[MD] The Relativist's journey

[david buchanan]

Steve said to dmb:
Okay, but what exactly _is_ your criticism. What the heck to you mean by relativism? ..How about specifying what you mean by relativism and how Rorty fits the bill while James does not?



dmb says:
You're asking the question in response to my answer to the question. Wouldn't it make a lot more sense to ask about the answer rather than ask the same question again? Is there something unclear about the answer I already gave or do you love it so much that you want another serving? Anyway, to repeat the answer already given, the criticism is "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 replied:
But Rorty never said that conversation is what constrains truth. ...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 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. ..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."


dmb says:
I'm glad you're bringing textual evidence but this is not news to me and it doesn't alter my point or my criticism. This is exactly what I'm complaining about and this is what Rorty's critics are balking at. This Rorty quote displays the all-or-nothingism I've been criticizing too. There are no wholesale constraints derived from the nature of objects or anything like that, therefore, he thinks, we ought not be doing epistemology, empiricism or worrying about any other truth theories. Conversation is the only constraint because we just can't have  "the voice of God", "the indubitable",  "the apriori structure of any possible inquiry", "permanent non-human constraints" or any other such "metaphysical comfort". That is what I mean by "all-or-nothingism". I hear a bleak nihilism and a dreary resignation where Rorty says, "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." That's Rorty's philosophical ethno-centrism for you; clinging together against the dark. 


Again, I'm glad you're bringing textual evidence but I'm already aware of Rorty's reasons for rejecting those metaphysical comforts. But, like I already said, the difference between Rorty and classical pragmatism simply isn't located there. Nobody is talking about skyhooks or the objective truth. Like I already said, they can all see Platonism as a common enemy and still disagree about where to go after that. Rorty goes to language. Pirsig and James go to experience. And the results are very different. 


Along the way, Steve also said:
(Unlike James, however, he [Rorty] 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.



dmb says:

We've been through this before. I distinctly remember that you never did grasp my point on this. Maybe I can explain it better this time and if you can see what I'm saying about truth and justification, then maybe you can also grasp pragmatism as a theory of truth. You may recall that I tried to explain that Rorty has rejected truth theories - as we see in the quote you brought - because he defines "truth" in terms of the Platonic aspirations he rejects. As Teed Rockwell, one of Rorty's many critics, points out, this is like saying we ought not be doing astronomy because nobody has been able to locate the crystalline spheres of heaven. And it is the old, rejected truth theories that generated the distinction between truth and justification. This is a version of the distinction between a non-human objective truth and our subjective beliefs about it. It's predicated on the idea that truth exists with or without us, that truth is what it is regardless of what we think or believe. 

James doesn't really equate the two so much as he denies the idea that there is any such thing as "the truth" apart from what we think or believe. That kind of truth would be a metaphysical fiction, or an abstract ideal. It is, by definition, outside of human human experience. Belief in that kind of truth is the essence of Platonism. It's otherworldly, inhuman and decidedly un-empirical. "Throughout the history of philosophy," James says, we have been plagued with "an artificial conception of the relations between knower and known". He was talking about SOM and the correspondence theory of truth, among other things, and he said the relations are known within the tissue of human experience and so there is no need to posit some truer truth. What we can justify in experience is all that "truth" can ever mean. If we go beyond that, we are no longer empiricists and all the metaphysical fictions start to leak back in. 


If a justified belief is later exposed as an error of some kind, this does not mean that truth is separate from justification. Instead, this is simply what the pragmatist means when he says that truths are provisional and not eternal. Ideas are supposed to grow and evolve and improve, just as we do. 

I distinctly remember asking you over and over again what "truth" as distinct from justification could possibly mean. I'm pretty sure you never even tried to answer. If you had, you would have ended up invoking one of the metaphysical comforts that Rorty denies in the quote you brought. It's a very weird thing to insist that "truth" be defined in terms of the metaphysical assumptions we're supposedly rejecting and replacing. It's like insisting that astronomy is defined as the search for crystalline spheres and then rejecting astronomy based on that definition. So it is with James's theory of truth. He's not looking for Plato's Forms, Descrates certainty or Kant's things-in-themselves. He's looking for human truths, ones that can be had in this world and in your life right now. Where else could it be? Where else would it ever matter?

Clinging in the darkness. How is that an improvement over the meaningless, purposeless, spiritually empty world painted by SOM?