Fall 1999 Cyberseminar in Objectivist Studies
The Continental Origins of Postmodernism

Week 14: December 13-19

Stephen Hicks Summarizes the Discussion of Richard Rorty's
"Solidarity or Objectivity?" and "The Contingency of Language"

To: TOC Cyberseminar <cybersem@objectivistcenter.org>

Sent: Tuesday, December 21, 1999 9:57 PM

Subject: Cyberseminar: Hicks Rorty Summary

Rorty's Neo-Pragmatism
By Stephen Hicks

For our purpose of understanding postmodernism, Richard Rorty's views are
important because he is the leading American postmodernist. Rorty's avenue
to postmodernism is the evolution of the analytic tradition in philosophy.
He is, however, one of the few analytically-trained philosophers who have
made a serious attempt to cross the analytic/continental divide. In
Philosophy & the Mirror of Nature, for example, Rorty identifies the three
"great edifying" thinkers of our time, the ones we all can learn the most
from: Dewey, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger (368). And in other essays he has
spent much time reflecting on the writings of Foucault, Derrida, and
Lyotard.

Rorty is also useful to us because he is a much easier read than most
postmodernists are. He brings to his writing the analytic tradition's
emphasis on clarity and getting to the point -- unlike the other thinkers
we've been reading in this course. He's also an easier read because one
senses from his writings that he's a nice left-liberal guy who hopes that
civilized discussion and liberal democracy will carry on in some form --
again unlike the others we've been reading.

Rorty is aware of the criticism that postmodernism is a threat to the future
of civilized discussion and liberal democracy, and he takes some pains to
respond to that criticism. In responding, however, he does not pretend that
he has knock-down arguments against the criticism or that the postmodernist
future will be bright and rosy. Instead he argues that the postmodern
condition is what we're stuck with, so we might as well face up to it with
good faith and no illusions.

Why are with stuck with it? The overall structure of his argument is
straightforward. The history of philosophy has made it clear that we have
to choose between objectivism and pragmatism. The history of philosophy
also shows us, however, that objectivism has failed. So like it or not,
pragmatism is it.

This suggests three topics for my summary post. First, what does Rorty mean
by the alternative of objectivism and pragmatism? Second, why does he think
objectivism has and must fail? And third, what can be said about Rorty's
view of our pragmatic future?

(In the references that follow, I've used the following abbreviations:
CoL = "The Contingency of Language," in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity;
SoO? = "Solidarity or Objectivity?" in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth;
PMN = Philosophy & the Mirror of Nature.)

Either Objectivity or Pragmatism

By my count, Rorty poses thirteen related formulations of the global
contrast between objectivism and pragmatism. The formulations range over
the debates about the relation of mind to reality, of self to others, the
concepts of fact, truth, objectivity, rationality, and the function of
philosophy.

1. On the self's orientation: One's fundamental relation as being to an
impersonal external reality vs. one's fundamental relation as being to
others. (SoO?, 21)

2. On the mind: The mind as a mirror of nature vs. the mind as creative.
(PMN)

3. On the source of truth: Truth as intrinsic vs. truth as a creation of
language. (CoL, 4-5)

4. On how truth is achieved: Truth as something discovered vs. truth as
something made. (CoL, 3)

5. On the status of truth: Truth as correspondence vs. truth as a useless
topic. (CoL, 8)

6. On the analytic/synthetic distinction: The analytic/synthetic and
necessary/contingent distinctions as valid vs. everything is synthetic and
contingent (in the Quinean sense). (SoO?, 26)

7. On objectivity: Objectivity as achieving correspondence vs. objectivity
as achieving inter-subjective agreement. (SoO?, 22-23)

8. On rationality: Rationality as the top-down application of criteria
vs. rationality as being empirical. (SoO?, 27)

9. On the priority of fact or value: Facts and truths as prior to values
and/or disconnected from values vs. values as prior to facts and truths and
facts and truths as contingent upon values. (PMN, 363-364; CoL, 8)

10. On the distinction between fact and value: Attempting to overcome the
fact/value dichotomy vs. accepting that it's unbridgeable to the
objectivist. (PMN, 383)

11. On the philosopher's goal: The philosopher as seeking a universal and
permanent framework for inquiry vs. the philosopher as part of an evolving
conversation. (PMN, 380, 389)

12. On the philosopher's allegiance: The philosopher as ally of the
scientist vs. philosopher as ally of the poet (and/or the scientist as
another kind of poet). (CoL, 7-8)

13. On philosophy's status: Philosophy as a non-empirical science of a
special higher realm vs. philosophy as having no subject matter. (CoL, 4)

Condensing the Rortyan list of alternatives to three broad issues -- one
metaphysical, one epistemological, and one ethical -- we get the following:

Metaphysically, what is the nature of the self/mind? The choice is between
mind as discoverer and mind as creator.

Epistemologically, when speaking of knowledge and truth, what is our
orientation? The choice offered is between a cognition orientation and an
action orientation.

Ethically, what ought we seek? The choice offered is between a fact
orientation vs. value orientation.

Rorty's version of the objectivist tradition holds that the mind is
primarily a discovery function and that our primary orientation should be to
the cognition of facts. The pragmatist tradition, by contrast, holds that
the mind is primarily a creative function and that our primary orientation
should be to action and value.

Clearly Rorty's list mixes several fundamental alternatives (1, 10, possibly
4, 5, and 7) with several false alternatives (2, 3, 6, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13). So
our task is to sort out the intrinsicist from the objectivist accounts of
truth, rationality, value, etc., and to contrast both to the subjectivist.

Part of the project of sorting the false from the fundamental alternatives
is the difficult project of constructing positive accounts that overcome the
traditional dichotomies. The broadly objectivist project has not been
successful in integrating the mind's discovery and creativity functions, and
it has not been successful in connecting thought to action and fact to
value. This gives some credibility to Rorty's next premise.

The Failure of Objectivism/Intrinsicism

The objectivist tradition's agenda was to give a true account of the world
out there, and then to use that true account to make the world a better
place for humans. But because of the problems of skepticism and of divorce
of fact and value, it has achieved neither a satisfactory account of truth
nor a connection between truth and action. And so philosophy has dead-ended
in skepticism and irrelevance.

There is a lot of truth to this account. Setting aside the Aristotelian
tradition that in the early modern world made possible Locke, Newton, and
the Enlightenment, the history of philosophy has been largely a history of
failure. To explain how philosophy ended up where it was in Rorty's
formative years -- the 1960s -- Rorty almost always singles out intrinsicist
thinkers and their philosophies as his foil. This line of thinking starts
with religious accounts of God and then is secularized by Plato. Kant gives
it an internalist turn, and then Hegel resurrects God/Plato with an
evolutionary twist. But by the time of Nietzsche the game is up for the
Hegelians, and Logical Positivism and Structuralism are the last gasps for
Kantian internalism.

On the standard Objectivist reading, what is wrong with all of these
thinkers is that they are intrinsicist and subjectivist variations on the
primacy of consciousness, and that intrinsicist or subjectivist accounts of
consciousness and reason are going to run into dead ends. The lesson
Objectivists draw is that objectivist accounts of consciousness and reason
must be developed.

Rorty disagrees. While we would like to distinguish the
Aristotelian/objectivist alternative from the Platonic/intrinsicist, Rorty
views the Aristotelian line as a watered-down version of Platonism: access
to nature is just as problematic as access to God, the Forms, or a noumenal
self, and the laws of nature are just as problematically rigid as religious
commandments and Kantian categories. So on Rorty's reading, what is wrong
with all of these thinkers, Platonic and Aristotelian alike, is that they
believe in transcendental and universal truths that are discoverable by
reason. (The religious thinkers are a partial exception, holding as they do
that transcendental universal truths are discovered by mystical experience
or faith). The lesson he draws, then, from the dead-end that philosophy had
reached by the 1960s is that the notion of transcendental and universal
truths need to be abandoned, and that the notion of reason needs to be
modified severely in a much more modest, pragmatic direction. (For a
summary of Rorty's historical account, see "Philosophy Without Mirrors," the
final chapter of PMN.)

So We're Stuck With Pragmatism

Rorty's addresses two species of criticism typically leveled against his and
others' pragmatisms -- that pragmatism is self-refuting, and that it
undermines civil society. Rorty offers two lines of response to the standard
criticism that pragmatism is self-refuting because when it attempts to give
itself a foundation it falls into an infinite regress or circularity.

In CoL, his response is that pragmatism is immune to charges of
self-refutation because it does not offer a positive theory. Recognizing
that making a positive statement would open him up to charges of
self-refutation, Rorty's strategy is to deny that his views say anything
positive at all. For example, he argues that pragmatism is neither
asserting nor denying that the world out there is real or ideal --
pragmatism does not offer a metaphysics at all (CoL, 7-8). Or he argues
that one can't criticize pragmatic epistemology as being relativistic
because pragmatism does not offer an epistemology (SoO?, 23-24).

Rorty's response here depends in part on a narrow conception of epistemology
as a set of normative rules derived by reason to be applied in a top-down
fashion. In place of that, his non-epistemological account is to give a
socio-historical account of some traditional epistemological concepts, e.g.,
"truth." All his account of truth says is that when we investigate how
people use the word "true" it turns out that they all use it as a
commendation for what they believe. So "true" does have a universal meaning
-- it's just not grounded transcendentally, merely socio-historically (SoO?,
23). Thus he concludes that his account avoids the problems that have
plagued transcendental correspondence accounts (SoO?, 24). Of course, in
making his socio-historic point Rorty is still making a positive claim of
fact, and that again raises the specter of self-refutation: is Rorty
merely commending his belief about how people use the word "true," or is he
saying that it's really true that that's how they use the word? If the
former, then he's not communicating; if the latter, then he's saying there
are facts that correspond to the word "true."

In SoO?, written after CoL, Rorty's approach is different. There he accepts
the criticism of circularity and agrees pragmatism has no way out (SoO?,
28-29). But, he argues, that's okay because objectivism is also stuck in a
circle whenever it tries to give itself a foundation. Since that both sides
are stuck in a circle, it's a draw, and the charge of circularity becomes
vacuous. Then the only choice is whether to continue the quixotic
objectivist quest or go with the pragmatist flow. And arguing on pragmatic
grounds, Rorty thinks that objectivism's track record of failure indicates
that the reasonable course is to abandon it.

Even more strongly, he offers a linguistic version of Kant's argument that
any attempt to ground the contents of our mind in a external world must
necessarily fail. The objectivist, writes Rorty, strives to come up with
criteria that will establish a correspondence between mind and reality --
between percept and object, concept and referents, proposition and fact.
But any attempt to come up with criteria starts within a given linguistic
framework and the generated criteria are a product of that linguistic
framework; and there's just no way to step outside that linguistic framework
to tell whether its generated criteria are true to fact. Just as there's no
way to jump outside one's head to compare one's percepts to reality, there's
no way to step outside of language to see if its constructs match reality.
So objectivism has and has to fail.

This argument is Kantian because it conceives of the contents of our
minds -- in this case, language -- as obstacles between our minds and
reality. And so the only responses to it are to point out that this account
of language presupposes a diaphanous model of consciousness, and then to
offer a successful non-diaphanous account.

The other major criticism of pragmatism is that it undermines the very type
of civil society that Rorty says he wants -- one characterized by civil
discussion, left-liberalism, tolerance, and solidarity. The criticism is
that if we abandon reason and objectivity, we get subjectivism; and if we
get subjectivism, then we get relativism; and if we get relativism without
recourse to reason, then we get brutality. Since brutality is incompatible
with liberal society, it is morally imperative for liberals to seek and
preserve objectivity.

Rorty raises and addresses this criticism beginning at SoO?, 28. Again he
argues that attempts to ground liberalism objectively have failed, so
there's no point to pursuing that line, however risky and scary the
pragmatist alternative may seem (SoO?, 33). Since we're stuck with
subjectivity, we might as well face up to it and push for a socially nice
version of it. Rorty agrees that he can't give a grounding for his social
and political values; he starts from their being appealing to him (SoO?,
29). So the best he can do is to make rhetorical appeals by comparing
liberal democracy with other social systems, and count on liberal
democracy's seeming more appealing to those who read his words. His
strategy is to enter the fray rhetorically, hoping to shift the conversation
in his direction by using language, not to identify facts, but in a way that
makes attractive the notions of solidarity and the goal of keeping the
conversation going. For example: "Conforming to my own precepts . I am
going to try to make the vocabulary I favor look attractive by showing how
it may be used to describe a variety of topics." (CoL, 9) The language is
of attractiveness, "attractiveness" here assumed not to have anything to do
with "true" in the traditional sense.

This is a fine line to walk. For sometimes Rorty speaks as though
solidarity, for example, is necessarily one of pragmatism's values and not
merely his personal preference (e.g., SoO?, 33). This is Rorty speaking qua
Rorty-speaking-personally. At the same time, his personal preferences are
nested within his Rorty-qua-postmodern-pragmatist framework, and from that
perspective he can't say that his values have to have any value beyond their
appealing to him, or that anyone else who is pragmatist has to find them
appealing. He can only say that they push his personal buttons, and that he
hopes his rhetoric pushes ours too. And so the question then is: For those
whose buttons are pushed otherwise, what recourse is left?

Postscript on the course

In ending the course, let me make two small points, one philosophical and
one administrative.

The major philosophical lesson of the CyberSeminar is to me the crucial
importance of epistemology and metaphysics. This is a familiar theme to
Objectivists, but our authors provide four more classic case studies.
Despite the postmodernists' billing themselves as anti-metaphysical and
anti-epistemology, their writings focus on those themes almost exclusively.
Heidegger attacks logic and reason to make room for emotion, Foucault
reduces knowledge to an expression of social power, Derrida deconstructs
language and turns it into a vehicle of aesthetic play, and Rorty chronicles
the failures of the objectivist/intrinsicist tradition in almost-exclusively
metaphysical and epistemological erms. It makes sense, then, that the kinds
of values our postmodernist thinkers advocate are almost entirely alien to
Objectivism's. For Objectivism, then, connecting mind to reality and
demonstrating the validity and efficacy of reason are critical to advancing
our values, induding defending them against postmodernism.

The administrative point is comparing our initial goals of the CyberSeminar
with what we actually achieved. Since our authors advocate a philosophy
diametrically opposed to ours, since they all write at the most abstract
level, and since three of the four of them write in a style alien to
Objectivism's, we understandably spent the bulk of our time simply making
sense of what our authors were saying. Compared to our initially stated
list of objectives, that is a modest achievement. But given the difficulty
of comprehending our authors, if we come away from the CyberSeminar with a
solid understanding of four more major figures on the intellectual
landscape, that is a significant achievement.


[Stephen Hicks]


*************************************************
Fall 1999 Cyberseminar in Objectivist Studies

All Cyberseminar posts are working papers with copyright
reserved to the author. They may not be published or adapted
without permission, but may be circulated for purposes of
scholarly discussion.

*************************************************