Welcome, and thank you for coming. As the first post on this Substack, and as a general ars poetica, I brought you the talk I gave at my favourite student society, Luminomelia Cambridge, on 28 January 2022.
Today I will talk about ‘making sense.’ I will discuss it specifically as a possible goal of ‘knowledge’—and within that, of social-scientific, humanistic, philosophical, historical and broadly theoretical knowledge. In this, I am going to first address a few questions in the philosophy of science, when viewed from a roughly pragmatist point of view (although I’d be careful about making any too strong categorisations.) I will invoke two main thinkers: first, 20th century English political philosopher Bernard Williams, who developed a specific idea of ‘making sense’ that I here advocate. Second, the more notorious philosopher Karl Marx, whose ideas about the relations between political practice and philosophical theorising will be better illuminated by the idea of ‘making sense’ that I here advance.
1
What is knowledge? It’s a big question, and in finding a working definition here I will not take the route of epistemology (the philosophical study of knowledge), but rather that of anthropology and sociology, as for example, in the work of Tim Ingold (or perhaps Quine); studying knowledge as a ‘thing in the world.’ We can observe at least two main forms of knowledge: on the one hand, a sort of technical ‘know-how’, an odd, tacit thing. People and animals often manipulate their environments to achieve a goal; if they successfully manage to do this with some regularity, we can say they ‘know’ how to do said thing. I ‘know’ how to fix a bike if I can coerce a broken bike into becoming a workable bike. But what if I want to convey this knowledge to someone else? I can either show them (and a process of learning through doing might occur), or I can try to either replace or accompany this process by telling them. Here we can find a second form of knowledge: knowledge not as a practical exercise of ‘know-how’, but as a (spoken or written) ‘text’ (for lack of better word) helping someone else access this ‘know-how.’
If we stopped here, we would have arrived at a view according to which, vaguely, ‘knowledge is power.’  This feels (shall I qualify, to me) as immediately intuitive and appealing when talking not just about everyday skills like cooking or bike-fixing, but also things like engineering. But what about things like natural science, especially fields that seem to be mainly descriptive? What about philosophy? Mathematics? Logic? And, of course: humanistic knowledge or political theory?
One way to go is to define other, fundamentally different species of knowledge. Many epistemologists or philosophers of science did so (for example, defining knowledge as justified true belief, then defining truth in various ways—as verifiable statements about what the case is, or as correspondence, all leading to various paradoxes). As I qualified in the beginning, I am not going to directly discuss these questions of ‘traditional epistemology.’ I don’t think that we need to define knowledge in terms of truth. To explain knowledge as we can observe it in the world, we do not in fact need to stray away from ‘knowledge is power.’
To tackle natural science first, we can look at what scientists are ‘actually doing.’ A range of sociologists of science, anthropologists, philosophers and so forth, have done so (e.g. Latour, Balibar etc). What we can invariably see is that scientists are all doing some practical work. They have their institutions (research foundations, universities, corporate R&D faculties), the construction of which is a very practical effort. Within those they have infrastructures of schooling and qualifying people to become scientists (again, very practical.) They write and circulate physical and digital texts. And some of them perform experiments. All very practical things! And explainable on each other’s terms.
At a certain level of generality, experiments are basically engineering. They involve the construction and use of complex technical apparatuses to achieve a certain goal: to generate and observe a certain natural phenomenon, convert it into more abstract objects of data. And what is scientific literature? On the one hand, it describes procedures that can be used to conduct these experiments. On a deeper level, they also construct ‘theory’: they develop interlocking conceptual models that can be used to describe and predict the results of real or potential experiments. We can thus say that modern natural science, as much as it is coated in abstractions, is, through the eyes of the naïve anthropologist, is much like bike fixing: there is some know-how and some written manuals.
What about things like theoretical physics, where predictions predated many discoveries? This is not a problem for our model either; theoretical production (the proliferation of potentially useful conceptual frameworks) can of course gain a degree of autonomy. Science, therefore, is also not a problem for ‘knowledge is power.’
2
If the ultimate practical aim of producing states of nature in experiments helps incorporate science into our practice-oriented theory of knowledge, what about other practices associated with knowledge, such as mathematics, philosophy, history and the humanities? On the one hand, they of course have the practical output of producing books and papers, and building institutions, just as scientists. But they don’t have their experiments. So, what are they doing? Mathematics can probably be salvaged by viewing it as an auxiliary of Science: it works out the abstract logical concepts and frameworks that can later be adopted to make predictions and make experiments. What about the rest?
I think there are at least two typical answers. Firstly, denial. Many like to castigate some or all of philosophy and the humanities into obscurity by claiming, to various degrees, that they are ‘meaningless’ or ‘unscientific’ (a term that is also interesting to interpret in light of the above). An extension of this is the second approach: that is to claim that non-natural sciences are merely at a lower stage of development. All modern natural science evolved out of nonscience (modern astronomy from astrology, for example; modern physics from various medieval theories of dynamics etc). Maybe today’s nonscience just needs a lil’ nudge to make the step. Contemporary examples include Peter Turchin, who is trying to turn History into ‘Cliodynamics’, while earlier attempts include the marginalist revolution that turned political economy into economics. A perplexing case is that of Geography, which, in the 60s and 70s had its own ‘quantitative revolution’ – and then, like the ancestors of whales returning to the water, it seems to have ‘reverted’ into being a ‘textual’ discipline.
However, if the possibility of evolution is not granted, but the validity of the contemporary form is denied, huge swathes of human inquiry, or Wissenschaft, is castigated to flames. It is ‘useless’, ‘worthless’, ‘stupid’ etc. I don’t think that is the case. That is because human knowledge (the sort that is stored in texts in the broad sense) can have a different practical goal: making things make sense.
Some things just ‘make sense.’ What does that mean? Very simply, sometimes I hear a proposition, and in my mind there is an immediate reaction of ‘Ding! Yes.’ or else: ‘eh… No.’ If I hear a mathematical axiom, such as ‘on a flat plane, there is exactly one straight line that can be drawn through any two points’, it just gets validated as ‘makes sense.’ Interestingly, however, it also works for incredibly complex propositions, such as ‘Western European capitalism was enabled by the growing class power of the mercantile bourgeoisie, due to the plundering of the Americas.’ It gets validated or invalidated on the spot. Makes sense—doesn’t make sense. Interestingly, sometimes I hear an incredibly well-argued position, one that I think should convince me; and yet it just ‘doesn’t make sense.’ If I reflect on it, I might also be able to put into words the things that bother me about it (and therefore to further make sense of the experience). But sometimes I am at a loss, and yet left with this odd off-putting feeling. We cannot simply will ourselves to feel that something makes sense.
In this way, making sense is a practical, physical effect. Debates about ‘free will’ to the side, it is clearly not under the domain of the same sort of will, as for example, walking around or saying certain things. However, it clearly doesn’t come out of nowhere either; in the above example, I could go on and reflect deeper on the sources of my convictions. Making sense is a result of many different kinds of stuff, including explicit arguments, past traumas, unconscious biases, class position, economic interests and so on.
3
Now we finally arrive at Bernard Williams, who discusses Making Sense (meaning something very close to my idea of it) on at least two occasions: in Truth and Truthfulness (2002, hereon T&T), and in In the Beginning was the Deed (2005, hereon IBD). Similarly to here, in both cases ‘making sense’ appears not as an abstract philosophical category, but as an ‘event in the world’, so to say. We know from experience that some things make sense to some people (in some place, in some time – in some historical context). I find it particularly interesting how he arrives at this concept; and for that, I’ll briefly review the arguments involved.
In Chapter 10 of T&T, Williams considers the historiographic question of how much a historian is allowed to interpret ‘historical facts.’ On one end of the spectrum, a ‘Minimalist’ programme might only allow historians to be chroniclers: e.g., ‘2020: here there was a plague’. ‘In 50 BC, Caesar was in Gaul; in 49 BC he crossed the Rubicon.’ However, we usually allow historians to indulge in some inference. Surely, if in 50 BC, Caesar was in one place, and in 49 BC, he was at a different place hundreds of kilometres away, it is very reasonable to suppose that sometime in between he took the road there. A historian would also be reasonable to guess which route he took, as there were not so many of them at the time. Surely, he and his soldiers ate certain things en route, thought certain things, felt certain things…
…Oh wait. Isn’t that going a bit a far? Isn’t this a horribly slippery slope? We might construe a caricature of a ‘Postmodernist’ historian who could argue, reasonably, that there really is no end, that beyond the fact of certain records stating certain things, the rest is all up to interpretation. History is not really different from historical fiction—or perhaps the difference lies entirely in the circumstance that it is institutionalised in fancy universities and its practitioners think awfully highly of themselves, willingly obfuscating what is really just an exercise of the imagination.
Williams doesn’t think that either of those positions (the ‘Minimalist’ or the ‘Postmodern’) is right. And his resolution of the paradox is also an answer to the ‘humanities denialism’ I mentioned above. There really is an ‘experimental output’ to the discipline of history (and for that matter, philosophy, literary studies etc.) The output is the experience of sense-making. If I read a history that claims that Caesar hopped on a green dragon and flew to Italia on its back, I might find that very amusing, but it just wouldn’t make sense. And even if I know all the ‘Postmodernist’ arguments for why it doesn’t matter, in the end, quite liberatingly, it still wouldn’t make sense. I just cannot help it.
What does this sense-making feed on? ‘Many different stuff’, I said above. In the case of history, Williams points out a very significant factor: the past is just what used to be the present. We certainly can make sense of things in the present, and we make sense of them in the form of ‘mininarratives’, as he calls them. One typical mininarrative concerns someone wanting something and acting to get it. We can accept explanations of disjunct events when connected by a narrative of desire. ‘Caesar went to Italy because he wanted to defeat Pompeius.’ Another one is to appeal to a natural process that everyone can observe. ‘Caesar had to eat because all men at all times have to eat.’ And crucially, I don’t care about the problem of induction – I am incredibly happy to assume that the Sun will rise tomorrow morning, or that the river Rubicon won’t suddenly reverse course. And since the past is just what used to be the present – well, if I accept these mininarratives as matter of fact in my everyday life, I should also accept them as a matter of historical explanation. They just… make sense. In IBD, Williams discusses the Hobbesian problem of how people come to accept coercive regimes. An important factor is not just personal interest – but also, often, that a given regime has given a legitimation of itself that made sense to its subjects.
When we start talking about political legitimation, we quickly arrive at the terrain of political philosophy. And if states (and not just states; parties, corporations, other political actors) need legitimation, and the substance of legitimation is a consent of the governed through accepting the existing order as ‘making sense’, then suddenly political actors appear to be doing just the same thing as scientists and bike-fixers! They have a state of nature they want to produce (the mental states of ‘making sense’, as well as a myriad of economic arrangements) and they have a know-how: the science and engineering of telling convincing stories about the world. Just like any science, it also has its Theory; even if this theory is mathematical only in very few cases and might often only exist as tacit knowledge (embedded in those with a talent to rule or the evolved practices of societies and institutions.) If ‘knowledge is power’, in the above sense, then politics is a natural science, a unity of a Theory and a Praxis.
4
One theorist who pointed this out very neatly was Karl Marx. One of my recent contrarian opinions is that Marx’s most important work is the brief Theses on Feuerbach. In it, Marx argues that earlier (post-Kantian German) philosophy characterised the philosopher as the standalone subject exploring the necessary conditions of their subjecthood, gradually expanding its circle of certainty until it encompasses the absolute (as in Hegel). In the process he might discover certain ethical principles of action that he can then apply to the world (as in Kant). Marx proposes a different philosopher: one who recognises that philosophy is already-acting in the world; that it is, in turn, already the result of other events in the real, material world; and that its ‘acting-ness’ has important implications for its contents.
The famous statement (that ‘philosophers thus far have only interpreted the world; the goal, however, is to change it’) can easily be interpreted as a normative one. So far, we had a ‘wrong’, purely perceptive philosophy; instead, we should have a ‘good’, practical philosophy. However, this is not the case: all philosophy at all times was practical. Philosophy produces ideas, concepts, explanations that, for the appropriate audience, MS, thereby altering, hindering or legitimating their world-view, their vision, their aspirations. After all, their wills and desires only lead to action through the mediation of these notions. What Marx attempts (inspired by Hegel) is to create a self-conscious philosophy, that understands itself as a continuation of action (of praxis, as Lukács and others termed it). Earlier great philosophies like institutionalised Christianity ended up affirming the status quo, providing a cosmology that made sense, and that gave a specific role to the divine right of kings and the rule of the ecclesiastical nobility. Modern economics does not just give practical tools to governments to manage financial crises: it also manufactures a legitimation narrative of why it is good that we have governments, government spending, corporations, markets and so on.
This self-understanding of political philosophy puts it in a powerful position to cynically produce the ideology needed for certain political aims. Lenin blatantly sets out, in What is to be done?, a vision of a communist intellectual vanguard, led by him, organising a revolution using the manpower of workers and making sense of the world through Marxist analysis. However, I think looking at Theory as eventually a tool producing the experience of sensemaking, another area opens up, also explored by Marx and his followers: that of ideology-critique, of Critical Theory. As I said, making sense is a visceral experience: we just feel it. But that doesn’t mean we cannot dig deeper! We can ask the right questions: where do my convictions come from? Did someone put this thought in my head? And arrive at some illuminating answers that – again –, make sense, but on a deeper, or rather ‘meta’ level.
Here another insight from Bernard Williams comes in: the intellectual virtue of sincerity. There is a great deal of philosophising to be done on ourselves, and our visceral convictions. But there is an unbridgeable hermeneutical problem. I might tell you that some thing makes sense to me, but to be fair, you have no way of verifying it. Knowing what makes sense to whom is an incredibly important asset in our world – a world where, as we have seen, there is a massive semi-obscure science of governance trying to put ideas in our head about what makes sense. But I could always lie to you. You might even find it convincing, but you can never be sure if I did the ‘critical theory’ on myself and revealing my actual ‘data’ about the structure of my beliefs, or if I am trying to fool you, or signal something about my intelligence. In order to do the ‘digging’, we need a structure of honesty and sincerity, where I can trust that you can actually say what you think, without shame, without ridicule, without the constraints of aggressive ‘debate.’ (It is for this reason that I am slightly afraid of people who like debating societies.) To do this, we need appropriate spaces, appropriate institutions, and let me not get started on how few and far between those are.
To conclude: knowledge is power, and when it seems like it isn’t, we should probably dig deeper. What I tried to provide here is a unified vision of knowledge – but in a way it has just become a unified vision of willed human action. If we want to do something, we need the know-how – and if this know-how is to be more than tacit, we need some form of to transmit it. And we need to make sense of it all, because… well, it seems like it’s some sort of need. What does this all say about truth? On a cursory reading, it might seem that this is a cynical account of truth and the possibility of accessing it. It debases scientific, philosophical, historical knowledge, we might say. But actually, I think, looking at the world like this, truth gets a bit demystified. Can you do things? Yes, you can. Can you teach others how to do things? Can you learn? Yes, you can. Is there something you want to do? Yes, there is. Are there things that work, and work consistently? Of course there are. And there it is, there’s your truth. Williams quoted Goethe: ‘in the beginning was the deed’.
Indeed, it still is.
Thank you for reading! This newsletter will be an experiment in public, sincere sensemaking, from a blatantly personal point of view, on issues relating to life, philosophy, politics and our world.
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