[MD] Rorty's Relativism

[Steve Peterson]

Hi DMB,

> 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:
I understand completely that Pirsig and pragmatists are concerned about 
being construed as relativists. Rorty himself has written a lot in 
defense of being labeled a relativist. People get called that by SOMers 
all the time. What I can't understand and what you still haven't 
explained is what a pragmatist could possibly mean in calling another 
pragmatist a relativist. If absolute-relative is a version of 
objective-subjective, what business would someone who has rejected SOM 
have in accusing someone else as being a relativist. What could they 
mean by the term?

Do you have a definition that a pragmatist would use for relativism? 
Would you like to use Rorty's?

"Relativism" is the view that every belief on a certain topic, or 
perhaps about any topic, is as good as every other. No one holds this 
view. Except for the occasional cooperative freshman, one cannot find 
anybody who says that two incompatible opinions on an important topic 
are equally good. The philosophers who get called "relativists" are 
those who say that the grounds for choosing between such opinions are 
less algorithmic than had been thought. . .So the real issue is not 
between people who think that one view is as good as another and people 
who do not. It is between those think our culture, or purposes, or 
intuitions, cannot be supported except conversationally, and people who 
still hope for other sorts of support." (Consequences of Pragmatism, U. 
of Minnesota Press, 1982, pp. 166-167.)

Based on the above options either no one is a relativist or everyone 
who isn't a theist or a Platonist is a relativist from the Platonist's 
perspective.


> 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.

Steve:
In the above, Rorty supports a whole bunch of liberal causes that you 
personally cheer for. How is that an example of relativism? The SOMer 
would complain that Rorty is not basing the superiority of these 
liberal causes on an ahistorical foundation. But what would a 
pragmatists complaint be?

And what prevents the Nazi's from using other philosopher's 
articulation of pragmatism? They used Christianity though any Christian 
will now say that it wasn't REALLY Christianity. I think any claim that 
the Nazi's simply could not use a particular philosophy would get into 
such a "No True Scottsman" fallacy.

The issue that Rorty addresses is not whether or not a bully could use 
pragmatism but whether we can use pragmatism or any philosophy against 
a bully. Rorty doubts that it will be of much use. Likewise, Pirsig 
argued that the instrument of conversation between intellect and such 
people is not philosophy but better equipped guys with guns.


DMB:
> 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.


Steve:
I'm not calling anyone a hack. I referred you to the text you quoted so 
that you could verify for yourself that you are using a claim that 
Rorty made about knowledge to ascribe to him a theory of truth, and you 
come back with an appeal to authority???? But anyway, all they said is 
that they are not surprised that Rorty gets called a relativists. I'm 
not surprised either! SOMers will always call pragmatists that. It's 
beside the point. What you need to say is what makes you think that 
Rorty has revealed himself as a relativist other than that he has been 
accused of being a relativist. You haven't even attempted to make a 
case.

DMB:
> 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.

Steve:
Well I just did a Google search for "David Buchanan has Rorty all 
wrong" and got 212,000 hits, so [sticking tongue out]!

Anyway, the issue is not whether or not Rorty has ever used the word. I 
just said that I never read it and acceoted that he may have though not 
in the way you claim. The issue here is that you claim that Rorty 
equates truth with intersubjective agreement and have not provided any 
evidence for that claim.


DMB:
> 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."


Steve:
Usually I'm a little skeptical when someone says "I just picked one at 
random," but I actually believe you here. I repeated the search and 
found the text you quoted came from Leadership U. It's a site I might 
frequent if I were a young evangelical Christian. Didn't you notice 
that the article began with this?

"How should Christians respond to postmodernism? Is it a profound 
threat that we must refute else it undermine the Christian perspective? 
Or is it a benign alternative to the more explicitly atheistic 
philosophies that have dominated twentieth-century thought? I answer 
that it is not benign, but that, even if Christians make no attempt to 
refute it, it will destroy itself, and possibly its antireligious 
philosophical predecessors such as Sartrian existentialism, logical 
positivism, and Wittgensteinianism. This self-destruction will occur 
despite the efforts of Richard Rorty, postmodernism’s most gifted 
defender, who may ultimately do more to destroy the movement that to 
defend it. However, I do not suggest philosophical passivity. There is 
much that both Christians and non Christians can learn and apply from 
the dead-ended emptiness of postmodernism."
http://www.leaderu.com/aip/docs/geuras.html

Even if this site had any credibility with either of us, it would still 
be just an appeal to authority rather than a quote of Rorty himself 
saying that he equates truth with intersubjectivity.

Best,
Steve