could expand this list, but three things are already clear:

1. none of these oppositions is clearly framed;2. each is independent in that we have absolutely

no reason a priori to suppose that adopting one of the views/attitudes on the left or right forces one to accept any other view/attitude in the same column; yet

3. broadly speaking members of the profession tend to align around one or other column and to disparage each other for doing so – this is the very phenomenon I seek to root diagnose and rootout.

So one way to attack the split might be to use 1. and2. to criticize the state of affairs described in 3. For example, we might show how someone could be (likeRichard Rorty) an anti-foundationalist (right column)yet an individualist Rawlsian liberal democrat (left column), or (like Joseph Raz) endorse ethical objectivity while rejecting individualism in favor ofa community-centered perfectionism. By showing how many ways the items in the left column can be combined with items in the right column, we might gradually dislodge the expectation that the two columns are inherently aligned or even have an elective affinity. But reviewing all these possible combinations would become tedious, and in any case would fail to be diagnostic and curative in the sense I intend. For it

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would be like giving a lame person a list of all the activities she will be able to do once she is healed – of no use at all (except perhaps motivational) in identifying the nature of her injury and the treatment that might nurse her back to health. We would still need to explain why theorists have encamped around the dualisms listed in Fig. 1, and why those dualisms persist and attract such emotionalcharge. To begin to get at this, we need to notice something that all of these oppositions share. The common feature to which I want to draw attention is that they can all underwrite error-theories of one sort oranother. By an ‘error-theory’ I mean to pick out a category of philosophical objection that became particularly prevalent in modern times within the human sciences. Philosophers reserve the term ‘error-theory’ for John Mackie-style moral skepticism, but Iwant to use the category here in a broader way, to capture any objection with the following general structure:

1. Some (set of) theory(ies) T claim(s) to establish x, y, z.

2. T’s support for x, y, z depends crucially on some theoretical assumption A

3. A is however untenable because it is demonstrably confused, fallacious, or incoherent.

4. Therefore, however attractive we find x, y, z, we must conclude that efforts to base them on T are vain, because T is vitiated by error (its reliance on A)

I am not aware of any explicit cases of error theory objections in the pre-modern era, although it is likely that many older arguments can be depicted as implicitly conforming to this model. The critique of natural rights and social contract theories found in Hume and Rousseau provides the first clear example of

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an argument along these lines of which I am aware. Marx’s claim that to judge capitalism (or indeed any economic system) by the lights of ‘justice’ is to indulge ideological delusion is another early example. But in the twentieth century error-theory arguments proliferated. One thinks for example of the cold war liberal argument that socialist appeals to a ‘common or collective good’ violate a principle of ‘methodological individualism’. Or Gilbert Ryle’s argument that Cartesian theories of the mind commit acategory-mistake. Or Karl Popper’s polemic against historicism. Or Joseph Schumpeter’s argument that classical theories of democracy presuppose a meaningless idea of a ‘social will’. Or MacIntyre’s argument that moral argument unguided by a teleological conception of human flourishing must be incoherent. Thanks in part to Macintyre’s efforts, indeed, even theologians (historically so often targets of error-theory arguments) have recently started to deploy such arguments themselves. John Milbank’s claim that all modern social science is vitiated by its commitment to a God-free Enlightenment outlook is quite plainly an error-theory objection, for example. The putatively antagonistic postures listed in Fig. 1are a veritable spawning ground for such arguments. The slogans on either side of that table are almost always tossed back and forth as error-theory objections, often ill-formed and bad, but bearing their distinctive tone: ‘your theory is a nonstarter’because: ‘relativist’; ‘individualist’; ‘committed toclosure’; ‘foundationalist’; ‘moralistic’; ‘it subordinates the individual to the collective’; ‘it ignores power’ etc., etc. Error-theory objections are perennially tempting to intellectuals. They allow one to reject whole families of doctrine by identifying a single,

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vitiating, fallacy infecting all their members, moreover without requiring a tedious, claim by claim,refutation of any of their detailed implications. Whybother pruning the branches when one can fell the tree with a single, well-aimed, swing of the axe? Error-theory objections also flatter the intellectualtemperament because in most of them, the purportedly fatal blow is delivered by some apparently neutral theoretical point not obvious in ordinary reflection,but available under more ‘sophisticated’ reflection. Who worries about “methodological individualism”, Cartesian category mistakes, the instability of nonteleological conceptions of virtue, or the “collapse of meta-narratives” in their everyday reflection about social groups, about contrasts between mental and physical health, about why they admire their mentors, or about whether they should attend church any more? But here comes an academic armed with an error theory to expose our naïvety. Hence the characteristic condescension of those lodging such objections. Think, for example, of the patronizing arrogance endemic to Hayek’s famous critique of socialism. Hayek granted that the socialist vision was animated by humane and noble feelings, but he saw the relevantsentiments as having evolved in the context of small-scale, face-to-face societies that have long since ceased to exist. For Hayek, socialism pointlessly applies ethical expectations that the development of large-scale, complex, open societies has rendered obsolete. So the whole enterprise rests on a wishful illusion. IF ONLY WE WERE HOBBITS, he seems to say. But alas! The Mordor of commerce has triumphed, and socialism is exposed as no more relevant than infantile nostalgia for an Atlantis-like Shire. Or consider Richard Rorty’s hilarious reference to the ‘collapsed circus tent of epistemology – those acres of canvas under which many of our colleagues

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still thrash aimlessly about.’ (Rorty 1998, 93) Although among the funniest lines ever penned by a philosopher, Rorty’s statement is also probably one of the cruelest; one can almost hear him cackling in triumph as he backs away from the computer into whichhe first typed it. From the standpoint of one who hasdevoted their career to publishing articles on reference in MIND, such comments must seem pretty offensive rather than amusing.

One should be clear, then, about the speech-act implicit in error theory objections. They typically combine the deprecation of others with self-congratulation: ‘Look at those dolts! They still think [______]: can you believe it? Good thing we’re not that superficial!’, where the blank could be filled in with various accusations of intellectual naivety. In the context of the split within politicaltheory under discussion here, likely insertions mightinclude: ‘relativism isn’t self-refuting’; ‘ethical disagreements can be resolved from some neutral, apolitical, ahistorical, standpoint’; ‘justice can bereduced to power’; or ‘closure is possible in politics’.So, error theory arguments pack a particular punch, and this explains, I think, why disputes defined by them can stir strong feelings. They don’t merely claim that certain theoretical conclusions should be rejected or that the arguments purporting to demonstrate them are problematic. Conclusions can be modified, arguments improved, and problems fixed. At least when they hit home, error theory objections render all this as pointless as trying to fix the undercarriage on a nosediving plane. And they therebyacquire potentially devastating existential, as well as cognitive, significance. For example, those committed to the ‘Enlightenment Project’, must receive Macintyre’s charge that it ‘had to fail’ as achallenge, not just to a theory or set of

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propositions, but also in some measure to themselves.For that charge implies that anyone (like them) foolish enough to pursue certain Enlightenment idealshas been – or is! – wasting his or her time. To characterize others’ activities in this way is to implicitly put oneself above one’s targets, able to discern a futility in certain intellectual frameworksthat (presumably) eludes those working within them. (For, if it were obvious to the latter, why would they bother to pursue them?) I stress that this has nothing to do with the accuracy of an error-theory objection: one claims that superiority simply by making such objections, whether or not they are any good. Launching an error-theory objection is the intellectual equivalent of telling someone to ‘get a life’. So the first part of my diagnosis is that the key terms of the dispute are existentially freighted for participants because they tend to raise the specter of vanity. And the reason for this is that the dispute pivots around a series of reciprocated error-theory objections. These characteristically challenge, not any particular theoretical conclusion,but the very coherence of the larger theoretical frameworks within which they are defended and accorded significance. When everyone is confronted with such insinuations of futility, it’s not surprising that those so targeted should start banding together in coalitions of the wounded.

Self-recriminationThe phenomenon just described helps explain the self-reinforcing psychological tension that attends current divisions among political theorists. However,it doesn’t explain why quarrel has developed around the sorts of issues flagged in fig. 1 above. Nor doesit show that it is problematic: so far, I have

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avoided pronouncing on the merits of any particular error-theory accusation. Explaining why a division has formed around those issues, and why that division is radically confused, requires a further and more ambitious, and I’m afraidcircuitous, diagnostic maneuver. To make it, I maintain, we must properly appreciate how political theorists today, especially those working in departments of Political Science, still live under the shadow of suspicion cast by the positivist epistemologies regnant in the mid twentieth century. During that time, positivists almost destroyed Political Theory as an academic subfield by directinga seemingly devastating error-theory objection at thewhole enterprise. The threat posed by positivism consisted in an attitude of skepticism about the possibility of reasoning about ‘values’ – about whichmuch more later. Even though its theoretical underpinnings have been comprehensively and multiply refuted by very powerful arguments, that skeptical attitude appears to persist among many empirical social scientists. At any rate, I cannot otherwise account for the contempt in which the subfield of Political theory continues to be held by some empirically oriented political scientists and very many economists.1 Of course, it’s not news that the positivistic attitudes of many empiricists clash with the philosophical outlook of most political theorists, nor that theorists live under the shadow of

1 As recently as 2000, David Mayhew of Yale University could write thattheorists have made a ‘tactical mistake’ in letting themselves ‘becomelabeled normative’. This, he claims with evident approval, ‘has allowed the kind of dismissal that Ayer (1948), writing at the high tide of logical positivism, gave to normative concerns’ (Mayhew 2000, 192). I find it astonishing that A. J. Ayer’s largely refuted Language Truth and Logic could be complacently cited as authoritative by a reputable social scientist writing at the turn of the 21st century. Andthis from an empiricist who is reasonably sympathetic to political theory; God knows what nonsense those hostile to it spread about.

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positivist suspicion in that they are rarely more than a weak and tolerated minority in most political science departments. If my diagnosis were merely a reminder of these familiar circumstances it would be neither novel nor apt. But I want to suggest something that is less often noticed. My contention is that the earlier confrontation with positivism was never properly resolved within political theory. As a result, confusions endemic to positivism itself were uncritically imported into theoutlook of many political theorists (and, no doubt, unconsciously reinforced by the positivistic attitudes still prevalent among their political scientist colleagues). To a surprising degree, elements of the positivists’ error-theory skepticism about the rational status of ‘normative’ inquiry haveactually found tacit, albeit unwitting, endorsement among political theorists who today think of themselves as having overcome positivism. So, the picture I want to paint is one of a field that has failed to completely extricate itself from the clutches of a lethal adversary. What started out as an external critique of the enterprise of political theory has evolved into a format for the self-recrimination that we observe within the subfield today. This, I believe, is partly why those recriminations often take the form of the error-theory objections described earlier.My thesis, then, is this: The present division of thesubfield over the sorts of issues listed in fig. 1, is a symptom of the unconscious reabsorption into Political Theorists’ own self-understanding of several toxic positivist prejudices. Fortunately, these positivist residues are as confused as positivism itself, so, in principle, the virus can beremoved. But to administer the required therapy, we must elaborate and verify the diagnosis. This in turnrequires that we first carefully review exactly why

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positivists regard the study of political theory as vitiated by a category mistake.

PositivismI take the positivist to assert:

1. The precepts of logic and the ‘scientific method’ exhaust rationality; hence only that which can be tested by those criteria is even a candidate for rational assessment

2. Metaphysical claims about unobservable entities (e.g. God, ‘spirit’, historical events and othernoumena) and all normative judgments can neither be vindicated nor falsified on logical or empirical grounds, and so fail as candidates forrational assessment

3. (Hence) The realms of ‘fact’ (the ‘positive’) and of ‘value’ (the ‘normative’) have a fundamentally different epistemic status: factual propositions can be rationally assessed,demonstrated, falsified; normative utterances are in contrast neither rational nor irrational,not subject to falsification or tests of rational plausibility.

The positivists took this trio of claims to imply that normative propositions are pseudo-propositions, beyond the scope of rational assessment, belonging (as the positivists sometimes charitably put it!) to the category of ‘non-sense’. This position, if sound,convicts political theory (and moral philosophy, ethics and theology) of delusion because these fieldstake themselves to be investigating the truth, plausibility, and justifiability of normative claims.From a positivist’s standpoint, such investigation isradically futile, since for them normative claims must fall outside the realm of reason. To take such inquiry seriously is to commit a howling category-mistake: trying to use reason to justify or assess

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value-judgments is like proposing to measure the temperature of the Goldberg Variations. The positivists of course allowed that normative utterance/behavior can be studied empirically: we can do moral anthropology, explore the history of moral and political philosophy, and study the logic of moral expression (so-called ‘meta-ethics’). But for apositivist such inquiry – because and to the extent that it is purely empirical – will itself be ‘value-free’ in two connected senses:

(a) it will be dispassionate, impartial, neutral, independent of any value-judgments – ‘just the facts’; and

(b) the conclusions of such inquiry cannot do anything to make any value-judgment more or lessrational.

To be sure, empirical findings may reveal certain choices to be rational for an agent given facts about their likely effects and given the agent’s preferences. But to say that the facts make it rational for me to choose X because they show that X will predictably bring about something I prefer is not to say that those facts justify my preference, or so goes the positivist line.

The positivists were aware, of course, that agents seem to make ‘value-judgments’ all the time, as when one says that (e.g.) human trafficking and rape are worthy of moral protest. The positivists insisted, however, that we shouldn’t be deceived by the grammatical form of such judgments into thinking thatthey represent ‘objectively’ testable claims, some ‘fact of the matter’ about the properties of human trafficking or rape. Instead, such judgments are for positivists radically ‘subjective’, unverifiable, arational, emotive expressions, in the same logical category as grunts, screams, hysterical laughter,

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rounds of applause, etc. They do not describe some state of affairs, but project agents’ contingent, andhighly variable, internal attitudes onto the world. In retrospect, that this doctrine was (and to some extent still is) taken seriously by intelligent people, and especially by those in the social sciences, is almost unbelievable. Almost, because, asmany philosophers of science have pointed out, the peculiarity of the positivist position is easily concealed by the status of the fact/value distinctionas a modern cultural institution (‘values are, like, *soooo* subjective -- lol!’). Yet even fairly superficial reflectionreveals the positivist view to be counterintuitive enough for one to demand very strong arguments beforeaccepting it. For example: do we really have no reason to judge the moral protests of the Klu Klux Klan neither more nor less well-founded than those of the Anti-defamation League? X regularly deceives his wife and friends, has sadistic tendencies, enjoys singing racist songs,and gets a kick out of forcing people to have sex with him. These are plain facts about X: do they really give us no reason to judge him a bad man? Of course, there may be other facts about X; people are notoriously morally complex. But suppose this information accurately sums up X’s predominant behavioral tendencies. Someone who responds: ‘what a great guy!’ seems to be making either a mistake or a sarcastic remark. (Perhaps the worst thing that can be said about positivism is that it would render sarcasm unintelligible. (I mean that.))For such reasons almost everyone will immediately sense that the positivist’s rigid fact/value dichotomy is fishy. However, where exactly that dichotomy goes off the rails at a deeper philosophical level isn’t quite so obvious, nor what one should conclude from its failure. One reason for this is that its philosophical deficiencies are

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massively overdetermined. When so many things are wrong with it, it is easy to emphasize some of its defects while failing to notice others. This circumstance, I now want to suggest, was crucially important in determining the directions in which different groups of political theorists moved after the demise of positivism. Everyone involved in the revival of political theory (and the intellectual analysis of normative claims more generally) from the1960s forward could (and largely did) agree that positivism had been discredited. But this agreement that the positivists had been wrong about the normative masked a lot of confusion about how positivism had gotten it wrong. And I now want to suggest that the current division between the so-called ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’ or ‘postmodern’ wings of the political theory profession has its roots in these confusions. Exposing those confusions,I maintain, explodes the cause of division.

How to reject the Fact/Value distinctionIn principle, there are (at least) two ways to attacka distinction. One can reject it outright, suggestingthat the purported contrast it draws is wholly incoherent or in some fundamental respect misleading.Applied to positivism, an objection along these lineswould argue that the positivists’ dichotomy of fact and value is itself confused, and hence that facts, values and rationality are indivisibly mutually implicated. Alternatively, one might suggest that those who use a distinction draw it in the wrong place, incorrectly sorting items by its lights. An anti-positivist objection of this second sort would accept the basic contrast between fact and value but suggest that the positivists incorrectly classified different discourses under the categories of (rationally adjudicable) ‘matters of fact’ and (nonadjudicable) ‘matters of value’.

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The first of these options is the way to go. One could cite many arguments favoring this move, but forpresent purposes it will be sufficient to note the quick yet decisive objection that positivism is self-refuting. Many have made this point, although Hilary Putnam has over the years been its most consistent and clearest exponent (Putnam 1981, 2004). The difficulty for the positivist is this: Saying that only certain sorts of propositions should be acceptedas true, or as subject to rational assessment, is to make a set of normative judgments. For it entails claims about what we ought to do (‘as far as possibleaccept only those beliefs that can be empirically verified’), what we ought to value (scientific explanation, empirical analysis, conceptual parsimony, generalizability etc.) and what we ought to regard as a waste of time (doing political theory). The resulting dilemma is fatal to positivism. For either

a. the positivist distinction between fact and value applies, in which case positivism itself turns out to be a nonrational view, a partisan expression of attitude that one cannot have any reason to accept or reject, or

b. the positivist commends her position as valid, sound, rational, etc., in which case she performatively contradicts her fundamental claimthat logic and empirical analysis exhaust rationality (for that commendation is a putatively rational normative judgment yet neither a logical truth nor an empirically verifiable one)

Positivism (and any science that conceives itself in positivist terms) is thus either groundless or incoherent.To my mind, this is an unanswerable, devastating, objection. The lesson to draw is that the positivistswere quite wrong to think of themselves as having

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triumphantly overcome a primitive and confused ‘pre-scientific’ consciousness in which reason, logic and fact were adulterated by arbitrary evaluative noise. Rather, the positivist episode was (like so much in the 20th century) an aberration, a misguided attempt to deny the once unselfconsciously held truth that rationality and normativity are more or less co-extensive. In the wake of positivism, that truth has lost its earlier innocence and so is now forced to assert itself in dull philosophical pronouncements about theinherent normativity of rationality. Dull, but nonetheless true: Rational consciousness is nothing but consciousness of having reasons to do, to think, to judge, to believe, to act, etc. and so just is normative, prescriptive, and imbued with value-judgment. Trying to isolate the aspects of reflection, thought, language, utterance etc. that are distinctively ‘normative’ from those that are distinctively ‘positive’ is a fool’s errand. The two are ineradicably ‘entangled’ (Putnam’s term), tied together in knots that cannot be unpicked. Even to identify a ‘fact’ is to commend it as ‘worthy to be believed, asserted or relied upon’ from some rationalpoint of view. Such commendation is already normative, not essentially different from identifyingactions as ‘worthy to be performed’ or institutions as ‘worthy to be supported, abolished, reformed’ etc.This first way of rejecting the fact/value distinction allows a clean break from positivism. I emphasize, however, that one who puts positivism behind them on this basis is committed neither to skepticism about nor to hostility toward empirical (social) science. It entails only an acknowledgement that empirical inquiry is, like all rational activity, unthinkable except as a norm-imbued practice. What it denies is that one can intelligiblyregard one area of intellectual inquiry as more or

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less ‘value-free’ than any other. In this respect at least, political science and political theory (or, for that matter, history and physics) are on all fours. To be sure, there are myriad other differences betweenthem; the questions asked in different academic fields are not all of the same sort, and obviously the intellectual techniques appropriate for addressing some questions may not be helpful for others. But for all these differences, they are all in the business of identifying questions worth askingand trying to discriminate between better and worse answers to them. Whatever form it takes, that is an inherently normative activity, guided by principles appropriate to the sorts of questions being asked, and by the general aim of identifying good reasons for relying on certain beliefs, arguments, principles, inferences, conclusions etc. rather than others. This much ought to be uncontroversial; and, had it been clearly appreciated on all sides, our story could end happily here. Unfortunately, many have beentempted by a particularly strong version of the second and incompatible line of objection described above. This has led to confusion about what it means to say (as I just claimed) that rational inquiry cannot be ‘value-free’.

How not to reject the Fact/Value distinctionThe second type of objection, recall, attacks not theunderlying distinction between the domains of rational fact and of nonrational value, but the positivists’ view of what falls on either side of it.To put it technically, such objections accept the intension of the distinction but question the positivists’ standard account of its extension. On that standard account, the fields comprising what we

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today call ‘STEM’ deal with verifiable propositions and so count as genuine sciences. But (the account continues) as one pushes beyond the orbit of physics,chemistry etc., and further into the social sciences,the humanities, and eventually to philosophy and religion, one eventually reaches a point at which rational standards no longer apply. According to positivists, once we cross this border, we enter an epistemic void, a realm of pseudo-science, journalism, superstition and metaphysics. Here, we can expect only the expression of conflicting nonrational assertions, value-judgments, preferences,etc. Agents may of course talk as if these differences of opinion can be rationally resolved, but in this they are quite deluded. Apart from any factual claims on which such opinions turn, these disagreements are from a positivist standpoint irresolvable. A. J. Ayer put this position as follows(I have added emphases whose significance will becomeclear):

When someone disagrees with us about the moral value of a certain action, … we do admittedly resort to argument in order to win him over to our way of thinking. But we do not attempt to show by our arguments that he has the “wrong” ethical feeling… we attempt to show that he is mistaken about the facts of the case. … But if our opponent happens to have undergone a different process of moral “conditioning” from ourselves, so that, even when he acknowledges all the facts, he still disagrees with us about the moral value of the actions under discussion,then we abandon the attempt to convince him by argument. … [Because] he employs a different setof values from our own … we cannot bring forwardany arguments to show that our system [of values] is superior. For our judgment that it isso is itself a judgment of value and accordingly

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outside the scope of argument (Ayer 1946, 110-11).

Notice, before going on, that (a) in speaking of ‘winning over’ an ‘opponent’, Ayer here implicitly uses the metaphor of an unwinnable contest to capturethe nature of evaluative discourse; and (b) he uses the inability to secure an opponent’s actual assent asevidence for the unarguable character of such disagreement – a criterion that, by the way, scientists quite rightly do not use (for by that standard, Darwinian natural selection would be ill-founded because, and to the extent that, convinced creationists will not actually assent to it).In any case, the second type of anti-positivist objection targets this standard account of the extension of the fact/value dichotomy. Such objections might be milder or more aggressive, but their general thrust will be to suggest that the realm of the ‘evaluative’ and (they will claim, hence) ‘unadjudicable’ extends further into the precincts of the sciences than positivists thought. Mild versions might leave the positivist credentials of mathematics, physics and chemistry intact but denythem to the social ‘sciences’, pointing out how oftenideology, politics and moral preference have shaped the agendas and conclusions of economists and political scientists, and perhaps then drawing on thehistory of eugenics to venture similar doubts about certain aspects of biology. Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions provides grounds for a deeper incursion, suggesting that the development of even the hard sciences can be understood as the working out of a politics within the community of scientists,and that rival scientific paradigms are rationally incommensurable. The ‘Strong Programme’ in the sociology of knowledge, which claimed that even formsof mathematics are culturally specific, or the Derridaist suggestion that scientific discourse is

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never anything but contingent ‘text’, make still moreradical advances in this direction.To be quite clear, my claim is not that arguments about the ideological or political dimensions of supposedly uncommitted research programs should be dismissed. To the contrary, that phenomenon is a sometimes real and pernicious one. Vigilance about the covert agendas that have shaped different scientific paradigms is vitally important, especiallyin the social sciences. Moreover, Kuhnian arguments about the history and evolution of scientific understanding can often provide invaluable clues about where such vigilance is most needed.The point relevant here, rather, is that using such arguments to question the positivist understanding ofwhere the boundary between ‘fact’ and ‘value’ lies preserves rather than threatens the positivists’ background understanding of the respective character of ‘rational’ as opposed to ‘normative’ discourse. For this line puts no pressure at all on the positivist idea that ‘rationality’ is to be exclusively identified with the application of ‘evaluatively neutral’ criteria for certifying propositions as true, and that the ‘normative’ is associated with contestation among partisans of conflicting and incommensurable evaluative perspectives. Instead, it merely enlarges the scope of the latter category, so that the self-image of scientific rationality as ‘neutral’ rather than culturally or politically partisan is called into question. Far from questioning the positivists’ view of how the ‘rational’ and the ‘normative’ differ in character, this line reinforces it. This remains true even if one adopts the most radicalversion of this line and claims (with e.g. postmodernists) that the set of discourses in which rational adjudication in the sense intended by the positivist is possible is empty or virtually empty.

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Appearances to the contrary, this radical move doesn’t lead to the conclusion that the fact/value dichotomy is incoherent (the correct view). It ratherimplies that the distinction is coherent but idle. An example of an idle distinction in the sense I intend that term is that between persons who are mammals andthose who are reptiles. It is idle because it distinguishes a filled set from an empty one: at least at this stage in biological evolution there areno reptile persons (outside episodes of ‘Dr. Who’). However, to object that a distinction is in this way idle is not to say that it is incoherent or unintelligible. It is (in our world) idle to distinguish people who have x-ray vision and those who don’t, because no one has it. Yet the concept of a person with x-ray vision is perfectly coherent, andif such people existed, they would be (in that respect) importantly distinct from those who lack it:they would, after all, be superheroes! Even though idle distinctions won’t actually distinguish anything (or much) in the world, one who draws them is still thereby committed to certain assumptions about the character of the items to whichthose distinctions might apply. That there are no reptile persons at least tells us that persons are warm-blooded and (pace Hobbes) aren’t generally covered in scales. Similarly, someone who claims thatno discourse is ever likely to satisfy the positivistcriteria for a rational science is implicitly committed to certain expectations about the likely character of all remaining discourse. Specifically, they will be led to expect that any actual discourse will display the properties that the positivists tookto be characteristic of the normative, at bottom unruly and arational as opposed to rationally adjudicable. Viewed from this angle, discourse as such will be, as we saw Ayer suggest above, a realm of contests between rationally incommensurable,

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unadjudicable normative perspectives that try, inevitably in vain, to win each other over.To argue in this way, then, is to tacitly endorse thepositivist implication that when claims cannot be demonstrated on empirical grounds, nor deduced validly from sound premises, without presuming any norms or values, they exist in a zone of rationally undecideable contestation. ‘Answerability to a universal, value-free rational tribunal’, certifying propositions first as testable and then as demonstrably true or false here remains the baseline of comparison. Perhaps not surprisingly, given the lingering positivist impetus of much modern social science, thetension that still exists between political scientists and political theorists is often viewed byboth sides through this prism. Within this dialectic,political scientists see themselves as applying neutral, value-free, criteria of rational verification and scorn political theorists for engaging in journalistic, ideological, moralistic, advocacy undisciplined by standards of rigor. Many theorists have responded, with not a little ressentiment, that political science is in the same boat because it, too, reposes on contestable, incommensurable, assumptions about rationality, ideological prejudices, and so forth. Politics, suchtheorists retort, is the realm of the ‘essentially contested.’ What one should do, as a theorist, is to make peace with that ubiquitous feature of the political and make war on any purported ‘science’, theory, argument, appeal to ‘universal rationality’ etc. that claims to put some conclusion about politics beyond reasonable dispute. The figure who has pushed this line most explicitly among political theorists is William E. Connolly (in The Terms of Political Discourse). He writes:

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To say that a particular network of concepts is contestable to say that the standards and criteria of judgment it expresses are open to contestation. To say that such a network is essentially contestable is to contend that the universal criteria of reason, as we can now understand them, do not suffice to settle these contests definitively (Connolly 1993, 225).

The importance of this claim for Connolly is that it unsettles the

wish to construct a neutral matrix for politicaldiscourse. While the sources of this urge are readily understandable, recurrent efforts to demonstrate that one particular scheme actually provides the neutral medium sought are constantly open to decomposition. Each attempt to provide a frame both rationally demonstrable and specific enough to guide practical judgment,opens itself to reasonable contestation (Connolly 1993, xix).

But this whole dialectic doesn’t so much pass judgment on, as operate within, the positivist framework. The similarity between Connolly’s use of the metaphor of ‘contestability’ and Ayer’s talk of winners and opponents is too striking to be ignored. Notice, too, Connolly’s implicit contrast between therealm of ‘essential contestability’ and that of the ‘rationally demonstrable’, the presumed but absent other in which ‘universal’ or ‘neutral’ ‘criteria of reason’ do suffice to settle controversial political questions. There is nothing in this position that is fundamentally opposed to positivism;2 indeed, one 2 Connolly follows Gallie in seeing ‘appraisiveness’ (which I take to be equivalent to ‘normative’) as a source of ‘contestability’. Connolly writes: ‘it is exactly the persisting disputes surrounding appraisive concepts that our analysis [The ‘essential contestability’ thesis] accounts for’. He then adds something puzzling, that those who accept the ‘descriptive-normative dichotomy’ must find the persistence of these disputes ‘mysterious’. But of course those who accept that dichotomy (the positivists) don’t find it mysterious at

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should think of it as a Trojan Horse by which the positivist opposition of the normative and the rationally demonstrable has been smuggled into many theorists’ own self-consciousness. This is the ‘curse of the contestable’.3

DiagnosisWhat I am calling the ‘curse of the contestable’ is the tendency for political theorists to be held captive by positivist delusion even as they congratulate themselves on having escaped it. Logicalpositivism may be long dead; but its implication thatcritical philosophical argument about values is ultimately vain and interminably political has survived. No longer supported by epistemic doctrine, or by a naïve emotivism, the implication now subsistsquite happily on strong versions of the ‘essential contestability’ thesis, which suggest that any theorization of a political concept will be driven by

all, because on the positivist account, the persistence of these disputes is inevitable because they occur around untestable normative nonpropositions. Connolly here fails to appreciate how his contestability thesis is continuous, rather than inconsistent, with the positivist account. 3 The fact that many in the field are under this curse, I think, explains the otherwise paradoxical fact that departments of Political Science have been oddly more receptive to ‘postmodern’ forms of political theory than have other disciplines (e.g. philosophy, history). On my view, the receptivity of Political Scientists to this line reflects their tendency to view normative discourse through the same positivistic lens that Connolly less self-consciously applies – as an untameable, nonrational, unsettled, field of interminable conflict defined by the absence of definitive value-free rational criteria for demonstrating propositional truth. Viewed in a longer historical perspective, though, perhaps none of this should really surprise us. It is not for nothing that the founders of logical positivism, Schlick, Carnap, and other members of the Vienna Circle (with whom Ayer hung out in the 1930s) admired and were influenced by Nietzsche. For me, there is a pretty direct line from Hume, through Nietzsche, to logical positivism and to the curse of the contestable. It is a cul-de-sac, and we need to turn around.

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some underlying, controversial, political agenda thatis neither falsifiable nor impartially justifying. This has restored prejudices about the character of normative argument that should have been long ago exorcised by the eclipse of logical positivism but into which theorists of contestability have alas breathed new life.Among its more pernicious implications is that the prospects for genuine intellectual progress on questions involving political values are dim. (By ‘intellectual progress’ I mean achieving a shared, justified but nonobvious judgment that certain political arguments or judgments succeed, fail, are more plausible than others etc.). That implication isa disaster for political theory. It is difficult to see what the point of engaging in it could possibly be if one started out with the presumption that no such progress can be made, or that one must continuously (Connolly: ‘relentlessly’) insinuate that any standard one proposes to measure it is subject to interminable reasonable contestation. Whatis left, under these rules, but narcissistic agitation for one’s own partisan sympathies? There isno surer way to fulfill positivist prophecies about the vanity of the enterprise. You may be tempted to reply: ‘but the only way to measure progress on some noncontestable basis would be by setting up universal, value-free, criteria of reason to demonstrate, beyond all possible doubt, that some political proposition is true.’ If you areso tempted, then I say that you, too, are victim to the curse of the contestable. For this response again propagates the same positivist dogma that rational acceptability, intellectual progress, havingreason to believe that your more recent beliefs improve over their predecessors, etc., can only be established by the application of such criteria.

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That dogma represented the positivists’ overcompensation for the metaphysical excesses of the19th century idealists. Fortunately, we don’t have tofollow them in this, for the dogma is a lie, and seeing why doesn’t require a resurrection of AbsoluteIdealism. Recall again the earlier objection: the positivists’ own belief that positivist natural science is a rational, indeed, rationally well-grounded, project cannot itself pass muster by the lights of those criteria of rationality. What this reveals is that much of what we quite properly judge to be rational or irrational is so despite the absence of formal criteria for demonstrating the ‘truth’ of relevant propositions. The fundamental locus of our concept of rationality is not the epistemic status of propositions (though that is certainly in its orbit), but the coherence, plausibility, appropriateness, justifiability etc. ofour reflective stance toward the world. The positivist is right that our reasons to value (say) carefully designed empirical research into the causesof unemployment, or critical theories that expose ideological delusion, or the Art of Fugue, cannot be certified by applying a formal checklist of conditions for propositional truth. But only if one buys positivist dogma (and succumbs to the curse of the contestable) will one infer that these therefore aren’t uncontestably good reasons to believe, do, or argue things. Some may suspect that in attacking especially the postmodern appeal to ‘contestability’ I am just behaving like another of those analytic types whom atone point Connolly (1993, ix) accuses of fomenting ‘evil’ (while at the same time boasting of his ‘generosity’ to difference). So, far from transcending the quarrel with which we began, I am launching another salvo within it, or so a critic might charge.

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To those stuck in the habit of dividing up the subfield in the way I want to abolish, this response will seem almost irresistible. But indulging it wouldmiss the point. It is true that I regard aspects of Connolly’s work, and of much what they have influenced, as a major symptom of the problem. However, I appeal to Connolly’s version of the ‘essential contestability’ thesis only to provide a particularly vivid, clear, illustration of a far wider underlying phenomenon.4 That phenomenon is a deep confusion about the character of normative discourse, one that I do not associate with any particular ‘wing’ of the subfield, but which crops upright across it – and in the social sciences more generally. That confusion consists in a failure to properly distinguish the two anti-positivist arguments I have discussed here. Those two arguments respectively claim that

a. no rational judgments about politics can be value-free because rationality is itself inherently normative.

b. no normative judgments about politics can be uncontestably demonstrated because the value-free criteria of rational acceptability needed so to demonstrate them are not (likely to be) available.

Logically inconsistent though they are, these claims are easy to conflate. Both, after all, are directed against positivism, and both imply that normativity 4 I should say, too, that I don’t regard Connolly’s The Terms of Political Discourse as a wholly misguided book. I find it more accurate to describe it as a tragic book, one that tries to make a decisive move beyond positivism but trips itself up by indulging the contestability thesis. Much in the book is on target: its attack on positivism, its skepticism about fact/value dichotomies, its appreciation for the nuances of ordinary language, and its specific accounts of power, freedom, responsibility, etc. But these valuable insights are let downby his dalliance with ‘contestability’.

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is an ineradicable feature of political discourse. The curse of the contestable is the tendency to see this superficial similarity and to then complacently elide the two. Such an elision inevitably introduces a crippling (and entirely unnecessary) self-consciousness about the status of inquiry within political theory, and especially about how to understand disagreements that arise in the course of such inquiry. In closing, I now want to suggest how this self-consciousness fuels the current division ofthe field into warring ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’ factions.

The analytic/continental divide as symptom Suppose for a moment that you and your fellow theorists have been completely inoculated against thecurse of the contestable. Every decent graduate program in the discipline drums into its students from the first day of classes the sad story of positivism and the importance of seeing clearly the difference between a. and b. Aspiring theorists wouldbe taught to recognize b. (along with its positivist residue) as the false friend that it is and to rejectit in favor of a. Consider now two professors of political theory who were trained in this way. One was impressed by Mill’s writings while a graduatestudent and was inspired to consider whether the rightful limits of legal control over autonomous individuals are exceeded by modern states. She eventually produces an important book arguing that Mill was broadly correct, and that the modern state’spower over the individual needs to be rolled back. The other was bowled over by Marx’s writings early inher career and became interested in exposing what shesuspects is the operation of a moralistic ideology that obfuscates the true power-relations operating inliberal-capitalist societies. She eventually producesan important book claiming to vindicate aspects of

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Marx’s hypothesis that much of modern liberal thoughtis merely capitalist ideology. By mid-career both accept senior positions in the same departments in the same year. When they meet at the University of Utopia’s Politics department pre-semester cocktail party and are introduced, what attitudes are they likely to have toward their work and each other?Two points deserve stress. First, neither is likely to believe that the arguments they have presented in their respective writings have proved beyond all possible doubt that their views about state power andliberal ideology are true. They will accept that theyare fallible and could be shown to be wrong. Their conclusions will have been controversial and triggered debates with colleagues working on similar or overlapping questions. But, liberated from the curse of the contestable, they wouldn’t see those debates as any more remarkable or problematic than disagreement about whether ADHD is a real condition, the causes and consequences of climate change, how quantum mechanics should be properly interpreted, or about whether the low carb diet is a good idea. Nor would they see any reason to regard the possibility that these debates will be ultimately inconclusive assigns of some special property of the concepts involved. They would accept it simply as a consequence of the limitations of rational understanding.Second, despite an apparent tension between their research agendas – one sympathetic toward, the other doubtful of, aspects of ‘liberal’ thought – they would be very unlikely to make much of it. They mightwell have difficulty getting excited about their colleagues’ work, and they might even suspect that their respective conclusions must have gone wrong somewhere. But they would find it easy to extend to each other the charity of assuming that they have conducted their research in good faith, done their

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best to assess the arguments from the standpoint of everyman, been willing to concede to critics who castlegitimate doubt on their conclusions, and so on. They would certainly not start out presuming that they are in an adversarial relation, or that the other’s work is a pointless waste of time. Although they would notice that their work presupposes different attitudes toward ‘liberalism’, they wouldn’t necessarily infer that their writings are in a ‘contending’ relation. For they would be clear that not all political difference is a symptom of a contest, or even of conflict. They might see their lines of questioning targeting very remotely related levels in the structure of ‘liberal’ thought,with no immediate implications for each other (like the difference between someone assessing a whole constitutional order and someone evaluating some veryspecific aspect of court procedure – like jury selection in criminal trials). They might also see each other as operating within incommensurable intellectual frameworks that in principle cannot be in competition (any more than playing chess is in competition with writing fugues). But they would be sophisticated enough to see that it doesn’t follow that one can’t rationally distinguish between incompetent and well-crafted fugues or between strongmoves and blunders. All would be well. Now transpose these two scholars to an intellectual milieu in which the curse of the contestable has become universalized. That doesn’t mean that they both fully endorse Connolly’s essential contestability thesis; it means that they vacillate between accepting and resisting it at different times, because they don’t clearly appreciate the distinction between a. and b. above. Under these conditions, I submit, they would be likely to entertain an unstable combination of attitudes. On the one hand, they will feel some pressure to admit

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that their intellectual activities make sense only relative to certain contestable political allegiances, so (for example), our Mill-inspired scholar will find herself sometimes acknowledging herliberal credentials, almost like a disclaimer. On the other hand, they will have a residual sense that their interest in their work and their conviction as to the soundness of their conclusions reflect, not some unarguable allegiance to a contestable tradition or worldview, but the independent plausibility of those ideas. They will beprimed to relativize their activities to putatively contestable liberal or Marxist ‘identities’ while at the same time believing that everyone has a reason totake an interest in, and accept, their conclusions. But their efforts to validate that latter belief willbe compromised from the outset. For those efforts will be haunted by a fatal self-consciousness about whether they offer those reasons in good faith or whether those reasons are emanations of some existential motive that ‘reason’ cannot ‘suffice’ to justify – their respective identities as ‘liberals’ and ‘Marxists’ in a world in which ‘liberalism’ and Marxism are ‘essentially contested’. Just as anxiety about sleeplessness begets sleeplessness, here bad faith becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy born of anxiety about bad faith. The result will be that their intellectual attention is increasingly divided between directly analyzing specific political arguments and indulging indirect, meta-speculation about the location of their exponents within some postulated field of (political)contestation. The pressure to ‘go meta’ in this way is, to my mind, merely a further perversion of the original positivist obsession with mapping different discourses and their mutual epistemic relations (nonscience vs. science vs. logic, with further internal subdivisions ([number theory, set theory,

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geometry, propositional logic, etc.], [Physics, Chemistry, Cognitive Science, etc.], [moral nonsense, aesthetic nonsense, religious nonsense, political theory nonsense etc.]). But now, instead of meta-mapping discourses by epistemic status (sense and nonsense, propositions and nonpropositions etc.), those under the curse will classify according to identifiable normative frameworks that are assumed to contend interminably against each other (liberalism, criticaltheory, communitarianism, utilitarianism, republicanism etc.).

Over time this tendency will gradually erode confidence in the hope – which presumably animates any scholarly enterprise – that intellectual progressis being made and will be properly recognized for what it is. For those involved will be constantly torn between announcing progress and proclaiming the contestability of the standards by which it is recognized. Although they will in this way frustrate themselves, they will be hindered in their efforts toadequately understand the source of their frustrationeven as they seek explanations for it. They will half-consciously realize that lingering positivist prejudices are involved; but, in the sway of the curse of the contestable, they will remain partly ensnared within those prejudices, unable to make a clean break with positivism. With the real cause of their discontent hidden from view, they will inevitably hunt around for scape-goats: those who, bydoing it wrong, are bringing the project into disrepute and impeding progress by continuing positivist errors. It seems inevitable, under these conditions, that at this stage, two dueling scapegoat narratives, reflecting the confusion surrounding a. and b., will develop. Both will see positivism as the enemy, but project different positivist vices onto their opponents.

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One group (the ‘PoMo Continentals’) will be blamed for reinforcing the positivists’ picture of normativity as unruly and nonadjudicable. They will stand accused of: politicizing rational inquiry; giving up on the detached assessment of arguments; indulging the same vulgar relativism the positivists espoused; surrendering reason to emotion thanks to a tacit emotivism; prematurely abandoning valid norms of justification in favor of a frivolous, playful, aestheticization of political language; a perverse refusal to acknowledge that arguments about values can be more and less plausible than others, etc. The other (the ‘analytic philosophers’) will be blamed for persisting in the vain delusion of evaluatively neutral criteria for assessing judgmentsrationally. They will stand accused of: concealing partisan agendas behind a hypocritical patina of universalism; vainly seeking ‘decision procedures forethics’ reminiscent of the positivist’s grail-like quest for formal criteria of rational acceptability; pretending to a neutrality that is impossible; suppressing ‘difference’ and particularity beneath a relentless drive to bring reflection under the control of abstract general categories; privileging narrow conceptions of ‘rationality’ over the affective dimensions of political experience; hung upon epistemic criteria rather than pragmatic ones etc.Sound familiar?

ConclusionIf what I have said is plausible, the opposition between the seemingly disparate positions grouped together in Fig. 1 is now intelligible as a single pathology: the curse of the contestable. Since that curse, paradoxically, has its source in a shared (buttragically self-defeated) determination to transcend

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positivism, it is rational for all of us to move on. Who would contest that?

Works cited

Ayer, A. J., 1946. Language, Truth and Logic. Oxford University Press.

Connolly, W., 1993. The Terms of Political Discourse (Third edition). Princeton University Press

Mayhew, D., 2000. ‘Political Science and Political Philosophy: Ontological not Normative.’ PS 33: 192-3

Putnam, H., 1981. Reason, Truth and History. Cambridge University Press.

_______, 2004. The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and other Essays. Harvard University Press.

Rorty, R., 1998. Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers vol. 3. Cambridge University Press.

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