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 naïveté?

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.”Footnote 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:

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.Footnote 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.”Footnote 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.”Footnote 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?”Footnote 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 “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.”Footnote 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.”Footnote 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.”Footnote 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 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.”Footnote 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.”Footnote ¹²

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’.”Footnote 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.”Footnote 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’.”Footnote 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 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.”Footnote 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:

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.”Footnote 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 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.”Footnote 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.Footnote 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.”Footnote 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).Footnote ²³ Ian Hacking, meanwhile, drew inspiration from Kuhn's turn to scientific practice to develop his own theory of “experimental realism” (or, “entity realism”).Footnote 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.”Footnote 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.Footnote 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.”Footnote 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.”Footnote 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.”Footnote ²⁹ But by 1966 Foucault had moved decisively in the direction 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.Footnote 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.”Footnote 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.”Footnote 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:

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 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 vérit'].”Footnote 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:

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”).Footnote 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 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.Footnote 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.”Footnote 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.”Footnote ³⁹

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.”Footnote 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.”Footnote ⁴¹ But Goodman would not back down:

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 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.”Footnote ⁴⁵

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.”Footnote 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.”Footnote 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:

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 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.Footnote 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.”Footnote 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 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.”Footnote 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.”Footnote 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.Footnote ⁵³ According to the famous “symmetry principle” a genuinely sociological understanding of a scientific practice had to sustain strict neutrality 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.Footnote ⁵⁴ SSK was stuck (perhaps unhappily) in a world where scientific realism still mattered.Footnote ⁵⁵

As Steve Fuller explains, Kuhn resented the efforts of the SSK school to invoke his authority for its own purposes.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.”Footnote ⁵⁸

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?”Footnote 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.Footnote 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.”Footnote 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.Footnote ⁶²

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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 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.”Footnote ⁶⁵