[MD] Rorty's Relativism

[david buchanan]

Steve said to Marsha:
I think we should always defend ourselves against the charge of relativism since it is used as an epithet and a way of dismissing someone without having to address their arguments.

dmb says:
I think you're being unfair here. While it's certainly possible to use the word as a dismissive epithet, there are also thoughtful people who see relativism as a genuine problem, as a real position held by real people with real consequences. Ironically, you seem to be dismissing the whole thing as nothing but dismissive. I mean, do you really think that pragmatists like Hildebrand and Rosenthal are just using the term to dismiss Rorty without having to address his arguments? The stuff they publish is reviewed by their peers and if they were engaged in such shoddy scholarship as that, they'd be very quickly attacked and humiliated for it. 

Steve continued:
While we can like the slogan "man is the measure of all things" because it captures the notion that unlike theists and rationalists we are not looking for a great, non-human, ahistorical power to tell us right from wrong, we also still deny being relativists because we deny the absolute-relative distinctions on the same grounds that we deny the objective-subjective distinction. It's the same thing as not wanting to be called a subjectivist.

dmb says:

Yea, that's not a bad way to look at what Pirsig is doing but Rorty and his critics have already managed to reject the subject-object distinction as primary and yet the relativism debate continues despite that. The demise of "objective truth", theism and metaphysics more or less spells the end of absolutism but that shift raises new questions about relativism. I mean, postmodernism in general has been struggling with this issue as it seems to leave no alternative except some kind of relativism and Rorty was among those articulating that postmodern shift. And to the extent that Pirsig resembles this, he's been accused too. Now, because of Rorty, pragmatists of all kinds have to defend themselves against such charges. Pirsig's defense of the MOQ is unusual if not unique but the classical pragmatists use the distinction between relativism and "perspectivism" as a defense. 

Steve said:
Pirsig later brings back the terms subjective and objective without their metaphysical baggage where subjective is just taken to mean social and intellectual patterns or "things that are hard to get agreement about" and objective is taken to mean inorganic and biological patterns or "things that are easy to get agreement about." Absolute and relative could be retooled in the same way, but I still think that we should avoid using such terms because doing so implies accepting an SOM premise that we don't accept. We can just say that some morals are easy to get agreement on and others not so much, and we can argue our case for the morality of our position.

dmb says:

Rorty wrote an essay called "Texts and Lumps" in which the differences between literary criticism (social and intellectual) and the hard sciences (organic and inorganic) are all but melted away. This was the assigned reading for a class in which Hildebrand and Rosenthal were guest lecturers and that was the basis upon which Rosenthal made a case that Rorty is a relativist. And in the following sections of a Stanford encyclopedia of Philosophy one can see that the issue of Rorty's relativism is of concern to a wide range of philosophers. 

"Epistemological behaviorism leaves no room for the kind of practice-transcending legitimation that Rorty identifies as the defining aspiration of modern epistemology. Assuming that epistemic practices do, or at least can, diverge, it is not surprising that Rorty's commitment to epistemological behaviorism should lead to charges of relativism or subjectivism. Indeed, many who share Rorty's historicist scepticism toward the transcending ambitions of epistemology—friendly critics like Hilary Putnam, John McDowell and Daniel Dennett—balk at the idea that there are no constraints on knowledge save conversational ones. Yet this is a central part of Rorty's position, repeated and elaborated as recently as in TP and PCP. Indeed, in TP he invokes it precisely in order to deflect this sort of criticism. In "Hilary Putnam and the Relativist Menace," Rorty says:
In short, my strategy for escaping the self-referential difficulties into which "the Relativist" keeps getting himself is to move everything over from epistemology and metaphysics into cultural politics, from claims to knowledge and appeals to self-evidence to suggestions about what we should try. (TP 57)"
[...]
"The broad scope of Rorty's metaphilosophical deconstruction, together with a penchant for uncashed metaphor and swift, broad-stroke historical narrative, has gained Rorty a sturdy reputation as an anti-philosopher's philosopher. While his writing enjoys an unusual degree of popularity beyond the confines of the profession, Rorty's work is often regarded with suspicion and scepticism within academic philosophy.
4.1 Critical Responses
As we have seen in connection with Rorty's attitude to science, it is particularly Rorty's treatment of truth and knowledge that has drawn fire from philosophers. While a great variety of philosophers have criticized Rorty on this general score in a great variety of ways, it is not very difficult to discern a common concern; Rorty's conversationalist view of truth and knowledge leaves us entirely unable to account for the notion that a reasonable view of how things are is a view suitably constrained by how the world actually is. This criticism is levelled against Rorty not only from the standpoint of metaphysical and scientific realist views of the sort that Rorty hopes will soon be extinct. It is expressed also by thinkers who have some sympathy with Rorty's historicist view of intellectual progress, and his critique of Kantian and Platonist features of modern philosophy. Frank B. Farrell, for instance, argues that Rorty fails to appreciate Davidson's view on just this point, and claims that Rorty's conversationalist view of belief-constraint is a distorted, worldless, version of Davidson's picture of how communication between agents occurs. Similarly, John McDowell, while also critical of Davidson's epistemological views, claims that Rorty's view of the relation between agent and world as merely causal runs foul of the notion that our very concept of a creature with beliefs involves the idea of a rational constraint of the world on our epistemic states.
However, critics are concerned not only with what they see as a misguided view of belief, truth, and knowledge, whether relativist, subjectivist, or idealist in nature. An important reason for the high temperature of much of the debate that Rorty has inspired is that he appears to some to reject the very values that are the basis for any articulation of a philosophical view of truth and knowledge at all. Rorty is critical of the role of argument in intellectual progress, and dismissive of the very idea of theories of truth, knowledge, rationality, and the like. Philosophers such as Hilary Putnam and Susan Haack have increasingly focussed on this aspect of Rorty's views. Haack, in particular, frames criticism of Rorty along these lines in moral terms; to her mind, Rorty's efforts to abandon the basic concepts of traditional epistemology are symptoms of a vulgar cynicism, which contributes to the decline of reason and intellectual integrity that Haack and others find to be characteristic of much contemporary thought. The charge of intellectual irresponsibility is sometimes raised, or at last implied, in connection with Rorty's use of historical figures. Rorty's reading of Descartes and of Kant i PMN have often been challenged, as has his more constructive uses of Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein. The kind of appropriation of other writers and thinkers that Rorty performs will at times seem to do violence to the views and intentions of the protagonists."

My point? It's not very reasonable or fair to dismiss these criticisms as some kind of quirky misunderstanding or as otherwise illegitimate. There are smart, sincere people on both sides of what many philosophers consider a legitimate debate. These people don't charge Rorty with relativism to dismiss him but to engage with what he's saying. I mean, in that world it's not too easy to get away with mere name calling or mere dismissal. Acting like that in the world of academic philosophy is likely to get you dismissed. And called names. ;-)




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