Stanley Fish on Convictions

June 13, 2007

In one of his weekly posts for the New York Times, the literary critic Stanley Fish briefly analyzes whether it is possible for the mind to analyze an issue in what we might call an objective fashion:

But why not come to a situation with no beliefs, or with the beliefs you have held in abeyance or bracketed, and take a good, hard look at the facts? Aside from the point I have already made (that any facts we look at will be available and perspicuous only from the perspective of some belief or other), what is it exactly that we would be looking with? Unless there is a corner of the mind that observes purely – and if there were all disputes could be settled by just going to it – we can only look with or within the convictions that anchor our minds and provide the possibility of judgment. It is within a conviction or belief that some assertion or description will seem to us to be right or wrong, adequate or inadequate. Absent a belief that grounds it and gives it a direction, the mind would be rudderless and incapable of going anywhere.

I agree that human beings are limited in their ability to step outside their own convictions. Every active perceiver of this world is fundamentally a biased perceiver. We take in ideas and facts only through a heavy screen of our own convictions. But.. and this is a big BUT.. the human mind is certainly able to bracket its own beliefs and ideas about the world. Not perfectly, but to a limited extent.

Fish pokes fun at this notion when he writes: "Unless there is a corner of the mind that observes purely..." Well, that makes it sound ridiculous, but I would propose that the imagination plays a role similar to this. The ability of my mind to reason: "If I valued this and believed that.. then maybe I would reason or act thus." That is a fundamental part of our cognitive ability.. and it is essential for either the writing of fiction or the reconstruction of the past. Linguistically this ability manifests itself through the easy use of counter-factuals.

I worry that Fish's denial of pure perception devolves all too easily into a denial of the worth of striving to imagine other people and their convictions. Fish himself is a master at this effort, and I have heard him in a lecture walk easily through the religious convictions of John Milton. That imaginative reconstruction of the convictions of another person (often distant in time) is at the heart of what I consider liberal education. Getting students to think imaginatively and counter-factually about historical figures is difficult. I have found that it means asking them to bracket their own values and convictions and try to imagine the world as it was perceived by someone else. To do this purely might be impossible.. but to do it a little is everything.