Response by David Ross and Others

This commentary is part of The Atlas Society's 1999 online "CyberSeminar" entitled "The Continental Origins of Postmodernism."

My assignment was to comment on Shawn’s review of Rorty. Shawn’s identification of issues on which Objectivists agree with Rorty, and his account of where we diverge, were very clear. And I particularly liked Shawn’s explanation of how and why Objectivism has been able to maintain the Enlightenment perspective. Along with Will Wilkinson’s analysis of Rorty as self-refuting, Shawn’s essay made a succinct and thorough account.

I’m afraid that I can find almost nothing to comment on, I simply agree with Shawn. I’m just going to ask some general questions about Rorty and his views, in the hope that some of the philosophers will educate me a bit about him, and about their field.

First, as I understand it, Rorty is regarded as one of the major living philosophers. Why? Of course, as Objectivists, we see Rorty’s view as rehash of old mistaken views, a rehash of Kant, Dewey, Ayer, and others. We reject Rorty because his views are mistaken. But I’d expect even the philosophy community to reject him--or at least to ignore him--because his views are old. I disagree with, say, Russell and Wittgenstein. However, I do recognize them as innovators. I can see why, by its own standards, the philosophy community has deemed them worthy of attention. What, by the standards of modern philosophy, has Rorty added to the field?

My second question is about intersubjectivity. For quite some time (beginning with Kant?), it has been taken as an alternative to a correspondence theory of truth in the context of arguments like Rorty’s, arguments that say that we don’t have the necessary access to reality to make correspondence possible. This has always seemed to me to be an argument that, more than any other, wears its self-refutation on its sleeve. Aren’t other humans parts of that reality to which we don’t have sufficient access? Why has this argument flourished so well for so long? Is there something, either about the argument, or the context, that I’m missing?

Shawn Klein wrote: “An interesting implication of this view is that metaphysics and epistemology are irrelevant disciplines (Rorty says as much on page 23 of [Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth]). Truth is not a matter of reality, but of the community. It does not require knowing anything about reality, only of other people.

Far from rendering epistemology irrelevant, it seems to me that an intersubjective standard would require a subtler and more complex science of knowledge. Other persons are the most difficult things to understand. Just understanding what they mean when they say something is often a chore. They’re vague in the first place, then they change what they’re saying, then they say something different to someone else, then they contradict themselves, then they act in a manner that refutes all of their utterances. What is the argument for the claim that we can establish intersubjective agreement without epistemological standards?

Michal Fram Cohen wrote:

David Ross wrote: “My second question is about intersubjectivity. For quite some time, (beginning with Kant?), it has been taken as an alternative to a correspondence theory of truth in the context of arguments like Rorty’s, arguments that say that we don’t have the necessary access to reality to make correspondence possible. This has always seemed to me to be an argument that, more than any other, wears its self-refutation on its sleeve. Aren’t other humans parts of that reality to which we don’t have sufficient access? Why has this argument flourished so well for so long? Is there something, either about the argument, or the context, that I’m missing?”

I would like to suggest the hypothesis that the idea of intersubjectivity is ultimately founded on the assumption that man’s consciousness has innate ideas, i.e., a source of knowledge that is independent of any correspondence to anything. Innate ideas, which originated in Kant’s categories, are irreducible. True, they are a part of reality, but they don’t correspond to anything in reality. They are primary ideas that man is born with. I would like to quote Martin Buber in “I and Thou” as an example of a possible connection between innate ideas and intersubjectivity:

“To man the world is twofold, in accordance with his twofold attitude. The attitude of man is twofold, in accordance with the twofold nature of the primary words which he speaks. The primary words are not isolated words, but combined words. The one primary word is the combination ‘I-Thou.’ The other primary combination is the combination ‘I-It;’ wherein, without a change in the primary word, one of the words ‘He’ and ‘She’ can replace ‘It’... Primary words do not signify things, but they intimate relations. Primary words do not describe something that might exists independently of them, but being spoken they bring about existence” (“I and Thou” 3).

It would be interesting to contrast Buber with Ayn Rand’s notion of the “I.” In the context of my post, however, I only intend to show that he attempts to describe collective innate ideas as a source of knowledge.

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

> Return to the parent page for this 1999 online CyberSeminar, "The Continental Origins of Postmodernism."