Programm

The Political Turn and Genealogical Anxiety: Reconciling theory, practice, and critique

Andrea Rodriguez et al.

Universidad de Granada, Spanien

There has been a growing interest in politically significant phenomena within analytic philosophy. In recent decades, disciplines such as the philosophy of language and epistemology have increasingly focused on topics like processes of polarization (Tanesini and Lynch, 2021), harmful uses of language (Stanley, 2015; Almagro et al., 2021), and injustices related to what a speaker can achieve with their words depending on their socio-normative status (Fricker, 2007; Kukla, 2014; Ayala-López, 2018). This trend, often referred to as a political turn in analytic philosophy (Bordonaba Plou et al., 2022), represents not only a shift in philosophical topics but also a renewed approach to the relationship between theory and practice. Some have argued (Cassam, 2023; Pinedo and Villanueva, 2022) that one criterion for evaluating the adequacy of a theory is its capacity to identify instances of pernicious phenomena and intervene in them. In this vein, one of the primary commitments of the political turn is to highlight that neglecting how our social positioning shapes our perspectives when theorizing often results in ideal theories (Mills, 2005), which obscure situations of injustice by reflecting only the experiences of the privileged one who theorize (Almagro and Guerra, 2023). In turn, the political turn urges theorists to embrace genealogical anxiety (Srinivasan, 2019), the fear that uncovering the causal, contingent origins of our beliefs and values will undermine the justification of our theories.

The purpose of this paper is to defend the normative validity of genealogical anxiety against two arguments. First, it has been argued that genealogical arguments undermine the normative status of theories (Wolf, 2022). If we understand the normative status of our claims and theories as grounded in our ability to provide reasons in their support, genealogical arguments challenge this status by emphasizing their contingent causal origins. Second, genealogical arguments have been criticized for leading to an infinite regress (Rini, 2016). When genealogists attempt to debunk a theory by pointing out that it depends on the theorists being part of a contingent causal chain, it can be countered that the genealogist’s own debunking claim is similarly dependent on their being part of a contingent causal chain.

Our response is twofold. First, we argue that genealogy does not undermine the normativity of concept use. As Brandom (2013, 2019), drawing on Hegel, has argued, a dynamic understanding of concept use, recognizing how processes and practices shape conceptual content, enables genealogical explanations without abandoning a normative account of rationality. Second, we contend that the regress argument presupposes a neutral conception of reason (Crary, 2018) and examine the asymmetry between genealogical luck, where contingent beliefs can amount to knowledge, and genealogical unluckiness (Srinivasan, 2019). Those with genealogical luck are uniquely positioned to view the world in a new light and critically assess the concepts structuring our theories, enabling what Srinivasan calls “worldmaking”. This connection between the rational critique of concepts and practical action highlights the vital interplay between theory and practice.