[7.1.4.] Conversational Constraints.

 

The last claim of Rorty’s that we examined was that

·         neither ethical nor empirical inquiry is constrained “by the ahistorical and nonhuman nature of reality itself. ...” (641)

·         in both sorts of inquiry, all we are constrained by, all that we can appeal to, are “the ordinary, retail, detailed, concrete reasons which have brought one to one’s present view.” (642)

 

This serves as a segue into Rorty’s third and favorite characterization of pragmatism:

 

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. (642)

 

In other words, what claims count as acceptable or legitimate outcomes of inquiry is not limited by the nature of

·         our minds,

·         the languages in which we make those claims, or

·         the things those claims are about.

 

The only limit on which claims count as acceptable or legitimate outcomes of inquiry is what other people say.

 

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 underwriter 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. (642-43)[1]

 

Although Rorty does not speak in terms of “justification” in this article, his point seems to be that whether a belief (claim, theory, etc.) is justified depends only on whether the person putting forward that belief (etc.) can defend it against conversational objections, i.e., objects made during conversations with other human beings.

                                                                                                                        

Rorty takes James to have anticipated this point:

 

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 nonhuman constraints. (643)

 

But it is not clear whether James meant to imply that there are no non-human constraints on inquiry. James made the “trail of the human serpent” remark in discussing the growth of belief. He was making the point that when a person accepts a new belief, she does so for “subjective reasons,” for “human reasons”—and that’s consistent with there being non-human constraints or limits on what counts as legitimate belief.

 

Purely objective truth, truth in whose establishment the function of giving human satisfaction in marrying previous parts of experience with newer parts played no rôle whatever, is nowhere to be found. The reasons why we call things true is the reason why they are true, for ‘to be true’ means only to perform this marriage-function.

The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything. (300)

 

 

[7.1.5.] Rorty on Relativism.

 

As mentioned at the outset, Rorty has been accused of being a relativist. In this article, he denies this class.

 

He begins his discussion of relativism with this definition:

 

relativism (RR’s df.): “the view that every belief on a certain topic, or perhaps about any topic, is as good as every other.” This implies that “two incompatible opinions on an important topic [can be] equally good.” (643-44)

 

For example:

·         if you are a relativist_RR about morality, you might say that “polygamy is immoral” and “polygamy is morally permissible” are equally good ethical claims, even though they are contradictory;

·         if you are a relativist_RR about every topic, you might also say that “the earth is flat” and “the earth is not flat” are equally good claims about the shape of the earth, even though they are contradictory.

 

But, says Rorty, no one actually believes this (“[e]xcept for the occasional cooperative freshman.”)

 

His point seems to be that people who call him and those who share his views “relativists” simply misunderstand his view.

 

Rorty’s view is as follows: “the grounds for choosing between [incompatible] opinions are less algorithmic than had been thought.”

 

An algorithm is a mechanical computational procedure—a finite list of step by step instructions that anyone should be able to follow and, using the same inputs, arrive at the same result.

 

Rorty seems to mean the following. The process by which inquirers decide which claims to adopt is less mechanical, less automatic, than philosophers have traditionally assumed. Inquiry is not a purely automatic process, a matter of following some established procedure at the end of which one will have successfully represented (“mirrored”) the real world in her mind. This is something that an inquiry-robot programmed by God might do. But it is not something that we do.

 

 

[7.1.5.1.] An Objection.

 

Rorty is using “relativism” in a non-standard way. Usually, “relativism” is used to label a view according to which one thing is relative to (depends on) another in some important way. There are multiple varieties of relativism; to arrive at a specific variety, you must specify exactly what it is that is dependent, and exactly what it is that it depends on.

 

A very common form of relativism is what we have been calling “relativism” from the start: relativism (df.): the view that truth and/or reality are somehow dependent on human thought.

 

As described above, Rorty’s view seems to be that whether a belief (claim, theory, etc.) is justified depends only on whether the person putting forward that belief (etc.) can defend it against conversational objections.

 

This view of Rorty’s (or something very close to it) has been dubbed contextualism by Susan Haack, who states it as follows: “‘A is justified in believing that p’ is to be analysed along the lines of ‘with respect to the belief that p, A satisfies the epistemic standards of the epistemic community to which A belongs.”[2]

 

So in the standard sense of relativism, Rorty does seem to be a relativist: he holds that epistemic justification (whether or not someone’s belief that p is justified) is relative to the epistemic standards of a person’s own community.[3]

 

 

[7.1.6.] Irrationalism: Why Continue the Conversation?

 

Rorty has described philosophy as carrying on the conversation: “the point of edifying philosophy is to keep the conversation going rather than to find objective truth.”[4]

 

He does not view philosophy as an area of inquiry that gets at how “things really are” (he doesn’t view any area of inquiry as doing that). Rather, philosophical activity is a continuance of the conversation begun by Socrates, a conversation about knowledge, truth, reality, morality, justice, etc.

 

Further, it is not a conversation that has as its goal discovering the essences of any of those things (recall Rorty’s anti-essentialism: he doesn’t believe there are such essences to be discovered).

 

Since there no such essences, we are not obligated to continue the conversation out of some duty to discover what they are.

 

By “irrationalism,” Rorty seems to mean (at least in part) the view that we should give up the conversation of philosophy that stretches back to the ancient Greeks.

 

The fear of the “anti-pragmatist” is that, unless knowledge, morality and the rest have essences, then there is no point to philosophy and that the irrationalist is therefore right: we should give it up.

 

But Rorty wants to take a middle position between the two extremes, each of which consists of two different claims:

 

position A	position B
1) essentialism: there are essences of knowledge, truth, morality, etc.   2) philosophy should continue, because it is justified by the attempt to discover these essences.	1) anti-essentialism: there are no essences of knowledge, truth, morality, etc.   2) irrationalism: philosophy is not justified by the attempt to discover such essences, and so it should be given up.

 

Rorty embraces anti-essentialism but rejects irrationalism. His view is

 

that the conversation which it is our moral duty to continue is merely our project, the European intellectual’s form of life. It has no metaphysical nor epistemological guarantee of success. Further (and this is the crucial point) we do not know what “success” would mean except simply “continuance.” We are not conversing because we have a goal, but because Socratic conversation is an activity which is its own end. (650-51)

 

Rorty admits that this is not a decisive argument in support of his view of philosophy or of (his sort of) pragmatism:

 

I do not think one can decide between [these two competing views of philosophy] save by meditating on the past efforts of the philosophical tradition to escape from time and history. One can see these efforts as worthwhile, getting better, worth contin­uing. Or one can see them as doomed and perverse. I do not know what would count as a noncircular metaphysical or epistemological or semantical argument for seeing them in either way. So I think that the decision has to be made simply by reading the history of philos­ophy and drawing a moral.

Nothing that I have said, therefore, is an argument in favor of pragmatism. (653)

 

 

Stopping point for Wednesday November 16. For next time, begin reading Rorty’s “Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism” (657-67).