6 The Whole Truth 1 The authority of norms For Rorty, the naturalization of normativity both undermines and substitutes for philosophy’s traditional sources of authority. Rather than advert to our normative relatedness to the World, or to the logic of our language, he regards our peers as determining the rules to which we are answerable. Programmed with language, linguistic communities interact causally with the world; but their members’ sentences stand in no relation to an antecedent order of facts. Whether they constitute the natural or human sciences, aesthetics, morals or folk-psychology, such ‘vocabularies’ are ways of coping with world, not of representing or corresponding to it. This wholesale collapse of ‘genre-distinctions’ between vocabularies implies a renaissance for discourses like aesthetics and morals, whose ‘cognitive’ status troubled philosophers confronted with the ‘hard facts’ of science. But, since all vocabularies now live and die according to the standards of a linguistic economy red in tooth and claw, none can lay claim to being necessary. It may have helped bequeath us the ‘precious values’ of the Enlightenment, but on this account philosophy, or at least philosophy on the Kantian, legislative model, has exhausted its potential to contribute to further ‘moral growth’. Those values are now best served by vocabularies that will extend and embed them, not offer the impossible promise of metaphysical justification. This Darwinian contrast between Realism and Rorty’s nominalistic, anti-represenationalist alternative casts in too sharp relief a GRR06.indd 183 L 7/10/2008 10:05:44 AM 184 The Whole Truth philosophical landscape that is more topologically interesting. In particular, it neglects those who share much of Rorty’s animus against Realism but regard his eliminativist quick-fix as betraying its underlying motivation. What unites these otherwise sympathetic critics is the conviction that we need an account of truth (and related concepts like objectivity and rationality) that neither inflates it to the status of Realism’s supernorm, nor levels it to a mere ‘property of linguistic entities’. It might help here to borrow from Wellmer what he calls the ‘antinomy of truth’ (1993: 109). This amounts to the ancient sceptical problem concerning our inability, when challenged, to back up the criteria we draw on when making validity claims in a nonquestion-begging way. In the contemporary setting, it suggests that we are caught between two equally unattractive alternatives: on the one hand, the ‘absolutist’ view that ‘there are . . . correct standards, right criteria . . . an objective truth of the matter’ which ‘seems to imply metaphysical assumptions’; on the other hand, the ‘relativist’ view that truth is indexed to ‘cultures, languages, communities, or even persons’ (ibid.). For Wellmer, this allows us to contrast the approach of Habermas, Apel and Putnam (to which we can add that of Bernstein, Elshtain, McDowell et al.) with that of Rorty. Where the former try ‘to show that absolutism need not be metaphysical’, the latter aims to demonstrate that ‘the critique of absolutism needn’t lead to relativism’ (ibid.: 110). The precise details of what this non-Rortian alternative represents or will achieve varies, of course. As we’ve seen (5.5–5.6), some hold that liberating the normativity of truth from the traditional sources of authority redeems its emancipatory content and makes it available for political theory; others that it allows us to work through philosophical problems in a way that is essentially ethical in nature (or at least more respectful of their source). The details are less important than their collective focus on the normativity of truth, and this topic will take centre-stage in this concluding chapter. Of particular interest will be the extent to which criticisms of Rorty’s position on normative authority undermine the moral views outlined in the preceding chapter. I will argue that for the most part they don’t, but that they reveal on Rorty’s part an attachment to the ‘outside’ view I associated with the liberal ironist in 5.7. It will help dramatize the debate between the two sides of Wellmer’s ‘antinomy of truth’ if we take a look at it from the other side of the ‘mirror’ (so to speak) and consider an example of someone who adopts a Realist (absolutist) position, regarding his opponent L GRR06.indd 184 7/10/2008 10:05:44 AM The Whole Truth 185 as committed necessarily to one or more forms of relativism.1 In the above terms, proponents of Realism take it that the normativity of our epistemic practices of truth and justification makes sense only on the assumption that our beliefs either do or do not represent the mind-independent facts. That is to say, norms derive their authority from being answerable to the world as it is in itself. 2 The view from nowhere In Fear of Knowledge2 Boghossian (2006) outlines the ‘three objectivisms’ that comprise the ‘Classical Picture of Knowledge’. Here are the first two: Objectivism about Facts [OF]: The world which we seek to understand and know about is what it is largely independently of us and our beliefs about it. Even if thinking beings had never existed, the world would still have had many of the properties that it currently has. Objectivism about Justification [OJ]: Facts of the form – information E justifies belief B – are society-independent facts. (2006: 22) Boghossian’s definition of OJ continues by informing us what these facts aren’t, not what they are. This reappears in his definitions of ‘Constructivism about Knowledge’: Constructivism about Facts [CF]: The world which we seek to understand and know about is not what it is largely independently of us and our social context; rather, all facts are socially constructed in a way that reflects our contingent needs and interests. Constructivism about Justification [CJ]: Facts of the form – information E justifies belief B – are not what they are independently of us and our social context; rather, all facts are constructed in a way that reflects our contingent needs and interests. (ibid.) Boghossian then goes on to ascribe both these forms of relativism to Rorty. We’ll begin by dealing swiftly with the second. One reason for doing so is that the first is regarded as the ‘more radical’ and the second entirely distinct from it (ibid.: 59, 63). The purpose of his dialectic is clear enough: Boghossian aims to dispense with the radical version first, leaving open the possibility of a more plausible form of relativism, which he then aims to rebut. Since the two are held to be separable, it is unclear what relation Boghossian thinks exists GRR06.indd 185 L 7/10/2008 10:05:44 AM 186 The Whole Truth between the two in Rorty’s work. The second reason for taking this approach, then, is to show that Rorty’s views cannot be pulled apart in this way, and that Boghossian’s attempt to do so serves to highlight the metaphilosophical differences between them. Boghossian characterizes OJ – epistemic relativism – in the following way: Let us begin by looking at particular unrelativized epistemic judgements, such as: 1 Copernicanism is justified by Galileo’s observations. The relativist says that all such judgements are doomed to falsehood because there are no absolute facts about justification. (2006: 84) Let’s cast (1) in the form Boghossian uses in his definition: (CJ1) The information provided by Galileo’s observations (E) justifies the belief in Copernicanism (B). Since ‘doomed to falsehood’ doesn’t mean ‘fated to be disconfirmed at some point in the future’, but simply false, Boghossian clearly holds that the epistemic relativist endorses the following: (OF1) (CJ1) is false In other words, the epistemic relativist is committed to OF; which is to say, to the falsity of CF. The reason Boghossian holds CJ is to be distinct from CF, then, is that the former are committed to the existence of unconstructed facts, amongst which number those of the form of OF1. Everything would therefore seem to turn on whether OF or CF can be ascribed to Rorty. Since neither party is interested in seeing Rorty as an objectivist about facts, let’s turn to CF, defined as follows: it is a necessary truth about any fact that it obtains only because we humans have constructed it in a way that reflects our contingent needs and interests . . . This thesis is clearly a version of the view that all facts are mind-dependent since it is clearly only minds that are capable of describing the world. (Boghossian 2006: 25, 28) If would be odd if this were the sole basis upon which CF is ascribed to Rorty. As we have seen, Rorty follows Quine in rejecting the idea L GRR06.indd 186 7/10/2008 10:05:44 AM The Whole Truth 187 that there’s anything philosophically useful about talk of necessity: a necessary truth is simply one that we can’t presently imagine doing without. More importantly, Rorty would disdain both this talk of facts and the idea that such things might be ‘constructed by humans’. A house might be built to reflect our need for shelter and our interest in keeping dry; but no sense can be given to constructing something as impalpable as a fact. Finally, in the light of earlier chapters, it is unwarranted to ascribe to Rorty the view that something could – or indeed could not – be mind-dependent3 since he supplants the ontological category of the mind with the linguist category of mind-talk. In that mode, it is people – and perhaps dolphins and Martians – that describe the world, not minds. ‘Mind’ just relates to a particular, potentially eliminable, aspect of that descriptive repertoire. Boghossian does have another attempt at ascribing CFto Rorty, however. The main problem CF has, he says, is avoiding the conclusion that, since facts are constructed, one community might construct the fact that P and another the fact that not-P. But how, he says, ‘could one and the same world be such that, in it, it is possibly the case that both P and that not-P’ (p. 40). Of course, it follows trivially from the way OF understands the world to be that it can’t be the case that both P and not-P. That is to say, since ‘fact’ for OF means something different from ‘fact’ for CF – on the hypothesis of the OF – then the objectivist can’t even state the contradiction the constructivist is accused of making. Boghossian regards Rorty’s as the most sophisticated form of CF, then, because he is taken to be proposing a view that would backup something like this sort of response. In other words, since he assumes that CF and OF exhaust the range of possibilities, the relativism imputed to Rorty is seen as a necessary condition for making sense of CF. Rorty, then, is held to maintain the following: It’s true according to C1’s theory T1, that there are X’s, in no way contradicts It’s true according to C2’s theory T2, that there are no X’s. (2006: 46) Although Boghossian gives no reference in the text, this evokes Rorty’s early work on eliminativism. Indeed, it was the rejection of GRR06.indd 187 L 7/10/2008 10:05:44 AM 188 The Whole Truth this reliance on theory, associated with Quine’s limited range of scientifically relevant purposes, which I associated with Rorty’s ‘turn’. We’ve discussed this in detail, but it’s worth noting parenthetically that the only time we’ve encountered Rorty stating anything like this is in the context of conceptual change through time, redescribed as: ‘There are X’s’ is true1 (but it might not be true2). Pressing on, what does Boghossian think his formulation of relativism commits Rorty to? Although he talks of theories here, on previous pages it is to ‘ways of talking’ (p. 44) that truth claims are held to be relative. What then does he mean by a ‘way of talking’? As we saw in 3.3, the usual way to generate relativism is to talk of conceptual schemes; and indeed that’s what Boghossian seems to think Rorty means: As [Rorty] puts it, there are many alternative schemes for describing the world, none of which can be more faithful to the way things are in and of themselves. (2006: 51) In the final analysis, then, Rorty’s ‘sophisticated’ form of CF is taken to depend on a dualism of ‘descriptive scheme’ and ‘things in themselves’, a version of the scheme–content distinction. Confronted with Rorty’s oft-stated rejection of the ‘very idea’ of this distinction, this is an odd attribution to make; indeed, it would clearly have been poison to Rorty to ‘put it’ this way. One might of course endeavour to show that he unwittingly presupposes such a commitment, but Boghossian offers no further support for his claim (and makes no mention of Davidson’s work in this respect). On Boghossian’s behalf, then, note that Rorty’s repeated juxtaposition of metaphors of finding with those of making don’t always help matters.4 If one begins with the traditional view that the (found) world is contrasted with the (passive) mind that mirrors or represents it, talk of making as opposed to finding suggests that the world has gone from being wholly mind-independent to wholly minddependent. Adding in the associations clustering around ‘making’, it’s not surprising that Rorty ends up saddled with the view that facts are constructed (CF) as opposed to being mind-independent (OF), or that there are different ways of ‘describing the world’. Of course, Rorty wants to opt out of the discourse that is structured L GRR06.indd 188 7/10/2008 10:05:45 AM The Whole Truth 189 around oppositions like mind–world, subjective–objective, absolute–relative, and – most importantly – scheme–content. Given the view he held until at least the end of the 1990s that the only nondiscursive significance the ‘world’ has is in terms of ‘its’ causal impacts on us, there are no grounds for claiming that what is out there is made not found because the conceptual space occupied by the ‘found’ has disappeared. To recall Nietzsche’s aphorism, it has become a fable. Ultimately, Boghossian’s response to Rorty demonstrates the extent to which the former’s thinking is structured around the exclusive opposition between a ‘commitment to absolute truth’ (p. 57) and a relativism so ‘bizarre . . . that it is hard to believe that anyone actually endorses it’ (p. 25).5 For Rorty, of course, what Bernard Williams (1978) calls ‘the absolute conception of reality’ is just an uncashable metaphor that has come to impede the progress it was intended to inspire. The absolute–relativist see-saw is what you get when you start off with the idea that the mind represents the (mind-independent) world and then try to avoid the scepticism that it ushers in. In a sense, Realists like Boghossian, Nagel et al. are right to associate relativism with ‘idealism’ and ‘subjectivism’ because the Realist and the Idealist, unlike the farmer and the cowman, never will be friends. But this is not box social Rorty wished to attend. 3 Relativism redux Although Boghossian takes Rorty to propound the most cogent form of relativism, his other primary target is Putnam. Putnam observes repeatedly that we are beings ‘who cannot have a view of the world that does not reflect our interests and values’ (Putnam 1990: 178). This echoes William James’s oft-quoted gnome that ‘the trail of the human serpent is over all’ and reflects the convergence between Putnam’s attack on Realism and the pragmatist tradition of Peirce, James and Dewey. Indeed, this parallel has become increasingly self-conscious in Putnam’s work. With Rorty, he denounces ‘the whole programme of providing a metaphysical foundation for ethics and society’ (2001: 31), holding that the genuine political reforms of the Enlightenment have been held back by a scientistic faith in metaphysical projects. He likewise contends that Dewey’s ‘fallibilistic and antimetaphysical’ (ibid.: 31) alternative to this GRR06.indd 189 L 7/10/2008 10:05:45 AM 190 The Whole Truth Kantian (ibid.: 22) rationalist programme promises a new participatory and deliberative model for democracy, pointing the way towards a renewal of the Enlightenment project. Despite the evident similarities, however, Putnam is a staunch critic of Rorty’s so-called ‘cultural relativism’ (cf. 1981, 1990, 1992, 2001). As a fellow pragmatist who has rejected metaphysical thinking and, presumably, shares Rorty’s politics, this is a more telling charge than that levelled by Boghossian and others. Unfortunately, when it comes to isolating its precise nature Putnam isn’t always helpful. He will characteristically remark that ‘since Rorty is too hard to interpret, let us simply imagine a typical relativist’ (1992: 69),6 and proceeds to ascribe to such a figure the theses that Rorty disdains. For example, Putnam notes that ‘Relativism, just as much as Realism, assumes that one can stand within one’s language and outside it at the same time’ (1990: 25), evoking Davidson’s thought that it is the correspondence theory of truth that engenders ‘intimations of relativism’ (2001b: 46). But, as we have seen, Rorty will have no truck with such views. One way into this is to examine Putnam’s response to Bernard Williams. Williams contrasts the absolute conception of reality that a perfected science would converge on (cf. 1985: 136) with two ‘lower levels’ of cognition: that relating to judgements whose generality derives from our common human constitution (judgements involving secondary properties), and moral judgements, whose ‘truth’ is indexed to the relevant community. The ‘truth in relativism’ (B. Williams 1982) amounts to recognition that, since moral judgements in particular fall short of the standards demanded of an absolute conception, with respect to cultures that differ radically from our own ‘the question of appraisal does not genuinely arise’ (B. Williams 1985: 141).7 Although science can be said to progress because it can vindicate concept change – offer genuinely rational justifications – such vindications are not available in ethical discourse (cf. B. Williams 2000). Putnam’s response is to argue that the ‘absolute conception’, like the associated idea of ‘the world as it is in itself’, is not one we can make any sense of (1992: 91–103) and that ‘claims concerning evaluations of problematical situations can be more or less warranted without being absolute’ (2001: 48). Although aware that Rorty has no time for Williams’s ‘absolute conception’,8 he argues that Rorty is committed similarly to denying that ‘our norms and standards of anything – including warranted assertibility – are capable of reform’ (1990: 21). To take the usual inflammatory example, Putnam con- L GRR06.indd 190 7/10/2008 10:05:45 AM The Whole Truth 191 tends that for Rorty one cannot vindicate a liberal egalitarian over a Nazi racist ‘vocabulary’ (cf. TP: 51). Rather than answer this directly, note that what Putnam might have claimed is that it is Williams’s absolute-true dualism (objective–subjective) that leads to the evacuation of critical normativity from the moral realm. If science weren’t put on a cognitive pedestal one wouldn’t conclude that life-world doings had a diminished status. Recalling Wellmer’s ‘antinomy’, Putnam implies that having rejected a metaphysical absolutism (like Williams’s), Rorty is left with the other (‘subjectivist) half of the original dualism and unable to show how we can reflect critically on ‘problematical situations’. Rorty’s view is rather that, having eliminated the genre distinction between science and the rest of culture, a new standpoint emerges that has no space for relativism and entitles us to the distinction between the more or less warranted. This brings us to the crux of the matter. What Putnam dismisses as relativism, Rorty embraces as ethnocentrism. Following the Davidsonian injunction that ‘only a belief can justify another belief’, justifications are always to some specific historico-cultural community sharing the relevant range of beliefs. ‘We’ can denounce the paradigmatic Nazis as our moral inferiors because we judge their loathsome racism from the perspective of our shared liberal values. But there is no neutral standpoint from which a set of facts or order of reasons acceptable to Nazis and democrats alike could be used to demonstrate that a rejection of the latter in favour of the former would constitute moral progress. Choices are made by people, in concrete situations and with particular ranges of values that more or less fix what counts as progress. When Putnam says he is an ‘unreconstructed believer in progress’ (1990: 27), Rorty would doubtless rejoin that he is an equally unreconstructed believer in hope; combined with the fear that the progress we have made so far might be reversed, and that no invocation of truth or reason – only power and effort – will keep the barbarians from the door. The underlying issue, then, is whether or not we can make sense of the view that S’s belief that P might be subject to a norm even if (ex hypothesi) everyone else believes not-P. Since that norm can’t be introduced by shifting the context of evaluation, we cannot assert (I) S’s belief that Nazism is morally wrong is unwarranted (in Nazi-world), L just because we can assert GRR06.indd 191 7/10/2008 10:05:45 AM 192 (II) The Whole Truth S’s belief that Nazism is morally wrong is warranted (in democrat-world). Or, rather, that new norm can’t be invoked unless there is a context of evaluation that encompasses our liberalism and their racism, facilitating the assertion of (III) S’s belief that Nazism is morally wrong is warranted (simpliciter). Since Rorty regards ‘warrant as a sociological matter, to be ascertained by observing the reception of S’s statements amongst his peers’ (TP: 50), he supposes that a notion of warrant simpliciter must be devoid of any sociological context and therefore meaningless. A critic is therefore presented with two options: either (i) deny that warrant must be rooted in a sociological context; or (ii) argue that we can make sense of a sociological context sufficiently broad to warrant an assertion of (III). To adopt (i) is to revert to some form of Realism (recall OJ), and a universalist, subject-centred conception of reason. Since the critics we’re presently considering are postmetaphysically inclined, their preferred option is (ii), answering to Putnam’s invocation of a non-absolutist, context-transcending norm. Putnam has changed his mind about the solution, but here’s an early statement of the problem: The whole purpose of relativism is . . . to deny the existence of any intelligible notion of objective ‘fit’. Thus the relativist cannot understand talk about truth in terms of objective justificationconditions . . . The relativist must end by denying that any thought is about anything either in a realist or a non-realist sense; for he cannot distinguish between thinking one’s thought is about something and actually thinking about that thing. In short, what the relativist fails to see is that it is a presupposition of thought itself that some kind of objective ‘rightness’ exists. (1981: 123–4) Until recently, the pragmatically inclined philosopher’s solution was to invoke some version of Peirce’s (1877) idea that since a belief is – following Bain (1859) – a habit of action, a true belief would be stable insofar as it didn’t give rise to doubt in the form of a felt need for further inquiry: something achieved at the end of ideal inquiry.9 Although Putnam and Habermas reject the notion of a promissory terminus, Peirce nevertheless suggests a way of cashing out the ‘ideal’ idea in a way that rescues reason from the decentring attacks L GRR06.indd 192 7/10/2008 10:05:45 AM The Whole Truth 193 of the ironists: reformulating it in inter-subjective terms by defining truth as ‘idealized rational acceptability’. This is one of Habermas’s formulations: (IV) [P] is true iff it can be justified in an ideal epistemic situation. (2003: 37) The aim, remember, is to show that we can distinguish between ‘practices that are regulated merely by social convention’ – Rorty’s ‘sociological matter’ – and ‘practices of justification orientated to truth claims’ (Habermas 1996: 15), while rejecting conjointly the subject-centred conception of reason and the Realist idea that what grounds the truth of a belief is its confirmation by the mindindependent facts. The ‘moment of unconditionality’ that underwrites this distinction is taken to be ‘built into factual processes of mutual understanding’ (Habermas 1987: 322–3). We thus have the idea that confirmation takes place ‘under the normatively rigorous conditions of the practice of argumentation’: This practice is based on the idealizing presuppositions (a) of public debate and complete inclusion of all those affected; (b) of equal distribution of the right to communicate; (c) of a nonviolent context in which only the unforced force of the better argument holds sway; and (d) of the sincerity of how all those affected express themselves. (ibid.) On this response to (ii), the relevant meaning of ‘sociological context’ is that which fulfils these idealizing presuppositions. We can assert (III) because truth provides the required norm for inquiry, and truth transcends what is merely the subject of (localized) consensus; namely, the Nazis agreeing with one another against S. Of course, talk of ‘sociological context’ here is misleading because these conditions are not strictly empirical. As Wellmer notes, the idealizations must be ‘supposed to operate already as “necessary presuppositions” on the level of ordinary communication and discourse’ (1992: 111). They are (at least quasi) transcendental conditions of the possibility of communication and discourse; and it is on this basis that the connection between truth and democratic politics can be claimed. R’s assertion that Nazism is morally acceptable is taken to involve a ‘performative contradiction’ insofar as the norms governing assertion ((a)–(d)) rule out the moral position (Nazism) he is purporting to advance. In terms of the transcendental arguments GRR06.indd 193 L 7/10/2008 10:05:45 AM 194 The Whole Truth we’ve already discussed, scepticism about democratic principles is self-defeating because it requires a rejection of the conditions of possibility of doubt. Recalling Rorty’s account of transcendental arguments, it should be evident how his response to this might go: Nazi morality is ‘parasitic’ on the practices of democracy. In his politically orientated idiom this just affirms the central tenet of ethnocentrism; namely, that when Habermas convicts Nazis of a ‘performative contradiction’ he is simply giving expression to the fact that we judge Nazi morality from our democratic perspective. Before filling out Rorty’s response in more detail, it should be noted that despite its promise both Habermas and Putnam abandoned the idea that truth can be analysed in terms of assertibility under ideal conditions. To see why, recall that the intuition is that, while justification and truth are linked at the level of ordinary discourse, the truth of an assertion somehow transcends the context of utterance. Although asserting (truly) that P requires being in a good position to justify the claim if challenged,10 justification is not equivalent to the truth. Rational acceptability under ideal conditions is meant to do the work of contrasting this local justification with truth. However, defining truth in this way asserts a conceptual connection with rational acceptability under ideal conditions, equivalent to claiming that X is a triangle just in case X is three-sided. However, just as this implies one cannot conceive of X being n-sided (where n is other than 3), Habermas and Putnam’s definitions of truth imply one cannot conceive of any change to what constitutes the ‘ideal epistemic situation’ for asserting P. But if the ‘processes of mutual understanding’ are in any way to be regarded as factual, one can imagine such changes and it seems unwarranted (indeed, false) to stipulate that there couldn’t be any. As Davidson remarks of Putnam’s formulation, ‘if the conditions under which someone is ideally justified in asserting something were spelled out, it would be apparent either that those conditions allow the possibility of error or that they are so ideal as to make no use of the intended connection with human abilities’ (1990: 307). Recognition of this problem by Habermas and Putnam is a tardy acknowledgement that the criticism levelled against the Peircean notion of the ideal end of inquiry applies to all ‘idealizations’ (cf. TP: 50; Rorty 2000a: 5–8). One can no more identify having arrived at the end of inquiry than one can know when the epistemic situation is ‘ideal’, as opposed to having invited all the people one can think of to the debate. But how, then, is one to explain that intuition about the non-identification of truth and justification? Rorty’s view L GRR06.indd 194 7/10/2008 10:05:45 AM The Whole Truth 195 is familiar: the ‘only indispensable function of the word “true”, or any other indefinable normative such as “good” or “right”, is to caution’ (2000a: 12). If one embraces the Bainian notion of belief, the ‘transcendence’ of truth over justification just registers the warning that one’s present ‘habits of action’ might not pass muster in the future. Just as many of the beliefs held by our ancestors are no longer well received, so too might some of ours come to be seen as provincial by a future, better-informed audience. Indeed, such a view is essential to Rorty’s notion of how solidarity might be strengthened. The lesson he takes from critics of the Enlightenment such as Foucault is that we have a history of excluding voices from the conversation, of not welcoming everyone to the debate. As we saw in 5.5, Rorty’s concern is that there are people who might not even have anything to contribute to the debate if invited because they have yet to acquire a language in which to articulate their sense of exclusion. In this respect, talk of ‘idealization’ (like that of the transcendental) risks reifying what are just the platitudes of normal discourse, excluding the potential of the abnormal. Finally, even this fallibilism about our beliefs cannot be ‘idealized’ to construct a platform from which we might criticize the Nazis who disdain such contingency: it too is a feature of our democratic communities11 and might succumb if the fundamentalists get their way. In short, the only idea of transcendence Rorty will sanction is that of some more inclusive, better-informed audience; but there is no ‘ideally’ informed audience that might authorize our present norms; and there are no ‘idealizing’ norms standing as conditions of possibility of our everyday discourse. Although Putnam and Habermas have rejected the ‘ideal’ idea, they haven’t embraced Rorty’s naturalization of warrant. Putnam continues to designate the function of philosophy as ‘reflective transcendence’ – ‘the act of standing back from conventional beliefs, received opinions, and even received practices, and asking a penetrating ‘Why should we accept this as right?’ (2001: 31) – an attitude he associates with what Habermas (1971) calls ‘the emancipatory interest’. In order to redeem the Realist intuition and restore respect for terms like ‘objectivity’, ‘reality’ and ‘reason’, he has embraced the recent renaissance of interest in perception, and with what McDowell calls our ‘answerability to the world’ (1994: passim). Similarly, Habermas continues to develop his ‘Kantian pragmatism’ (2003: 30) by showing how ‘by orientating themselves to unconditional validity claims and presupposing each other’s accountability, interlocutors aim beyond contingent and merely local contexts’ GRR06.indd 195 L 7/10/2008 10:05:46 AM 196 The Whole Truth (p. 17).12 Unconditionality, as that towards which justification strives but falls short, is now cashed out in terms of the (necessary) presupposition of an objective world of things, which ‘provides a justification-transcendent point of reference for discursively thematized truth claims’ (p. 39). Once one steps back from a ‘strong’, constitutive idea of idealizations, however, the direct link between ‘the practice of argumentation’ and ‘the universalist idea of democracy and human rights’ (Wellmer 1993: 115) disappears. The fact that the ‘unconditional’ nature of discursive claims now turns on the ‘supposition . . . of a single objective world’ (Habermas 2000: 48) seems to weaken that link to breaking point. There may, however, be a way of thinking about this that lends support to this new Habermasian view. First off, this talk of Nazis and democrats constituting independent, norm-authorizing communities sounds rather artificial. After all, the National Socialist movement arose not so very long ago in the middle of the continent that came up with most of the ideas we associate with modern democracies. Nazism didn’t spring into being as a fully fledged belief-system, and it didn’t disappear overnight. If things had gone differently, those earnest readers of Mein Kampf might have been talked out of their foolishness and won over to an egalitarian world-view. Talk of Nazi-world versus democracy-land seems to imply two incommensurable, rationally closed systems, but such an idea is clearly absurd. As Wellmer observes ‘[1] rationality . . . cannot end at the borderline of closed language games (since there is no such thing); but then [2] the ethnocentric contextuality of all argumentation proves quite compatible with the raising of truth claims which transcend the local or cultural context in which they are raised and in which they can be justified’ (1993: 120). The inference from [1] to [2] betokens Wellmer’s ‘weak’ (by a ‘series of links’ (p. 15)) attempt to link truth to the ethnocentric context of democracy. Rorty, of course, rejects it. Like all attempts to milk something out of the concept of ‘unconditionality’, he regards it as a mere flourish, marking a willingness to embrace the abnormal in its myriad forms and keep the conversation going (2000a: 12–13). However, since he later associates [2] with a commitment to ‘a single community of justification . . . created by the ability to communicate’ (p. 14), one might be able to secure a critical toe-hold here. To that end, recall that Rorty’s rejection of the assimilation of ethnocentrism to relativism turns on an acknowledgement of Davidson’s argument against the coherence of alternative conceptual L GRR06.indd 196 7/10/2008 10:05:46 AM The Whole Truth 197 schemes. As we noted in 3.3, when first articulated the conclusion drawn is that Davidson shows us that we can dispatch the Realist’s conception of the world as something that we either are (if the Realist is right) or are not (if the sceptic is right) in touch with because ‘The fact that the vast majority of our beliefs must be true will . . . guarantee the existence of the vast majority of the things we now think we are talking about’ (CP: 14). In the sense that these things comprise the world we keep, ‘it is the world that determines truth. All that “determination” comes to is that our belief that snow is white is true because snow is white, that our beliefs about the stars are true because of the way the stars are laid out, and so on’ (ibid.). Now a question that arises is what use of ‘truth’ is being deployed here? It is clear from the context what isn’t required; namely, ‘a controversial and nontrivial doctrine of truth as correspondence’ (ibid.: 15). The argument, he tells us: makes us remember . . . what a very small proportion of our beliefs are changed when our paradigms of physics, or poetry or morals, change – and makes us realize how few of [our beliefs] could change . . . that the number of beliefs that changed among the educated classes of Europe between the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries is ridiculously small compared to the number that survived intact. (p. 13)13 This piece was written before Rorty came to distinguish, in particular, the normative/justificatory from the cautionary use of truth, but it is evident that he takes the argument to proceed by showing that we can only recognize someone as a language user if we ascribe to them beliefs that are mostly the same as our own (p. 914); which is to say, beliefs that are justified. But now one might suppose that if all language users necessarily share vast tracts of justified beliefs then they share a ‘rational’ structure. After all, what on Rorty’s pragmatist account would a rational structure be other than this holistic web of inferentially connected beliefs? And, since most of one’s beliefs are not at any one time accessible to reflection, one might conclude that, in this sense at least, rational structure ‘transcends’ any local context. Rorty’s response to this takes us back to the preceding quotation. Although the proportion of beliefs that differ synchronically and diachronically is small, it is these beliefs that are all important when it comes to a community’s moral identity. The massive overlap GRR06.indd 197 L 7/10/2008 10:05:46 AM 198 The Whole Truth between the fundamentalist and the democrat ensures that they are not ‘mutually unintelligible’ (2000a: 15). But to get from [1] mutual intelligibility to [2] is, for Rorty, to infer from the bare possibility that some S might be able to justify a belief to some R to a readiness on the part of each and all to justify their beliefs to anyone. As one might expect, given our prior discussion of solidarity, it is the local sense of the ‘we’ that’s important here, the range of those to whom we’re willing to justify ourselves. Although I can comprehend what the racist says, I feel no need to justify my egalitarianism to them; though I may try to argue them out of their sentiment if the conditions are propitious. However, I did feel a need to justify my opposition to the invasion of Iraq to fellow liberals who took the converse view, and part of the reason for that was to test the coherence of my own moral views. For Rorty, then, to infer [2] from [1] requires belief in a prior order of reasons that will be revealed when communication is made distortion-free. Since he thinks that ‘any community of justification will do to make you a language-user and a believer, . . . philosophy of language runs out before we reach the moral imperatives’ that claims like [1] express (2000a: 16). Ultimately, of course, he regards a concern with the ‘unconditionality’ of truth as a part of philosophy’s attempt to retain a privileged place for itself. By presupposing that the human essence is to know, to transcend context in the direction of truth, it sets itself the task of standing above politics, pursuing the task of identifying principles that ultimately no subject can fail to acknowledge because their truth ‘bursts every provinciality asunder’ (Habermas 1987: 322). What Rorty takes to be the underlying commitment to a ‘planet-wide inclusivist community’ (2000a: 1) is best served not by associating it with a goal called ‘truth’, but by acknowledging that the political ambition it constitutes, like the countries which imperfectly embody it, is the dream15 of a contingent community. His redescriptions of concepts like ‘truth’, ‘objectivity’ and ‘rationality’ are intended to help realize that dream by putting them at the service of ‘democratic politics’ (ibid.: 25). 4 Triangulation Misgivings related to the foregoing are expressed from many directions. A potentially serious one comes from Davidson, whose views Rorty strongly associates with his own. In ‘Truth Rehabilitated’, Davidson echoes Rorty’s contention that the epistemological tradi- L GRR06.indd 198 7/10/2008 10:05:46 AM The Whole Truth 199 tion encouraged the ‘confused idea’ that ‘philosophy was the place to look for the final and most basic truths on which all other truths . . . must rest’ (2000: 65). He likewise disparages the idea that understanding ‘the concept of truth’ will either lead one to discover ‘important general truths about justice or the foundations of physics’, or provide the key to how to go about discovering such truths (ibid.). Given such views, it is clear that Davidson offers no succour to those, such as Habermas and Putnam, who take the philosophical concern with truth to express an ‘emancipatory interest’. Davidson’s agreement with Rorty extends to the following: 1 We are never in a position to tell which of our beliefs are true. 2 Truth is not a goal of inquiry (Davidson 2000: 67; cf. Rorty 2000b: 262). However, Davidson rejects the idea that accepting (1) and (2) involves abandoning the idea that there is an ‘ordinary, but philosophically interesting concept of truth’ (2000: 66). That concept amounts to the claim that: 3 Truth is objective: ‘the truth of a belief or sentence is independent of whether it is justified by all our evidence, believed by our neighbors . . .’ (ibid.) On the face of it we have here a ‘merely philosophical’ difference that might make a difference. The upshot of Davidson’s view is that we cannot distinguish between the uses made of ‘truth’ in the way that Rorty does. Recall that in his original attempt to conscript Davidson into the pragmatist camp, Rorty distinguishes the fieldlinguist’s ‘outside’ view from that of the ‘earnest seeker after truth’ (ORT: 141). The former constitutes Rorty’s metaphilosophical response to the diagnosis that it is only if one can ‘picture’ stepping outside of language or of our minds, and contemplating whether or not our beliefs ‘represent’ the world, that either the Realist’s aspiration or the sceptic’s threat can be made to appear compelling. The standpoint of the field-linguist is regarded as the ‘naturalistic’ alternative to this metaphysical (or transcendental) god’s-eye view. From the perspective of the philosopher-as-field-linguist, the standpoint is descriptive, not normative (p. 132). When adopted, a subject’s beliefs are viewed as ‘causal interactions with the environment’ (p. 139), not as standing in normative relations with extra-linguistic items like facts. From the ‘outside’, then, ‘true’ is used disquotationally to GRR06.indd 199 L 7/10/2008 10:05:46 AM 200 The Whole Truth compile the T-sentences of a theory of truth. So we have descriptive sentences of the form: (T3) ‘Snow is white’ is true3 just in case snow is white, which contrasts with the use of normative use of truth made from the ‘inside’ of a social practice (T1) ‘Snow is white’ is true1, where warrant is of course a ‘sociological matter’. Crucially, then, Rorty aims to undermine the inside (mind)-outside (world) dichotomy while retaining a detached standpoint for the philosopher (as field-linguist) acknowledging the contingency of beliefs. Moreover, he associates the desire to run the normative and descriptive stories together with the philosophical picture that would make conceptual space for the philosopher’s ‘view from nowhere’, and for which a Realist account of truth – as normative for inquiry – is required to close the gap between beliefs and the World. The gist of Davidson’s response is to deny that one can distinguish between these uses of truth; or, rather, that since truth is ‘primitive’ different uses do not connote differences of meaning (Davidson 2000: 74, fn. 4). Although Davidson doesn’t align his ‘uses’ of true with Rorty’s, he makes two relevant claims. This first is that it’s ‘easy to explain why we use the same word’ to nominate the property preserved in valid inferences and ‘to talk about what we have to know to understand a sentence’ (ibid.). Consider the fact that, from the truth of ‘Rachel is happy’ and ‘Rachel is at home’, you can determine that Rachel is at home; or that the truth of ‘If Rachel is happy and Rachel is at home then Rachel is at home’ can be determined, even though you don’t know Rachel, her whereabouts or her mental state. What you have to know to understand a sentence is its truth-conditions, and it is to the truth-conditions of sentences that we appeal when we explain the rules of inference employed in these examples. Both cases exemplify (3), the objectivity of truth. His second point is that he doubts whether we can explain ‘in a philosophically interesting way’ why we use the same word to ‘caution’ people as we do to talk about validity. We’ll return to this latter point below. Taking up the first, Rorty holds that what you might be said to ‘know’ when you understand a sentence is know-how; specifically, the know-how that is involved in having internalized the norms that warrant one saying that, for L GRR06.indd 200 7/10/2008 10:05:46 AM The Whole Truth 201 example, ‘Snow is white’ and it ‘passing muster amongst one’s peers’. Accordingly, what is preserved by valid inference is truth under its normative guise. However, there is cause for confusion here. As we observed in 6.3, Rorty takes it that the supposition that most of someone’s beliefs must be true by our lights, if we are to count them as believers, goes with the normative use of truth; and we’ve just added that he contrasts this with the ‘disquotational’ use of truth associated with the descriptive travails of the field-linguist. But Davidson employs his argument as part of a demonstration of the rational constraints placed on interpreters aiming to derive the theorems of a Tarski-style theory of truth. That is to say, it is precisely because the concept of truth comes as part of the same conceptual apparatus as ‘language, belief, thought and intentional action’ (Davidson 2000: 73) that the ‘meaning’ of truth doesn’t change in the way Rorty – talking of ‘uses’ – suggests. Needless to say, this is not a conclusion that would faze Rorty. His interest is in redescribing Davidson to support a picture wherein we can ignore problems arising from the mind’s seemingly fraught relationship to the world (response: it’s not problematic (namely, normative); it’s just causal). He doesn’t dispute the revisionary nature of the suggestions relating to, for example, the ‘uses’ of truth and the rejection of objectivity-talk in favour of solidarity-talk. On the contrary, the gamble is that these will help with the task of democratic growth. The question this raises is on what terms might one engage critically with Rorty’s work; especially with regard to abstract concepts like truth and objectivity, which Rorty regards as ‘up for grabs’ (2000a: 25). With this in mind, let’s turn to one of the more edifying responses to Rorty’s views. In his preface to Mind and World, McDowell reports that the goad to his own version of ‘Kantian pragmatism’16 was ‘my usual excited reaction to a reading . . . of . . . Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature’ (1994: ix). Like Rorty, McDowell rejects Realism, or what he calls ‘bald naturalism’, on this usage of the view that ‘reality has an intrinsic character . . . captured by . . . the language of the natural sciences’ (1998b: 420). He likewise wants to dispose ‘therapeutically’ of the ‘intellectual obligations of traditional philosophy’ (1994: 146) that arise from regarding the relationship between mind and world as somehow problematic: ‘to exorcize the feeling of distance rather than trying to bridge the felt gap’ (ibid.: 147). Finally, he concurs with Rorty that if there is no such gap to bridge, there is no sense in which philosophy maintains a privilege with respect to other areas of GRR06.indd 201 L 7/10/2008 10:05:46 AM 202 The Whole Truth inquiry: there is no ‘need for philosophy as priestcraft’ (2000: 110). Despite the overlap of metaphilosophical ends, Rorty and McDowell differ dramatically on how to go about achieving them. For present purposes, this focuses on their respective appropriations of Davidson’s work, which relates to the observed discord about ‘uses’. What Rorty dismisses as the unfortunate side of Davidson thinking, McDowell regards as acknowledgement of an all-important insight. Moreover, their respective accounts of how to understand truth turn on their reactions to this. The significance of this particular metaphilosophical disagreement will be better appreciated after a quick look at McDowell’s project. McDowell’s aim is to elucidate a philosophical thought to the effect that there ough t to be no mystery in the idea that our thinking has objective purport;17 that in an oft-repeated phrase, ‘our thinking is answerable to the world’. For McDowell, this thought has been ‘deformed’ (1998a: 366) by association with another; namely, that what the world delivers up to us in the way of experience (‘the receptivity of sensibility’) is independent of the concepts we use to arrive at a world-view (‘the spontaneity of the understanding’). On this dualistic account, however, it seems as if nothing rationally constrains our thinking. This gives rise to ‘an intolerable oscillation’ (1994: 23) between two positions. On the one hand, there are appeals to something ‘given’ in experience, which offers an ultimate ground for empirical judgements; on the other hand, we reject the need for rational constraint on thought ‘from the outside’ and embrace a fully fledged coherentism. For McDowell, these are equally unacceptable, the first for Sellarsian reasons, and the second because it ‘cannot make sense of the bearing of thought on objective reality’ (ibid.). McDowell’s aim, then, is to give us an account of experience wherein it is not held absolutely distinct from conceptual thinking, ‘a notion of experience as an actualization of conceptual capacities in sensory consciousness itself’ (1998a: 366). Since Rorty dismisses as distractingly metaphysical any concern with ‘objective purport’ and ‘answerability to the world’, one might ask where he fits into this? Note that for McDowell the aforementioned ‘deformation’ arises from an improper contextualization of ‘the distinctive intuition . . . that the conceptual apparatus that centers on the idea of objective purport belongs in a logical space of reasons that is sui generis, by comparison with the logical space in which the natural sciences function’ (1998b: 421). While those caught up in the oscillation are guided by this intuition, their responses are ‘controlled’ by the view that modern science offers L GRR06.indd 202 7/10/2008 10:05:46 AM The Whole Truth 203 a form of understanding that circumscribes what counts as ‘natural’. On this ‘disenchanted’ view, exercises of conceptual capacities are excluded from ‘our’ nature and sensibility (‘a natural capacity’ (1998a: 367) falls on the wrong side of the divide opened up between the mind’s ‘space of reasons’ and the ‘logical space’ of its (natural) world). One reaction to this is to level the genre distinction between all forms of discourse and thus deny that there are distinct logical spaces here at all. This expression of ‘bald naturalism’ can take the form of a Realist claim that a natural-scientific view of nature can provide all the concepts required to ‘reconstruct the structure of the space of reasons’ (1994: 73). Insofar as it refers to Rorty, however, it amounts to his rejection of McDowell’s ‘distinctive intuition’ that the idea of objective purport belongs in that ‘logical space of reasons’. McDowell’s diagnosis, then, is that Rorty seeks to avoid the ‘intellectual obligations of traditional philosophy’ that arise from the ‘distinctive intuition’ by embracing a picture that simply eliminates it. At first blush, then, it is on the significance of the ‘distinctive intuition’ for Davidson that Rorty and McDowell disagree. Where McDowell takes it to be of paramount importance, and ascribes a similar conviction to Sellars18 (1994: passim; 1998b: 422), Rorty regards it as nothing more than a ‘dubious’ throwback to Quine (1998: 390). And, again, on the face of it Rorty seems under no obligation to take it seriously. The reason McDowell thinks he should is that the intuition is regarded as philosophically interesting insofar as it helps to ‘diagnose and dissolve’ (1998b: 424) the very problems that Rorty wants to simply dismiss. McDowell’s thought that there oughtn’t to be any mystery about objective purport is a (non-constructive but nevertheless) philosophical thought because he acknowledges the force of that normative requirement. It’s a philosophical task to inculcate the ‘frame of mind within which those apparent intellectual obligations [of traditional philosophy] are seen as illusory’ (ibid.: 421), not by rejecting the ‘distinctive intuition’ but by ‘seeing it aright’.19 At this level, then, the charge against Rorty is twofold. He cannot ‘give philosophy peace’ (Wittgenstein 1953: §133) because his ‘external approach can easily leave the philosophical questions looking as if they ought to be good ones’, thus resulting in ‘continuing philosophical discomfort, not an exorcism of philosophy’ (McDowell 1994: 142); and his revisionist proposals concerning truth and objectivity cannot be made intelligible because they turn on an account of inquiry that denies itself one of the resources required to be viewed as such an account. GRR06.indd 203 L 7/10/2008 10:05:47 AM 204 The Whole Truth McDowell’s contention, then, is that we can preserve a prelapsarian sense that our thinking is answerable to the world without implying that philosophy stands in a normatively privileged relation with respect to how things are: ‘the resources of ordinary investigative activity can suffice to put us in touch with the subject matter of investigation’ (2000: 110–11). Epistemology needn’t be conceived of as complicit in the ‘frame of mind’ that leads to traditional philosophical problems by seeing it as an activity internal to the dissolution of those problems. In this respect, McDowell is placing himself in the position Rorty associated with Wittgenstein et al. at the end of his introduction to TLT: that of those who are seeking to ‘end’ philosophy through practising it; the position, that is to say, ‘beyond’ which Rorty has tried to define a discursive space since PMN. From that perspective, the implication is that Rorty has failed in at least one respect to elucidate that space. In ‘Towards Rehabilitating Truth’, McDowell suggests this in two ways. In the first part he offers an alternative history of the epistemological tradition, one that usefully questions Rorty’s rather cavalier tendency to run together ‘philosophy since Plato’ with the modern tradition that reaches its apotheosis with Kant. Given the role that narrative plays in Rorty’s work, alternative stories are propaedeutic; but I want to focus on the more substantive features of McDowell’s criticism. One might redescribe McDowell’s objection is as follows. There is an ‘inside’ way of seeing ourselves and an ‘outside’ way. Rorty and Putnam associate the latter with the metaphysician’s longing for a ‘god’s-eye view’; McDowell prefers the phrase ‘sideways on’. Recall Rorty’s treatment of truth (and reference): where the Realist (or ‘representationalist’) sees the truth3 of our beliefs (from the ‘outside’) as signifying a normative relatedness or conformity to things as they are in themselves, Rorty sees it (from the ‘inside’) as signifying possession of a sociological warrant (truth1). The intimation, then, is that Rorty’s thinking is structured around the opposition between the Realist’s outside view and the pragmatist’s inside view, and involves a rejection of the ‘outside’ view in favour of the ‘inside’ view. In other words, rather than reconceptualize the ‘singular’ view, he accepts what was the ‘inside’ view as the singular view. In this sense, Rorty’s conception of the singular view is still caught up in the logic of its original opposition to the ‘outside’ view. From McDowell’s perspective, then, Rorty’s rejection of talk of objective purport goes with his idea that the only significance that can be given to it is from the (rejected) outside view, and that an L GRR06.indd 204 7/10/2008 10:05:47 AM The Whole Truth 205 innocent, and as it were pre-epistemological understanding of objectivity is lost thereby. And we can extend this to include the thought that, having rejected the idea that philosophy finds its identity in the coherence of that ‘outside’ standpoint, the only one left to it is the ‘field-linguist’s’ descriptive, detached view, from which reference3 has no meaning, non-normative (non-cautionary) truth is reduced to truth3, and there is no place for a reformed, singular view of normative philosophical reflection. It is in the light of this sort of diagnosis that McDowell criticizes Rorty’s fragmentation of the uses of truth. Normativity (truth1) is restricted to what was formerly the inside view on the assumption that any other invocation of norms would presuppose that the world being appealed to was the World (well lost). Accordingly, the cautionary use must be regarded as non-normative, its meaning exhausted through the implied reference to the authority of some future community. For McDowell, however, Davidson’s application of Tarski’s theory of truth to the interpretation of persons embodies all Rorty’s uses of truth. In (T1) ‘Cold-fusion hasn’t been achieved’ is true iff cold-fusion hasn’t been achieved, the (disquoted) right-hand side of the bi-conditional specifies the norm governing the correct usage of the quoted sentence (2000: 116). When you claim that cold-fusion hasn’t been achieved then, if what you say is true, you get the world right; or, to put it another way, if you get the world right what you say is disquotable: ‘Norms of inquiry are normative for inquiry precisely because disquotability is the norm for its results’ (1994: 150). As we’ve seen, this is not far from Davidson’s criticism of Rorty. But we also noted that Davidson does not think that a philosophical story can be told about how the cautionary use relates to the other use (relating to validity/what we understand). Given his view that truth is not a norm, this is perhaps not surprising. One of the things that distinguishes McDowell from Davidson as well as Rorty, then, is that he thinks that the cautionary use is also captured by disquotation. So where Rorty, for example, aims to isolate the justification-transcending use of ‘true’ by distinguishing the cautionary from the normative by writing (say): (R) GRR06.indd 205 ‘Cold-fusion hasn’t been achieved’ is true1, but it might not be true2, L 7/10/2008 10:05:47 AM The Whole Truth 206 McDowell thinks that disquotability can do the same job without relinquishing the univocality of truth. So instead we have something like: (Mc) It might not be true that ‘ “cold-fusion hasn’t been achieved” is true’. To see how this works, note that the clause forms part of the theorem: (T2) ‘ “Cold-fusion hasn’t been achieved” is true’ is true iff ‘coldfusion hasn’t been achieved’ is true and since the disquoted right hand side of the biconditional can be written as: ‘Cold-fusion hasn’t been achieved’ is true iff cold-fusion hasn’t been achieved, (T3) by substitution, (Mc) gives: (Mc′) It might not be true that cold-fusion hasn’t been achieved. To defend the view that one is justified in claiming that coldfusion hasn’t been achieved, not in the light of what one one’s peers will let one get away with (the old, inside view) but in the light of how things are, McDowell then goes on to offer something like the following (transcendental) argument:20 1′. One conceives of oneself as claiming that cold-fusion hasn’t been achieved – as making a claim with a specific content, rather than as ‘vocaliz[ing] in step with one another’. (2000: 119) only if 2′. L GRR06.indd 206 One can discern the difference between whether or not it’s the case that cold-fusion hasn’t been achieved and whether or not saying ‘cold-fusion hasn’t been achieved’ will pass muster in one’s linguistic community. 7/10/2008 10:05:47 AM The Whole Truth 207 only if 3′. ‘cold-fusion hasn’t been achieved’ is justified ‘in the light of how things stand with its subject-matter’. (ibid.: 118) (1′) is the shared claim that we have a world-view; (2′) is another expression of the being right (norms of inquiry)/seeming right (discourse-governing norms) distinction; and (3′) expresses the disputed claim that truth (as disquotability) is normative for inquiry. Now it should be noted that the normativity of truth here is ‘innocuous’ (ibid.: 119). It tells us nothing about how we would go about finding out how things are with the world, and we understand what the norm of disquotability comes to sentence by sentence. There are as many norms as there are true sentences, the content of the norm being the disquoted right-hand side of those sentences. If this conclusion appears less than incendiary, that is of course the point. It is only if, with the Realist, one thinks that the mind requires tethering to the world that one will regard truth as some sort of encowled super-norm. And, by implication, it is only if one’s notion of the singular view is caught up in the logic of an opposition to Realism that one will think that regarding truth as a norm for inquiry is problematic. The latter is McDowell’s diagnosis of Rorty’s position, and maps on to our earlier discussion of standpoints. If one denies that the (inside) normative standpoint is to be contrasted with the (outside) descriptive standpoint of the philosopher as field-linguist, on the grounds that the ‘inside view’ is caught in the logic of the old dichotomy, then it leaves open the possibility that the philosophical standpoint is the standpoint one takes from amidst one’s practices. And for McDowell those practices, like the practice of claim-making, involve the innocuous use of truth as a norm – ‘as a mode of justifiedness’ (ibid.) transcending consensus. It is the possibility of such a standpoint that allows McDowell to claim that one can bring about a negotiated philosophical peace, rather than accept a Pax Rortiana. For McDowell, Rorty’s restriction on the nature of the ‘internal’ makes it impossible for us to regard as anything other than a mystery ‘how we manage to direct our thoughts and speech . . . past the endorsements of our fellows and to the facts themselves’ (ibid.), in part because it denies that there’s a way to interpret this aspiration that doesn’t presuppose that the claim invites a god’s-eye view. GRR06.indd 207 L 7/10/2008 10:05:47 AM 208 The Whole Truth On this account, Rorty’s conceptual restriction on what constitutes a practice, and the consequent rejection of the vocabulary of objectivity, leads to the very ‘philosophical trouble’ (ibid. 121) he seeks to avoid. By ruling out the innocuous notions of truth and of objective purport, he leaves Realism looking like the only plausible option remaining. Incipit Boghossian! Rorty does not, of course, accept this argument. Unfortunately, his responses tend to reinforce rather than undermine McDowell’s criticisms. Amongst these, two are of note. First, he rejects (2′) on the basis that it involves the introduction of a pragmatically useless distinction between two norms, one relating to inquiry and the other relating to truth (2000b: 125). But, of course, one would only ascribe this position to McDowell if one thought he was aiming to supplement the norm relating to sociological warrant with a contextbusting supernorm. And one would only do that if one conceived of the first sort of norm on the image of the ‘old’ inside view, one whose authority was undermined by adverting to the world. As McDowell makes clear elsewhere – and this is the point of ‘deducing’ (3′), of course – ‘answerability to the world and answerability to each other have to be understood together . . . we cannot make sense of discourse-governing norms prior to and independently of objective purport’ (2002: 275). Rorty later confesses that ‘it was a mistake to locate the norms . . . where my peers are’ (2000b: 376), though he does so in the context of repeating the ‘two norm’ accusation against McDowell. We’ll turn to this change of heart momentarily. On the way, consider the second response; namely, the rejection of (1′). Rorty (ibid.: 126) notes that he sees nothing wrong with the description of claim-making as ‘achieving vocal unison’ and adds that one might be terribly upset if, for example, one staked one’s reputation on the likelihood of utterances of ‘cold-fusion hasn’t been achieved’ being vocalized in unison by one’s peers and that turning out not to be the case. Of course, characterizing this social practice in terms of ‘vocal unison’ sounds like the outside descriptive standpoint (of Rorty’s field-linguist). But from that perspective one cannot talk about ‘staking reputations’ and ‘bitter disappointments’. As both Davidson and McDowell remind us, when we take up the standpoint of the field-linguist in order to attribute beliefs and desires to biological entities qua persons, we do so from the midst of our practices. From the (external; descriptive) standpoint of the field-linguist, as Rorty conceives of it, one is not entitled to regard beliefs as ‘causal interactions with the envi- L GRR06.indd 208 7/10/2008 10:05:47 AM The Whole Truth 209 ronment’ because one is not entitled to the concept of belief. One might offer a neurological story linking brain-states or ‘vocalizations’ to their distal causes, but there’s no reason to think that what one is talking of here are beliefs. And, indeed, insofar as one accepts the architectonic of Davidson’s account of interpretation, one accepts that the attribution to a subject of mostly true beliefs goes along with talk of ‘language, belief, thought and intentional action’. What this amounts to is recognition of McDowell’s ‘distinctive intuition’; in Davidson’s terms, the irreducibility of talk about persons to talk about (inanimate) things. In one of his reactions to Mind and World, Rorty (1998) notes that after correspondence with McDowell he’d come to see that what the latter ‘prized most’ in Davidson’s essay ‘Mental Events’ were the pages relating to this and ‘about which I had always had qualms’ (p. 390). This is an issue we looked at in 4.4, and again in 4.5, where it was associated with Rorty’s attack on the Geistes-/Natur-wissenschaften distinction; and, indeed, in his reply to Rorty, McDowell associates the thought he takes ‘to be common to Davidson and Sellars’ with ‘the distinction between Verstehen and Erklären, which is familiar from the way it has been exploited in separating’ the sciences (1998b: 423). To summarize (Rorty 1998), the matter turns on what Rorty regards as Davidson’s recidivistic (namely, Quinean) distinction between ‘indeterminacy’ and ‘under-determination’. That is to say, Rorty cannot see how what distinguishes the sort of nomological exactitude one aspires to in certain vocabularies (say, particle physics) from the lesser ambitions of others (say, the special sciences like biochemistry, neurology, etc.) differs from what distinguishes the former from the vocabulary of intentionality, in which beliefs, desires and so on are assigned. In what way, he asks, is the relative under-determination marking the first contrast different from the purported indeterminacy that marks the latter? It is not that Rorty is arguing for reduction here: rather – to repeat the metaphilosopical point made in 4.4 – his claim is that there is nothing philosophically interesting about the difference. Now, even in this piece, Davidson is ambivalent about the basis for irreducibility; in any event, within a few years he has come to reject openly the idea that indeterminacy per se has anything to do with the irreducibility of the intentional (Cf. 2001a: chs. 9 and 10). It is with this work in mind that we’ve already touched on his response to Rorty’s question: the irreducibility that derives from the GRR06.indd 209 L 7/10/2008 10:05:47 AM 210 The Whole Truth indeterminacy of interpretation comes down to the fact that the process of interpretation is guided by ‘the constitutive ideal of rationality’ (Davidson 1980: 222), the idea that the attitudes attributed are ‘placed’ in the normative space (the ‘space of reason’) in which they provide an understanding of why people do the things they do. In a later, more explicitly Wittgensteinian piece, Davidson restates his view. He was mistaken, he says, to rest the case for the irreducibility of the mental on the question of indeterminacy: ‘that turns up in both domains’ (2001b: 215). It is the specific source of the indeterminacy that distinguishes mental concepts from physics and the special sciences that’s important: We depend on our linguistic interactions with others to yield agreement on the . . . structures in nature . . . We cannot in the same way agree on the structure of sentences or thoughts we use to chart the thoughts and meanings of others, for the attempt to reach such an agreement simply sends us back to the process of interpretation on which all agreement depends. It is here . . . that we come to the ultimate springs of the difference between understanding minds and understanding the world as physical. A community of minds is the basis of knowledge; it provides the measure of all things. It makes no sense to question the adequacy of this measure, or to seek a more ultimate standard. (p. 218) For Davidson, this is part of an integrated view of self-knowledge, knowledge of the minds of others, and knowledge of the world in which the ‘I’, the ‘we’ and the ‘world’ form the vertices of a triangle: ‘until the triangle is completed connecting two creatures, and each creature with common features of the world . . . thought and speech would have no content at all’ (p. 212). As he concludes, ‘when we look at the natural world we share with others we . . . acknowledge membership in a society of minds’ (p. 219). Rorty’s response to this piece is to restate the conviction that talk of normativity and rationality adds nothing to the fact that all vocabularies are alike under-determined: that since the irreducibility of one vocabulary to another applies across the board – ‘no two ways of describing anything can ever do precisely the same job’ (2000b: 393) – irreducibility does not make a distinction between vocabularies philosophically interesting. Of course, this is Rorty in by now familiar ‘external’, descriptive mode, and McDowell remarks that these considerations ‘are irrelevant to the point’ as he has explained it (1998b: 423). This, to repeat, is just the view that with respect to persons the appropriate way of finding L GRR06.indd 210 7/10/2008 10:05:48 AM The Whole Truth 211 them intelligible is in terms of ‘the pattern of a life led by an agent who can shape her action and thought in the light of an ideal of rationality’ (ibid.). Now it’s interesting to note that shortly after this exchange, Rorty appears to concede something like this point, along with the earlier one about truth. In short, he notes that one has to be part of a community of persons (not minds21) – a community that imposes checks and balances on one another’s utterances – in order to deploy any descriptive vocabulary: ‘the describing counts as describing only if rule-governed, only if conducted by people who talk about each other in the vocabulary of agency’ (Rorty 2000b: 372). So what privileges the normative vocabulary of agency is not the fact that it’s irreducible (since all vocabularies are) but that it’s ‘inescapable’ (p. 371). Whereas Rorty implied previously that the ‘outside’ descriptive view – beliefs as causal links – was not only distinct from but unrelated to the ‘inside’ normative vocabulary, he comes to see that the deployment of any descriptive vocabulary, including that of the philosopher as field-linguist, presupposes a normative vocabulary. Referring back to McDowell’s transcendental argument, it looks as though Rorty comes close to conceding the inference from (1′) to (2′), since claim-making requires membership of a norm-governed community. The being right/being wrong distinction is not yet the right one, however. Now it should be noted in passing that Rorty regards the relationship between the normative and descriptive vocabularies as pragmatic, not inferential (2000b: 372). Likewise, he continues to reject the idea that there are constitutive principles of rationality guiding the attribution of beliefs. However, even that pragmatic link leads to the already flagged concession on truth. Recall that, hitherto, Rorty has taken Davidson’s claim to the effect that most of someone’s beliefs must be true as meaning ‘true by our lights’; which is to say, justified (true1). We’ve already noted that as an interpretation of Davidson this is odd, since Rorty takes the field-linguist’s standpoint – from which, for Davidson, this ‘mostly true’ assumption is deduced – to be descriptive, involving the nonnormative ‘use’ of true. The problem is that if ‘justified by our lights’ means justified by my lights, then we lose any sense of what justified might mean – that, after all, is Wittgenstein’s point. But then, if we take ‘our’ here to denote some normative community of fellowbelievers, we seem to have begged the question, since it’s membership of such a community we’re (as it were) auditioning for. It is for this reason that we must take people to have mostly true beliefs: GRR06.indd 211 L 7/10/2008 10:05:48 AM 212 The Whole Truth ‘most of what anybody says about whatever they are talking about gets that thing right’ (p. 374). And it is on this assumption that we get Rorty’s concession to McDowell’s (2′): ‘you can only get right what you can get wrong’ (p. 375). If we can only get right what we can get wrong, and what it is to be right is to have true beliefs about the things talked about, then it would seem we have an acknowledgement of (3′). Given the apparent centrality of Rorty’s revisionary account of truth and objectivity, it therefore behoves us to conclude by examining what implications this has for Rorty’s bigger project. L GRR06.indd 212 7/10/2008 10:05:48 AM