I shared this with Hurley earlier with the questions below (copied-pasted). I suppose it's worthwhile to incorporate more people in the discussion.
I'm unfamiliar with Bacon and Derrida, but the article above got me interested. Mostly, I'm left unnerved. Here's the worrisome section:
Obviously the rationalist Enlightenment agenda does not survive this deconstructive analysis intact, which doesn't mean that it must be discarded (the claim to be able to discard it from a position superior to it merely replicates it) or that it doesn't yield results (I am writing on one of them); only that the progressive program it is thought to underwrite and implement — the program of drawing closer and closer to a truth independent of our discursive practices, a truth that, if we are slow and patient in the Baconian manner, will reveal itself and come out from behind the representational curtain — is not, according to this way of thinking, realizable.
Fish's argument seems to call into question progressivism, at least my understanding of it: what can man progress to, if not truth? I had presumed the rational inquiry to be an adequate guide in political (and philosophical) life, but it seems now decapitated by the deconstructionists. Also, does this limit the possibility of a quiet truth--that is, a truth that we can approximate and even reach, but not know? Odd, then: faith would buttress and validate the rationalist agenda. Or is the solution less clean: tangible progress needs no independent grounding, it is empirical. We are free to determine our own metric (be it lives saved, jobs created, etc) to measure political progress. This seems at once commonsensical and hollow.
Am I reading this completely wrong?
2 comments:
The problem, as I understand it, is that if no combination of words can have a truth-value, then there is no grounds to choose one empirical measurement over another, and thus it is impossible to say that one state affairs represents progress over another.
I won't claim to have resolved the issue, but here are some thoughts.
Words are not only defined in terms of other words, otherwise we would have no starting point to learn any of them. Words can be explained in terms of other words, but we can also explain "blue" by pointing to various blue things and allowing the learner to discern the quality that each of the examples has in common. In this way, we associate a sound with a particular concept and can reliably deploy that concept and evaluate whether a given use of it matches our experience.
The objects in the real world we are pointing to in these cases may not be blue (blue may be a secondary characteristic, only present because of how we perceive it), but this has nothing to do with blue's capacity to be a true descriptor. Even if you see what I think is red when I tell you to think of blue, we both refer to the same real-world quality when saying "blue," even if it is not itself blue. A difference between two experiences of the world (or a difference between the real world and an experience of it) is only problematic if it be sensed. For example, if I have a pebble in my hand that you cannot sense (directly or indirectly) and the pebble cannot interact with anything you can sense, this situation is functionally the same as one in which I have no pebble.
Taken together, these observations seem to show that descriptions made up of words can have a truth-value. That is, they are true if they correspond with our shared perceptions. Even if the real world is different from our shared perceptions, this difference will only foul up the truth-value of a description if it becomes tangible (if, all of a sudden, you could see the pebble), in which case it becomes one of our perceptions.
If descriptors can be true, then we merely need to pick which ones we want to measure progress along. I, for one, would vote for freedom and autonomy (assuming that one is more free when better off in terms of health and wealth, as these things expand one's range of significant options). There is your progressivism.
Hurley got back to me with some comments. I thought I'd share them here:
"1)A rejection of ‘closer to’ is not a rejection of ‘better than’. If progress involves an improvement upon what came before, it doesn’t follow that progress involves getting closer to some particular goal. If there are better reasons to do it this way than that way, and it is then progress to do it this way instead, what does it add to say that it is also closer to something (e.g. “the truth”)
2)On one way of reading the passage, it is just a rejection of one particular, and particularly naïve, theory of truth, the representational or correspondence theory of truth typical of Descartes and some of the early empiricists. But this is not a rejection of the quest for the truth, only of one outmoded way of framing what that quest involves in terms of peering behind the veil, etc. On another way of reading this passage, a more Derridean way, the author is in danger of falling prey to a kind of global stultifying skepticism that precludes any of the talk of “results” etc. in which he/she wants to engage. If there is nothing beyond our “discursive practices,” nothing to which such practices are in some sense accountable, then all claims are relative to the schemes in which they are made, and no substantial conversation of the sort that the author is attempting to have would appear to be possible. Many people writing on such matters confusedly slide from one of these claims (the first, noncontroversial one) to the other (the second, internally incoherent one) and back again with abandon. I would have to read more to know if your author means only one, or the other, or, like Rorty and Derrida, slide with abandon back and forth between them at various points illicitly."
-Paul Hurley
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