Sometimes Always True

Undogmatic Pluralism in Politics, Metaphysics, and Epistemology

Jeremy Barris

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780823262151
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy

Sometimes Always True aims to resolve three connected problems. First, we need an undogmatic pluralist standpoint in political theory, metaphysics, and epistemology. But genuine pluralism suffers from the contradiction that making room for fundamental differences in outlook means making room for outlooks that exclude pluralism.Second, philosophy involves reflecting on the world and meaning as a whole, yet this means adopting a vantage point in some way outside of meaning.Third, our lived experience of the sense of our lives similarly undermines its own sense, as it involves having a vantage point in some way wholly outside ourselves.In detailed engagement with, among others, Davidson, Rorty, Heidegger, Foucault, Wilde, and gender and sexuality theory, the book argues that these contradictions are so thoroughgoing that, like the liar's paradox, they cancel the bases of their own meaning. Consequently, it argues, they resolve themselves and do so in a way that produces a vantage point on these issues that is not dogmatically circular because it is, workably, both within and outside these issues' sense. The solution to a genuinely undogmatic pluralism, then, is to enter into these contradictions and the process of their self-resolution.

1. Comparing Different Cultural or Theoretical Frameworks

Davidson, Rorty, and the Nature of Truth

In comparing and considering dialogue between very different standpoints, whether cultural, subcultural, individual, or theoretical, the nature of truth itself becomes a problem. If, for example, we see the standpoints as genuinely but legitimately different with respect to the truth, we have the problem of conceiving how conflicting views can both be true. If they can, then within one of the standpoints, what the other takes as truth is equally legitimately taken as false, as the opposite of truth. In that case, are we dealing with truth at all anymore? Further, in comparing them, we occupy a more general framework that includes all the relevant views. That is, that framework consists in taking both (or more) conflicting views into account simultaneously, so that in our single comparison-making standpoint we are regarding one and the same thing as simultaneously both true and false.

If, on the other hand, we reject this contradiction within truth, we have to assume that standpoints cannot be legitimately different with respect to the truth. This view has been very powerfully argued by, for example, Donald Davidson. But this seems to eliminate the sense of a comparative perspective altogether, at least when it comes to conceptions of truth. Our view of the nature of truth in general, then, of whether truth can legitimately be construed in conflicting ways and so involve contradictions, or whether truth is ultimately universal, determines how we understand the nature of differences between standpoints, and so whether a properly comparative approach is ultimately appropriate or, instead, distorts the realities of intercultural and interperspectival understanding.

Richard Rorty has very subtly argued a third view of truth, largely on the basis of Davidson’s work. This view is that there is no need for or point in talking about truth at all. Consequently there are no logical obstacles to comparison between conflicting standpoints: there is no worthwhile conception of truth at all, and so no conflict of conceptions of truth to trouble us. Comparison can then proceed as far as we have the energy and practical conditions for it. On the other hand, it is also a consequence of this view that there is no ultimate justification, no ultimate foundation, for anything. As a result, this view excludes in advance the possible legitimacy of all the many standpoints that do find the concepts of truth and ultimate foundations meaningful. This view too, then, seems troubling for the possibility of a genuinely comparative approach.

In contrast with these views, I want to show that it is in fact both possible and necessary to have a properly pluralist conception of standpoints, one that therefore allows and requires a properly comparative approach. That is, I want to defend a conception in which standpoints can have conflicting conceptions of truth without also, because these conceptions contradict each other, ultimately eliminating their sense altogether. In fact, I want to show that the contradictions involved in the ways in which truth is relative, and only those contradictions, justify the idea that there are ways in which the same truth excludes contradiction, that is, ways in which it is universal or absolute.

I shall argue, then, that truth is contradictory, but in ways that give rise to noncontradictory sense and knowledge.1 More specifically, I shall argue that we sometimes can and must think of truth as both absolute and relative in the same respects, and also sometimes as just universally the one, sometimes as just universally the other. I approach this argument through a discussion of Davidson’s and Rorty’s work. I try to show how their own, cogent arguments lead, though entirely despite themselves, to the pluralist, proper comparison-requiring conclusions for which I argue. More precisely, I try to show that their arguments are productively self-canceling (that is, that they undermine their own sense), both in ways that they themselves insist on, and in a further way that leads to a properly comparative view.

Since absolute truth involves given or natural essences of things, and relative truth involves the construction of truths by the perspectives through which they are known, this discussion also applies to the ideas of truth as given essences (essentialism) and as historical construction (constructionism).2 Variations of these ideas of the nature of truth, and consequently of the fundamental nature of reality whose truth it is, are central in and perhaps foundational to the history of philosophy, and they are often also taken up in contemporary liberatory political and subcultural theory. I discuss essentialism and constructionism in their own right in Chapter 6 on heterosexual normativity, and the logic of essences or natures in the context of metaphysics most directly both there and in Chapter 7, on Heidegger.

1. Ethnocentrism and Antirelativism

Rorty argues that we cannot be anything but ethnocentric. That is, we can only take as true what appears true to “us.” As he puts it, we “have to start from where we are”; we cannot escape from our historical circumstances.3 He argues, however, that this claim does not mean that truth is relative. In fact, he argues that it means the reverse. To say that ethnocentrism implies that truth is relative is to say that there are positions other than ours to whose truths we can compare our own, so that our truths are relative to theirs. But, as Rorty points out, we cannot meaningfully talk at all about positions so radically other than ours that their most basic ideas about truth conflict with ours. Anything we say about such positions is inescapably bound to the basic ideas of truth in our own position. That is, we cannot meaningfully compare our truths with fully incompatible ones because the comparison itself is already limited to our ideas of truth. The idea that our truths are relative consequently does not make any sense from the start (25–26, 38, 215–16).

It also follows from this line of thought that we cannot meaningfully talk about a world of objects independent of our culture’s beliefs, to which our beliefs could be relative. Any reference we make to objects is already made in the form of a belief (12, 50–51). That is, anything we can say about such objects, including that they are independent of our beliefs, which is itself a belief, is inescapably bound to the meanings and ideas available to us with which to speak or think. Even our sensory impressions only have meanings and roles for us in the context of our culturally given meanings, language, and beliefs. This side of the issue of relative truth will help clarify various aspects of Rorty’s and Davidson’s discussions of cross-cultural truth, and I occasionally draw on it.

Ethnocentrism, however, does not mean that we cannot test our beliefs. We can test them against each other, and against what we understand in the beliefs of other communities (41). What we ultimately settle on as the best understanding in and between such communities or cultures is true, since truth only has meaning as what we, who can only work with our culture’s meanings, can stably understand (50). Rorty therefore sees legitimate science, for example, “as solidarity” and open-mindedness (38ff.).

Rorty relies heavily on Davidson in arguing the antirelativistic side of these points. Davidson argues against the relativistic idea defended by, for example, Thomas Kuhn and W. V. O. Quine, that it is possible for a culture or position to be so different from ours that we could not translate the meanings of its language into ours.4 If this idea is justified, we cannot avoid the conclusion that truth is relative. The ideas of a position or culture like this would be “incommensurable” with ours: that is, it would have such different ideas about everything that there would be no common standard of meaning or sensemaking with which to compare its meanings with ours. As a result, there would be no way even to begin to compare its ideas with ours so as to decide which is right.

Against this view, Davidson argues that if a language were so fundamentally different from our own, we would not even be able to regard it or meaningfully talk about it as a language at all.5 (Davidson notes that “putting matters this way is unsatisfactory,” and goes on to “improve” the “credibility of the position” (186). I address his subsequent arguments below in discussing translatability.) Consequently the idea of such a radically different language is literally meaningless (232). This is the same kind of argument Rorty offers in connection with cultures or positions radically other than “ours.”

If, on the other hand, Davidson argues, we are able to regard a different language as a language—and this capacity is presupposed and so conceded by the very idea of a different language—then it has basic commonalities with our own meanings and we are then also able to translate it into our language. This would remove the basis for thinking that its and our truths are incomparable with each other and so inescapably relative to different standards. And we are in fact able to regard any different language as a language, for two related reasons that are also arguments supporting his claim that “languages” incommensurable with our own are rightly not regarded as languages at all.

First, Davidson argues, in order to make sense of the idea of a language at all, we have to assume that most of what the speakers of the language say is true (27, 137, 196). Davidson calls this assumption the principle of charity. If this assumption about languages were not true, no one could come to understand any language (200). If someone were trying to learn a language while the people around her or him were making mainly false statements, the words and sentences that person learned would not serve the communicative and practical functions that they do serve in a working language. To put this more accurately, the person would not be able to learn the meanings of the words and sentences at all, since they can only be learned in the course of serving those communicative and practical functions. Since languages are all learned, the assumption that most of what the speakers of the language say is true is involved in the very idea of a language. And in all cases this refers to how we understand truth, since it is our assumption. Consequently, if we are genuinely talking about languages, very different or not, the same connection with and standards for truth are already established with respect to all languages, in common.

Davidson expresses this by saying that the concept of truth is “primitive.” As he states,

I shall call such theories absolute to distinguish them from theories that (also) relativize truth to an interpretation, a model, a possible world, or a domain. In a theory of the sort I am describing, the truth predicate is not defined, but must be considered a primitive expression. (216)

That is, the term “truth” is not analyzed into anything more basic. It does not require analysis to understand it beyond its immediate, unanalyzed meanings, because it itself is the basis of analysis and understanding (216–18).6

Since language is learned in the course of its communicative and practical functions, and since, in fact, its meanings partly consist in just those functions (one necessary test that someone understands what is said, for example, is that she or he reacts in certain ways and performs certain activities), Davidson points out that we can learn the meanings of a language by observing which statements people make in which specific circumstances (162). And because it is already part of the concept of a language that most of what its speakers say is true, we can establish the truth of what the speakers are talking about in the same way.

The second, related reason Davidson gives for our ability to translate any language into ours is that any disagreement we might have about truth, or about anything else, presupposes a background of innumerable agreements (153, 192). If we can say that we differ from another position in any respect, then we have already conceded that we share agreements with the other position about, for example, some of the characteristics of the issue or object we are disagreeing about. If we did not share such agreements, we could not begin to disagree, since we could not even refer to what it is we disagree about. Disagreeing languages, then, share innumerable agreements, and so have an extensive common basis for translating each other into their own terms.

Davidson, then, argues for “a theory of absolute truth” (221; and see also 216, quoted above). And as he also insists, “we do not relinquish the notion of objective truth—quite the contrary.… We … re-establish unmediated touch with the familiar objects whose antics make our sentences and opinions true or false” (198). He argues for this kind of absolute objectivity via a theory of “radical interpretation,” based on the arguments discussed above for the possibility of “radical translation.”

Rorty works out some of the social and scientific consequences of just this idea that we cannot meaningfully question our basic beliefs, although he rejects the terminology of truth, absolute or otherwise. He rejects this terminology because if, as he argues, there is no comparison between our beliefs and the world independent of our (culture’s) beliefs, the idea of truth can contribute nothing to how we assess our beliefs beyond the relations of those beliefs among themselves. Consequently, “There is a human activity called ‘justifying beliefs’ … but this activity does not have a goal called Truth.” And if “one takes the principal use of the adjective ‘true’ to be endorsement [like a term of praise] rather th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Epigraphs
• Introduction: Sometimes Always True
• 1. Comparing Different Cultural or Theoretical Frameworks: Davidson, Rorty, and the Nature of Truth
• 2. An Internal Connection between Logic and Rhetoric, between Frameworks, and a Legitimate Foundation for Knowledge
• 3. Pluralism, Legitimate Self-Contradiction, and a Proposed Solution to Some Shared Fundamental Problems of Political and Mainstream Epistemology
• 4. The Logic of Genuine Political Pluralism and Oscar Wilde’s Artificiality of Wit and Style
• 5. Foucault’s Pluralism and the Possibility of Truth and of Ideology Critique
• 6. How to Be Properly Unnatural: The Metaphysics of Heterosexual Normativity and the Importance of the Concepts of Essence and Nature for Pluralism
• 7. The Necessary Inconclusiveness of Heideggerian Interpretation of Metaphysics and the Undecided Nature of Essential or Logical Connection
• 8. The Formal Structure of Metaphysics and The Importance of Being Earnest
• 9. The Logical Structure of Dreams and Their Relation to Reality
• Coda: Overviews
• References
• Index