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AGONIES OF THE REAL: ANTI-REALISM FROM

KUHN TO FOUCAULT

PETER E. GORDON

Modern Intellectual History / Volume 9 / Issue 01 / April 2012, pp 127 - 147

DOI: 10.1017/S1479244311000515, Published online: 13 March 2012

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S1479244311000515

How to cite this article:

PETER E. GORDON (2012). AGONIES OF THE REAL: ANTI-REALISM FROM
KUHN TO FOUCAULT. Modern Intellectual History, 9, pp 127-147 doi:10.1017/
S1479244311000515

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Modern Intellectual History, 9, 1 (2012), pp. 127–147 
C Cambridge University Press 2012
doi:10.1017/S1479244311000515

agonies of the real: anti-realism

from kuhn to foucault∗
peter e. gordon
Department of History, Harvard University
E-mail: pgordon@fas.harvard.edu

. . . it’s my opinion, simpleton and sinner though I am, that it isn’t an enchantment at all,
but real bruises and real misery.

Sancho Panza, from Miguel Cervantes, Don Quixote (Part I, Chapter XXXVIII)

When did historians begin to put quotation marks around the word real ? There
are many examples of this habit and some of them will be set forth as evidence
in what follows. But before doing so we might ask a preliminary question: What
are the quotation marks themselves supposed to mean? Today we find them so
familiar they hardly need to be written and they are more frequently consigned to
the everyday repertoire of silent gesture: two fingers on either hand clutch at the
air as if they meant to tickle the flanks of the invisible beast between them. The
popular term is “scare-quotes,” a pun on the word “scarecrow.” Its etymology is
revealing: just as a mere representation of a body in a field may scare off birds, so
too scare-quotes permit someone to deploy a word without sincere commitment
to what it normally means. But further reflection tells us that the effects are not
so similar after all: To use a term without sincerity robs it of its original meaning
and holds up its lifeless corpse to ridicule. The more knowing sort of crow can
settle on the shoulder of the figure on the pole precisely because it recognizes
that such a sorry excuse for a man can in fact harm no one. Similarly when one
puts reality in quotation marks (thus: “reality”) we are put in mind of the living
concept but we are immediately alerted to the fact that, for the user at least, the
new term enjoys no metaphysical prestige. How did this happen? When and why
did the single most privileged word in the entire lexicon of metaphysics begin
to lose its authority such that in certain spheres of intellectual sophistication its
sincere use would only seem an embarrassment and a sign of naı̈veté?

∗
For helpful comments on this paper my warmest thanks to Joel Isaac, Samuel Moyn, and
Judith Surkis.

127
128 peter e. gordon

To take on at one sitting the whole history of this transformation—of how

real became “real”—would exceed my capacities here. In what follows I will focus
my attention on only a few small episodes in this complicated tale. All of them
concern the philosophy and history of science in the major years of controversy
that followed upon the 1962 publication of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions. Although I am not literally concerned with the quotation
mark phenomenon as such, it will be a minor implication of my argument in
what follows that the habit of marking the word “real”—together with its abstract
noun “reality”—with signposts of disbelief began to take hold partly thanks to
the rise of a species of anti-realism that some considered Kuhn’s achievement. It
is a well-known irony that Kuhn himself did not intend, and later came to regret,
some of the more extravagant versions of anti-realism or radical constructivism
that were ascribed to his book. But no author is an absolute monarch. Readers
rebel only to found new traditions in the author’s name. My chief aim in what
follows is to trace out some of the fortunes of an inflationary style of anti-realism
that, though not intended by Kuhn himself, came to enjoy special prominence
in the post-Kuhnian era. By revisiting some critical moments in its history, from
Kuhn to the post-positivist philosophy of science (Quine, Putnam, Goodman),
and from French post-structuralism (Foucault) to the cultural history of science
(Laqueur) we might come to a better understanding of an idea that even today
has not run its course.

kuhn and the limits of anti-realism

The original 1962 text of Kuhn’s Structure is replete with language that on
the most straightforward reading would appear to suggest that the author had
committed himself to some species of anti-realism. What sort of anti-realism
was at issue is a question I will address further on. For now it suffices to observe
how at several junctures in the book Kuhn appeared to endorse the idea that
the world as described by a paradigm was in an important sense dependent
on that paradigm. Paradigms were not merely frameworks for engaging with a
metaphysically independent nature but were in fact “constitutive of nature.”1
The revolutionary shift from one paradigm to another thus suggested a startling
change, not merely in how nature was observed but in what that nature was or
whether it was at all. Kuhn’s most memorable way of making this point was to
say that after a shift of paradigms the scientist might be said to “live in a different
world.” But the anti-realist thrust of such statements was often tentative. Consider
the following two passages:

1
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd edn (Chicago, 1996; first
published 1962), 110.
 agonies of the real 129

The very ease and rapidity with which astronomers saw new things when looking at old
objects with old instruments may make us wish to say that, after Copernicus, astronomers
lived in a different world. In any case, their research responded as though that were the case.2

At the very least, as a result of discovering oxygen, Lavoisier saw nature differently. And in
the absence of some recourse to that hypothetical fixed nature that he “saw differently,”
the principle of economy will urge us to say that after discovering oxygen Lavoisier worked
in a different world.3

These passages are revealing for the way they simultaneously endorsed and
qualified statements of anti-realism. In the second example, Kuhn seemed to
conclude only that we should say that the natural world depends on the extant
paradigm, but he also hastened to note that such a verdict was thrust upon us
only by logical inference rather than by common sense. On the level of rhetoric
it is striking to note how throughout Structure Kuhn indulged in the language
of world-change only to follow up with statements of embarrassment: at one
point Kuhn granted that talk of world-change was a “strange locution” and best
avoided.4 The anti-realism he gave with one hand he just as quickly took back
with the other: “The same difficulties are presented in an even more fundamental
form by the opening sentences of this section: . . . I am convinced that we must
learn to make sense of statements that at least resemble these.”5
The ambivalence of such phrasing has left Structure vulnerable over the past
half-century to a variety of different and mutually exclusive interpretations. At
one end of the spectrum is Peter Godfrey-Smith, who characterizes Kuhn’s stance
as “metaphysical constructivism.”6 The distinguishing mark of metaphysical
constructivism is the view that “it is not even possible for a scientific theory
to describe the world as it exists independent of thought, because reality itself
is dependent on what people say and think.” A metaphysical constructivist is
therefore a radical idealist who believes that the world depends for its very
existence on the way we construe it. All such theories leave Godfrey-Smith
impatient since “they look so strange when interpreted literally. How could we
possibly make the world just by making up a new theory?”7 But while Godfrey-
Smith is rightly flummoxed by Kuhn’s talk of “world-change,” the charge that
Kuhn was a metaphysical constructivist (alongside Latour and Goodman) ignores
crucial qualifications in Kuhn’s language. Consider the notoriously tangled phrase

2
Ibid., my emphasis.
3
Ibid., 118, my emphasis.
4
Ibid., 118.
5
Ibid., 121, my emphasis.
6
Peter Godfrey-Smith, Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science
(Chicago, 2003).
7
Ibid., 181–3, original emphasis.
130 peter e. gordon

“though the world does not change with a change of paradigm, the scientist
afterward works in a different world.” Surely the first part of this statement is
meant as a denial of anti-realism or metaphysical constructivism. But then, what
did Kuhn wish to say?
There have been at least two dominant readings of Structure that help us to
understand such language. They also help us to understand Kuhn’s pivotal place
in the transformation of the history and philosophy of science over the past half-
century. On the first reading, Kuhn was read as theorizing the status of science as
a social practice. One of the most frequent observations that greeted The Structure
of Scientific Revolutions in the early years was the charge that its author paid far
too much attention to the scientific community as the social setting in which
the paradigm-following activity of normal science was carried out. For all of his
idealistic emphasis on paradigms as theoretical or ideational constructs Kuhn
broke from the standard model in the history of science according to which
science appeared as if it were an anonymous “world-explanation” that bore
only the most contingent relation to the way scientists actually worked in their
laboratories. As Ronald Giere observed, “Kuhn’s real legacy for North American
philosophy of science is that he shamed post-war philosophers of science into
dealing with real science, rather than trivial logical surrogates for real science.”
Specifically, “Kuhn’s real science included real scientists possessing real cognitive
abilities operating in real scientific communities developing and experimentally
testing models of the real world in real historical time.”8
Certain early critics feared that by emphasizing the social dimension of
scientific research Kuhn had thrown open the door to irrationalism and social
determinism. Imre Lakatos, in a memorable phrase from a paper delivered
at London’s Bedford College for the 1965 International Colloquium in the
Philosophy of Science, warned that Kuhn’s theory reduced the history of science
to “mob psychology.”9 But another, increasingly prolific sector in the history of
science welcomed Kuhn’s theory as the sign of a disciplinary turn (in Andrew
Pickering’s phrase) “from science as knowledge to science as practice.”10
Such a reading of science as social practice has the great advantage of permitting
us to sidestep the extravagant idea that it is the world itself that changes in a
paradigm change. After all, there is an obvious sense in which a social practice
should be construed in the idealist sense, as metaphysically dependent on the

8
Ronald Giere, “Kuhn’s Legacy for North American Philosophy of Science,” Social Studies
of Science 27/3 (June 1997), 483–50, 497, original emphasis.
9
Imre Lakatos, “Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes,” in
Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave, eds., Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge,
1970), 91–196, 140 n. 3.
10
Andrew Pickering, ed. Science as Practice and Culture (Chicago, 1992).
 agonies of the real 131

human beings who practice it. Take away humans and you take away science. But
the social character of scientific research need not awaken metaphysical worries
that the entities encountered in and through our research also depend on us for
their existence. One can be a social constructivist about social practices while still
believing that those practices reach out into a metaphysically independent world.
Kuhn wished to draw just this distinction: “though the world does not change
with a change of paradigm, the scientist afterward works in a different world.”
The conclusion seems clear: Kuhn’s talk of “world-change” is best interpreted
not as a metaphysical strike against the independence of the entities described
by scientists but rather as an observation about how large a role the scientific
community seems to play in describing what we take the world to be.
But there is a second interpretation that perhaps better captures what Kuhn
himself probably meant by “world-change.” We should recall that Kuhn was
working out some of the very same issues that preoccupied the earliest generation
of post-analytic philosophers such as Goodman and Quine, who in the 1950s had
already begun to develop sophisticated arguments against the logical positivist
notion of a pure language of observation. Goodman’s 1951 The Structure of
Appearance (which is directed especially against Carnap’s Logical Structure of
the World) was one of the very few works of contemporary philosophy that
Kuhn took care to cite by name in the original text of Structure. Quine’s “Two
Dogmas of Empiricism” also appeared in 1951, though the philosopher’s name
appears for the first time not in Stucture but only in its 1969 “Postscript.”11 As John
Zammito observes, the key idea that supports Kuhn’s argument for world-change
bears an obvious debt to the early critique of logical positivism and especially to
Quine, with whom Kuhn spent the 1958–9 academic year at Stanford’s Center for
Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences while Quine was drafting the second
chapter of Word and Object (on radical translation) and Kuhn was composing
Structure.
The crucial lesson that Kuhn derived from the early critics of logical positivism
was that there could be no such thing as a theory-neutral language. Evidence
does not come in reducible bits but is already intertwined with theory. The
appeal to theory-neutral evidence must therefore yield before a holistic and
pragmatic understanding of science. As Quine argued, “The totality of our so-
called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and
history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics
and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the
edges.”12

11
Kuhn’s reference to Quine appears in Kuhn, Structure, “Postscript,” 202 n. 17.
12
Quine thus eschewed dogmatic realism and added that as an empiricist he considered
physical objects “irreducible posits” that were necessary for science but epistemologically
132 peter e. gordon

It is noteworthy that the more extravagant anti-realist language appears chiefly

in chapter 10 of Structure, entitled “Revolutions as Changes of World View,” which
suggests that Kuhn was concerned with holistic changes in epistemology (world
views) rather than changes in ontology (worlds). But this does not explain all of
Kuhn’s more inflationary statements. Some way toward the chapter’s end Kuhn
launched his own attack on the idea that sensory experience could be “fixed and
neutral.” He cited several authorities. After a brief nod to the Duhem–Quine
thesis (regarding the underdetermination of theory by evidence), Kuhn invoked
Gestalt-psychological theories that purported to show how even the same retinal
impressions could yield dissimilar visual reports. Lastly he cited Goodman’s
Structure of Appearance to deliver the decisive blow: “No language thus restricted
to reporting a world fully known in advance,” Kuhn declared, “can produce mere
neutral and objective reports on ‘the given’.”13 The critique of logical positivism
and the post-Quinean move to a holist theory of meaning gives us a better way
of understanding what Kuhn actually meant by world-change. Once the strong
distinction between theory and evidence had collapsed one could no longer talk
easily about undigested bits of evidence that falsified the theory. Paradigms were
responsible for shaping what counted as evidence. Kuhn’s closing lines to chapter
10 reinforce this interpretation: with the paradigm shift to Dalton’s theory of
chemistry, “The data themselves had changed. That is the last of the senses in
which we may want to say that after a revolution scientists work in a different
world.”14
This second or postpositivist interpretation of Kuhn’s argument for world-
change also explains how Structure came to enjoy two very different lines of
academic reception: Whereas the founders of the sociology of scientific knowledge
(SSK) discovered in its pages a helpful opening to an understanding of science
as a social practice, philosophers of science saw it largely as an application of
Quinean holism to particular cases in the history of modern science. But both
lines of reception would continue to be haunted by questions of anti-realism that
Kuhn had not laid fully to rest. Already his 1969 Postscript acknowledged the
trouble he had caused with “constant recourse in my original text to phrases like
‘the world changes’.”15 Such language left early readers free to worry whether Kuhn
was an anti-realist, but he now moved to rectify the misunderstanding, affirming
the “existence” of world-stimuli while denying that the stimuli could be received
up a neutral way: if one considered two different groups, whose members felt

comparable to “the gods of Homer.” W. V. Quine, “Two Dogmas,” in idem, From a Logical
Point of View (Cambridge, MA, 1961), 20–46, 44.
13
Kuhn, Structure, 126–7.
14
Ibid., 135, my emphasis.
15
Ibid., 192.
 agonies of the real 133

different sensations when receiving the same stimuli, Kuhn affirmed that such
groups “do in some sense live in different worlds.” Yet even so he granted that
“We posit the existence of stimuli to explain our perceptions of the world, and
we posit their immutability to avoid both individual and social solipsism. About
neither posit have I the slightest reservation.”16
Such an explanation, however, did not wholly settle the anti-realism problem,
since Kuhn adduced his own argument against a naive conception of the real:
A scientific theory is usually felt to be better than its predecessors not only in the sense
that it is a better instrument for discovering and solving puzzles but also because it
is somehow a better representation of what nature is really like. One often hears that
successive theories grow ever closer to, or approximate more and more closely to, the
truth. Apparently generalizations like that refer not to the puzzle-solutions and the concrete
predictions derived from a theory but rather to its ontology, to the match, that is, between the
entities with which the theory populates nature and what is “really there.”17

There is, I think, no theory-independent way to reconstruct phrases like “really there”: the
notion of a match between the ontology of a theory and its “real” counterpart in nature now
seems to me illusive in principle . . . I do not doubt, for example, that Newton’s mechanics
improves on Aristotle’s and that Einstein’s improves on Newton’s as instruments for
puzzle-solving. But I can see in their succession no coherent direction of ontological
development.18

Such passages suggest that Kuhn’s Structure remained in an indeterminate

position—between an inflationary commitment to anti-realism and a more
moderate commitment to theory-holism that reflected trends in the postpositivist
philosophy of science.
There is reason to believe that the author was still uncertain about where he
stood. In a reply to Richard Boyd at a 1977 conference on Metaphor and Thought
Kuhn affirmed that “Both of us are unregenerate realists.”19 But even in his later
years he had not put the question to rest. In a paper on “Possible Worlds in
the History of Science” (presented at the 1986 Nobel Symposium) Kuhn again
challenged the model of truth associated with realism. To evaluate the truth
values of any statement was only possible within the bounds of a language and
the outcome of any such evaluation thus depended on the language. “If, as
standard forms of realism suppose, a statement’s being true or false depends

16
Ibid., Postscript, 192, my emphasis.
17
Ibid., Postscript, 206, my emphasis.
18
Ibid., Postscript, 206.
19
Thomas Kuhn, The Road since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970–1993, with an
Autobiographical Interview, ed. James Conant and John Haugeland (Chicago, 2000),
quoted from Kuhn’s 1977 paper “Metaphor in Science,” reprinted in Kuhn, Road since
Structure, 203.
134 peter e. gordon

simply on whether or not it corresponds to the real world—independent of time,

language, and culture—the world itself must be somehow lexicon-dependent.”
The consequent problems for realism were therefore “both genuine and urgent.”20
Kuhn ended by endorsing a view allied with Hilary Putnam’s “internal realism,”
according to which the objects of description can be said to be real only within
the bounds of the specific language that describes them. As Putnam had argued,
the metaphysical realist could avoid this theory only by appealing to the “God’s-
Eye Point of View,” a perspective the internal realist was glad to abandon.21 For
Kuhn the conclusion was unavoidable: “There is no basis,” he declared, “for talk
of science’s gradual elimination of all worlds excepting the single real one.”22
Kuhn’s anti-realism, then, was never as deep as some of his own statements
may have implied. His theory of science grafted a realistic acknowledgement of
the place of the scientific research community onto a postpositivist conception
of the relation between theory and evidence, resulting in a historicized portrait
of scientific research that (a) qualified the authority of scientific description
even while it (b) did so without surrendering the metaphysical independence
of the world science claims to describe. It would in fact be more accurate to
say that Kuhn’s major lesson was epistemological rather than ontological: the
idea “world-change” was meant to suggest a transformation in the world as
known to a given scientific community (an epistemological concern) rather than a
transformation in the world itself (a metaphysical specter Kuhn bracketed from
analysis). Kuhn’s readiness to place “reality” in scare-quotes was a signal that
metaphysics was suspended, not erased. But if this was its dominant message,
Structure was nonetheless sufficiently loose in its argumentation as to permit
countervailing interpretations—a symptom of the author’s having perhaps not
fully made up his mind.

reality after kuhn (foucault and others)

In the years since Structure the philosophy of science and the history of science
seem to have parted ways. Philosophers of science in general only rarely went any
further than Kuhn in the direction of anti-realism (Bas Van Frassen being perhaps
the most prominent exception).23 Ian Hacking, meanwhile, drew inspiration
from Kuhn’s turn to scientific practice to develop his own theory of “experimental

20
Thoimas Kuhn, “Possible Worlds in History of Science,” in idem, Road since Structure,
58–89, 77.
21
Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History (Cambridge, 1981), see esp. 60–74.
22
Kuhn, “Possible Worlds,” 86, my emphasis.
23
Bas Van Frassen, The Scientific Image, (Oxford, 1980).
 agonies of the real 135

realism” (or, “entity realism”).24 A thousand theories bloomed, in such profusion

that eventually some critics grew tired of the controversy and waved a white flag
of Wittgensteinian “quietism.”25 Rather than providing a mere inventory of these
various schools of thought, in the remaining portions of this essay I will consider
just a few of the ways that the history of science since Kuhn has tried to finesse the
problems of anti-realism he left unresolved. I shall focus chiefly on some relevant
issues raised in the work of Michel Foucault.
In his remarkable study of anti-realism in Continental thought, Lee Braver
notes how Foucault moved in fits and starts toward a theory that we can rightly
call anti-realist.26 In his early works Foucault confined himself to describing
how various social languages categorized and constrained aspects of human
experience: the mad were defined as mad and thus confined to the sanatorium. The
ill became the objects of a medical perception. As Braver notes, such arguments in
the early Foucault still retained a “Kantian flavor” insofar as they distinguished
between actual people and the way such people were known: “The constitution
of the ‘contemporary experience of madness’ (mental illness) is understood . . .
as fitting a preexistent, independent entity (madness) into a specific set of forms,
that is, as a content stuffed into a scheme.”27 But by the later 1960s this Kantian
argument gave way to a full-blown and Heideggerian style of anti-realism that
dispensed with any commitment to an underlying “noumena” exceeding its
field of historical manifestation. “From this point on in Foucault’s work,” writes
Braver, “only that which occurs within the historical purview of experience will
be admitted as real.”28
The decisive turn occurred with The Order of Things (Les mots et les choses)
first published in 1966, and The Archaeology of Knowledge (L’archéologie du
savoir), three years later. Béatrice Han has observed that especially in these
works Foucault developed a quasi-Kantian notion of the “historical a priori”
that remained “equidistant from a precritical realism and an excessively idealistic
transcendentalism.”29 But by 1966 Foucault had moved decisively in the direction

24
As explained in Ian Hacking, Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the
Philosophy of Natural Science (Cambridge, 1983), 17.
25
See e.g. Simon Blackburn, “Realism: Deconstructing the Debate,” Ratio XV/2 (June 2002),
111–33, which describes the standoff, with Richard Boyd and Putnam on one side and Van
Frassen on the other. Arthur Fine’s “fictionalism” represents another attempt to get past the
stalemate by proposing a “natural ontological attitude.” See e.g. Arthur Fine, “Piecemeal
Realism,” Philosophical Studies 61 (1991), 79–96.
26
Lee Braver, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-realism (Evanston, 2007).
27
Ibid., 347.
28
Ibid., 352.
29
Béatrice Han, Foucault’s Critical Project: Between the Transcendental and the Historical,
trans. Edward Pile (Stanford, 2002), 41.
136 peter e. gordon

of a post-Heideggerian ontology that abandoned any residual commitment to a

noumenal realm beyond the historical disclosure of a given episteme: “We are not
trying,” he explained, “to reconstitute what madness itself might be, in the form
in which it first presented itself to some primitive, fundamental, deaf, scarcely
articulated experience, and in the form in which it was later organized (translated,
deformed, travestied, perhaps even repressed) by discourses.” As Braver notes,
this means that madness could not be “a self-identical thing” that could be either
misrepresented by improper languages or restored to freedom by a language that
captured its reality.30 Foucault now announced that he wished “to dispense with
‘things.’” He would “substitute for the enigmatic treasure of ‘things’ anterior to
discourse, the regular formation of objects that emerge only in discourse.”31 As
he explained, “The object does not await in limbo the order that will free it and
enable it to become embodied in a visible and prolix objectivity; it does not pre-exist
itself, held back by some obstacle at the first edges of light. It exists under the positive
conditions of a complex group of relations.”32
In such passages Foucault often seemed to affirm anti-realism with a rhetorical
flourish exceeding logical consistency. For if it was a cardinal principle in The
Order of Things that certain rules of thought were historically contingent, the
transhistorical stature of this very principle was called into doubt. Was anti-
realism itself perhaps vulnerable to historicization and was its truth confined
to a certain paradigm or episteme? This is not an idle challenge for a method
that aimed to leave nothing untouched by historicity. In an early chapter of the
book Foucault performed one of his virtuosic interpretations of a literary text, in
this case Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Playing the uncharacteristic role of physician
Foucault offered an epistemological diagnosis of the hero’s illness:

His adventures will be a deciphering of the world: a diligent search over the entire surface
of the earth for the forms that will prove that what the books say is true. Each exploit
must be a proof: it consists not in a real triumph—which is why victory is not really
important—but in an attempt to transform reality into a sign.33

The diagnosis betrayed a strange complicity: for what was madness for “the knight
of the sad countenance” was for Foucault a cherished piece of methodology.
In the later, genealogical phase of Foucault’s thinking in the 1970s, the
robust commitment to anti-realism was not consistently applied. But it made

30
Braver, Thing of this World, 353.
31
Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M.
Sheridan Smith (New York, 1972), 47; as quoted in Braver, Thing of This World, 353.
32
Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 45, quoted in Braver, 354, my emphasis.
33
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York,
1973), 47.
 agonies of the real 137

a bold return in The History of Sexuality (1976) where Foucault interrogated the
hermeneutic and repressive model of sexual desire according to which there is an
interior reality to the self that manifests its truth in exterior signs. According to
Foucault this hermeneutic model presupposed a principle of generative (broadly
Hegelian) expressivism that animated all “modern” conceptions of selfhood and
social experience since the early nineteenth century. The very notion of an interior
reality, he argued, was conditional upon the discourse that disguised creation as
discovery: “At issue is not a movement bent on pushing rude sex back into some
obscure and inaccessible region, but on the contrary, a process that . . . implants it
in reality and enjoins it to tell the truth [l’implantent dans le réel et lui enjoignent
de dire la vérité ].”34 Foucault had now approached the extremity of anti-realism,
and here the quotation marks began to proliferate, placing in question the unreal
status of the reality they named:
this materiality that is referred to, is it not, then, that of sex, and is it not paradoxical to
venture a history of sexuality at the level of bodies, without there being the least question
of sex? . . . is [sex] not the “other” with respect to power, while being the center around
which sexuality distributes its effects? Now, it is precisely this idea of sex in itself that we
cannot accept without examination. Is “sex” really the anchorage point that supports the
manifestations of “sexuality,” or is it not rather a complex idea that was formed inside the
deployment of sexuality?35

Though phrased merely as questions, in the conclusion Foucault sharpened his

anti-realist critique into a quasi-metaphysical principle: “We must not place sex
on the side of reality, and sexuality on that of confused ideas and illusions;
sexuality is a very real historical formation; it is what gave rise to the notion
of sex, as a speculative element necessary to its operation.” (“Ne pas placer le
sexe du côté du réel, et la sexualité du côté des idées confuses et des illusions;
la sexualité est une figure historique très réelle, et c’est elle qui a suscité comme
élément speculative, nécessaire à son fonctionnement, la notion du sexe”).36
In such arguments one sees how the two phenomena—“sex” and “sexuality”—
had exchanged metaphysical positions. Contesting the notion that “sex” was the
higher reality and “sexuality” a realm of mere discourse, Foucault insisted that

34
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction (New York,1980), 72.
Original French as quoted in Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité, I: La volunté de savoir
(Paris, 1976), 97. My emphasis.
35
“Or, justement, c’est cette idée du sexe qu’on ne peut pas recevoir sans examen. ‘Le sexe’
est-il, dans la réalité, le point d’ancrage qui supporte les manifestations de ‘la sexualité,’ ou
bien une idée complexe, historiquement, formée à l’intérieur du dispositive de sexualité?”
Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 152. French, 201. Original emphases. I have modified
the English translation and its grammatical marks to reflect the original.
36
Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 157, Histoire de la sexualité, 207.
138 peter e. gordon

the discursive formation called “sexuality” was the “real historical formation”
that first gave “sex” its obdurate reality. But one could not help but notice how
“reality” suffered from a simultaneous deflation and inflation: robbed from “sex”
and assigned to “sexuality,” reality was first devalued only to metamorphose into
a new principle of metaphysical creativity once it stood on the other side of the
ontological divide. The “power” taken from the real was given to discourse, which
then enjoyed as much constitutive authority as the explanandum that had once
been its master.
Reflecting on Foucault after Kuhn, certain similarities are apparent: both
paradigm and episteme function as prior but historically contingent frameworks
of knowledge. Both impose an internal homogeneity upon the modalities of
research or the rules for truth and falsity that characterize a given age. And both
exhibit a fragility that can be burst asunder with a violence that precludes talk of
continuity or progress: Kuhn sees “incommensurability,” Foucault (borrowing
from Bachelard) sees epistemic rupture or coupure.37 But if we consider their
respective attitudes toward anti-realism we see that Kuhn and Foucault remain
divided by their choice of phenomena: Kuhn remained chiefly interested in
the natural sciences, Foucault in the sciences humaines. Notwithstanding their
various commonalities this difference is decisive, especially if one considers the
implications for anti-realism. Anti-realism regarding facts of the social world
arouses little controversy because we are accustomed to the thought that society
has no nature to be carved at its joints: classes of people can be brought into being
through a social process of naming and categorizing, and a host of institutions will
harden these classes into an obdurate reality—a process Ian Hacking has called
“the looping effect of human kinds.”38 Anti-realism regarding nature arouses
greater controversy, because few are ready to surrender the idea that the very
goal of the natural sciences is to come to understand the way nature actually is
(an ideal we can sustain even if we believe that all current scientific description
fails to get a grip on nature at all). Kuhn and Foucault remain distinct because
anti-realism works differently in the natural and human realms: shaping one,
constituting the other. As Hacking reminds us, “We remake the world, but we
make up people.”39

37
On Foucault’s relation to Bachelard see G. Gutting, Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of
Scientific Reason (New York, 1989), 9–54.
38
Ian Hacking, “The Looping Effect of Human Kinds,” in D. Sperber et al., eds., Causal
Cognition: An Interdisciplinary Approach (Oxford, 1995), 351–83.
39
Ian Hacking, “Five Parables,” in idem, Historical Ontology (Cambridge, MA, 2002), 27–50,
49–50.
 agonies of the real 139

making stars, making sex

Certain philosophers have dared to extend wholesale anti-realism to the
natural sciences. One instructive case is Nelson Goodman, who, though
acknowledged in Structure as a philosophical ally, would move well beyond
Kuhn into the troubled waters of “irrealism.” In Ways of Worldmaking (1978)
Goodman entertained an idea of world-change that closely resembles the Kuhn’s
argumentation in Structure (even if Goodman appears to have arrived at the idea
on his own). According to Goodman, one must always describe the world under
a frame of reference or “world-version.” And there are as many world-versions
as one would like: “many different world-versions are of independent interest
and importance,” Goodman observed, but no one of them could be said to enjoy
the special distinction of getting the world “right.” For in order to make sense of
rightness we would have to gain independent access to an “underlying world.”
But because the worlds we can know are always world-versions the very notion
of an underlying world stops being of interest: “while it need not be denied to
those who love it, it is perhaps on the whole a world well lost.”40 In the ceaseless
battle between realists and anti-realists Goodman declared himself an agnostic:
an “irrealist.”
In a series of ripostes, Hilary Putnam and Israel Scheffler challenged Goodman
to explain how the items that populate various worlds could be simply “made”
the way he claimed. Scheffler was scathing: “the claim that it is we who made the
stars by making the word “star” I consider absurd,” he wrote. Goodman’s talk
about making the elements of a given world was therefore either nonsense or
“purely rhetorical.”41 But Goodman would not back down:
Scheffler contends that we cannot have made the stars. I ask him which features of the
stars we did not make, and challenge him to state how these differ from features clearly
dependent on discourse . . . In short, we do not make stars as we make bricks; not all
making is a matter of molding mud. The worldmaking mainly in question here is making
not with hands but with minds, or rather with languages or other symbol systems. Yet
when I say that worlds are made, I mean it literally.42

Kuhn, unlike Goodman, did not mean it literally. Although Kuhn put “real” and
“reality” in quotation marks this hardly implied that he was willing to bend
reality itself to the will of paradigms. It was instead a noteworthy sign that

40
Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis, 1978), 1–22, reprinted in Peter
J. McCormick, ed., Starmaking: Realism, Anti-Realism, and Irrealism (Cambridge, MA,
1996), 63.
41
Israel Scheffler, “The Wonderful Worlds of Nelson Goodman,” reprinted in McCormick,
Starmaking, 133–41 (first published 1980).
42
Nelson Goodman, “On Starmaking” originally published in idem, Of Mind and Other
Matters (Cambridge, MA, 1984), reprinted in McCormick, Starmaking, 143–7.
140 peter e. gordon

he had redefined his terms: “reality” and reality were no longer the same. He
thereby avoided what Scheffler called the “absurd” thought that paradigms could
magically call scientific objects into being. As Ian Hacking would later observe,
Kuhn’s actual perspective was best described as nominalism, which was (at least
logically) compatible with realism.43
That we make the stars sounds absurd. That we make sex does not. Once
Foucault made an intelligible case for historicized anti-realism by reversing the
relation between sex and sexuality, the way was clear for historians of medicine
and the biological sciences to consider the ways that sexual anatomy itself might be
refashioned over time. Much of the credit for this undertaking goes to the cultural
historian Thomas Laqueur for his 1990 work Making Sex: Body and Gender from
the Greeks to Freud, which confronts us with a fantastical (and at times startling)
archive of anatomical images and scientific treatises that document a shift in
the medical understanding of male and female genitalia. Until the sixteenth
century, Laqueur argues, it was customary to conceive of sexual anatomy in the
singular: there was only one sex and that sex was male. Female sexual anatomy was
understood to be merely an inversion of the male. Sometime in the seventeenth
century, however, the one-sex model began to dissolve and was displaced by
a two-sex model that divided human sexual anatomy into the now-familiar
dimorphism of male and female. Genital organs were now essentially different.44
The theoretical implications of Laqueur’s study are manifold. My aim here is
to consider the ways that Making Sex marked out some of the limits to full-blown
anti-realism. We can begin by noting that Laqueur himself was keenly aware
of the methodological complexities of his own discipline, in which dogmatic
principles of scientific progress had lost their appeal. So the reader could
not feel surprised when Laqueur dispensed a Kuhnian lesson: “The manifest
anatomical differences between the sexes, the body outside of culture, is known
only through highly developed, culturally and historically bound paradigms, both
scientific and aesthetic. The notion that scientific advance alone, pure anatomical
discovery, could account for the extraordinary late eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century interest in sexual dimorphism is not simply empirically wrong—it is
philosophically misguided.”45

43
As Hacking has observed, Kuhn himself never meant to endorse full-blown anti-realism.
Both Putnam and Kuhn are best understood as nominalists rather than genuine idealists,
since neither denied that the world contains some sort of mind-independent “real stuff.”
They denied only that this stuff “is naturally and intrinsically sorted in any particular way,
independent of how we think about it.” Ian Hacking, Introductory Topics in the Philosophy
of Natural Science (Cambridge, 1983), 108–11.
44
Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge,
MA, 1990).
45
Ibid., 169, my emphasis.
 agonies of the real 141

Such an argument still belonged to Kuhn’s world of paradigms. Yet Making Sex
was by no means a derivative work. Part of its claim to originality lay in the way it
registered with unusual candor both the merits and demerits of anti-realism. As
if in a conscious recapitulation of Foucault’s memorable image of the vanishing
of the humanist face at the end of The Order of Things, Laqueur opened his work
with an epitaph for the vanishing of the material body: “Under the influence
of Foucault, various versions of deconstruction, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and
poststructuralism generally, it [the body] threatens to disappear entirely.”46
Laqueur seems to summarize the basic lesson of inflationary anti-realism: “Thus,
from a variety of perspectives, the comfortable notion is shaken that man is man
and woman is woman and that the historian’s task is to find out what they did,
what they thought, and what was thought about them. That ‘thing’, sex, about
which people had beliefs seems to crumble.”47
But there was a difference. Whereas Foucault seemed to forecast the coming
dissolution of the humanist self with a revolutionary’s anticipation, Laqueur
could not happily endorse the theoretical dissolution of the body, perhaps because
as the medium of life its vanishing would signify the end of life and not merely
the end of an ideological construct. For Laqueur recognized that the strange
dissonance between mind and body becomes especially vivid for anyone who has
observed the dismantling of a cadaver:
In my own life, too, the fraught chasm between representation and reality, seeing-as and
seeing, remains. I spent 1980–81 in medical school and studied what was really there as
systematically as time and circumstances permitted. Body as cultural construct met body
on the dissecting table; more or less schematic anatomical illustrations—the most accurate
modern science had to offer—rather hopelessly confronted the tangles of the human neck.
For all of my awareness of how deeply our understanding of what we saw was historically
contingent—the product of institutional, political, and epistemological contingencies–the
flesh in its simplicity seemed always to shine through.48

Laqueur’s anecdote of time spent in medical school may serve to remind us of

the very fragility and imprecision of the languages by which we make sense of
the external world. It thereby calls us back in the most vivid fashion to the limits
of metaphysical anti-realism: the space that separates the anatomist’s chart from
the cadaver’s body is also the ontological divide between language and its object,
between representation and world. In the confrontation between them we may
be tempted to imagine that our discursive powers enjoy the greater authority: the
power to bend the world into whatever shape we wish. But anti-realism reaches

46
Ibid., 12.
47
Ibid., 13.
48
Ibid., 14–15, original emphasis.
142 peter e. gordon

its terminus precisely when our attention is turned to worldly phenomena that
resist our description and refuse the ready-made categories by which we try to
make sense of what it is we are seeing. Against the extravagant ambitions of
metaphysical constructivism every cadaver is a memento mori.
In this argument one could still hear an echo of Kuhn. An important lesson of
Structure was that normal science is not immune from surprises. The everyday
process of working through the specific puzzles that characterize normal scientific
research within the bounds of a given paradigm will gradually confront an
accumulation of anomalous evidence. It is in fact the build-up of anomalies
that explains why Kuhn believed revolutions were inevitable: no anomalies, no
revolutions. And yet the very idea of an anomaly is intelligible only if one
subscribes to at least a minimal realism: the world will surprise us only if we
think there is a gap between how the paradigm says the world should behave
and how the world behaves on its own. This is a shared lesson of both Kuhn’s
anomaly and Laqueur’s cadaver.
But Making Sex may also be read for the way it illustrates various of the
cultural anxieties that have attended the rise of academic anti-realism. Laqueur
was hardly blind to the fact that the natural sciences have enjoyed a tremendous
prestige in the modern West precisely because they claim privileged knowledge
and technological manipulation of the real. No doubt this prestige has been
frequently abused: the authoritative discourse of the scientist or the physician all
too often lends an imprimatur of incontestable realism to what are in fact merely
the contingent fabrications of cultural prejudice. Laqueur mentions the case of
sociobiology, which at times projects historically specific understandings of male
and female into the eternal space of nature.49 But he also shared a more personal
explanation for his concerns about scientific authority: the son of a pathologist,
Laqueur relates how as a boy he would accompany his father to the laboratory
to observe as the doctor prepared body specimens (kidneys, lungs, and so forth)
that struck the young observer as (in Laqueur’s phrase) “unimpeachably real.”
In the grip of such a memory Laqueur cannot strike the usual pose of anti-
realist sophistication but feels genuinely conflicted (as only a dutiful child can be
conflicted) by the relation between science and its historical study: “My father
was the expert on what was really there.”50
Ultimately what makes Laqueur’s study so instructive is the way it thematizes
without resolution some of the agonies and contestations of the anti-realist
discourse that gained unprecedented esteem in the history of science since Kuhn.
Unlike Foucault (also the son of a physician) Laqueur is unwilling to subordinate
the real to its discursive twin. He insists on “a distinction between the body and

49
Ibid., 21.
50
Ibid., 14, emphasis in original.
 agonies of the real 143

the body as discursively constituted, between seeing and seeing-as.” He readily

admits that the modern sciences have licensed unspeakable cruelties but does
not think such abuses are sufficiently compelling to justify a wholesale suspicion.
“Clearly” he insists, there has been “progress in understanding the human body in
general and reproductive anatomy and physiology in particular.” A few examples
illustrate the point: “Modern science and modern women are much better
able to predict the cyclical likelihood of pregnancy than were their ancestors;
menstruation turns out to be a different physiological process from hemorrhoidal
bleeding, contrary to the prevailing wisdom well into the eighteenth century, and
the testes are histologically different from the ovaries.” For Laqueur (unlike
Kuhn) such discoveries validate the idea of scientific progress: “Any history
of a science, however much it might emphasize the role of social, political,
ideological, or aesthetic factors, must recognize these undeniable successes and
the commitments that made them possible.”51 The vehemence with which
Laqueur affirms such advances is a testament to Kuhn’s overwhelming impact,
for it is only in the post-Kuhnian era that a historian of science would find such
an affirmation necessary.

postscript: the culture and politics of anti-realism

It is a well-known irony in the reception history of Structure that its author
came to regret the book’s more extravagant claims. “To my dismay,” Kuhn later
confessed, “my ‘purple passages’ led many readers of Structure to suppose that
I was attempting to undermine the cognitive authority of science rather than
to suggest a different view of its nature.”52 But the gates had been opened. The
great emphasis Kuhn placed on the social consensus of the research collective in
his portrait of normal science helped pave the way for the full-blown sociology
of scientific knowledge (SSK) as pioneered by scholars such as David Bloor,
who regarded both the philosophy of science and its “cognitive authority”
with suspicion.53 According to the famous “symmetry principle” a genuinely
sociological understanding of a scientific practice had to sustain strict neutrality

51
Ibid., 16.
52
Thomas Kuhn, “Afterwords,” in Paul Horwich, ed., World Changes: Thomas Kuhn and the
Nature of Science (Cambridge, MA, 1993), 314. As quoted in John H. Zammito, A Nice
Derangement of Epistemes: Post-positivism in the Study of Science from Quine to Latour
(Chicago, 2004), 296 n. 53.
53
The classic statement of SSK is David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery. (Chicago,
1976). As Paul Roth observed, “At the philosophical center of the strong programme is
Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.” Paul Roth, “Voodoo Epistemology: The
Strong Programme in the Sociology of Science,” in idem, Meaning and Method in the
Social Sciences (Ithaca, N.Y, 1987), 174.
144 peter e. gordon

regarding scientific claims to truth. Because this also raised doubts about the
scientific status of sociology, Bloor introduced the principle of “reflexivity.” But
this only acknowledged the paradox without resolving it: SSK could not apply
the symmetry principle to its own explanatory efforts without surrendering the
authority sociology was meant to enjoy as a causal discourse about the social
world.54 SSK was stuck (perhaps unhappily) in a world where scientific realism
still mattered.55
As Steve Fuller explains, Kuhn resented the efforts of the SSK school to invoke
his authority for its own purposes.56 But it was the ambivalent fate of Structure
that certain of its most controversial themes would flow into the larger stream of
anti-realism that engulfed academic discourse especially in the 1970s and 1980s.
By the 1990s it was almost inevitable that a scientist (Alan Sokal) would try to stem
the tide with an insincere parody of anti-realism that bore at least a superficial
resemblance to some of the more radical theories of social constructivism.57 Sokal
may have believed that his essay on the social construction of gravity would expose
the opposing views as “fashionable nonsense.” But as John Guillory notes, both
sides of the scandal were playing out a well-established script. Quite apart from its
theoretical or political stakes, the “Sokal hoax” revealed the epistemological gulf
that now separated the two cultures within the modern American university: most
natural scientists subscribed without reflection to a crude species of metaphysical
realism, whereas the greater share of cultural theorists saw social constructivism
as a disciplinary imperative. Most felt an intuitive alliance not with natural
scientists but with theorists of literature and post-Heideggerian philosophers in
the Continental tradition who lamented the supremacy of the natural sciences as
a late chapter in the metaphysical–technological history of the West. Emboldened
by a diversity of trends both literary and philosophical, anti-realism had become
(in Guillory’s phrase, following Althusser) “the spontaneous philosophy of the
critics.”58

54
Since sociology is only one science among many, it is unclear why a sociology of natural
science would be the one discipline uniquely authorized to furnish a scientific explanation.
Thus Peter Slezak, “Scientific Discovery by Computer as Empirical Refutation of the Strong
Programme,” Social Studies of Science 19/4 (Nov. 1989), 563–600.
55
For criticism of Bloor on causality and sociological explanation as science, see Peter
Slezak, “Bloor’s Bluff: Behaviourism and the Strong Programme,” International Studies in
the Philosophy of Science 5/3 (1991), 241–56.
56
Steve Fuller, Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times (Chicago, 2000), 3.
57
Alan Sokal, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of
Quantum Gravity,” originally in Social Text (Spring–Summer 1996), reprinted in Lingua
Franca, eds., The Sokal Hoax: The Sham that Shook the Academy (Lincoln, 2000), 11–45.
58
John Guillory, “The Sokal Affair and the History of Criticism,” Critical Inquiry 28/2
(Winter 2002), 470–508.
 agonies of the real 145

Bruno Latour begins his 1999 book Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality
of Science Studies with the amusing anecdote about an academic gathering in
Switzerland where he was approached by a psychologist who asked, “Do you
believe in reality?” Latour laughed in reply, “But of course! What a question! Is
reality something we have to believe in?”59 When one considers the immense
complexities of anti-realism as a philosophical doctrine Latour’s cavalier manner
seems surprising. But his encounter tells us something important about the
tenor of the times. Since the appearance of Kuhn’s Structure a half-century ago,
“reality” has become increasingly contested terrain not only in the world of
scholarship but in the broader culture as well.60 If we turn momentarily toward
the aesthetic sphere, it is instructive to recall that magical realism vaulted to world
popularity in 1967 with One Hundred Years of Solitude by the Colombian novelist
Marquez, who (in his own words) aimed at “destroying the line of demarcation
that separates what seems real from what seems fantastic.”61 The appeal of the
genre (as exemplified by Günther Grass, Isabel Allende, and Salman Rushdie)
may suggest a diminished cultural appetite for anything that locks us into the
grey everydayness of the real. “Artificial reality” and “reality television” seem
only further turns of the screw, away from rather than toward the reality they
repackage for culture-industrial consumption. Even the avant-garde seems to
have taken up reality as a theme for creative appropriation: What Hal Foster has
called “the return of the real” enlisted techniques such as photo-realism (Richard
Estes) or uncanny reproduction (Cindy Sherman, Duane Hanson) that unsettle
our confidence in the familiar by confronting us with its simulacrum.62

59
Bruno Latour, “‘Do You Believe in Reality?’ News from the Trenches of the Science Wars,”
in idem, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA, 1999),
1–23, 1.
60
To detect an alliance between anti-realism as a philosophical doctrine and the anti-realist
trends evident in the era of media-saturated capitalism may seem overly speculative.
But it is crucial to note that the movement toward aesthetic anti-realism first developed
in complicity with a theory-enriched avant-gardism according to which “realism” was
seen as a conformist residuum of nineteenth-century bourgeois aesthetics and therefore
inimical to social emancipation (despite the historical connection between the earlier style
of literary and pictoral realism and redemptive ethnographies of the laboring classes, e.g.
Engels, Eliot, Dickens, Courbet). Ironically, however, postmodern anti-realism itself was
a species of realism insofar as it furnished a realistically accurate representation of “the
cultural logic of late capitalism.” If Jameson is right that there is a logic to the aesthetic
that dominates a given era, it would not be surprising to discern a rarefied species of the
same logic within academic discourse itself. See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The
Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, 1990).
61
As quoted in Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, “Introduction” in Zamora and
Faris, eds., Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community (Durham, 1995), 5.
62
Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century. (Cambridge,
MA, 1996).
146 peter e. gordon

Nor is the appeal only aesthetic. The trend toward inflationary anti-realism
that I have charted above might also be understood as a cultural protest against the
military–industrial complex and the “Big Science” it funds. Humanists vulnerable
to feelings of ressentiment when confronted with declining enrollments and
demands for relevance may decide that the prestige of the natural sciences can be
combated only with the discursive constructivism that just happens to be the last
weapon in their arsenal. If it is true that the natural sciences derive their cognitive
and cultural power from the claim that they alone enjoy privileged access to
metaphysical reality, one can understand why humanists would feel tempted to
believe that the disciplinary hierarchy could be challenged only by contesting its
metaphysical premises.
Surely one of the important landmarks in this disciplinary struggle was
Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), which wove together
arguments against “the myth of the given” (Wilfrid Sellars) with themes from
postpositivist philosophy to urge his colleagues to abandon older concerns
of epistemology in favor of a new ideal of the philosophical discipline as
a “conversation” oriented primarily toward matters of the common good.63
Though well received by some humanists and advocates of American pragmatism,
Rorty’s arguments were largely condemned by professional philosophers who
detected a whiff of heresy. Paul Boghossian would strike the final blow with
his 2007 polemic Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism, in
which Rorty appeared less as a philosopher than as a symbol for a broad array
of offenses.64 A fuller account of anti-realism in the post-Kuhnian era would no
doubt require consideration of Rorty’s legacy. Here it suffices to note that Rorty
was one of the few philosophers to frame his arguments against conventional
realism with appeals to both Anglo-American (“analytic”) and European (post-
Heideggerian and post-structuralist) canons of thought. Shunned by many in the
American philosophical profession, Rorty spent his later career as professor of
humanities at the University of Virginia (1982) and then professor of comparative
literature (and, by courtesy, of philosophy) at Stanford (1997), during which time
he enjoyed a pan-disciplinary stature atypical for professional philosophers in
part because he gave an imprimatur of philosophical respectability to anti-realism
and the broader disciplinary revolt against the natural sciences.
But the cultural and political consequences of such a reversal are ambivalent
at best. What was supposed to be an anti-authoritarian gesture—a critique
of the cultural authority of science that had grounded its knowledge claims

63
Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, 1979).
64
Boghossian’s pronounced distaste for anti-realist or social-constructivist theories of
science occasionally moves him to adopt an overly dismissive stance; see Paul Boghossian,
Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism (New York, 2007).
 agonies of the real 147

in metaphysical realism—ultimately nourished an unhealthy and totalizing

rejection of the natural sciences and the substitution of an inflationary
postmodernism according to which anything that arrogated to itself the prestige
of reality was said to be merely “real.” The way was clear for an indulgent
species of anti-realism that moved as far as it was possible to go in the direction
of (in Godfrey-Smith’s phrase) “metaphysical constructivism,” toward a place
that disallowed any distinction between reality and its dissimulation. Today the
academic fashion for stringent anti-realism may have faded, but there is still at
least one place where it holds sway: at the newly built home for the University
of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts an inscription marks the
entranceway: “Limes regiones rerum,” a Latin translation of the school’s motto:
“Reality ends here.”65

65
M. Cieply, “A Film School’s New Look Is Historic,” New York Times, 8 Feb. 2009, archived
online at www.nytimes.com/2009/02/09/movies/09film.html.