In this review, I concentrate on analysing the response Tom Shakespeare’s Disability rights and wrongs has awoken in the disability studies community. I argue that the complicated relationship between politics and science is the underlying cause for many controversies in disability studies. The research field should regain its autonomy and scrutinise properly its ontological premises.

The field of disability studies in the UK is in turmoil. During the past 10 years or so, there have been several debates that have revolved around the social model of disability. The latest source of a heated debate is Tom Shakespeare’s Disability rights and wrongs. Many of us working outside the UK have followed this debate with feelings ranging from amazement to disapproval, from amusement to sadness. The February 2007 issue of Disability & Society, the leading disability studies journal in Britain and also the persistent unofficial organ of the social model, includes a review symposium on Shakespeare’s book. It is nowadays rare to come across mischievous, ad hominem arguments in academic publications. However, one of the reviewers, Mike Oliver, a sociologist and the main architect of the social model, has no problem lashing Shakespeare by depicting him as “a relatively affluent person with a minor impairment who is never going to be at the sharp end of personal support services” and who thus writes “well intentioned but meaningless platitudes”.1 According to Oliver, the main reason for Shakespeare’s allegedly errant writings is the fact that his book draws heavily on philosophy, a discipline whose “only use is as a career opportunity for middle-class intellectuals who can’t get a proper job”.1

Although the UK disability studies community produces, fortunately, a lot of ambitious work that respects the traditional criteria of good academic practice and research, the preceeding description gives some idea of what kind of intellectual and ideological community Shakespeare comes from, and which he so passionately criticises. Disability studies originate in the political activism of disabled people in the 1960s and 1970s. People with impairments were through with the domination of the medical profession over their lives and numerous other discriminatory social practices. One crucial component in the discrimination against disabled people was seen to be a matter of definition and knowledge: the traditional medical view of disability reduced social disadvantages to biological impairments, thus making disability an object of medical scrutiny, and medical scientists the primary experts concerning disability. The disability movement revolutionised the conceptualisation of disability by (1) raising the personal experiences of disabled people as the primary source of knowledge regarding disability and (2) identifying disability as a social problem that should be dealt with through social interventions, not an individual problem that was to be dealt with through medical interventions.2 3

Especially in Britain, the field of disability studies has been closely related to the disability movement and it was harnessed early on to promoting political aims defined by the movement. So, research and politics have traditionally walked hand in hand in British disability studies. For someone educated outside of Britain, and according to the ideals of old-fashioned modern science, the marriage between science and disability politics seems highly problematic. As Shakespeare points out in his book, the horse before the disability studies carriage is often politics, not science. What we have as a result may be useful politically but is often academically problematic, to say the least.

Differing views about the purpose of research boils down partly to academic traditions. In Britain, the field of disability studies is firmly located in the politics of disability and the disabled people’s movement. This is not so much the case in, for example, the Nordic countries, where leadership is located in the academy. In Finland, the university is traditionally based on Humboldtian ideals, where the production of knowledge is a value in itself, and it does not necessarily need to have any practical relevance whatsoever (this is the case especially with basic research, the necessary condition of applied research). Also, universities and academics are entitled, or even obliged, to practise full freedom as to which topics to research and how to do the research. From this perspective, it seems absurd to require that academic research should always be accessible to disabled people, including those with intellectual impairments.4 From the disability movement’s perspective this may seem like a reasonable qualification; from the academic perspective it is an impossible demand that is in conflict with the basic ethos of science.

THE MASTER PLAN: EMANCIPATORY RESEARCH PARADIGM

Regarding the current state of the field of disability studies, one of the most important contributions of Disability rights and wrongs is that it openly aims to explain and understand disability irrespective of possibly uncomfortable political implications. Shakespeare openly detaches himself from the tradition in which the validity of research is measured by political standards. Researchers using the social model of disability, however, have placed themselves at the service of disabled people and adopted an emancipatory research paradigm.5 6 This approach requires the adoption of a social model of disability as the ontological and epistemological basis for research production, undertaking such research as will be of practical benefit to the self-empowerment of disabled people and developing control over research production to ensure full accountability to disabled people and their organisations.7 8

This kind of research strategy is a consistent outcome of the kind of sociological thinking that sees virtually all human and social phenomena as interconnected. For example, the idea of researchers being independent and autonomous is an illusion that should be abandoned. There is no independent haven or middle ground when researching oppression (which, according to the social model, disability is all about): “academics and researchers can only be with the oppressors or with the oppressed.”9 And in line with this kind of epistemological approach, Alison Sheldon9 aims to refute Shakespeare’s criticism of social model research as laden too much with ideology to offer sound argument and evidence, by arguing that “all views about ideology are in themselves ideological” (needless to say, this is not true; views about ideology or normative judgments can be, for instance, descriptive). So, according to Sheldon, Shakespeare cannot offer any sound views or arguments about the social model ideology without accepting that his views are necessarily ideological as well, and explicating his own ideology. At the end of the day, all we have is a battle of ideologies that cannot be settled with the help of sociology or any other academic discipline, but, rather, can be settled only with politics.

This general outlook where everything is interconnected, and is ideological, political, relativistic, or what have you, is one example of the ontological confusion in disability studies, where various ontological categories are muddled. This tendency is built into the emancipatory research paradigm, because (1) it denies the possibility of “claims to objectivity through overt political commitment to the struggles of disabled people for self emancipation”,7 but, at the same time, (2) claims that one “can be objective about oppression” and that disablist oppression can be examined “as an objective reality”.10 In other words, the emancipatory research paradigm is based on a methodology in which descriptive judgments are judged by the normative judgments settled beforehand; what is, is derived from what ought to be. This seems intuitively a very peculiar methodology, especially since the social model tradition does not provide a further explication or argument for this paradigm. This is just one example of the lack of theoretical scrutiny in disability studies. However, since the emancipatory research paradigm regards commitment to certain ontological premises as a crucial factor concerning research production, it appears to me that we are facing, to the great disappointment of sociologists, a philosophical issue that must be dealt with accordingly. I will analyse now very briefly whether the emancipatory research paradigm offers a solid foundation for academic research.

ONTOLOGY OF DISABILITY: SUBJECTIVE VERSUS OBJECTIVE

First, we must recognise an important distinction between the senses of “objective” and “subjective”, as for epistemology and ontology. An epistemic sense of objective–subjective distinction refers simply to discussions about our judgments of how things are in the world and their truth (or credibility). A judgment is subjective if its truth (or correctness) depends on the attitudes, feelings or points of view of the maker and the hearer of the judgment. A judgment is objective if its truth is settled by facts in the world that are independent of the maker and hearer of the judgment. In other words, if a statement is objective in the epistemic sense, there is an objective fact in the world that makes it true (p 8).11

In the ontological sense, objective and subjective are predicates of the entities in the world, the types of entities, and their mode of existence. Objective entities exist independently of any perceiver or mental state, whereas subjective entities are dependent on perceivers and mental states. So, in the ontological sense, pains are subjective entities because their existence depends on the subject’s experience. But mountains, for example, are ontologically objective, because their mode of existence is independent of any perceiver; mountains would stay in the world even if all the humans and other subjects with senses disappeared from the earth. Here we need to distinguish between the senses of objective and subjective, that is, we can make epistemically subjective statements about entities that are ontologically objective, and, similarly, we can make epistemically objective statements about entities that are ontologically subjective. For example, the statement “individuals with spina bifida are an oppressed group of people” is about an ontologically objective entity, but makes a subjective judgment about it. On the other hand, the statement “The fact that my child has spina bifida causes me emotional distress” reports an epistemically objective fact in the sense that it is made true by the existence of an actual fact that is not dependent on any opinion of observers. Nevertheless, the phenomenon itself, the actual emotional distress, has a subjective mode of existence (pp 9–11).11

Various entities thus have different kinds of modes of existence, and they can exist independently of each other. Spina bifida is not inherently connected to oppression, because the existence of a neural tube defect is an intrinsic feature that exists independently of our views about it. Spina bifida does, however, include observer-relative features as well—the kind of feature that exists relative to observers. Oppression, for example, is always experienced by subjects and is fundamentally rooted in human experience. The observer-relative features of the world do not add any material objects to reality, but they can add epistemically objective features to reality where the features in question exist relative to human beings (pp 9–11).11 So, in this sense, and in line with the emancipatory research paradigm, it does actually make sense to say that ontologically subjective phenomena can be studied objectively; one can be objective about oppression, but oppression as a phenomenon has a subjective mode of existence.

A more fundamental issue, however, is the nature of disability in itself; can disability as a phenomenon be satisfactorily explained in terms of oppression? Within the social model, it is agreed that we have no objective criteria for settling the issue but that we should just decide that disability indeed is a matter of oppression and examine it (objectively or subjectively) accordingly. These theoretical premises in disability studies are based on political convictions. However, for those who think that the aim of academic research is to produce accounts that are in line with reality and thus true, the issue is more problematic.

RECLAIMING FACTS AND TRUTHS

If one is not willing to commit to completely nihilistic premises, we do know for a fact that certain statements are either true or false. For example, it is true that the earth goes around the sun, not vice versa. It is also true that spina bifida is caused by the failure of the fetus’s neural tube to close completely in early stages of pregnancy. These are the kinds of facts, or truths, that as facts exist independently of human beings and their views. John Searle calls them brute facts as distinct from institutional facts, which can exist only within human institutions. But before we can name or agree on any facts, that is, to have institutional facts, we have to have brute facts. In order to have money, games, schools, medical diagnoses or any other human institution, for each there must be some physical realisation, some brute fact on which we can impose its social function. All sorts of substances can be money. Whether it is bits of metal or pieces of paper or magnetic traces on plastic cards, it has to exist in some physical form or other. Or more precisely, all institutional facts require, in part for epistemic reasons, a physical grounding; it is constitutive for an institutional status that it can be recognised as such (pp 34–5).11

According to the social model, disability as a social phenomenon is about oppression and discrimination against people with impairments. By definition, then, disability as a social phenomenon includes not just a mere institutional level, but a brute level of facts as well, namely, impairments. Disability cannot thus be satisfactorily conceptualised purely in terms of institutional facts, such as oppression. The problem with the emancipatory research paradigm is that its foundation is based on the upper stairs of the ontological ladder, as it were, and that it ignores the inevitable physical foundation of social phenomena. As a result, what it manages to provide is ontologically an insufficient, or even a flawed, account of the phenomenon of disability. It should be noted that this flaw is more serious in the case of those impairments that include clearly verifiable brute facts, such as the causes of spina bifida and trisomy 21. However, the situation is not that clear in the case of so-called social impairments such as ADHD; it is far from clear whether these kinds of conditions are impairments in the proper sense or whether they are mere institutional facts.

Tom Shakespeare is obviously concerned in his new book with truth. He accuses the social of model of disability of being sectarian and ideological and calls for “a balanced, rational and coherent analysis of disability” (p 1).12 Political—correct or incorrect—views as such do not satisfy him. It is easy to support Shakespeare in his endeavour, if for no other reason than for the fact that true views and statements are in the long run probably more useful than false statements, however politically correct they may presently seem to some.

CONCLUSIONS

The central strength and weakness of Disability rights and wrongs is the fact that it is a reaction against the British disability studies orthodoxy. Shakespeare provides an extensive review based on considerable reading. He writes and argues with an admirable clarity and fluency, and risks stating many unpleasant facts about, for example, impairment effects that have traditionally been painful to be admitted in the social model of disability. However, at some points Shakespeare could, perhaps, be criticised for objecting to virtually anything that, in his view, the social model represents. For example, he may have been a bit too keen to discard the expressivist objection to selective abortion and the uses of the politics of disability identity.

Altogether, Disability rights and wrongs can be described as Tom Shakespeare’s quest for truth regarding disability. Whatever one thinks of his success, rather than burying itself in the trench of political correctness, the disability studies community should join Shakespeare in his intellectual expedition.