[MD] Rorty's Relativism

[Steve Peterson]

Hi DMB,


> Steve replied:
> I suppose the issue has something to do with the "linguistic turn."  
> While the classical and neo-classical pragmatists talk about  
> experience. Rorty focuses on language. I'd be interested in hearing  
> your take on the linguistic turn and what is lost in taking this turn.
>
> dmb says:
> Yes, that's right. David Hildebrand writes (a paper and a book)  
> about how the linguistic turn led Rorty to a "theoretical starting  
> point", which is at odds with what he calls the "natural starting  
> point" in James and Dewey, both of whom were radical empiricists.  
> And basically that's lost in his theoretical starting point. Rorty  
> doesn't begin with experience. He begins with language. We hear  
> this echoed in the way he construes the rejection of the  
> correspondence theory of truth as a matter of matching "sentences"  
> with reality. The radical empiricists instead says that valid  
> concepts or high quality ideas have to agree with experience.  
> Rorty's starting point basically has him rejecting any kind of  
> empiricism. If memory serves, he thinks epistemology is just as  
> dead as metaphysics.

Steve:
I think "agreement with experience" is a general account of truth  
that pretty much everybody subscribes to. Where it gets dicey is when  
philosophers try to get more specific about what this agreement is  
supposed to be like.


>
> Steve said:
> Another issue that may separate Rorty from other pragmatists is  
> that Rorty doesn't equate truth with "warranted assertability"  
> which is why, as I recall, Davidson never wanted to be called a  
> pragmatist and why Putnam didn't think Rorty was really a pragmatist.
>
> dmb says:
> Yea, Hildebrand's book is very much about the Rorty-Putnam debates  
> and the phrase "warranted assertability" gets used a lot. It's  
> telling, I suppose, that all three of those guys come out of the  
> analytic tradition and when that dream didn't pan out there was a  
> tendency to find something less ambitious as far as discovering  
> "reality" and the "truth". I mean, I don't like Putnam or Davidson  
> any better than Rorty. Somehow that whole tradition just smells  
> like the kind of amoral rationality that Pirsig sought to  
> overcome.  Putnam, for example, thought that Rorty was a spoiler, a  
> nihilist and "an explicit cultural relativist". Even if that's only  
> half way true, it would still be very far away from what Pirsig is  
> up to.

Steve:
I think anyone such as Putnam making the charge of relativism must be  
doing so within a subject-object picture where relative-absolute,  
subjective-objective, accidental-essential distinctions make any  
sense, so I think you'd then have to look at such people as Putnam  
making this charge as not understanding what Rorty is doing. It's not  
because the likes of Putnam are just too dumb to get it. It's just  
that they are too attached to the subject-object picture to make  
sense of Rorty or Pirsig.


> Steve said:
> When I hear the charge of relativism being made, all it sounds like  
> is an epithet that a Rigel type uses when he disagrees with someone  
> else's morality. As I see it, Rigel is going to walk away  
> unconvinced by both Pirsig's and Rorty's protestations about being  
> called a relativist, but that doesn't make either one a relativist.  
> I completely understand that Pirsig and Rorty will be accused of  
> relativism by someone like Rigel, but I can't understand how you  
> would be interested in making the charge. Isn't asking if morality  
> is relative or absolute pretty much the same as asking whether it  
> is subjective or objective?
>
>
> dmb says:
> I know what you mean. Whenever a person complains about relativism  
> I find myself waiting for the other shoe to drop. The next step is  
> very, very often a defense of God's morality or the greatness of  
> one's own culture. In other words, complaints about relativism are  
> very often motivated by absolutism or religious fanaticism. And  
> Rigel himself, as a character, is kind of a dick. But I can also  
> tell you that the issue of relativism came up in every one of my  
> philosophy classes. Apparently, college kids these days are mostly  
> one or the other, either they are relativists or they are religious  
> as hell. Professors can't stand up in front of the classroom and  
> dis religion but they certainly have a few choice words about  
> relativism. I mean, just because a dick says it doesn't necessarily  
> mean the point is invalid.

Steve:
I find that it's generally hard to tell what people mean by  
relativism. If they mean that a relativist doesn't see anything as  
better or worse than anything else, then there is no such thing as a  
relativist (at least outside of the college kids while in a  
philosophy classroom). If they mean that relativists think that the  
circumstances surrounding an act have a lot to do with the morality  
of an act, then pretty much everyone is a relativist.

DMB:
> I think your equation - where relative truths are subjective and  
> absolute truths are objective - is pretty damn good. That's one of  
> the reasons I'm so suspicious of Rorty notion of what counts as  
> truth, namely "intersubjective agreement". I think it's pretty  
> clear that this is the idea that leads Rorty's critics to conclude  
> that he's an explicit cultural relativist.

Steve:
I haven't read anything that suggests that Rorty thinks that truth is  
determined by consensus. Rorty takes the pragmatic view of beliefs as  
habits of action and characterizes a belief that is held to be (as  
far as we know) true to be one that such that no other belief is (as  
far as we know) a better habit of action.

Dewey's "warranted assertability" is often viewed as pragmatism's  
theory of truth and defining truth as "that which works." Critics  
have noted that to do so is to conflate truth with justification.  
Rorty prefers to keep Plato's formulation of knowledge as justified  
true belief and thinks that these three terms (justification, truth,  
and belief) need to be kept separate, i.e., we can't say we know  
something if it isn't true or if we don't believe it or if we are not  
justified in believing it even if it turns out later to be true.

He reads Dewey as not having a theory of truth, as suggesting that we  
give up on the project of finding a theory of truth and instead go  
ahead and talk about the process of justification, anyway, which is  
what is always our concern in practice. That's where "that which  
works" comes in for Rorty--not as a theory of truth but as an  
explanation of the verification process by which we justify our  
beliefs to ourselves and to others. If a belief leads us to what we  
want, i.e., if it works, we hold it to be true, at least  
provisionally. Pragmatists don't say that's how it ought to be and  
define truth as such. They simply note that that's how justification  
functions in practice.

Rorty drops any notion of finding an interesting theory of truth on  
pragmatic grounds, because a theory of truth isn't going to help us  
say more true things or tell the difference between a true and a  
false statement. The problem here for theories of truth in general is  
that that was the whole purpose of searching for a theory of truth to  
begin with.

Even though he lost interest in theories of truth, you still don't  
need to be concerned with Rorty's "notion of what counts as truth."  
For Rorty, only true statements count as true. "The cat is on the  
mat" is a true statement only if the cat is on the mat. Neither Rorty  
nor anyone else has come up with a theory that tells us in general  
which statements actually are true, so he doesn't expect anyone to  
come up with anything much more philosophically interesting than such  
tautologies.

Best,
Steve