[MD] Rorty's Relativism

[david buchanan]

Steve said to dmb:
I don't know how to settle a pissing match between the contemporary classical pragmatists' radical empiricism, Rorty's panrelationalism, and Pirsig's Quality to see who has rejected SOM most flamboyantly, and I don't think it matters. None of these are SOMists which means to me that none of these should be interested in accusing the others of relativism since buying into absolutism-relativism is a just another way of clinging to SOM.

dmb says:
Well, first of all I think it's unfair and inaccurate to characterize that philosophical debate as a pissing match or a flamboyance contest and it's also pretty obvious that there are contemporary pragmatists who think it does matter. Secondly, my point in saying that "the classical pragmatists like Rosenthal, Stuhr and Hildebrand ...are actually a lot more explicit about their rejection of SOM than is Rorty" was to refute your assertion that accusations of relativism can only be made from within SOM, that it only matters to SOMers. These are specific examples of philosophers who are concerned with relativism despite the fact that they've already explicitly rejected SOM. To cite the most relevant and familiar example, Pirsig also felt the need to deny relativism in both books despite his rejection of SOM. He felt the need to dispute this not just for his critics or people like Rigel but he also disputes Plato's charges against the Sophists. Pirsig expressed this concern with respect to William James, who was also accused of relativism, and he felt the need to make some corrections because of it too.
Steve said:
...How can relativism be described in pragmatic terms as something to be concerned about? Can you give a definition of relativism as you see pragmatists applying to Rorty?


dmb says:
Well, remember all that talk about William James being unable to prevent the NAZIs from using his pragmatism? Compare that to this...
"“It seems to me that the regulative idea that we heirs of the Enlightenment, we Socratists, most frequently use to criticize the conduct of various conversational partners is that of ‘needing education in order to outgrow their primitive fear, hatreds, and superstitions’ ... It is a concept which I, like most Americans who teach humanities or social science in colleges and universities, invoke when we try to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic, religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own ... The fundamentalist parents of our fundamentalist students think that the entire ‘American liberal establishment’ is engaged in a conspiracy. The parents have a point. Their point is that we liberal teachers no more feel in a symmetrical communication situation when we talk with bigots than do kindergarten teachers talking with their students ... When we American college teachers encounter religious fundamentalists, we do not consider the possibility of reformulating our own practices of justification so as to give more weight to the authority of the Christian scriptures. Instead, we do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization. We assign first-person accounts of growing up homosexual to our homophobic students for the same reasons that German schoolteachers in the postwar period assigned The Diary of Anne Frank... You have to be educated in order to be ... a participant in our conversation ... So we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable. We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours ... I don’t see anything herrschaftsfrei [domination free] about my handling of my fundamentalist students. Rather, I think those students are lucky to find themselves under the benevolent Herrschaft [domination] of people like me, and to have escaped the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents ... I am just as provincial and contextualist as the Nazi teachers who made their students read Der Stürmer; the only difference is that I serve a better cause.”– ‘Universality and Truth,’ in Robert B. Brandom (ed.), Rorty and his Critics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 21-2.




Previously, dmb quoted the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
Which says, "it is not surprising that Rorty's commitment to epistemological behaviorism should lead to charges of relativism or subjectivism"  because his critics "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" and "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 "conversationalists view of truth" is what I referred to earlier. That is to say, he construes truth as intersubjective agreement.
Steve replied:
This is a misunderstanding of Rorty. I don't think I've ever read him using the term, and if so I would think that it was only done in the context of describing justification rather than truth. Since he is criticized for not having a theory of truth it wouldn't make sense for him to have a "conversational theory of truth." Rorty pretty much says "truth is truth, let's leave it at that," because theories of truth don't help us distinguish between true and false statements anyway which is the only reason that we would want to pursue such a theory.

dmb says:

Well, if those hacks over at Stanford University aren't good enough for you then I don't know what would be good enough. But I can tell you that if you do a web search with "richard rorty" and "intersubjective agreement", you'll get over 1,500 hits and a certain percentage of those will be Rorty himself using that phrase. Picking one of the hits randomly from the first page, I found this...
"He agrees with Hillary Putnam that there is no "God’s eye standpoint" that reveals reality in itself.{3} Each person interprets reality in accordance with his own subjective condition. But Rorty does not argue for an individualistic free-for-all notion of truth. He emphasizes the social influence upon the individual and his beliefs. Truth, or what for Rorty substitutes for it, is an intersubjective agreement among the members of a community.{4} That intersubjective agreement permits the members of the community to speak a common language and establish a commonly accepted reality. The end of inquiry, for Rorty, is not the discovery or even the approximation of absolute truth but the formulation of beliefs that further the solidarity of the community, or "to reduce objectivity to solidarity."{5} He argues that once the notion of objective truth is abandoned, one must choose between a self-defeating relativism and ethnocentrism, neither of which can be justified in a manner that is not circular."

Oooops. Gotta go. More later,
dmb
> 
> DMB:
> > I think you're quite right to say that "pragmatists want to drop  
> > the notion of 'how the world actually  is' but that's because the  
> > phrase refers to a single objective reality. And I think you're  
> > quite right to think "that SOM philosphers would criticize what  
> > he's doing" in order to maintain their belief in such an objective  
> > reality. But I'm not talking about those critics and in fact I'm  
> > not even aware of any such critics. The radical empiricist would  
> > not oppose Rorty on those grounds but they still think that his  
> > "conversationalist view of truth" or his linguisticized pragmatism  
> > still makes them balk at the idea that there are no constraints on  
> > knowledge except conversation. Instead of saying that our claims  
> > are constrained by objective reality, they insist that our claims  
> > are constrained by experience. Conversation would count as  
> > experience but that's hardly the only kind that counts. More  
> > specifically, in Pirsig's case, "conversation" is always going to  
> > be a secondary thing that relies on concepts derived from a more  
> > primary kind of experience. You know, for Pirsig dialectic is the  
> > great usurper whereas Rorty has pretty much put it on the throne.
> 
> Steve:
> Note that he is talking about knowledge rather than truth. He is NOT  
> saying that truth is only constrained by conversation. He sees truth  
> in the usual way. A statement is true or false independently of who  
> believes it or who makes a stronger case for their position.   
> Knowledge refers to claims to holding a "justified true belief" by  
> Plato's formulation. He is saying that the constraints on such claims  
> are conversational which is one more way of saying that no theory of  
> truth will ever help us settle the matter of whether what someone  
> claims to know is true. Such questions are always settled in  
> conversation. Knowledge is not merely believing the truth but also  
> being justified in believing the truth. Only in conversation can we  
> deal with justification.
> 
> > Steve:
> > It's not that Rorty isn't open to criticism by smart people. It's  
> > just that I can't see how a pragmatist or anyone not taking the  
> > subject-object picture for granted could make the particular  
> > criticism of relativism with respect to Rorty. I'm sure that  
> > professional philosophers mean something more than what people  
> > generally seem to be doing with the word relativism, but I also  
> > can't tell what that is.
> >
> > dmb says:
> > Let me put it this way. As I understand it, the "middle way"  
> > rejects both sides. It rejects the notion of absolute values and  
> > just as vigorously it rejects the notion that there are no values  
> > at all. It is neither nihilistic nor absolutist. You seem to be  
> > saying that pragmatist reject absolutism and therefore should have  
> > no problem with relativism. I'm saying they're both equally  
> > objectionable and that rejecting one doesn't have to mean an  
> > endorsement of the other.
> 
> Steve:
> No, I'm saying that someone who really has rejected SOM has by  
> definition lost interest in asking the question "is it objective or  
> subjective?" And no one who has stopped asking "is it objective or  
> subjective" would want to ask "is it absolute or relative?" So how  
> could a non-SOMer ever accuse someone of relativism?
> 
> This makes me wonder what you or the contemporary classical  
> pragmatists could mean by a relativist. What does it mean to you?
> 
> Let me put the issue another way. What sorts of things do you think  
> that Rorty needs to say before you or classical pragmatists in  
> general would be convinced that he is NOT a relativist?
> 
> Best,
> Steve
> 
> 
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