Fall 1999 Cyberseminar in Objectivist Studies
The Continental Origins of Postmodernism

Week 13: December 6-12

Shawn Klein's Review of Richard Rorty's
"Solidarity or Objectivity?" and "The Contingency of Language"

To: TOC Cyberseminar <cybersem@objectivistcenter.org>

Sent: Tuesday, December 07, 1999 9:16 AM

Subject: Cyberseminar: SK Rorty Review

From: Shawn E.Klein

SK review of Rorty


I'm not going to say much directly criticizing Rorty's view. Will's review
did an excellent job at showing where, how, and why Rorty goes wrong. What
I found more interesting were the seeming similarities between Objectivism
and Rorty. Obviously, there are vast differences between Rorty's view and
Objectivism, and I am not going to outline them in detail here. But I do
think it is important to realize that the view of objectivity and knowledge
that Rorty is opposing is opposed by Objectivism as well. Also, some of
what Rorty says, Objectivism is, or should be, in agreement with. I will
begin by briefly explicating Rorty's view of objectivity and solidarity.

Objectivity, according to Rorty, is the attempt to understand one's self by
reference to some non-human, independent reality. This orientation leads
one to look for a truth that is "out there." The central task of humans,
in this orientation, is the discovery of truths. Metaphysics and
epistemology become centrally important to our understanding of the world.
We are committed to a correspondence theory of truth, that is, that the
propositions that are true correspond to the facts in reality and that in
order to say something is true we have to show how the facts do correspond.

This, Rorty believes, leads us to the need to look outside of our
community, our humanity, and ourselves. We must transcend the human way of
knowing things in order to see reality-as-it-really-is. In order for the
objectivity view to function, we need a God's eye view of reality, not the
limited human view. This requirement, if really a requirement, is the end
of the road for objectivity. A God's eye view of reality is not possible,
so objectivity is not possible. We can, as humans, only have human
knowledge. This supposed failure of objectivity leads Rorty to posit an
alternative orientation.

Solidarity is the alternative method of understanding one's place in the
world. It directs one to look at their own particular community and its
practices and language to understand and describe the world. Truth and
rationality are meaningless except in so far as they are "descriptions of
the familiar procedures of justification which a given society - ours -
uses in one or another area of inquiry" (ORT 23). To speak of something as
true is not to speak of something corresponding to reality or the
way-it-really-is. It is to speak of something as being thought of in the
community, or indicated by the practices of the community, as being
justified. For instance, to say that "my cat is fat" is true is not to say
anything about the existence of my cat and his preponderance of fat cells.
It is only to claim that according to the practices and beliefs of my
community it is good for me to believe "my cat is fat."

As such, appeals to anything outside of the practices of the community are
incoherent dead ends. If truth is understood as something created within
the practices and language of the community, then anything outside of the
community can offer no direction or further understanding. The solidarity
view does not deny that things outside of the community exist, only that
they are wholly irrelevant to any task of understanding or describing the
world.

An interesting implication of this view is that metaphysics and
epistemology are irrelevant disciplines (Rorty says as much on page 23 of
ORT). Truth is not a matter of reality, but of the community. It does not
require knowing anything about reality, only of other people. Essentially,
what matters is what other people think. Objectivism used to use the word
social metaphysician to describe this view of orienting oneself to the
thoughts and ideas of others rather than to reality. Theories of knowledge
and existence become secondary; servants of ethical and political theories.
Determining if something is good is more important than determining if it
is true(which is actually irrelevant). For Objectivists, at least this
one, this is hard to understand. How can something by truly good, if it
were not true?

Rorty would see me as some how entrenched in my community of objectivity.
I am still looking for what is truly good. Of course something being
_truly_ good depends on it being true, that's analytic. Truth, as
non-rortians define it, is not important to the question of what is good
for us, only intersubjective agreement is important. If there is a
consensus on X being good, then it is good.

Rorty thinks that knowledge is "a compliment paid to the beliefs which we
think so well justified that, for the moment, further justification is not
needed" (ORT 24). Knowledge is no longer justified true belief, but
justified commonly accepted belief. But how does one come to think of a
belief being justified in the first place? What is the standard for
something being justified or not? Something is justified by reference to
the consensus on the community's beliefs. At some point, however,
individuals have to have decided whether something is good or if something
is justified to believe in. A consensus requires that people have an
opinion of their own in the first place, right? You cannot build a
consensus from no opinions. Then how do they decide their opinion? Rorty
believes that individuals will decide by reference to the practices of the
community. But this seems somewhat circular. It takes for granted the
existence of a consensus. For example, X is a justified belief. It is
justified because of the intersubjective agreement on its justification.
The subjective decisions of the members of the community are made,
according to this view, by reference to prior intersubjective agreements.
But these also require prior individual decisions which in turn require
intersubjective agreements and so on. Justification is then based on this
unending regress of intersubjective agreements, made up of individual
decisions, and individual decisions, made by reference to intersubjective
agreements. Justification does not seem to get very far.

Solidarity is the orientation of pragmatists. Pragmatists view truth as
that which is good for us to believe. Truth does not depend on reality,
but what is seen as good or useful for us to believe. Truth for its own
sake is meaningless, it is just a way of saying this thing is useful for
our ends.

Truth, according to this view, is completely human-dependent. Truth is not
out there, it depends on there being sentences and propositions which do
not exist independently of human consciousness. It is a function of
language. Rorty concludes from this that truth is created by man and does
not depend on knowing what is "out there." We do not discover truths, but
create them; they are "in here." Rorty is pretty explicit in claiming that
he is not advocating some kind of idealism where the "out there" does not
exist. Reality is out there, only it has nothing to do with truth. Poking
and prodding reality will get us no closer to truth; it is an "unprofitable
topic" (CIS 8).

The idea that truth is not out there in reality and is linguistically
determined seems right to me. The world is not true, it just is. Rorty is
right in thinking that truth does depend on their being propositions and
hence human beings. As Rorty writes: "Only descriptions of the world can
be true or false. The world on its own - unaided by the describing
activities of human beings - cannot" (CIS 5). The mere existence of the
sun is not a question of true or false, it just is. Describing the sun as
a star with such and such characteristics is something that can be true or
false. It either has those characteristics and the description is true or
it does not and the description is false.

However, Rorty does not determine truth in this way. This is where
Objectivism and Rorty go their separate ways. We say that the truth that
the sun has a certain characteristic is determined by whether in fact it
does have that characteristic. For Rorty, the truth is determined by some
linguistical, intersubjective framework that we exist in. For him, facts
are irrelevant to the matter of truth. For us, facts determine the truth of
a proposition.

The point is that Objectivism does not view truth as something that is "out
there" or "in here," as the false dichotomy that philosophy has offered for
a millennium or more requires. It is something that arises in relation
between what is out there and what is in here. Truth and other concepts do
not exist without humans, but that does not, Objectivism argues, make them
arbitrary or completely subjective as Rorty and other modern philosophers
believe. The flip side Rorty misses is that as much as truth does not exist
without humans, it does not exist without the facts of the world.

Another aspect where I think Objectivism and Rorty begin on the same side
but then go in different directions is the attack on the God's eye view of
the world as the paradigmatic objective view. Rorty attacks objectivity
because the orientation to reality instead of community requires, he
thinks, an attempt to see the world as it really is. He thinks that in
order to be objective we would need to see the world without interference
from our human ability to see the world; we would need, in other words, the
view of the world that God, if he or she existed, would have. Rorty
rightly points out that this is not going to be a successful or fruitful
attempt. We can not break out of our means of knowing reality to know it
in some other way, God-like or any other -like. For Rorty, this means
removing our orientation towards reality and pointing it towards things we
do think we can know: other people(why we can trust our knowledge about
others and not reality has never been clear to me).

Objectivism also thinks this view of objectivity is a dead end. (We also
think it is the wrong view to attribute to objectivity.) There is no God
and there is no God's eye view of the world. But this does not, according
to Objectivism, relegate us to social metaphysicians. Our very human
ability to know the world (our senses) really _is_ a way of knowing the
world. That is, we do not need the God's eye view of the world to know
reality, our own view is sufficient.

Part of Rorty's problem is his assumption that the objectivity orientation
is based on representationalism; that our precepts, concepts, and
propositions are intended to represent reality and need to correspond to
it. Like Rorty, Objectivism is anti-representationalist. We claim that we
directly perceive reality, not some representation of it that is suppose to
correspond to reality. We have no conflict between things as they appear
to us and reality. Reality is as it appears to us.

Like many philosophers, Rorty assumes that for the human faculties to
directly perceive reality we would need a diaphanousness model of
awareness. David Kelley, in _Evidence of The Senses_, shows how this model
and its acceptance has led to many of the errors and problems in
philosophy. We do not need to go into the critique of the diaphanousness
model or representationalism. These are well known to Objectivists(and if
not read David's book).

I think it is interesting that in some ways we start from the same
recognition points as Rorty and other post-moderns, in recognizing the
nature of truth and the hopelessness of the God's eye view of objectivity,
but we do not end up where they do. It is interesting that we place
ourselves within the Enlightenment tradition that Rorty and the
post-moderns are criticizing but criticize that tradition for some of the
same reasons that Rorty does. We have been able to stay within the
Enlightenment tradition because we are still pursuing truth and knowledge,
having not given up on that pursuit as Rorty has done, and have been able
to correct, or begin to correct, some of the gravest errors of that
tradition. By giving up on the Enlightenment mission because of its
historical problems, Rorty and the post-moderns like him have thrown the
proverbial baby out with the bath water. They have given up on truth,
knowledge, and political liberalism(despite what Rorty might think).
Because Objectivism has not given up and has worked to correct the errors,
we will be able to save the Enlightenment tradition from the trash bin of
history and fulfill its mission.

Shawn Klein
Arizona State University



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Fall 1999 Cyberseminar in Objectivist Studies

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