[MD] The Relativist's journey

[Steven Peterson]

Hi dmb,


> dmb replied with a quote from SEP which says otherwise:
> "..., 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,..
>
> dmb says:
> The criticism I'm offering is much more subtle than you're willing to acknowledge, apparently. Please notice that I'm criticizing Rorty's neo-pragmatism from the position of classical pragmatist, namely Pirsig, James and sometimes Dewey. But you keep making your counter-arguments as if this criticism could only ever be leveled by some kind of Platonist or Objectivists. I'm sure Rorty has those kinds of critics but I'm not one of them. Religious people go nuts over anything that even remotely smells like relativism. But I'm not one of those either. The conversation should NOT be about Kantian critics or about the kind of relativism that we find only among co-operative freshman, the kind where "anything goes". It's more subtle than that, Steve.

Steve:
Okay, but what exactly _is_ your criticism. What the heck to you mean
by relativism? I think you'll have a difficult time defining it in a
way that doesn't apply apply equally to James who of course is also
routinely accused of relativism. Your case has simply been that other
people seem to think he is a relativist. How about specifying what you
mean by relativism (since SEP says it can mean lots and lots of
things) and how Rorty fits the bill while James does not?

dmb:
It's about the consequences of thinking that conversation is the only
constraint on truth. That's what his critics balk at and I think every
serious person should think about why they're balking, especially
those who follow Rorty or who call themselves a pragmatist of any
kind.

Steve:
But Rorty never said that conversation is what constrains truth. In
fact Rorty doesn't have a theory of truth other than to say with James
that the beliefs we call true are those that are earning their keep in
leading to successful action. (Unlike James, however, he does not
simply equate truth and justification since we may be now justified in
believing something that turns out to be false.)

You've quoted SEP saying that Rorty says there are no constraints on
knowledge save conversational ones. It is your Jamesian conflation of
justification and truth that is the problem in your misreading here.
What Rorty actually said in Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism
is,  "... pragmatism: it is the doctrine that there are no constraints
ON INQUIRY save conversational ones -- no wholesale constraints
derived from the nature of the objects, or of the mind, or of
language, but only those retail constraints provided by the remarks of
 our   fellow-inquirers. The way in which the properly-programmed
speaker cannot help believing that the patch before him is red has no
analogy for the more interesting and controversial  beliefs which
which provoke epistemological reflection."

SEP has taken Rorty's claim that there are no non-conversational
constraints on "inquiry" to mean there are no constraints on
"knowledge" (rather than on claims to knowledge or what is to be
considered justified), and then you took it one step further still to
say that he is talking about truth itself.

Plus, do you have any idea what he is excluding and including with the
phrase "non-conversational constraints"? I've continued the quote
where he unpacks his slogan so you can see exactly what it is he is
denying. I suspect you will likewise want to deny the very same things
that Rorty is denying as "non-conversational constraints."

Rorty:
"The pragmatist  tells  us  that  it  is  useless  to  hope that
objects will constrain us to believe the truth about  them, if only
they are  approached  with an unclouded  mental  eye, or a rigorous
method, or a perspicuous  language. He wants us to give up the notion
that God, or evolution, or some other under-writer of our present
world-picture, has programmed us as machines for accurate verbal
picturing, and that philosophy brings self-knowledge by letting us
read our own program. The only sense in which we are constrained to
truth is that, as Peirce suggested, we can make no sense of the notion
that the view which can survive all objections might be false. But
objections -- conversational constraints -- cannot be anticipated.
There is no method for knowing when one has reached the truth, or when
one is closer to it than before.

I prefer  this  third  way  of  characterizing pragmatism  because it
seems to me to focus on a fundamental choice which confronts the
reflective mind: that between accepting  the contingent  character of
starting points, and attempting to evade this contingency. To accept
the contingency of starting-points is to accept our inheritance from,
and our conversation with, our fellow-humans as our only source of
guidance.

To attempt to evade this contingency is to hope to become a
properly-programmed machine. This was the hope which Plato thought
might be fulfilled at the top of the divided line, when we passed
beyond hypotheses. Christians have hoped it might be attained by
becoming attuned to the voice of God in the heart, and Cartesians that
it might be fulfilled by emptying the mind and seeking the
indubitable. Since Kant, philosophers have hoped that it might be
fulfilled by finding the apriori structure  of any possible  inquiry,
or  language,  or form  of  social life. If we give up this hope, we
shall lose what Nietzsche called "metaphysical comfort", but we may
gain a renewed sense of community. Our identification with our
community -- our society, our political tradition, our intellectual
heritage - is heightened when we see this community as ours rather
than nature's, shaped rather than  found,   one  among many   which
men  have   made. In the end,  the pragmatists  tell us,  what
matters  is  our  loyalty to other  human beings  clinging  together
against  the  dark, not our hope of getting things right. James, in
arguing against realists and  idealists   that   "the trail of  the
human serpent is over all", was reminding us that our glory is in our
participation in fallible and transitory human projects, not in our
obedience to permanent non-human constraints."

Best,
Steve