Date: Mon, 15 Dec 1997 17:38:44 +1100
From: Rob Schaap <rws-AT-comserver.canberra.edu.au>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Re: Pragmatism


G'day Thaxists,

Probably my last post for a couple of weeks.  I'm making off for the cozy,
comfy, modestly spectacular Tasmania, scene of my late teens and early
twenties (which, whilst not marked by as much horizontal folk-dancing as
were Jurri's, were good years indeed).

To business.  Justin sinks the slipper into Carrol thus:

>It's absolutely mind-boggling ignorance of pragmatism to think that we
>take the perspective of the isolated individuals apart from all social
>relations.

As surely as a Levi post follows a Henwood post, this must be so, Carrol!
I think Andy has been trying to tell us just this.

This excerpt from yet another of my dusty old drafts that never got to be
articles (on Pomos, the 'antirepresentationalist pragmatist' Rorty and
Habermas in this case).  Actually, I'd quite like to know if all this was
crap, anyway.

___________________________
... When Aronowitz  argues (Bove, 1986, 9) that critical scholars, such as
Habermas, refuse to recognise that our knowledge is constituted by
basically discontinuous discourses and that transcendental truth, and
consequently the transhistorical subject, are untenable assumptions, he
unwittingly opens the way for the pragmatic rejoinder of Richard Rorty.

Rorty suspects that Habermas's 'unfinished project' need not succumb to
this post-modernist criticism.  He offers an approach, which shares its
basics more, but by no means entirely, with Habermas than the others, by
which scientific discourse can usefully be located and utilised.  In
focusing on the notions of knowledge and truth, he (1991a, 1) invokes the
'antirepresentationalist', position:

'one which does not view knowledge as a matter of getting reality right,
but rather as a matter of acquiring habits of action for coping with
reality. '

In short, he effectively denies that the truth of a statement can be found
by checking it against an objective reality.  Rather, truth is determined
by what social practices allow as evidence.   This effectively makes of
humanity the very 'basis of which all knowledge could be constituted as ...
evidence'.  The subject is thus rescued from Foucault's antihumanist
prescription.

(blah, blah ...)

The British Hegelian F. H. Bradley (1914, 258) was arguing along these
lines eighty years ago:

'In the realm of the special sciences and of practical life, and in short
everywhere, unless we except philosophy, we are compelled to take partial
truths as being utterly true.  We cannot do this consistently, but we are
forced to do this, and our action within limits is justified.'

and (1914, 266):

'... within limits and in their proper place our relative view insists
everywhere on the value and on the necessity of absolute judgements.'

By this reasoning, truth is defined much more accessibly as that which is
tenable in both argumentation and application, according to beliefs about
the universe that characterise a sociohistorical instance.  This is
effectively how Habermas defines it (1979, ch. 1), and Marx's German
Ideology can also be read as making just this point.  At the very least,
both thinkers might join Geuss (1982, 94) in developing the significance of
this point:

'If rational argumentation can lead to the conclusion that a critical
theory (defined as 'the self consciousness') of a successful process of
'emancipation and enlightenment' represents the most advanced position of
consciousness available to us in our given historical situation, why the
obsession with whether or not we may call it 'true'?'

(Blah, blah ... )

Rorty (1991b, 168) sheets the responsibility home to the discourse of
scientism:

'we think we need this only because an overzealous philosophy of science
has created an impossible ideal of ahistorical legitimation.'

Marx too was aware of the socio-historical contingency of truth.  His
interest and expertise lay in critiquing issues in contemporary society.
The mode of production and the associated formation of the social of the
day he characterised as that transient organising principle he termed
'capitalism'.  In that light, political economy encompassed,

'forms of thought which are socially valid, and therefore objective, for
the relations of production belonging to this historically determined mode
of production (Marx, 1976, 169).'

... Whether we be at a stage in historical development, as Marx, Habermas
or Geuss would have it, or trapped within a specific autonomous 'bloc' in
time, as Foucault, Lyotard and Aronowitz would have it, our place in time
and space may still be characterised as a stage, or an episode, of a
'consciousness' which sets specific standards and possibilities of truth.
In this sense the arguments between, say, Habermas and Lyotard, lose much
of their relevance.  We retain what Aronowitz calls the 'critical purpose'
of theory, in that we pursue an alliance with practice that is always
historically specific (1981, 127).  With the help of Richard Rorty, we can
arrive at a tenable theoretical solution that satisfies the modernist's
'project' yet does not have to contradict the post-modernist's denial of
modernist historicism.

Such a position is not inconsistent with recent socio-historical analyses
of scientific practice (as posited by Feyerabend, 1975, 303/4; and Kuhn,
1977, 24), and the 'post-structuralist' arguments of Foucault (ibid) and
Derrida (1982).  Habermas's critique of science (1972, 34) summarises the
position most succinctly:

'the unity of the objectivity of possible objects of experience is formed
not in transcendental consciousness but in the behavioural system of
instrumental action.'

The Kantian distinction, between that which can be known and that which is,
has thus lost its relevance.


(Blah, blah ...)

Rorty (1991a, 13)  pursues the point,

'If one reinterprets objectivity as intersubjectivity, or as solidarity ...
then one will drop the question of how to get in touch with
'mind-independent' and 'language-independent' reality.  One will replace it
with questions like 'What are the limits of our community?  Are our
encounters sufficiently free and open? ... These are political questions
rather than metaphysical or epistemological questions.  '

They are also the sorts of questions Habermas has been addressing for three
decades ...  (more blah ...).
________________________

Please ridicule this by return mail, as I'm off in twenty-four hours.

My sincere gratitude for a great year in cyberspace, comrades!  And a
Bacchanalian Christmas to you all.

Love,
Rob.



************************************************************************

Rob Schaap, Lecturer in Communication, University of Canberra, Australia.

Phone:  02-6201 2194  (BH)
Fax:    02-6201 5119

************************************************************************

'It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have
lightened the day's toil of any human being.'    (John Stuart Mill)

"The separation of public works from the state, and their migration
into the domain of the works undertaken by capital itself, indicates
the degree to which the real community has constituted itself in
the form of capital."                                    (Karl Marx)

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