Rorty’s Bewildering Platonic Backsliding: Truth Claims are Absolute and Eternal
I recently read (and listened to parts of) Rorty’s last lecture, Dewey and Posner on Pragmatism and Moral Progress. In it, he makes an astonishing claim (at least it astonished me):
We can cheerfully agree that truths — all kinds of truths — are eternal and absolute.
I find it almost impossible to believe Rorty said this. Here’s the context for the quote (bolding throughout this essay is added unless otherwise specified):
But pragmatists, at least those of my sect, do not think that anything — either the physical world or the consensus of inquirers — makes beliefs true. We have as little use for the notion of “what makes a true sentence true” as we do for that of “what a true sentence corresponds to.” On our view, all consensus does is help us recognize moral truths. We can cheerfully agree that truths — all kinds of truths — are eternal and absolute. It was true before the foundations of the world were laid both that 2 + 2 = 4 and that I should be wearing this particular tie today. It was also true that the lash is, in the sense of the Eighth Amendment, a cruel punishment. Eternal and absolute truth is the only kind of truth there is, even though the only way we know what is true is by reaching a consensus that may well prove transitory. All that can be salvaged from the claim that truth is a product of consensus is that finding out what other people believe is, most of the time, a good way to decide what to believe oneself.
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Our judgments of progress and of rationality will remain as parochial as our judgments of everything else. Yet the parochial, historically-conditioned character of justification is compatible with the eternal and absolute character of truth.
I found this talk of eternal and absolute coming from Rorty deeply disturbing. The one word that is most problematic is cheerfully. Agree would have been fine (though accept or tolerate would have been better), but cheerfully is hard to swallow. Perhaps Rorty was being ironic. Worse, sarcastic. Worst of all, petty. By describing the agreement as cheerful, Rorty cuts the legs out from under the pragmatic project (first articulated by Dewey) to wean us from the need to characterize truth as eternal and absolute. What makes it worse is that Rorty knows agreeing that truth claims are absolute and eternal is an empty compliment because such claims are generated by speakers whose truth theories are based on the parochial, historically-conditioned character of justification: the only way we know what is true is by reaching a consensus that may well prove transitory.
So I dove into researching his statements on truth claims hoping to find some way to explain such apostasy. I know that his beliefs about truth were largely derived from Donald Davidson, so I also looked more deeply into Davidson’s beliefs regarding the absoluteness and timelessness of truth claims.
I’m sad to report the following conclusions:
- This final lecture was not a one off aberration. Rorty has been claiming that truth claims are absolute and eternal for a long time, at least since Truth and Progress.
- However, he also repeatedly criticized such views over roughly the same period.
- Finally, he attributes his beliefs about the absolute and eternal nature of truth claims to Davidson — but this is a serious misreading of Davidson’s views.
Note that I am specifically addressing the nature of truth claims (e.g., slavery is immoral), not the nature of truth theories. Rorty’s conflicting views are regarding the absolute and eternal nature of truth claims. He has always been quite clear that pragmatic theories of truth, based as they are on justification, are parochial and historicist.
Let’s start off by reviewing Rorty’s negative comments about absolute and eternal truth claims over the years (if I had more time, I would try to exactly order them chronologically to help pinpoint when he changed his mind about the nature of truth claims):
In what follows, I shall be arguing that it helps understand the pragmatists to think of them as saying that the distinction between the past and the future can substitute for all the old philosophical distinctions — the ones which Derrideans call ‘the binary oppositions of Western metaphysics’. The most important of these oppositions is that between reality and appearance. Others include the distinctions between the unconditioned and the conditioned, the absolute and the relative, and the properly moral as opposed to the merely prudent. (Philosophy and Social Hope)
“It is, indeed, the case that ethical knowledge cannot claim absoluteness, but that is because the notion of absoluteness is incoherent.” [Quoting Putnam.]
Since we agree on all this, I have long been puzzled about what keeps us apart and in particular about why Putnam thinks of me as a “cultural relativist.” (Truth and Progress)
If we shift from correctness and warrant to truth, then I suppose we might say, noncontroversially if pointlessly, that the truth of what we say is not just for a time or place. But that high-minded platitude is absolutely barren of consequences, either for our standards of warranted assertibility or for any other aspect of our practices. It is the sort of vacuity that pragmatists should avoid. (Truth and Progress)
We pragmatists take the same dim view of Absolute Truth and of Reality as It Is in Itself as the Enlightenment took of Divine Wrath and Divine Judgment. (Truth and Progress)
[T]his shift would lead Hegel, and us, to describe our own community and our own philosophical views in terms of parochial, temporary, contingent needs. It would lead one, for example, to put forward an account of truth not as something that clears up all difficulties or removes all obscurities connected with the topic, but as something useful in clearing up our difficulties and removing our obscurities. If one claims that a theory of truth is what works better than any competing theory, one is saying that it works better by reference to our purposes, our particular situation in intellectual history. One is not claiming that that was how it would have paid, always and everywhere, to have thought of truth. It is simply what it would be best for us to believe about truth. Taken as part of an overall philosophical outlook, such a theory would be part of an attempt to hold our age in thought.
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I said earlier that the most Dewey can claim is that truth as what works is the theory of truth it now pays us to have. It pays us to believe this because we have seen the unfortunate results of believing otherwise — of trying to find some ahistorical and absolute relation to reality for truth to name and we must now try to do better. (Truth and Progress)
Unfortunately, in contemporary American academic culture, it is commonly assumed that once you have seen through Plato, essentialism, and eternal truth you will naturally turn to Marx. (Achieving Our Country)
But after a time I became convinced that the idea of such a destined terminus — the idea that rational inquirers must necessarily converge to a common opinion — was just one more attempt to escape from time into eternity. That is why so much of what I have written has been dismissive of notions such as “the love of truth,” “universal validity,” and “getting things right.”
Ideas like these, I have argued, bolster fantasies we would be better off without. (Intellectual Autobiography)
I look forward to an era in which the question “Are there absolutes?” has no resonance. (Intellectual Autobiography)
One might draw the conclusion from such an array of quotations that Rorty was adamantly opposed to all claims of absoluteness and timelessness. One would be wrong.
Let’s look at where Rorty apparently first fully endorses the view that truth claims are absolute and eternal:
Truth is, to be sure, an absolute notion, in the following sense: “true for me but not for you” and “true in my culture but not in yours” are weird, pointless locutions. So is “true then, but not now.” Whereas we often say “good for this purpose, but not for that” and “right in this situation, but not in that,” it seems pointlessly paradoxical to relativize truth to purposes or situations. On the other hand, ‘justified for me but not for you” (or ‘justified in my culture but not in yours”) makes perfect sense. So when James said that “the true is the good in the way of belief,” he was accused of confusing justification with truth, the relative with the absolute.
James would, indeed, have done better to say that phrases like “the good in the way of belief” and “what it is better for us to believe” are interchangeable with ‘justified” rather than with “true.” But he could have gone on to say that we have no criterion of truth other than justification, and that justification and betterness-to-believe will always be as relative to audiences (and to ranges of truth candidates) as is goodness to purposes and rightness to situations. Granted that “true” is an absolute term, its conditions of application will always be relative.
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Granted that the criterion of truth is justification, and that justification is relative, the nature of truth is not.
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Davidson has helped us realize that the very absoluteness of truth is a good reason for thinking “true” indefinable and for thinking that no theory of the nature of truth is possible. It is only the relative about which there is anything to say.
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For the absoluteness of truth makes it unserviceable as such a goal. (Truth and Progress)
There are two things interesting about this extended passage. First, it appears in the introduction to Truth and Progress, so presumably it was written after the essays in that volume; essays in which Rorty was largely critical of the view that truth is absolute and eternal(see above). Second, he seems to credit Davidson for claiming that truth is absolute (though elsewhere Rorty also credits Jeffrey Stout for correcting his views, see below).
I’ll first address Rorty’s contradictory descriptions of truth, then his claim that Davidson describes truth as absolute (and presumably eternal).
There’s no question that Rorty was ambivalent about the nature of truth claims right to the end. In his final lecture he says that truth claims are absolute and eternal. But in his Intellectual Autobiography, one of the last things he wrote, he continues to argue that we should give up on notions of absoluteness (see above).
His volume of essays, Truth and Progress, is where he is at his most ambivalent about the nature of truth claims. In the introduction, he fully embraces the view that they are absolute and eternal. But in various essays in the same volume he criticizes claims of absoluteness. If I were to pick the place where Rorty first suggests he has changed his mind about the absolute and eternal nature of truth claims, it would be this passage in one of the essays in that volume:
It was, of course, true in earlier times that women should not have been oppressed, just as it was true before Newton said so that gravitational attraction accounted for the movements of the planets.42
42 Pragmatists need not deny that true sentences are always true (as I have, unfortunately, suggested in the past that they might)…Stout…rightly rebukes me for these suggestions and says that pragmatists should agree with everybody else that “Slavery is absolutely wrong” has always been true even in periods when this sentence would have sounded crazy to everybody concerned, even slaves (who hoped that their fellow tribespeople would return in force and enslave their present masters). All that pragmatists need is the claim that this sentence is not made true by something other than the beliefs we would use to support it and, in particular, not by something like the Nature of Human Beings. (Truth and Progress)
(I qualify Rorty changing his mind about the absolute and eternal nature of truth claims, because he elsewhere changed his mind about other aspects of truth, e.g., whether we get things right. For more on this other change of mind, see my essay Rorty Recants (partially). I don’t think the two issues are related.)
In this passage, Rorty admits that he was wrong to have denied that truth claims are always true. Rorty credits Chapter 11 of Jeffrey Stout’s book Ethics After Babel for showing him the error of his ways. Since I don’t have access to Stout’s book at the moment, I’m unable to follow this thread further. I will point out that the argument seems to be one based on the common sense understanding of truth, since he says, pragmatists should agree with everybody else.
What’s odd about this capitulation is that in the very same volume of essays, Rorty provides an extended discussion of how Dewey urged us to let go of common sense notions of absoluteness and timelessness, even though such feelings run very deep in Western thought:
John Dewey once quoted G. K Chesterton’s remark that “[p]ragmatism is a matter of human needs and one of the first of human needs is to be something more than a pragmatist.” Chesterton had a point, and Dewey granted it. Dewey was quite aware of what he called “a supposed necessity of the ‘human mind’ to believe in certain absolute truths.” But he thought that this necessity had existed only in an earlier stage of human history, a stage we might now move beyond. He thought that we had reached a point at which it might be possible, and helpful, to wrench ourselves free of it. He recognized that his suggestion was counterintuitive and would meet the kind of opposition Searle mounts. But he thought that the long-term good done by getting rid of outdated needs would outweigh the temporary disturbance caused by attempts to change our philosophical intuitions.
As Dewey saw it, the need to distinguish between the pursuit of truth “for its own sake” and the pursuit of what Bacon called “the improvement of man’s estate” arose out of particular social conditions.” These conditions prevailed in ancient Greece and made it useful to draw certain distinctions that became, in the course of time, part of our common sense. These included, for example, the distinctions between theory and practice, mind and body, objective and subjective, morality and prudence, and all the others Derrida groups together as “the binary oppositions of Western metaphysics.”
Dewey was happy to admit that these distinctions had, in their time, served us well. In their time, they were neither confusions nor repressive devices nor mystifications. On the contrary, they were instruments that Greek thinkers used to change social conditions, often for the better. But over a couple of millennia, these instruments outlived their usefulness. Dewey thought that, just as many Christians had outgrown the need to ask whether the sentences of the Creed correspond to objective reality, so civilization as a whole might outgrow the supposed necessity to believe in absolute truths.
Dewey learned from Hegel to historicize everything, including Hegel’s own picturesque but outdated story of the union of subject and object at the end of History. Like Marx, Dewey dropped Hegel’s notion of Absolute Spirit, but kept his insight that ideas and movements that had begun as instruments of emancipation (Greek metaphysics, Christianity, the rise of the bourgeoisie, the Hegelian System) had typically, over the course of time, turned into instruments of repression — into parts of what Dewey called “the crust of convention.” Dewey thought that the idea of “absolute truth” was such an idea and that the pragmatic theory of truth was “true in the pragmatic sense of truth: it works, it clears up difficulties, removes obscurities, puts individuals into more experimental, less dogmatic, and less arbitrarily sceptical relations to life.” “The pragmatist,” he continued, “is quite content to have the truth of his theory consist in its working in these various ways, and to leave to the intellectualist the proud possession of [truth as] an unanalyzable, unverifiable, unworking property.”
Dewey said that Chesterton’s remark “has revealed that the chief objection of absolutists to the pragmatic doctrine of the personal (or ‘subjective’) factor in belief is that the pragmatist has spilled the personal milk in the absolutist’s cocoanut [sic].” His point was that Chesterton had implicitly admitted that the best, and perhaps the only, argument for the absolutist view of truth was that it satisifed a human need. Dewey saw that need as one we could outgrow. Just as the child outgrows the need for parental care and the need to believe in parental omnipotence and benevolence, so we may in time outgrow the need to believe in divinities that concern themselves with our happiness and in the possibility of allying ourselves with a nonhuman power called the Intrinsic Nature of Reality. In doing so, we might outgrow both the need to see ourselves as deeply sinful and guilty and the need to escape from the relative to the absolute. Eventually, Dewey thought, the subjective-objective and relative-absolute distinctions might become as obsolete as the distinction between the soul and the body or between natural and supernatural causes.
Dewey was quite aware, however, that the good work still being done by old distinctions would have to be taken over by new distinctions. He was also quite aware of what Berkeley called the need to “speak with the vulgar and think with the learned,” to apply different strokes to different folks. So his writings are a sometimes confusing mixture of invocations of familiar distinctions with counterintuitive philosophical reinterpretations of those distinctions. His reformulations were often, at least to the vulgar, merely bewildering. So we should not be surprised to find Dewey, at the same time that he was energetically defending the pragmatic theory of truth against his absolutist opponents, writing such sentences as “The university function is the truth-function” and “The one thing that is inherent and essential [to the idea of the university] is the idea of truth.” (Truth and Progress)
It’s ironic (and to me a bit sad) that in his last lecture, the annual Dewey Lecture in Law and Philosophy(!), Rorty falls prey to the same “confusing mixture” of views that he ascribes to Dewey. Rorty’s views are just as bewildering as Dewey’s. And this is not the only place where Rorty describes the belief in absolute and eternal truth claims as a form of common sense we should outgrow:
The distinction between the found and the made is a version of that between the absolute and the relative, between something which is what it is apart from its relations to other things, and something whose nature depends upon those relations. In the course of the centuries, this distinction has become central to what Derrida calls ‘the metaphysics of presence’ the search for a ‘full presence beyond the reach of play’, an absolute beyond the reach of relationality. So if we wish to abandon that metaphysics we must stop distinguishing between the absolute and the relative. We anti-Platonists cannot permit ourselves to be called ‘relativists’, since that description begs the central question. That central question is about the utility of the vocabulary which we inherited from Plato and Aristotle.
Our opponents like to suggest that to abandon that vocabulary is to abandon rationality — that to be rational consists precisely in respecting the distinctions between the absolute and the relative, the found and the made, object and subject, nature and convention, reality and appearance. We pragmatists reply that if that were what rationality was, then no doubt we are, indeed, irrationalists. But of course we go on to add that being an irrationalist in that sense is not to be incapable of argument. We irrationalists do not foam at the mouth and behave like animals. We simply refuse to talk in a certain way, the Platonic way. The views we hope to persuade people to accept cannot be stated in Platonic terminology. So our efforts at persuasion must take the form of gradual inculcation of new ways of speaking, rather than of straightforward argument within old ways of speaking.
To sum up what I have said so far: We pragmatists shrug off charges that we are ‘relativists’ or ‘irrationalists’ by saying that these charges presuppose precisely the distinctions we reject. If we have to describe ourselves, perhaps it would be best for us to call ourselves anti-dualists. This does not, of course, mean that we are against what Derrida calls ‘binary oppositions’: dividing the world up into the good Xs and the bad non-Xs will always be an indispensable tool of inquiry. But we are against a certain specific set of distinctions, the Platonic distinctions. We have to admit that these distinctions have become part of Western common sense, but we do not regard this as a sufficient argument for retaining them. (Philosophy and Social Hope)
One interpretation of why Rorty in his final lecture chose to speak with the vulgar, by cheerfully agreeing that truth claims are absolute and eternal, is that he had simply grown tired of trying to wean the vulgar from our increasingly outdated common sense views regarding truth claims. He was tired of deflecting the relativist label, especially given that he was speaking at one of the last bastions of Platonism, the University of Chicago. And Rorty was aware of the good work still being done by old distinctions, for example, his claim that the very absoluteness of truth makes it unserviceable as a goal of inquiry. All of these factors may help us understand his cheerfulness in accepting a description of truth claims that overall he hoped we would outgrow.
A less charitable interpretation of why Rorty clung to the common sense view that truth claims are absolute and eternal is that he deeply misunderstood Davidson’s views on the matter. It wouldn’t be the first time he misunderstood Davidson.
While Davidson does view truth claims as all or nothing, i.e., there are not degrees of truth and so such claims are absolute in that sense, he does not claim that truth is absolute in the sense of for all people and cultures. On the contrary, he explicitly formalizes his theory of truth claims to be speaker and time relative!
We can get away from what seems to be talk of the (absolute) truth of timeless statements if we accept truth as relativized to occasions of speech, and a strong notion of translation. (Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation)
Even Davidson’s definition of an absolute theory of truth was nonetheless relative to the occasions of speech (speaker and time):
By a theory of truth, I mean a theory that satisfies something like Tarski’s Convention T…The theory must be relativized to a time and a speaker (at least) to handle indexical expressions. Nevertheless 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. (Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation)
Davidson makes clear that an absolute theory of truth was nonetheless relative to speaker and time. Absolute did not mean true for everyone and for all time, it meant not relative to an interpretation, a model, a possible world, or a domain. (It would have been clearer if Davidson had used general theory of truth vs special theory of truth for the distinction.) Also, note that Davidson describes the truth predicate as primitive. It cannot be defined by or reduced to other concepts. It is possible that Rorty mistook the primitiveness of the truth predicate for absoluteness.
In fact, Davidson explicitly discussed the issue of how the same sentence may at one time or in one mouth be true and at another time or in another mouth be false (Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation):
I shall barely suggest how this could be done, but bare suggestion is all that is needed: the idea is technically trivial, and in line with work being done on the logic of the tenses. We could take truth to be a property, not of sentences, but of utterances, or speech acts, or ordered triples of sentences, times, and persons; but it is simplest just to view truth as a relation between a sentence, a person, and a time.
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The theory of meaning undergoes a systematic but not puzzling change; corresponding to each expression with a demonstrative element there must in the theory be a phrase that relates the truth conditions of sentences in which the expression occurs to changing times and speakers. Thus the theory will entail sentences like the following:
‘I am tired’ is true as (potentially) spoken by p at t if and only if p is tired at t. ‘That book was stolen’ is true as (potentially) spoken by p at t if and only if the book demonstrated by p at t is stolen prior to t.
Thus, Davidson would completely disagree with Rorty’s claim that
Truth is, to be sure, an absolute notion, in the following sense: “true for me but not for you” and “true in my culture but not in yours” are weird, pointless locutions. So is “true then, but not now.” (see above)
In fact, Davidson fully embraced similar locutions in his formal theory of truth. So Davidson would have no problem with a truth claim such as: ‘Slavery is good’ is true as spoken by Jefferson Davis in 1860 iff slavery is good for Jefferson Davis in 1860.
So despite his arguments to the contrary, Rorty’s view that truth claims are absolute and eternal is supported by nothing else than Platonic distinctions so deeply embedded in Western common sense over two millennia that they have become common sense. Rorty cannot legitimately look to Davidson’s theory of truth for support since it flat out contradicts Rorty’s views regarding the absolute and eternal nature of truth claims.
I suppose what most jars me when I hear Rorty say that truth is absolute and eternal is the fact that he so cheerfully employs such a barren platitude — the sort of vacuity that pragmatists should avoid — when his whole career was spent showing us how to leave such empty descriptions behind. What also deeply saddens me is that because it was his last lecture, there was no chance for any substantive rebuttal by his critics. Thus, we will never settle the matter of how Rorty really felt about truth claims.
I publish my research into this question with the fervent hope that some Rorty scholar will show that I’ve made some fundamental mistake in my interpretation of Rorty’s inconsistency on this issue. I did search for essays dealing in depth with these contradictory strains in Rorty’s thought. I was surprised and disappointed to come up empty. If anyone knows of such an analysis, please let me know. Nothing would please me more than to discover that in the end, Rorty completely and unequivocally rejected the view that truth claims are absolute and eternal.
Appendix: Miscellaneous Quotes regarding absolute and eternal truth claims
I collected the following quotes in my research. While I didn’t find them useful for the flow of my argument above, they may prove useful to others thinking about this topic, so I am including them here:
[I]t runs together the truth of a sentence (which, unless it contains a referent to a time, is eternally true or eternally false and cannot “become” true) with the expediency of believing a sentence to be true. (Truth and Progress)
The pragmatist wants to derelativize [ethics and science] by affirming that in both we aim at what Williams thinks of as “absolute” truth, while denying that this latter notion can be explicated in terms of the notion of “how things really are.” The pragmatist does not want to explicate ‘true’ at all, and sees no point either in the absolute-relative distinction, or in the question of whether questions of appraisal genuinely arise. Unlike Williams, the pragmatist sees no truth in relativism. (Objectivity Relativism and Truth)
As they pointed out over and over again, Dewey had no absolutes. To say, as Dewey did, that ‘growth itself is the only moral end’, left one without a criterion for growth, and thus with no way to refute Hitler’s suggestion that Germany had ‘grown’ under his rule. To say that truth is what works is to reduce the quest for truth to the quest for power. Only an appeal to something eternal, absolute, and good like the God of St Thomas, or the ‘nature of human beings’ described by Aristotle would permit one to answer the Nazis, to justify one’s choice of social democracy over fascism. (Philosophy and Social Hope)
So pragmatists are often said to confuse truth, which is absolute and eternal, with justification, which is transitory because relative to an audience. Pragmatists have responded to this criticism in two principal ways. Some, like Peirce, James and Putnam, have said that we can retain an absolute sense of ‘true’ by identifying it with justification in the ideal situation’ the situation which Peirce called ‘the end of inquiry’. Others, like Dewey (and, I have argued, Davidson), have suggested that there is little to be said about truth, and that philosophers should explicitly and self-consciously confine themselves to justification, to what Dewey called ‘warranted assertibility’.
I prefer the latter strategy. … Furthermore, I think that any ‘absoluteness’ which is supposedly ensured by appeal to such notions is equally well ensured if, with Davidson, we insist that human belief cannot swing free of the nonhuman environment and that, as Davidson insists, most of our beliefs (most of anybody’s beliefs) must be true. For this insistence gives us everything we wanted to get from ‘realism’ without invoking the slogan that ‘the real and the true are “independent of our beliefs” , a slogan which, Davidson rightly says, it is futile either to accept or to reject.
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The claim that ‘pragmatism is unable to account for the absoluteness of truth’ confuses two demands: the demand that we explain the relation between the world and our claims to have true beliefs and the specifically epistemological demand either for present certainty or for a path guaranteed to lead to certainty, if only in the infinitely distant future.
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Pragmatists realize that this way of thinking about knowledge and truth makes certainty unlikely. But they think that the quest for certainty even as a long-term goal is an attempt to escape from the world. (Philosophy and Social Hope)
