Customer Reviews

Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers (Philosophical Papers (Cambridge)) (Volume 1)

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Published in 1990, `Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth' (ORT) is the first installment in the 4-volume Richard Rorty: Philosophical Papers collection published by Cambridge University Press. ORT contains approximately a dozen essays originally published by Rorty in the 1980s. His pragmatic view of philosophy posits that knowledge results from conversation and convention, rather than from the uncovering of ahistoric truth, in other words, knowledge is created not than discovered. For those unfamiliar with Rorty, he is one of the best known and most controversial American thinkers of the late twentieth century; an accomplished philosopher, essayist and cultural critic. I offer a few comments for potential readers.

While sharing a common pragmatic theme the essays are roughly divided between those that deal with questions of language and epistemology and those that are concerned with socio-political issues. While the essays are non-technical in nature they presuppose (especially the non-political ones) a familiarity with the Western intellectual tradition, its key thinkers and ideas. Indeed, much of the fun or frustration depending on your perspective, in reading Rorty is interacting with his highly creative and oft criticized interpretations of other thinkers. In regard to this latter point the consistent casting of Dewey throughout ORT as a proto-Rortian has motivated me to re-read Dewey, while his engagement with Davidson has rekindled my interest in a philosopher that I have tended to overlook.

Often characterized as a post-modern relativist Rorty is careful to distance himself from highly individualistic versions of relativism, preferring to define himself as a pragmatist, a pragmatist who sees knowledge creation as a group rather than an individual undertaking. While shifting the frame of reference for knowledge from the individual to the group seems intuitively correct, I am unsure such a move it can be justified Rortian presuppositions. That is, when pressed the notion of a `group' or a `community' is itself seems a rather slippery and arbitrary concept. What constitutes a legitimate social unit, a country, a culture, a self-designated group? There seems to be no compelling reason that a social unit could not be as small as two individuals; in such a case, the community in effect dissolves into individual.

In `The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy' Rorty is at his provocative best; interacting with opposing thinkers and challenging the notion that democratic institutions require philosophical underpinnings. While I share many of his values, I am skeptical about the potential fruits of the post-modern project. Only in a world formed by Judeao-Christian values and enlightenment principles is it possible to naively assume that current cultural attitudes will prevail once their foundations have been cast aside - is a free and democratic society possible in Rorty's disenchanted and pragmatic world. Selfishness, power and totalitarianism seem as likely to fill the void created by post-modern doubt as is Rorty's utopian "democratic, progressive, pluralist community".

With regard to shortcomings I offer two thoughts. First, the text's font is diminishingly small and can be difficult to read. It strikes me as odd why the publishers did not use a more reader-friendly font - the book would still have been of a modest size. Second, with regard to style, Rorty is sometimes accused of smugness and elitism - dismissing those that disagree with him and fanatical and unworthy of serious considerations, while his writing style at times can feel more rhetoric than substance - albeit beautiful rhetoric.

Overall, I highly recommend the small text. It may be particularly enjoyable/beneficial for graduate students who have been schooled in the analytic tradition. To fully appreciate ORT, however, it is important have a good grounding in the modern intellectual tradition (philosophy, literature, science).

I was amazed by this book. Having read several of his works since I would recommend that you should start reading Rorty with this book.

You do not need to be a philosopher to read this book, or even be very interested in philosophy. All that is required is an interest in any of: History, science, politics and literature. I am pretty sure that Rorty's ideas about the common ground that these disciplines can be seen to occupy will be invigorating.

Rorty is a love/hate philosopher. I love him so there is your full disclosure.

Love him or Hate him ORT is important reading. If you read nothing but PMN and ORT you would be well equiped to begin your apology/critique.

A reader, Lechman, wrote here that "All scientists and engineers would reject Rortys ideas as extremely sloppy and antiscientific." Having not read this particular book [I gave it 4 stars to keep the score as I found it], I still can comment that Rorty's claims against science have nothing anti-scientific about them. As a pragmatist, Rorty would certainly not hold science to be without value, and I seriously doubt that he--in this book or in any other--challenges how scientists go about their work. Really, it's just not much of concern to science whether scientists believe themselves to be revealing metaphysical truth or not--they'll still get their work done.

But the question remains, 'what is the truth-value of the results produced by science?'. Many modern people, stuck in circular thinking, attempt to justify science with scientific premises. Even the biggest advocates of science in philosophy realize that that's not tenable.

As interesting and successful as Rorty is, he fails to make me feel comfortable identifying myself with the postmodernist liberals. Rorty holds to some sort of a skepticism. At best, he doesn't seem to care about any sort of representationalistic epistemology. Also, he tries to reduce any representationlistic epistemology to a simplistic "mirror" epistemology. To me, that is a straw-man argument.

Despite Rorty's claims not to be a relativist, I would assert that he is. No doubt, we all, in the end, use arguments that could be accused of being a mere petitio principii (i.e. begging the question). However, when one is an evolutionaristic anti-essentialist at the same time, one cannot escape cultural relativism, at best. There is no common ground among language games, according to Rorty's philosophy. If so, there is no moral obligation for one to play one language game, or hold to one web of belief, as opposed to another.

Well, anyway, it was a good read. Rorty is definitely another one of those innovative and interesting postmodernists (along with others like Foucault and Derrida). One difference, though, is that Rorty is much more optimistic than his peers. Of course, this optimism is groundless, though not reasonless.

Montaigne points out that "It is far easier to live like Caesar and talk like Aristotle than to live and talk like Socrates." In other words, it is far easier to rest content in the smug satisfaction that one is in possession of the truth than it is to unremittingly persevere in the quest for truth, recognizing that one is and will always remain merely a seeker.

There is a smugness of individuals, there is a smugness of communities, and there is a smugness of entire ages. Richard Rorty's essay "The priority of democracy to philosophy," reprinted in this volume, is a valuable document because it shows all too clearly just how smug our age has become.

Rorty provides us with a set of convenient techniques for the comfortable maintenance of our self-satisfaction. Among these is the technique of designating with the term "fanatical" any opinion that is not commensurate with the consensus of the age. The fanatic is to be compelled by the regime to "sacrifice her conscience on the altar of public expediency," (p. 175) or, for the sake of such expediency, to stop asking uncomfortable questions (p. 190). Rorty even suggests that we extirpate from our language the very vocabulary in which such uncomfortable questions are posed (p. 190).

Consider Rorty's claim that "Contemporary intellectuals have given up the Enlightenment assumption that religion, myth, and tradition can be opposed to something ahistorical." (p. 176) One might object that contemporary intellectuals are not nearly so unanimous on this point as Rorty makes them out to be. This entirely misses the point, however. For Rorty, agreement on this point _is_ unanimous. It is unanimous because those who disagree are "fanatics," and therefore no longer worthy of participation in the discussion--no longer even worthy of being called "contemporary intellectuals."

Entirely missing from Rorty's approach to philosophy is John Stuart Mill's sentiment that "Ages are no more infallible than individuals, every age having held many opinions which subsequent ages have deemed not only false but absurd."

Rorty believes that we must view critics of liberal democracy--Nietzsche, Loyola, and their intellectual heirs, for example--as "crazy," (p. 187) because "the limits of sanity are ... determined by our upbringing, our historical situation." (p.188) This sort of slavish submissiveness to the present age would indeed be inevitable if no vestige of past ages had not been preserved for us. But this is not the case. The written word gives us sufficient access to other ages that we need not submit uncritically to our own. The greatest and most original thinkers are exactly those who have refused to submit to their own age: Nietzsche, for example, who assiduously studied the Presocratics, and Heidegger, the student of Medieval philosophy.

The first volume, Objectivism, Relatativism and Truth, is mainly concerned with Donald Davidson and John Dewey. Dewey I was vaguely familiar with(and still am) while concerning Davidson I was completely ignorant. My light-hearted critique Rorty is similar to a critique of Sartre. Sartre begins with the fact that there isn't a God, what do we do now. In many ways Rorty begins with that same position and though that doesn't effect my critique, it should be noted that we begin everything from different positions.

Rorty, like Rawls, takes religious belief very lightly. He is apparently friends with Alaisdair MacIntyre so he understands that theism is intellectually sustainable. In fact, in volume 2 he cites MacIntyre saying that "dramatic narratives may well be essental to the writing of intellectual history." I only bring this up to show Rorty's understanding of theism and yet his disregard of it in taking the position of a postmetaphysical philosopher.

My memory is unfortunately fleeting concerning the first volume which I no longer have, but thanks to the amazon excerpt I can bring up a few quotes.

Rorty's chief concern is the rivalry between platonic realists and Jamesian pragmatists. This is how he puts it:


Those who want to ground solidarity in objectivity - call them "realists" - so they have to contstrue truth as correspondence to reality. So they must construct a metaphysics which has room for a special relation between beliefs and objects which will differentiate true from fals beliefs...

By contrast, those who wish to reduce objectivity to solidarity - call them "pragmatists" - do not require a metaphysics or an epistemology. They view truth as, in William James' phrase, what is good for us to believe.


So this is basically it. He goes on for a few hundred pages, and then 200 more in the second volume, but it all basically comes down to this difference and his support of pragmatism. The support occurs because it is more beneficial for him to be a pragmatist, so I guess he is in line with his own philosophy, but then again, he doesn't consider philisophy an occupation worth much (he is now a humanities professor). Rorty doesn't much get into benifit, what that is, why that matters, but rests on a culture understanding with a desperate attempt to avoid ethnocentrism.

Volume 2 goes into Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Derrida but mainly to show how they aline with Dewey and James, a noble quest if there ever was one. Mainly he goes about readings of their early works, trapped within the prison of metaphysics, or free into the...ambiguity? of pragmatism. I'd say delight but then that would put them all out of jobs. Maybe its just a grudge and Rorty wants to make all of the philosophy faculties of the world close because they gave him a wedgie in grad school.

So why not pragmatism? Well, the pragmatist is trapped in either solopsism or hedonism, two positions I do not envy and from which I do not see an escape nor do I think there is an attempt at one. But more than anything, pragmatism is a system that does not affect anyone else so frankly, it's not why pragmatism, but why should I care, and after reading enough of him the answer is evident, I don't.

I'm sure Richard Rorty has some important things to say but to me his writing comes across as "philosophical shop talk." He writes of -ism this and -ism that but seldom makes a direct point.