Rorty on Solidarity and Objectivity A Comment

Rorty on Solidarity and Objectivity in Science:A ReassessmentMartin Kusch

Richard Rortys book Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (1989) has been an influential text in discussions of solidarity as an ethical and political concept (see e.g. Geras 1995). The same can not be said of Rortys papers Solidarity or Objectivity (1985/1991) and Science as Solidarity (1987/1991). And yet, these papers are probably amongst the most-widely-read recent texts carrying the term in their title.

Rorty suggests that there are two ways in which we can give meaning to our intellectual lives. On the one hand, we can strive to achieve an immediate relation to a nonhuman reality by finding truths that correspond to the physical world. On the other hand, we can aim to contribute to a community, real or imagined (1985/1991: 21). The former, realist, view tries to ground solidarity in objectivity; it seeks solutions to social problems from an objective viewpoint beyond and above any specific, historically situated and limited, community. The latter, pragmatist, standpoint wishes to reduce objectivity to solidarity (ibid. 22). That is to say, the pragmatist rejects the dualisms of truth vs. justification, knowledge vs. opinion, or appearance vs. reality. Objectivity is replaced by the idea of unforced agreement (1987/1991: 37), rationality qua strict methodology by rationality as reasonableness, convergence on the truth by proliferation of ideas; and truth as correspondence by truth as commendation (1985/1991: 24).

Rorty denies that pragmatism is a form of relativism. As he sees it, relativists claim either that every belief is as good as every other or that true is indexed to cultures or conceptual schemes. Rorty deems the first view self-refuting and the second eccentric: the fact that true recommends different beliefs in different cultures does not make it indexical (1985/1991: 23). To distinguish pragmatism from relativism, Rorty calls the former ethnocentric. The core of ethnocentric pragmatism is the thesis that there is nothing to be said about either truth or justification apart from descriptions of the familiar procedures of justification which a given society ours uses in one or another area of inquiry (ibid.). Moreover, the ethnocentrist has learnt his lessons from Donald Davidson (1974/1984) and denies that there are conceptual schemes to which beliefs, knowledge or truth are relative. The ethnocentrist accepts that there is no in-principle distinction between intra- and intercultural disagreements (1985/1991: 26); he recognises that we are unable to justify our beliefs to people who are very different from us; and he is happy to adopt the lonely provincialism that divides the human race into the people to whom one must justify ones beliefs and the others (1985/1991: 30).

Rorty laments the fact that we tend to conceptualise natural science using the imagery of objectivity. We naively assume that it is sciences relation to a nonhuman reality that alone makes it valuable. Pragmatism offers a different account of the value of science. Natural science is special because of its adherence to the moral virtues of tolerance, respect for the opinions of those around one, willingness to listen, [and] reliance on persuasion rather than force (1987/1991: 37, 39). It is these virtues, Rorty insists, that the rest of culture should try to emulate: the only sense in which science is exemplary is that it is a model of human solidarity. We should think of the institutions and practices which make up various scientific communities as providing suggestions about the way in which the rest of culture might organize itself. When we say that our legislatures are unrepresentative or dominated by special interests, or that the art world is dominated by fashion, we are contrasting these areas of culture with areas which seem to be in better order. The natural sciences strike us as being such areas. (1987/1991: 39-40)

Rortys views on science, solidarity and objectivity have been criticised numerous times almost always by defenders of various forms of realism. Often such defenders lump Rortys position together with contemporary forms of social constructivism and relativism, especially in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK) (e.g. Haack 1998, Boghossian 2006). I shall develop a different form of criticism: I shall argue that Rortys position on objectivity and solidarity is unsatisfactory when judged in light of work in and around SSK.

There is of course a considerable degree of overlap between Rortys pragmatism and the concerns of SSK. Some of the convergence is due to the fact that both positions are strongly influenced by Mary Hesse, Thomas Kuhn and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Moreover, much of the work in SSK fits naturally under the slogan of reducing objectivity to solidarity. For instance, David Bloor once argued that Karl Poppers World 3 (i.e. the objective world of scientific problems, abstract entities, theories, etc.) is really the world of social institutions (Bloor 1974, cf. Kusch 1996). And Bloors influential essay happily invokes images of reduction.

And yet, even here the common language of reduction masks important differences in approach and aspiration. Remember that reduction can take two forms: incorporation and elimination. A case of the former is the reduction of heat to mean molecular motion; a case of the latter is the claim that witches are nothing but figments of our imagination. In the former case the reduction incorporates heat into our preferred scientific theory; in the latter case, the reduction eliminates witches from our ontology. Bloor and Rorty belong on different sides of this distinction. Bloor is trying to convince us that objectivity and rationality are best understood as social entities. But objectivity and rationality are real and they cannot be eliminated without changing our social life, or our form of solidarity, in radical and unforeseeable ways. Rorty is an eliminativist; he thinks that objectivity is simply an illusion. Accordingly he recommends switching to a new vocabulary in which concepts like objectivity do not appear. Unfortunately, Rorty opts for eliminativism without first probing reduction qua incorporation. And thus he never considers the possibility that the vocabulary of objectivity might have a crucial social role. In ignoring this possibility, Rorty turns out to be an individualistic voluntarist; he assumes that we simply can pick and choose our vocabularies as we like.

Rortys insufficient grasp of the interplay between objectivity and solidarity also affects his hypothesis concerning the historical origins of the desire for objectivity. As he sees it, this desire has its roots in the attempt to overcome our parochial solidarity, that is, our communities limitations in space in time: this objectivist tradition centres around the assumption that we must step outside our community long enough to examine it in light of something which transcends it (1985/1991: 22). This is one-sided at best. What is missing here is an appreciation of the fact documented in numerous historical studies in SSK that accounts of the natural worlds are often tools in the construction of new, or weapons in the destruction of old, forms of solidarity, hierarchies or power structures. To mention just one famous case study (Shapin 1979): when phrenologists in early-nineteenth-century Edinburgh insisted that human brains have more than twenty-five distinct and differentially developed modules, they were not just trying to overcome their communitys limitations in space and time; they were also arguing that a capitalist mode of production with its extensive division of labour was natural and objectively called for.

Rortys ethnocentrism is fruitfully contrasted with the relativism of SSK. One important difference is that the relativism of SSK is first and foremost methodological or heuristic. When Bloor and others suggest that all beliefs should be treated symmetrically they do not mean that all beliefs are equally true. Instead Bloor and others propose that for the purposes of sociological inquiry all beliefs need to be analysed in terms of the same general categories of sociological explanantia. Rortys ethnocentrism is openly asymmetrical. Used as a heuristic for historical research is would encourage the Whiggish anachronism of favouring the beliefs of historical actors that we find most congenial.

Methodology aside, it is hard to find Rortys distinction between two forms of relativism on the one hand, and his ethnocentrism on the other hand, altogether convincing. Only an individualistic (Protagorean) form of epistemic relativism holds that every belief is as good as every other. A cultural relativist can retain the distinction between good and bad beliefs as applying within a shared epistemic system (Barnes and Bloor 1982). Rorty is also too quick in rejecting the idea that true is indexical. Here he simply relies uncritically on Peter Strawsons old idea that to call a proposition true is simply to endorse it (Strawson 1949). That this proposal is unable to capture the linguistic data and our intuitions was obvious even in the late 1980s. Finally, rather than being an alternative to epistemic relativism, ethnocentrism seems merely to be one possible way of living with it. After all, the ethnocentrist accepts all three key ingredients of epistemic relativism (Williams 2007): (1) beliefs can be justified only relative to systems of beliefs; (2) there are many different systems of beliefs some of which are radically different; and (3) it is impossible to demonstrate (in a non-circular fashion) that our system of beliefs is superior to all others.

Finally, there is of course something oddly dated and nave also about Rortys insistence that the rest of culture should emulate science as a model of human solidarity. It is hard to believe that science can be our model for the equal representation of different social groups in political life when women, ethnic minorities and the interests of the developing countries are so crassly underrepresented in current scientific research efforts. It is even more strange to suggest that science is free from the domination of special interests. Consider for example the realm of medical research. It has been shown that the conclusions of review articles on second-hand smoking whether second-hand smoking is harmful or not vary systematically with whether or not the author of the review article is affiliated with the tobacco industry (Barnes and Beto 1998: 1599). And studies of published papers on drug testing, papers in which rival drugs were compared, found that almost always the drug produced by the sponsor of the research was found superior (Davidson 1986; Friedberg et al. 1999; Stelfox et al. 1998; cf. Brown 2004). But perhaps more important than these blindspots is Rortys inability to appreciate that modern political life calls for institutions and forms of decision making that are fundamentally unlike those found in natural science. It is desirable that scientific research is usually governed by the assumption that there is one correct answer to a given research problem; and it is desirable that scientific institutions are structured accordingly. But our modern, ethnically, politically, and religiously diverse and technological democracies had better not treat the one correct answer principle as of overriding importance (Collins and Evans 2002; Jasanoff 2005; Wilsdon, Wynne and Stilgoe 2005; Kusch 2007). LiteratureBarnes D. and L. A. Beto (1998), Why Review Articles on the Health Effects of Passive Smoking Reach Different Conclusions, Journal of the American Medical Association 279: 1566-70.Barnes, B. and D. Bloor (1982), Rationalism and the Sociology of Knowledge, in M. Hollis and S. Lukes (eds.), Rationality and Relativism, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 21-47.Bloor, D. (1974), Popper's Mystificationof Objective Knowledge, Science Studies 4: 65-76.Boghossian, P. (2006), Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism, Oxford: Clarendon PressBrown, J. (2004), Money, Method and Medical Research, Episteme 1: 49-59.Collins, H.M. and R. Evans (2002), The Third Wave of Science Studies: Studies of Expertise and Experience, Social Studies of Science 32: 235-96.Davidson, R. (1986). Sources of Funding and Outcome of Clinical Trials, Journal of General Internal Medicine 12: 155-58.Davidson. D. (1974/1984), On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme (1974), in D. Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984, 183-198.Friedberg, M., B. Saffran, T. Stinson, W. Nelson, C. L. Bennett (1999), Evaluation of Conflict of Interest in Economic Analyses of New Drugs Used on Oncology, Journal of the American Medical Association 282: 1453-7.Geras, N. (1995), Solidarity in the Conversation of Humankind: Ungroundable Liberalism of Richard Rorty, London: VersoHaack, S. (1998), Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate: Unfashionable Essays, Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press.Jasanoff, S. (2005), Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Kusch, M. (1996), "Kehitysapua kolmannelle maailmalle: kuinka argumentit ovat olemassa?, in I. A. Kiesepp, S. Pihlstrm, and P. Raatikainen (eds.), Tieto, totuus ja todellisuus: Kirjoituksia Ilkka Niiniluodon 50-vuotispaivan kunniaksi, Gaudeamus, Tampere, 30-37.Kusch, M. (2007), Towards a Political Philosophy of Risk: Experts and Publics in Deliberative Democracy, in T. Lewens (ed.), Risk: Philosophical Perspectives, London: Routledge, 131-155. Rorty, R. (1985/1991), Solidarity or Objectivity (1985), in Rorty 1991: 21-34.Rorty, R. (1987/1991), Science as Solidarity (1987), in Rorty 1991: 35-45.Rorty, R. (1989), Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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