,
CRÍTICA
Revista Hispanoamericana de Filosofı́a
Vol. XXIX, No. 85 (abril 97): 41–64
A CRITIQUE OF HISTORICISM
ROY CLOUSER
The College of New Jersey
Although the Hegelian and Marxist forms of historicism
are now out of fashion, scholars in a variety of fields are
presently endorsing new forms of that theory. In fact, the
influence of historicism has spread with such amazing rapidity that its concomitant relativism has become the HIV
infection of the contemporary scene.
The central claim of historicism is that all theories, traditions, interpretations, and most —if not all— concepts,
are nothing more than cultural artifacts of a particular time
and place. Since they are one and all human creations,
none of them can claim to be true in the sense of corresponding to reality. On this view, virtually everything
from reports of present perception to 1 + 1 = 2 are taken
to be en toto historically conditioned artifacts of human
culture.
This essay will first examine some of the key claims of
historicism as a theory of knowledge, and offer a critical
response to them. It will do this selectively rather than in
great detail, considering only the central claims that lie at
the heart of all its varieties so that it is the more significant
that these claims are found to fail. It will then focus on one
of the most virulent of its varieties, namely, its combination
with pragmatism as advocated by Richard Rorty.
41
Two Senses of the Term “History”
It is a tautology that everything (other than God) is history if “history” is used to mean the totality of all that
has been and will be in time. But in that case the word
would —confusingly— mean the same as “the universe”,
and historic-ism would not comprise an interesting or informative theory about human experience or knowledge. The
only way it can be a genuinely interpretative hypothesis
is if the term “historicism” derives from another meaning
of history, one which connotes the human power to form
culture and which is the subject of the discipline called history. The historian does not study everything that has ever
happened for the simple reasons that: 1) to do so would
take as long as the past took to unfold, and 2) most of
what has happened is unimportant. Unimportant to what?
To the development of a given culture, which is therefore
a more precise description of what the study of history is
about. This is why a historian does want to understand the
conditions, causes, and effects of, say, Caesar’s crossing of
the Rubicon, or the bubonic plague of the 13th century,
but not of whether you or I got a raise last year. Whether
we got raises is very important to us and our families, but
made virtually no difference to the culture in which we
live.
At bottom, then, culture means any product of the human power to control the environment. It includes control
over other persons so as to give form to their social existence, and control over nature so as to give new form to the
materials, sounds, colors, etc., that already exist.1 In this
sense languages, social organizations, sciences, technology,
arts, as well as all artificial objects, are cultural products
1
Cmp. Dooyeweerd’s remarks in A New Critique of Theoretical
Thought, vol. II, Presbyterian & Reformed Pub. Co., Philadelphia,
1955, p. 198.
42
and history is the study which aims at explaining their
development. With this distinction between the two senses
of “history” in mind, we may say that Historicism is the
theory which claims that history in the narrower sense, the
sense of culture-formation, is the sole interpretive standpoint form which history in its all-encompassing sense is
to be understood. This is why Maurice Mandelbaum has
characterized the theory as “a genetic model of explanation
which attempts to base all evaluation on the nature of the
historical (culture-forming) process itself”.2
Earlier in this century, Wilhelm Dilthey praised this
theory as “the last step to the liberation of man”. He said:
The historical consciousness of the finiteness of every historical phenomenon, every human or social condition, and
of the relativity of every kind of belief, is the last step in
the liberation of man.
By its means man attains to the sovereign power to appropriate the contents of every experience, to throw himself entirely into it, unprejudiced, as if there were not any
system of philosophy or belief which could bind men. Life
becomes free from conceptual knowledge; the mind becomes
sovereign with regard to all the cobwebs of dogmatic thought
[. . . ] Here we are confronted with something that cannot be
spirited away. And, in contrast to relativity, the continuity of
the creative force asserts itself as the most essential historial
fact.3
The liberation of which Dilthey speaks in this quote is the
same as that which had been sought by Kant: liberation
from the advances of the natural sciences that seemed to
threaten humans with being but little cogs in the great cosmic machinery. For if humans are wholly determined products of random natural causes, then their alleged freedom
2
See Maurice Mandelbaum, “Historicism”, in The Encyclopedia
of Philosophy, vols. 3 & 4, Macmillan Co., 1967, p. 24.
3
Quoted in Dooyeweerd, op. cit., p. 206.
43
of thought and will, their creativity, and their moral responsibility, are but illusions. The way to defeat the threat of
such naturalistic determinism, says Dilthey, is to see concepts and sciences as human cultural products. So whereas
the threat is that we are the creation of blind natural forces,
historicism’s solution is to turn the tables. It claims with
respect to both God and nature that it is we who have
made those forces, and not they that have made us. In this
way historicism presses as far as possible toward the goal
of concluding that all experience and knowledge are never
of any independently existing reality, but only of cultural
forms we have created.
Historicism is therefore best understood as (yet) another
version of Kant. In place of categorical concepts which humans impose unconsciously on sensation so as to create the
world we experience, historicism has it that these concepts
too are our own creations. So instead of having to defend
a particular set of concepts as privileged because necessary
and beyond our control, historicism holds that it is only the
human power of control —“the continuity of the creative
force”— which is in a privileged position “in contrast to
relativity”. It is the one exception because it is the force
which creates all concepts of the natural world, the social
world, the sciences, the arts, religious beliefs, etc., as well
as all other competing epistemological hypotheses about
how to interpret the nature of experience and knowledge.
A Critique of Historicism
But one has only to state such a theory to see at once
that it generates the most grievous difficulties. As noted
above, historicism welcomes the result that all statements
of belief are products of the human power to create them.
But it holds this not just in the obvious and trivial sense
that our concepts and beliefs have been formed by us,
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but in the vastly different sense that —so far as we can
ever know— their content is wholly our invention. Thus
even math, physics, and biology, are reflections of our own
desires, needs, and preferences rather than discoveries of
the way the world is. Historicism welcomes this because if
human cultural activity produces its objects (the way Kant’s
categories did), no concept of natural order can be thought
to stand over against humans and determine what they are.
Thus human freedom is preserved.
But such a position also entails that no belief or statement of a belief can be known to be true in the sense
of corresponding to reality, so that every opinion has the
same ground as any other. Indeed, Dilthey himself saw this
clearly when he said:
The historical world-view has broken the last chain not yet
broken by philosophy and natural science. Everything is
flowing, nothing remains. But where are the means to conquer the anarchy of opinions which threatens us?4
In fact, this difficulty is even more critical than Dilthey
seems to have realized. For in this way of attempting to
save human freedom from the domination of “conceptual
knowledge” and the “cobwebs” of dogmatic theories, every
belief whatever is relativized to the human power to form
it. The difficulty with this is that if all beliefs are on equal
footing because none can be known to correspond to what
they purport to be about, this conclusion would have to
apply to the theory of historicism itself! Historicism, too,
according to historicism, is just one more story we invent
without ever having any way to know that it does or doesn’t
correspond to reality. And in that case historicism fails as
a theory of human experience and knowledge because it is
4
Dooyeweerd, op. cit., p. 207.
45
self-referentially incoherent in the strong sense: when applied to itself it requires that it cannot be true in precisely
the sense in which it claims to be true.
Of course it is open to a defender of historicism to try to
meet this difficulty head-on by arguing that while all other
claims to knowledge are cultural artifacts constructed for
our own purposes, the assertion of historicism alone is not.
Perhaps Dilthey had this rejoinder in mind by when he
said that the creative force stands in contrast to all that is
relative; perhaps he meant to include not only the force
itself but also the belief that it is what creates all else. But
what could possibly be said to defend this claim that would
not be forced to assume many other types of statements as
true in the sense historicism denies? Any argument for it
would have to regard the logical principles of reasoning,
statements about the natural world, number beliefs, and
much about the rise and nature of language as also corresponding to reality. For example, it would have to be
able to assert that there is only one statement which is not
historically relative (the statement of the historicist claim),
and the fact that there is only one would have to be allowed
to logically entail that there are no others. If such beliefs
are tacitly assumed rather than explicitly defended, historicism can avoid self-referential incoherence only at the
price of being self-assumptively incoherent: the unstated
assumptions of the argument would be incompatible with
the claim the argument is defending. Thus historicism is
either false because it cancels itself or false because defenses of it have to assume what it denies.
In fact, I know of no version of historicism that does not
admit into itself beliefs it takes to correspond to reality; it is
mainly by smuggling such incompatible facts, claims, and
evidences into their accounts, and by equivocating on the
two senses of “history” distinguished at the outset of this
essay, that historicism has managed to disguise its intrinsic
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incoherency. It acquires deceptive plausibility by making
use of nonhistorical knowledge and passing it off as historical in the sense that our acquisition of it has a history,
rather than in the sense that it is wholesale the creation of
the historical process. In other words, at least part of what
historicism throws out the front door with great fanfare, it
smuggles back in through the servant’s entrance without
so much as an acknowledgement. The smuggling integrates
into what is supposed to be a purely historical account of
knowledge, other sorts of knowledge which are relied on
as true independently of the process of culture-formation.
The smuggling is cloaked by declaring that the other kind
of knowledge is part of history but, as I said, the trick is
that this is only shown in the trivial sense that it arises in
a cultural context rather than demonstrated for the radical
historicist sense of being nothing more than a cultural
artifact. The result is that the additional sorts of knowledge are utilized under the pretext that they are nothing
but history, while they are actually treated as though they
correspond to reality in just the way historicism denies we
can ever know anything to correspond to reality —with the
possible exception of our own power to create culture.
Consider but one outstanding example of this. The historicist Oswald Spengler declared scientific knowledge to
be entirely dependent on, and determined by, the morphological characteristics of each culture:5
in the eyes of the historically-minded there is only a history
of physics. All its systems do not appear to him as right or
wrong, but historically, psychologically conditioned by the
character of the period and more or less perfectly representative of it.
5
Quotes are from The Decline of the West as cited in Dooyeweerd,
op. cit., vol. II, pp. 218–219.
47
The same holds true for math as for physics, says Spengler:
There are more arithmetical worlds than one because there
are more kinds of culture than one. In the course of history
we find systems of number that differ from civilization to
civilization [. . . ] each [. . . ] symbolizes a particular kind of
validity that is, also scientifically, exactly restricted to this
type of culture.
First, I cannot resist the observation that historically the
latter claim is factually false. That people have symbolized
quantities differently has nothing to do with whether mathematical validity changes from culture to culture. Whether
we add 1 + 5 and get 6 with Arabic numerals or we add
I and V end get VI in Roman numerals, the quantitative
truth obtained is irrelevant to the symbols representing it
and I know of no culture that ever got a different sum
for 1 + 5. But that aside, notice the blatant self-assumptive
incoherency of Spengler’s claim that there is more than
one arithmetic because there is more than one culture: he
must use the concept of number (“one”) in order to express
his claim. So while his claim says that all number concepts are culturally relative, he also claims to know there
is more than one culture! A similar fate befalls his claim
that we cannot know physical reality but only the history of
physics. How does he know there are other cultures? How
can he know they have distinct histories? Isn’t it because
physical cultural artifacts and documents are unearthed?
Isn’t it because his physical body can travel through space
to other places and observe physical houses, roads, clothing, and read the writings of those who live there? But
how can he do those things if there is no knowledge of
physical objects which is distinct from his own culturally
determined thought?
It is worth noticing at this point that historicism also
commits a third incoherency which is perhaps more sub48
tle and apt to be overlooked. In addition to being selfreferentially and self-assumptively incoherent, the theory
is also self-performatively incoherent.6 This means that it
is incompatible with either a state or an activity of the
thinker that is needed to form the theory. To borrow and
recast a Marxist expression, the theory is incompatible with
“the means of its production”. The activity in point is the
act of abstraction required to differentiate the historicist
standpoint for interpreting experience and knowledge from
all other rival standpoints. Historicists readily acknowledge that there are rival standpoints, of course, and are at
one in rejecting them. Such alternative candidates for the
basic nature of experience and knowledge include: numbers and their relations (Pythagoras), ideal forms (Plato,
Aristotle), physical matter (Hobbes, Smart, Churchland),
clear and distinct ideas (Descartes), feelings and sensations
(Berkeley, Hume, Mill), sensory forms plus logical categories (Kant), to name but a few.
The standard strategy employed by epistemological theories has been to defend a candidate for the esssential nature
of knowledge in one of two ways. The first is to argue that
all knowledge is identical with the kind favored by the
theory, so that there really are no rival candidates. The
second allows that there are other kinds of knowledge but
argues that the kind of knowledge favored by the theory
is the one all other kinds depend on. Logical abstraction is
obviously indispensable to both forms of this strategy since
it is the activity by which the various aspects of experience
are distinguished, and is thus a precondition for identifying any of them as the sole or basic nature of knowledge.
And historicism is no exception to this. From the entire
6
These three incoherencies are explained and illustrated in more
detail in my book, The Myth of Religious Neutrality, Notre Dame
Press, 1991, p. 68ff.
49
welter of all we experience and seem to know, historicism
abstracts and postulates culture-forming as the key to understanding it all and defends its selection by arguing that
all its possible rivals are either identical with history or
dependent on it.
It appears, however, that the very process of abstracting
is incompatible with any claim that all knowledge has only
a cultural character, so that the first form of the standard
strategy is self-performatively incoherent. This is because it
makes no sense to claim that all experience and knowledge
are identical with history when the need for the activity of
abstracting presupposes there is more to whatever is initially experienced than anything that can be abstracted from
it. If not, from what was culture-forming distinguished?
From a purely descriptive standpoint, the objects of experience seem to exhibit many kinds of properties and laws
other than the historical, and we seem to have knowledge
of each kind. For example, we seem to have knowledge of
such varying kinds as quantitative, spatial, physical, biotic, sensory, logical, aesthetical, and ethical. How could all
these be nothing more than the human power to form culture and that power still be logically distinguishable from
them? To put the same point another way: how could anything have a history if everything is history? It appears,
then, that historicism can only be plausible in its second
form: it will have to argue that while experience and knowledge are multiform, the other kinds of knowledge depend
entirely on the historical kind while the historical does not
depend on them.
But the act of abstraction needed to distinguish the kind
of knowledge that is basic is as incompatible with the second form of the strategy as it is with the first. The argument is a follows. Since the heart of the second form is to
show that one kind of knowledge is independent of all others, this claim suggests an obvious experiment in thought (a
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“Gedanke”): if a particular kind of knowledge is supposed
to be independent of all other kinds, let us try to conceive
of it that way. For if no such independence can as much
as be conceived then it certainly cannot be justified. So
let us now try to abstract the historical process itself and
conceive of it in total isolation from all the other ways of
experiencing and knowing. When I try this I find that once
we really strip from our concept of history every reference
to quantity, space, matter, life, sensation, logic, language,
social relations, and values, there is literally nothing left.
There is nothing which could have a history, so the very
idea of “historical process” itself loses all meaning.7
But if this is right —if we cannot so much as conceive of
the historical process and historical knowledge apart from
the other kinds of knowledge— how can it be argued that
it is really independent of the rest? How can it be shown
that the “continuity of the creative force” is the fact to
which all (other) beliefs are to be relativized? Once again,
it appears that any justification for such a claim would have
to appeal to other kinds of knowledge, kinds historicism
says do not correspond to reality!
I conclude, therefore, that historicism is self-performatively incoherent in addition to being self-referentially
and self-assumptively incoherent. Moreover, these incoherencies appear to lie at the heart of the historicist claim
and not merely to attack what is dispensable to it or peculiar only to this or that version of it. So I further conclude
that historicism fails as an epistemology. It needs to be an
exception to its own claim, can only be defended by arguments that assume beliefs incompatible with that claim,
and cannot justify the status it confers on culture-forming
power owing to the very activity of abstraction needed to
7
Dooyeweerd, op. cit., vol. II, p. 209ff., esp. p. 229.
51
distinguish that power in the first place.8 For these reasons, historicism’s claim to have found that the essential
nature of all knowledge is historical is destroyed. We cannot have any ground for taking it to be either the only
kind of knowledge or the kind on which all other forms of
knowledge depend.
Can Pragmatism Save Historicism?
In recent years Richard Rorty has urged that pragmatism
can be combined with historicism in a way that provides a
fuller account of knowledge than either can do alone. He
thinks that by forgoing any attempt to determine truth,
and substituting the idea of what is practically beneficial
instead, pragmatism corrects what has been wrong with
philosophy and science from their inception. This leads
him to reassert the non-correspondence thesis in a stronger
form. Whereas for Dilthey no statements could be known
to correspond to reality except that of historicism, Rorty
extends the claim to every statement whatever:
For the pragmatist, true sentences are not true because they
correspond to reality, and so there is no need to worry about
what sort of reality, if any, a given sentence corresponds to
—no need to worry about what “makes” it true [. . . ] He
drops the notion of truth as correspondence with reality
altogether, and says that modern science does not enable
us to cope because it corresponds, it just plain enables us to
cope.9
8
The three senses of incoherency so briefly appealed to here,
are applicable to epistemologies generally. They have been applied
to materialism and phenomenalism, e.g., as well as historicism. See
The Myth of Religious Neutrality, pp. 69–73, 191–193; and A New
Critique of Theoretical Thought, vol. I, pp. 34–56, 272–275, 290–302.
9
Consequences of Pragmatism, University of Minnesota Press,
1982, pp. xvi–xvii. All other quotes from this work will be cited by
page number in the text rather than in notes.
52
Thus
There is no method for knowing when one has reached the
truth, or when one is closer to it than before. (pp. 165–166)
In conjunction with the pragmatist substitution of usefulness for truth, Rorty also advocates what he calls the
“ubiquity of language”. By this he means two things: 1)
that language is entirely our own creation, and 2) that we
experience and know only what language makes possible.
He says:
The ubiquity of language is a matter of language moving
into the vacancies left by the failure of all the various candidates for the position of “natural starting-points”of thought,
starting-points which are prior to and independent of the
way some culture speaks or spoke. (p. xx)
In this connection he cites with approval thinkers he calls
“prophets of the ubiquity of language” who make such
remarks as: “Human experience is essentially linguistic”
(Gadamer), and “[. . . ] all awareness of abstract entities
—indeed even of particulars— is a linguistic affair”
(Sellers). (p. xx) At even greater length he quotes Peirce’s
assertion that “man makes the word, means nothing that
the man has not made it mean [. . . ] But since man can
think only by means of words or other external symbols,
these might turn around and say: You mean nothing we
have not taught you [. . . ].” (p. xx) The consequence of
this is clear, says Rorty:
[On this view] criteria are seen as [. . . ] temporary restingplaces constructed for specific utilitarian ends. On the pragmatist account, a criterion (what follows from the axioms,
what the needle points to, what the statute says) is a criterion
because some particular social practice needs to block the
road of inquiry, halt the regress of interpretations, in order
to get something done. (p. xli)
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Thus:
[There is] no criterion that we have not created in the course
of creating a practice, no standard of rationality that is not
an appeal to such a criterion, no rigorous argumentation that
is not obedience to our own conventions. (p. xlii)
To accept such a radical view is no easy task, Rorty admits:
Can the ubiquity of language ever really be taken seriously? Can we ever see ourselves as never encountering any
reality except under a chosen description [. . . ] as making
worlds rather than finding them? (p. xxxix)
It should be clear even from these brief comments that
for Rorty historicism can succeed by appealing to pragmatic needs as the motivating reasons for culture-creation,
and to language as the means by which the creation is
accomplished. So while the first part of his position reasserts the old pragmatist claim that the notion of truth is
to be replaced by that of usefulness, the latter part takes
the form of a hypothetical syllogism about language: if all
we ever experience and know is determined by language,
and if language itself is our own creation, then all we ever
experience and know is our own creation. Let’s examine
the argument about language first.
The first premise of the argument is what Rorty calls
the “ubiquity of language”, and expresses by the phrase
“language goes all the way down”. There are, I think, reasons to suppose this claim is false. Take, for example, a
case in which you and I are in the woods collecting mushrooms. You have explained to me how to discriminate the
poisonous from the edible ones, and we are picking only the edible ones and putting them into a basket. The
whole while, however, we are discussing Beethoven’s 5th
Symphony so that our language exchange is completely
54
occupied with the innovative nature of that composition
—say, its introduction of trombones in the last movement.
The fact that this is possible shows that I have acquired
a logical concept of the difference between the edible and
nonedible mushrooms that is not identical with words, and
that I am employing that concept all the while our linguistic exchange is about something entirely different. I am
not thinking of the difference between the mushrooms in
language; I do not have two conversations running simultaneously —not even one that is public and the other private.
Rather, I am not thinking any words whatever about the
mushrooms, though I am recognizing their differences by
perceiving them under the guidance of a new logical concept which enables us to pick out differences I find in
them.
And there are other examples as well. If I invent a new
tune, for example, and compose an accompaniment for it,
that does not require me to think in words at all. The tune
and its harmonization depend upon my logically discriminating pitches and conceiving of their arrangement, but not
upon thinking any words. Notice that I am not saying that
mushroom selection or tune invention can’t be represented
or discussed symbolically. They, like all human activities,
have a linguistic aspect or side to them. But they also have
a nonlinguistic side, a side that does not depend entirely
on language to be experienced.
Thus the claim that language creates our experience appears false. But more than that, it appears incompatible
with pragmatism. For how can language create our experience if it was itself invented to satisfy pragmatic needs?
Wouldn’t we have to experience and know at least some
of those needs in order to develop a language that could
deal with them? Or are we to believe that there really are
no poisonous and edible mushrooms, but that this is only
a creation of our language? Don’t we learn to discrimi55
nate that difference and embody it in language because
we’ve already found that some mushrooms cause death?
More than that: wouldn’t people have to have experienced
things already in order to think of the very idea of representing them symbolically? The point is that the central
claim of pragmatism, the idea of substituting pragmatic
value for truth, presupposes the priority of experience and
logical thought to language. For how could people know
what their pragmatic needs are unless they already experienced them and had formed concepts and beliefs about
them? And how could they know themselves to be happier
with one way of meeting those needs than another unless
they experienced and knew their own internal states? But
in that case, knowing such things would have to precede
the formation of ways to preserve or alter them, and thus
precede the creation of language as one of those ways.
What is more, both the pragmatic claim and that about
the ubiquity of language appear incompatible with Rorty’s
non-correspondence thesis which claims we are totally unable to know that any belief ever corresponds to reality.
(This is aside from the fact that the non-correspondence
claim is also self-referentially incoherent. Isn’t it supposed
to correspond to the way we and our experience really are?)
For if nothing we can affirm can be said to correspond to
reality, then the ubiquity of language can’t be said to do
so, and neither can pragmatism. Rorty himself says that
pragmatic value consists in a belief or action making us
“happier than we now are”. But if we cannot know any
statement to correspond to reality, we cannot ever know
that we are happy, how happy we are, or how our present
happiness compares to that of any other time. Thus the
non-correspondence claim is not only incompatible with
pragmatism and the ubiquity of language, but simply appears false: are we really to belive that we can never know
our own internal states? Don’t I even know that I’m happy
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or that I feel a pain in my left knee, for example? (How
could I possibly be wrong about such things?) Nevertheless,
Rorty appears to belive that the ubiquity of language and
the non-correspondence thesis support both one another
and pragmatism which in turn supports historicism!
Given the internal quicksands this theory creates for itself, one is left to wonder why Rorty —or anyone else—
holds it. What could induce acceptance of a theory which,
because of its own central hypotheses, cannot produce any
reasons for thinking it is true? One possible answer could
be that this approach is a matter of intuitive insight. Perhaps he means to suggest that one either sees it or one
doesn’t, but seeing it is not a matter of arguments. But in
fact Rorty flatly rejects this answer in the comments he
makes about the role of intuition in the debate between
himself and the realist. He says:
What really needs debate between the pragmatist and the
intuitive realist is not whether we have intuitions to the effect
that “truth is more than assertability” [etc.]. Of course we
have such intuitions. How could we escape having them?
We have been educated within an intellectual tradition built
around such claims [. . . ] But it begs the question between
the pragmatist and realist to say that we must find a view
which “captures” such intuitions. The pragmatist is urging
that we do our best to stop having such intuitions, that we
develop a new intellectual tradition.
What strikes intuitive realists as offensive about this suggestion is that it seems as dishonest to suppress intuitions
as to suppress experimental data [. . . ] This view [. . . ] presupposes either that, contrary to the prophets of the ubiquity of language, language does not go all the way down, or
that, contrary to appearances, all vocabularies are commensurable. The first alternative amounts to saying that some
intuitions, at least, are not a function of the way one has
been brought up to talk, of the texts and people one has encountered. (p. xxx)
57
Here we hit a bedrock metaphysical issue: can one ever appeal to nonlinguistic knowledge in a philosophical argument?
[. . . ] That is just the issue about the status of intuitions
which [. . . ] is the real issue between the pragmatist and the
realist. (p. xxxvi)
There are no fast little arguments to show that there are no
such things as intuitions —arguments which are themselves
based on something stronger than intuitions. For the pragmatist [. . . ] the only argument for thinking that intuitions
[. . . ] should be eradicated is that the intellectual tradition to
which they belong has not paid off, is more trouble than it
is worth, has become an incubus [. . . ] a dogmatism of intuitions is no worse, or better, than the pragmatist’s inability
to give noncircular arguments. (p. xxxvii)
The surprise here is that instead of saying that the realist has one set of intuitions while he has another, Rorty
speaks as though only the realist has them while he has
freed himself from them! Thus it is only fair to point out
that not only has Rorty left himself no other ground for his
historicist-pragmatism as a whole, but that he also appeals
to specific intuitions in his own account of his position.
For example, he claims that it would “beg the question”
if the realist were to insist that the job of philosophy is to
“capture” our intuitions. But what is wrong with begging
the question? Is it wrong because it results in an invalid
argument according to the rules of logic? But are not those
rules themselves grasped intuitively? Surely they are not
the conclusions of inferences. It seems, then, that Rorty’s
position is not one of eschewing all intuitions and resting only on pragmatic needs in a language-created world.
Rather, it is one of accepting his own intuitions about pragmatism and the ubiquity of language.
What is worse in this connection is that it appears Rorty
reserves the intellectual right to appeal to intuitions about
logic when it pleases him to do so, while denying those
same principles to realists whenever it pleases him to do
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that. In fact, this tactic recurs frequently in the form of
attempts to defend the ubiquity of language thesis not by
appealing to its pragmatic usefulness, but by appealing to
“facts” —facts which could not be known if the ubiquity
of language and the non-correspondence theses were true.
Even as seemingly unobjectionable a statement as the following does this:
[The intuitive realist] may say [. . . ] that language does not
go all the way down —that there is a kind of awareness
of facts which is not expressible in language and which no
argument could render dubious [. . . ] (p. xxxv)
This is part of Rorty’s case that no one can point to any
awareness of anything that is not linguistically determined,
and that he can render doubtful any attempt to do so. But
notice that it assumes he can, after all, know what he and
others are saying in reality, and that his knowing what is
being said is not wholly determined by his language nor
being accepted as such merely because he prefers to think
it will make him happier to do so.
Nor is the rest of that quote anything we should let Rorty
get away with. Why would the intuitive realist have to say
what Rorty ascribes to him in order to deny that language
“goes all the way down” (creates our experience)? Why
think that believing perceptions and concepts are preconditions for the development of language implies that our
experience of the world around us need be both inexpressible and infallible? Who ever seriously believed perception
to be infallible? And why would the realist have to think so
in order to hold that language reflects rather than creates
the world? Why, in order to hold that there is a nonlinguistic side to our awareness of facts, would a realist have
to say that what is known in that way must be “inexpressible in language”? What we experience by perception, e.g.,
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appears to be just such a direct awareness of facts, an awareness that has nonlinguistic sides as well as a linguistic side.
And isn’t that the whole point of language: that it can and
does represent and express symbolically the nonlinguistic
sides of experience? Besides, don’t animals also perceive
the world around them? Don’t they manage that without
language? Or are we really to believe that animals and their
behaviors are merely products of the way we’ve chosen to
speak —that we can’t really know there are such beings at
all?
At times Rorty seems bent on holding his position in
just such an extreme form, a form requiring that all our
experience is no more than an internal virtual reality show
programmed by our language:
the only intuition we have of the world determining truth is
just the intuition that we must make our new beliefs conform
to a vast body of platitudes, unquestioned perceptual reports
and the like. (pp. 13–14)
the time may have come to recapture Dewey’s “naturalized”
version of Hegel’s historicism. In this historicist vision, the
arts, the sciences, the sense of right and wrong, and institutions of society are not attempts to embody or formulate
truth or goodness or beauty. They are attempts to solve
problems —to modify our beliefs and desires and activities
in ways that will bring us greater happiness than we now
have. (p. 16)
Dewey thought that if scientific inquiry could be seen as
adapting and coping rather than as copying [. . . ] we would
be receptive to notions like Derrida’s —that language is not
a device for representing reality, but a reality in which we
live and move. (pp. 86–87)
Taken neat, and as the whole story, this view seems to
be as internally incoherent as anything one could imagine.
Once again: how could language and science arise as tools
for solving problems unless problems were already logical60
ly distinguished and conceived? How can we judge what
would make us happier than we are unless at least some
concepts correspond to reality?
But perhaps Rorty does not mean for this extreme form
of historico-pragmatism to be taken neat and as the whole
story. There are places where he seems to back away from
such a position and actually concedes that language does
not “go all the way down”. For example:
The great fallacy of the tradition, the pragmatists [say] is
to think that the metaphors of vision, correspondence, mapping, picturing, and representation which apply to small
routine assertions will apply to large and debatable ones.
(p. 164; emphasis mine)
The way in which a properly-programmed speaker cannot
help believing that the patch before him is red has no analogy for the more interesting and controversial beliefs which
provoke epistemological reflection. (p. 165)
This may be a step in the right direction, but it is unclear
how it is to be related to the more frequently made claims
that all is historically relative (in which case so is this concession), that language creates our experience (with which
this concession is inconsistent), that no belief can be known
to correspond to reality (with which this concession is inconsistent), and that all beliefs are held only on grounds
of pragmatic usefulness (with which this concession is also
inconsistent).
Anyway, how could this weaker version of his claims be
defended? Is it not just as self-referentially incoherent as
the strong version? For example, why should we think that
it is only our large-scale theories that are all determined
by our language when this claim is itself part of a large
scale theory? Is not the weaker version still insisting that
large-scale controversial theories cannot ever be known to
correspond to reality? And why, then, should we adopt
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a pragmatic view of the whole of life when that is also
a large-scale epistemologically controversial belief and not
one of the “small routine assertions” which he concedes
may be immune from the radical relativism he otherwise
advocates?
Finally, consider one last example of the way nonhistorical knowledge is smuggled into the discussion and taken
to correspond to reality. Rorty says:
There is no method for knowing when one has reached the
truth, or when one is closer to it than before [. . . ] If we
give up this hope [. . . ] we may gain a renewed sense of
community. Our identification with our community [. . . ] is
heightened when we see this community as ours rather than
nature’s, shaped, rather than found, one among many which
men have made. In the end [. . . ] what matters is our loyalty
to other human beings clinging together against the dark,
not our hope of getting things right. (p. 166)
Notice that it takes as more than a linguistic convention
and as corresponding to reality, the fact that we are “huddled against the dark” (even though it starts by saying we
never know we have any truth). This I take to be a reference
to all that is life threatening. If that is right, then another
one of Rorty’s intuitions is that the basic facts of biology
are not merely our construction, not just “stories we tell
ourselves”. We really do need air, food, water, and shelter.
We really do die. And our survival really does depend on
mutual cooperation.
The epistemological issue here is obvious: how then can
we know we are right to pick biology and enshrine it as
reality but reject the same status for physics? Why does
biology correspond to reality but not mathematics? By what
criterion can we count on biological “stories” but not on
those about the covenant God made with Abraham? The
answer cannot be the traditional pragmatic one, “it works”,
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for two reasons. First, because Rorty said that all criteria
are our own inventions to get done something we want
done. In that case the pragmatic criterion too will be his
own arbitrary invention created in order to make his theory
look better. And second because any attempt to show his
view really has practical advantages will have to require
many other pieces of information and many other beliefs
be taken as true —not just useful— in order to establish
that it has those advantages.
I conclude, therefore, that Rorty’s four main theses pragmatism, ubiquity of language, non-correspondence thesis,
and historicism —far from mutually supporting one another are related so that if any one is true the others can’t be.
If pragmatic usefulness is a genuine criterion for belief and
action, then what we believe about it must correspond to
reality and be more than a linguistic convention or it could
not supply our most basic survival needs. At the same time,
if pragmatic usefulness is the genuine guide for all thought
and belief, it would have to be for the development of
language also —in which case language could not be the
creator of all experience. At the same time, if language does
create all experience, then historicism itself is no more than
a linguistic convention, and no supposed pragmatic value
could correspond to any real need. Meanwhile, if the noncorrespondence thesis is taken seriously then every claim to
pragmatic value, the ubiquity of language, and historicism
all fail to be the way things really are. Therefore I find that
Rorty has failed to rescue historicism from the incoherencies native to it. Its central claims are still self-referentially,
self-assumptively, and self-performatively incoherent, and
Rorty’s additions to them only compound the difficulties
by being mutually inconsistent.
Recibido: 13 de septiembre de 1996
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RESUMEN
En este artículo estudio algunas de las versiones más influyentes
del historicismo: la teoría de que todos, o casi todos, nuestros
conceptos y creencias están determinados completamente por
nuestra cultura. En mi opinión, esta teoría es errónea. Enseguida, estudio el intento de Richard Rorty por defender el historicismo combinándolo con el pragmatismo, y descubro que esto
sólo empeora las cosas. En contra tanto del historicismo como
del pragmatismo, defiendo el punto de vista de que en efecto
tenemos conceptos y creencias que corresponden a la realidad.
No obstante, aunque éstos siempre aparecen en un ambiente
cultural, y muestran la influencia de éste en su forma de expresión y uso, también contienen información que puede ser, y es,
reconocida transculturalmente.
[Traducción: Claudia Chávez A.]
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